16 ms·

Underrated Startup Success Factors

218 points by yinso 9y ago

Palomides 9y ago
> timing > products that seem stupid or annoying at first. In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product saved you a click
- tomascot 9y ago
  You are offering a great product. I hope you can scale.
  - kelukelugames 9y ago
    I would love a summary of every post but unfortunately we don't allow bots or novelty accounts on here.
    - lj3 9y ago
      Luckily, we have reddit for that.
    - cercatrova 9y ago
      The app Hews has a feature that shows the post with the text "tl;dr" in it underneath the link. It's quite useful in my experience.
    - sillysaurus3 9y ago
      You'd like it in the short term but probably not the long term. It's useful to remember HN isn't just a list of links. It's a conversation. If you set up your list of links to attract a certain audience, those people will eventually dominate the conversation. From a strategic standpoint, the way to win is to appeal to a bookish audience. It's why HN is better than any subreddit. (Besides /r/HighQualityGifs.)
    - Palomides 9y ago
      http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ (not me)
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    I'll have to say. It's annoying at first.
- Clubber 9y ago
  Yes, that wasn't a very good article. "Timing." well duh. Might as well have said, "success," or "luck," or "having rich parents." Then the rest of it was a puff piece on how awesome the guy being interviewed was. I'm going to assume no one really knows, and everyone just pretends to know.
  - ahartman00 9y ago
    To be fair, its different for every product. If you aren't a social network, I don't see how you could go viral. Search ads wont work if nobody searches for your product, ie if it is something completely new. You can't get users to refer friends if you have no incentive to give. This is why I pay closer attention to advice that is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Tell me what your situation is, and what you did that worked, and let me extrapolate. Bonus points for what didn't work.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      > To be fair, its different for every product. Doesn't that mean the entire idea is not generalizable?
  - michaelbuckbee 9y ago
    I think timing is something you can actually reason about though? "Lots of people have tried a similar thing before, what's different this time?" Maybe it's that now there's millions more mobile users. Maybe there's a new regulation that got removed/got put in place. Maybe any of a hundred other things. But timing goes to an actual underlying reason. I'm kind of pushing this point as it's something I've screwed up a number of times. I'd write off some startup as doomed while really the problem was that I wasn't considering everything.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      Sure, I mean Star Wars was/is such a cultural phenomenon because of timing, but it was so much more than that. It was a great story, it blended old style movies with new style movies, it had great music, great special effects, etc. 10 years earlier and it's Buck Rogers, 10 years later and it's Flash Gordon. Lucas went over budget and had to deal with the executives who wanted to bail and pulled it off. The article just wasn't very insightful, and it was on the top of the list. It's obvious this was a clickbait article to puff the guy they were interviewing. I suspect he is looking for clients and is using HN to get eyeballs and got some people to up vote it. That's more insightful than the article. I dunno, maybe I'm just grumpy today.
- sdrothrock 9y ago
  > In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product For writers and bloggers, this is often explained as "100 true fans" -- not sure if that particular term is popular in the startup sphere.
  - maneesh 9y ago
    Kevin kelly's 1000 true fans
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  It's really just another way to say "Product Market fit" (rather than just Product), which was already identified by pmarca as what he thinks is the the dominant factor for startup success.
- infectoid 9y ago
  > small group of early adopters who really care Reminds me of Kevin Kelly idea of 1,000 true fans. http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
everdayimhustln 9y ago
I love sheepdog startups which are like grandma sleeper cars with 1000 hp under the hood. Innovating in an area others dismiss, and killing it.
- crucini 9y ago
  Got any examples?
  - Clubber 9y ago
    iPhone (not really a startup), NEST off the top of my head.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      The iPhone wasn't in any way developed "in an area others dismiss". It was a huge market, with huge new competitors entering it (like Google).
      - Clubber 9y ago
        It's the lack of mechanical keyboard that really differentiated it. They all had number pads or mechanical keyboards, because everyone dismissed it. Now none of them do. Even Google's early prototypes had mechanical keyboards. When Schmit took took the idea to Google, they switched to screen keyboards.
chicagogal 9y ago
My favorite quote: "[timing] could be explained as foresight or genius of the founder to launch the startup at a great moment in time". We should stop attributing others' success to pure luck
ryandamm 9y ago
I pitched Niko (he passed for now, too early) -- and this interview does capture his style pretty well. My cofounder and I found him very smart, but also personable and genuinely interested in what the startup is doing. He asked good questions. As for the '2 Underrated Success Factors' -- I think when Niko calls it 'timing,' you wouldn't be wrong to call it 'luck' (he hedges a bit in the interview). Any mental model for startup success that doesn't incorporate a huge dollop of luck is probably overfitting. But that's my two cents, not the article or Bonatsos's.
hayksaakian 9y ago
> In contrast, some really talented and hardworking founders just happen to work on the wrong things and don’t attain the same level of success. Some even tried Zuck’s idea but were too early. It often isn’t their fault. The timing just wasn’t right. How do you plan your company around timing? It seems easy to say "they had good timing" in retrospect. This sounds like hindsight bias. It's too easy to blame timing instead of your own mistakes. For example, with Justin TV/ Twitch TV they were "too early" because 4G internet was not ubiquitous, and most average people could not even consume their streams. After years of grinding it out, the tech caught up and they were positioned to lead the market. It's certainly possible to be "too early" or "too late" to market. I think if you have the right people working together you can make it through being "too early". If you're "too late" then you have the opportunity to win with brand appeal or marketing now that the market is familiar with the product or service.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  Timing is just a component of luck, no?
  - adventured 9y ago
