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Good, but not good enough. Ask some successful founders if there was ever a time when they felt like all hope was lost. Very few will say never.
by solve 11y ago
Good, but not good enough. Ask some successful founders if there was ever a time when they felt like all hope was lost. Very few will say never.
- Mimu 11y agoThey may say and think they felt it, however I don't think they would have kept going if they honestly thought no hope at all was there.
- solve 11y agoThe lows of startups are far more terrible than you probably think.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoDidn't downvote but... the issue with this line of thinking is that of sheer numbers. If you give 100 people a 1% of succeeding, but difficult times in the first years, and they all refuse to give up, after it's all said and done 99 will be depressed, estranged from friends & family, in debt, feeling like a failure etc. And 1 person will be successful, and he'll do a PandoDaily fireside chat and talk about how he lived on a couch, and racked up creditcard debt, and woke up crying, but that he kept on going and is a billionaire now. And he'll command the majority of the media narrative around startups. Of course I'm exaggerating to make a point, but the notion that most people fail and don't make it, and probably shouldn't continue after some point is completely true. It's the same line of thinking that says 'well Bill Gates was a drop out, and so was Zuckerberg etc'. It may say that dropping out is not the end of the world. (similar to how being at a low point in a startup is not the end of said startup). But it also carries the implication that dropping out is somehow not an issue, or that being at a low point in a startup is just a phase. For the majority of people, dropping out carries consequences, and being at a point where all hope seems lost, is usually rightly so the beginning of the end of your startup. Expecting endless perseverance by looking at the tiny percentage of hugely successful startups that went through difficult times, ignoring the much bigger number of completely unsuccessful startups that went through difficult times, is probably why people downvote your post. As the OP doesn't appear to have traction, have any semblance of salary, shifted to do freelance work and didn't provide ideas on how to pivot, I think it's probably time for him or her to put this one in the freezer and try something else. edit -- weird thought you mentioned getting downvotes. Might be going crazy :)
- jacquesm 11y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- solve 11y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value If your strategy involves doing something that eliminates your upside potential, while leaving downside potential, then the strategy has negative expected value and is a bad strategy. If nearly 100% of non-consulting startups go through bad times, but you've chosen the strategy of cutting your losses as soon as you run into bad times, it's fair to estimate that the eliminating the upside potential may have lowered the expected value for that strategy to below 0. Might as well go gamble or just do a fun hobby in that case. Non-consulting tech startups are particularly rigged against using this strategy of cutting out as soon as things turn bad, because it's typical that founders are forced to take a big loss relative to their alternatives until the very end when the exit happens. The norm is for it to always be financially worse than the more stable alternatives, until eventually maybe it turns good at the end.
- watmough 11y agoI tend to think of Gates not so much "dropping-out", but pivoting, once he was convinced he could make it with software.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago