The problem with articles and discussions like this is that the "markers of success" pointed out may all be true, but incidental.
Take Slack as an example. Yes, it was a simple idea with low product surface area and easily protypeable etc etc. But other people had built Slack-like products before that met the all those same criteria and were not successful. The critical factors for Slack were the connections the founders had (or made), the VC money, and perhaps a whole bunch of other things.
As much as we'd like for there to be a nice, neat guides for successful businesses e.g. "build a little snowball", the truth is that the reasons for success are often totally unique, contradictory and unrepeatable.
Slack also has an amazing UX, I haven't used a competing product that was as enjoyable to use. Yes I know this is subjective, but of the people I know that like Slack actually love it. Whereas I've never met somebody that loves HipChat.
First of all I don't want to talk to "@jjm", I want to talk to John Jameson. Why can't it show me the full, human name?
Second, chat is basically the hello world of push based apps, but any other update, like renaming channels, editing documents etc. aren't real time. I have to close the app and reopen it to see the update. Come on!
Third, the document feature is not multiplayer. You have to lock the document in order to edit it. And for todo lists, you can't even tick off a box without locking the whole document.
Slack has an option to display full names, which you can set. An admin can also make that the default.
Secondarily, the reason for @username is because you basically have to use usernames of some kind to ensure you can directly refer to another user consistently. Users can also setup "highlight words" which will notify them if someone says them in a channel they're in. This could be their name for example, or other things.
I set up a Slack channel for the PTs at the gym my wife and I run, and have defaulted it to real names and I get an alert for my first name, our last name, and a handful of other words. Having never used Slack before I was pretty impressed with the customizability of it.
I agree, but I still think the advice has a ton of merit. I've seen weaker ideas padded with features as if the cumulative total can somehow make the product special. ("Sure others are in the space, but we'll be the only product that also does this, this, and this.")
That's a hard way to build something and the result is often really hard to sell. This is especially true with software products where additional features never feel as expensive as they actually become.
In the beginning, it's important to be known for one unique, valuable thing that you do very well. That's how people place you in their mental maps of the world. The challenge I think, is that focus does take bravery. You'll be barraged with feature ideas from customers, investors, employees, and even yourself.
I've been part of at least three organizations that had a running joke of "chat programs suck, I can't believe how stupid their developers are, we could write our own that would be much better". A couple even got as far as writing and using them for a while.
But none of us actually believed it. We all assumed there had to be some good reason that all the chat programs out there were awful - almost an efficient-markets viewpoint. I think Slack's great innovation was the psychological willingness to actually just write a good chat program. (I have no idea how - or if - they figured out the money-making side of things though).
> As much as we'd like for there to be a nice, neat guides for successful businesses e.g. "build a little snowball", the truth is that the reasons for success are often totally unique, contradictory and unrepeatable.
Yes, but I guess the point is that if you start with a little snowball, at least when you fail in the end, you didn't waste too much effort on it.
This is somewhat interesting, but relies on the all too common tautological device of "hustle," a quasi-magical activity whose details are usually elided over.
Start a small company. "Hustle" diligently for a while. Profit. Repeat. Now you have a large, successful company.
What makes a successful company? "Hustle." What is "hustle"? Why, it just means "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." It's a perfectly circular definition.
Proposal: always avoid the word "hustle." Instead, talk about specific actions and decisions that led to success in particular cases.
This one drives me crazy. Sure, you have to be good and smart and you have to hustle, but you also have to be lucky, and luck is a bigger factor than anyone likes to admit. People who make it big forget the luck aspect and start believing that because it worked, they did everything right. They then go around dispensing questionable advice on the basis of 'it worked for them' while knowing full well that they're a massive outlier.
It's like when old successful people give "life-affirming" advice like "quit your job, follow your dreams, take risks, LIVE!" Which is great advice if you're already financially secure and you know that doing so didn't result (in your case) in you ending up as some peon working in a fast food joint. Never mind the other 99% of people who did the exact same thing and it didn't work out, because who listens to a failure?
I agree with you, but there's a valid psychological reason that people don't admit to being lucky more often. It's because to maximize your chance of success you have to focus on what you can control. Sitting around and looking at others to try to dissect what was luck vs skill is a sort of armchair criticism where the practitioner is immune to failure by virtue of not even trying. Ultimately the question of luck is so subjective that it starts to become philosophical at some point. After all, so many small things happen via day-to-day serendipity that anything that actually happens can be considered incredibly lucky. On the other hand, one has a lot of agency when it comes to building a company, and the art of building a startup is about matching incredibly limited resources to the highest return activities, and ratcheting that over and over again through years of changing circumstances. All the luck in the world won't drop an Instagram-like success in your lap without just the right preparation leading up to that amazing moment.
