Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
medium.com
medium.com
(This is essientially the first and maybe the second point reiterated.)
Suppose you were a cook with your own restaurant. How do you figure out what works and what doesn't?
Do you go and do market research, have questionaries, focus groups, do statistics, user-driven cooking or whatever?
Surely not. You create dishes, put the new ones in the menu as today's special. Then you figure out whether people like them or not.
How do you figure that out? Do you ask them? Of course you don't because you know that if you ask "did you enjoy your dinner?" People will just be polite and tell you "yes - it was excellent - thank you very much". No. You look at whether they finished their plates or send it back half-full. Whether you get any sales. Whether they come back for more.
Even my mother knows this. When she cooks cookies, she doesn't ask me "do you like them?" Because she knows I will just say "yes - they are the best cookies in the world, mum". She asks me if I want another. And if I stay the night, she looks at whether I get up at 3 am to roam the kitchen for more of them cookies.
This is basic human behaviour but somehow lost in the academics of business administration.
The second thing is that I get the feeling that the author simply haven't explored the huge "product space" between takeaway and ready-to-cook prepackaged ingredients with a recipe at all. How about - this is essientially takeway but you have to heat the curry in your microwave and then add the fresh coriander yourself - the upshot is that it will last a week in your fridge should you not eat it all tonight. Or maybe: It is protein shakes and vitamin pills for a week - no problem - it stays "fresh" for 5 years. Or: It is the latest Jamie Oliver book with ingredients to get you started on the first three dishes.
I think OP was simply complaining that the article author approached market research academically, throwing common sense out of the window in the process. Classic outsmarting yourself. You don't need to call it market research for it to be effective (the chef probably doesn't).
Should I consciously avoid using the jargon (which is really a shortcut way of expressing a longer idea to a familiar audience)? No, rather than giving you a long winded discussion of the steps to getting dressed (or whatever the jargon may be), I'll just say, "I got dressed".
It conveys more information in a shorter frame. Why would someone avoid being compact and expressive to a niche audience?
The problem with jargon is that while it can express abstract purpose or intent (that can otherwise difficult to describe), it's basically meaningless in describing actual actions.
For example, you could say "I was doing market research today." But wtf does that really mean? It sounds smart and like you know what you're doing, but ultimately it's more meaningful to say "I was reading our competitor's website" or "I was asking people on the street if they would buy our product."
Jargon has it's place, but just because you call talking to your friends about your idea "market research" doesn't make it any more useful. I think it's easy to fall into that trap.
My point was that jargon has it's place as a shortcut to language. Sure, people use it to sound smart. But it's also a short cut.
Back to the original point, doing "market research" could be very meaningful to people I report to in the context of my job. They don't care what the steps were, exactly, just that I was doing my duty diligence and figuring out what the hell we should sell to whom.
Based on your last graph, I think I agree more than disagree. But I've had very dense, yet brief, conversations with other technical people that could only be brief due to jargon. And non-technical people thought we were b.s.ing each other because they didn't understand the terminology.
But you are definitely correct -- if you want the greatest reward-to-time ratio when learning a field, just learn the jargon first. In fact, even if you want depth of understanding, learn the jargon first. 1) you'll then know what other people are talking about, and 2) you'll be "part of the tribe", and more trusted.
YMMV. For me, learning the language of a culture is just step 1 to communicating with them.
If you don't have a reasonably strong belief that your idea is going to work, why bother testing it at all? At the least, you should probably try it on a tiny scale first (i.e. on yourself or a few friends) before taking investments, hiring employees, etc.
Sometimes you get positive feedback at a small scale that doesn't work in a larger sense. That was kinda one of the major points in the article.
In a startup all these things are up for grabs. You have much more freedom to experiment, but it is orders of magnitude more expensive to test business models then it is to test cookie recipes. One of these takes months or even years to validate, and one of these takes less than an hour.
"The second thing is that I get the feeling that the author simply haven't explored the huge "product space" between takeaway and ready-to-cook prepackaged ingredients with a recipe at all."
This is very true, but that ties into my point: it's much much harder to do this testing than to test a new recipe. Hence many people try to find a cheaper way to validate ideas, which is what market research is all about.