    I'd agree that it frequently can be. It's not always luck however. There's another component to it. Actually spotting that the time has arrived for a thing, that a confluence of technologies is ready to make something new possible at a formerly impossible scale (or possible period). That doesn't have to be luck. Paul Allen watched like a hawk what was going on in the very early personal computing market, he was aggressive and relentless in doing so, as well as about prodding Gates about starting a business around it (Gates then played brake to Allen being frequently early with an idea). That Microsoft was one of the first software companies, wasn't luck, they saw the opportunity after watching it for years and then acted. It took a lot of intentional time and effort application for Allen to accumulate the knowledge and skill necessary to see that opportunity coming. That's the case with Tesla. The iPhone. And so on. Jobs didn't like the Newton because he believed it was a crap user experience. He was right, the time was wrong for the technology. He did the iPhone because he believed the time was right, that several technologies were ready to come together in a small form factor that could produce a high quality experience. That wasn't luck, it was decades of evolved knowledge and skill looking at a problem / opportunity.
kelukelugames 9y ago
"The 2 Underrated Startup Success Factors" sounds as bad as "one weird trick for startup success!" Please edit title?
manuelflara 9y ago
To mw, the most underrated success factors that seemingly nobody talks about (probably because it goes against the motto of "be smart & work hard and you'll be successful" that we all want to believe), are being lucky and existing personal connections/wealth.
- CM30 9y ago
  The latter reminds me of an example of a London based startup where the CEO wasted millions of dollars on holidays and personal luxuries while trying to market an app with no mainstream audience. But hey, his dad was in the banking industry and could get him millions from investors he knew, so hey a non viable company got funded.
  - foldr 9y ago
    The relevant ethic being that it is ok to give money away as long as you give it to people who already have it.
skndr 9y ago
The other relevant parts: > What are three things that turn you off when entrepreneurs pitch to you. The first is founders who don’t know their numbers. I am talking about the post early stage company that has launched a product and has users but the founders either don’t know their metrics or are trying to hide something. The second, also related, would be the founders not having empathy for and understanding their users. As a founder you need to understand the key reasons that are driving adoption of your product, in great depth. Lastly, I want to invest in people who are learning animals. This is a tough one to assess in the thirty minutes to an hour I have with a founder but it is absolutely critical. I don’t care if you are expert now but I do expect that you will be one in three years.
adamnemecek 9y ago
> YikYak (valued at $500 million). Oh the irony (they folded in April iirc).
curiouslurker 9y ago
Interesting but I often wonder how much better VCs are than the rest of the population at determining startup success. In hindsight they can always say "see, those two factors were important, for my X exit. Told you so" but they also pick companies that make zero sense. Like the $400 juicer company (backed by the most respected VCs in town). Some also claim to have a thesis but will quickly drop it the moment a hot company comes along that violates their thesis and everyone seems to be investing. I'd like to see a VC publicly state a thesis and then invest in only companies that fit it for 10 years and then do better than average. And how much of it is confirmation bias? If you back a Facebook early in your career, the very best entrepreneurs will gravitate to you and you will have more success.
- tyrw 9y ago
  To be fair, the 2 things that are most often cited (timing and product market fit) are what many VCs do invest in, and they often get called crazy for doing so. The $400 juicer is a great example: my guess is there were some metrics that led them to believe traction or timing were real, even though on the face of it the idea seems silly.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
edoceo 9y ago
Fails to mention Customer Development, a critical first step. Customer Development (see book by Alvarez) is the boring grunt work that makes it look like you had "timing". Really you are building traction.
ThomPete 9y ago
Timing and luck.
- rhizome 9y ago
  and measurement.
jkuria 9y ago
The op here. Thanks HN! I appreciate the traffic and engagement. Let me know how if I can be helpful to you: jkuria gmail. And of course, thanks Niko for agreeing to do an interview with a random stranger who cold emailed!
d--b 9y ago
These do not seem to very underrated. Jessica Livingston lists "luck" (mostly timing) as the #1 factor for becoming a unicorn. Empathy for users is also a frequent one "build something that you know is painful for your users" I'd love to read about truly underrated aspects, such as: - tiny differences that make all the difference (like Airbnb professional photographer) - the mayonnaise effect (like Facebook: start small, whip the hype up, open up little by little) - connections: different kind of startup founders need to know what kind of people? - what's different between different successful startups?
ToJans 9y ago
I think luck and timing make sense from a VC point of view, but when you are on the other side, it feels slightly different: as a founder, you need to have a vision about your future consumers within 5 to 10 years, even before you are laying down the first brick... It needs to be so obvious and in your face that you can sell it effortlessly to others (including VC's and your prospects). You start from a gazillion ideas and hunches, and after a while some will keep emerging until they will evolve into a vision. You pick some of those ideas and try to assess them, to figure out if you are stuck in your own bubble, or are really on to something. To me it's a little bit like Thoughtworks' tech radar: adopt, trial, assess and hold. Once you've made your choice, one of the most important things IME is that you need to be able to adapt that vision based on customer feedback. By the time you're in that phase, it might look like it's sheer luck and timing, but I honestly believe that all the grunt work and preparation you did increase the odds to succeed big-time...
martinmusio7 9y ago
Of course are timing and empathy for the user crucial to success, but the most important feature a person can have is being a learning animal (as he names it)! Staying hungry for new things and being bold are, long-term thinking, most rewarding!
m12k 9y ago
A couple anecdotes about timing: I remember one of the Unity founders talking about how they essentially built a ship in the desert (a user-friendly game engine for Mac) and then a flood came for them to ride (the iPhone app store and all its games). And in a similar vein, one of the founders of a European ride-sharing service, GoMore (in case you don't know them, it's an actual ride-sharing service, not a taxi-service-disguised-as-a-marketplace like Uber) said that he'd essentially had his company in hibernation for several years when the smartphone revolution happened and suddenly they time was right for them to grow.

