Are You a Seesmic or Balsamiq Entrepreneur? | Hacker News Reader

Are You a Seesmic or Balsamiq Entrepreneur?

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27 pointsbbuffone19 comments

Seesmic is just a plain terrible idea though. Growth first, profit after is a great proven model which works well, but not if your idea is lame to start with.

There's no evidence to suggest people want to view slow videos of people making comments/waffling, rather than reading them. Seesmic traffic barely registers.

Most people don't bother about video comments since most of them are by people who are promoting themselves and they're also very low on info density. You can read a paragraph in few seconds and it takes you minutes to get the same thing from a video comment. Video is perfect for teaching but I don't think it's great for quick bursts of communication.

I think video comments are going to be irrelevant in the long run. It's interesting to make a parallel with video phone. Video phone never took off because people didn't want to be bothered with checking how they look before they answer a phone. Fixing hair, shaving, etc... why bother with that?

The ROI "upside" to moon-shot companies like Seesmic is deceptive. Yes, the success stories in the Seesmic bracket are 8-9 figure exits. But the founders (a) see only a small fraction of that return after preferences and dilution and (b) are disallowed from pursuing any but the most lucrative conceivable exits; the rocket is strapped to their back, and it's the moon or bust.

The investment "risk" of bootstrapped companies is also deceptive. If you have a business model that works, you don't need investment; if you'd benefit from an investment, you pursue it at your leisure.

Balsamiq: real.

Seesmic: bullshit.

Google is an archetypal "Seesmic" startup. They didn't even start making money for years. It just happened to work in that case.

I heard they were profitable before their first angel round. How long did that take?

Except Google was solving a real problem, Seesmic created the problem that they solved. Some might find video comments cool, but if they ceased to exist tomorrow the world wouldn't be much different.

Sony Walkman also didn't solve any problem people knew they have at the time. "Solving a problem" is a good approximation of something people want, but it's not a perfect substitute.

Listening to music has been a fairly established wish for humans for thousands of years. Video comments on blogs? Not so much. It's less useful than text in almost all circumstances.

In fact, everyone easily forgets that Google made revenues very early by selling their search engine as appliance for enterprises. They became profitable already in their third year in business (even before starting adwords).

There are also hybrid models. A "market place" startup might introduce individuals to other individuals or companies to individuals. In this case there might be a per transaction cost or the startup might charge one party and not the other.

In this case, the startup might grow horizontally with the freebie crowd and obtain a large market share, then sell the audience to an interested party for a fee. That's what my startup is doing :-)

I think the term "lifestyle business" scares a lot of startups.

No, it scares investors, as well it should.

Which is why having outside investors isn't right for everyone. Who needs whom more?

Yes, I was going say the same thing. I think investors want entrepreneurs to do a scale first. Easier to make big and fast bucks on something emotional than something rational.

Every business should be a "lifestyle business". If don't know what a non-lifestyle business is, but it sounds like something that's unsustainable, that doesn't make you happy and thus doomed to fail.

PG seems to have done pretty well with viaweb, even though it was a fairly brief part of his life.

In any case, though, I would take issue with the idea that 'profit first' is necessarily a 'lifestyle business'. That seems to be comparing apples and oranges.

Definitely a Balsamiq style entrepreneur. I don't even think twice about ideas that don't have a pricing model. I don't even seem to come up with them in the first place.

certainly combos also can include free and premium service.

with scale model -- you better have a landmark vision and the ability to execute exceptionally well.

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