11 ms·

I Reached $4k/Mo. But How Many Great Startup Ideas Have Died?

205 points by raunometsa 4y ago

krm01 4y ago
The only person you should ever ask if they like your startup idea are potential customers. Share with them the problem you’re tackling and the solution you’re building. opinions from anyone who is not your potential customer means literally nothing. Be it positive or negative. Friends, investors, strangers on the internet. Nobody matters except for customers. When I started a tiny design agency [1], I got the same reaction from random people (not scalable, why are you only focussing on B2B etc). We’re doing very well luckily and it’s a joy working with customers who love what you are offering. [1] http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro
- soperj 4y ago
  And how do you find these potential customers to ask?
  - krm01 4y ago
    Where ever they are. Customers are school teachers? Go to FB groups where they gather. Targeting Marketing execs? Send them an email.
    - soperj 4y ago
      I'm doing a meal planning app[0], didn't really think there'd be a facebook group for that, but lo & behold... Now I guess i have to get a facebook account :/ [0] - www.reciped.io
      - soperj 4y ago
        So I've just tried joining a few of these facebook groups, and a number of them ask specifically if you're going to try marketing to the group, and have rules against it. Seems like they've had enough of this tactic.
        garrickvanburen 4y ago
        You can learn a lot by not marketing.
        soperj 4y ago
        That's a good point. I'm not a very good marketer, so that should be pretty easy haha.
        fragmede 4y ago
        It's less organic, but you can just pay Facebook to run ads once you've identified the particular niche.
        soperj 4y ago
        I didn't even have a facebook account before, I hate their business model, last thing I really want to do is to give them money. I hate the way they do ads.
        mdorazio 4y ago
        If you're planning to immediately market to your target customer segment you're doing it pretty wrong since you almost certainly don't have product market fit yet. You should be talking with them, asking questions, learning, and trying to understand their pain points, existing solutions, & decision making processes. I recommend the book The Mom Test here. Marketing comes after all of that and there are many posts on how to do it with small ad spends, a landing page, and an email signup form.
        riku_iki 4y ago
        you may be buy some ads targeting these specific group. If your app is really solving some problem, you likely will get good conversion rate.
        nl 4y ago
        You don't join FB groups to market to them! You join to do customer development. There's a huge difference between going in and going "try my app" and "hey I'm an app developer, building this thing, and I'm wondering if people here would find X or Y more useful". Do it the first way and you'll get banned. Do it the second way and you'll get people asking to try it.
  - raunometsa 4y ago
    What I've often seen with startups on MicroFounder – cold outreach. "We started with cold outreach to creators, Indie Hackers, and startup founders, who might be interested in our product." – Marie from Tally ($24k/mo) Depending on the product, some communities can be also helpful, but this probably doesn't work for everything. It did for Julien who is building NotionForms though (now $11k MRR): https://microfounder.com/startups/notionforms https://microfounder.com/startups/notionforms
    - daniel-cussen 4y ago
      That's what Steve Jobs did. Got featured in the Ashton Kutcher movie. When he screams after getting hung up on--that's the 150th call he made that day. They were rude as shit with him. That rejection is too lightly touched on. And it's like a club for a novat after you ask every girl to dance and nothing, then go ask every girl to dance again. Wander. No validation. Get their contempt. He didn't add up to shit in the eyes of VCs. Nothing. His resume was just...and he didn't have chapitas, badges of eg graduating from the right schools, and then a smooth up-and-to-the-right career trajectory that had to trace an exponential curve. Dropouts were nothing then, like you could open up a photo booth be a hippie or yes be an inventor--sort of in the late seventies, very limited, not open to everybody by that point like in the 1920's. VCs only got more open-minded by people like Jobs--him more than absolutely anybody--opening those skulls with the rippling effect of figurative kicks to the ass. Missing out. Getting bounced. And for a few with already open minds, absurd riches. Work the club.
  - yomkippur 4y ago
    again and again it is this road to customers that is tough as a technical founder, who can I hire on upwork that can take on this task of doing cold out reach? Business development? How would I structure the compensation (per lead or per hour or both?) so many ideas fail because they cannot get through this grind. I got my customers from a simple tweet that was retweeted. It's literally rolling dice because when I posted the same thing years ago there was no response. I wonder if successful people just got lucky at rolling dices early on that puts them in a good mentality position to build their chips for the bubbles in a poker tournament.
  - mbesto 4y ago
    This is basically the one thing that no one ever teaches you but is arguably the hardest part. I think Steve Blank's Customer Development Manifesto nails it on the head: https://growthorientedsustainableentrepreneurship.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/en-customer-development-manifesto.pdf https://growthorientedsustainableentrepreneurship.files.word... This is the reason you often see older (person's age) entrepreneurs more successful because they've already created network of trust, or people who have exited multiple companies...getting intros to potential clients for customer development is stupidly easy because you're already pre-sold because of those relationships. That being said, I've found in my career that as long as you're willing to listen to early potential customers most individuals of any size company are motivated to tell you all about their issues. Trust me, get someone on the phone and they'll air all of their dirty laundry. You gain trust with those early potential customers (and eventually payments) by being a good listener - replay back what you heard, explain how you're going to fix it, and then deliver. As Steve Blank says "There are no facts inside your building, so get outside". I'm going to generalize here, but I think the reason too may technically minded entrepreneurs fail is because they're simply too introverted to get outside.
  - nazka 4y ago
    You do a super neat hero page with the features your product will have. You say you are working on it but they can preorder. When they click on preorder with the price you actually say that no payment is required but you will shoot them an email when the product will be ready to be tested. That way the person saw your product, saw the price, and was ready to buy it.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    I think that at least for B2B it's key to have someone among your founding team who either is/was a potential customer (e.g. has worked for some years in the role&industry who would be buying this) or personally knows a few such customers (e.g. because they have worked in a different role but in the same industry, or in a similar role in a different industry). If you don't have that, you can "import" that knowledge but that will take a lot of effort and time, and you risk making some very wrong assumptions early on. And IMHO there are no shortcuts, to understand your market you have to walk a mile in their shoes, and if you haven't already done so before starting the startup, doing that will take out a big chunk of your runway. So it's not about some specific activities, but about choosing a project that fits your team or a getting together a team that fits your project.
DaveExeter 4y ago
Two words: survivor bias.
- xmprt 4y ago
