[HN Gopher] The first 18 months of a startup
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The first 18 months of a startup
Author : prakhargurunani
Score : 213 points
Date : 2021-04-14 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| void_mint wrote:
| The two themes I'm noticing from this list are "Lean heavily into
| a founders/startup community" and "Ask tough questions often".
| There are several bullets around coaching, bouncing ideas off of
| other (external) founders, leaning into internal cofounders
| strengths/passions, etc. I would generalize to say these things
| are not specific at all to the first 18 months at a startup (or
| startups in general). Leaders should be communicating with other
| leaders, teammates should be relying heavily on other teammates,
| all humans should seek counseling (via therapists, coaches and
| friends). A significant part of this process is knowing when to
| just smile and nod through unsolicited feedback/shitty advice.
| This is also totally unrelated to startups.
|
| To his second theme (ask tough questions often), it's just the
| common trap tons of startup founders seem to fall into. "We don't
| know if users will pay for this" should be one of the first
| questions you answer, way way before "How will we scale" or "What
| tech should we use". Managing worry is identical to asking tough
| questions (why are we worried about this and how do we overcome
| the worry). Mitigating risk is identical to asking tough
| questions (what could cause us to fail that is in our control). A
| part of being a leader is being unafraid to ask questions that
| need answering, even if their answers may be painful or scary.
| Most people aren't capable of looking hard at all of their
| possible failure scenarios honestly, and even less are able to
| objectively move forward with the findings of that examination.
| It's a tough ego game to play.
| gnabgib wrote:
| A little bit more readable:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1382351985584721926.html
| radicalriddler wrote:
| Hero!
| polote wrote:
| /21 dont listen to these advice because that only worked one time
| for one person (myself)
|
| I'm wondering if startup gurus know their advice won't help
| anyone but still give them because that's what people want to
| read. Or if they don't know this won't help anyone
| loganfrederick wrote:
| My optimistic view is that I think it's more that they are
| providing a data point rather than a conclusion. If every
| founder writes their experience, then maybe readers will have a
| large enough sample to find some signal from the noise (luck of
| individual founders).
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I think this is also why its so important for founders to
| talk about their general background, professional
| experiences, and product domain. Understanding the
| constraints the advisor is working with helps the advisee
| effectively process or ignore their advice.
| fatiherikli wrote:
| Sorry bud but looks like a you created a SPAM message generator
| to me.
| philshem wrote:
| Wasn't this guy the CEO of the unnamed startup in Anna Wiener's
| "Uncanny Valley"?
|
| https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/uncanny-valley-brand-names...
| JCM9 wrote:
| That's what was said at the time. Regardless, the stories
| coming out of Mixpanel under his leadership weren't great to
| put it lightly.
| vhs001 wrote:
| Folks in this thread are assuming the author is trying to present
| a failproof method for creating a successful startup. But i don't
| think this is true. It seems more like simply words of advice.
| With words of advice, you take what you can when it applies. But
| words of advice are hardly comprehensive or sufficient.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Good Lord this makes me feel old.
|
| mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you
| convert, engage, and retain more users."
|
| I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In
| days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical
| 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation
| software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and
| related issues strikes me as a risky bet.
|
| To be fair, probably due to offshoring, about the only useful
| startups I've personally run into for the last decade or so have
| 100% been specialized medical hardware. The FDA can quickly
| become the main focus of your life.
| tlb wrote:
| Any website can benefit from analytics, not just advertising-
| supported ones. You still want to know what pages and links are
| getting clicked on.
|
| Here's a way to find startups that make something:
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?industry=Consumer%20El...
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I liked the thread a lot, but as with all things startup I feel a
| lot like this is trusting a very successful horse race gambler
| with his perfect method to track the form.
|
| I have a feeling with these things timing and luck is everything
| no matter how well you follow what worked before. I bet some
| startups do almost the opposite of this advice and still end up
| doing well just because the idea and timing were so good.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| People who take the thread's advice to heart will be better
| positioned to benefit from luck.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Suhail seems to be spending a lot of time trying to establish
| himself as a thought leader. How does that square or not square
| with the goal of giving one's business the best chance of
| success?
| anonu wrote:
| > Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with
| things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated
| superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed--I had forgotten
| how much goes into getting ready for work.