In short, it's not that luck isn't super important, but if you are thinking about luck then you probably won't be ready to capitalize on it.
Of course luck is important. Elon Musk wouldn't be where he is today without at least some luck. On the other hand, a lot of people have had much more luck and opportunities than Musk and still didn't go nowhere. And the people with the drive and capacity of Musk who didn't get lucky are almost all still quite successful.
While luck isn't something you can completely control, it doesn't have to be entirely random either. I read this article a while back talking about a "luck surface area"[0], which you can expand, increasing your odds of being "lucky" in the future.
This blog post is a common line of messaging in the "how to succeed in startups" - "see what (hugely successful company X) did? That's what you should do, that's how you succeed!"
Truth is that success comes from a somewhat magical mixture of timing, luck, spotting of opportunity, knowing how to build it, having the resources to build it, meeting just the right people at the right time who will play a role in that success, somehow making the product "slightly more right" instead of "slightly more wrong" and sometimes seeing some incredible new way of viewing the world that others don't. Like a magic spell it's a bit of all these ingredients put together in a recipe that, well, works.
Then the bloggers and venture capitalists come along, timeline what you did and say "ha! there is the recipe for success!".
I agree. Not just lots of companies. Most companies die. ("Hustle" or no.)
However I think that's actually a point in favor of starting small: If you're going to fail? At least fail fast. While you have time to "pivot", or wind down, or whatever makes sense to try instead.
If you're onto something, you can usually tell at a small scale. Sure, sometimes there are network effects and exponential growth. But not hockey sticks. (Source: My own opinion and anecdata.)
"Before the final twist, Mack, who led all scorers with 30 points, looked as if he’d go from hero to goat in that split second when he fouled Brown, who led Pitt with 24 points. He admitted he was guilty of the infraction."
Odd that the first example appears to be from a basketball write-up, which is exactly where I very frequently hear the term goat/GOAT used in the sense I described.
GOAT, the positive acronym, isn't even used in today's sportswriting about basketball (at least without an unpacking explanation). It's more of a slang / online forum term.
I don't know if hustle is enough for success, but I don't think people simply mean "working hard at doing all the things that make a company successful." when they use the word. Even though the precise definition is hard to pin down, you can easily spot it during its absence.
There are times when you wish to do something, and you avoid it because it just feels like you might be pushing it a bit. If you still did it anyway - what you did was hustle. In fact, I would say that if you reflect on your life and think of the times when you didn't take that invitation to an event, or that break to go on a vacation, or introduce yourself to a person who you liked, and then realized that the choice you made was too safe, and your choice (lack of hustle) didn't help you all that much long term anyway, you can see its absence quite plainly.
Having said that, I also agree with you on one front. Instead of using the word hustle, if these articles gave an example, and then maybe made a point about why that is hustle, it would read much better.
Interesting. I don't have a problem with it because I usually read it as early stage growth hacking that involves manual, tedious, and hard work: getting the first few users, converting the first few customers etc.
Maybe Hustle is like a heuristic or genetic search. Trying random things picked up from other companies and mutating them and trying again until certain things seem to work based on metrics. Then doing more of those things.
However, if you move randomly around a discrete 3D space, you only have a ~34% of returning to your starting point, even if you keep moving forever. The more dimensions, the lower the chances that infinite randomness reaches any given point.
These strategies are intended for individual use but can also be combined for maximum effectiveness.
Maybe you can guess which companies are currently using each strategy. I'll give you one for free; currently Tesla are being very successful with be Elon Musk and burning investor money by talking about self driving cars.
As much as I hate to admit it, the author isn't wrong.
Ideas too big to feasibly execute in typical startup fashion (i.e. incremental funding rounds tied to key metrics) have a snowball's chance in hell of actually succeeding. It doesn't matter if it's the best idea in the world; the ability to adapt to and survive within the existing funding eco system ultimately has more utility because it moves the company forward.
The project I'm working on has evolved over the years into something I can no longer feasibly accomplish alone. I truly believe the idea is solid, but that's worthless without being able to go from zero to one.
The best I can do is hack together tiny glimpses of the final vision. As a solo founder with no track record, pitching a concept for a product that has high funding requirements with no hope of revenue until late-stage is virtually impossible.