  That's one way to put it. Another way is to say that you had a good enough execution to stand out from the crowd of all the other failed startups and the people criticizing your idea didn't have the same vision as you. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
- katzgrau 4y ago
  Survivor here, with several failed startups in the past. Bootstrapped to 100k / mo over 10 years. Sufficiently cynical folks will never hear anything I say as anything other survivor bias. My only advice is stay bootstrapped, avoid company-ending risk like investment, and maintain control of the company. Through learning and persistence, you'll figure out how to grow it. Just remember that the survivors figured out two things: how not to die (much easier for the Bootstrapped), and how to adapt to changing conditions.
  - scubakid 4y ago
    "not dying" is surprisingly underrated these days :D
- jokoon 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 Copy pasted: Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work. Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.
dangus 4y ago
This begs the question: why is the startup now making $4k a month? Is it because of the idea, or is it because of other factors? Or the idea combined with other factors? Addressable Market? Marketing savvy? Sales leads? Product execution? Luck/Viral Posts/First Mover Status? I like that this common criticism was brought up in the article: > "Doesn't this exist? So many big platforms do it. Very competitive." This is a validator in itself. A small business can see an existing, competitive market, and that's usually an indicator that there are a lot of potential customers. If you look at products like FastMail or Hey they aren't so concerned that 95%+ of people are fine with the big free email providers, because literally everyone uses email at some point. I think my overall point is this: The "idea" part of a startup is perhaps one of the less important aspects of it, in my opinion. Maybe it's even the least important part of the equation.
- raunometsa 4y ago
  > Is it because of the idea, or is it because of other factors? Not because of the idea specifically! But I've seen in my own life and in the lives of other "microfounders" that if you're not sure about your startup idea or you don't have that much momentum going on with it (it's a new idea, you haven't thought about it much) it's much easier to abandon the idea when you hear from friends, investors, or just some random people on Twitter that this idea is not a good one and it probably won't succeed.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    I have experienced this many, many, many times, so I'm really grateful for what you wrote. Even if I don't think I'm absorbing other people's doubts about whether it would work, or even internalizing their certainty that it won't work, I can be doing that exact thing outside of my awareness. It reminds me of the quote attributed to Muhammad Ali: "I said I'm the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was." How often do I start to doubt my dreams because I'm talking with someone who doesn't share the same dreams? I've wanted to build an online platform to train people to be world leaders, almost like a martial art created by MLK. I can vividly remember when I said this to one guy, a stranger (!), who laughed and said, "I don't think you'll be the person to do that." That has stuck with me for years, a creeping doubt deep within. That's all to say: thank you very much for what you wrote. I think I needed to read it today.
scubakid 4y ago
Another thing to be cautious about is folks who steer your idea in a new direction towards a larger TAM (with bigger encumbents) because they don't see how the current idea can 1000X. Sometimes, intentionally going after a market niche can be a good thing; you don't always have to set your sights on being the next unicorn. Especially if you're starting out as a solo dev, building the best product out there for a very specific audience can be a good strategy that leaves you with enough breathing room to continue to innovate and grow incrementally. That's the general approach I've been taking with ProjectionLab.com (the personal finance simulator I've been building on the side for a year now) and thus far, it's been a fun and modestly fruitful journey.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  I'm the founding CTO of a small startup, and I've been trying to find the business equivalent of your side project. Have you come across any modern tools for financial forecasting?
  - scubakid 4y ago
    I've been shown a couple tools geared for startups that some of my users had been playing around with, but those didn't look modern or nuanced enough to me. I haven't done a formal search though, so perhaps there are good things out there I'm not aware of. Eventually, I'd like to add better support for business use cases to ProjectionLab; in some ways, it's already close, but I'll need to carefully think through a few things like more granular event timing/scheduling and short/near-term views.
  - tnorthcutt 4y ago
    https://usesummit.com/ https://usesummit.com/
    - scubakid 4y ago
      Visual editor seems pretty cool. Can summit do probabilistic things like monte carlo simulation as well, or is it scoped to deterministic projection?
bagels 4y ago
Did you build the thing from the tweet? A marketplace for microstartup investment?
- raunometsa 4y ago
  Ah, I suspected that the main image may give a wrong feeling as it's not really about a microstartup investments right now. But it fit together with the "no" and "your idea is not good" topic so I kept it. Anyways, I'm still planning to build a part of MicroFounder towards investments. Probably not legal/technical side but the marketplace, yes. The idea is this: you're a developer and you want to build a (micro)startup that pays your bills etc. But it can be hard to find the necessary time and energy to work on it so much that it will succeed (or it takes just too long). And of course there's a risk that it will never take off. So, you de-risk and sell part of it to an investor. Maybe even not a % of the company but you agree on a profit share for some period/amount. Because now you have an idea for a startup and – let's say — $120k to pay your salary until you reach $10k MRR, or something like that. You will focus on this startup and see if it works out or not after a year. Another thing is from the point of the investors. Like this whole MicroAcquire thing. I was considering selling my other solo startup RemoteHunt.com – some investors said that "hey take like $120k for 10% but I still need you on the project as otherwise I have to hire a team etc that takes a lot of money, time, etc.)
  - bagels 4y ago
    I completely understood the context of the tweet in the post, but was interested if there was traction in the investment marketplace. I've browsed microacquire both as a founder and as an investor. As an investor, I always come back to the same thought that I'd just be buying another job, which isn't so appealing.
cosmodisk 4y ago
Recently I've been contemplating about creating something fairly small, that would eventually bring in. ~100K/year. Many would say it's not big enough,or so,but it would allow me to build a decent retirement fund, support many activities that don't cost a fortune but still require money and so on.
- imnotreallynew 4y ago
  How could you possibly know some product or idea would bring in such a specific amount?
- encoderer 4y ago
  Do it. That would also be an asset worth anywhere from $100k-500k (depending on the type of business, growth rate, etc).
- scubakid 4y ago
  Curious to hear more about your idea if you feel like sharing. Is your 100k ARR target an estimate based on research into the space or more like a notional goal you'd be content with reaching?
- raunometsa 4y ago
