
Matt Brezina: No One Cares About Your Stupid Little Startup - prakash
http://www.slideshare.net/brezina/no-one-cares-about-your-stupid-little-startup
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DanielBMarkham
This is all great stuff.

Be careful that you don't apply lessons too broadly. If you're selling high-
dollar, recurring sales items into big business it might be enough to have 100
purchasing managers love you. You probably don't need a media blitz.

As an aside, not particularly related to this story, one of the drawbacks of
learning from success is that every deck ends with how great things are. I
wonder 1) if sometimes luck gets disguised and genius and 2) if it wouldn't be
more useful to study failures than successes.

The commercial airline industry has a great safety record. They do this by
meticulously taking apart every accident that happens. Too bad we don't do
that in other fields.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_They do this by meticulously taking apart every accident that happens._

Well, the reason this works so well for airplanes is that the airplane used to
work, and everybody knows exactly what a working airplane is supposed to look
like.

In general, nobody has any idea what a working version of a failed startup
would have looked like. There are too many ways to succeed, and so many
chaotic events that affect the timeline in profound ways (imagine if the
inventor of CP/M hadn't been out when IBM came to call...) that you can't
really think about the various alternate histories without quickly running
into a combinatorial explosion. So I think your metaphor is not very useful.
;)

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Well, that used not to be the case, but the industry matured because they
started doing that.

My uncle is an aerobatics pilot, and he says that the main reason aviation is
so safe is due to the meticulous and ubiquitous use of check-lists. Every time
there's an accident the intent is to analyse it so we can update the check-
lists to prevent it from happening again.

You're right, we don't know what a successful startup should look like, but
they didn't used to know what a safe 'plane was like. Because of the
unrelenting analysis of crashes, we do now.

~~~
dasil003
I think the point still stands though. Success and failure in airplane flight
is very well defined, and the amount of human hours logged in designing,
building, flying, and analysis of one single and clearly-defined (even if
complex) task dwarfs the amount of resources available to startups (or any
company for that matter).

Not only is the problem space nearly infinite in comparison to flight, but the
"physics" governing business success change impossibly fast.

None of that is to say that we shouldn't study failures, but the question is
which failures have widely applicable lessons? If you indulge me to abuse the
analogy further, most startups are like those early flight attempts by people
who jumped from high places wearing ridiculous balsa and fabric contraptions.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Let's not go immediately to extremes -- obviously some sort of things work
better than some others. It's not as if there is no definition at all out
there. Things like incremental releases, getting close to the customer, or
wealth versus money are true no matter how your startup is configured or where
it operates.

I think the analogy might best be put at the borderline between flying-
chicken-man and the Sopwith. Obviously there are some folks that are flying,
and flying reliably, obviously some things work and some things don't -- so
now is the time to start writing it all down and sorting it out.

The problem is that we can't even see the airplanes of the folks who are
flying -- we just get to hear the cool stories about how they got from point A
to point B.

I look at places like DreamWorks which are able to capture "lightning in a
bottle" over and over again or some of the serial entrepreneurs out there, and
think that it is possible to take highly variable environments and put a
_little_ bit of structure around them. Nowhere near as much as aviation, but
like the other posters pointed out, the only reason we have that for aviation
is that a lot of smoldering craters became somebody else's life lesson.

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buckwilson
Enjoyed the slides for the most part. The importance of PR for startups cannot
be overstated. Get out there, get to know people, go to conferences, talk to
media, be personable. If you aren't this type of person, then hire one.

------
brezina
I was on a flight so I wasn't able to respond. I actually have a much more
indepth description of this preso on my blog

<http://www.mattbrezina.com/blog>

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skmurphy
A couple of lines I would change.

    
    
      slide 5 "added users from beta list when we needed lab rats"
      slide 10 "need business model to make sausage machine work."
      slide 19 "Journalists are lazy. Help them be lazy."
    

try

    
    
       added beta users as we could absorb their feedback
       <delete>
       journalists are busy, help them hit deadlines

~~~
gridspy
Yeah, there goes all the fun.

~~~
skmurphy
I don't think it's useful to label journalists as lazy or beta users as lab
rats. I am not trying to be politically correct: I think these terms can
introduce an unconscious framing that's harmful, and these are not labels
members of these groups would adopt for themselves.

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charliepark
Really appreciated these slides, and the notes on your blog. On the charts,
it'd be nice if the time scale were consistent. That 18 months of stealth
looks like the same length of time as the 2 months of the 10k - 12k beta.

But the preso and notes are great. Thanks.

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gcheong
Is there accompanying audio/video of the presentation? I always find just
seeing the slides leaves a lot of gaps in my understanding of the
presentation.

~~~
chubbard
Agreed. Lots of things I couldn't quite connect to what they were saying?
Particularly be a source of data section. But, this was a good topic.

~~~
count
From a PR perspective, if you're generating numbers/data that can be easily
used in reports by journalists - they will be used. As the deck says,
journalists are lazy. Being cited as a source because you provided the info in
the most accessible fashion is great for PR and cements you as a recognizable
authority.

