Hi Davies! Founder of Aevy here. Incredibly sorry for this. I used your name and image as an example when sketching the front page internally. I intended to replace you before going live, but completely forgot! I understand that you're upset, will get this fixed and deployed as soon as possible. Again, sorry!
Could someone explain why "signals of growth", or as in this case "momentum", would be relevant to anyone? I understand that actual growth stats might be difficult to get hold of, but I think I'd rather have 200 of those than 200 000 "weekly growth of web traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, employees, and social media".
I'd suggest "signals of growth" & "momentum" are a proxy for a site that has repeat traffic & systematic word of mouth. You can't maintain the momentum of growth unless you retain a significant number of new visitors.
If new visitors are developing the habit of repeat visits, thats a strong signal the startup has discovered a formula that strikes a chord with their niche/market.
Agree - to assume based on analogy seems risky. Taking the Musk "first principle" road and then navigating based on feedback the "lean" way is what makes the most sense to me.
I'm guessing: There will always be people who think they know why your idea won't work. It's in the nature of the game (http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html etc). Founders who take these people's opinions seriously are more likely to give up.
Agree. He seems to struggle with how to interpret the "want" part of of "make something people want". The point of this sentence as I've learned the hard way through sales, pain points etc is that "want" and "should want" are not the same things.
Even though Francis Pedraza's intuition says that people should want something, it's not certain that they actually do (and will pay for it). For example, my intuition tells me it'll be really difficult to build a business around his Everest app but if there's something to learn from Lean it's that intuition rarely is sufficient. (And I'm sure the Everest team proves my intuition wrong with good growth and feedback).
Though, in general, I love visionary startups and founders but I don't think that a grand vision should be an excuse for not validating the value and growth hypothesis.
And of course he has a good point in that startups often need many iterations to find the exact product that their customers want and since these iterations can be painful it's very helpful, if not necessary, for founders to be vision driven.
Wouldn't it be a good idea for Github to set up a video + sound stream from their office when these things occur? I for one would watch. Can't really work anyway (at least that's what I persuade myself to think).
Alright, perhaps ordinary web cams on the faces of the employees involved? Just seeing the hard work and stress in their eyes would be pretty soothing. That might be an idea for any site: "We're currently down, but here are the faces in real-time of our engineers trying to fix it".
Maybe they would, but I'm sure a bunch of people would also be wondering why they waste their time on putting on a show instead of fixing their core business :P
It's bizarre that this type of essential advice is news to so many founders (including me). It's understandable from the VCs perspective though. Since they're mostly in it for huge exits it's rational for them to prefer companies with zero revenue, but good traction, over profitable (or close to profitable) companies with the same traction. Simply because the close to profitable company will have much more leverage than the zero-revenue one. In fact, a zero-revenue company who has been aiming at a VC Series A will often be forced to accept the term sheet at one or another VC whereas the profitable or close to profitable always can downsize, get a loan etc if they're not comfortable with the terms they can get at a VC. All this is because profitability isn't to the VC that much of a hint of long-term mega success as some growth metrics might be.
Related to this, it's a shame that the VC terms are often not well understood among first-time founders. If they were, I'm sure more people would try the revenue-route.
For a founder, it all boils down to how much this possible revenue will harm overall growth. In some cases (Instagram etc) it really does. In most other cases, it does not (or very little). But the zero-revenue route is easy to decide on since it's less work. "Yeah, let's take sales and all that later on" is easy to say especially when endorsed by the VC industry.
