Scoble: Why I'm treating startups more critically lately
plus.google.com
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Most early-stage founders I meet are working in a vacuum. They have ideas, but no way to validate those ideas against reality. Mostly, they're just wasting time on half-baked visions of world domination. The game doesn't start until you ask a customer for money.
It's a bit like whitewater kayaking: You can float around all day looking at the rapids, but eventually you've got to let the current suck you downstream towards the waves and rocks.
Now, maybe in Scoble's world, the rules are different. He sees so many startups that anything less than perfection on the first try is a failure. But this suggests that Scoble's market is getting saturated—perhaps we already have enough mobile/social/local apps for tech bloggers?
Maybe it's time to listen to patio11, and find markets where any solution at all will make users climb across their desks with a checkbook in hand.
There's a million fun, valuable, important problems to solve out there which you go grow old and die without ever reading about on a Valley blog.
If most startups fail, and your idea is most likely to fail, the best way to find something that works is to fail, pivot, and fail again, until you get something people want.
The MVP entices this fail/pivot loop to happen as fast as possible.
And Scobble is right! If you are still on the failing phase, you shouldn't be seeking attention. Failing silently makes the whole experience less traumatic. And then we can move on to refraiming fail fast to learn fast.
Bravo, the guy is really convincing. But he's a marketer and his opinions should be sandboxed as such. He's right, the bar is really really really damn high now. But he has hasn't a clue on what it takes to get your chin up above the bar. I see a fat guy at a chin up bar and see somebody who, if they ate healthier and did some exercise, could do ten chin-ups easily. He sees a fat guy who shouldn't even bother to try.
Those who can, do -- those who can't, teach.
Why should we listen to him?
Look: if you want to get a lawyer who managing your transaction with a VC. Who would you take? A guy you did +50 transactions and know the entire village or somebody who took all his wisdom out of a book, let's say Venture Deals and is blogging like Scoble?
Because he spends a lot of time looking at new products and technologies. He really tries them out. He does fantastic interviews with founders, often asking quite good questions about the products.
He's built a huge network of people who consider him a credible source for new product recommendations. Getting featured by him can be huge for an early stage product.
Just because someone is a blogger, it doesn't make their advice useless.
Programming is not the only valuable thing in the world. Learn to respect other professions. You're not going to make it without them.
- spend a lot of time with new products and tech (no achievement)
- try them really out (no achievement)
- do interviews and they are not fantastic (no achievement)
- nowadays build a huge network w/Facebook, G+, LinkedIn (no achievment)
It is no achievement to blog while sitting for years at Microsoft doing some wishy-washy corporate job. But it is an achievement to build a startup, get traction and raise money w/empty pockets and a family to feed -- and that's just more than "programming". Don't get me wrong but this is a different psychological level than blogging from your safe job.
> So you only have binary states for achievement? Blog:0, Startup:1?
We talk past each other. Blogging is fine and it's a achievement with a certain scale. But he is blogging from a safe job (!!) -- that's something completely different to starting a venture after you have burnt your boats. And he is giving advice about something he doesn't have a clue of.
I'm a not a big Scoble fan, I find him verbos, and sometimes smug and self-regarding. I dropped him from my Google+ circles due to the sheer volume of marginally useful stuff.
However this article is decent.
His 'blogging from his safe job' involves a fair amount of travel, disruption to routine home/family life, and an insane amount of work that goes in to his productions (hint - he does a lot of video, not just 'text blogging').
All that said, I think he (and most of tech journalism) has given most startups a bit of a free pass, and glad to see his current stance (although it feels about 5 years too late).
That accountant they use? Never built a startup.
The lawyer who's managing all their contracts? Never built a startup.
The bankers at Goldman Sachs who's taking them public? Never built a startup.
Yeah - to hell with all of them - they've never been a "founder" so what the fuck would they know about "founding" something, right?
I noticed that people who can't teach what they are doing mostly suck at it.
Laughable. The world's best users. How do you qualify for that? By adding Scoble to your Facebook graph?
Ultimately, it doesn't matter how tough the journey is if the product you put out at the end of the process sucks. I don't think it takes an entrepreneur to call out various "me too" social/mobile/local clones for being derivative and void of innovation. The world is a harsh place and effort has never been rewarded; all that matters is results.
Before even talking to Scoble, a startup should have come up with the idea, have built a first version, launched as early as possible (but only after what you have is better/more useful than what is currently out there), found a core group of users that sticks around and uses the product, and iterated based on their feedback.
The fact is, this is likely to take at least a year, if not more. And only after you think you've achieved product-market fit should you be going after the press "big guns".
Don't take Scoble's post as advice on how to get a startup off the ground -- take it as advice on how far along you should be before you pitch him.
What he's saying is that many products are similar to other efforts with additional features. That's not going to cut it. Page Rank wasn't a little bit better than existing search engines. It wasn't Yahoo but with feature x,y,z; it was a completely new approach to vetting results. I won't switch for a few features. I don't care if you're better; I care if you're solidly different.
Show us the insight! Show us the corner turned. Show us why this rocket has escape velocity when all others fell back to earth. Stop trying to simply make money and start trying to significantly innovate.
> Another company tonight that I met showed me a similar app, when I started it up (I do that while you talk to me) it gave me an error. Gone.
For all we know that company might have created some revolutionary technology but, who knows, their build system is still crappy and they forgot to change a symlink somewhere?
He wouldn't have. If probably wouldn't have -- if they pitched the idea but the site wasn't working. But the first time I used Google I said, "Wow! This is vastly superior to anything else."
