4 ms·

Matt Brezina: No One Cares About Your Stupid Little Startup

86 points by prakash 17y ago

buckwilson 17y ago
Enjoyed the slides for the most part. The importance of PR for startups cannot be overstated. Get out there, get to know people, go to conferences, talk to media, be personable. If you aren't this type of person, then hire one.
gcheong 17y ago
Is there accompanying audio/video of the presentation? I always find just seeing the slides leaves a lot of gaps in my understanding of the presentation.
- chubbard 17y ago
  Agreed. Lots of things I couldn't quite connect to what they were saying? Particularly be a source of data section. But, this was a good topic.
  - count 17y ago
    From a PR perspective, if you're generating numbers/data that can be easily used in reports by journalists - they will be used. As the deck says, journalists are lazy. Being cited as a source because you provided the info in the most accessible fashion is great for PR and cements you as a recognizable authority.
DanielBMarkham 17y ago
This is all great stuff. Be careful that you don't apply lessons too broadly. If you're selling high-dollar, recurring sales items into big business it might be enough to have 100 purchasing managers love you. You probably don't need a media blitz. As an aside, not particularly related to this story, one of the drawbacks of learning from success is that every deck ends with how great things are. I wonder 1) if sometimes luck gets disguised and genius and 2) if it wouldn't be more useful to study failures than successes. The commercial airline industry has a great safety record. They do this by meticulously taking apart every accident that happens. Too bad we don't do that in other fields.
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  They do this by meticulously taking apart every accident that happens. Well, the reason this works so well for airplanes is that the airplane used to work, and everybody knows exactly what a working airplane is supposed to look like. In general, nobody has any idea what a working version of a failed startup would have looked like. There are too many ways to succeed, and so many chaotic events that affect the timeline in profound ways (imagine if the inventor of CP/M hadn't been out when IBM came to call...) that you can't really think about the various alternate histories without quickly running into a combinatorial explosion. So I think your metaphor is not very useful. ;)
  - RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
    Well, that used not to be the case, but the industry matured because they started doing that. My uncle is an aerobatics pilot, and he says that the main reason aviation is so safe is due to the meticulous and ubiquitous use of check-lists. Every time there's an accident the intent is to analyse it so we can update the check-lists to prevent it from happening again. You're right, we don't know what a successful startup should look like, but they didn't used to know what a safe 'plane was like. Because of the unrelenting analysis of crashes, we do now.
    - dasil003 17y ago
      I think the point still stands though. Success and failure in airplane flight is very well defined, and the amount of human hours logged in designing, building, flying, and analysis of one single and clearly-defined (even if complex) task dwarfs the amount of resources available to startups (or any company for that matter). Not only is the problem space nearly infinite in comparison to flight, but the "physics" governing business success change impossibly fast. None of that is to say that we shouldn't study failures, but the question is which failures have widely applicable lessons? If you indulge me to abuse the analogy further, most startups are like those early flight attempts by people who jumped from high places wearing ridiculous balsa and fabric contraptions.
brezina 17y ago
I was on a flight so I wasn't able to respond. I actually have a much more indepth description of this preso on my blog http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog
skmurphy 17y ago
A couple of lines I would change. slide 5 "added users from beta list when we needed lab rats" slide 10 "need business model to make sausage machine work." slide 19 "Journalists are lazy. Help them be lazy." try added beta users as we could absorb their feedback <delete> journalists are busy, help them hit deadlines
- gridspy 17y ago
  Yeah, there goes all the fun.
  - skmurphy 17y ago
    I don't think it's useful to label journalists as lazy or beta users as lab rats. I am not trying to be politically correct: I think these terms can introduce an unconscious framing that's harmful, and these are not labels members of these groups would adopt for themselves.
charliepark 17y ago
Really appreciated these slides, and the notes on your blog. On the charts, it'd be nice if the time scale were consistent. That 18 months of stealth looks like the same length of time as the 2 months of the 10k - 12k beta. But the preso and notes are great. Thanks.

