Do Not Start A Startup: Or, What I Learned At Startup School 2011
andybrett.com
andybrett.com
Why can't Justin.TV fix their platform so that people can find the videos?
Every single time there is a startup school thread on HN, there is a sub thread of Justin.TV urls passed around like dodgy bittorrent urls. Surely the platform should support this?
The titles on the URLs make it even worse: "Broadcasting LIVE on Justin.tv" - hours & days after it isn't being broadcast, isn't live and is only on Justin.TV because they happened to record it.
</RANT>
I'm pretty ambivalent about the public display of votes on HN, but it might be useful for the Justin.TV people to know how many people agreed with my complaint.
I don't have any hard stats, but I think that a majority of justin.tv's traffic is gaming related. In my observations, a single gamer can produce hours of content a day, most days of a week. For these types of streamers, it is more of the exception than the rule that someone will go back to watch the stream.
In the case that there is an interesting game that people want to link to or whatnot, they do end up passing around crazy urls and mentioning time offsets. If it is a really popular thing, someone will rip it off of the site and post it to youtube.
One commonality that I see (at least for the partnered streamers) is that in between games, they will run a commercial (they have the ability to choose when commercials happen). That would be a natural point to split the video on justin.tv's side, and then you could at least directly link to a particular game. Giving the ability for streamers to title a video after it is completed would help discoverability as well.
Example of what you get when a broadcaster uses these features: http://www.justin.tv/naslseasontwo/videos
This brings in lots of traffic to Justin.tv (there are ads on each video). Because you can't really search for these, it becomes very difficult to get caught (unlike youtube).
For myself, failure is quite okay. I spent the entire weekend at a hackathon where I failed to have anything to demo. My teammate and i were the only ones there to fail to have a demo. I had had success at other hackathons so this hurt. Ultimately it doesn't scare me though, as I'll explain later.
And on the billion dollar company, I have to say I can't relate. My friend and I come from middle class (blue collar working town middle class) families, so we've never had much money and we don't really chase it.
So for us, it's not about the money, it's always been about building great things that we want for ourselves. And with each failure and each success, we learn more, and what we make becomes better and better from our learning. I like the idea of failure because it's only ever made the things that I make better, and helped me to be sure that I am doing what I love. Ultimately every time I ready one of these articles, and I realize that I embrace failure as an opportunity, and see money as a distraction, i feel more right with myself that we should indeed be starting a startup.
Disclaimer: I am a student who has no idea what I'm talking about.
Goes to show how good an actor he is too - I never would've imagined that the same person who played the doofus Kelso in That 70's show, or the guy from punkd would be giving solid, down to earth business advice at such a young age.
and continues into Part 2: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298680010
One of the truly undervalued assets in this world is learning from other people's mistakes instead of having to learn from your own. It can be the difference between winning and losing.
I was in a business simulation competition once during university. At the end, when they were about to announce the winners, one of the judges got up and said, "Business is like sex. If you've never tried it, it doesn't matter how much you read about it, how much you know about it, etc. Until you experience it, you don't really understand it for real." It made for a laugh afterwards, because some people weren't happy with how he had judged their teams.
I guess it's because most people are not good at managing their own psychology, ala this post: http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-diff... Head knowledge is hard to remember when you're in the fire. Heart knowledge is instinctual.
I'm not making a comparison between knowledge and experience as they are two different animals. But there is certainly a lot to learn from another person's experience. It's the reason a boxer study tapes of their opponents fighting other people, although it by no means ensures success it does increase their chances.
The thing is in the real life you don't get unlimited chances to learn from your own mistakes. In somes cases if you fail once, its over. You don't get a chance to build a new product everyday, or write a book, or play for a championship ring, etc. If you can find sound advice that saves you the time/pain of failing, take it. Winning is better anyway.
Why?
If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is looking for.
Side note: When joining a startup you ask that question.
Basically think Google. Google was the first search engine to make search fast and accurate. They had probably 10 competitors, 1 of which, yahoo, was thought to be immovable.