Years ago I reasoned the only way I'd get off the ground is to launch something and get organic traction. Despite my best efforts to delude myself into believing the contrary, that seems to have proven correct.
If anything, thinking too big for your own good is tantamount to a mental prison of sorts. You just become obsessed with an idea that has a significantly lower chance of being realized. Hence why your snowball advice is on point. :)
That's very interesting. Thanks so much for the answer.
From all the work you've done on it, if you really think outside the box, is there some single facet that could potentially be turned into do-one-thing-well?
The product is ultimately n-facet, with each facet relying upon the same underlying core technology and principles.
There's three conceptualized facets. Two of them are relatively easy to implement from a technical perspective, but are otherwise rendered very difficult by non-technical considerations. The facet I believe to have the widest appeal is paradoxically far harder to implement than the others in all respects.
I think I'll take your advice and either try simplify an existing facet with laser-focus, or perhaps think far outside of the box and hopefully come up with something that's both stupid-simple yet feasible to implement. Something that gains traction while acting as a proof of concept at the same time.
That's true, and while there is a huge benefit to having co-founders there's also drawbacks (e.g. time spent on recruitment and vetting, potential drama down the road, less equity for employees, a fractured vision). In my situation, that time and energy is likely better spent pushing forward.
Regardless, I should have qualified that statement by saying that a sizable team is required at a minimum to ship anything resembling a final product. It's far beyond what a few co-founders could accomplish together.
I have some ideas that probably fit that description. But does the "lean startup" concept still not fit? In other words, is the MVP feasible alone, developed to a point where it can be announced and tested by real users, and possibly gain popularity and possibly income, and ultimately facilitate the necessary growth?
No. My only shot at completing a user-facing MVP with no funding would be to either think up an entirely new facet that requires far less work and is congruent with existing plans, or somehow trim down an existing facet. Otherwise I'm just stuck pitching concepts.
Is the Google example oversimplified, or is my history wrong? It's reduced here to a "simple database search" but I thought some of Google's novel search technology was there from the get-go, so who cares how the index was persisted?
Oversimplified to the point of absurdity. The original Google was based on Pagerank [1], which came out of the postgrad research of Larry and Sergey.
They also had to build a crawler, systems to calculate pagerank on relatively huge graphs, and the search engine.
That is years of decidedly non-trival hard work, both academic and engineering - pretty much the opposite of the 'snowball' the author claims it to be.
The snowball idea for Google was "download the web, keeping only the links" [1], and from there it grew into PageRank, sorting by PageRank, sorting by PageRank with a filter for keywords, a search engine, etc. The description in the article is largely bullshit; Google search has never used a database, and PageRank predates the idea of Google as a search engine.
[1] source: Larry Page, explaining to Nooglers why they shouldn't be afraid to work on ideas that seem crazy or useless at first.
> Is the Google example oversimplified,
> or is my history wrong?
> It's reduced here to a "simple database search"
> but I thought some of Google's novel search technology
> was there from the get-go
The article called it "a simple database search returning ranked results based on the number of backlinks." Therein lies the rub. Larry Page came up with the idea of backlink counting, inspired I think by how in scholarly writing a measure of importance is the number of other scholarly writings that cite it. He first called it BackRub, then later renamed it to PageRank.
Of course there were other pieces of evidence in their secret sauce, and they are ever tweaking it. But I would say that backlinks made the biggest difference. In those days Hotbot and AltaVista returned a cacophony of results based on word matches in the body of the page itself. Google I believe was the first search engine that went by the text in the links of other websites pointing to it. One of Sergey Brin's and Larry Page's professors tells the story of being introduced to their prototype, searching for "Stanford," and for the first time the top result was actually stanford.edu.
A few times people exploited this. For example, someone got a bunch of their friends to link to George Bush with the link labeled "miserable failure," so that when you googled "miserable failure," the top result was George Bush. This is called google bombing.