Now whether the OP did market research well is a different matter. In fact he's quite up-front he didn't. But that doesn't mean well conducted market research in not worthwhile.
The best way to track how customers found you when they call is to use different phone numbers in your marketing. Even in web forms, asking where you heard about me...I bet 50% of your responses are the first choice in the drop down menu.
Customers Lie. Not maliciously...but you can't expect them to understand and respect the importance accurate tracking on your side of the fence is.
What if you are just learning to cook, and don't have the resources to setup a full kitchen?
A startup is not a 'real' company, writ small. There are tricks to emulate the necessary feedback mechanisms, but your analogy is more appropriate to an operating company.
I have found that people here simply respond well to a little bit of formal language, so it's not surprising the author would habitually use it. People tend to take it as an implicit promise that you know what you're doing.
You can usually get away with a little semantic trickery though; of course we do market research, we're a serious business after all. It's just that in the startup context, the best way of doing this is trying stuff and actually observing behavior.
When called on the bluff, invent a qualifier: Oh of course market research works differently in the startup context; we call it "highly iterative" market research. (Schnelliterationsmarktforschung).
Not for the founder's bank account per se, but for the fact that he has all the wrong takeaways from his startup experience.
You started off well. You did the market research. Great. You've clearly gotten people interested in the service. Even better. You demonstrated in your post that a clear-headed approach was taken and you objectively determined people would want your product.
But then ... what ... you just buy a bunch of groceries and think people will just engage with your service? Not once in your start-up debrief do you mention your marketing approach. That's a huge red-flag for me about how you thought about your business.
Lesson 8. Marketing.
I believe this idea would have worked if you had decent marketing. Do I live in England? No. But I still know that the Brits are getting a lot more concerned about health. Even Jamie Oliver with school dinners and other social ventures. It's a sentiment that has cultural traction and I think the idea here is great.
But marketing ... oh yeah that thing:
- What was your overall engagement strategy?
- What genuinely creative concepts did you come up with that would make your service compelling and sexy to your people?
- How did you demonstrate how to use the service?
- How did you make others see the value your market research subjects saw?
- What compelled people to emotionally invest in your company as a consumer?
OP, you're a smart guy - so I'm using your failure as a case-study for a greater trend I see amongst startups around "pain points". Sure, pain points are important. But people forget that marketing, done well, is the creation of pain points.
I believe most startups die because founders don't have a vision beyond the mechanics of the business. It's sad to see post-mortems like these that point the finger back at the idea - which was inspired and had legs. I'm not sure what the marketing strategy was here (OP didn't think it was important enough to tell us), but I'm assuming like most he was happy enough with I-stock artwork and a quirky explainer animation that the public is so thoroughly bored of.
His market was for people who wanted to cook for themselves, but didn't know where to buy the ingredients.
There are lots of shops, so this really isn't a problem.
I'm not convinced. I am surprised to hear it has worked anywhere.
I'm not a gourmet cook by any stretch, but I do cook most of my own meals. I would never buy fresh ingredients online. Shopping for the ingredients, perusing the choices and selecting "the best" unblemished fruits, vegetables, and meats is part of the experience of cooking. I don't want to have someone else or some robot do it and dump it on my doorstep. When I don't care, I just go to a restaurant, which will be cheaper and faster than a service like this could possibly be.
The thing is, they do it right. Once they get the orders, they go directly to the farms and get exactly what they need for delivery each day. That way they never have to deal with spoilage. And they can be picky about the product they buy and later deliver to their customers. And to top it all off, they offer free delivery and are still usually cheaper than shopping at the grocery store. I believe this is profitable for them because they don't have to deal with spoilage.
I also like to cook, but I buy all my vegetables online anyway. I find the online experience good enough, and the convenience totally worth it. I would probably be an infrequent user of this service.
It would also be neat if you could allow people to store customized versions of recipes. Say they like more carrots in a particular soup, etc.
I don't believe it's coincidental that the delivery service worked in the least densely populated part of Europe.