218 points by yinso 9y ago

> timing > products that seem stupid or annoying at first. In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product saved you a click

tomascot 9y ago
You are offering a great product. I hope you can scale.
- kelukelugames 9y ago
  I would love a summary of every post but unfortunately we don't allow bots or novelty accounts on here.
  - lj3 9y ago
    Luckily, we have reddit for that.
  - cercatrova 9y ago
    The app Hews has a feature that shows the post with the text "tl;dr" in it underneath the link. It's quite useful in my experience.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    You'd like it in the short term but probably not the long term. It's useful to remember HN isn't just a list of links. It's a conversation. If you set up your list of links to attract a certain audience, those people will eventually dominate the conversation. From a strategic standpoint, the way to win is to appeal to a bookish audience. It's why HN is better than any subreddit. (Besides /r/HighQualityGifs.)
  - Palomides 9y ago
    http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ http://n-gate.com/hackernews/ (not me)
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  I'll have to say. It's annoying at first.
Clubber 9y ago
Yes, that wasn't a very good article. "Timing." well duh. Might as well have said, "success," or "luck," or "having rich parents." Then the rest of it was a puff piece on how awesome the guy being interviewed was. I'm going to assume no one really knows, and everyone just pretends to know.
- ahartman00 9y ago
  To be fair, its different for every product. If you aren't a social network, I don't see how you could go viral. Search ads wont work if nobody searches for your product, ie if it is something completely new. You can't get users to refer friends if you have no incentive to give. This is why I pay closer attention to advice that is descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Tell me what your situation is, and what you did that worked, and let me extrapolate. Bonus points for what didn't work.
  - rhizome 9y ago
    > To be fair, its different for every product. Doesn't that mean the entire idea is not generalizable?
- michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  I think timing is something you can actually reason about though? "Lots of people have tried a similar thing before, what's different this time?" Maybe it's that now there's millions more mobile users. Maybe there's a new regulation that got removed/got put in place. Maybe any of a hundred other things. But timing goes to an actual underlying reason. I'm kind of pushing this point as it's something I've screwed up a number of times. I'd write off some startup as doomed while really the problem was that I wasn't considering everything.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    Sure, I mean Star Wars was/is such a cultural phenomenon because of timing, but it was so much more than that. It was a great story, it blended old style movies with new style movies, it had great music, great special effects, etc. 10 years earlier and it's Buck Rogers, 10 years later and it's Flash Gordon. Lucas went over budget and had to deal with the executives who wanted to bail and pulled it off. The article just wasn't very insightful, and it was on the top of the list. It's obvious this was a clickbait article to puff the guy they were interviewing. I suspect he is looking for clients and is using HN to get eyeballs and got some people to up vote it. That's more insightful than the article. I dunno, maybe I'm just grumpy today.
sdrothrock 9y ago
> In addition, there should be a small group of early adopters who really care about the product For writers and bloggers, this is often explained as "100 true fans" -- not sure if that particular term is popular in the startup sphere.
- maneesh 9y ago
  Kevin kelly's 1000 true fans
hkmurakami 9y ago
It's really just another way to say "Product Market fit" (rather than just Product), which was already identified by pmarca as what he thinks is the the dominant factor for startup success.
infectoid 9y ago
> small group of early adopters who really care Reminds me of Kevin Kelly idea of 1,000 true fans. http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/ http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

