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Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)

196 points by docuru 7y ago

docuru 7y ago
I bet many of you have read all of Paul's essays, I thought I have read this one. I didn't know this one exists until today. Many of the points in 2006 are still hold true
jacknews 7y ago
messages from a bygone era
- hazz99 7y ago
  Which parts do you think have been antiquated?
adrianmsmith 7y ago
> Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That's one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified. I’m not sure if I’d agree with that point. Google were not the first search engine, Facebook was not the first social network, etc. I mean, for a user perspective, Google literally worked like other search engines at the time. You enter your phrase, see results. Of course the results were better than Yahoo, the user-interface cleaner, etc. But that’s definitely incremental value for the user, not a whole new category of product.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
  Meh, I kind of think you're both right. I mean, while Google was just the evolution of a search engine, they did solve a very specific unsolved problem that the founders identified (namely, how to rank results in a manner that was a much better indicator of relevance and quality). When it comes to Facebook, people forget that before them, using your real name and identity online in a social network was extremely rare. Similarly, there were loads of dating apps before Tinder, but they solved a very specific problem: how to let either partner indicate interest withOUT letting the other partner know unless there was a match, in an intuitive way. So yes, there are not many startups that are bold ideas that are completely new (for exceptions see Elon Musk), but they mostly DO bring something fundamentally new to the table.
- TheGrassyKnoll 7y ago
  I think their best feature was speed. The internet in those days was clunky, but Google was impressively fast along with the clean interface.
arielm 7y ago
Very insightful, as with most of Paul’s work. But it also shows a very specific mindset. In my opinion #15 was wrong back than and is even more obviously wrong now in 2020. The idea that you have to build first and monetize later has barely worked for some and forced many many many others to sell at no gain or close. We mostly saw the successful ones, but what happened recently with the likes of wework is causing that perception to shift. #16 though is super important, and not just from the programmer direction. A good founder needs to understand the moving pieces of their startup, regardless of whether they have the training for that or not. I’m not saying they should be the ones to lead the effort on something they have no clue about, but they should be able to understand it. This is critical for single founders and important for multiple founders who make decisions together.
juped 7y ago
Interesting to see how this aged. By my reckoning: 1 (Single Founder) - people just ignore this one, more or less. 2 (Bad Location) - this one became a horrifying monster that devours everything it touches. 3 (Marginal Niche) - probably the biggest killer, then and now. 4 (Derivative Idea) - meh. People worry about this too much. Is there an unserved market? 5 (Obstinacy) - on point. Serve the market. 6 (Hiring Bad Programmers) - This one also became a horrifying monster. Graham says "In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't." Darkly hilarious in hindsight. 7 (Choosing the Wrong Platform) - meh. People use fucking backend Javascript now. 8 (Slowness in Launching) - Pretty valid. 9 (Launching Too Early) - maybe, I guess. 10 (Having No Specific User in Mind) - absolutely important. You have to be serving a market. 11 (Raising Too Little Money) - this pendulum has swung way over the other way now. 12 (Spending Too Much) - Yes. (Hiring too much. Stop trying to feel like an important funded company.) 13 (Raising Too Much Money) - Something of a subtle point, but still an important one - especially now that you can get too much money thrown at you more easily. 14 (Poor Investor Management) - of course. 15 (Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit) - I'll just note that Graham writes that Google puts users first. Hindsight! 16 (Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty) - Graham means with sales work. Very much true. 17 (Fights Between Founders) - This is why you vest, I guess. Graham was still down on founder vesting at the time. 18 (A Half-Hearted Effort) - I mean, why put in more of an effort if you have a route to fail upward?
- hef19898 7y ago
  Guilty of number 18, guess why it took two years between wanting to found and actually doing it. Also guilty of number one, kind of. But that is more due to family /economic situation than a lack of a co-founder. Regarding programmer and platform. There are so many cloud solutions out thereby now, unless softwareis your product, there is no need to develop it in-house. Take warehouse management and transportation management. Unless you want to built a new WMS or TMS, but build a service, just use the stuff that exists. Which make the programmer a guy able to appraise and implement said software. And like the programmer, one of the founders should be good at doing that.
noneckbeard 7y ago
