
Founders: Don't Forget to Sell The Dream - jasonshen
http://www.jasonshen.com/2013/startup-founders-dont-forget-to-sell-the-dream/
======
rdl
It's important that what you build can turn into something huge, but I still
think being something a small initial niche absolutely loves is a lot stronger
pitch for a startup than something which you think a lot of people will use.

"Make something people want" -- 1) Make sure you convince the investor that
you can make it, that you're the best to make it, and that this is the right
time for it

(Best way to show this is by having already done it...)

2) "want" -- as in hair on fire need. Not "tell you they would use if it
existed, probably"

3) "people" -- a viable market, sure, but it matters more that you have a way
to reach them (probably by being one of them), vs. that there theoretically
exist huge numbers of them somewhere. "Oh, we're making something which all
students would use, if the school districts provided it" is a lot worse if you
have no way to convince school districts to provide it (e.g. if it's a new
class of product they don't currently buy, and where incumbents sell
(expensively) to the districts for other products).

(Of course, the best way to demonstrate "people want" is committed orders or
actual product delivery and use metrics.)

4) "something" -- focus on it being a concrete product, vs. an abstract
platform. Having something you can show is ideal.

------
kamobit
To quote PG, "...the way to do really big things seems to be to start with
deceptively small things."

Aspirational goals are useful, but an answer to the "billion $" question is
not always a necessity. Many billion dollar companies started off without an
explicit goal to become huge businesses. See Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.

Quote is from here: <http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html>

------
coopdog
Maybe it's just the engineer in me but the second paragraph just didn't
resonate. Too hucksterish maybe

------
jamesaguilar
Makes sense. When you're selling to people looking for top-end outliers, it
makes sense to describe what yours is rather than just telling them about the
median expectation.

------
tsmith
F __* the dream! Founders: Don't Forget to Sell The Product!

~~~
mindcrime
Part of selling "the product" is exactly "selling the dream". How boring is it
when I sit down to try and sell somebody something and start rattling off
lists of detailed technical specifications:

 _Well, this is built on the JVM, using Groovy and Grails, and implements all
the relevant technical standards, including Atom 1.0, RSS 1.0, WSDL 2.0, SOAP
1.13, GRDDL 11.9, FOAF 1.0, RuleML, SWRL, OAGIS, and UMBEL, and it has great
features, like application integration over JMS, FTP, REST, SOAP and AMQ using
Camel and an Enterprise Service Bus, and there's an Integrated Activity Stream
using the activitystrea.ms protocol, and did I mention that you can make
semantic assertions and store them in RDF using Jena and then query them using
SPARQL..._

are you asleep yet? No? Well most customers eyes would have glazed over after
about the second acronym.

OTOH, what about:

 _Are you worried about how your company will survive, and the legacy you will
leave behind? Nobody wants to be known as "CEO of a company that went
bankrupt". The thing is, you have a ton of potential here, you just need a way
to unleash it. Imagine if... all of your employees were enabled to easily and
conveniently share, transfer, remix and create knowledge, based on their
experiences and the experiences of their co-workers. Imagine if innovations
developed in the R &D labs made it into new, profitable product lines 5x
faster than they do now. Imagine if you had the ability to have your whole
company sense important signals from the environment you operate in, and react
to those signals in a agile, adaptive manner.. never letting a competitor get
the jump on you, and serving new customer needs before even the customer
realizes them. Wouldn't that be a nice thing, Mr. CEO? Yeah? Well then great,
we have some gnarly knowledge management and collaboration products that I'd
like to tell you about..._

Of course, if you really want to get tricky, throw in some NLP "time
distortion" pattern language:

 _You know, Mr. CEO, in five years, when your company is more profitable than
ever, and you've won the State Chamber of Commerce "CEO of the Year" award,
you're going to look back on today and see that this was the beginning of a
very beneficial partnership, aren't you?_

------
michaelochurch
I can't speak for investors, but I've been burned more by horrible startups--
as an employee, so more than any investor ever could be-- because I was some
combination of naive and falsely desperate (I have a strong work ethic, and
that sometimes impels me to work stupidly hard) and I'm fucking sick of most
of these goddamn dreams. Bait-and-switch hiring is the worst. If I lie to get
a job, I get fired-- and I should. But if a company engages in bait-and-switch
hiring because "priorities changed" and I leave them, then I'm the asshole
"job hopper". Fuck that.

Let's talk about substance. Not these dreams, most of which are impractical
and laughable. I don't want to waste another year of my life implementing some
wanker's dream in the hope that he'll one day throw me a bone (a real title,
investor contact) so I can be on the other side of the table, lying to naive
smart people in their 20s in order to get them to ruin their lives and
relationships in exchange for 0.02% of something because they aren't smart
enough to realize that token equity doesn't make them real business partners.

I'm sick of this nonsense. Why is our generation stuck in VC-istan instead of
working on things that actually matter?

This whole ecosystem is built on selling dreams to clueless young people of
extreme talent and dedication (like me, except I'm not young anymore; thanks
assholes for wasting most of my 20s) who have no idea what they're worth yet.
I can't speak about "most" but a great many founders that I know well are
fuckheads (because the requirement of VC connections selects heavily in favor
of assholery) who have no lack of skill _already_ in selling vacuous dreams
and making empty promises. Let's not make these lying fucksticks any better
than they already are at misleading people.

