

Keep Emotions Out of Your Startup - rupalim
http://startupbox.posthaven.com/keep-emotions-out-of-your-start-up

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kordless
Just like anything else dealing with emotions, keeping them out of your
startup is a sure way to put a bullet in it.

Emotions like joy, trust, interest and surprise are critical to engagement
with customers. Marketing is basically raising interest. Product deals with
the rest. The CEO broadcasts all of them, if he's good at his job.

You also can't keep negative emotions from injecting themselves at the most
inopportune time. How you handle those negative emotions, on the other hand,
has far reaching implications.

~~~
gerbal
This guy seems like yet another smart person who assumes themselves supremely
rational and really is just bad at coping with their emotions.

As you said, running any successful enterprise depends on being aware of your
emotions, your customers emotions, your collaborators emotions. You can't
treat emotions as some alien thing you can ignore until they go away. All that
will do is poison your project.

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makerops
"A year ago, I was talking to a fellow start-up founder and I realized how
much he likes to stick with his ideas.... I wondered: is this passion or
simply stubbornness?"

The whole article is based on a false premise imo. There are a myriad of
reasons why I would, or wouldn't listen to a suggestion from someone else.

The best I can do at least, is to listen to everyone, and try the often
repeated suggestions, but if you are implementing every whim a customer
suggests, you probably aren't operating optimally.

~~~
namenotrequired
I agree - he's right that you should "make something people want" but ignores
the question of whether the people who want X are in your target audience or
not. Simply implementing the most popular suggestions can easily pull you in
many different directions and take you away from your goal of making something
people want.

~~~
cinquemb
This might be a little bit meta, but for my start up we interpreted "make
something people want" as make something that takes advantage of the behaviors
people exhibit whether or not they explicitly say they want it or not. We get
tonnes of feedback/complaints (that are very emotionally charged) about what
we are doing every week that we don't respond to, but despite that, we keep
growing.

I wish I could figure out how to turn this into a win(us)-(lose)them, into a
win-win (because there could be an upside, like building a movement), but what
people are demanding is in direct conflict of their behaviors (and our growth)
so there little actualized incentive on our part except for maybe trying to
exacerbate the issues more with a new feature in order to get more growth.

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tsmith
"Every new idea or piece of feedback about your start-up has immense value and
it's up to the founder(s) to prioritize these ideas and suggestions and
utilize them."

The author seems to be in the fortunate position of never having suffered from
feedback overload.

In my experience, anyone is willing to give feedback when asked for it, and
most of that feedback will be wrong and/or conflicting with the advice of
others and/or inapplicable to the situation at hand.

As a founder, it is your privilege and your duty to free yourself from the
opinions of others and blaze your own trail.

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semerda
The whole idea of selling products & services are built around emotions. Read
the work of Sigmund Freud for deeper insights into how powerful emotions are
and how our triune brain is wired for them.

The lesson when/where emotions are involved should be to develop your
empathy.. now that will open up you mind & provide clarity!

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thebiglebrewski
Didn't you guys kinda rip off AirBNB's design? And...idea? Just curious what
differentiates you.

~~~
bitwarrior
They're keeping emotions out of their startup, like guilt due to plagiarism.

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LCDninja
Easier said then done ;-)

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wellboy
Your idea doesn't define you, you define your idea.