  Yes! This is what my site MicroFounder is exactly about and by that, I don't mean you should buy the paid membership (you can build it without paying for any "framework" or community or whatever). I feature new startups built by solo founders on the front page (for free) to show people that it's possible to build a profitable internet startup to pay the bills. Or, to keep the job and build a retirement fund, or travel fund, or whatever. I'd say that every developer should think about it. Yes, of course, work your full time dev job but also start thinking and then building some small startups. Maybe you won't reach $10k MRR in a year (although I have many examples on my site who do) but still, you're starting to move in this direction. And there's this question of "if" – can I succeed? Others are doing it, but me — me personally, can I do it? And I'd say of course, yes, 100% – because it's a matter of making the decision.
  - 4y ago
tomxor 4y ago
>> I don't see how this could grow 100x. This only means it's not large enough to be investible, that's not necessarily a problem and doesn't mean it's an inherently "bad" idea. Small ideas can net the individuals that work on them just as much as working on large ideas... the workforce might be smaller but once you divide it up it's all the same. If the idea provides value to the world, you like it, and can grow it without investment, go for it.
- fourneau 4y ago
  100%. Some of the most important problems in the world are solved by a thousand "tiny" companies. Sure, they didn't look attractive from an investor's standpoint (most live by the 'high risk = high reward' approach), but that does not mean they are not important.
deleted 4y ago
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abrax3141 4y ago
can someone post a python to a clear and simple How To do a microstartup from scratch? There must be such a thing.
- mkl 4y ago
  "a python"?
  - abrax3141 4y ago
    Sorry typoo: A pointer.
lakomen 4y ago
In my experience "friends" are clueless, especially if they have ni clue about IT and the possibilities. They only see "virtual product" and can't imagine you being successful because after all they aren't and you can't be better than them. I got rid of those friends. In fact if you have them on board sooner or layer you'll have trouble with them. Them not working hard enough or not taking it seriously enough or not only not supporting your vision but actively fighting it. It's bad for the friendship and bad for the business. After all friends are just people you spent time with more than with other people, because circumstances or similar view on things. That was then but life goes on and people change.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  This is a terrible take on friendship.
- scubakid 4y ago
  Is this a hot take on the risks of going into business with friends? Or a hot take on... friends in general?
bdominy 4y ago
I just passed 100 downloads of my app after 6 months and I’m thrilled with that pace. In that time I’ve been able to make sure my backend is solid, and talk with people to gain valuable insights. My main metric is excitement. If I’m excited to show people my app and they are excited to try it after we talk, I’m happy.
lkrubner 4y ago
Peter Drucker, perhaps the greatest business guru of the 20th Century, once remarked that innovators are often disappointed by the manner in which their innovations become popular. In his 1985 book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker relates the story of Alfred Einhorn, who invented Novocain, which then became popular with dentists as a local anesthetic. Einhorn held a contempt for dentistry, since it represented such a small niche of medicine. He felt that Novocain should be used by surgeons for all forms of surgery, and so he waged a campaign against the use of Novocain by dentists. In the end, his innovation was successful despite him, rather than because of him. According to Drucker, this pattern, where a product or service is undercut by the entrepreneur who is trying to promote it, is extremely common. When I first read Drucker’s book I found it hard to believe that an entrepreneur would actively sabotage their own innovation. However, having now spent several years working with startups, I’ve seen that it is, indeed, a common pattern. Many entrepreneurs starts websites at least in part because they consider themselves uniquely creative and insightful, and they want the whole world to see them as they see themselves. The website they launch proves them wrong: their insights are proven false, what works in the end is something unexpected. For instance, in 1992, when Bo Peabody launched Tripod, he was thinking that the site would offer content aimed at college students. His idea failed. The company was saved because some of the programmers at the company had started a side project that allowed anyone to create their own web pages. This then became the future of the company. In his book, Lucy or Smart, Peabody says it is important to be smart enough to know when you are getting lucky. And then, you have to be willing to accept that luck. This takes humility. What’s needed in an entrepreneur is emotional resilience, the kind of strength that allows for openness to the unexpected. Twice now I’ve seen an entrepreneur sabotage their own website because it became successful for what they felt were the wrong reasons. This emotional resistance to success is nearly always inspired by one of two factors: 1.) The success is with a small niche. The startup was suppose to grow till it was larger than Google, and success with a small niche is, therefore, extremely disappointing. The niche might be big enough to potentially generate several million in revenue, but it won’t ever be enough to catch up with Google. 2.) The success is of a conventional type and, therefore, the entrepreneur regards it as boring. Perhaps the site was suppose to pioneer an altogether new style of interaction among humans, and instead the part of the site that becomes popular is of an old type – for instance, the blog on the site becomes highly successful. The entrepreneur is then disappointed, maybe even angry, to be the owner of a boring success. Drucker also emphasized how much self-sabotage tends to trip up entrepreneurs. I documented a case of this in my own book, How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=how+to+destroy+a+tech+startup&qid=1661109298&sprefix=how+to+destroy+a+tech+s%2Caps%2C79&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...
rank0 4y ago
Ideas are cheap. Implementation is the hard part!
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  I have enough experience to implement anything from microcontrollers and Linux drivers to react webapps and scalable k8s clusters. I think that I can build most projects alone and limited only by time, not by skills. I have yet to find an idea that I would consider worthy spending time on, despite the fact that I really want to be independent developer with my own project. Of course I had miriads of ideas but nothing that I would really trust to become a business, even something small. I think that it's required to have some different background to be able to understand what people need and to be able to reach those people, because anything you could imagine as a programmer was implemented or nobody will pay for it.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    In my experience, you can create literally anything and there will be someone out there who will pay for it. Ideas don't matter in that respect. The hard part is implementing methods and processes that will capture the early adopters and learn from them so that you product can grow into something that is appealing to a wider audience. Tech implementation is easy. Business implementation is hard.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      > Tech implementation is easy. Business implementation is hard. This is what we tell the MBAs so they feel better. Keep up the good work!
      - randomdata 4y ago
        Thing is, MBAs end up in roles under existing business that are already implemented because they don't know how to implement business. An experienced developer is likely in a better position to implement business, but it is still going to be hard.
deleted 4y ago
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black_13 4y ago
erwinh 4y ago
