7 ms·

Best ways to kill your startup

89 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

tptacek 9y ago
It doesn't sound like these are drawn from the author's experience, but rather from other things the author read, which would make it more of a haphazard survey than earned advice.
- carterehsmith 9y ago
  That article looks like a bot-generated content. There are Facebook bots, Twitter, Amazon bots (like, bots that generate book contents), even Youtube bots with (sometimes super-weird) machine-generated videos. BTW they do get clicks, so this is not some AI research moonshot, it is more like a little cottage industry popping up.
  - bramkrom 9y ago
    Hey, I'm the author, and it's not :) But I guess the fact that you think it is is good feedback, so thanks
- bramkrom 9y ago
  Hey, FYI: I'm the author. Thanks for the feedback. And you're right, for most part. That's why I mentioned it's with input from 50 entrepreneurs who shared their mistakes and failures. Thanks for keeping others sharp about it, though.
Veen 9y ago
Essentially, make something people want, don't spend all your money before you have an income, fire weak employees, and find a co-founder you can work with. I've never started a startup, but I'd be surprised if these nuggets of wisdom are news to anyone. The tennis analogy was quite clever, but it lead me to expect more incisive advice.
- myf01d 9y ago
  Even if you did all these things, there is no guarantee that your startup will succeed. You can have a superior product but it's too early or too late. You can have bad luck with publicity or there could be other million reasons out of your control that cause you fail.
- aerophilic 9y ago
  While I agree with another poster that these don’t quite seem like “earned knowledge”. I wouldn’t dismiss these ideas out of hand for their simplicity. In my personal experience, the most valuable/powerful things are deceptively simple, but very hard to do well, or do consistently. A few examples that many people struggle with: - Spend less than you earn - Exercise regularly - Prioritize doing things, or spending time with people you love In my experience, startups are very similar. There are not that many rules you need to follow, but they are often difficult to “execute on”. A couple of examples: - Find great people you trust and can perform - Find your market/path to profitability as quickly as possible I am sure if we spent time, we would find lots of other “simple rules”. But the key point I am making is that simple rules are usually the right things to do, but they are often the hardest to really accomplish.
- sky_rw 9y ago
  I've been involved in several startups, a couple winners and a couple losers. Like all things in life I've found that the simplest principles are often the hardest ones to grok. It's like jumping into a Indy Car, and you think "Just go straight and then turn left". Turns out when you are going 200mph at a concrete wall the simple things become a lot more complex.
  - csallen 9y ago
    A lot of the simple advice needs further unpacking, too. I've seen founders interpret "Make something people want" in all sorts of ways, as belied by their behavior: - "Make something nobody wants, then keep adding features until something magical happens." - "Copy another app that people already use, but add 'better' or 'faster' or 'easier' or 'prettier' in my marketing copy." - "Survey my users and build whatever they tell me, no questions asked." - "Build features that align with my own personal vision of what the product should look like, then hope that other people want it." - "Create 1/5th of an ambitious product that people want." - "Do an excellent job solving a trivial pain point that nobody cares about solving." - "Make something completely new and unique that the world has never seen before, regardless of whether or not anybody wants it."
dom96 9y ago
So if I have an idea that I think people want, how do I figure out whether my assumptions are correct? Short of actually making the thing.
- harlanji 9y ago
  Watch Netflix. :) kidding, I go with actions are louder than words. Make something, send it into the world. The thing need only attract the people you wanna talk to (ie. get money from or proxies).
  - karimdag 9y ago
    I don't know why you were downvoted. I am of the same opinion for when it comes to humans, action speaks louder than words.
- Strom 9y ago
  You talk to a bunch of people and ask them if they would be willing to pay right now. Better if you don't mention that it's not available until they agree to pay. It's sort of a funnel: people you think want it > people who actually want it for free > people who can see themselves wanting it if someone else pays (i.e. future them could pay) > people who are actually willing to pay themselves.
  - advertising 9y ago
    ^^^^ This funnel is great
  - zachsnow 9y ago
    > people who can see themselves wanting it if someone else pays (i.e. future them could pay) Great way to make this point! So when you ask someone "would you pay for it?" you are really asking "would you use it if someone else paid for it?" Which, really, doesn't tell you very much at all.
  - Guest9812398 9y ago