86 points by prakash 17y ago

Enjoyed the slides for the most part. The importance of PR for startups cannot be overstated. Get out there, get to know people, go to conferences, talk to media, be personable. If you aren't this type of person, then hire one.

gcheong 17y ago

Is there accompanying audio/video of the presentation? I always find just seeing the slides leaves a lot of gaps in my understanding of the presentation.

chubbard 17y ago
Agreed. Lots of things I couldn't quite connect to what they were saying? Particularly be a source of data section. But, this was a good topic.
- count 17y ago
  From a PR perspective, if you're generating numbers/data that can be easily used in reports by journalists - they will be used. As the deck says, journalists are lazy. Being cited as a source because you provided the info in the most accessible fashion is great for PR and cements you as a recognizable authority.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago

This is all great stuff. Be careful that you don't apply lessons too broadly. If you're selling high-dollar, recurring sales items into big business it might be enough to have 100 purchasing managers love you. You probably don't need a media blitz. As an aside, not particularly related to this story, one of the drawbacks of learning from success is that every deck ends with how great things are. I wonder 1) if sometimes luck gets disguised and genius and 2) if it wouldn't be more useful to study failures than successes. The commercial airline industry has a great safety record. They do this by meticulously taking apart every accident that happens. Too bad we don't do that in other fields.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
They do this by meticulously taking apart every accident that happens. Well, the reason this works so well for airplanes is that the airplane used to work, and everybody knows exactly what a working airplane is supposed to look like. In general, nobody has any idea what a working version of a failed startup would have looked like. There are too many ways to succeed, and so many chaotic events that affect the timeline in profound ways (imagine if the inventor of CP/M hadn't been out when IBM came to call...) that you can't really think about the various alternate histories without quickly running into a combinatorial explosion. So I think your metaphor is not very useful. ;)
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
  Well, that used not to be the case, but the industry matured because they started doing that. My uncle is an aerobatics pilot, and he says that the main reason aviation is so safe is due to the meticulous and ubiquitous use of check-lists. Every time there's an accident the intent is to analyse it so we can update the check-lists to prevent it from happening again. You're right, we don't know what a successful startup should look like, but they didn't used to know what a safe 'plane was like. Because of the unrelenting analysis of crashes, we do now.
  - dasil003 17y ago
    I think the point still stands though. Success and failure in airplane flight is very well defined, and the amount of human hours logged in designing, building, flying, and analysis of one single and clearly-defined (even if complex) task dwarfs the amount of resources available to startups (or any company for that matter). Not only is the problem space nearly infinite in comparison to flight, but the "physics" governing business success change impossibly fast. None of that is to say that we shouldn't study failures, but the question is which failures have widely applicable lessons? If you indulge me to abuse the analogy further, most startups are like those early flight attempts by people who jumped from high places wearing ridiculous balsa and fabric contraptions.

brezina 17y ago

I was on a flight so I wasn't able to respond. I actually have a much more indepth description of this preso on my blog http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog

skmurphy 17y ago

A couple of lines I would change. slide 5 "added users from beta list when we needed lab rats" slide 10 "need business model to make sausage machine work." slide 19 "Journalists are lazy. Help them be lazy." try added beta users as we could absorb their feedback <delete> journalists are busy, help them hit deadlines

gridspy 17y ago
Yeah, there goes all the fun.
- skmurphy 17y ago
  I don't think it's useful to label journalists as lazy or beta users as lab rats. I am not trying to be politically correct: I think these terms can introduce an unconscious framing that's harmful, and these are not labels members of these groups would adopt for themselves.

charliepark 17y ago

Really appreciated these slides, and the notes on your blog. On the charts, it'd be nice if the time scale were consistent. That 18 months of stealth looks like the same length of time as the 2 months of the 10k - 12k beta. But the preso and notes are great. Thanks.