
The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success - inmygarage
http://viniciusvacanti.com/2011/09/12/the-long-grind-before-you-become-an-overnight-success/
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jjmaxwell4
I think the most important advancements in history were done with a Long Grind
before a huge success. Einstein worked away in mediocrity, living what to most
people must have looked like a sub-par life on the surface. He toiled away on
his own for years, then came his stratospherical rise to the upper echelons of
human thought. Kant is another example; he spent 10 years alone in thought,
publishing nothing in that time, before coming out with what turned out the be
(arguably) the most influential philosophical work ever.

It seems that the hardest part is not losing faith as you're grinding away.
However corny/lame it sounds, people who believe in you are the most important
thing during the grind. How many people did you guys (yipit) have that had
your back as you were working away for 2+ years?

I'm not in the Valley, but I've heard that this might be the best part about
the it; you don't get judged for working on some random project full time(like
this article says happened in New York).

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alexkearns
I would have enjoyed this post a lot more if at the end they had not simply
created yet another bloody coupon site.

I can understand going through two and half years of no money, pain and self-
doubt if you were working on something world-changing. But just another bloody
coupon site...

I don't want to be down on these guys. They sound like really nice guys;
intelligent, persistent and bright. But, please, no, not another bloody coupon
site

~~~
lionhearted
(I didn't downvote you)

I think it's important to make a distinction between businesses that are
aesthetically pleasing and appealing to you, and business-in-general that's
successful. Lessons from business-in-general can be very useful even if you
wouldn't patronize them yourself and it's always nice when people open up
about their experience.

Unless a business is actively knowingly hurting people, I think it's good to
celebrate business-in-general even if the aesthetics/offers don't appeal to
you.

~~~
jayliew
Yup. It's kind of like being a web developer and building a startup. You have
to be clear that you're trying to build a business, not a web site.

In business, you don't get points for being creative/sexy and win by getting
the most points. You win by simply winning. At business.

Seriously, there is no reason to be so negative towards anybody's startup, no
matter how "bloody" you think it is. Be happy for other people.

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mdoerneman
As a 31 year old with a full-time job to pay the bills and a family to raise,
I feel like there is not enough time to act on my ideas so they just continue
to collect dust. Stories like this give me motivation but I still haven't
found the answer to the question: "how can I focus on my ideas full-time and
still pay the bills and support my growing family?". In other words, I don't
have the savings for _two and half years of hustling on no salary_ and I don't
see that changing anytime soon. I will continue searching for the answer.
Thanks for the story!

~~~
patio11
You take a look at your life, identify that hour here and half-hour there that
aren't getting you closer to where you want to be, and use them for nights-
and-weekends hacking. Then you start a long slog of little-by-little
improvement. Eventually, the business eclipses the day job, and you quit. If
you feel like it, you can then start another slog.

I have a very modestly successful small business, built over the last five
years and change. At all points over that interval, I had sufficient income to
maintain a wife and children to a standard of living commonly accepted among
middle class folks where I live.

There are other options, such as "Transition from full-time salaried
employment to contracting/consulting/etc, make a lot more money than you do
right now, buy time with money."

~~~
astrofinch
Do contracting and consulting really pay reliably more than salaried work?

In either case it seems like programmers make enough money to save up living
expenses if they only lived like people in blue-collar professions. I saved
enough money from my summer coding internship for many months runway easily.
($3000 a month from my internship plus a $3000 stipend; both after taxes;
$1000 a month estimated burn rate based on $750 a month for rent and utilities
and ~$5 daily food budget by buying all of my food from the dollar store.)

~~~
Egregore
When consulting doesn't pay it gives you time to work on your project.

~~~
astrofinch
All that really matters is how much you get paid per hour right? If high
paying hours were easier to come by through salaried work, you could just work
at a job with a salary for a year and then quit.