Another part of their algorithm that proved how far off course most people, including me, thought that the Web should be organized was laid out in Sergey Brin's research pager, "Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web." While everybody, including me, thought that the way to bring order to the chaos of the Web would be to somehow persuade more and more people to write better web pages (semantic HTML, microformats, etc.) Sergey Brin just took what he was given. As an example he talks about finding author-title pairs on the Web. He starts with a seed list of, say, five author-title pairs:
Isaac Asimov, The Robots of Dawn
David Brin, Startide Rising
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors
and just combing the web for patterns between the elements of each pair. Instead of pristine microformats and "proper" HTML, he takes what he gets:
<LI><B>title</B> by author (
<i>title</i> by author (
author || title (
It seems the best kind of startups to create this days are about teaching other people how to start a startup! Take the OP "nugget", "The Foundation" (Dane Maxwell), "The Secret Society Mastermind" (Timothy Marc), etc, etc... It's a pattern better explained on this comic:
As someone who is currently on the process of trying to find his "Own Little Snowball" and has sent over 500 emails on the last couple of weeks trying to interview people to find that "one-thing" to do well.
I have to say that the whole process of funding an startup has come to be oversimplified by most trying to talk about it, they present it on a nice little set of steps from A to B and from B to C.
But once you get started trying to follow the path, you notice the "magic" happens on what's in between the steps, and that's something nobody talks about.
I find the "do one thing well" advice to almost always be sound. Great ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is the hard part. Sticking to one thing allows you to focus on executing it well.
Sound and well written advice; however, I would add: don't expect your snowball to reach über size. There are tons of problems to solve/improve but the great majority of them have a small market size/potential. The big markets are too hard to disrupt.
I don't agree that the only way to make a company is to build something small and iterate. It's just one way, not better nor worse than other ways. Some companies have succeeded doing this, other have not. Which means that the point of the blog post is basically wrong. Don't "build something small and iterate", build the product that you have in mind that you think people will want - that might be big and need lots of functionality or it might be small with minimal functionality.
Just because plenty of companies have done this does not mean it isn't equally valid to build something with a broad set of functionality.
Survivor bias.
It's also painfully true that uncountable companies have built something small that got no bigger. Maybe they would have been better to build out their idea into something more full featured.
I think it goes without saying this is not the only way you can build a sucessfull company.
There are so many existence proof examples of companies that are precisely the opposite of little snowballs.
Hootsuite, Salesforce, Microsoft, etc.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but the implicit understanding is that this post is aimed at the lone wolf or small teams with no funding.
Sure, you can be a lone wolf or small team and try to build a large complex project. I actually know quite a few folks who've done that. Most failed. Some were sucessfull - https://www.centraldesktop.com - comes to mind.
But, the main point is, it is simply easier on most business vectors to tackle a do-one-thing-well rather than build a big-complex-product.
Hootsuite was absolutely a little snowball. Invoke Labs was an agency in Vancouver that build Ow.ly (a link shortener that's still around). They then continued to build an early ver of Hootsuite to manage their clients' social media campaigns. Then they realized that other people might want it and offered a free version. I had dinner with the founder the night before they turned on their paid plans, and he was unsure what the reception would be since they gave so much to so many people for free.
The reception was somewhat positive but they continued to grow and sell the crap out of Hootsuite and now it's on track to go public. But they started SUPER small.
Microsoft actuallly were a classic snowball in their first few years with MS BASIC.
Then, in 1981, they took the snowball and threw it smack dab into that huge towering snow slab they had noticed called the IBM PC, causing an avalanche of hitherto unknown proportions...the rest is history. :)
They missed the point where little plucky bootstrapped Uber bought growth with VC money in every market they entered. It's a model, but I'm not sure there are many lessons your average bootstrapped business can learn from Uber.
I really want to know how to be better in noticing the problem. I do get annoy by some regular task, however I will easily adapt to it and lost the incentive for solving the problem.
While I don't know if my snow balls will go anywhere, one thing I've noticed is that many (most?) successful entrepreneurs have a high risk tolerance. I went to a meetup where Alan Grant (Hired) talked about his tolerance for risk- sometimes it even involved activities on his part that were a violation of TOS. The point is sometimes to do creative destruction you have to get your hands dirty. Try to maintain a "chaotic good" alignment if you will ;)
Nicely written. Although uber and Airbnb are big because of the big VC money that can afford the lawyers and engineers. Not a lot of places around the world where capital + talent is available for snowball ideas.
Take Slack as an example. Yes, it was a simple idea with low product surface area and easily protypeable etc etc. But other people had built Slack-like products before that met the all those same criteria and were not successful. The critical factors for Slack were the connections the founders had (or made), the VC money, and perhaps a whole bunch of other things.
As much as we'd like for there to be a nice, neat guides for successful businesses e.g. "build a little snowball", the truth is that the reasons for success are often totally unique, contradictory and unrepeatable.