    Keep in mind you'll get a lot of false positives. This is one of the biggest mistakes I always did when validating ideas. I would ask people (and myself), would you use or pay for product X? People would say yes, I would develop it, and then no one would use it. I realized you need to ask a follow-up question. Would you use or pay for product X? If yes, then why are you not using similar services Y and Z that already exist? If it's truly a good idea, then they already know about Y and Z, because they've been searching for a solution to their problem. They might be paying for one of those existing inferior services too, because they need this problem solved, and they're the only options available. That would be great news. It's bad news when they don't know anything about the existing services. As a simple example, you could ask pet owners if they would use a social network for pets, where they register their pet, post entertaining photos of their pet, follow other pets, etc. Basically, Facebook where all the profiles and posts are from animals. You'll get a bunch of yes answers from pet owners, which sounds very promising, and you might start on development. As I said, this is a mistake. If you search on Google, you'll find lots of existing pet social networks. So, ask those same people, if they said yes, why don't they visit Google today, and register on one of those other 10 sites? Why didn't they sign-up on one last month? Usually, once they find out the idea exists (or you develop it), they realize they don't care for, or need the service as much as they originally thought. As another example, I might want to develop a HN theme with bigger voting icons, larger text and links for improved readability, etc. When I ask myself, I answer yes, it's all positives, and I want and would use this theme. But then I ask, why have I never used any existing HN themes from other users? When did I last search for HN themes, because one probably exists today with some of the features on my list. I then realize that I don't care that much about a theme after all, and I actually prefer running sites as they're originally designed, without third-party themes or add-ons, even if they do add a few beneficial features.
kome 9y ago
Please clap.
epberry 9y ago
At this point it's hard to tell if these posts are auto-generated or not. On this one, I'm leaning towards yes.
- YPCrumble 9y ago
  Well put. Perhaps AI is getting closer to passing the Turing test because humans are regressing.
  - inimino 9y ago
    The Turing test is a dialogue. There is already tons of programmatic content on the web and it is indistinguishable from human-written content in the absence of contextual cues.
- bramkrom 9y ago
  Would've been cool to use AI to generate this post. If you know of any tools that can do this, let me know. BTW. I'm the author :)
benjaminsuch 9y ago
I don't get the quintessence of this article. Startup life is hard, a rollercoaster and many factors may it be good or bad will turn your startup into a success or failure. I miss suggestions or ideas how to face these problems and what a founder can do to minimize the risk. For the author, I would love to read about scenarios where a startup or the author itself overcome or prevent the mentioned problems.
- bramkrom 9y ago
  Hey Benjamin, I'm the author of the article, and love your feedback! This article was actually a follow-up on a previous article, and wanted to dig deeper on the failures of others. Will dig even deeper to figure out how to overcome and prevent those problems. Thanks!
hacknat 9y ago
Posts on creating a successful startup seem to all suffer from a lack of 2nd order thinking. Even some of the posts from PG. I’m sorry, but it is blindingly obvious, IMO, that startups should focus on surviving, whereas someone like Jeff Bezos has to think about how to serve an ace (and can suffer a good deal of failures before it would threaten his company). The unending stream of platitudes that come with these posts are also quite obvious, but also somewhat useless: don’t hire too fast, but don’t hire too slow; find a market, but don’t copy your competition. I think PG said in a post once that the YC partners joked that their job was to give founders advice that they would then ignore. So that makes me think that the advice/wisdom people should be dispensing/pursuing is: what can you do to make sure you follow all this good advice in a disciplined way? It seems like a lot of intelligent people fail to do so, why? How can you make yourself the exception? I don’t necessarily have the answers, but from my limited experience the best advice you can give an aspiring founder is: 1. Don’t found a company. You have a good idea and you think you can execute? Great, go find someone who is very likely already doing it and help them out. You’ll have way more fun and probably make more money. 2. Okay, you absolutely have to do this? The thing you have to really nail to follow all this great advice is culture. I have been at many startups, the ones that suceeded all had one thing in common: a highly functional culture. What does that mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone having warm fuzzies and a Swedish masseuse. It means that information in your organization can move effectively from anywhere in your company to anywhere else and people will feel empowered to act on that information. This is not the default mode for any organization. The default mode for any organization is territorialism/feudalism. Humans have evolved to be zero sum thinkers, they can’t help it. You have to create and organization that fights this constantly.
- andrewstuart 9y ago
  >> it is blindingly obvious, IMO, that startups should focus on surviving I don't think it is blindingly obvious. In fact I think the typical beginner entrepreneur really doesn't know where to focus. I've seen a number of people commence business and focus on logo, writing blog posts, legal setup, making a website, and then the whole thing goes kaput months down the track because they didn't have any revenue, when I think they were perfectly capable of earning money from my external viewpoint, but the beginning entrepreneur thinks they should, or is enjoying, playing "business theatre". And strangely it seems that there's nothing you can do to advise people otherwise during this phase of their personal development.... they are full of confidence and optimism and not open to hearing that they are not doing the right things. People are more likely to listen once they have failed and it has all come crashing down, then they have good reason to start looking for answers.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
bramkrom 9y ago
Note: I'm the author of the piece. Thanks a lot to the person who decided to share this here. It taught me a lot. HN really hosts a group of experts. The comments here have been super nuanced, showing actual mastery of the content. Really helps me sharpen my writing, so thanks to all for commenting.