Did they ever attempt to position it in this way? How did they position it? The answers to these questions would be of equal value to all the other information provided.
I like that.
1. Very few people will tell a founder their idea is bad right in front of them; and
2. Founders suffer from the worst case of confirmation bias ever. They are only looking for positive signs that their idea is good.
There are ways around this error if you know market research methods well enough, but unfortunately the prevailing wisdom in the startup community is the only way to do thorough market research is for the founders to "get out of the building" and do in-person interviews.
It's refreshing to see articles like this where the founder realized their errors and didn't just outright blame the process of market research.
I've gotten some great feedback from customers 'venting at the support guy' that I don't think I would have if they knew I was actually the founder.
I feel like this would be a giant red flag to me. You are essentially a logistics startup, and you believe this is not "tech-heavy". Logistics is likely one of the most complicated tech-heavy problems being solved right now.
Things like pricing(30% margins in grocery food sounds very high), recommendations etc. Was there ever a way for food bloggers to have their recipes automatically pulled into Dinnr for readers to purchase?
This is almost a 100% tech company. I wonder how much of underestimating that, combined with the founders possible(I'm guessing) lack of tech knowledge contributed to the failure.
I think you are right about logistics being tech-heavy. But, I also do not think that having more knowledege/understanding of tech would have "saved" Dinnr. The tech and logistics (i.e., not being able to scale, fill orders, etc.) were not what did them in – lack of customers/market is what seems to have done them in and I do not think tech alone would solve that problem.
This would maybe be a "100% tech company" operating at the scale of say Amazon. Over-engineering the technology would have been a huge waste of time and resources.
Should they have outsourced their development? Absolutely not, but only because they needed to iterate in order to find what makes the service useful for their customer base.
1. Throw up landing page explaining service
2. Have people put in orders via email or form submission
3. Ride bike to grocery and deliver items
4. Collect cash or use Square upon delivery
Market test complete. Failure with minimal $ committed.
It worries me that an idea that could be done for so little capital is able to raise money. These are heady times.
Question to OP: did you ever consider targeting caregivers who would like to cook for their loved ones but can't leave the house for significant periods?
Granted they may have tried this
> UK, London, Single Men/Women, Interest:cooking, TV shows: Biggest loser or Hells Kitchen.
> Then send them to Landing Page.
What specifically happened? What were the recipes like?
Did anyone like the food?
Your experience is the most valuable thing you gain from a failed experiement. I urge you not to try to distill it into business platitudes. Be specific and descriptive!
I read about a focus group once where a company was asking consumers about different color tea kettles. They had tea kettles in a dozen colors and asked people which one they would purchase. The responses were split fairly evenly among all the different colors. At the end of the day, the people who participated in the focus group were allowed to take home one of the tea kettles for free. Almost all of them chose white or black.
Dude, you're obsessed with being a founder, more than you have vision/plan/reason/skill to actually be one. You have all of the lingo right, all of the right words, hell, your post here even knows how to speak to why you failed in a voice that will get the rest of this community to read it. Your company name even had an "r" at the end with a missing vowel!
Reading your article, like many others before me, I was annoyed at first but thought, you know, maybe this is just another young wantrepenuer who needed to learn for himself...
Then I saw this response. "I will address your comments in a blog post". Really? Look at the great posters/founders that come in here and respond to comments. They do so comment by comment, to the point where sometimes I wonder how they've got the time and then remember how much I cared when I was trying to do my own thing and know I'd have done the same. Do you really think we're all waiting with baited breath to see your next blog post? Think it'll get upvoted too? Not likely. Something cool with security/lisp/new tech x/can't believe someone just did y/PG's thoughts on life/3D 2048 MMORPG will drown it in seconds.
I'm not saying to quit, you're terrible, or anything like that. Just start being real, stop thinking about your presence, funding, seeding round 22, or whatever, and get to building something actually awesome, and you'll have the startup ecosystem banging your door down. The rest just makes you look hungry to be something you're not.
I almost feel like these negative comments are coming from founders who feel like frauds on the inside and need to call out others as frauds to elevate themselves and their own egos.
