

7 Ways I've Almost Killed FreshBooks - davidcrow
http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2008/08/27/7-ways-ive-almost-killed-freshbooks/

======
brasmusen
It's crazy how many of this type of post are showing up everywhere. In the
past couple weeks I've seen 4-5 posts on what founders did wrong or right with
their companies.

It must be nice to be past all that and looking back on it to glean the
lessons. Can't wait to get there.

~~~
terpua
It's a personal entrepreneur's list of what to do (or not) and I find them
useful.

Taken as a whole, it's cliff notes for entrepreneurial hackers.

~~~
rw
Cliff notes are useless for college-level classes. Does your analogy hold in
the real world of entrepreneurship?

~~~
terpua
Yes. Having "front lines" advice and anecdotes from actually building a
startup are helpful even if they are only tidbits (i.e. cliff notes) of
information.

Founders at Work is a great example of this.

------
ryanwaggoner
The one about thinking that they needed to move really fast reminds me of one
of my favorite quotes, recounted in "The Dip" by Seth Godin:

"We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on
it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our
feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd
made a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big
hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better."

~Sergey Brin (cofounder Google)

That's a crazy mentality to have, and stands in such stark contrast to most of
the frantic behavior of startups today.

Take your time and build a great product.

------
rokhayakebe
_but slow burning fires burn the hottest_

But if it burns to slow (ie if your product does not generate the minimum
amount of buzz to keep it alive) it will die. Entrepreneurs should make the
difference between a slow burning fire and a slowly dying fire.

EDIT:

 _Thinking we had to spend more than we did_

Too much resources handicaps more than not having enough. Give 3 coders a few
thousand and they create Omnisio, which sells for millions. Give coders 15
millions and Omnisio will show up half as good and one year too late.

 _Placing my faith in consultants_

Dude. I am not even going to talk about this one. Nowadays everybody claims to
be a consultant.