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collinalexander
This post reminds me of a philosophy held by Seymour Schulich, Canadian
businessman and philanthropist. His philosophy:

"Your twenties are not a time to make money, they are a time to build your
foundation; your thirties are when you make money."

The exact ages are peripheral, but the idea is sound: incur personal strength
and experience and external success will ( _be more likely to_ ) follow.

Mark Suster's post about a time to learn and a time to earn hints at this same
idea: [http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-
for...](http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/04/is-it-time-for-you-to-
earn-or-to-learn/)

~~~
mahyarm
Making money building your foundation is usually better than not making money
doing so.

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bootload
_"... In all honesty, I probably would have given up earlier. The only reason
why I didn’t was out of loyalty to my co-founder, Jim, who had also quit his
finance job. He had passed up many amazing job opportunities to work alongside
me and I wasn’t going to quit on him. ..."_

Interesting observation. The advantage of having multiple founders is shown
here where _"accountability to comrades"_ , _"bonding"_ , and _"mutual
surveillance"_ [0] means the founders stuck at the task long after a solo
founder might quit in despair.

[0] David Grossman, P21, _"Defeating the Enemy’s Will: The Psychological
Foundations of Maneuver Warfare"_ ~
<http://killology.com/defeating_the_enemys_will.pdf>

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johnrob
This is a pretty good case against the notion that "ideas don't matter". They
absolutely matter; how else can 3 days so drastically change the prospects of
a company?

~~~
leon_
Would you have bought that idea for $1 million?

No one says ideas don't matter. Without a good idea even the best execution
will yield nothing. Ideas alone are just not that much worth. (Other way round
this is true too.)

I'm sure that if 100 teams would have tried to execute this specific idea many
of them would have failed.

Don't be just the idea guy and don't be just the execution guy. Try to be both
:)

~~~
gfodor
"No one says ideas don't matter." This is patently false. People say "Ideas
are nothing, execution is everything" all. the. time. and it's just as wrong
every time they do.

~~~
sdrinf
What they really mean by that, is _ideas are on the critical 1%_. You can mess
up a lot on the execution, and still have a viable business; but if you're
building the wrong thing, no amount of execution will save you.

But! In terms of energy spent, ideation consumes less, than a percent of the
total investment: hence, a guy with an idea (even if it's the right one) can't
claim to have invested much _effort_ into the business as the one researching
/ custdeving / building it.

~~~
gfodor
Time and time again people jump to the defense of people saying "ideas don't
matter" by saying that's not what they _really_ mean. If not, why not just
_say that_ , instead of such hyperbole that certainly gets misinterpreted.

~~~
dasil003
The reason is because the world is full of people who believe they have a
billion dollar idea, and all they need is to "find an engineer to build it".
By contrast, there is not a single engineer running around offering to pay
$10,000 for a killer idea so they can use it to execute their way to a
billion-dollar business.

~~~
gfodor
Thats true, but there are also surely people executing on poorly thought
through or uninspiring ideas since they've been told to not go through the
various thought exercises one should go though before settling on an idea for
a new venture.

~~~
dasil003
If you lack the common sense to realize that in order to sell something people
need to be willing to buy it, then all the startup wisdom in the world won't
help you.

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danmaz74
Very good post, I especially liked that they built the winning minimum
available product so fast: It would have been most likely impossible without
all the learning and failed attempts. Unfortunately, some things you can only
learn by doing.

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larrys
WSJ has taken to calling them a research firm "According to estimates from
research firm Yipit Data" in an article about groupon

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190426550457656...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904265504576566804156893080.html)

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ArbitraryLimits
Mostly the lesson I'm getting from this post is not to quit your day job until
you have some evidence of traction.

