
Overnight success takes a long time - peter123
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight-success-takes-long-time.html
======
nostrademons
The risk is that the world will change around you in the meantime and make
what you're working on irrelevant.

My two previous employers were both started in 2001, in terms of the idea and
not the corporate entity. Last I heard, they are both still around, though in
one case a founder let the company fold and then ran off to China with the IP
to start again with cheap labor. But the ideas are increasingly irrelevant
now.

In one case, the product was software to tunnel through firewalls. Most recent
products just build that into the product itself now (witness: FogCreek
CoPilot, AIM, anonymous proxies), using essentially the same technology we
were working on 8-9 years ago (FogCreek calls it the Reflector) so there is
less need for a general solution.

In the other case, the product started out as a desktop quant analytics
interface. But then around 2002-2004, everything switched to the web. They did
too, but they fell off the leading edge of technology: other firms now have
much more web expertise than they do. And now with the financial crisis, I'd
guess that people are increasingly suspicious of quant analytics.

I keep thinking about whether it's better to go for breadth or depth (in
anything, not just startups). The answer always seems "Go for depth, _as long
as you're going deep into the right thing_." But it's often not possible to
tell what the right thing is until you've gone deep into it. By then, of
course, you've already sunk a lot of effort into exploring the territory.
Maybe that's why people ascribe so much of success to pure luck.

~~~
paul
Yes, timing is always an issue. It can actually be a problem in both
directions though -- many startups are actually too early for the market/tech.
Marc Andreessen has some good stuff to say about this, but I can't find it at
the moment.

Getting market timing right is a simple matter of predicting the future ;)

~~~
ALee
Paul may be referring to these seminal posts:

The Only Thing That Matters: <http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the-pmarca-
gu-2.html>

How much funding is too little? Too much? <http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/07/the-
pmarca-guid.html>

------
bonaldi
It continues to baffle me that GMail is the only client* with all-in-a-page
threaded email. Some desktop apps make a stab at it, but generally limit it to
some kind of highlighting by subject line. Even if it didn't have the search,
I'd stay with Gmail for that.

* Well, Zoe had a go, but was always buggy and now seems dead.

~~~
boris
Mutt has email threads. It had them for as long as I've been using it (6+
years). It also has regex search and selection, besides other things...

~~~
kragen
Mutt's threads aren't all-in-a-page; you only see one message at a time.

~~~
boris
Yes, you are correct. Though in mutt you can hit 'n'/'p' while reading a
message in a thread and you will move to the next/previous email in the
threading order. I would imagine one would need to use scrolling in gmail for
any substantial thread which results in a pretty similar experience (i.e., you
only see one or two emails at a time).

~~~
timf
Anyhow, I prefer threaded + n/p myself. For complicated discussions (like at
work) it's much better to see exactly which mail is in reply to which (not
just time based).

------
sachinag
It's really nice to see him promote Posterous (as opposed to Google's Blogger)
as the easiest way to blog thoughts.

~~~
fallentimes
Yet Posterous is not one of the featured services on Friendfeed (you can do it
manually via RSS).

~~~
paul
Nor is Blogger or most other blog services. You can simply add them as "Blog"
though. The "featured" services are generally things other than blogs where
it's friendlier to ask for their username instead of url (such as YouTube), or
that require other special processing.

~~~
rantfoil
Thank you for the mention, Paul. We really appreciate it.

I think the main reason why we'd like to be able to add Posterous through the
FF main page is the fact that people don't understand RSS, especially our
users who are brand new to blogging and are doing it for the first time
through email.

In the longer term as FF reaches mainstream, these considerations around dead
simple import of feeds become even moreso important.