If I understand him correctly, he's not saying, "Don't launch until it's perfect." He's saying, "Differentiate yourself." He can't see that if your site doesn't work or it's just Existing Site X with a couple more features. An MVP works. An MVP shows how it is Significantly Different. In fact, that's exactly the purpose of an MVP -- not to show that you could build and publish.
That was exactly my experience. I first became curious about Google because it was spidering my personal website, well before when Google became the name of the project. By tracing back where the Web spider came from, I tried out searches, and by the time Google was Google, I was recommending it to all my friends as much superior to AltaVista (the king of the hill in search in those days), and all the more superior to the also-rans in search. Being substantially better at something is what every startup needs to achieve.
if you're prepping for a meeting with such an influential person (regardless of your thoughts about him, his opinion carries weight in tech circles) wouldn't you triple check everything and make sure it's ready to go so you don't blow your one big shot? in that situation people should be prepared and have a backup device ready with the app loaded to shove in his face instead so he could still mes around with it
Don't try if you look less sexy than XYZ is NOT the way to go. Every startup has different dynamics. For some design is core for others timing might be.
Scoble is a tech blogger he hardly knows anything of startups. Oh wait, he never had one! There are just too many moving parts to declare why a startup failed, Scoble is the last person I'd ask what those parts are.
Shipping stays at top. No matter what. Even if startup fails, learning is priceless.
His past proclamations, i.e. Google Gears will kill MS Office, Google Chrome OS has already won, put him on very shaky ground with me from a credibility standpoint. That said, I don't discount all future comments from the guy.
In this post, he does offer up some sound advice: clear use case, compelling product -- but really, if you're in the business this shouldn't be news to you anyway.
Unfortunately, one is forced to look past the short-sighted, the mis-aligned or the presumptive to find any take-away value. Focus on a use-case, but make sure the app works for everybody? Magical applications are those where people make comments right away? Without Facebook or Twitter integration, your app is lame? The narrow-minded-ness of these comments simply reflect Robert's lack of scope on the world.
The fact that he's arriving at these conclusions now shows more about his thought process than anything else.
Take note: ask your friends back at the HQ to pose as enthusiastic users while you're pitching your next app :)
Am I the only person who feels slightly bored that about 50% of startups I hear about are basically all about sharing links on social networking websites?
Since when did start-up become synonymous with consumer application start-up?
If it makes you feel any better, our startup is enterprise focused. Not everybody is focused on just consumer apps.
I don't know about you guys, but I am enticed by the idea of selling something to organizations that generally expect to (and do) spend actual money on products and services. The whole advertising based, or even freemium model, world of consumer apps just doesn't resonate with me. Not saying it doesn't work, obviously it does. Just saying that it doesn't feel like where I personally want to be.
Am I the only person who feels that social media is a lot of work with little reward?
Wouldn't it be more interesting to find new stuff that people can do with computers. We have all of these "Post PC" devices now, but to be honest I feel I have yet to see a killer application for them.
From what I remember in the early 2000s these social websites mostly started out as some geeks spare time project to show off their mad php skillz , some of them gained traction and become fulltime businesses some didn't. Now everybody seems to want massive financial backing and rockstar MIT programmers to build them.
I remember using late 90s versions of ICQ which was remarkably ahead of it's time and I'm surprised it never gained more traction although later versions seemed like a regression.
Scoble: Tells you how to create a successful startup -- never even tried
Can we start getting some advice from people who actually do this shit for a living?
I'm not suggesting you ignore the media, but put it into perspective: The guys actually creating things don't have time to be writing about creating things on Google+.
That's the same as Darren Rowse (problogger.net) not having a blog and never having blogged before but still giving you advice on how to become a pro blogger.
Robert isn't telling us what makes a great company, he's telling us what has become a minimum standard.
But don't forget to integrate with Twitter or you'll look like a dummy!
He forgets totally about the business sector. A crappy looking app with some errors would still be years of light ahead of consolidating a P&L from 30 different excel files sent from 30 different parts of the world.
Don't know, maybe people are focusing too much on the same thing.
"...the market is very crowded now for certain kinds of apps. Especially location-based and social network ones. So, if you're gonna pitch me something it better provide magic. Angels better sing when I open your app up. Otherwise, why should I use your app instead of Instagram, Foodspotting, Foursquare, Yelp, or my new ones, Batch, SocialCam, or Oink?"
So yes, he's not concentrating on the business sector. On the other hand, the very first piece of advice he gives would rule your hypothetical application in in:
1. Have at least one very clear, and cool, use case. I.E. have something you can show someone else that makes them say "oh, my, that's freaking useful."
In fact the first 5 pieces of advice also apply.
He makes some good point, they just don't apply everywhere. And even if he says people are doing too many similar apps, his examples are still about the kind of apps he complains about in the first place. You see the flaw?
Curious if anyone else has this experience.
The player assumed that winning the game depended on his arm alone when the truth was many things had to align with that arm to win games. The vantage point from the turf isn't the only one.
There's a similar sequence in the movie "Tin Cup" where two golfers make a bet about who can hit a ball the farthest. One hits his ball actually onto the golf course where lands in some grass, rolls a foot or two and stops. The other guy hits his ball onto the highway where it lands on the asphalt and rolls and rolls and rolls and rolls...
The player assumed that winning the game depended on his arm alone when the truth was many things had to align with that arm to win games. The vantage point from the turf isn't the only one.
Indeed. Having something like that to break one out of one's tunnel vision and preconceived notions can be a powerful thing.
He uses 33000 people to tell him it's good. So you get things that appeal to the average.
There is no place for niche apps and no cult hits in his world. Just the sexy and the summer blockbuster.
But there are other lots of other bloggers out there in the world.