

First-timer entrepreneur symptoms and cures - jordanmessina
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/08/first-timer-entrepreneur-symptoms-and-cures.html

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vaksel
I think the "Symptom: you're about to give up too quickly." should also be
followed up with "Symptom: you're sticking with an idea that is dead"

if you had 3,000 people come through your site, without a single sale, it's
probably a good idea to try something else.

it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are a hockey stick
case. "oh yeah, we've had 2 sales @9.99 this month...but remember the hockey
stick...a year later, we'll have 5,000 sales a day!"

if you are going to stick with an idea, you need to have consistent sales that
are actually increasing. So that there is an indication that someone actually
wants the product you have to offer.

personally I take a 3 step approach to this. 1) get actual people to the site
and see if it actually converts(2-3000 people is plenty). Once you find out
your starting conversion rate(even if it's 1:2000) 2) then your goal is to
scale up so you get decent traffic to the site...100-200 people a day at
least. 3) then you start optimizing...run a multivariate a/b test every week
with 3-4 variations. Discard the crap and keep the better converting ones.
Keep doing this every week, and by the end of the year, you'll go through 100+
different variations, and your 1:2000 conversion rate, will most likely be
down to 1:50-1:100.

and with a/b tests you have to test EVERYTHING...don't leave anything to
chance. You don't know your audience, until you actually test. You have no
idea if you'll get more conversions with "buy" "buy now" "get it" "download
it" "order" "order today" "give us your money" "stop being an idiot" or
"insert coin"...not until you actually test it. For all you know that "stop
being an idiot" order button will increase your sales 10 fold.

~~~
freshfunk
I'm glad this was pointed out. Doing a startup is definitely like doing a
dance. You have to know when to step forward, and when to step sideways and
when to step back. Do it at the wrong time and you'll end up in pain.

I know people who give up too quickly on an idea and I know people who stayed
too long on an idea. The problem is usually that it's never so binary as to
quit or keep going. It's easy to end up in a situation where you've spent 6
months or a year building a product. Over that next year you convince yourself
that that NEXT feature is all that's needed for your product to explode. In
the meantime you have a handful of users that give you validation that there's
value to the idea.

A/B testing would be great but there's also a saying that A/B optimization too
early is also a mistake. Time could be better spent understanding product-
market fit.

Perhaps, more important than this was mentioned in the blog post:"spend a lot
of your time thinking about customer acquisition (for me it's ~50%). Only very
rarely will they come on their own early on."

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dryicerx
What I find most interesting is that no matter how many times these points are
brought up or given advice... a person who is just starting out will not take
these in until experiencing them first hand, almost in a rite of passage
way...

I recall doing every single one of these mistakes, and more. But it only truly
registers fully when you actually hit them.

~~~
StavrosK
Not only that... When it comes to our startup (<http://historio.us>), I (I can
only speak for myself) find that a small piece of negative critique, or a new,
better funded startup launching that is remotely related to what we do, can
lead me to becoming demoralised and think that it's not leading anywhere, even
though we've hit 3,000 users in two weeks, have tens of subscribers already,
_lots_ of positive feedback from users and even some people asking to
invest...

This post was very good for telling people things they might not already know,
but which are indispensable. For example, when I'm demoralised, I regularly
find myself saying "okay, it might feel bad but in reality people find the
service very useful", and then the rational part of my brain kicks in and
tells me to keep doing what I'm doing because it's probably worth it...

Many thanks to the author, the post was very encouraging.

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jacquesm
It's very easy to fall for some of those, also if you're not a first timer!

Even big, established companies run by visionary or at least very experienced
CEOs seem to get some of those wrong at times, especially the 'you build it,
they will come' and 'you're about to give up too quickly'.

Wave and N1 for instance with Google.

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iamclovin
"You're about to give up quickly" is the hardest thing to judge really.
Especially when you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur running out of cash,
persistence becomes very tricky.

Would love to hear how fellow bootstrapped HN'ers dealt with such a situation.

~~~
StavrosK
In our case, we became profitable. When all you need is money to pay for a
small server and can get consulting gigs to pay for food, becoming profitable
at two weeks (so far so good, anyway) really puts your mind at ease that what
you're doing will at least hopefully be self-sustainable.

I realise this is useless advice for most other startups, but hey, spend as
little as you can (but not too little), and you're doing the best you can.

~~~
iamclovin
Yes doing consulting gigs is a great way to fill the coffers and we do that
too but strictly speaking it's not your product which is profitable, right?

We are running at very bare costs but our biggest expenses are salaries for
ourselves (which in an expensive city like Singapore) can drain your finances
pretty quickly.

~~~
StavrosK
Oh, you misunderstand. The product itself is profitable, it makes more per day
than the operating costs. Right now, actually, it makes the monthly operating
costs every two days on average. Fingers crossed that this trend will
continue.

The consulting gigs are so we can afford food. We aren't getting paid
anything, but we don't count our time against expenses...

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nanijoe
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the most important advice you can give
someone just starting out, is to just go out and release something.That you
are going to make mistakes is almost a given, so why not make them as quickly
as possible

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Aaronontheweb
A quote my father:

"Most ideas with an NDA attached aren't ones worth hearing."

IP is paper armor for most startups - you're advantages are going to come from
things related more to execution than any sort of legal ecosystem.