This seems to be the perfect place to reply with a smart remark that subtly links to the project you are building: https://thestackreport.xyz https://thestackreport.xyz
carom 4y ago
I have a lot of variance in how I answer "what are you building?" for this exact reason. There is what I am building right now and my vision. Getting people to see the vision is difficult. >What are you building? 1. An image labeling tool for making open datasets. 2. A data-centric training and serving platform. 3. I am going to index the physical world in the same way Google indexes the internet.
Rackedup 4y ago
money is so important
dt3ft 4y ago
So microfounder.com is selling a list of ~200 startups operated by solo founders making $4k/Mo in the process. Huh, you really can sell everything these days. Inspiring!
taf2 4y ago
I feel like I heard someone once tell me if you talk about what you are going to do it reduces the chance you’ll actually do it… so just do it is my approach in general… congrats on reaching 4k
holoduke 4y ago
What is this? An article spoiled with 4000 in almost every sentence. As if that amount is attracting someone to start something. Money is never the motivator. I created several products on my own. All solo. Some make 30k a month. I never thought about becoming rich or making this amount or that amount. I always wanted to create a product people enjoyed. I never used any so called accelerator tools. Analytics usage very basic. I spend all my time in development. Frontend , backend , infra everything. Please don't believe these annoying articles or products they represent. They sell air.
- treelovinhippie 4y ago
- s1k3 4y ago
  I think he’s trying to say that you shouldn’t let outside validation or invalidation affect your decision to build a startup. You as the founder should know (via research, interviews, insights and industry knowledge) whether your startup is solving a real problem. Don’t let someone with less expertise than you talk you out of it, or converse, talk you into it.
- dqh 4y ago
  $4000 a month is enough to live on. Knowing that solo founders have bootstrapped to $4000 a month is highly significant to someone with the right skills but a short financial runway.
  - tasuki 4y ago
    You are of course right, but I can also see holoduke's point. I'd just change to "Money is never the right motivator" (not the only sufficient one, anyway).
6510 4y ago
I've heard all the negative slogans from people who don't know any better. I have tons of ideas but only one set of hands. I usually don't plan to implement anything which is the only poor quality of the business plans I bother to talk about. The funniest has to be one where I spend years simplifying the description of the product because people didn't understand how it was suppose to work. The comments were persistently negative and dismissive but went from hating on one part they didn't understand to the next. The pun here is that if people are to stupid or lazy to understand your product you don't have a product. Eventually (after years) I got the description hammered down to beautiful short and easy to understand. It was so mind-blowingly simple now that the same moaners each individually took the same entirely different angle of attack (because it are attacks): If it was that simple someone else would have done it. The actual lesion to be learned from this process is not what you think. I look at the "negativity first" folk as sad little creatures who simply don't get it. It is behavior so pathetic and intentionally hurtful that you should go on a search to find those qualities in yourself. Every man or woman has things that make them get up in the morning. Their own passions or things to ponder. We all know instinctively how to hide these precious things from others who want to rub poop on them. If you approach someone humbly and carefully and ask them to tell the story of their thing they will re-examine you, look closely what the intend is behind your questions. If you are honest, kind and objective long enough they will eventually tell you how they found their thing and what makes it such an interesting thing for them personally. Identify and purge the negativity from your system when it arises, something like: "what an idiot spending all this money on model trains" or "the banjo is a dumb instrument", "this woman with her stupid hand bag collection". Listen but focus on the emotions and stories around their passion. And then... all of a sudden... you find yourself surrounded by passionate people. It is remarkably easy to work on your own thing in the right company. You might not be sinking years into trying to bake the perfect cheese cake but your know your [proverbial] software project is not up to those standards. You go back in to check if you dotted the i's perfectly because that is what you do, who you are.
benatkin 4y ago
I don't agree with blog posts being referred to as "physical" and thoughts being referred to as "non-physical".
strangattractor 4y ago
How many Great Startup Ideas Have Died? Probably as many that where started and failed despite people telling them it would fail to begin with. The success cannot be predicted in advance. A great startup idea by definition is one that first gets started and then becomes successful. Ideas that fail are never considered great.
- nine_k 4y ago
  This is the first level. On the next level, many good ideas fail because they arrive too early. Apple Newton in 1992, a flop, embodies many of the ideas that made iPhone in 2007 a colossal success. Examples are many. Sometimes it's worth revisiting a failed but promising idea, and check if the factors that made it fail are still extant.
maoeurk 4y ago
I'm working on a B2C product as an indie founder and I run into this quite a lot. Though from my perspective a lot of the "physical vs non-physical" disconnect is also about the fact that people who have not had direct experience in the creation of a software product are unable to extrapolate from what they're currently seeing. I think that's actually completely reasonable though; people take things at face value. But what that means is that all the potential in the world means nothing unless you can show via features how that's a good thing and what the impacts are. This impacts the product I'm working on because there's a lot of stuff on a base level that seems like similar products in the space but the real value is the integration of systems and data to fundamentally change the interactions. And until recently, we didn't have much of the "Big Picture Ideas" on display for our users.
111111101101 4y ago
I've found that whenever I've shared my ideas with friends or family, they default to poking holes in them. Instead of looking for reasons why it could work they start listing obvious problems that I've already considered. Things like "You would have to get insurance" or my personal favorite "if it were that easy then everyone would be doing it." Because of this, I learned long ago not to share any of my projects or ideas with anyone. The flip-side is that when I started to have some success, those same people who would always be so negative became angry with me. After his first time visiting my new home one guy even picked a fistfight with me and I've picked up that several family members have been running me down behind my back. Many working-class people are prone to envy but at the same time they underestimate their own potential. It's best not to worry about them.
fairity 4y ago
This is a typical example of over-generalization. The author believes because he is successful, his approach to success must be correct or optimal. The truth is that almost all ventures will end reaching his level of success if you simply don’t give up, and apply consciousness to your work. You’ll likely have to pivot as you learn more about your chosen market, but if you’re smart and persistent you’ll eventually figure something out. Instead of shutting out criticism early on (like the author suggests), it’s better to listen and just throw out the unhelpful parts. I’ve actually found that investors are great at pointing out legitimate weaknesses in your business model, but they typically overstate the lethality of such weaknesses.