In the Wrong Platform section he mentions how the new PayPal CEO wanted to switch the company to Windows and “Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.” That CEO they gave the boot? Elon Musk. It was probably still a good decision and maybe we wouldn’t have spaceX or Tesla without that change, but still hilarious!
- sethammons 7y ago
  If anyone knows, I’d be interested in more details around the windows thing.
  - andygcook 7y ago
    IIRC from reading the book PayPal Wars, Elon wanted to switch PayPal over to Windows because he saw it as the future. At the time, PayPal was on Unix. Max Levchin and the other main programmers didn’t want to switch. The disagreement on platform eventually came to a head and Elon was replaced by the board with Peter Thiel. If you haven’t read PayPal Wars, it’s a great book.
    - statictype 7y ago
      Further, a lot of Tesla's internal systems are apparently Windows, mainly because Musk likes it, apparently?
    - noneckbeard 7y ago
      Agreed. I think it was also a power struggle over which engineering team would be in control moving forward. Musk’s X.com was built on windows and he wanted everyone to switch over on the merge.
  - tokipin 7y ago
    The Elon Musk biography has Musk's side of the story in the appendix. Paraphrasing, but basically he saw the tooling for Windows software development (Visual Studio etc) as being more coherent/batteries included/practical, in part because of Microsoft's investments in gaming and needing those tools to work on commercial games, which were stupidly complex even back then. Keep in mind Musk had some experience in the gaming industry. I'm not familiar with Linux, but it was likely rudimentary by comparison at the time. Another good point he brings up is that you could find a lot of smart engineering talent, who is working on games, by using their tools/language of choice. SpaceX uses a similar tactic on a more subject matter level. People that can understand 3D game programming are probably a great pool of talent for writing rocket software.
rexreed 7y ago
The REAL mistakes that kill startups: 1. Not solving a real problem - Product / market fit 2. Raising Too much money - Growing beyond ability for the market to support 3. Hiring the wrong people 4. Too much founder ego 5. Too much founder inexperience combined with a lack of a desire to learn 6. Focusing too much on investor needs vs. customer needs 7. Spending too much money 8. Perfect is the enemy of good - Start small, think big, iterate often. I think single founder issues, so-called "bad location" issues, derivative ideas are not really issues at all. The top 7 will kill you even if you have great locations. And there are many examples of great business started by sole founders outside the high expense "prime" locations.
- barrkel 7y ago
  On "bad location": consumer-focused startups will need to scale up fast if they get traction. Those are the ones that benefit most from being in SV: a pool of skilled labour they can bid their VC dollars + stratospheric ambitions on. B2B companies may be better off located in one of the top areas for the business vertical. For example, non-consumer FinTech startups may be better off in New York or London than SV.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    I still firmly believe that a lot of people get the scalability/sustainability thing wrong, and then overhire like crazy. If you ran a lean startup, would location be as much of an issue? Or asked the other way around: should all startups outside of the valley be lean startups? It may just be the horizontal versus vertical question. A lot of the work I do, when to have the autonomy to do it, is to make sure that every developer can get more done, or be more certain that the work really is done. I’m trying to vertically scale developers. In systems design, when communication is cheap you scale horizontally. When it’s expensive, you scale vertically. What have we really done as an industry to improve the effectiveness of human communication? I mean, really? Most of those improvements were made in the 90’s, a bit more in the 00’s, and everything since has been refinement (or regression.)
mbesto 7y ago
The only mistake that kills startup is running out of money. Every other piece of advice is hand-wavy at best and lacks context. For example - How much is too much to raise? How much is too little? What constitutes a bad programmer?
- longerthoughts 7y ago
  I agree but don’t think “don’t run out of money” makes for very helpful advice, hence a bunch of other suggestions that help you not run out of money. If a doctor told me “don’t have a heart attack/stroke/etc” I’d probably have some follow-up questions.
  - mbesto 7y ago
    So, how is "don't hire bad people" good advice when you can't describe what a good or bad hire looks like?
jancurn 7y ago
> PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows — even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead. It’s pretty funny to see that in 2006 Elon Musk didn’t even deserve a mention of his name. How things have changed...
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  Pretty common when new managers "get an idea." A new manager at Google wanted to shift Adsense (I believe) to Oracle Enterprise from MySQL. Some favorable MySQL benchmarks stopped that. Responsys was all-Windows for quite a while. They eventually migrated their server farm to Linux. Almost certainly a combination of performance and an internal license audit (using Microsoft server products to scale a SaaS is brutally expensive.)
- pragmatic 7y ago
