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Don't Start Big, Start a Little Snowball
- nojvek 10y agoNicely written. Although uber and Airbnb are big because of the big VC money that can afford the lawyers and engineers. Not a lot of places around the world where capital + talent is available for snowball ideas.
- leereeves 10y agoThat's one reason a lot of startups end up moving to Silicon Valley.
- jv22222 10y agoI don't know about that... There are quite a few little snowball startups that started out as self funded that do pretty well. I'm thinking about Buffer, Drip, Litmus, Basecamp to name a few. Sure, some of them did raise money, but that was a long time after they were profitable.
- pjlegato 10y agoThis is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over. Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company. What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." It's a perfectly circular definition. Proposal: always avoid the word "hustle." Instead, talk about specific actions and decisions that led to success in particular cases.
- bbcbasic 10y agoMaybe Hustle is like a heuristic or genetic search. Trying random things picked up from other companies and mutating them and trying again until certain things seem to work based on metrics. Then doing more of those things.
- Retra 10y agoYou can sort a deck of cards by shuffling it if you have enough time.
- bbcbasic 10y agoYour not trying to sort though. You are trying to optimise.
- barrkel 10y agoHowever, if you move randomly around a discrete 3D space, you only have a ~34% of returning to your starting point, even if you keep moving forever. The more dimensions, the lower the chances that infinite randomness reaches any given point.
- jv22222 10y agoOP here. That is an excellent point and now you have essentially named the title one of one of my new blog posts: "What is Hustle?" It especially rings true because something we've tried hard to do over the years on TechZing is unpack miracle functions exactly like this.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoif it rings ESPECIALLY true, and you've been trying for YEARS to do things EXACTLY LIKE THIS, then it seems that TechZing does not hustle, does not know how to hustle, and thus doesn't have hustle required to unpack what it means to hustle.
- pjlegato 10y agoSounds good! I look forward to it.
- amasad 10y agoInteresting. I don't have a problem with it because I usually read it as early stage growth hacking that involves manual, tedious, and hard work: getting the first few users, converting the first few customers etc.
- amasad 10y agoInteresting. I don't have a problem with it because I usually read it as early stage growth hacking that involves manual, tedious, and hard work: getting the first few users, converting the first few customers etc.
- bsder 10y ago> Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company. And, also, survivor bias. Lots of companies hustled and hustled and died. Elon Musk is a really good example. At one point he couldn't meet cashflow--and then the government contract for SpaceX finally came in. 3 months of delay on that contract and Musk is a goat instead of a hero.
- hoodoof 10y agoYou make a good point. This blog post is a common line of messaging in the "how to succeed in startups" - "see what (hugely successful company X) did? That's what you should do, that's how you succeed!" Truth is that success comes from a somewhat magical mixture of timing, luck, spotting of opportunity, knowing how to build it, having the resources to build it, meeting just the right people at the right time who will play a role in that success, somehow making the product "slightly more right" instead of "slightly more wrong" and sometimes seeing some incredible new way of viewing the world that others don't. Like a magic spell it's a bit of all these ingredients put together in a recipe that, well, works. Then the bloggers and venture capitalists come along, timeline what you did and say "ha! there is the recipe for success!".
- prawn 10y agoHaven't heard "goat" used in that context before. In my circles, goat/GOAT would be read as "Greatest Of All Time".
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- phonon 10y agohttp://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fro4.htm http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fro4.htm
- prawn 10y ago"Before the final twist, Mack, who led all scorers with 30 points, looked as if he’d go from hero to goat in that split second when he fouled Brown, who led Pitt with 24 points. He admitted he was guilty of the infraction." Odd that the first example appears to be from a basketball write-up, which is exactly where I very frequently hear the term goat/GOAT used in the sense I described.
- thr0waway1239 10y agoI don't know if hustle is enough for success, but I don't think people simply mean "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." when they use the word. Even though the precise definition is hard to pin down, you can easily spot it during its absence. There are times when you wish to do something, and you avoid it because it just feels like you might be pushing it a bit. If you still did it anyway - what you did was hustle. In fact, I would say that if you reflect on your life and think of the times when you didn't take that invitation to an event, or that break to go on a vacation, or introduce yourself to a person who you liked, and then realized that the choice you made was too safe, and your choice (lack of hustle) didn't help you all that much long term anyway, you can see its absence quite plainly. Having said that, I also agree with you on one front. Instead of using the word hustle, if these articles gave an example, and then maybe made a point about why that is hustle, it would read much better.
- rl3 10y agoAs much as I hate to admit it, the author isn't wrong. Ideas too big to feasibly execute in typical startup fashion (i.e. incremental funding rounds tied to key metrics) have a snowball's chance in hell of actually succeeding. It doesn't matter if it's the best idea in the world; the ability to adapt to and survive within the existing funding eco system ultimately has more utility because it moves the company forward.