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cousin_it
Okay, how do I tell the kind of long grind that leads to overnight success
from the kind of long grind that leads to nothing?

~~~
robjohnson
And that's the difficult thing. It's inspiring to hear about how a team's
long-running lack of constructive feedback finally led to success, but what
about the 20 other teams who have gone 3 years and still haven't found it?
Don't get me wrong, I like reading stories like this, but there is a lot more
at play.

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iamclovin
The hardest question which I battle with is knowing when is the right time to
fold and start afresh. PG's 'Relentlessly Resourceful' post ties in very well
this - <http://paulgraham.com/relres.html>

Great story, very inspiring!

~~~
collinalexander
I agree. I remember reading Seth Godin's book "The Dip" and the same conundrum
is presented: when do you push through the dip and when do you quit?

He says you should quit when you're in a cul-de-sac or heading towards a dead
end, both ultimately ending unfavourably. A dip, on the other hand, has a low
point that feels like a dead end but inevitably gets better the longer you
persist.

A good, short read that gives some suggestions to deciphering which is which
if you're interested.

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dr_
This is really inspirational for people who are working at it, hard, but don't
get traction immediately, and all the while are reading about others whose
businesses just skyrocketed right away.

It's not always a launch to the moon, sometimes you have to orbit for a while.

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Omnipresent
How do you guys make money from being in the deal aggregating business.

~~~
vacanti
affiliate revenue, advertising revenue, data licensing revenue

~~~
ohyes
Your 'about' says that you learned Django and Python, is that what you are
using for Yipit? What does your technology stack look like?

~~~
AdamN
The stack is all Python (2.7) using Django (1.3) on Ubuntu (11.04) and it
works great. Python is fantastically easy to program and Django does plenty of
heavy lifting. We use the ORM in about 95% of the queries and raw SQL in the
other 5% (The Django ORM doesn't handle all m2m queries very well).

We use Celery for asynchronous processing and everything is running on Amazon
Web Services. We use ec2, RDS, S3, SQS, CloudFront, Route53, and ELB so we are
heavily invested on that front.

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rglover
Really inspiring article. It's great to attach positives to what you're doing
not only to keep your morale up, but also to remind yourself that if what
you're working on now doesn't pan out, it's not the end. Crazy to learn,
though, that they managed to turn around their business in a matter of three
days. Impressive that they kept with it and had the focus to transition to
another idea (and make it successful).

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DallaRosa
Nice post! I've just had a failing experience but that also served to teach me
some of the problems and difficulties involved in creating a startup. I'm
happy you guys made it and I'm gonna keep trying till I find my place there
too.

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astrofinch
As cheesy as it may sound I find this song helps me keep in mind that I should
_expect_ things to take a lot of time and effort.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1iR2Wi3u5o>

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lallouz
Great post Vin! A great story and inspiration for everyone who is grinding
hard in the startup life. We all need a little reminder that its a slogfest
before you make it.

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jsvd
I remember a very nice 2d chart of success vs time with an exponential curve,
with a vertical line near the high rise, showing what people see vs what
really happens.

Can anyone find it?

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tled
What is the differences, advantages that you guys (Yipit) have over other
competitors (e.g 8coupons.com)?

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suurvarik
Awesome post. I really liked the instructions about getting inital press.

I'am sure it will help me along the way. Thanks.

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toblender
One can not plant a seed and expect fruit the next day.

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Hisoka
Just a question about Yipit... don't they need millions of visitors to be
successful?

100K visitors/month sounds nice, but they're in the deal aggregating business,
so the margins are even less than if they were a deal site. They don't make
money off every single user, and when they do... they make a tiny percentage
as affiliate commission. Am I missing something here? I know regular old-
fashioned coupon sites(like CouponCabin) that make good profit, but they have
visitors in the millions, and their margin is much more.

~~~
diolpah
Yeah, you're missing something. It's 2011, and we're in the middle of a huge
bubble. The only thing that matters to most new startups is "getting funded".
Making money is merely a sideshow to the main event, which is growing traffic
and conducting round after round of follow-on financing.

~~~
cageface
If only we'd gone through something like this before and knew better than to
make the same mistakes all over again.

~~~
pyre
This Time It's Different(tm)