  We laugh now, but I remember reading that iis on windows nt blew the doors of Apache in the late 90s/early 00s. I'd love to find the source as I can't find it right now, bit I thought that was bc Apache could only fork back then, etc
  - zbentley 7y ago
    > I thought that was bc Apache could only fork back then Shit, nobody tell the Postgres folks that fork-only parallelism doesn't work...
  - alexkcd 7y ago
    I remember reading that too. I think Ben Horowitz might have talked about this in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, though I might be misremembering the source.
iamcasen 7y ago
Hiring bad programmers is so common it's crazy. Most hacker news types probably won't know this, but there are so many startups out there than aren't VC backed and they have a limited dev budget. They try and hire who they think is good, spend all their money on programmer salaries, and then what get's built is a total turd. They never get traction because they keep failing to launch. Company dies. All too common.
- dchyrdvh 7y ago
  They all want to get experienced corporate lawyers for an entry level associate price.
- codingslave 7y ago
  The funny part is they scoff at an extra 50k for a better programmer, and then watch as that cheaper guy that looks good on paper writes a pile of garbage
  - iamcasen 7y ago
    True, but how can a non-technical founder know who is good, or who is just expensive? I've seen dev consultancies that are very expensive, and they play the part in every way, but they produce total garbage. There really isn't any way to know unless... well you know. The best way to figure it out is through a vigorous investigation of references I think, but even then, the past projects they worked on may have been better suited to their skills that what you're hiring them for.
tjchear 7y ago
I'm gonna take a stab at assessing the relevance of the mistakes to a self-bootstrapper: 1. Single Founder: Plenty examples of successful bootstrappers on Indiehackers. There are also plenty of failed bootstrappers, but you likely won't hear about them obviously. The reasons pg listed for single founder failure is still valid for a bootstrapper though - it's a very lonely journey. 2. Bad Location: this is important for a different reason: as a bootstrapper relying on their own savings, I'd say location with low cost of living and fast Internet is the most ideal. 3. Marginal Niche: bootstrappers target niches since they're not focused on hyper-growth like conventional startups do. 4. Derivative Idea: not that big of a deal. Derivative ideas are pretty common amongst bootstrappers. You spend less time finding product/market fit if you work on popular/derivative ideas - but of course you'll also run into plenty of competitors. 5. Obstinacy: yeah, big killer. Be willing to adapt is sound advice regardless of your situation. The question is when do you know things aren't working well, or you just need to push a little more? Talk to users. 6. Hiring Bad Programmers: Definitely a killer. For bootstrappers who work alone, the question becomes am I skilled enough to build the product within a realistic scope and timeframe? 7. Choosing the Wrong Platform: people tend to use whatever they're most skilled at/comfortable with. It's still important that you do a survey of what's available out there before you commit, and always have a realistic migration plan when your success outgrows your initial scope. 8. Slowness in Launching: bootstrappers are big on the idea of MVPs and launching fast, but in practice, this is hard. Perfectionism is the bane of those who failed to launch. 9. Launching too Early: valid, but I imagine this is less of a problem for bootstrappers since you likely don't have much attention at the initial launch anyway. 10. Having No Specific User In Mind: totally valid. 11. Raising too little money: irrelevant. 12. Spending too much: I can't speak for all bootstrappers, but if you're bootstrapping from your own savings you're likely to be more careful with your spending. 13. Raising too much money: irrelevant. 14. Poor investor management: irrelevant. 15. Sacrificing Users to Supposed Profit: bootstrapped companies have to be profitable from day 1. There's no investor money to keep you going. I believe a good trade-off can be achieved here. 16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty: yeah, arguably the most important one. Only way to deal with this is to constantly reach out to people and talk to them. 17. Fights Between Founders: totally valid, but irrelevant to single founder bootstrappers (plenty of these). 18. A half-hearted effort: a killer, for sure. But you don't necessarily have to quit your day job. Ideally, work part time as a consultant/contractor, and work on your business the rest of the time. It comes down to self (and time) management.
bze12 7y ago
this still holds pretty true, but you know the essay is dated when he calls it "The Facebook"
jimthrow 7y ago
Most software startups die due to lack of demand for their product.
danielmarkbruce 7y ago
Shameless plug - I put (almost)all PG essays in podcast form here: https://www.roderick.io/feed/pg https://www.roderick.io/feed/pg This is the rss(xml). In most podcast apps you can add a podcast by url.
ablekh 7y ago
Here are relevant thoughts from 10 years later by another well-known venture capitalist (and 2x founder) Mark Suster: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/how-to-decrease-the-odds-that-your-startup-fails-e0fc13213792 https://bothsidesofthetable.com/how-to-decrease-the-odds-tha....