- jv22222 10y agoThanks! Just curious, why do you hate to admit it? :)
- rl3 10y agoThe project I'm working on has evolved over the years into something I can no longer feasibly accomplish alone. I truly believe the idea is solid, but that's worthless without being able to go from zero to one. The best I can do is hack together tiny glimpses of the final vision. As a solo founder with no track record, pitching a concept for a product that has high funding requirements with no hope of revenue until late-stage is virtually impossible. Years ago I reasoned the only way I'd get off the ground is to launch something and get organic traction. Despite my best efforts to delude myself into believing the contrary, that seems to have proven correct. If anything, thinking too big for your own good is tantamount to a mental prison of sorts. You just become obsessed with an idea that has a significantly lower chance of being realized. Hence why your snowball advice is on point. :)
- jv22222 10y agoThat's very interesting. Thanks so much for the answer. From all the work you've done on it, if you really think outside the box, is there some single facet that could potentially be turned into do-one-thing-well?
- rl3 10y agoThe product is ultimately n-facet, with each facet relying upon the same underlying core technology and principles. There's three conceptualized facets. Two of them are relatively easy to implement from a technical perspective, but are otherwise rendered very difficult by non-technical considerations. The facet I believe to have the widest appeal is paradoxically far harder to implement than the others in all respects. I think I'll take your advice and either try simplify an existing facet with laser-focus, or perhaps think far outside of the box and hopefully come up with something that's both stupid-simple yet feasible to implement. Something that gains traction while acting as a proof of concept at the same time. Thanks for your help, much appreciated.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kristianc 10y agoThey missed the point where little plucky bootstrapped Uber bought growth with VC money in every market they entered. It's a model, but I'm not sure there are many lessons your average bootstrapped business can learn from Uber.
- Mendenhall 10y agoI find the "do one thing well" advice to almost always be sound. Great ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is the hard part. Sticking to one thing allows you to focus on executing it well.
- jasonkit 10y agoI really want to know how to be better in noticing the problem. I do get annoy by some regular task, however I will easily adapt to it and lost the incentive for solving the problem.
- andy_ppp 10y agoI have this magical formula for building a startup that is 100% guaranteed to work, but no-one discusses. - Do something illegal, then lobby for your rights! - DDOS your competition - Be evil - Ignore regulations designed to protect your workforce (often referred to as 'partners', hah!) - Tell everyone you have a special insight in making successful startups - something to do with 'hustle' and 'product market fit' - Burn investor money while shouting stuff about self driving cars - Underpay your staff and/or take a huge cut of their value - Take massive equity stakes in already existing/launched companies and call it seed funding - Be Elon Musk /snark
- thatcat 10y ago>Take massive equity steaks and over cook them
- cmillard 10y agoI agree with your points- I can just see Elon Musk reading this from his Emperor Palpatine swivel chair- "Yes, let the hate flow through you!"
- mandeepj 10y agoIt all sounds uberish too until you mentioned musk
- andy_ppp 10y agoThese strategies are intended for individual use but can also be combined for maximum effectiveness. Maybe you can guess which companies are currently using each strategy. I'll give you one for free; currently Tesla are being very successful with be Elon Musk and burning investor money by talking about self driving cars.
- mandeepj 10y agoMay be Musk can talk because he have proved himself? Shallow talking will not go too far
- hoodoof 10y agoI don't agree that the only way to make a company is to build something small and iterate. It's just one way, not better nor worse than other ways. Some companies have succeeded doing this, other have not. Which means that the point of the blog post is basically wrong. Don't "build something small and iterate", build the product that you have in mind that you think people will want - that might be big and need lots of functionality or it might be small with minimal functionality. Just because plenty of companies have done this does not mean it isn't equally valid to build something with a broad set of functionality. Survivor bias. It's also painfully true that uncountable companies have built something small that got no bigger. Maybe they would have been better to build out their idea into something more full featured.
- jv22222 10y agoI think it goes without saying this is not the only way you can build a sucessfull company. There are so many existence proof examples of companies that are precisely the opposite of little snowballs. Hootsuite, Salesforce, Microsoft, etc. Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but the implicit understanding is that this post is aimed at the lone wolf or small teams with no funding. Sure, you can be a lone wolf or small team and try to build a large complex project. I actually know quite a few folks who've done that. Most failed. Some were sucessfull - https://www.centraldesktop.com https://www.centraldesktop.com - comes to mind. But, the main point is, it is simply easier on most business vectors to tackle a do-one-thing-well rather than build a big-complex-product.
- kareemm 10y agoHootsuite was absolutely a little snowball. Invoke Labs was an agency in Vancouver that build Ow.ly (a link shortener that's still around). They then continued to build an early ver of Hootsuite to manage their clients' social media campaigns. Then they realized that other people might want it and offered a free version. I had dinner with the founder the night before they turned on their paid plans, and he was unsure what the reception would be since they gave so much to so many people for free. The reception was somewhat positive but they continued to grow and sell the crap out of Hootsuite and now it's on track to go public. But they started SUPER small.
- thesmallestcat 10y agoIs the Google example oversimplified, or is my history wrong? It's reduced here to a "simple database search" but I thought some of Google's novel search technology was there from the get-go, so who cares how the index was persisted?
- andreasklinger 10y agohave the same memory they solved the hard part but had troubles with the "normal" portal site media-like work - thus the "simple website"
- TheGrassyKnoll 10y agoAs I recall, in the days of a pretty clunky internet, their search results were fast, freeeeking fast.