205 points by raunometsa 4y ago

The only person you should ever ask if they like your startup idea are potential customers. Share with them the problem you’re tackling and the solution you’re building. opinions from anyone who is not your potential customer means literally nothing. Be it positive or negative. Friends, investors, strangers on the internet. Nobody matters except for customers. When I started a tiny design agency [1], I got the same reaction from random people (not scalable, why are you only focussing on B2B etc). We’re doing very well luckily and it’s a joy working with customers who love what you are offering. [1] http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro

soperj 4y ago
And how do you find these potential customers to ask?
- krm01 4y ago
  Where ever they are. Customers are school teachers? Go to FB groups where they gather. Targeting Marketing execs? Send them an email.
  - soperj 4y ago
    I'm doing a meal planning app[0], didn't really think there'd be a facebook group for that, but lo & behold... Now I guess i have to get a facebook account :/ [0] - www.reciped.io
    - soperj 4y ago
      So I've just tried joining a few of these facebook groups, and a number of them ask specifically if you're going to try marketing to the group, and have rules against it. Seems like they've had enough of this tactic.
      - garrickvanburen 4y ago
        You can learn a lot by not marketing.
        soperj 4y ago
        That's a good point. I'm not a very good marketer, so that should be pretty easy haha.
      - fragmede 4y ago
        It's less organic, but you can just pay Facebook to run ads once you've identified the particular niche.
        soperj 4y ago
        I didn't even have a facebook account before, I hate their business model, last thing I really want to do is to give them money. I hate the way they do ads.
      - mdorazio 4y ago
        If you're planning to immediately market to your target customer segment you're doing it pretty wrong since you almost certainly don't have product market fit yet. You should be talking with them, asking questions, learning, and trying to understand their pain points, existing solutions, & decision making processes. I recommend the book The Mom Test here. Marketing comes after all of that and there are many posts on how to do it with small ad spends, a landing page, and an email signup form.
      - riku_iki 4y ago
        you may be buy some ads targeting these specific group. If your app is really solving some problem, you likely will get good conversion rate.
      - nl 4y ago
        You don't join FB groups to market to them! You join to do customer development. There's a huge difference between going in and going "try my app" and "hey I'm an app developer, building this thing, and I'm wondering if people here would find X or Y more useful". Do it the first way and you'll get banned. Do it the second way and you'll get people asking to try it.
- raunometsa 4y ago
  What I've often seen with startups on MicroFounder – cold outreach. "We started with cold outreach to creators, Indie Hackers, and startup founders, who might be interested in our product." – Marie from Tally ($24k/mo) Depending on the product, some communities can be also helpful, but this probably doesn't work for everything. It did for Julien who is building NotionForms though (now $11k MRR): https://microfounder.com/startups/notionforms https://microfounder.com/startups/notionforms
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    That's what Steve Jobs did. Got featured in the Ashton Kutcher movie. When he screams after getting hung up on--that's the 150th call he made that day. They were rude as shit with him. That rejection is too lightly touched on. And it's like a club for a novat after you ask every girl to dance and nothing, then go ask every girl to dance again. Wander. No validation. Get their contempt. He didn't add up to shit in the eyes of VCs. Nothing. His resume was just...and he didn't have chapitas, badges of eg graduating from the right schools, and then a smooth up-and-to-the-right career trajectory that had to trace an exponential curve. Dropouts were nothing then, like you could open up a photo booth be a hippie or yes be an inventor--sort of in the late seventies, very limited, not open to everybody by that point like in the 1920's. VCs only got more open-minded by people like Jobs--him more than absolutely anybody--opening those skulls with the rippling effect of figurative kicks to the ass. Missing out. Getting bounced. And for a few with already open minds, absurd riches. Work the club.
- yomkippur 4y ago
  again and again it is this road to customers that is tough as a technical founder, who can I hire on upwork that can take on this task of doing cold out reach? Business development? How would I structure the compensation (per lead or per hour or both?) so many ideas fail because they cannot get through this grind. I got my customers from a simple tweet that was retweeted. It's literally rolling dice because when I posted the same thing years ago there was no response. I wonder if successful people just got lucky at rolling dices early on that puts them in a good mentality position to build their chips for the bubbles in a poker tournament.
- mbesto 4y ago
  This is basically the one thing that no one ever teaches you but is arguably the hardest part. I think Steve Blank's Customer Development Manifesto nails it on the head: https://growthorientedsustainableentrepreneurship.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/en-customer-development-manifesto.pdf https://growthorientedsustainableentrepreneurship.files.word... This is the reason you often see older (person's age) entrepreneurs more successful because they've already created network of trust, or people who have exited multiple companies...getting intros to potential clients for customer development is stupidly easy because you're already pre-sold because of those relationships. That being said, I've found in my career that as long as you're willing to listen to early potential customers most individuals of any size company are motivated to tell you all about their issues. Trust me, get someone on the phone and they'll air all of their dirty laundry. You gain trust with those early potential customers (and eventually payments) by being a good listener - replay back what you heard, explain how you're going to fix it, and then deliver. As Steve Blank says "There are no facts inside your building, so get outside". I'm going to generalize here, but I think the reason too may technically minded entrepreneurs fail is because they're simply too introverted to get outside.
- nazka 4y ago
  You do a super neat hero page with the features your product will have. You say you are working on it but they can preorder. When they click on preorder with the price you actually say that no payment is required but you will shoot them an email when the product will be ready to be tested. That way the person saw your product, saw the price, and was ready to buy it.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  I think that at least for B2B it's key to have someone among your founding team who either is/was a potential customer (e.g. has worked for some years in the role&industry who would be buying this) or personally knows a few such customers (e.g. because they have worked in a different role but in the same industry, or in a similar role in a different industry). If you don't have that, you can "import" that knowledge but that will take a lot of effort and time, and you risk making some very wrong assumptions early on. And IMHO there are no shortcuts, to understand your market you have to walk a mile in their shoes, and if you haven't already done so before starting the startup, doing that will take out a big chunk of your runway. So it's not about some specific activities, but about choosing a project that fits your team or a getting together a team that fits your project.

