Things I learned at YC
aelag.com
aelag.com
For me, the items fall into 4 categories:
1. Go without saying, but need to be said anyway:
- Real businesses have customers
- It gets harder, not easier
- Investors are normal people too
- Being committed in the face of contrary evidence can sometimes be a game-maker. Generally though it’s just stupid.
- Even very successful people frequently misunderstand their own success
- There is no one thing that makes a company work.
- Everyone is basically scared of everyone else at first
- Bring a notebook; don’t take notes on your phone. People think you are tweeting or something.
- People without life responsibility (kids, wife, etc) are at a serious advantage in the beginning stages
- Every guy has thought about starting a dating site
- If it seems hard but important and you try to outsource it, you'll probably get screwed. Potentially for a long time.
- The more stability the rest of your life has, the easier it’ll be to deal with the massive instability of a startup
- Small problems between team members will become big problems given time
- Stop dancing around the thing and say the thing (I love this one.)
Do you think this is related to impostor syndrome[1], or something different? Perhaps not as "harsh" as impostor syndrome?
This is why I'm not so sold on advice given by 'one-hit wonders,' people who scored big with a startup and are now seen as gurus because of it. I'm interested to hear what they say, but I'm skeptical.
I suspect what Amir is saying is that some successful people attribute their success to one thing, but that may not be the actual reason.
As an example - where the successful person has been clever enough to recognise their initial hypothesis for their success may have had flaws - many early Paul Graham essays credited the success of his Viaweb startup to the use of Lisp[1], while now most of his advice doesn't touch on a specific technology stack at all[2].
From my experience the things successful people credit for their success are infrequently wrong, but very often incomplete.
[1] eg, http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html (from 2001)
[2] eg http://www.paulgraham.com/ds.html (2013)
This is the most interesting and counter-intuitive point, I think.
That's the most important point about how to take advice if you put it in a formula, it's basically the mathematical explanation.
The way it has been phrased on numerous other blog post was to take advice not literally, but to see where the other person is coming from and how the advice is applicable to your startup specifically.
My most favourite way to phrase it is to try to find the 10% of advice out of the 100% that the person gave you, that is valuable for your startup.
I actually like the number being there- it helps prepare me for what's in the article. It also kind of helps my bs detector. I do prefer, however, that the gratuitous adjective be dropped.
This one is so hard, I've spent probably over 100 dollars in the past on those magical domain name thinker upper tools
Of course there are, but what use is telling people that they can execute smoothly and be successful (without outside funding) and everything will be great when this isn't how it works for the majority of people. I understand that being told that its hard and you will fail is demotivating, but telling people otherwise isn't going to help them because it is hard and most people will fail many times before they become successful. Maybe it should be seen as a perseverance test - if you can still stay motivated after being told these demotivational things, then its an indicator that you might just have what you need to persevere and make it.
The 90% of startups failing thing is true - I see it all around me, I even experienced it myself. You may think it doesn't apply to you (as I did in my previous startup), but chances are it does. I think its best to prepare people for this reality and help them persevere and learn and become stronger. Even if its demotivating...
When things are tough is when you need motivation. And the type of motivation you need is motivation to be stoic. That's exactly what this type of advice is.
It would be a very tough world for founders if "great ideas", smoothly executed, led to living at a decent level. Startups make sense because of the chance of a 10000x outcome. Otherwise, it's a losing proposition to begin with, there are much much better ways of living at a "decent level".
Of course that's only the financial part of it. There are other, better reasons to do a startup.
If you want stories about small businesses that don't require outside funding, the articles about the YC experience probably aren't for you. (Nothing is wrong with small self funded businesses, it's just a different genre)
Before we hit profitability, I thought "If only we can hit profitability, it will be smooth sailing - all our problems will go away." It's anything but. Two things do change: the type of problem changes (often to bigger, scarier problems), and you start facing more and more problems you can't talk about publicly.
I wish I had heard other entrepreneurs say "It gets harder not easier" when I was in some of my darker times. It would have raised my spirits to know that I wasn't alone in feeling like things kept getting harder when I thought they should keep getting easier.
(I recently started a website that nobody else seems to have done before -- web version of a desktop based tool)
In regards to the original statement -- if there's no competition there's a possible risk that there's no market. It's not always the case (once in a while you really did create something that nobody knew they needed until you give it to them), but it can be dangerous to delude yourself into thinking you came up with that one product.
More often, no competition means no market and no market means it doesn't matter how good your product is -- nobody wants it.
Example: BuddyMedia created the social media management tools market; hundreds of startups are now in that market.
There could be an easily identifiable market that is big enough to provide you with acceptable revenues... But it could be that this market is too difficult to satisfy! There could be any number problems:
- The solution they need is terribly complicated but their budget is pathetic and will never allow you to recoup your development costs.
- Or the problem they have is very convoluted but they expect your solution to be incredibly easy to use. Some markets are full of people who say things "this is too complicated/unfamiliar, I'll just do it on paper/FAX it to them/put it in Excel" or any other shockingly antiquated thinking.
- Or maybe the market looks to be uniform from the outside but once you dive in you realize that each customer in the market requires your solution to work in a different way, making it very hard to please even a subset of the market.