|
| There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
| csomar wrote:
| Linux TTYs is how I do it. If you press Ctrl+Alt+2, you can
| open a new terminal and run a new graphical interface. If you
| use a tiling Window Manager, you can have different "desktops"
| for every project. By switching you TTY, you move to that work
| environment where you have left your editor, tabs open,
| database editor, servers, etc...
|
| It gets you in the zone almost instantly.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| and the flip side of that coin means that there is no H in WFH
| only, W.
| paxys wrote:
| While there is some benefit to a physical office space, I can't
| imagine the 9-6, 5 days a week grind will ever be back for most
| knowledge workers.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It really depends on the person. The people who naturally focus
| and can ignore distractions excel at WFH.
|
| A second category of worker benefits from the rituals of
| getting ready in the morning, context switching to office mode,
| seeing their peers in person (however briefly), and sitting
| down at a separate workstation that is dedicated to work and
| nothing else.
|
| In my experience managing mixed on-site and remote teams, most
| people assume they're in the first category but many people
| eventually discover they're actually in the second category.
|
| WFH is great for some, but actually quite difficult for many
| others.
| jolmg wrote:
| > The people who naturally focus and can ignore distractions
| excel at WFH.
|
| Depends on whether there are more distractions at work or at
| home. Some live alone and so have no distractions at home,
| but at work must try to ignore some really loud people in an
| open-office and engage in constant impromptu meetings at
| work.
| ecf wrote:
| I'm in the process of leaving a company who has sent half a
| dozen surveys to employees about how they think return to
| office should work, but not a single survey about what
| employees would like to see from a long-term WFH strategy.
|
| It seems some hope to bait and switch their employees back into
| office and then say WFH isn't allowed anymore.
| codezero wrote:
| As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to
| decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder
| (I'll use it when it works).
|
| After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people
| were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing
| companies, and very few founders go through that experience in
| the same way as non-founders do.
|
| Founder advice is for founders.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| There are good pieces of advice in founders' self-reported
| experience, but it needs to be taken as a distorted data point
| rather than absolute truth.
|
| Founders tend to rewrite history in ways that benefit
| themselves presently. It's human nature, but it's finely honed
| in founders who are pitching their personal brand on social
| media. Even the humble, self-deprecating anecdotes are usually
| carefully filtered in ways that make them look good in the
| present, or as something they can wear as a badge of honor for
| overcoming.
|
| I worked for a small startup that nearly died because one of
| the founders made some really bad decisions. That same founder
| now writes a lot of Medium thinkpieces about how to be
| successful, including advice to do some of the things that were
| clearly not at all beneficial to our startup.
|
| Take everything with a grain of salt.
| jchonphoenix wrote:
| I'll second this one as a founder and early employee at a
| couple of the recent IPOs. The definition of "successful" here
| must be that the product and revenue succeeded, not that the
| team did well within the company. Otherwise, you're just
| filtering for politicians.
|
| The reason this works is that you're identifying the
| individuals who are able to make success happen while having
| the deck stacked against them. People who have this skill and
| are in a successful company tend to have better experiences and
| can be more valuable. But it's also harder for you to identify.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The advise on how to take advise. In that case I would need to
| see advise takers that has failed a few times taking advise
| from successful founders giving advise before taking your
| advise.
| codezero wrote:
| I appreciate how meta this comment is. I've given a lot of
| bad advise before, and I plan to give a lot more in the
| future!
| raverbashing wrote:
| Really, I think some twitter accounts are more vapid feel-good
| nuggets than actual advice (including this one)
|
| I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to
| it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary
| of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in
| SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project
| elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project
| (looks too niche to be sustainable)
| freebuju wrote:
| > looks too niche to be sustainable
|
| To be fair, he did say that his first target was 10
| customers. I assume all 10 of them happy as he mentioned.
| codezero wrote:
| I follow Suhail, and he was the founder of a competitor of
| mine, the stuff he's working on now is really interesting and
| a lot of the technical challenges the team are working on are
| fun and interesting.
|
| He's not someone I consider to be full of bullshit, but his
| thoughts on startups are as valuable as anyone else's with a
| few extra grains of salt that are worth considering.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Similar thought from me. My personal feeling is that the best
| founder advice comes from people who failed at least once
| (preferably more than once) before succeeding. And the best
| employee advice comes from people who've worked at a
| combination of "good" and "bad" companies. It's hard to have
| enough perspective to formulate good advice when your sample
| size is 1 (which could have been mostly luck).
