4 ms·

Embracing the Incrementality Mentality

60 points by dmor 13y ago

johnrob 13y ago
Thank you - that is good, hard earned knowledge from the trenches. We don't often get that these days. I would offer one piece of advice to anyone trying to stay on course: when you experience those early highs (launch, fundraising, etc), try to explicitly capture how you feel and why you feel that way. Write it out somewhere you won't lose it, then make a habit of re-reading it regularly. There's nothing foolish about that phase of optimism. It's no worse then some future dose fueled by a new tangent. Keep that optimistic mental image around and use it to fuel new attacks in what can become a boring fight.
gingerlime 13y ago
Sorry to complain, it was a good post, but those loopy animated gifs seriously distract me from being able to read properly. Maybe I have some strange attention disorder, but the last part of the post I felt like I just can't concentrate on the text because the moving images kept grabbing my attention.
- agumonkey 13y ago
  pipe it through printfriendly.com, no chrome, no image (if so desired), simple typography.
  - gingerlime 13y ago
    Thanks for the tip! I normally use instapaper to read stuff offline, but some things are easier to read on the spot. I wonder if printerfriendly can also help in combination with instapaper - some pages, e.g. paul graham's blog (and others) are not converted properly to epub on instapaper for some strange reason. Will give it a try.
    - agumonkey 13y ago
      Yeah they all try to infer meaning from html structure but none can be perfect. I switch from printfriendly, readability or simply disabling css in firefox.
rbrbrbrubyrubyr 13y ago
It amazes me that pg (who has seen a lot more startups than I have) sees 5-10% WEEKLY growth as a reasonable target. That is amazing. I suppose its really the difference in "startup" and "lifestyle business" (more my style) right there - the pure scale of the growth.
- noelwelsh 13y ago
  That 5-10% per week is probably only for a very short period. From the article: Important context for this advice, which I believe is often missed, is that the majority of companies in YC launch during the tail end of the program. So we're talking about companies launching a few weeks before demo day, making a big splash, and getting some nice numbers for demo day. When you've only been launched for four weeks it comparatively easy to get great numbers like this.
  - wellboy 13y ago
    Yeah, especially if your user base is in the low thousands, if you toss in a $1,000 into marketing per week, you should get a few hundred users from that :)

60 points by dmor 13y ago

Thank you - that is good, hard earned knowledge from the trenches. We don't often get that these days. I would offer one piece of advice to anyone trying to stay on course: when you experience those early highs (launch, fundraising, etc), try to explicitly capture how you feel and why you feel that way. Write it out somewhere you won't lose it, then make a habit of re-reading it regularly. There's nothing foolish about that phase of optimism. It's no worse then some future dose fueled by a new tangent. Keep that optimistic mental image around and use it to fuel new attacks in what can become a boring fight.

gingerlime 13y ago

Sorry to complain, it was a good post, but those loopy animated gifs seriously distract me from being able to read properly. Maybe I have some strange attention disorder, but the last part of the post I felt like I just can't concentrate on the text because the moving images kept grabbing my attention.

agumonkey 13y ago
pipe it through printfriendly.com, no chrome, no image (if so desired), simple typography.
- gingerlime 13y ago
  Thanks for the tip! I normally use instapaper to read stuff offline, but some things are easier to read on the spot. I wonder if printerfriendly can also help in combination with instapaper - some pages, e.g. paul graham's blog (and others) are not converted properly to epub on instapaper for some strange reason. Will give it a try.
  - agumonkey 13y ago
    Yeah they all try to infer meaning from html structure but none can be perfect. I switch from printfriendly, readability or simply disabling css in firefox.

rbrbrbrubyrubyr 13y ago

It amazes me that pg (who has seen a lot more startups than I have) sees 5-10% WEEKLY growth as a reasonable target. That is amazing. I suppose its really the difference in "startup" and "lifestyle business" (more my style) right there - the pure scale of the growth.

noelwelsh 13y ago
That 5-10% per week is probably only for a very short period. From the article: Important context for this advice, which I believe is often missed, is that the majority of companies in YC launch during the tail end of the program. So we're talking about companies launching a few weeks before demo day, making a big splash, and getting some nice numbers for demo day. When you've only been launched for four weeks it comparatively easy to get great numbers like this.
- wellboy 13y ago
  Yeah, especially if your user base is in the low thousands, if you toss in a $1,000 into marketing per week, you should get a few hundred users from that :)