- It could be that the entire market needs your solution to interface with product-X, but that vendor won't even talk to you for any number of reasons (exclusive with someone else, they think you're a joke, or whatever).
And on and on...
A number of my startup ideas when I was younger surrounded areas that were technologically very cool and got a bunch of hype around smart young technologists, but weren't really something the mainstream needs (yet, I thought). I applied to YC in 2005 with an idea that was basically Google Wave, and I applied again in 07-08 for a game creation site. Both of these had a number of competitors at the time which I took to be market validation. In both cases, there was no market, and all of the competitors failed too.
Ideally you want to be in a situation where there is a big, dumb, rich company making a lot of money solving a problem that you solve better. The big company is your prey; you can then focus on how to win their market bit by bit without worrying about the much larger (and usually intractable) problem of how to create a market.
2) You could just think you have no competition but just be uninformed
3) You could think you have no competition but have tons of non-obvious competition.
Either way if the need exists people are solving it somehow currently even if it's a kludge. That kludge is your competition.
If there is no kludge exists and no real competition exists, then does the need even exist? (Probably not)
FWIW most of these lessons I learned the hard way so try not to take them as saintly advice delivered from on high. I just screwed up and wrote down how I screwed up and then later read the notes.
And even if the need exists, people probably don't think of it as the kind of problem that has a solution ... the hardest part may be getting them to realize that a solution could exist.
If you think there are no competitors, you are probably missing something.
- Everyone’s problem is money until it’s hiring
Two I liked, highlighting subtle but critical pain/points.
- The more stability the rest of your life has, the easier it’ll be to deal with the massive instability of a startup
- People without life responsibility (kids, wife, etc) are at a serious advantage in the beginning stages
So what would your conclusion be here? Are people with stable love-life in advantage, or are single people the ones that have better chances?
With respect to stability: Persons with lots of frequently changing variables in their lives (e.g. frequent beginnings/endings to relationships, moving around, etc.) have less stability. Adding the instability that comes with a turbulent, chaotic tech start up just compounds the issue and taxes one's resilience even more, because inevitably one will have to pay attention to instabilities other than business related ones.
With respect to responsibility: having kids, a spouse and other similar obligations (can) act as a tether and definitely act as dividers of attention. A spouse and children necessarily require attention that could otherwise be focused on the business. This is really much more of a problem for individuals who aren't already financially secure and depend on some relatively secure, stable income to support their lives.
The common element in both cases is time and attention: living an unstable life increases the probability of something other than the business acting as competition for attention, and living a life with other responsibilities "baked in" guarantees competition for attention.
If your spouse is a source of drama, chaos, and fights, then it will detract from your startup goals. If your spouse is highly supportive, hard working, and believes in your startup, then it will assist your startup goals.
If you're single and have a reasonable social life, it can add to your startup goals. If you're single and out closing down the bar every night, then it will subtract from your startup goals.
Political alliances with whom exactly?
"Every guy has thought about starting a dating site."
That one cracked me up.
"If there is no competition you’re probably screwed."
Maybe, but if the second best will be close in quality to the best one in your vertical, you won't have a very valuable company. See Peter Thiel's comments in his PandoMonthly interview.
"It gets harder, not easier"
Can you give some examples? Being able to build a team should make things easier on the founders, as they no longer have to be great at everything. I've seen founders get more relaxed as the business matured.
"All the technology heavy startups wanted to try to somehow outsource their marketing or customer acquisition"
I've seen this a lot and guilty of it myself.
Is it accepted to discredit them/talk crap about them if they're not doing this?
I did a Startup Weekend a few months ago and the biggest lesson I learnt there was "Listen, listen, listen!" as well as "Ask for help, you don't have all the answers".
The peopl are there to help and they are either volunteering their time to do so. Take full advantage of that.
Even if you have a great product, some industries, like advertising or public sector, are an order of magnitude harder to sell to if you're not really well connected.
That said, I have noticed a high correlation between taking notes on a phone and taking really shitty notes - a few characters instead of a sentence, no connections between related ideas that came up at different times, no drawings, interruptions for futzing with the lackluster select/editing tools on touch devices.
But maybe all that doesn't matter and it's not the tool at all. Maybe it's that the only people who try it don't know how to take notes while being engaged in a conversation.
That was good.
All successful companies are alike. Each failure fails in its own way.
Of course they did a lot of things right and it's worthwhile to listen to how they accomplished that, but if you were to duplicate exactly what they did you wouldn't necessarily be successful. So clearly there is something more to it.
In any case, there will be bad advice coming from both successes and failures. To eliminate all the "failures" as having "terrible insights" is short-sighted.
PS: I'm NOT a YC alum. And my bootstrapped company is running with revenues.
Aside from that, most of the people reading are in the "doing nothing" category (I'm largely in this category myself when it comes to startups, though I have tried and failed before), and so it behooves them to listen to the failures. :-)
If you really want to get in-depth wisdom, you need to talk to a founder who has previously failed trying to do something awesome that no one has ever managed to do before.
The secret lessons can only be found at rock-bottom. They are just lying around there, because no one can be bothered going there and picking them up. So, go there.