The few paths to startup success | Hacker News Reader

The few paths to startup success

nathanspeller.com

56 pointsnspeller16 comments

Nice heads up. It seems that most newbie entrepreneurs don't really want to get their hands dirty (which is obviously not programming).

Yet, success is a very abstract concept. With that in mind I don't think that, in general, success is rare. Failure and success are both abundant. A single outcome can be a success and failure, depending on what is your baseline.

For example, when I built a small financial firm my goal was to build something cool AND get bloody rich. I failed on that. Yet, we have millions of customers right now. My dream of retiring before 30 to work for fun didn't work out.

Ask the right questions. Create hypotheses. Create experiments to test your assumptions. Measure, measure, measure.

This is what everyone always, consciously or unconsciously is trying. Taking a more scientific approach doesn't necessarily need to increase your chance.

The thing is: there is no pattern for success generation. This is against the nature of being exceptional. Stop seeking it.

> The thing is: there is no pattern for success generation. Stop seeking it. This is against the nature of being exceptional.

Of the same idea is Alberto Savoia in his book about pretotyping, where he describes such a Law of Failure.

What one can do is try to fail faster and I very much suggest to read the book, it's for free: http://www.pretotyping.org/pretotype-it---the-book

Failing fast is in my opinion also not a formula for success.

Too bad the theory sometimes is hard to implement...For example, my startup don't have enough money to test our marketing theories, the only thing we can do is forever change our products, but that won't help, when you make mobile apps, you /need/ marketing, otherwise you /will/ fail.

there is always alternative marketing solutions including web in person and other. Be alert to the changing demographic in the area. and if it is too hard to user feedback test, go for a leaner product without so much non-tested assumptions. Gud luk bro

I hate buying into the idea that any company /needs/ marketing. Word of mouth is very powerful. I think all companies need to position themselves for slow growth. For example, I LOVE the Weebly story: http://startupschool.org/2012/rusenko/

Over night successes rarely happen. That's my issue with incubators. A lot of times they invest in potential overnight successes when they should really be investing in those most positioned for slow growth.

Marketing != advertising

Marketing, for a startup, means finding a repeatable sales model.

It's more. Marketing is you, your partners, your service, your FAQ, the way to handle email/phone calls, interviews, the building of trust.

Yup, I definitely meant advertising here but had marketing burned in the brain because of the original comment.

If you have zero people seeing your stuff, how they will word of mouth it?

So get money. Either by raising or contracts, or whatever. Or shoot your idea, people can help here.

From what you write, it looks like you equate marketing with advertising (unless it's your marketing theories that include advertising as the only path to success). That's not the case - advertising is one of the tools of marketing, not the only one. If you're interested in expanding your horizons, one interesting read is Frank Lane's "Killer Brands" - the start of the book is a little too boombastic for my tastes, but the content is very good.

I also include in marketing generating word of mouth, good site, store SEO, and so on.

But it is needed anyway, apps ( specially on iOS ) do not get traction anymore by pure organic growth alone.

For example: Apple removed the new app list from iTunes, and the search take in account popularity, so a new launched app has zero visibility.

I think the trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is trying to create the next billion dollar company. It's better to start small. Find your niche and solve an actual problem for that niche. If it really is a good product, it will eventually grow on its own.

Part of the problem with the backtracking analogy is that the graph changes while you're traversing it. It changes due to external factors. The act of moving to different nodes may cause the previous edge to be deleted. And so on.

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