7 ms·
Eric Ries: “Don’t Be In A Rush To Get Big, Be In A Rush To Have A Great Product”
- mathgladiator 15y agoWhy rush at all?
- ivankirigin 15y agofaster is better
- arkitaip 15y agoIdeas are never truly unique. No matter how special they might seem to you, rest assure that at least a sufficient amount of people have been sensitive to the zeitgeist to pick up the same, seemingly weak, signals that lead you to that idea of yours. Ergo, you need to be agile, to iterate fast and competently to flesh out and develop the idea into a business.
- mechanical_fish 15y agoIf you have infinite runway you don't need to listen to Eric Ries or anybody else. Build whatever you want. Take as long as you want. Give the stuff you built away in your will when you die. Or, have your executors burn it all in a massive bonfire. Most of us do not have infinite runway, however. And even if you do: There is an optimum pace at which to create any given work of art. Working on it too much can be just as bad as working on it too little. The momentum runs down. The zeitgeist changes. The authors become too familiar with the product to see it afresh. The fanbase gets bored and stops paying attention. And the stakes get higher: The longer you work on something, the more of your reputation is tied up with that thing.
- martinkallstrom 15y agoThis echoes the Einstein quote I regard as my personal mantra: "Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value." - Albert Einstein.
- idlewords 15y ago"Be skeptical of inspirational quotes ascribed to great men" - Gandhi
- jsherry 15y ago"Yeah but Einstein wasn't just great according to a number of subjective measures, he was brilliant by just about any objective measure." - Me
- mechanical_fish 15y ago"There are only two kinds of quotes: Those that are ascribed to famous people, and those that aren't good enough to make their authors famous." -- mechanical_fish [Note that this doesn't rule out the existence of the many unfortunate authors whose sentences are so good that they get mis-ascribed to even more famous authors, rather than making the original authors themselves famous.] [Zen practitioners will note the existence of a third type of quote: If a sentence is uttered in the woods but nobody is listening, it will never be attributed to anyone famous.]
- gruseom 15y agowhose sentences are so good that they get mis-ascribed to even more famous authors There seems to be a bucketing algorithm that, over time, labels all the quotes in a bucket with the most famous approximately applicable name. For example, "First they laugh at you..." (early 20th century, subject: social activism) goes to Gandhi instead of Nicholas Klein (who? my point exactly); "Not everything that counts can be counted" (mid 20th century, subject: measuring shit) goes to Einstein instead of William Bruce Cameron. Often the quotes themselves get optimized along the way, so Eliot's "Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal" (mid 20th century, subject: art) goes to Picasso, but as the snappier "Good artists copy, great artists steal". It makes sense that this happens as time recedes, for the same reason that you see only the major landmarks at a distance. But it probably gives us a skewed idea of individual genius.
- 15y ago
- staunch 15y agoWhat about the startups where scale is the product? Such as Reddit, Etsy, Quora, Airbnb, eBay, or any network effect/marketplace business?
- alexro 15y agoYou haven't included Digg - a perfect example of getting big instead of polishing the product.
- staunch 15y agoDigg's product is crowd sourced news. They failed through poor community management not a lack of innovation in their UI.
- alexro 15y agoTheir product had numerous bugs in each new version, that drove the users away too. Had they not been on a rush, they'd probably tested more.
- brandnewlow 15y agoDidn't they fail because they were too proud to copy Reddit's subreddit structure the week after Reddit pushed it live?
- recoiledsnake 15y agoThe biggest reason was Digg v4, which was buggy, didn't have features present in the previous version and basically sold the readership to tech news outlets. By the time they fixed it, everyone went to Reddit.
- badclient 15y agoDon't the fathers of lean generally believe that if you think you've got the next FB, throw away all our advice? I believe I heard something like that on a video.
- mtogo 15y agoThe Over Capitalization In The Title Is Really Kind Of Ridiculous.
- golden_apples 15y agoThats funny. What is it about marketers overdoing title case in setting they write anyways? I actually added this line to a clients stylesheet once: * { text-transform: capitalize !important; } ...trying to demonstrate how ridiculous his headlines looked. When he said he loved it, I decided never to work for him again.
- robjohnson 15y agoI really like that they are perpetuating this methodology as far as possible. Steve Blank and Eric Ries are developing a logic and ration driven scientific approach to entrepreneurship - very exciting indeed.