DaveExeter 4y ago

Two words: survivor bias.

xmprt 4y ago
That's one way to put it. Another way is to say that you had a good enough execution to stand out from the crowd of all the other failed startups and the people criticizing your idea didn't have the same vision as you. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.
katzgrau 4y ago
Survivor here, with several failed startups in the past. Bootstrapped to 100k / mo over 10 years. Sufficiently cynical folks will never hear anything I say as anything other survivor bias. My only advice is stay bootstrapped, avoid company-ending risk like investment, and maintain control of the company. Through learning and persistence, you'll figure out how to grow it. Just remember that the survivors figured out two things: how not to die (much easier for the Bootstrapped), and how to adapt to changing conditions.
- scubakid 4y ago
  "not dying" is surprisingly underrated these days :D
jokoon 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076 Copy pasted: Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something. Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on. Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work. Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it.

dangus 4y ago

This begs the question: why is the startup now making $4k a month? Is it because of the idea, or is it because of other factors? Or the idea combined with other factors? Addressable Market? Marketing savvy? Sales leads? Product execution? Luck/Viral Posts/First Mover Status? I like that this common criticism was brought up in the article: > "Doesn't this exist? So many big platforms do it. Very competitive." This is a validator in itself. A small business can see an existing, competitive market, and that's usually an indicator that there are a lot of potential customers. If you look at products like FastMail or Hey they aren't so concerned that 95%+ of people are fine with the big free email providers, because literally everyone uses email at some point. I think my overall point is this: The "idea" part of a startup is perhaps one of the less important aspects of it, in my opinion. Maybe it's even the least important part of the equation.

raunometsa 4y ago
> Is it because of the idea, or is it because of other factors? Not because of the idea specifically! But I've seen in my own life and in the lives of other "microfounders" that if you're not sure about your startup idea or you don't have that much momentum going on with it (it's a new idea, you haven't thought about it much) it's much easier to abandon the idea when you hear from friends, investors, or just some random people on Twitter that this idea is not a good one and it probably won't succeed.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  I have experienced this many, many, many times, so I'm really grateful for what you wrote. Even if I don't think I'm absorbing other people's doubts about whether it would work, or even internalizing their certainty that it won't work, I can be doing that exact thing outside of my awareness. It reminds me of the quote attributed to Muhammad Ali: "I said I'm the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was." How often do I start to doubt my dreams because I'm talking with someone who doesn't share the same dreams? I've wanted to build an online platform to train people to be world leaders, almost like a martial art created by MLK. I can vividly remember when I said this to one guy, a stranger (!), who laughed and said, "I don't think you'll be the person to do that." That has stuck with me for years, a creeping doubt deep within. That's all to say: thank you very much for what you wrote. I think I needed to read it today.

scubakid 4y ago

Another thing to be cautious about is folks who steer your idea in a new direction towards a larger TAM (with bigger encumbents) because they don't see how the current idea can 1000X. Sometimes, intentionally going after a market niche can be a good thing; you don't always have to set your sights on being the next unicorn. Especially if you're starting out as a solo dev, building the best product out there for a very specific audience can be a good strategy that leaves you with enough breathing room to continue to innovate and grow incrementally. That's the general approach I've been taking with ProjectionLab.com (the personal finance simulator I've been building on the side for a year now) and thus far, it's been a fun and modestly fruitful journey.

danielvaughn 4y ago
I'm the founding CTO of a small startup, and I've been trying to find the business equivalent of your side project. Have you come across any modern tools for financial forecasting?
- scubakid 4y ago
  I've been shown a couple tools geared for startups that some of my users had been playing around with, but those didn't look modern or nuanced enough to me. I haven't done a formal search though, so perhaps there are good things out there I'm not aware of. Eventually, I'd like to add better support for business use cases to ProjectionLab; in some ways, it's already close, but I'll need to carefully think through a few things like more granular event timing/scheduling and short/near-term views.
- tnorthcutt 4y ago
  https://usesummit.com/ https://usesummit.com/
  - scubakid 4y ago
    Visual editor seems pretty cool. Can summit do probabilistic things like monte carlo simulation as well, or is it scoped to deterministic projection?

bagels 4y ago

Did you build the thing from the tweet? A marketplace for microstartup investment?

raunometsa 4y ago
Ah, I suspected that the main image may give a wrong feeling as it's not really about a microstartup investments right now. But it fit together with the "no" and "your idea is not good" topic so I kept it. Anyways, I'm still planning to build a part of MicroFounder towards investments. Probably not legal/technical side but the marketplace, yes. The idea is this: you're a developer and you want to build a (micro)startup that pays your bills etc. But it can be hard to find the necessary time and energy to work on it so much that it will succeed (or it takes just too long). And of course there's a risk that it will never take off. So, you de-risk and sell part of it to an investor. Maybe even not a % of the company but you agree on a profit share for some period/amount. Because now you have an idea for a startup and – let's say — $120k to pay your salary until you reach $10k MRR, or something like that. You will focus on this startup and see if it works out or not after a year. Another thing is from the point of the investors. Like this whole MicroAcquire thing. I was considering selling my other solo startup RemoteHunt.com – some investors said that "hey take like $120k for 10% but I still need you on the project as otherwise I have to hire a team etc that takes a lot of money, time, etc.)
- bagels 4y ago
  I completely understood the context of the tweet in the post, but was interested if there was traction in the investment marketplace. I've browsed microacquire both as a founder and as an investor. As an investor, I always come back to the same thought that I'd just be buying another job, which isn't so appealing.

cosmodisk 4y ago

Recently I've been contemplating about creating something fairly small, that would eventually bring in. ~100K/year. Many would say it's not big enough,or so,but it would allow me to build a decent retirement fund, support many activities that don't cost a fortune but still require money and so on.

