

Embracing the Incrementality Mentality - dmor
http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/08/embracing-the-incrementality-mentality/

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johnrob
Thank you - that is good, hard earned knowledge from the trenches. We don't
often get that these days.

I would offer one piece of advice to anyone trying to stay on course: when you
experience those early highs (launch, fundraising, etc), try to explicitly
capture how you feel and why you feel that way. Write it out somewhere you
won't lose it, then make a habit of re-reading it regularly. There's nothing
foolish about that phase of optimism. It's no worse then some future dose
fueled by a new tangent. Keep that optimistic mental image around and use it
to fuel new attacks in what can become a boring fight.

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gingerlime
Sorry to complain, it was a good post, but those loopy animated gifs seriously
distract me from being able to read properly.

Maybe I have some strange attention disorder, but the last part of the post I
felt like I just can't concentrate on the text because the moving images kept
grabbing my attention.

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agumonkey
pipe it through printfriendly.com, no chrome, no image (if so desired), simple
typography.

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gingerlime
Thanks for the tip! I normally use instapaper to read stuff offline, but some
things are easier to read on the spot.

I wonder if printerfriendly can also help in combination with instapaper -
some pages, e.g. paul graham's blog (and others) are not converted properly to
epub on instapaper for some strange reason. Will give it a try.

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agumonkey
Yeah they all try to infer meaning from html structure but none can be
perfect. I switch from printfriendly, readability or simply disabling css in
firefox.

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rbrbrbrubyrubyr
It amazes me that pg (who has seen a lot more startups than I have) sees 5-10%
WEEKLY growth as a reasonable target. That is amazing. I suppose its really
the difference in "startup" and "lifestyle business" (more my style) right
there - the pure scale of the growth.

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noelwelsh
That 5-10% per week is probably only for a very short period. From the
article:

 _Important context for this advice, which I believe is often missed, is that
the majority of companies in YC launch during the tail end of the program._

So we're talking about companies launching a few weeks before demo day, making
a big splash, and getting some nice numbers for demo day. When you've only
been launched for four weeks it comparatively easy to get great numbers like
this.

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wellboy
Yeah, especially if your user base is in the low thousands, if you toss in a
$1,000 into marketing per week, you should get a few hundred users from that
:)