everdayimhustln 9y ago

I love sheepdog startups which are like grandma sleeper cars with 1000 hp under the hood. Innovating in an area others dismiss, and killing it.

crucini 9y ago
Got any examples?
- Clubber 9y ago
  iPhone (not really a startup), NEST off the top of my head.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    The iPhone wasn't in any way developed "in an area others dismiss". It was a huge market, with huge new competitors entering it (like Google).
    - Clubber 9y ago
      It's the lack of mechanical keyboard that really differentiated it. They all had number pads or mechanical keyboards, because everyone dismissed it. Now none of them do. Even Google's early prototypes had mechanical keyboards. When Schmit took took the idea to Google, they switched to screen keyboards.

chicagogal 9y ago

My favorite quote: "[timing] could be explained as foresight or genius of the founder to launch the startup at a great moment in time". We should stop attributing others' success to pure luck

ryandamm 9y ago

I pitched Niko (he passed for now, too early) -- and this interview does capture his style pretty well. My cofounder and I found him very smart, but also personable and genuinely interested in what the startup is doing. He asked good questions. As for the '2 Underrated Success Factors' -- I think when Niko calls it 'timing,' you wouldn't be wrong to call it 'luck' (he hedges a bit in the interview). Any mental model for startup success that doesn't incorporate a huge dollop of luck is probably overfitting. But that's my two cents, not the article or Bonatsos's.

hayksaakian 9y ago

> In contrast, some really talented and hardworking founders just happen to work on the wrong things and don’t attain the same level of success. Some even tried Zuck’s idea but were too early. It often isn’t their fault. The timing just wasn’t right. How do you plan your company around timing? It seems easy to say "they had good timing" in retrospect. This sounds like hindsight bias. It's too easy to blame timing instead of your own mistakes. For example, with Justin TV/ Twitch TV they were "too early" because 4G internet was not ubiquitous, and most average people could not even consume their streams. After years of grinding it out, the tech caught up and they were positioned to lead the market. It's certainly possible to be "too early" or "too late" to market. I think if you have the right people working together you can make it through being "too early". If you're "too late" then you have the opportunity to win with brand appeal or marketing now that the market is familiar with the product or service.

Waterluvian 9y ago
Timing is just a component of luck, no?
- adventured 9y ago
  I'd agree that it frequently can be. It's not always luck however. There's another component to it. Actually spotting that the time has arrived for a thing, that a confluence of technologies is ready to make something new possible at a formerly impossible scale (or possible period). That doesn't have to be luck. Paul Allen watched like a hawk what was going on in the very early personal computing market, he was aggressive and relentless in doing so, as well as about prodding Gates about starting a business around it (Gates then played brake to Allen being frequently early with an idea). That Microsoft was one of the first software companies, wasn't luck, they saw the opportunity after watching it for years and then acted. It took a lot of intentional time and effort application for Allen to accumulate the knowledge and skill necessary to see that opportunity coming. That's the case with Tesla. The iPhone. And so on. Jobs didn't like the Newton because he believed it was a crap user experience. He was right, the time was wrong for the technology. He did the iPhone because he believed the time was right, that several technologies were ready to come together in a small form factor that could produce a high quality experience. That wasn't luck, it was decades of evolved knowledge and skill looking at a problem / opportunity.

kelukelugames 9y ago

"The 2 Underrated Startup Success Factors" sounds as bad as "one weird trick for startup success!" Please edit title?

manuelflara 9y ago

To mw, the most underrated success factors that seemingly nobody talks about (probably because it goes against the motto of "be smart & work hard and you'll be successful" that we all want to believe), are being lucky and existing personal connections/wealth.