Here's the truth. This guy took a shot. That makes him more entrepreneurial than 99% of the folks out there! Did he make mistakes. Yes. Could they have been avoided. Probably.
But... he took a shot. He who fails the most, succeeds! You only need one success.
The other alternative is that it was not the book which you hadn't known about before - but rather that the article had the link to the book .... but in this case, what does "before" refer to? Did you submit another comment earlier in the thread?
Interesting though on #5: "As one of my first investors later told me, you must have developers on your core team in the same room."
I think this is never the guess and am surprised when some startups take their devs offshore.
It's actualy the interesting part. Advices or lessons don't have a lot of value without context.
edit: never mind, I found http://meatinabox.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/dinnr-a-review/ and it suggests it was in the $20-25/person/meal. That seems steep... I see other reviews (they did a nice job getting reviews and getting good search placement with them) saying 22GBP for an entree for 2, and 12GBP for an app for 2.
I think this kind of expectations ruin good business ideas.
A thing like Dinnr may have worked well if run for years, not just tested out for 18 months. It may have not produced a 10x return, but it may have been enough for four people to live on and, maybe, then expand to another city and have four other people live working at Dinnr 2.
I thought this was an interesting read. Armchair after-the-fact analysis when you weren't the one involved (which can cloud judgement) is pretty easy.
Thanks to the author for taking the time to write up his experiences.
Hrm... I get asked (on occasion) to do this sort of 'stress test' on someone's idea - and usually they don't want to hear the negatives anyway. Sometimes it can morph a not-great idea in to a better/great one, but sometimes the reality is "this should be dropped". I wonder if the author had actually received some of that hyper-critical thinking on dinnr earlier, and the feedback was "this is bad, don't do it", if he'd still pressed on or not.
Many founders (myself included) find it difficult to scrap an idea they have created and are emotionally attached to, even after seeing strong evidence to the contrary.
I often wonder if YC has seen better results from teams that were accepted without an idea (granted, it's likely a much smaller sample size to work from). I wonder if that somehow makes them less susceptible to this tendency for founders to place a disproportionately high value on the quality of their idea(s), allowing them to focus more broadly on markets and identifying real problems to solve.
Yeah, after trying, I've found it's very difficult to get people to listen to this kind of advice and give it the weight it deserves. I feel like most would-be entrepreneurs either can already think in this manner themselves and so don't need me or anyone else to do it for them or are destined to learn how, expensively.
So when you bring up all this other stuff, you're messing with their flow, breaking them out of their comfort zone, killing their buzz. You become that weird guy who's always telling them no, the more you try to impress upon them the need to critically analyze what they're trying to do, and to keep doing it as time goes on and they make limited progress.
There is that rare breed of "person", as you want to put it, that can sustain a critical dialogue about themselves, but these people won't need you to do it for them.
http://www.brw.com.au/p/business/mid-market/how_frustrated_c...
http://www.pehub.com/2013/09/berlin-based-food-site-hellofre...
I signed up in Australia when they were doing a 50% off promo, figuring on getting a cheap box of groceries and then cancelling immediately. My wife loved it and now we're paying full price.
Also, I found this bit about their target market weird:
urban professionals, couples without kids or with one baby max
Urban professionals without kids have time to shop. It's families with young kids that don't!
Sure, "solving a problem" is important. But Nike isn't solving a problem that other shoe companies haven't solved a thousand times over. The reason they're successful is that buying into their brand makes you part of a bigger community, and that community has a positive identity attached to it.
Same thing with a startup like Exposure (https://exposure.co/). Sure, the product is great, but they're also fostering a community and projecting a very specific image. Without that special "something" they'd be no different from Flickr or the countless other photo sharing services out there.
This brings me to Dinnr. Did you try to grow a community of passionate members organically by writing a blog, hosting events, being active on forums like whatever the Hacker News for cooking is?
Or did you just try to "solve a problem"?