~~~
brandnewlow
Please stop and consider taking some time away from HN.

The stories posted here clearly anger and upset you. This comment you just
posted is a strawman argument and you posted a variant of it the other day in
another thread, and another variant of it in another thread before that
and....you've been posting variants of it on HN almost daily for months now.

As a founder, my ears always perk up with I find pointed criticism of founders
on HN. I read carefully to see if there's any ideas or advice I can come away
with. But for months now, every time there's been really aggressive criticism
of founders on HN, the comment always turns out to be written by you. And it's
always the same complaint or variant on it every time. It's gotten to the
point where I have to screen comment threads ahead of time in case you've
posted already.

Is it really healthy to keep returning to a well you find so poisonous? Jason
wrote a well-intended article here and you're using it to post your same ideas
for the 10th time this month. Is that fair to him? Is that fair to Hacker News
readers?

Take some time off. Find things that excite you, captivate you, and make you
feel joyful to be live. VC-istan is clearly not a place you want to spend time
in, so go explore and find a better place.

~~~
michaelochurch
I feel like my work isn't done. The truth needs to be told, and unfortunately,
very few people have the courage to tell it, especially under their real
names.

No, I don't dislike all founders or VCs obviously. I just hate most of the
ones I've interacted with, and I'm shocked by the number of people who've had
similarly horrible experiences. When I left my last startup after being asked
to do something horribly unethical, in March 2012, I thought I'd been
extremely unlucky. I thought my experience was a 1-in-10,000 case of bad luck.
As I poked around, though, I realized that horrible experiences are the norm
in VC-istan. People just don't talk about it.

Why the fuck aren't they speaking up? Why aren't they exposing unethical
people and companies? Why are people so terrified of ex-bosses that they
refuse to tell the truth so the horrible founders can fail and some good ones
can step in?

I've managed to put cracks in the image of VC-istan. My job is to make those
cracks bigger so some light can get through. At least some of the climate of
anger that's been on Hacker News for the past few months is something I've
started. Good for me. I'm starting to _contribute_. Courage is in rare supply
in our industry; we tend to bend over and take it when our masters screw us.
Well, at least I will fucking speak up.

So, I've also worked in finance. As an industry, it has an image problem. To
get smart people, it has to _pay_. So it does. Most of the work isn't terribly
interesting, but the pay is good and the people are actually a lot more decent
than in VC-istan. If you're good, they'll treat you well. In general,
financial firms are a lot better, ethically speaking, than VC-istan.

If we can bring VC-istan's image in line with what it actually is, then
they'll have to (like finance) start treating engineers better if they want to
get talent, and the bad startups will die out, making room for good ones.

~~~
textminer
I find your comments to be spectacularly useful. I'm a twenty something
machine learning developer with a functional bent and high expectations for
rewarding stimulation in VC-land, and you've recapitulated many of my own
thoughts and conclusions spectacularly well. Would you mind if I bent your ear
about a dilemma over private channels?

~~~
jamesaguilar
You might be better off asking someone who has accomplished more than blog
posts and hn comments. Sounding like you know what you're talking about and
actually knowing it are not always the same. Results are often a better signal
of the latter. Just my 2c.

