4 ms·

If you're looking at past examples, they'll all be successful because the ones that ran out of money and still failed are on the streets panhandling $10/hour.

If you're looking at past examples, they'll all be successful because the ones that ran out of money and still failed are on the streets panhandling $10/hour. Maybe people fail at even higher rates when they tunnel onto their currently unsuccessful projects, but the advice appears good because instead of writing a post-mortem that everyone can read the failures are hunting for copper wiring in people's empty vacation houses. Baye's Theorem: P(successful | desperate) * P(desperate) = P(desperate | successful) * P(successful) There's a LOT of desperate people on the streets, and not many rich millionaires. 21% of millionaires inherited their money, upper-bounding P(desperate | successful), so P(successful | desperate) seems like a really low number. Also, this advice would imply you should give away most of your life savings to someone to create a panic'd deadline. Maybe hit up a casino so you have a 50% chance of getting rich gambling, and a 50% chance of losing and getting more motivation for your startup to be successful.

lelag 5y ago
You could have summed up your point with 2 words: Survivorship bias.
- MichaelBurge 5y ago
  If the ratios are 10% success and 90% failure, then we need to write 10x as many negative words as the article author wrote positive words so that the reader later recalls random positive/negative points in the correct ratio.
- raunometsa 5y ago
  It's always like that when I try to see why some startups succeed. People tell me there's a "survivorship bias." Well, fine, I get that I look at startups who "succeeded" and yes there are many others who didn't succeed. But I still believe there's some truth in this – when your personal runway starts to end, you'll really need to focus on making money or admit that you failed. And most of all I think it's the mindset: you stop tweaking the css and get real. You start selling, and if it doesn't sell, you try to understand why it doesn't sell, and then you change things, or start a new project. But we don't need to run out of money to have this mindset. We can, instead, just to decide to have this mindset. What do you think?
  - season1bias 5y ago
    This line of discussion is one of those "Goddamnit HN" types of things, not dissimilar from the infamous Dropbox / rsync post of old. When one comes along and says "Oh, just do X and you'll succeed because that is what I did." - THAT is survivor bias. When one comes along and discusses what happened to them, how it affected them, motivated them, pressed them to change their behavior and outlook which lead to their hockey-stick sales graph... that isn't unto itself survivorship bias. Catastrophic events absolutely have a way of causing many folks to "buckle down" and "get to brass tacks" instead of fucking around with CSS and starting on that Angular to React to Vue rewrite. Personally, I'm sort-of in that boat in that I'm solo-founding a document signing software (pursuing a GitLab model, the only real market differentiator to this point). Well, I am doing this as a side-venture. There's no need to make it work, I don't have to hustle, I can say "Ya know what, lemme shave that yak and add in some nice test coverage charts." In doing that, I do what I'm good at and what makes me comfortable - software. I'm an engineer. It also leads to me not doing important things like marketing... actually getting my work out in front of my audience, whatever it is. Of course, I can "justify" this all to myself because as much as I would love this to take off and grant me my "freedom" (which with my remote, uber flexible, well paying job isn't really all that free anyway) I'm not in dire straits. I have to catch myself and force myself to stay on track. If someone reads this post and is able to use that to reflect on their own position, that's not only NOT survivorship bias but a really good thing.
    - raunometsa 5y ago
      Thanks! I enjoyed reading your comment. 1. This was beautifully said: "instead of fucking around with CSS and starting on that Angular to React to Vue rewrite." 2. Yeah, so you're exactly in this place. You have money to live. You work on your product. You (probably?) enjoy it. But will it "succeed" in that it will start making enough money for you to live off it? Btw here's one more post I wrote that's related: https://raumet.com/marketing https://raumet.com/marketing 3. If you want to share what your product is, I'd be happy to look at it. Doc signing pursuing a GitLab model sounds interesting... my email is rauno@raumet.com

lelag 5y ago

You could have summed up your point with 2 words: Survivorship bias.

MichaelBurge 5y ago
If the ratios are 10% success and 90% failure, then we need to write 10x as many negative words as the article author wrote positive words so that the reader later recalls random positive/negative points in the correct ratio.
raunometsa 5y ago
It's always like that when I try to see why some startups succeed. People tell me there's a "survivorship bias." Well, fine, I get that I look at startups who "succeeded" and yes there are many others who didn't succeed. But I still believe there's some truth in this – when your personal runway starts to end, you'll really need to focus on making money or admit that you failed. And most of all I think it's the mindset: you stop tweaking the css and get real. You start selling, and if it doesn't sell, you try to understand why it doesn't sell, and then you change things, or start a new project. But we don't need to run out of money to have this mindset. We can, instead, just to decide to have this mindset. What do you think?
- season1bias 5y ago
  This line of discussion is one of those "Goddamnit HN" types of things, not dissimilar from the infamous Dropbox / rsync post of old. When one comes along and says "Oh, just do X and you'll succeed because that is what I did." - THAT is survivor bias. When one comes along and discusses what happened to them, how it affected them, motivated them, pressed them to change their behavior and outlook which lead to their hockey-stick sales graph... that isn't unto itself survivorship bias. Catastrophic events absolutely have a way of causing many folks to "buckle down" and "get to brass tacks" instead of fucking around with CSS and starting on that Angular to React to Vue rewrite. Personally, I'm sort-of in that boat in that I'm solo-founding a document signing software (pursuing a GitLab model, the only real market differentiator to this point). Well, I am doing this as a side-venture. There's no need to make it work, I don't have to hustle, I can say "Ya know what, lemme shave that yak and add in some nice test coverage charts." In doing that, I do what I'm good at and what makes me comfortable - software. I'm an engineer. It also leads to me not doing important things like marketing... actually getting my work out in front of my audience, whatever it is. Of course, I can "justify" this all to myself because as much as I would love this to take off and grant me my "freedom" (which with my remote, uber flexible, well paying job isn't really all that free anyway) I'm not in dire straits. I have to catch myself and force myself to stay on track. If someone reads this post and is able to use that to reflect on their own position, that's not only NOT survivorship bias but a really good thing.
  - raunometsa 5y ago
    Thanks! I enjoyed reading your comment. 1. This was beautifully said: "instead of fucking around with CSS and starting on that Angular to React to Vue rewrite." 2. Yeah, so you're exactly in this place. You have money to live. You work on your product. You (probably?) enjoy it. But will it "succeed" in that it will start making enough money for you to live off it? Btw here's one more post I wrote that's related: https://raumet.com/marketing https://raumet.com/marketing 3. If you want to share what your product is, I'd be happy to look at it. Doc signing pursuing a GitLab model sounds interesting... my email is rauno@raumet.com