This comment misses the point. The first goal of a startup should be to solve a problem. Companies identify problems and offer solutions to customers. If you've started a company without having identified and solved a problem a lot of people face, you've already failed as a business. Trying to organize a "community of passionate members" should be considered incidental, particularly considering that the overwhelming majority of successful companies (particularly young ones) have no organized "passionate" community whatsoever. You don't need to spend your free time hosting events to rally people around your brand identity if your product is legitimately good and useful -- and if your product is legitimately good and useful you'll attract brand loyalty organically anyway. Trying to do this in the opposite order by attempting to bind people to a brand that hasn't proven its worth and doesn't actually do anything worthwhile is going to be futile.
In other words, solving problems is great and all, but you can also make a great product that people just enjoy using, and let it grow organically.
Of course, you could argue that any good product does solve a problem. But my point is that despite what everybody says, the problem doesn't always have to be the starting point.
also why would people use a product they enjoy that doesn't solve a problem?
The functional problem it solves as a shoe may not need solving, but indentifying with a brand, culture and community is a much more powerful need than protection for feet.
If you really think about it...Pain points are primarily emotion driven and solutions need to solve the emotional point much more than the functional one. (the functional point is just the ante to play the game.)
These people used to be called 'house keepers'. Some of them offer other domestic services and may be called 'butlers.'
That aside - there are some useful reality checks in the piece.
Back around 2000 I had a conversation with someone who was trying to launch a pickup-your-goods service for online shoppers. He said that out of everyone he'd talked to, I was the only person who told him it was a losing idea with no commercial prospects. (It sank without trace not long after the first dotcom bust. After about a decade of unstoppable brand building, Amazon eventually reinvented something not unlike it.)
It's interesting that he had the same experience of alleged market research and comments from prospective customers that gave him totally worthless and misleading information.
This gets into one of the points the post made: you need to verify that people actually prioritize the problem you want to solve.
Cooking might fall into an uncomfortable crack, in this model, because the people most receptive to the benefits of a home-cooked meal with greater variety and quality ingredients are also disproportionally likely to be DIY cooks.
Meanwhile you are five times as slow as an experienced cook, and the food doesn't come out as good. That's really frustrating, and not something one or two lessons can fix. You just have to chop your hundred onions.
Also, this idea hits on one of those things that lots of people really want to believe that they would do - cook their own healthy, organic, gourmet, etc food - but very few will actually take much initiative to do on their own. That doesn't necessarily mean that it isn't viable, but it does mean that your big challenge is going to be marketing and conversions - getting people to go beyond saying things that basically mean "I really want to believe that I am the kind of person who would use something like this, even though I'm not", and actually buy the product regularly.
After thinking about it some more and reading some of the posts on here, this might be a viable idea, but it's going to need a lot better marketing to go anywhere. A few ideas, some stolen from other posts, mostly in an attempt to exercise my own marketing-think muscles:
Make the product stickier - try to sell a recurring plan of a meal a week that has to be explicitly cancelled. Or at least email people who have ordered regularly to suggest new meals for them. You do have new, promoted meals, right?
Have a spread of products, from things that just require heating, barely a step above microwavable, though mild prep, up to things that may require an hour or 2 in the kitchen to make. See which ones sell the best, and emphasize those.
Try to partner with anybody involved in cooking or recipes with an audience in the area. If they're on the web, make it super easy for them to submit ingredient lists for their recipes to you, then an easy way for them to put a link on their site for "Get the ingredients for my [whatever] delivered to your door today with Dinnr!", with affiliate payments for orders. Now you're helping them monetize their sites too, so they have a good incentive to work with you.
In person, too. There's probably some cooking classes in the area. Get those classes to plug your site for their students to get ingredients for an affiliate fee.
Get some cooking experts on staff, and start producing your own youtube videos and blog content on how to cook things, with an emphasis on explaining the basics for newbie cooks. It would probably help you make sure you're actually getting good quality ingredients too.
Make social connections. Make a way for people to tell their friends on FaceTwitInstaPint that they just cooked X, and it was awesome! It might even be good to make it so that they can only order basic things at first, and they get points or something from cooking them, which will eventually make them eligible to order the more advanced things. They can brag about how many Dinnr points they have. They can see that they're either getting more than the other guy, so they can think they're better than them, or they aren't getting as much as somebody else, so they need to order more stuff. Then you can suggest new meals, too, based on their skill level and their preferences.
