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> I asked John how his product was doing, and he said that he’s looking to hire a CEO with more product experience...when I talked to him further, he said he wa

> I asked John how his product was doing, and he said that he’s looking to hire a CEO with more product experience...when I talked to him further, he said he was still looking to launch his MVP...So after 1.5 years, John basically spent $10,000+ attending financial conferences, collected no revenue, and hasn’t even launched a working website Laughing at how real this is. This is exactly the situation with me and a friend. We both had an idea for different businesses 2 years ago. He prints business cards, incorporates a business, talks about partnerships, a launch party, worries about getting too big....and has no users. I quit my job to code away in the morning, reply to user feedback in the afternoon and emulate my competitor's marketing at night. I did this every day....and just passed 100,000 users. Hardly anybody knows what I do. The difference between us: he works for a big tech company where everyone talks about their app idea™ over lunch and lives in a city where splashing $1000 on bottle service is seen as smart instead of foolish. I don't. Instead I grind for two simple reasons: to be free of a boss and to make something people find valuable. I love my friend and I'm not knocking his approach, nor saying mine is better. But printing business cards before gaining users is a bizarre way to order one's priorities.

spamizbad 9y ago
"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" applies to startups just as much as anything.
detritus 9y ago
"emulate my competitor's marketing at night, every day" Might you expand on thisa little, in loose terms, please?
- factsaresacred 9y ago
  Bad grammar made that sentence more confusing than it should have been so I fixed it. What I mean is I spend 1/3 of my day looking at how my competitors got to where they are and try to replicate it. Did they get featured in Lifehacker, are they trying any shady stuff like purchasing positive app store reviews, are their primary channels email or search - this kind of stuff. I try copy their secret sauce and add my own.
clairity 9y ago
i like your naecdote but wanted to add another perspective on the business cards. there are different paths to success. one path is through sales, in which a good prototype/demo and pitch can get you early, paying customers. you print up business cards and product sheets--even before you have a company set up--and hand them out during sales meetings to bring a little bit of legitimacy to your venture, and that's worth the $15-20 (plus design time) it takes.
- notahacker 9y ago
  Yeah. For some markets the business cards, registered company name and client specific conferences and illusion of prestige actually earns you the users to pay you up front to write the code, or are more important than the code period. (funnily enough, I walked out on a fledgling fintech startup with a guy from a similar background to John from the article whose prestige obsession was the opposite: paying for people to write serious amounts of software to create a more mostly-cosmetically modern bespoke internal document management system he was convinced he needed to get the partners he needed to take his ideas for disrupting other aspects of their mostly customer marketing & relationship driven business model seriously. Frustrating when he had connections to potential needed partners anyway and they were more worried about leadgen than anything else, something he knew a fair bit about about and could have focused on instead, but something that might have resulted in falling at the first hurdle... tbf he paid for it, stuck at it and his business is showing some signs of life these days)
- factsaresacred 9y ago
  Yes, I don't mean to dismiss business cards. They matter. But for the type of biz (customer facing Saas) and the amount of progress made (zero) they didn't matter as much as almost everything else.
chubot 9y ago
Not saying I'm successful in the web area, but one thing I try to do is to have some working code before buying a domain name. Like business cards, buying a domain name makes it seem like you're doing something, but you're really not. You haven't even started; you're just throwing a small amount of money down the drain and dreaming of some future moneymaker. I'm sure there are many people who have domain names for 1+ years but haven't worked on the product the whole time. I did that once and then learned my lesson! If it helps, think of buying (and choosing) the domain name as the reward for making something work :) ---- EDIT: "playing house" is the term that Paul Graham uses for people who go through the motions of starting a business without understanding what they're doing. http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html
- vtange 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure thoroughness and self-discipline is what actually matters. Going to a site and actually buying the darn name is actually work some dreamers are too lazy to even start. You have to be pretty convicted that this is the name you're going to plaster all over the place for a while. You also have to be pretty darn sure your name might go very soon if you don't stake it asap. I bought my domain name (my user name) relatively early (before I had even learned Node) because as Chinese names often go, vtang was already taken and many easy alternatives as well. I ended up with an "e" at the end for "engineer" but as we all know there is probably a Vincent Tang out there in the world who is also an engineer. Checked all social media and hammered things in asap.

spamizbad 9y ago

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" applies to startups just as much as anything.

detritus 9y ago

"emulate my competitor's marketing at night, every day" Might you expand on thisa little, in loose terms, please?

factsaresacred 9y ago
Bad grammar made that sentence more confusing than it should have been so I fixed it. What I mean is I spend 1/3 of my day looking at how my competitors got to where they are and try to replicate it. Did they get featured in Lifehacker, are they trying any shady stuff like purchasing positive app store reviews, are their primary channels email or search - this kind of stuff. I try copy their secret sauce and add my own.

clairity 9y ago

i like your naecdote but wanted to add another perspective on the business cards. there are different paths to success. one path is through sales, in which a good prototype/demo and pitch can get you early, paying customers. you print up business cards and product sheets--even before you have a company set up--and hand them out during sales meetings to bring a little bit of legitimacy to your venture, and that's worth the $15-20 (plus design time) it takes.

notahacker 9y ago
Yeah. For some markets the business cards, registered company name and client specific conferences and illusion of prestige actually earns you the users to pay you up front to write the code, or are more important than the code period. (funnily enough, I walked out on a fledgling fintech startup with a guy from a similar background to John from the article whose prestige obsession was the opposite: paying for people to write serious amounts of software to create a more mostly-cosmetically modern bespoke internal document management system he was convinced he needed to get the partners he needed to take his ideas for disrupting other aspects of their mostly customer marketing & relationship driven business model seriously. Frustrating when he had connections to potential needed partners anyway and they were more worried about leadgen than anything else, something he knew a fair bit about about and could have focused on instead, but something that might have resulted in falling at the first hurdle... tbf he paid for it, stuck at it and his business is showing some signs of life these days)
factsaresacred 9y ago
Yes, I don't mean to dismiss business cards. They matter. But for the type of biz (customer facing Saas) and the amount of progress made (zero) they didn't matter as much as almost everything else.

chubot 9y ago

Not saying I'm successful in the web area, but one thing I try to do is to have some working code before buying a domain name. Like business cards, buying a domain name makes it seem like you're doing something, but you're really not. You haven't even started; you're just throwing a small amount of money down the drain and dreaming of some future moneymaker. I'm sure there are many people who have domain names for 1+ years but haven't worked on the product the whole time. I did that once and then learned my lesson! If it helps, think of buying (and choosing) the domain name as the reward for making something work :) ---- EDIT: "playing house" is the term that Paul Graham uses for people who go through the motions of starting a business without understanding what they're doing. http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

vtange 9y ago
I'm pretty sure thoroughness and self-discipline is what actually matters. Going to a site and actually buying the darn name is actually work some dreamers are too lazy to even start. You have to be pretty convicted that this is the name you're going to plaster all over the place for a while. You also have to be pretty darn sure your name might go very soon if you don't stake it asap. I bought my domain name (my user name) relatively early (before I had even learned Node) because as Chinese names often go, vtang was already taken and many easy alternatives as well. I ended up with an "e" at the end for "engineer" but as we all know there is probably a Vincent Tang out there in the world who is also an engineer. Checked all social media and hammered things in asap.