196 points by docuru 7y ago

I bet many of you have read all of Paul's essays, I thought I have read this one. I didn't know this one exists until today. Many of the points in 2006 are still hold true

jacknews 7y ago

messages from a bygone era

hazz99 7y ago
Which parts do you think have been antiquated?

adrianmsmith 7y ago

> Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That's one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified. I’m not sure if I’d agree with that point. Google were not the first search engine, Facebook was not the first social network, etc. I mean, for a user perspective, Google literally worked like other search engines at the time. You enter your phrase, see results. Of course the results were better than Yahoo, the user-interface cleaner, etc. But that’s definitely incremental value for the user, not a whole new category of product.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
Meh, I kind of think you're both right. I mean, while Google was just the evolution of a search engine, they did solve a very specific unsolved problem that the founders identified (namely, how to rank results in a manner that was a much better indicator of relevance and quality). When it comes to Facebook, people forget that before them, using your real name and identity online in a social network was extremely rare. Similarly, there were loads of dating apps before Tinder, but they solved a very specific problem: how to let either partner indicate interest withOUT letting the other partner know unless there was a match, in an intuitive way. So yes, there are not many startups that are bold ideas that are completely new (for exceptions see Elon Musk), but they mostly DO bring something fundamentally new to the table.
TheGrassyKnoll 7y ago
I think their best feature was speed. The internet in those days was clunky, but Google was impressively fast along with the clean interface.

arielm 7y ago

Very insightful, as with most of Paul’s work. But it also shows a very specific mindset. In my opinion #15 was wrong back than and is even more obviously wrong now in 2020. The idea that you have to build first and monetize later has barely worked for some and forced many many many others to sell at no gain or close. We mostly saw the successful ones, but what happened recently with the likes of wework is causing that perception to shift. #16 though is super important, and not just from the programmer direction. A good founder needs to understand the moving pieces of their startup, regardless of whether they have the training for that or not. I’m not saying they should be the ones to lead the effort on something they have no clue about, but they should be able to understand it. This is critical for single founders and important for multiple founders who make decisions together.

juped 7y ago

Interesting to see how this aged. By my reckoning: 1 (Single Founder) - people just ignore this one, more or less. 2 (Bad Location) - this one became a horrifying monster that devours everything it touches. 3 (Marginal Niche) - probably the biggest killer, then and now. 4 (Derivative Idea) - meh. People worry about this too much. Is there an unserved market? 5 (Obstinacy) - on point. Serve the market. 6 (Hiring Bad Programmers) - This one also became a horrifying monster. Graham says "In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't." Darkly hilarious in hindsight. 7 (Choosing the Wrong Platform) - meh. People use fucking backend Javascript now. 8 (Slowness in Launching) - Pretty valid. 9 (Launching Too Early) - maybe, I guess. 10 (Having No Specific User in Mind) - absolutely important. You have to be serving a market. 11 (Raising Too Little Money) - this pendulum has swung way over the other way now. 12 (Spending Too Much) - Yes. (Hiring too much. Stop trying to feel like an important funded company.) 13 (Raising Too Much Money) - Something of a subtle point, but still an important one - especially now that you can get too much money thrown at you more easily. 14 (Poor Investor Management) - of course. 15 (Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit) - I'll just note that Graham writes that Google puts users first. Hindsight! 16 (Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty) - Graham means with sales work. Very much true. 17 (Fights Between Founders) - This is why you vest, I guess. Graham was still down on founder vesting at the time. 18 (A Half-Hearted Effort) - I mean, why put in more of an effort if you have a route to fail upward?

hef19898 7y ago
Guilty of number 18, guess why it took two years between wanting to found and actually doing it. Also guilty of number one, kind of. But that is more due to family /economic situation than a lack of a co-founder. Regarding programmer and platform. There are so many cloud solutions out thereby now, unless softwareis your product, there is no need to develop it in-house. Take warehouse management and transportation management. Unless you want to built a new WMS or TMS, but build a service, just use the stuff that exists. Which make the programmer a guy able to appraise and implement said software. And like the programmer, one of the founders should be good at doing that.

noneckbeard 7y ago

In the Wrong Platform section he mentions how the new PayPal CEO wanted to switch the company to Windows and “Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.” That CEO they gave the boot? Elon Musk. It was probably still a good decision and maybe we wouldn’t have spaceX or Tesla without that change, but still hilarious!