| [deleted]
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| There's some great nuggets about business:
|
| _4 / Think of a way to make your users have some skin in the
| game enough to yell at you to make your product better. Charge or
| trade for it early on. Waiting for your product to be "good
| enough" reduces the amount you'll learn each day. The first set
| of users paid me $20 on Venmo!_
|
| This will vary by type of market you are pursuing. Some things
| are harder to charge for and take longer to get a first sale,
| but, yes, you need to be charging. Otherwise, you are "playing
| house" (a thing they say at YC) or you merely "have the trappings
| of a business, not an actual business" (that's my typical
| phrasing for the phenomenon).
|
| In a nutshell: The difference between a business and a hobby is
| _paying customers_.
|
| _8 / Be married to the problem, not the technology._
|
| There are some great videos from YC that also make this point and
| I think it needs to be said more often.
|
| There are also some great nuggets about self-management that can
| be useful to anyone doing anything hard in life or living through
| a crisis. Some of these resonate with me as a former military
| wife who raised two special-needs kids mostly alone as the
| husband was often gone.
|
| _13 / If you're worried about something that will cause your
| inevitable demise, use my patented Threshold of Worry (tm):
|
| 1. Set a quantitative value for the worrisome issue. 2. If it's
| above the value, worry! 3. If it's below the value, focus on the
| next risk & ignore_
|
| I have a longstanding policy of "bread and circus." If you can
| work on the problem, work on the problem. If you can't work on
| the problem, feed everyone and keep them entertained so they
| aren't freaking out, panicking, fighting, etc.
|
| _17 / When building a startup:
|
| If you have fear, de-risk by talking to users. If you have
| uncertainty, build a prototype to rapidly rebuild your
| conviction. If you have sudden doubt, sleep. Try again tomorrow._
|
| When my kids were little and I was chronically short of sleep, I
| learned that eating something, drinking something and/or taking a
| short nap could be the difference between feeling like everything
| is overwhelmingly impossible and feeling like "The sun will come
| out tomorrow."
|
| _19 / I was ruthless about ensuring I had as much deep work time
| as possible. Live somewhere boring. Eliminate meetings. Don't
| meet investors if you're not raising. Build a rhythm each day
| that enables the largest chunk of hours to get great work done.
| Users will notice your pace._
|
| This is gold. Stop whining about how you have a phone addiction
| and you can't turn your phone off because all your friends and
| relatives will be mad if you don't answer it and so on. Stop
| claiming that all the shiny tech we live with is controlling your
| life and you are a victim of circumstance. Start taking control
| over your time and doing what you need to do to carve out time to
| think, to work without distraction, etc.
|
| We live in an incredible era with amazing things. But you do need
| to pick and choose and not feel obligated to be plugged into
| everything all the time. You do have a choice in the matter.
| sparsely wrote:
| No opinion on the thread, but his current startup involves
| streaming a chrome instance from the cloud, which feels very
| "Internet in 2021"
| hardwaregeek wrote:
| Yeah...I'm skeptical to be honest. If you're running Chrome on
| a server, you have to fetch the website to the server, then
| send back to the client. Now I suppose the server could be in
| some datacenter with really fast internet and include some
| aggressive caching, but that's still two trips instead of one.
|
| I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this
| could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembly, you could
| end up with something like a video editor or photoshop in the
| browser. And yeah, if big apps in the browser becomes a thing,
| people will want to run the big app on slower computers. But
| it'd have to be one beefy server to make the latency of
| streaming worth the performance speed up. Maybe if you keep
| common sites hot in the browser JIT and share it across users
| it'll be really fast but holy security issues Batman.
|
| I'm not super pessimistic about the idea. If there's one thing
| I'd bet on it's internet speeds increasing while compute speeds
| plateauing. But I'm not sure I'd bet my own money or 5-10 years
| of my life on the idea.
| liuliu wrote:
| It surely will pivot. Low-latency high-fidelity streaming
| doesn't come handy, and a lot of hard engineering work. But
| if worked, a lot of applications. Like you said, 100Gbps NIC
| between your data and video editor is much better than 1T
| fast local storage editing rig with 10Gbps NIC to the
| archive. Citrix worked really well in industries that need
| tighter control over your digital environment. Oculus Link
| just started to support WiFi, and would be cool if it can go
| over WAN.
