The Startup Whisperer | Hacker News Reader

The Startup Whisperer

technologyreview.com

49 pointsjl7 comments

>> At least a third of startups entering the incubator end up changing their goals, sometimes completely.

This is an interesting inference. A pivot is a much more strategic stance than abandoning the startup, specially at a time when numerous (established) founders advise not to quit until absolutely necessary.

>> Graham says young founders are better at building products aimed at young users.

This is true. Having said that, most products aimed at young users are incredibly hard to monetize. The other option is to give it away for free, build a huge user base and hope for an acquisition.

On the flipside, the nice thing about older founders, presumably building products for older users, is that monetization is usually part of the product from the get-go. Older users have money and need solutions, and a solution can usually be reduced to "save me time" or "save me money." If you can save them time, they'll gladly pay you for it. If you can save them money, you can steal a ton of share from existing providers in the marketplace.

I'm not saying that younger founders can't do this, and there are plenty of exceptions on either side. But there does seem to be an age-related tendency toward either product-as-gadget or product-as-solution.

Further playing to stereotypes, many of the 'social network' startups we've seen over the past several years have seems to come from college-age people (kids?!) and they all center on some variation of "how do I find out what my friends are doing/listeningto/watching/etc?"

These affairs often have "get a large audience" as a main goal, relying on network effects for hockey stick growth, and indeed, for the core value of the project.

Even when I was in college, knowing what my friends were doing was never really a main concern of mine, and it's certainly not one I have these days. Perhaps I've always been a bit more money-focused than some friends, but I have always been concerned with the monetization details of any project from day one.

In high school or college teenagers do want to know one thing ... is that hottie dating anyone?

You can also talk about communication channels. SMS was really popular amongst teenagers because asking "wanna go out?" over SMS is less threatening than doing it face to face and you could also do it in class during hours.

I don't disagree - there's fewer things that have any real impact on your life when you're 17-22 vs 45.

Understandable, however you can't monetize without users it's a good idea to have a general idea of where you're going to make your money but I would avoid spending too much time on it and focus more or building something cool that can be monetized.

Of course, but there's a difference between creating value for users and selling it to them, and creating value because of all the other users in the system (network effect), and only being able to monetizing users after, say, 50,000 users are active users.

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