The 10 Mistakes I've made...so you don't have to | Hacker News Reader

The 10 Mistakes I've made...so you don't have to

slideshare.net

238 pointsbrianl42 comments

Wow. Thanks for putting my presentation on Hacker News. I believe this is my first appearance here. :) If you have any questions, feel free to ask! (p.s. thanks Jerome for jumping in! that's why he's an amazing cofounder!)

And point taken re: stock photos, not putting all of the points up front (more for the audiences sake) and using Guy Kawasaki's stuff...

Very strong deck even without the presentation. Rivals some of Ries' stuff.

I m afraid there are uncountable number of possible mistakes, on top of the ten you have stressed. And all those mistakes usually occur due to sticking to rigid rules rather than trying to be flexible at different stages of business lives, but some occur due tho being flexible rather than having rigid principles.

Gems! I just went through this & felt compelled to thank - dropped a note to author.

Very nice presentation with plenty of pictures & amazingly good words of wisdom all through.

One thing that stood out for me is this: "just because your competitors have raised more $$ doesn't mean they will win. (we've watched 10 competitors raise oodles of dough and then shutter or pivot)". (paraphrased it).

I'd add "know when to quit". Determination by itself is great, but sometimes the right thing to do is to abandon your current startup and work on something else. How do you know when to quit? Unfortunately, there's no formula for that. (My tendency, if anything, is to quit too late.)

From what I read, it seems like there's always a time to quit. She kept pivoting, changing, adapting, etc until she hit it right. Do you know when she should quit?

When is it better to quit then to pivot? Seems like with pivoting you are able to make better use of your experience then if you quit and start something completely new.

I can't say in general, but I can share my own experience. I did a YC startup, struggled, quit, and made the Rails Tutorial (which has gone extremely well). There wasn't any way to pivot from the startup to the tutorial; they are completely different kinds of businesses. Among other things, my startup had a cofounder and investors (i.e., YC), whereas the Rails Tutorial is a solo enterprise. Developing an intuition for when to shut things down and move onto something new is an invaluable skill, one I'm only beginning to master.

How do you do marketing for Rails Tutorial? is it mostly search organic traffic? paid traffic? word of mouth?

Inbound links, organic search, and word-of-mouth are the main methods. I experimented with AdWords, but the conversion rate wasn't good enough, and I was too lazy to try to improve it.

I think knowing when to quit is like predicting the stock market. Many extremely successful companies were in positions where they should've quit but didn't, and then ended up successful because they managed to pivot correctly (either by pure luck or good observations).

Means you shouldn't worry if you messed up if you didn't 'quit at the right time', but you should be more concerned if you acted rationally and took an objective view on everything, and most importantly took the time to judge how your company/startup is doing and how you can improve it.

these are good slides. just realized that buyosphere is the same as pinterest.

one succeeded and one didn't (or maybe hasn't yet?). my first observation about buyosphere is that the name itself drives users away. to the user, it kind of sounds like spam, a site where they have to buy stuff.

and..."pinterest" is resonates better with the user.

so give a choice, i'd probably choose pinterest, even though the two sites you could say are similar.

For the record, I'm the CTO and co-founder of Buyosphere.

Yes, for the moment, Buyosphere may at a first glance look a lot like Pinterest. At the moment, the main visible difference is: we focus around products people want or have... and the site is much slower (that will be solved soon). The end goal is to help people discover products they want. Hence the name Buyosphere.

We're working on a nice twist that will be released at the end of the month. It will make our unique value proposition much clearer. Stay tuned!

I disagree on the connotation.

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” - Thomas Edison. I've never seen that quote before but I love it. Great slideshow and thanks for sharing.

Would be cool to have this presentation on http://speakerdeck.com/

why?

Because it's a new service that focus on slides designed by tech people, so it would be nice to have another tech presentation to live there.

Normally I would down-vote such a comment, being that it's all promotion and no contribution...

But I clicked the link and have to say that site is gorgeous. I signed up to give it a try.

I'm no where affiliated with the site, I like, like yourself, how clean their service is compared to slideshare.

"Stop thinking about the big picture. Start thinking about creating value NOW."

Learned this one the hard way.

69 slides? How long was the presentation?

They're all brief. I imagine she flew through them.

Excellent presentation, I love the slide with the Gartner-esque magic quadrant!

pdfs please.... i loved it.

There's a download link at the top of the presentation - though you'll need to log in to do so.

Awesome. Like the Venn diagram particularly ;-)

I think there is a lot of refreshing stuff going on in this slide deck, thank you for sharing!

Take guts to do that, thanks.

I clicked the first 2 or 3 slides, and did not see all ten mistakes listed at once. I am NOT going to click through 60 odd slides to see if it might be worth my time to click through 60 odd slides.

Probably decent advice in here, the comment is more on attracting views. Let me know it's worth it.

I really enjoyed the presentation. It's designed more like a paper that's spread across 60 "pages" than a keynote speech, but there's quite a bit of good advice there.

Not every presentation is (or should be) written with the impatient online info-grazer in mind.

She obviously didn't get the memo about the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

If I had been in a room where she presented this live, I would've fallen asleep in about 5 minutes.

To quote from that article:

"this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement"

And that's exactly it. This seemed like a talk people attended because it sounded interesting or insightful (and I found very interesting indeed) and not a pitch.

Especially technical talks (and let's be generous and file it as technical under entrepreneurship, but much more so about programming/etc topics) aren't bad just because of an abundance of slides. To the contrary, I very much appreciate elaborate slides on slideshare/etc so I can get something out of the talk without having attended.

10/20/30 applies to a very specific kind of presentation—investor pitches to raise money (and other things in that vein). This presentation wasn't in that category.

Very nice presentation, loved the tables, very helpful

Love it! Great words of wisdom.

I like the point about how being in covers of tech blogs doesn't mean much. It's all mostly noise, and if one did a study, I bet they'd find the failure rate of startups covered by tech blogs to be around the same as the overall failure rate of the average business. E

Confirmation bias.

Cofounders need good conflict resolution skills. Sounds pretty obvious, but this is the first piece I've seen that says it outright.

Bone - pick:

Please, if you are going to upload a presentation online after giving it, have a version tailored for Slideshare or Speakerdeck.

Please for the love of all that is holy in the world: stop with the meme's, stock photo + funny/ironic text. Getty Images et al have some funny stuff, and if you type "guy frustrated with the world with frizzy hair" you'll likely find something, but it's over-played.

For the most part, presentations work better online as a visual accompaniment to a really well thought out and concise blog post.

With no info graphics please.

I would rather speakers upload exactly what they presented, as soon as possible after a presentation, than spend time (and perhaps never actually complete) making a custom version 'tailored for online' or 'reduced to blog post'.

It's great if they want to make other versions, but it's no knock against them for sharing what they've got, in the form they've got it.

TL;DR: Commenters' peeves, in a totally different forum, are not the presenters' problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com