~~~
brlewis
As an alternative, vote up (er, Like) my suggestion:
[http://friendfeed.com/e/c5a09856-762d-43ad-9298-b32080b4190a...](http://friendfeed.com/e/c5a09856-762d-43ad-9298-b32080b4190a/Add-
feed-X-to-friendfeed-via-web/)

Then you, I, or anyone passionate about getting her/his own site easily
integrable with FriendFeed can set up a UI to do it from our end.

~~~
paul
I finally got around to adding that. You can now prefill the configuration and
set a "next" url so that FriendFeed can be easily integrated into a
configuration flow on your own site.

For example,
[http://friendfeed.com/settings/services/blog?url=http://mybl...](http://friendfeed.com/settings/services/blog?url=http://myblogurl.com/&next=http://myservice.com/afteradd)
will add the blog <http://myblogurl.com/> and redirect the user to
<http://myservice.com/afteradd> afterwords. There is also a "nextcancel"
parameter which can be used to distinguish between success and cancel.

~~~
brlewis
Thanks! I feel befriended and fed.

------
lunaru
"Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content.
But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being;
nor can the dead ever be brought back to life." -- Sun Tzu, Art of War

i.e. Be patient and don't give in.

~~~
Caligula
For a book of vague generalizations, you should be able to mine a much more
relevant quote than the above :>

~~~
lunaru
Didn't mine it... I just had that one in mind and this post reminded me of it.

------
indiejade
I really like FriendFeed for the fact that it doesn't try to suck people in.
It is efficient. Unlike Facebook (which seems like it's trying to re-invent
everything on the Internet inside it's little bubble o'beacon-tracking),
FriendFeed unobtrusively allows each one of its services to showcase a core
competency: _e.g._ flickr for photos, twitter for nonsensical tidbits, youtube
for video, rss for blogs, SU for those random and great finds, etc.

By not nudging users into any one specific direction, it effectively
aggrandizes collective genius.

Now, it just needs an option for HN posts. . .

~~~
unalone
I like being contrary, so I'll take the side of Facebook advocacy: by
"showcasing," as you say, Friendfeed makes their service far less efficient,
and to some degree less valuable. It adds nothing but a place to visit
everything at once, which means that it hurts the communal aspects of those
other sites and reduces the visual efficiency of each. Facebook, on the other
hand, centralizes everything, which means that as a user you can use it and
only it and have everything you need. I have relatives who use Facebook
because it's so easy to understand.

Also, what does it mean to effectively aggrandize collective genius?

------
aswanson
I always look at friendfeed as the beginning of something that I could
broadcast to my friends that don't haunt the web that much. What if you could
take the feed and somehow turn it into a show, where a more passive web viewer
could just watch?

~~~
brlewis
What I did a few days ago was to create a friendfeed account for my family
email list, and set it up to get weekly email summaries. The first summary
hasn't arrived yet, or I'd tell you how it's going.

~~~
aswanson
Set it up to be as easy to use as ourdoings...and you're on to something.

~~~
brlewis
I appreciate the compliment. I know there's plenty more I could do to make
OurDoings easier for the people who put stuff on it.

------
kajecounterhack
Maybe the only reason I don't have friendfeed is it's welcome page.

 _FriendFeed helps you discover and discuss interesting stuff that your
friends and family find on the web._

Like I have time with which to look at interesting stuff after spending all
day on news.yc....

~~~
brlewis
Check out FriendFeed's "best of day" or "best of week" feature. Or just have
it email you a daily or weekly summary.

~~~
Tichy
You just made me log into friendfeed, but I don't see those features. Where
are they?

~~~
brlewis
Click on the "Account" link (upper right) and look for the section "Email
settings". It's the checkbox labeled "Send me my friendfeed every..." with a
daily/weekly option.

------
rokhayakebe
Stick in it. Adapt to the market, when you are no coding, you had better be
selling and when you are not selling you had better be marketing. And be
patient.

~~~
brlewis
My 2009 resolution is to sell better.

------
redorb
the only over night sucesses I have heard of are those 2 startups that flipped
within hours for around 1.5k each, so there is some truth in this article