The real pain point isn't shopping, getting ingredients, or throwing away unused ingredients. It's wanting to be seen to their social circle as the kind of person who cooks awesome stuff. Figure out how to hit that, and you'll probably sell.
> Right after I read this, my immediate reaction was to
> feel kind of annoyed at the author. A little
> superficially, no tech or design talent in house, no
> food industry experience, and not much marketing and
> sales expertise, so what exactly does he bring to the
> table here, besides really wanting a startup?
But also: am I wrong to think that there are many examples of successful startups being started by outsiders? Execution sounded pretty reasonable, he just had misjudged the market, based on the same model working well in other markets.
>Misjudged the market
This business was a pure play "do this thing you already do, but now with a computer" model. Understanding the market IS the execution. He subbed out the design of the site and frankly most of the actual company. So really, the "execution" was essentially knowing product/market fit. I would argue the execution was, in fact, horrible. He did non-representative research, tried to start at full scale, and had no idea what sort of market he was operating.
>failed to pivot when his launch did 12 orders first week.
If you have ideas how to make that skill marketable (or even better received)...
I wonder how well these guys are going to do.
[0] http://signup.marleyspoon.com/ - it's operational in germany at https://www.marleyspoon.de/
[1] $1.5M Seed according to https://angel.co/marley-spoon/
Unfortunately not. In this case it's just personal experience. I am a German who has been living in the UK for 4 years now. Over here everything is more fast food and 'instant' oriented than in Germany.
There could be some cultural difference, sure. But I think it's relatively small. Other factors, some mentioned on other comments, can come into play. For example:
* much easier way to order fresh groceries online in the UK (including Sunday delivery, 1 hr delivery slot, mobile apps etc)
* execution, execution, execution (I can't tell about the OP, but the founder of Marley Spoon is also a founder of Delivery-Hero, which is well-established in the fast-food delivery online market)
Ocado still seems light-years ahead in terms of flexibility, convenience and service.
Seriously, the author seems completely unaware that his "lessons" could have been avoided if he would have simply looked at the growing body of literature, on-line classes, Startup Weekends, blogs by Eric Ries, Alexander Osterwalder, et al that now exist.
Even in writing these lessons he seems to be unaware of them.
What's missing?
Most Recent Funding
$15 Million Series A on August 9, 2014
I am not responsible for the state of your liver if you follow the implied advice.
In reality, both of them were way too much work. We were excited to try them but don't miss them at all. I think the blog describes it well: this is not a real pain point (at least for us - 2 adults, one baby).
They require you to be pretty adept with a chopping knife and good at prep work, while assuming that the only ingredient you own is cooking oil. So you get cocaine-like bags full of two tablespoons of flour.
It's like a sous chef simulator that fills your house with packaging. I buy as much as I can from them, since I figure they are running at a loss and I want venture capitalists subsidizing my dinner.
But it freaks me out to stab all those melted cold packs and bleed them out into the sink every night.
Yes, that was pretty much what we experienced as well. The prep time was often much longer than 20~30 minutes, and really took the fun out of it.
Admittedly, it was all very tasty but for us, it created more pain than it solved. We tried Plated to see if it was better but it pretty much was the same experience.
I will set aside some time in the next few days to write a response to most of the points raised. I'll then post the link here (or you can follow me on twitter @mbohanes)
Again, many thanks for taking the time.
Then you are removing the inefficiency of buying food items that you only use portions of and eliminate things going bad.
Why take 5 months to make a new site?
London Business School is world-class and the self-starters who go there are self-selecting.
Groceries distribution requires good experience and knowledge of logistics.
If I wanted to buy some ingredients, I would go to the supermarket or (usually a better choice) one of the many different foreign grocers that are 5 minutes away.
So this article is saying people can order the ingriedidnts for a single meal and have them delivered that day? That would definitely put him out of business huh?
From what I can tell, Dinnr didn't seem like a bad idea - I know a lot of people in London who really care about food, really enjoy making it themselves, and get excited about anything to which they can attach words like "artisanal"... and many of them don't really care much about the cost.
