
From Zero to a Million: There Are Two Usual Paths for Startups; I Took the Third - brault
https://blog.markgrowth.com/from-zero-to-a-million-there-are-two-usual-paths-for-startups-and-i-took-the-third-one-e82ecf96591e
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katzgrau
Sounds a lot like my first startup out of college:

* Focus split between two products * No real revenue * A blog to catalogue our path to wild success (I think it lived at diariesofastartup.com)

Long story short, it didn't pan out for me (too many cooks, differing levels
of commitment, cluelessness) but I've had some good successes since then.

Best of luck - the path does become clearer as you learn the lessons of
growing a business.

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jakobegger
Can someone explain? What are the usual paths? What's the third path? Am I
missing something, or is this just a clickbait headline?

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vinceguidry
A critical reading of the blog post has me thinking that he hasn't invented a
new way to do startups, he's just making the common mistake of building
product before verifying demand. The obstacles he's running into are the exact
obstacles one would expect to run into if you do this.

If you are starting a startup and have no money to burn through validating a
business model, your only real way forward is to start with sales. You can
sell your idea to potential customers (bootstrapping), or you can sell it to
investors.

There's no third way to do this, because those are the only two groups of
people that can give you money.

This guy is choosing to bootstrap. A fine path, but it requires you to schlep.
You have to talk to a _lot_ of people to validate a business idea. People who
are _so_ enthusiastic about the idea suddenly develop cold feet when it comes
to buying your product and integrating it into their business / life.

If you are a coder, the natural tendency is to avoid talking to people and
instead do what you know: build product. But unless you talk to people you
aren't going to know what to build. His entire blog post is just exploring
these failure modes, except with added self-importance.

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andriesm
I would say ignore the nay-sayers and the guys slamming you for your "ego" or
just giving you attitude - but do extract the actionable feedback, but only
apply that which resonates with YOU. (But now at least you have the other bits
that don't agree with you somewhere on your periphery of awareness, in case
you turn out to just be stubborn and wrong - but there is no one proven way
despite protestations in the comments, and even well validated startup mrthods
like focusing on "customer interviews")

I can certainly related to your experience, also solving very hard problems,
but I would laugh about 11 weeks as painful as "large amounts of sunk time"
is.... We are thinking in terms of years not weeks.

Bootstrapping is almost always the best way to start.

Unless you are lucky, most VC only happens after your success is pretty
obvious.

Our solution has been to do dev work for money on the side, one of which
resulted in a maintenance retainer. It's a pain in the ass, but has allowed us
to work on our startup for almost two years, buying us time to pivot aspects
of our bring-to-market strategy or what market to apply our idea to.... In
other words, do several BIG pivots.

I would also suggest you decide how to weigh your attention between your
products or put them in a sequential strategy that makes sense to you... I
don't think you can build three services at the same time at the same level of
priority.

If you take the long view, keep pivoting, and keep searching for as much real
world customer interaction, your chances of converging on something cool is
much improved.

We also got nice growth metrics with very little long term activation/use,
which drove us back to do more customer development in the real world (and
over skype!)

Keep trying things, keep sharing the journey, we all make many mistakes along
the way, hopefully they don't sink a business that "could have" worked.

My view is, you should only fail with flawed ideas, not fail winning ideas due
to mistaken models of execution.

Keep learning.

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CamTin
You list "Migrated the email list from MailChimp to SendinBlue" as a "major
accomplishment". This is a minor, even trivial, administrative or technical
task. Trumpeting it as if it is one of the biggest things you've managed to
achieve makes you sound bush-league.

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shostack
Without knowing the level of automation and unique data associated with the
records stored within the first ESP it is not fair to cast blanket judgement.

Having migrated ESPs and selected/on boarded new ones, vendor lock in can be a
major concern and headache. This is due to all of the automations you add,
performance data, audience segmentation data, etc. Often, particularly for
business users, this can be in a proprietary format locked inside the
platform.

If for example, your entire welcome onboarding flow is locked away like this,
you need to be very careful not to disrupt a major touch point in your funnel
or you risk losing very real dollars.

Email platform transition/setup and management at scale with any complexity is
one form of hell i hope most people never get subjected to.

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CamTin
I'm not saying it wasn't a pain in the ass, just that intermingling what
amount to administrative tasks with major business objectives under the header
"major accomplishments" isn't great for your image.

It's like a major public company mentioning the fact that IT finally got
everybody in the company on the same build of Windows 7 in a quarterly report
to investors. Yes, it was probably a lot of work, and yet nobody cares, and
mentioning it as being a big deal raises doubts about whether you can manage
things that are much more difficult, like for example your actual line of
business.

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osullivj
With no investment and little revenue how is the team getting paid?

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_nalply
They are paid in play money er stock options?