- combatentropy 10y ago> Is the Google example oversimplified, > or is my history wrong? > It's reduced here to a "simple database search" > but I thought some of Google's novel search technology > was there from the get-go The article called it "a simple database search returning ranked results based on the number of backlinks." Therein lies the rub. Larry Page came up with the idea of backlink counting, inspired I think by how in scholarly writing a measure of importance is the number of other scholarly writings that cite it. He first called it BackRub, then later renamed it to PageRank. Of course there were other pieces of evidence in their secret sauce, and they are ever tweaking it. But I would say that backlinks made the biggest difference. In those days Hotbot and AltaVista returned a cacophony of results based on word matches in the body of the page itself. Google I believe was the first search engine that went by the text in the links of other websites pointing to it. One of Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's professors tells the story of being introduced to their prototype, searching for "Stanford," and for the first time the top result was actually stanford.edu. A few times people exploited this. For example, someone got a bunch of their friends to link to George Bush with the link labeled "miserable failure," so that when you googled "miserable failure," the top result was George Bush. This is called google bombing. Another part of their algorithm that proved how far off course most people, including me, thought that the Web should be organized was laid out in Sergey Brin's research pager, "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web." While everybody, including me, thought that the way to bring order to the chaos of the Web would be to somehow persuade more and more people to write better web pages (semantic HTML, microformats, etc.) Sergey Brin just took what he was given. As an example he talks about finding author-title pairs on the Web. He starts with a seed list of, say, five author-title pairs: Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn David Brin, Startide Rising James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science Charles Dickens, Great Expectations William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors and just combing the web for patterns between the elements of each pair. Instead of pristine microformats and "proper" HTML, he takes what he gets: <LI><B>title</B> by author ( <i>title</i> by author ( author || title ( and other patterns. He uses these patterns to find more pairs, which he uses to find more patterns, and so on (http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/421/1/1999-65.pdf http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/421/1/1999-65.pdf).
- anthonygore 10y agoThe problem with articles and discussions like this is that the "markers of success" pointed out may all be true, but incidental. Take Slack as an example. Yes, it was a simple idea with low product surface area and easily protypeable etc etc. But other people had built Slack-like products before that met the all those same criteria and were not successful. The critical factors for Slack were the connections the founders had (or made), the VC money, and perhaps a whole bunch of other things. As much as we'd like for there to be a nice, neat guides for successful businesses e.g. "build a little snowball", the truth is that the reasons for success are often totally unique, contradictory and unrepeatable.
- bikamonki 10y agoExactly. Timing is of utter importance. Yet, these packed formulas do help to increase the odds of success, don't you agree?
- daurnimator 10y agoStep one: climb mountain Step two: build a little snowball Step three: give your little snowball a little push Step four: fret about which direction your growing snowball is going
- murukesh_s 10y agoStep one: climb mountain - Does the mountain mean silicon valley :)
- jsemrau 10y agoThere is a startup world outside of Silicon Valley ;-) ...just saying.
- Clobbersmith 10y agoSlack also has an amazing UX, I haven't used a competing product that was as enjoyable to use. Yes I know this is subjective, but of the people I know that like Slack actually love it. Whereas I've never met somebody that loves HipChat.
- cmillard 10y agoWhile I don't know if my snow balls will go anywhere, one thing I've noticed is that many (most?) successful entrepreneurs have a high risk tolerance. I went to a meetup where Alan Grant (Hired) talked about his tolerance for risk- sometimes it even involved activities on his part that were a violation of TOS. The point is sometimes to do creative destruction you have to get your hands dirty. Try to maintain a "chaotic good" alignment if you will ;)
- bikamonki 10y agoSound and well written advice; however, I would add: don't expect your snowball to reach über size. There are tons of problems to solve/improve but the great majority of them have a small market size/potential. The big markets are too hard to disrupt.
- otto_ortega 10y agoIt seems the best kind of startups to create this days are about teaching other people how to start a startup! Take the OP "nugget", "The Foundation" (Dane Maxwell), "The Secret Society Mastermind" (Timothy Marc), etc, etc... It's a pattern better explained on this comic: http://thegentlemansarmchair.com/comic/escape-the-9-to-5/ http://thegentlemansarmchair.com/comic/escape-the-9-to-5/ As someone who is currently on the process of trying to find his "Own Little Snowball" and has sent over 500 emails on the last couple of weeks trying to interview people to find that "one-thing" to do well. I have to say that the whole process of funding an startup has come to be oversimplified by most trying to talk about it, they present it on a nice little set of steps from A to B and from B to C. But once you get started trying to follow the path, you notice the "magic" happens on what's in between the steps, and that's something nobody talks about.
- ktRolster 10y agoHere's my little snowball: http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/3.html http://www.zerobugsandprogramfaster.net/essays/3.html Trying to spread the idea that code can exist with a low bug count, and that it's better to write code that way.
- rgun 10y agoUnix philosophy for the business world!
- adventured 10y agoChris Dixon's bowling pin post is among my favorite on this topic: http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/ http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/