imnotreallynew 4y ago
How could you possibly know some product or idea would bring in such a specific amount?
encoderer 4y ago
Do it. That would also be an asset worth anywhere from $100k-500k (depending on the type of business, growth rate, etc).
scubakid 4y ago
Curious to hear more about your idea if you feel like sharing. Is your 100k ARR target an estimate based on research into the space or more like a notional goal you'd be content with reaching?
raunometsa 4y ago
Yes! This is what my site MicroFounder is exactly about and by that, I don't mean you should buy the paid membership (you can build it without paying for any "framework" or community or whatever). I feature new startups built by solo founders on the front page (for free) to show people that it's possible to build a profitable internet startup to pay the bills. Or, to keep the job and build a retirement fund, or travel fund, or whatever. I'd say that every developer should think about it. Yes, of course, work your full time dev job but also start thinking and then building some small startups. Maybe you won't reach $10k MRR in a year (although I have many examples on my site who do) but still, you're starting to move in this direction. And there's this question of "if" – can I succeed? Others are doing it, but me — me personally, can I do it? And I'd say of course, yes, 100% – because it's a matter of making the decision.
- 4y ago

tomxor 4y ago

>> I don't see how this could grow 100x. This only means it's not large enough to be investible, that's not necessarily a problem and doesn't mean it's an inherently "bad" idea. Small ideas can net the individuals that work on them just as much as working on large ideas... the workforce might be smaller but once you divide it up it's all the same. If the idea provides value to the world, you like it, and can grow it without investment, go for it.

fourneau 4y ago
100%. Some of the most important problems in the world are solved by a thousand "tiny" companies. Sure, they didn't look attractive from an investor's standpoint (most live by the 'high risk = high reward' approach), but that does not mean they are not important.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

abrax3141 4y ago

can someone post a python to a clear and simple How To do a microstartup from scratch? There must be such a thing.

mkl 4y ago
"a python"?
- abrax3141 4y ago
  Sorry typoo: A pointer.

lakomen 4y ago

In my experience "friends" are clueless, especially if they have ni clue about IT and the possibilities. They only see "virtual product" and can't imagine you being successful because after all they aren't and you can't be better than them. I got rid of those friends. In fact if you have them on board sooner or layer you'll have trouble with them. Them not working hard enough or not taking it seriously enough or not only not supporting your vision but actively fighting it. It's bad for the friendship and bad for the business. After all friends are just people you spent time with more than with other people, because circumstances or similar view on things. That was then but life goes on and people change.

mellosouls 4y ago
This is a terrible take on friendship.
scubakid 4y ago
Is this a hot take on the risks of going into business with friends? Or a hot take on... friends in general?

bdominy 4y ago

I just passed 100 downloads of my app after 6 months and I’m thrilled with that pace. In that time I’ve been able to make sure my backend is solid, and talk with people to gain valuable insights. My main metric is excitement. If I’m excited to show people my app and they are excited to try it after we talk, I’m happy.

lkrubner 4y ago

Peter Drucker, perhaps the greatest business guru of the 20th Century, once remarked that innovators are often disappointed by the manner in which their innovations become popular. In his 1985 book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Drucker relates the story of Alfred Einhorn, who invented Novocain, which then became popular with dentists as a local anesthetic. Einhorn held a contempt for dentistry, since it represented such a small niche of medicine. He felt that Novocain should be used by surgeons for all forms of surgery, and so he waged a campaign against the use of Novocain by dentists. In the end, his innovation was successful despite him, rather than because of him. According to Drucker, this pattern, where a product or service is undercut by the entrepreneur who is trying to promote it, is extremely common. When I first read Drucker’s book I found it hard to believe that an entrepreneur would actively sabotage their own innovation. However, having now spent several years working with startups, I’ve seen that it is, indeed, a common pattern. Many entrepreneurs starts websites at least in part because they consider themselves uniquely creative and insightful, and they want the whole world to see them as they see themselves. The website they launch proves them wrong: their insights are proven false, what works in the end is something unexpected. For instance, in 1992, when Bo Peabody launched Tripod, he was thinking that the site would offer content aimed at college students. His idea failed. The company was saved because some of the programmers at the company had started a side project that allowed anyone to create their own web pages. This then became the future of the company. In his book, Lucy or Smart, Peabody says it is important to be smart enough to know when you are getting lucky. And then, you have to be willing to accept that luck. This takes humility. What’s needed in an entrepreneur is emotional resilience, the kind of strength that allows for openness to the unexpected. Twice now I’ve seen an entrepreneur sabotage their own website because it became successful for what they felt were the wrong reasons. This emotional resistance to success is nearly always inspired by one of two factors: 1.) The success is with a small niche. The startup was suppose to grow till it was larger than Google, and success with a small niche is, therefore, extremely disappointing. The niche might be big enough to potentially generate several million in revenue, but it won’t ever be enough to catch up with Google. 2.) The success is of a conventional type and, therefore, the entrepreneur regards it as boring. Perhaps the site was suppose to pioneer an altogether new style of interaction among humans, and instead the part of the site that becomes popular is of an old type – for instance, the blog on the site becomes highly successful. The entrepreneur is then disappointed, maybe even angry, to be the owner of a boring success. Drucker also emphasized how much self-sabotage tends to trip up entrepreneurs. I documented a case of this in my own book, How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-ebook/dp/B0772FJQ1T/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=how+to+destroy+a+tech+startup&qid=1661109298&sprefix=how+to+destroy+a+tech+s%2Caps%2C79&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Three-Steps-eboo...

rank0 4y ago

Ideas are cheap. Implementation is the hard part!

vbezhenar 4y ago
I have enough experience to implement anything from microcontrollers and Linux drivers to react webapps and scalable k8s clusters. I think that I can build most projects alone and limited only by time, not by skills. I have yet to find an idea that I would consider worthy spending time on, despite the fact that I really want to be independent developer with my own project. Of course I had miriads of ideas but nothing that I would really trust to become a business, even something small. I think that it's required to have some different background to be able to understand what people need and to be able to reach those people, because anything you could imagine as a programmer was implemented or nobody will pay for it.
- randomdata 4y ago
  In my experience, you can create literally anything and there will be someone out there who will pay for it. Ideas don't matter in that respect. The hard part is implementing methods and processes that will capture the early adopters and learn from them so that you product can grow into something that is appealing to a wider audience. Tech implementation is easy. Business implementation is hard.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > Tech implementation is easy. Business implementation is hard. This is what we tell the MBAs so they feel better. Keep up the good work!
    - randomdata 4y ago
      Thing is, MBAs end up in roles under existing business that are already implemented because they don't know how to implement business. An experienced developer is likely in a better position to implement business, but it is still going to be hard.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

black_13 4y ago

erwinh 4y ago

This seems to be the perfect place to reply with a smart remark that subtly links to the project you are building: https://thestackreport.xyz https://thestackreport.xyz

carom 4y ago

I have a lot of variance in how I answer "what are you building?" for this exact reason. There is what I am building right now and my vision. Getting people to see the vision is difficult. >What are you building? 1. An image labeling tool for making open datasets. 2. A data-centric training and serving platform. 3. I am going to index the physical world in the same way Google indexes the internet.