CM30 9y ago
The latter reminds me of an example of a London based startup where the CEO wasted millions of dollars on holidays and personal luxuries while trying to market an app with no mainstream audience. But hey, his dad was in the banking industry and could get him millions from investors he knew, so hey a non viable company got funded.
- foldr 9y ago
  The relevant ethic being that it is ok to give money away as long as you give it to people who already have it.

skndr 9y ago

The other relevant parts: > What are three things that turn you off when entrepreneurs pitch to you. The first is founders who don’t know their numbers. I am talking about the post early stage company that has launched a product and has users but the founders either don’t know their metrics or are trying to hide something. The second, also related, would be the founders not having empathy for and understanding their users. As a founder you need to understand the key reasons that are driving adoption of your product, in great depth. Lastly, I want to invest in people who are learning animals. This is a tough one to assess in the thirty minutes to an hour I have with a founder but it is absolutely critical. I don’t care if you are expert now but I do expect that you will be one in three years.

adamnemecek 9y ago

> YikYak (valued at $500 million). Oh the irony (they folded in April iirc).

curiouslurker 9y ago

Interesting but I often wonder how much better VCs are than the rest of the population at determining startup success. In hindsight they can always say "see, those two factors were important, for my X exit. Told you so" but they also pick companies that make zero sense. Like the $400 juicer company (backed by the most respected VCs in town). Some also claim to have a thesis but will quickly drop it the moment a hot company comes along that violates their thesis and everyone seems to be investing. I'd like to see a VC publicly state a thesis and then invest in only companies that fit it for 10 years and then do better than average. And how much of it is confirmation bias? If you back a Facebook early in your career, the very best entrepreneurs will gravitate to you and you will have more success.

tyrw 9y ago
To be fair, the 2 things that are most often cited (timing and product market fit) are what many VCs do invest in, and they often get called crazy for doing so. The $400 juicer is a great example: my guess is there were some metrics that led them to believe traction or timing were real, even though on the face of it the idea seems silly.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

edoceo 9y ago

Fails to mention Customer Development, a critical first step. Customer Development (see book by Alvarez) is the boring grunt work that makes it look like you had "timing". Really you are building traction.

ThomPete 9y ago

Timing and luck.

rhizome 9y ago
and measurement.

jkuria 9y ago

The op here. Thanks HN! I appreciate the traffic and engagement. Let me know how if I can be helpful to you: jkuria gmail. And of course, thanks Niko for agreeing to do an interview with a random stranger who cold emailed!

d--b 9y ago

These do not seem to very underrated. Jessica Livingston lists "luck" (mostly timing) as the #1 factor for becoming a unicorn. Empathy for users is also a frequent one "build something that you know is painful for your users" I'd love to read about truly underrated aspects, such as: - tiny differences that make all the difference (like Airbnb professional photographer) - the mayonnaise effect (like Facebook: start small, whip the hype up, open up little by little) - connections: different kind of startup founders need to know what kind of people? - what's different between different successful startups?

ToJans 9y ago

I think luck and timing make sense from a VC point of view, but when you are on the other side, it feels slightly different: as a founder, you need to have a vision about your future consumers within 5 to 10 years, even before you are laying down the first brick... It needs to be so obvious and in your face that you can sell it effortlessly to others (including VC's and your prospects). You start from a gazillion ideas and hunches, and after a while some will keep emerging until they will evolve into a vision. You pick some of those ideas and try to assess them, to figure out if you are stuck in your own bubble, or are really on to something. To me it's a little bit like Thoughtworks' tech radar: adopt, trial, assess and hold. Once you've made your choice, one of the most important things IME is that you need to be able to adapt that vision based on customer feedback. By the time you're in that phase, it might look like it's sheer luck and timing, but I honestly believe that all the grunt work and preparation you did increase the odds to succeed big-time...

martinmusio7 9y ago

Of course are timing and empathy for the user crucial to success, but the most important feature a person can have is being a learning animal (as he names it)! Staying hungry for new things and being bold are, long-term thinking, most rewarding!

m12k 9y ago

A couple anecdotes about timing: I remember one of the Unity founders talking about how they essentially built a ship in the desert (a user-friendly game engine for Mac) and then a flood came for them to ride (the iPhone app store and all its games). And in a similar vein, one of the founders of a European ride-sharing service, GoMore (in case you don't know them, it's an actual ride-sharing service, not a taxi-service-disguised-as-a-marketplace like Uber) said that he'd essentially had his company in hibernation for several years when the smartphone revolution happened and suddenly they time was right for them to grow.