|
| There are some competitions, such as Parsec or Stadia, but if
| you can have an higher-frequency use case to iterate on, why
| not go with that?
| nprz wrote:
| Why would people want this? With the recent concerns of
| censorship and getting locked out of platforms this just feels
| like handing even more power to some central authority that can
| suddenly decide who can and cannot browse the web.
| hawthornio wrote:
| "It's like Stadia but for Chrome"
| ggregoire wrote:
| Showerthoughts: why not stream the entire OS at this point,
| with a dedicated storage? Like an EC2 with a desktop
| environment that you can access in a VNC-like way but with
| the resolution, FPS and input responsiveness similar to what
| Stadia/Mighty offers.
|
| Which will allow you to play Cyberpunk (Stadia) + browsing
| the web (Mighty) + do whatever else you want, like using
| After Effects (?).
| igorlev wrote:
| At least a few banks have been running like this since 5+
| years ago, and at least one collaborated with AWS which led
| to this: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-
| workspaces-desktop-c....
| edoceo wrote:
| Apache Guacamole is like webbased vnc client so any VNC
| server would do
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Since you'll need an OS (a minimal one but still) on the
| client side, you can reduce the bandwidth required by
| sending paint commands to draw the UI locally (on the
| client) and just send the resources on the wire as well as
| updates. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System
| airstrike wrote:
| This is literally what https://shadow.tech does
|
| I used it for about a year and it's fantastic _if_ you have
| really fast (preferably wired) internet
| ggregoire wrote:
| That's exactly what I was thinking about. :)
| Cilvic wrote:
| That's sounds awesome and I'd be ready to pay alot for
| that.
|
| Can you use it as desktop replacement installing all
| applications etc.?
|
| Or is there an hour limit? The pricing of 14 EUR / month
| can't really provide an unlimited usage of 4
| core/12GB/256GB SSD/GTX 1080?
|
| Also when i try to pre-order for Germany the ETA is Mach
| 29, 2022 ...
| owyn wrote:
| I've been using Shadow for a year and that's exactly what
| it does. It's a standard windows box and you can install
| whatever you want on it, and there's no usage limits. I
| use it to play windows games on my mac without fussing
| with dual booting. I played through the Witcher 3
| entirely on that machine. :)
|
| Non action games are playable over Wifi, but on a wired
| connection it's much better. It does have its own client
| and disconnects if you are idle so I don't think you
| could run it as a server, but I never tried.
|
| The only odd issue I ran into is that it supports a
| virtual USB device for pass-through which is cool, but
| you can't use a fancy multi-button mouse as that USB
| device because the mouse is "special" and it's always a 2
| button virtual mouse but the xbox controller worked just
| fine.
|
| They do have a fairly slow rollout of new hardware
| updates and new country support at this point, and seemed
| to be in danger of going out of business for a while, but
| so far it's still there. You can always hook up something
| like Dropbox to back up work in progress.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I'm working with a number of clients that are doing this.
| Either an outsourced vmware horizon deployment or Windows
| Virtual Desktop. Local hardware is only thin clients. No
| servers in-house, no desktops, no laptops. It isn't as good
| as local hardware, but it's good enough for most business
| applications and even video conferencing.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal#Dumb_termin
| a...
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| Congratulations, you just re-invented the terminal.
| ggregoire wrote:
| I can't play Cyberpunk in 4k 60+ FPS in my terminal.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Not with that attitude!
| randomsearch wrote:
| Any comment like this is just a set up for "show HN" in a
| fortnight
| hawthornio wrote:
| fortnite in the terminal you say...
| paxys wrote:
| Anyone remember Thin Clients?
| ska wrote:
| Which iteration?
| tonyarkles wrote:
| First thing I thought of was Sun Rays and the magic of
| taking your smartcard around with you and wherever you
| say down your desktop would follow you around. Magic!
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Isn't Stadia in chrome? As, it's some kind of extension?
