

The 10 Mistakes I've made...so you don't have to - brianl
http://www.slideshare.net/missrogue/the-10-mistakes-ive-madeso-you-dont-have-to

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tarahunt
Wow. Thanks for putting my presentation on Hacker News. I believe this is my
first appearance here. :) If you have any questions, feel free to ask! (p.s.
thanks Jerome for jumping in! that's why he's an amazing cofounder!)

And point taken re: stock photos, not putting all of the points up front (more
for the audiences sake) and using Guy Kawasaki's stuff...

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alperakgun
I m afraid there are uncountable number of possible mistakes, on top of the
ten you have stressed. And all those mistakes usually occur due to sticking to
rigid rules rather than trying to be flexible at different stages of business
lives, but some occur due tho being flexible rather than having rigid
principles.

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happyfeet
Gems! I just went through this & felt compelled to thank - dropped a note to
author.

Very nice presentation with plenty of pictures & amazingly good words of
wisdom all through.

One thing that stood out for me is this: "just because your competitors have
raised more $$ doesn't mean they will win. (we've watched 10 competitors raise
oodles of dough and then shutter or pivot)". (paraphrased it).

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lien
these are good slides. just realized that buyosphere is the same as pinterest.

one succeeded and one didn't (or maybe hasn't yet?). my first observation
about buyosphere is that the name itself drives users away. to the user, it
kind of sounds like spam, a site where they have to buy stuff.

and..."pinterest" is resonates better with the user.

so give a choice, i'd probably choose pinterest, even though the two sites you
could say are similar.

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jeromeparadis
For the record, I'm the CTO and co-founder of Buyosphere.

Yes, for the moment, Buyosphere may at a first glance look a lot like
Pinterest. At the moment, the main visible difference is: we focus around
products people want or have... and the site is much slower (that will be
solved soon). The end goal is to help people discover products they want.
Hence the name Buyosphere.

We're working on a nice twist that will be released at the end of the month.
It will make our unique value proposition much clearer. Stay tuned!

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mhartl
I'd add "know when to quit". Determination by itself is great, but sometimes
the right thing to do is to abandon your current startup and work on something
else. How do you know when to quit? Unfortunately, there's no formula for
that. (My tendency, if anything, is to quit too late.)

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dasil003
When is it better to quit then to pivot? Seems like with pivoting you are able
to make better use of your experience then if you quit and start something
completely new.

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mhartl
I can't say in general, but I can share my own experience. I did a YC startup,
struggled, quit, and made the Rails Tutorial (which has gone _extremely_
well). There wasn't any way to pivot from the startup to the tutorial; they
are completely different kinds of businesses. Among other things, my startup
had a cofounder and investors (i.e., YC), whereas the Rails Tutorial is a solo
enterprise. Developing an intuition for when to shut things down and move onto
something new is an invaluable skill, one I'm only beginning to master.

~~~
Hisoka
How do you do marketing for Rails Tutorial? is it mostly search organic
traffic? paid traffic? word of mouth?

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mhartl
Inbound links, organic search, and word-of-mouth are the main methods. I
experimented with AdWords, but the conversion rate wasn't good enough, and I
was too lazy to try to improve it.

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robjohnson
“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to
success when they gave up.” - Thomas Edison. I've never seen that quote before
but I love it. Great slideshow and thanks for sharing.

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pothibo
Would be cool to have this presentation on <http://speakerdeck.com/>

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wmeredith
Normally I would down-vote such a comment, being that it's all promotion and
no contribution...

But I clicked the link and have to say that site is gorgeous. I signed up to
give it a try.

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pothibo
I'm no where affiliated with the site, I like, like yourself, how clean their
service is compared to slideshare.

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ericmsimons
"Stop thinking about the big picture. Start thinking about creating value
NOW."

Learned this one the hard way.

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wmeredith
69 slides? How long was the presentation?

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zecho
They're all brief. I imagine she flew through them.

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j_col
Excellent presentation, I love the slide with the Gartner-esque magic
quadrant!

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geekytenny
pdfs please.... i loved it.

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shadowsun7
There's a download link at the top of the presentation - though you'll need to
log in to do so.

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Hitchhiker
Awesome. Like the Venn diagram particularly ;-)

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par
I think there is a lot of refreshing stuff going on in this slide deck, thank
you for sharing!

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magsafe
She obviously didn't get the memo about the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint.

<http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html>

If I had been in a room where she presented this live, I would've fallen
asleep in about 5 minutes.

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wink
To quote from that article:

"this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement"

And that's exactly it. This seemed like a talk people attended because it
sounded interesting or insightful (and I found very interesting indeed) and
not a pitch.

Especially technical talks (and let's be generous and file it as technical
under entrepreneurship, but much more so about programming/etc topics) aren't
bad just because of an abundance of slides. To the contrary, I very much
appreciate elaborate slides on slideshare/etc so I can get something out of
the talk without having attended.

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sixtofour
I clicked the first 2 or 3 slides, and did not see all ten mistakes listed at
once. I am NOT going to click through 60 odd slides to see if it might be
worth my time to click through 60 odd slides.

Probably decent advice in here, the comment is more on attracting views. Let
me know it's worth it.

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e1ven
I really enjoyed the presentation. It's designed more like a paper that's
spread across 60 "pages" than a keynote speech, but there's quite a bit of
good advice there.

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phzbOx
Take guts to do that, thanks.

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pothibo
Very nice presentation, loved the tables, very helpful

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rottendoubt
Love it! Great words of wisdom.

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Hisoka
I like the point about how being in covers of tech blogs doesn't mean much.
It's all mostly noise, and if one did a study, I bet they'd find the failure
rate of startups covered by tech blogs to be around the same as the overall
failure rate of the average business. E

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Joakal
Confirmation bias.

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TheSOB88
Cofounders need good conflict resolution skills. Sounds pretty obvious, but
this is the first piece I've seen that says it outright.

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ethank
Bone - pick:

Please, if you are going to upload a presentation online after giving it, have
a version tailored for Slideshare or Speakerdeck.

Please for the love of all that is holy in the world: stop with the meme's,
stock photo + funny/ironic text. Getty Images et al have some funny stuff, and
if you type "guy frustrated with the world with frizzy hair" you'll likely
find something, but it's over-played.

For the most part, presentations work better online as a visual accompaniment
to a really well thought out and concise blog post.

With no info graphics please.

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gojomo
I would rather speakers upload exactly what they presented, as soon as
possible after a presentation, than spend time (and perhaps never actually
complete) making a custom version 'tailored for online' or 'reduced to blog
post'.

It's great if they want to make other versions, but it's no knock against them
for sharing what they've got, in the form they've got it.

TL;DR: Commenters' peeves, in a totally different forum, are not the
presenters' problem.