sethammons 7y ago
If anyone knows, I’d be interested in more details around the windows thing.
- andygcook 7y ago
  IIRC from reading the book PayPal Wars, Elon wanted to switch PayPal over to Windows because he saw it as the future. At the time, PayPal was on Unix. Max Levchin and the other main programmers didn’t want to switch. The disagreement on platform eventually came to a head and Elon was replaced by the board with Peter Thiel. If you haven’t read PayPal Wars, it’s a great book.
  - statictype 7y ago
    Further, a lot of Tesla's internal systems are apparently Windows, mainly because Musk likes it, apparently?
  - noneckbeard 7y ago
    Agreed. I think it was also a power struggle over which engineering team would be in control moving forward. Musk’s X.com was built on windows and he wanted everyone to switch over on the merge.
- tokipin 7y ago
  The Elon Musk biography has Musk's side of the story in the appendix. Paraphrasing, but basically he saw the tooling for Windows software development (Visual Studio etc) as being more coherent/batteries included/practical, in part because of Microsoft's investments in gaming and needing those tools to work on commercial games, which were stupidly complex even back then. Keep in mind Musk had some experience in the gaming industry. I'm not familiar with Linux, but it was likely rudimentary by comparison at the time. Another good point he brings up is that you could find a lot of smart engineering talent, who is working on games, by using their tools/language of choice. SpaceX uses a similar tactic on a more subject matter level. People that can understand 3D game programming are probably a great pool of talent for writing rocket software.

rexreed 7y ago

The REAL mistakes that kill startups: 1. Not solving a real problem - Product / market fit 2. Raising Too much money - Growing beyond ability for the market to support 3. Hiring the wrong people 4. Too much founder ego 5. Too much founder inexperience combined with a lack of a desire to learn 6. Focusing too much on investor needs vs. customer needs 7. Spending too much money 8. Perfect is the enemy of good - Start small, think big, iterate often. I think single founder issues, so-called "bad location" issues, derivative ideas are not really issues at all. The top 7 will kill you even if you have great locations. And there are many examples of great business started by sole founders outside the high expense "prime" locations.

barrkel 7y ago
On "bad location": consumer-focused startups will need to scale up fast if they get traction. Those are the ones that benefit most from being in SV: a pool of skilled labour they can bid their VC dollars + stratospheric ambitions on. B2B companies may be better off located in one of the top areas for the business vertical. For example, non-consumer FinTech startups may be better off in New York or London than SV.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I still firmly believe that a lot of people get the scalability/sustainability thing wrong, and then overhire like crazy. If you ran a lean startup, would location be as much of an issue? Or asked the other way around: should all startups outside of the valley be lean startups? It may just be the horizontal versus vertical question. A lot of the work I do, when to have the autonomy to do it, is to make sure that every developer can get more done, or be more certain that the work really is done. I’m trying to vertically scale developers. In systems design, when communication is cheap you scale horizontally. When it’s expensive, you scale vertically. What have we really done as an industry to improve the effectiveness of human communication? I mean, really? Most of those improvements were made in the 90’s, a bit more in the 00’s, and everything since has been refinement (or regression.)

mbesto 7y ago

The only mistake that kills startup is running out of money. Every other piece of advice is hand-wavy at best and lacks context. For example - How much is too much to raise? How much is too little? What constitutes a bad programmer?

longerthoughts 7y ago
I agree but don’t think “don’t run out of money” makes for very helpful advice, hence a bunch of other suggestions that help you not run out of money. If a doctor told me “don’t have a heart attack/stroke/etc” I’d probably have some follow-up questions.
- mbesto 7y ago
  So, how is "don't hire bad people" good advice when you can't describe what a good or bad hire looks like?

jancurn 7y ago

> PayPal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X.com, the new CEO wanted to switch to Windows — even after PayPal cofounder Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1% as well on Windows as Unix. Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead. It’s pretty funny to see that in 2006 Elon Musk didn’t even deserve a mention of his name. How things have changed...

redis_mlc 7y ago
Pretty common when new managers "get an idea." A new manager at Google wanted to shift Adsense (I believe) to Oracle Enterprise from MySQL. Some favorable MySQL benchmarks stopped that. Responsys was all-Windows for quite a while. They eventually migrated their server farm to Linux. Almost certainly a combination of performance and an internal license audit (using Microsoft server products to scale a SaaS is brutally expensive.)
pragmatic 7y ago
We laugh now, but I remember reading that iis on windows nt blew the doors of Apache in the late 90s/early 00s. I'd love to find the source as I can't find it right now, bit I thought that was bc Apache could only fork back then, etc
- zbentley 7y ago
  > I thought that was bc Apache could only fork back then Shit, nobody tell the Postgres folks that fork-only parallelism doesn't work...
- alexkcd 7y ago
  I remember reading that too. I think Ben Horowitz might have talked about this in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, though I might be misremembering the source.