Shame it didn't work out, really.
The problem with London, however, is that even compared to other large world cities, the density of food stores is so high that it's easy to get ingredients.. and the sort of people who are active enough to cook their own food are also the sort who'd be happy to pop out for five minutes for ingredients they can touch and feel first.
And their point is valid: There is a wide "startup" belief that you needn't know the market or domain, the customers, etc. You just need to find a domain name and make a web page and customers will come and somehow a business will fall together. Only the overwhelming odds are that it will face likely failure.
Another trait of many of these types of posts is what idlewords points out: The tendency for people to generalize lessons. This is the risk of the dirty sushi restaurant with poor service that inevitably fails, but then writes a broad treatise about how the area won't support sushi restaurants. We see this constantly among such "lessons learned", where macro inputs are often substituted for micro failures.
Also:
..."things no responsible person would ever not know before even considering raising money." ...
...classic marketing grad trying to do startup things...
...over-exuberant and irresponsible entrepreneurs...
not sure how you don't see this as ad hominem critical.
An attack on BOTH the writer and the argument, as unnecessary critical or negative as it could be, is not an ad hominem attack, and by no mean make the criticism an invalid one. Especially if the criticism of the writer comes because of the writing (ie. "from what you've done, it seems like you're too inexperienced and naive etc...")
(I'm sorry that this is really off topic ...)
Using mailchimp and wufoo-
https://medium.com/who-what-why/from-a-mailchimp-email-and-w...
Built a Facebook page-
> Their observation isn't remotely an ad hominem
>> "things no responsible person"
Saying a position should be rejected because it is presented by someone who is irresponsible is ad hominem.
Ad hominem argument isn't the same thing as a personal attack; its the fallacy of arguing that a position should be rejected because of the personal characteristics of the person presenting it.
I loved this post (gets one of my rare upvotes) because the guy does a great job taking apart everything he did wrong. Maybe these lessons should be obvious, but empirically they aren't: people keep making these mistakes, over and over.
Thank you for saying this. It's something that's only cemented in me over the past few years to connect the similarity between "anonymous" survey data and what gets posted on another anonymous posting place, 4chan.
I've learned the hard way that it's exactly the lessons that are "obvious" are the ones that I should be paying attention to. If a lesson was both obvious and easy to implement, you probably wouldn't hear the lesson repeated so many times over so many different people.
So whenever I read yet another startup lesson that seems obvious and is frequently repeated, that's a signal for me that that lesson is actually very difficult to implement on the ground, in the moment.
When you're in the startup you most often miss the forest for the trees. You're too involved sort of like a peson in an abusive relationship. It sometime takes a neutral third part to make you realise "wow you really have it bad".
I've never read a story about any failure that didn't sound obvious in a after-the-fact analysis. Read up on why Nokia failed against Apple or how the banking system collapsed. When reading any of thee you will always think "huh, what a bunch of dumbasses", we highly over value our own behaviour and pretend that can never be us but it frequently is.
Basically, I don't see it as an inherently bad thing. Until we've got Culture terminals and a Hub to chat with to convince us why something is a bad idea, I believe it'll always be this way. The other thing is that sometimes it works, so being an entrepreneur can have the same allure as a lotto ticket, only with even more illusion of control.
I thought this was a great post by OP, and I thank him for it.
This idea that there is some magic advice that this article is lacking and that only a seasoned (technical) founder can share with you is a fallacy. You are chasing a unicorn if you cannot accept common sense advice on its face.
Here's a piece of advice and lesson that you might not know (although I hope you do.)
There is something to learn from everyone, and the if you aren't willing to learn from EVERYONE, the problem is you that you aren't willing to learn, not that they don't have something to share with you.
When you're young, you are bulletproof and ten feet tall and can run through walls and you have no concept of your own limitations. What seems obvious to those of us who have gone through the cycle of a startup is the greenfield learning experience for starry-eyed newbies.
Paul Buchheit has talked about the "danger of experience" (http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-technology.html). It's tough, but it's compulsory on us to apply our experience while simultaneously challenging conventional thinking.