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Comment by chrisdbanks | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like all the parents who've had one baby that slept well and spend the rest of their lives telling other parents what worked for them. Very difficult to draw anything meaningful from a sample size of one. Sometimes a company just works despite all your best efforts to sabotage it, and sometimes even then best founders can't make something work. Right idea, wrong time.

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> This sounds like all the parents who've had one baby that slept well and spend the rest of their lives telling other parents what worked for them.

This sounds like quite the opposite:

> The takeaway? Don't stress over all the things you are not doing but focus on the few you are doing right.

Maybe I was being too subtle. I mean it sounds like offering completely random advice that has no statistically significant correlation with success, and therefore is just as likely to be wrong as right.

That's exactly what the author says. He does not give advice. He just give a laundry list of facts for his business.

The only advice is to not sweat over things you don't do. Do you suggest one should?

As a business owner, it resonates with me.

Guess the article was too subtle.

> offering completely random advice

To be fair, all startup advice is completely random advice. Really, there's no guaranteed rulebook for success, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt.

It read to me more like general advice that one should carefully examine any industry "best practice" in the light of your company's specific needs and circumstances.

So for example "we just used Heroku" might stick in the craw of developers who think AWS Lambda based microservices are the future, but for a small startup with limited resources and time Heroku is probably a safe bet.

Their point is that you will do many things others will tell you are “wrong”. They may be right about some and wrong about others.

You need to stop focusing on all the things you’re doing incorrectly and focus on the things you’re doing well that are working for you.

If you take any of the items they said they didn’t do as a recommendation to not do that thing then you’re missing the author’s point.

Yes; in other words: don't do cargo cult. Do what needs to be done, not what you think needs to be done because you have read about it somewhere.

But of course this is much easier to say than to put in practice; "what needs to be done" is very hard to know, while random generic advice is always top of mind.

> not what you think needs to be done because you have read about it somewhere

So then we shouldn’t follow the advice in this article either.

Maybe we should just do nothing lest we follow someone’s advice.

That does not really follow.

Their advice is to not cargo cult. Not to ignore all advice.

What that would mean is that even for the advice that they give, not to cargo cult, you need to examine whether that’s actually good advice or not.

It may turn out that your product is a component library, in which case, being in the spaces the cargo cult tells you to be it may actually make sense for you to follow, because that’s where the largest market would be.

Agree, it’s especially difficult avoid cargo cults if you are surrounded by people who insist that it’s necessary to do certain magical incarnations in order to be successful.

In case of doubt, stick with the needful.

Their competitor also raised $138 million [1] along a similar time frame. In fact both companies look like almost exact copies of each other. Maybe they should have done some of these things.

[1]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/front-app

You say this as if the goal of building a business (and measure of success) was to raise money? From what I can see, Front has 360+ employees and generates $64M in revenue, which works out to $177K revenue per headcount. Missive generates $2M with a headcount of 4, which comes out to $500k revenue per employee. Imo, generating almost 3x more revenue per headcount, and not having to deal with the headaches of managing a 360+ employee team (while maintaining complete ownership of your company) is the type of success that more founders should aspire to.

You can’t pull their revenue from one of those estimate sites and pretend it is any bit reliable. It’s like those celebrity net worth sites, a total guess.

I think what it really shows is how product-market fit is more important than nearly everything else combined

But getting to product market fit requires effort and time.

And you don’t have either without some level of traction. Which in turn requires a GTM strategy and money to execute on it.

You can't get to product-market fit without time and effort, but the amount you put in can be scaled up as you get a positive response. If you're iterative, you can adapt your GTM and funds invested based on feedback.

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