You know what's funny about that, though? Larry and Sergey wouldn't have had a great answer for that question when they started. They had a relatively primitive technology demo, and were taking on massive competitors with deep pockets (hell, even they tried to sell the idea before they gave in and started Google). There's absolutely no reason that one of the major search companies couldn't have focused their resources on search, come up with something similar to PageRank, and smothered Google in the crib. They just didn't. Oops.
Frequently, the correct answer to your question is: "our competitors are bureaucratic and slow, and while our approach could be replicated by any good, two-person team, history suggests that won't happen"...but that always seems to be the hardest answer to sell. Everyone is looking for the deterministic solution to the problem of innovation, when the solution is actually stochastic.
If you're solving a problem that your stronger competitors could be solving, and everyone knows that it's a valuable problem that needs to be solved, they'll probably squash you. Or be willing to buy when you offer up your solution.
This is not something you just change, and it was a very real benefit for Google (but perhaps one that was difficult to see).
So I'd argue that the answer wasn't bureaucratic and slow, but "our competitors are set in their ways".
No matter how nimble you are, if you've stared yourself blind on your own perceived solution of a problem, you might be unable to react to the challenge of some little startup coming in and solving the problem in a different way. You might even have tied yourself down with partners etc. in ways that makes changing your model incredibly much harder even if you do realize.
Google's main competitor was Altavista. I don't know why everyone else switched from Altavista to Google, but I can tell you that for me it wasn't because of Google's much-vaunted "page rank" algorithm (I certainly didn't notice any improvement in the search results over Altavista). I had two reasons for switching:
1 - Google had no ads, versus tons of ads on Altavista.
2 - Google was very fast.
These two factors made choosing Google over Altavista a no-brainer for me. I'm convinced that if Altavista had restrained themselves from serving up ads along with their search results, Google would have been dead in the water.
For me, the speed and lack of ads vs. Altavista was irrelevant. When my friends and I finally switched, it was because the results finally convinced us that spending a lot of time tweaking search queries on Altavista wasn't worth it when Google would give better results on the first query. That realization was a long time coming.
Altavista's basic ranking was abysmal, and if you didn't notice any improvement it is probably because you like me knew how to search on Altavista. Regular users didn't. It worked well for technical users because we'd expect to do stuff like add "+term" and "-term" and quote phrases and use and and or. Regular users didn't.
I remember a lot of very long back and forth discussions with people I knew about whether or not Google would have a chance, because the above described method worked so well and it seemed so simple to use that it was hard for us to accept that getting non-technical users to use it wouldn't fly. Many of us were convinced that the Altavista model would win out in the long term, and it frustrated some of us (me included) to no end that Google were so stingy with their operator support even after we'd switched.
But as the net got flooded with relative beginners who'd type in a single word or two and expect decent results immediately, it rapidly became obvious that Altavista was a dinosaur.
Today we see just how much we (and Altavista) overestimated a large part of the user base:
Go to search.yahoo.com. Type "google" in the search box. Watch the second search box appear in the results with a "Get straight to your answers here with Yahoo! Search" above it... It's there for a reason: People do indeed search for search engines by name on Yahoo. I first learned of this one when I worked at Yahoo; they had numbers to back it up.
And if those things need a company as a vehicle, make that, too.
MVPs and customer interviews and everything else are great, but at the end of the day, what's most important is that you target a market large enough to sell to enough customers to make for a sustainable business model. Even a perfect product can fail if a market is too small or worse, completely non-existent.
I also think that building something cool in the hopes that you will get bought out by a large company is the hip thing to do.
Selling and marketing is boring to many of the people that want to start a company.
Also, there was a good discussion about profit[2] a week ago. I recommend to take a look.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/30/us-venture-bround-...
Likealittle, with zero revenue model, exemplifies what everyone is complaining about.
Hardly a convincing condemnation of what Likealittle are doing.