iamcasen 7y ago

Hiring bad programmers is so common it's crazy. Most hacker news types probably won't know this, but there are so many startups out there than aren't VC backed and they have a limited dev budget. They try and hire who they think is good, spend all their money on programmer salaries, and then what get's built is a total turd. They never get traction because they keep failing to launch. Company dies. All too common.

dchyrdvh 7y ago
They all want to get experienced corporate lawyers for an entry level associate price.
codingslave 7y ago
The funny part is they scoff at an extra 50k for a better programmer, and then watch as that cheaper guy that looks good on paper writes a pile of garbage
- iamcasen 7y ago
  True, but how can a non-technical founder know who is good, or who is just expensive? I've seen dev consultancies that are very expensive, and they play the part in every way, but they produce total garbage. There really isn't any way to know unless... well you know. The best way to figure it out is through a vigorous investigation of references I think, but even then, the past projects they worked on may have been better suited to their skills that what you're hiring them for.

tjchear 7y ago

I'm gonna take a stab at assessing the relevance of the mistakes to a self-bootstrapper: 1. Single Founder: Plenty examples of successful bootstrappers on Indiehackers. There are also plenty of failed bootstrappers, but you likely won't hear about them obviously. The reasons pg listed for single founder failure is still valid for a bootstrapper though - it's a very lonely journey. 2. Bad Location: this is important for a different reason: as a bootstrapper relying on their own savings, I'd say location with low cost of living and fast Internet is the most ideal. 3. Marginal Niche: bootstrappers target niches since they're not focused on hyper-growth like conventional startups do. 4. Derivative Idea: not that big of a deal. Derivative ideas are pretty common amongst bootstrappers. You spend less time finding product/market fit if you work on popular/derivative ideas - but of course you'll also run into plenty of competitors. 5. Obstinacy: yeah, big killer. Be willing to adapt is sound advice regardless of your situation. The question is when do you know things aren't working well, or you just need to push a little more? Talk to users. 6. Hiring Bad Programmers: Definitely a killer. For bootstrappers who work alone, the question becomes am I skilled enough to build the product within a realistic scope and timeframe? 7. Choosing the Wrong Platform: people tend to use whatever they're most skilled at/comfortable with. It's still important that you do a survey of what's available out there before you commit, and always have a realistic migration plan when your success outgrows your initial scope. 8. Slowness in Launching: bootstrappers are big on the idea of MVPs and launching fast, but in practice, this is hard. Perfectionism is the bane of those who failed to launch. 9. Launching too Early: valid, but I imagine this is less of a problem for bootstrappers since you likely don't have much attention at the initial launch anyway. 10. Having No Specific User In Mind: totally valid. 11. Raising too little money: irrelevant. 12. Spending too much: I can't speak for all bootstrappers, but if you're bootstrapping from your own savings you're likely to be more careful with your spending. 13. Raising too much money: irrelevant. 14. Poor investor management: irrelevant. 15. Sacrificing Users to Supposed Profit: bootstrapped companies have to be profitable from day 1. There's no investor money to keep you going. I believe a good trade-off can be achieved here. 16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty: yeah, arguably the most important one. Only way to deal with this is to constantly reach out to people and talk to them. 17. Fights Between Founders: totally valid, but irrelevant to single founder bootstrappers (plenty of these). 18. A half-hearted effort: a killer, for sure. But you don't necessarily have to quit your day job. Ideally, work part time as a consultant/contractor, and work on your business the rest of the time. It comes down to self (and time) management.

bze12 7y ago

this still holds pretty true, but you know the essay is dated when he calls it "The Facebook"

jimthrow 7y ago

Most software startups die due to lack of demand for their product.

danielmarkbruce 7y ago

Shameless plug - I put (almost)all PG essays in podcast form here: https://www.roderick.io/feed/pg https://www.roderick.io/feed/pg This is the rss(xml). In most podcast apps you can add a podcast by url.

ablekh 7y ago

Here are relevant thoughts from 10 years later by another well-known venture capitalist (and 2x founder) Mark Suster: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/how-to-decrease-the-odds-that-your-startup-fails-e0fc13213792 https://bothsidesofthetable.com/how-to-decrease-the-odds-tha....