89 points by vinnyglennon 9y ago

It doesn't sound like these are drawn from the author's experience, but rather from other things the author read, which would make it more of a haphazard survey than earned advice.

carterehsmith 9y ago
That article looks like a bot-generated content. There are Facebook bots, Twitter, Amazon bots (like, bots that generate book contents), even Youtube bots with (sometimes super-weird) machine-generated videos. BTW they do get clicks, so this is not some AI research moonshot, it is more like a little cottage industry popping up.
- bramkrom 9y ago
  Hey, I'm the author, and it's not :) But I guess the fact that you think it is is good feedback, so thanks
bramkrom 9y ago
Hey, FYI: I'm the author. Thanks for the feedback. And you're right, for most part. That's why I mentioned it's with input from 50 entrepreneurs who shared their mistakes and failures. Thanks for keeping others sharp about it, though.

Veen 9y ago

Essentially, make something people want, don't spend all your money before you have an income, fire weak employees, and find a co-founder you can work with. I've never started a startup, but I'd be surprised if these nuggets of wisdom are news to anyone. The tennis analogy was quite clever, but it lead me to expect more incisive advice.

myf01d 9y ago
Even if you did all these things, there is no guarantee that your startup will succeed. You can have a superior product but it's too early or too late. You can have bad luck with publicity or there could be other million reasons out of your control that cause you fail.
aerophilic 9y ago
While I agree with another poster that these don’t quite seem like “earned knowledge”. I wouldn’t dismiss these ideas out of hand for their simplicity. In my personal experience, the most valuable/powerful things are deceptively simple, but very hard to do well, or do consistently. A few examples that many people struggle with: - Spend less than you earn - Exercise regularly - Prioritize doing things, or spending time with people you love In my experience, startups are very similar. There are not that many rules you need to follow, but they are often difficult to “execute on”. A couple of examples: - Find great people you trust and can perform - Find your market/path to profitability as quickly as possible I am sure if we spent time, we would find lots of other “simple rules”. But the key point I am making is that simple rules are usually the right things to do, but they are often the hardest to really accomplish.
sky_rw 9y ago
I've been involved in several startups, a couple winners and a couple losers. Like all things in life I've found that the simplest principles are often the hardest ones to grok. It's like jumping into a Indy Car, and you think "Just go straight and then turn left". Turns out when you are going 200mph at a concrete wall the simple things become a lot more complex.
- csallen 9y ago
  A lot of the simple advice needs further unpacking, too. I've seen founders interpret "Make something people want" in all sorts of ways, as belied by their behavior: - "Make something nobody wants, then keep adding features until something magical happens." - "Copy another app that people already use, but add 'better' or 'faster' or 'easier' or 'prettier' in my marketing copy." - "Survey my users and build whatever they tell me, no questions asked." - "Build features that align with my own personal vision of what the product should look like, then hope that other people want it." - "Create 1/5th of an ambitious product that people want." - "Do an excellent job solving a trivial pain point that nobody cares about solving." - "Make something completely new and unique that the world has never seen before, regardless of whether or not anybody wants it."

dom96 9y ago

So if I have an idea that I think people want, how do I figure out whether my assumptions are correct? Short of actually making the thing.

harlanji 9y ago
Watch Netflix. :) kidding, I go with actions are louder than words. Make something, send it into the world. The thing need only attract the people you wanna talk to (ie. get money from or proxies).
- karimdag 9y ago
  I don't know why you were downvoted. I am of the same opinion for when it comes to humans, action speaks louder than words.
Strom 9y ago
You talk to a bunch of people and ask them if they would be willing to pay right now. Better if you don't mention that it's not available until they agree to pay. It's sort of a funnel: people you think want it > people who actually want it for free > people who can see themselves wanting it if someone else pays (i.e. future them could pay) > people who are actually willing to pay themselves.
- advertising 9y ago
  ^^^^ This funnel is great
- zachsnow 9y ago
  > people who can see themselves wanting it if someone else pays (i.e. future them could pay) Great way to make this point! So when you ask someone "would you pay for it?" you are really asking "would you use it if someone else paid for it?" Which, really, doesn't tell you very much at all.
- Guest9812398 9y ago
  Keep in mind you'll get a lot of false positives. This is one of the biggest mistakes I always did when validating ideas. I would ask people (and myself), would you use or pay for product X? People would say yes, I would develop it, and then no one would use it. I realized you need to ask a follow-up question. Would you use or pay for product X? If yes, then why are you not using similar services Y and Z that already exist? If it's truly a good idea, then they already know about Y and Z, because they've been searching for a solution to their problem. They might be paying for one of those existing inferior services too, because they need this problem solved, and they're the only options available. That would be great news. It's bad news when they don't know anything about the existing services. As a simple example, you could ask pet owners if they would use a social network for pets, where they register their pet, post entertaining photos of their pet, follow other pets, etc. Basically, Facebook where all the profiles and posts are from animals. You'll get a bunch of yes answers from pet owners, which sounds very promising, and you might start on development. As I said, this is a mistake. If you search on Google, you'll find lots of existing pet social networks. So, ask those same people, if they said yes, why don't they visit Google today, and register on one of those other 10 sites? Why didn't they sign-up on one last month? Usually, once they find out the idea exists (or you develop it), they realize they don't care for, or need the service as much as they originally thought. As another example, I might want to develop a HN theme with bigger voting icons, larger text and links for improved readability, etc. When I ask myself, I answer yes, it's all positives, and I want and would use this theme. But then I ask, why have I never used any existing HN themes from other users? When did I last search for HN themes, because one probably exists today with some of the features on my list. I then realize that I don't care that much about a theme after all, and I actually prefer running sites as they're originally designed, without third-party themes or add-ons, even if they do add a few beneficial features.