Rackedup 4y ago

money is so important

dt3ft 4y ago

So microfounder.com is selling a list of ~200 startups operated by solo founders making $4k/Mo in the process. Huh, you really can sell everything these days. Inspiring!

taf2 4y ago

I feel like I heard someone once tell me if you talk about what you are going to do it reduces the chance you’ll actually do it… so just do it is my approach in general… congrats on reaching 4k

holoduke 4y ago

What is this? An article spoiled with 4000 in almost every sentence. As if that amount is attracting someone to start something. Money is never the motivator. I created several products on my own. All solo. Some make 30k a month. I never thought about becoming rich or making this amount or that amount. I always wanted to create a product people enjoyed. I never used any so called accelerator tools. Analytics usage very basic. I spend all my time in development. Frontend , backend , infra everything. Please don't believe these annoying articles or products they represent. They sell air.

treelovinhippie 4y ago
s1k3 4y ago
I think he’s trying to say that you shouldn’t let outside validation or invalidation affect your decision to build a startup. You as the founder should know (via research, interviews, insights and industry knowledge) whether your startup is solving a real problem. Don’t let someone with less expertise than you talk you out of it, or converse, talk you into it.
dqh 4y ago
$4000 a month is enough to live on. Knowing that solo founders have bootstrapped to $4000 a month is highly significant to someone with the right skills but a short financial runway.
- tasuki 4y ago
  You are of course right, but I can also see holoduke's point. I'd just change to "Money is never the right motivator" (not the only sufficient one, anyway).

6510 4y ago

I've heard all the negative slogans from people who don't know any better. I have tons of ideas but only one set of hands. I usually don't plan to implement anything which is the only poor quality of the business plans I bother to talk about. The funniest has to be one where I spend years simplifying the description of the product because people didn't understand how it was suppose to work. The comments were persistently negative and dismissive but went from hating on one part they didn't understand to the next. The pun here is that if people are to stupid or lazy to understand your product you don't have a product. Eventually (after years) I got the description hammered down to beautiful short and easy to understand. It was so mind-blowingly simple now that the same moaners each individually took the same entirely different angle of attack (because it are attacks): If it was that simple someone else would have done it. The actual lesion to be learned from this process is not what you think. I look at the "negativity first" folk as sad little creatures who simply don't get it. It is behavior so pathetic and intentionally hurtful that you should go on a search to find those qualities in yourself. Every man or woman has things that make them get up in the morning. Their own passions or things to ponder. We all know instinctively how to hide these precious things from others who want to rub poop on them. If you approach someone humbly and carefully and ask them to tell the story of their thing they will re-examine you, look closely what the intend is behind your questions. If you are honest, kind and objective long enough they will eventually tell you how they found their thing and what makes it such an interesting thing for them personally. Identify and purge the negativity from your system when it arises, something like: "what an idiot spending all this money on model trains" or "the banjo is a dumb instrument", "this woman with her stupid hand bag collection". Listen but focus on the emotions and stories around their passion. And then... all of a sudden... you find yourself surrounded by passionate people. It is remarkably easy to work on your own thing in the right company. You might not be sinking years into trying to bake the perfect cheese cake but your know your [proverbial] software project is not up to those standards. You go back in to check if you dotted the i's perfectly because that is what you do, who you are.

benatkin 4y ago

I don't agree with blog posts being referred to as "physical" and thoughts being referred to as "non-physical".

strangattractor 4y ago

How many Great Startup Ideas Have Died? Probably as many that where started and failed despite people telling them it would fail to begin with. The success cannot be predicted in advance. A great startup idea by definition is one that first gets started and then becomes successful. Ideas that fail are never considered great.

nine_k 4y ago
This is the first level. On the next level, many good ideas fail because they arrive too early. Apple Newton in 1992, a flop, embodies many of the ideas that made iPhone in 2007 a colossal success. Examples are many. Sometimes it's worth revisiting a failed but promising idea, and check if the factors that made it fail are still extant.

maoeurk 4y ago

I'm working on a B2C product as an indie founder and I run into this quite a lot. Though from my perspective a lot of the "physical vs non-physical" disconnect is also about the fact that people who have not had direct experience in the creation of a software product are unable to extrapolate from what they're currently seeing. I think that's actually completely reasonable though; people take things at face value. But what that means is that all the potential in the world means nothing unless you can show via features how that's a good thing and what the impacts are. This impacts the product I'm working on because there's a lot of stuff on a base level that seems like similar products in the space but the real value is the integration of systems and data to fundamentally change the interactions. And until recently, we didn't have much of the "Big Picture Ideas" on display for our users.

111111101101 4y ago

I've found that whenever I've shared my ideas with friends or family, they default to poking holes in them. Instead of looking for reasons why it could work they start listing obvious problems that I've already considered. Things like "You would have to get insurance" or my personal favorite "if it were that easy then everyone would be doing it." Because of this, I learned long ago not to share any of my projects or ideas with anyone. The flip-side is that when I started to have some success, those same people who would always be so negative became angry with me. After his first time visiting my new home one guy even picked a fistfight with me and I've picked up that several family members have been running me down behind my back. Many working-class people are prone to envy but at the same time they underestimate their own potential. It's best not to worry about them.

fairity 4y ago

This is a typical example of over-generalization. The author believes because he is successful, his approach to success must be correct or optimal. The truth is that almost all ventures will end reaching his level of success if you simply don’t give up, and apply consciousness to your work. You’ll likely have to pivot as you learn more about your chosen market, but if you’re smart and persistent you’ll eventually figure something out. Instead of shutting out criticism early on (like the author suggests), it’s better to listen and just throw out the unhelpful parts. I’ve actually found that investors are great at pointing out legitimate weaknesses in your business model, but they typically overstate the lethality of such weaknesses.