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| There are some useful nuggets here, but every company and founder
| are different. Having run three different accelerator programs I
| have learned to STOP assuming what makes a good or bad idea. Some
| of the companies I thought were certain for failure have raised
| multiple rounds, found product market fit, and are growing just
| fine. The first 18 months of a startup should include one thing,
| "GET SOMEONE TO PAY FOR YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE!" Everything else is
| just iteration.
| randomsearch wrote:
| It's obvious that a promising startup can fail, eg great idea
| but bad execution.
|
| It's really not obvious that an unpromising startup could
| succeed, though.
|
| What were the main factors in those unpromising startups doing
| well?
| majormajor wrote:
| Promising/unpromising is a judgement call here. If you
| thought something was a great idea but you were wrong,
| there's a potential failure mode for a promising startup. And
| the reverse would give you a successful one that you found
| unpromising.
|
| That's what the poster you're replying to is saying - it's
| hard to be consistently correct on if an idea is good or bad.
| ska wrote:
| Good execution on a weak idea can rapidly be redirected to a
| better idea. If you can't execute, the ideas don't really
| matter.
|
| I guess it depends a bit on what you mean by "unpromising".
| One person might see the product idea and think "those guys
| are gone is 6 mo", while another might see the team coming
| together well and think "that team is going to do something
| interesting"
|
| Also, in my experience most people are bad at evaluating
| these things early on.
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| It's a good question. From what I've seen a lot of it has to
| do with their network and the founder's ability to sell the
| narrative that what they're building is something no one else
| can build and/or execute. In those early days of a startup
| investors look at the team more closely than the product. If
| you're able to show that you're focused on revenue from day
| one it tends to shift the leverage. Very few investors are
| funding ideas anymore.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| The world is full of inferior products and standards that
| ended up winning because of early mover advantages. There's
| even a name for it:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
| jonas21 wrote:
| I think "worse is better" is more about keeping things
| simple and composable than necessarily being the first
| mover.
| jolmg wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by inferior. If you mean inferior
| as in quality, then your link doesn't support you:
|
| > It refers to the argument that software quality does not
| necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a
| point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable
| option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.
|
| It's a rephrasing of KISS. This isn't about getting
| something quicker out the door.
| simonw wrote:
| One of the most important lessons I learned as a founder is that
| everyone will give you advice, and the advice will often conflict
| with other advice, and that's OK.
|
| The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about
| why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation
| are similar to yours?
|
| So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your
| decision making and consider the context when you decide which
| advice to lean into.
| jagath wrote:
| Well said! People often ask me for my founder perspective, and
| I always say the following at the end of such meetings - This
| is just my point of view biased by my personal experiences. You
| should talk to more people and hear their points of view. And
| in the end you should make your own decision.
| alexchamberlain wrote:
| A few years ago before planning our wedding, my mother said to
| me _You have to listen to advice, but you don't have to take
| it._ I don't have the best reputation for always listening -
| her point was that it's polite to listen and then it's up to
| you to judge whether the advice is right for you and the
| situation at hand.
| ozim wrote:
| My approach in life is that all advice is bad.
|
| Exactly because of the same reason you write about.
|
| Someone giving advice usually does not have all needed context
| of your situation. At the same time they are not going to give
| you all the context they were in while taking similar decision.
|
| Even if you would deal with the same people as that person,
| those people might just not like you and they liked him/her.
| Where someone giving advice will think they are just like that
| for everyone.
|
| Even advice about "great restaurant" is probably bad, because
| well they were there a while ago, maybe chef will have a bad
| day or you will get a rude waiter because you will sit in a
| different spot, maybe they were there with great friends and
| you want to go with a girlfriend. It might turn out that
| restaurant was not that great when you arrived.
| tomerico wrote:
| Do you also ignore online reviews on movies, restaurant,
| products, etc.?
| cutenewt wrote:
| I always remind myself that advice givers often have a
| projection bias.
|
| Reading between the lines, it seems like this founder is
| telling others advice he's trying to tell himself.
| danenania wrote:
| Definitely! It's also important to realize that many people are
| way too quick to give advice with limited information. Watch
| out for anyone who gives you advice quickly without taking the
| time to understand your situation. Giving good advice to a
| founder who is past the early stages and no longer a neophyte
| takes a fair amount of questioning and digging in. It's rare to
| find easy answers without tradeoffs. Even if someone is really
| smart or has been successful in the past, low-effort advice
| that they give you off the top of their head will often cause
| more harm than good if you follow it blindly.
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(page generated 2021-04-14 23:00 UTC)