Why Your Start-up Will Fail | Hacker News Reader

Why Your Start-up Will Fail

forbes.com

30 pointsdrm23715 comments

An oft-cited study estimates that just two-thirds of all start-ups see their second birthdays, and less than half make it to their fourth.

Whatever the exact figures, no one would argue that scores of budding new ventures die on the vine. One of the most common killers: lack of focus.

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I read a lot of stuff by startup pundits. Obviously YC, but also rants by Joel Spolsky, Wil Shipley and others. Each offers something to the mix.

Sadly, I've never found anything of note in the writings of Wil Schroter. It mostly seems like a list of flaccid truisms. Has anyone else found nuggets of wisdom in there?

Read PG's stuff on Why Not Not to Start a Startup instead. Way more considered.

His book has few interesting points (though, rather inspiring than ground breaking).

"Sadly, I've never found anything of note in the writings of Wil Schroter."

I was talking with a girl the other day who had confused him with Ben Casnocha, which I thought was pretty funny.

i don't know what's more sad, the fact that she thought I was ben casnocha or the fact that i'm less popular than ben casnocha.

I know Ben's writing has been accused of being trite, but isn't feeling sorry for his readers a bit harsh?

/joke

sanj - it's tricky to find a voice and message that resonates with a broader audience. in my book, for example, i explained a lot of stuff like "how to scale" which i thought was relatively pedestrian yet was really complicated for some people to understand. then when you take it a step further and publish it in mainstream media like forbes, you have to be careful of alienating a broader audience. what to you is a "flaccid truism" (great label btw) is a wildly powerful concept to others. i spend far more time trying to simplify concepts than trying to dig deeper into them. from what i've seen of most on-line startup pundits, a great deal of their audience is made up for the same people and becomes somewhat nepotistic.

On the other hand, pg's articles have never managed to crash my browser even once.

I hate "welcome" screens

Yes, the top two reasons why Forbes will fail are:

1. a startup screen that smells strongly of 1998;

2. that annoying sound which emerges faintly from your speakers as you read the article. It turns out that it's coming from the video ad that has been thoughtfully placed at the top of the screen to remind you, the reader, that you have just been linkbaited.

I hope for Forbes' sake that I accidentally clicked on that video ad, because audible ads that play automatically are a harbinger of doom, like finding an angry black cat underneath your broken mirror.

I'm doing some screen-scraping type stuff right now, and Forbes has the nastiest HTML I've ever seen on a big site. I don't think it means they'll fail though.

Have you looked at MySpace's html yet? Good luck with that...

Other reasons why startups fail:

Observations from 10 Months at a Startup: http://www.tortoiseandachilles.com/2007/09/observations-from...

10 more reasons why web startups fail: http://www.jroller.com/dscataglini/entry/5_more_reasons_why_...

Wow, they're really milking that 12 ad a page slide-show aren't they?

Graham's "how not to die" is closest to my mindset

The startup fail for various reason but most common reasons are 1. Idea: Bad idea, not a realistic idea etc. 2. Time: Right idea but bad timing 3. Team: Lacks of skills, confidence, collaboration within. 4. Money: Too much or not enough money, unwise spending on marketing, PR, salaries etc. 5. Focus: team is not focused on the idea 10000000000%.

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