kome 9y ago

Please clap.

epberry 9y ago

At this point it's hard to tell if these posts are auto-generated or not. On this one, I'm leaning towards yes.

YPCrumble 9y ago
Well put. Perhaps AI is getting closer to passing the Turing test because humans are regressing.
- inimino 9y ago
  The Turing test is a dialogue. There is already tons of programmatic content on the web and it is indistinguishable from human-written content in the absence of contextual cues.
bramkrom 9y ago
Would've been cool to use AI to generate this post. If you know of any tools that can do this, let me know. BTW. I'm the author :)

benjaminsuch 9y ago

I don't get the quintessence of this article. Startup life is hard, a rollercoaster and many factors may it be good or bad will turn your startup into a success or failure. I miss suggestions or ideas how to face these problems and what a founder can do to minimize the risk. For the author, I would love to read about scenarios where a startup or the author itself overcome or prevent the mentioned problems.

bramkrom 9y ago
Hey Benjamin, I'm the author of the article, and love your feedback! This article was actually a follow-up on a previous article, and wanted to dig deeper on the failures of others. Will dig even deeper to figure out how to overcome and prevent those problems. Thanks!

hacknat 9y ago

Posts on creating a successful startup seem to all suffer from a lack of 2nd order thinking. Even some of the posts from PG. I’m sorry, but it is blindingly obvious, IMO, that startups should focus on surviving, whereas someone like Jeff Bezos has to think about how to serve an ace (and can suffer a good deal of failures before it would threaten his company). The unending stream of platitudes that come with these posts are also quite obvious, but also somewhat useless: don’t hire too fast, but don’t hire too slow; find a market, but don’t copy your competition. I think PG said in a post once that the YC partners joked that their job was to give founders advice that they would then ignore. So that makes me think that the advice/wisdom people should be dispensing/pursuing is: what can you do to make sure you follow all this good advice in a disciplined way? It seems like a lot of intelligent people fail to do so, why? How can you make yourself the exception? I don’t necessarily have the answers, but from my limited experience the best advice you can give an aspiring founder is: 1. Don’t found a company. You have a good idea and you think you can execute? Great, go find someone who is very likely already doing it and help them out. You’ll have way more fun and probably make more money. 2. Okay, you absolutely have to do this? The thing you have to really nail to follow all this great advice is culture. I have been at many startups, the ones that suceeded all had one thing in common: a highly functional culture. What does that mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean everyone having warm fuzzies and a Swedish masseuse. It means that information in your organization can move effectively from anywhere in your company to anywhere else and people will feel empowered to act on that information. This is not the default mode for any organization. The default mode for any organization is territorialism/feudalism. Humans have evolved to be zero sum thinkers, they can’t help it. You have to create and organization that fights this constantly.

andrewstuart 9y ago
>> it is blindingly obvious, IMO, that startups should focus on surviving I don't think it is blindingly obvious. In fact I think the typical beginner entrepreneur really doesn't know where to focus. I've seen a number of people commence business and focus on logo, writing blog posts, legal setup, making a website, and then the whole thing goes kaput months down the track because they didn't have any revenue, when I think they were perfectly capable of earning money from my external viewpoint, but the beginning entrepreneur thinks they should, or is enjoying, playing "business theatre". And strangely it seems that there's nothing you can do to advise people otherwise during this phase of their personal development.... they are full of confidence and optimism and not open to hearing that they are not doing the right things. People are more likely to listen once they have failed and it has all come crashing down, then they have good reason to start looking for answers.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

bramkrom 9y ago

Note: I'm the author of the piece. Thanks a lot to the person who decided to share this here. It taught me a lot. HN really hosts a group of experts. The comments here have been super nuanced, showing actual mastery of the content. Really helps me sharpen my writing, so thanks to all for commenting.