
Lessons That Might Have Saved Our Business Had We Learned Them Earlier - jacobwg
http://blog.path.to/post/55607312083/six-lessons-that-might-have-saved-our-business-had-we
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xianshou
Summary - (1) make money fast, (2) say no to new features unless necessary,
(3) dominate small core markets, then expand, (4) _really_ listen to feedback,
(5) _really_ listen to your team, (6) trust your users.

Every time I see one of these letters, it saddens me to think how strongly the
current SV model pushes growth before value. You might say it's best for VCs
but not for founders, but does even the VC see the upside they might have
gotten with more patience?

What these stories seem to say...Groupon isn't a deviation; it's the most
successful incarnation of a broken and widely promoted growth model whose
typical end state is this.

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zaidf
Groupon's created a ton of actual value with their product. Groupon's issues
have less to do with value delivered and more to do with competition and their
stock being over-valued.

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GVIrish
The principle problem with Groupon wasn't the competition or the stock being
overvalued. Groupon's main problem is that their acquisition costs were so
high that they couldn't make money.

Competition only became a drag on them when users began to get fatigued with
daily deals. But even if users didn't get tired of daily deals, their business
model simply wasn't on the path to profitability.

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zaidf
CPA is closely tied to competition.

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cobbzilla
TLDR: we made nearly every rookie mistake in the book.

“A ‘build it and they will come’ mentality has taken over the startup space."

I don't want to sound patronizing (but I will anyway). "Has taken" is the
wrong verb tense. It's been that way for over a decade, particularly for early
stage startups with technical founders. Find yourself some better advisors
next time around, if you failed on rookie mistakes, you'll have little hope of
solving the "level 2" problems without some seasoned counsel.

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jacques_chester
Back in the late 90s people used to walk around saying "GBQ": Get Big Quick.

Changing the name of the concept to "traction" doesn't change that cashflow
matters.

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prawn
For anyone like me who would mostly hit the link to check, this is a
recruitment service rather than the app-based social network by the guy with
the day and night iPhones.

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csears
Do you chalk it up to a failure of execution? Or was the core concept not
viable?

I've always thought some kind of OkCupid approach to matching job seekers and
employers would be very useful. GroupTalent seems to be doing something
similar, but mostly focused on developers.

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Matt_Mickiewicz
There's definitely believe there's room in the market to displace contingent
recruiters, create efficiency, drive down costs, and create a much more
pleasant experience for both sides of the transaction.

One key with job seekers: there's a narrow window of opportunity to make
matches. If you have quality talent, but you lack intent to switch jobs,
nothing happens.

Likewise, if you have a huge pool of talent - and only some of it is good -
you create too much work for the employers to filter/sort, and they are better
off just using LinkedIn/Entelo/TalentBin to play spray & pray game - also
known as guess & check - at a lower cost.