~~~
nitrogen
On the other hand, only talking to those who have been wildly successful, or
giving their advice more weight, sounds like a great way to get trapped by
confirmation and survivorship bias.

~~~
jamesaguilar
Good point. But if I were looking for an unsuccessful person to get advice
from, I'd pick someone who looked within for mistakes/opportunities for
improvement, rather than exclusively blaming external factors.

~~~
nitrogen
Even if they are largely external, we can't say that michaelochurch hasn't
been providing suggestions for improvement. His overall message doesn't strike
me as complaining just to complain, even if some of his individual posts are a
bit over the top.

~~~
jamesaguilar
His overall message is how companies and management can improve -- advice for
a position he's never been in and has no experience with. If he's said things
that represent a serious acknowledgement of his own shortcomings as an
employee -- i.e. a frank discussion of why such a high proportion of his
employment experiences have been bad compared to typical HNers or engineers --
I'm not aware of them. He seems to be fairly self-congratulatory on that
front, which is at odds with the results so far.

~~~
michaelochurch
I checked your profile. One of those. Still butthurt that I exposed
calibration scores and embarrassed "your" company?

 _His overall message is how companies and management can improve -- advice
for a position he's never been in and has no experience with._

Wait, so watching idiots incinerate hundreds of millions, if not billions, of
dollars of value through horrible business decisions when I could have done
their jobs better at 17 is not direct experience?

I'm good at learning from failures-- my own (I've made plenty of mistakes,
despite your claim that I don't acknowledge error on my part) and other
peoples'.

 _a frank discussion of why such a high proportion of his employment
experiences have been bad compared to typical HNers or engineers_

What has astonished me is to learn that my horrible experiences are _not_
atypical. I thought I was the only person to be screwed over so badly, and
found out that there are hundreds of people with similar stories.

I won't claim that it's the norm, but it's not shockingly rare. People just
don't fucking admit to these experience because they internalize their losses
when the reality is that most people have shitty careers not because they are
human garbage (as their bosses want them to think) but simply because they
have been lied-to, exploited, and fucking robbed blind by their extortionist,
criminal managers who have demolished their careers through bad work
allocation and political malfeasance.

I wouldn't put myself so far out there on these issues if I hadn't realized
that there's a whole corrupt system whose malignancies are underreported. If
it was just me having bad experiences, I wouldn't go out there and point out
how awful it is. Too embarrassing, no point. Unfortunately, the abuses of
talent by the well-connected criminals are commonplace and it's time to fight
back. Technology is _our_ territory by rights and we should take it back from
those assholes.

~~~
jamesaguilar
> butthurt

I'd be lying if I claimed you did not spark my interest with your episode at
my workplace. However, I am in no way upset about it, any more than I'd be
upset by one of those YouTube fail videos. I was actually one of the ones who
tried to help you. So, let's stick to discussion of my actual points. If I
made untrue claims, it's enough to point them out, right?

Reiterating my primary point, in case it has been lost in the back-and-forth:
if your approach leads to satisfaction, success, wealth, fame, or any other
thing an ordinary person wants, I'd love to see some evidence of it. Does any
exist? Failing evidence, I advise a novice to consider your words with a
strong degree of skepticism, and to take into account your personal track
record. This is healthy, no?

> so watching idiots ... [fail where] I could have done better at 17

You are like a walking, talking paragon of the Dunning-Kreuger effect. If you
could do better, do it. I'd be surprised, but surprise is an emotion
rationalists welcome. If I see some evidence of your extraordinary claims [1],
I'll update.

And, no, backseat CEO-ing does not count as experience. Come on, that much
_must_ be obvious.

> not atypical

Hard to say if you're falling to selection bias or me. You are highly atypical
among the people I know or have heard of, and your comments certainly stand
out as unusual on this site.

> Technology is our territory

It is the territory of people who make things, or who lead makers, as it has
always been. People who do neither of those are mere onlookers.

[1]
[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_ex...](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Extraordinary_claims_require_extraordinary_evidence)

~~~
michaelochurch
I tried to read your reply and my brain threw this:

    
    
       internet.util.MindBlownException
       Caused by: DoucheOverloadException
           at lowSignalSnark(your.post:9)
       Caused by: MoronDoesntUnderstandDunningKrugerError
           at yabberYabber(your.post:11)

~~~
jamesaguilar
In other words, you have no salient objections to what I've said. Got it.

