How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?
cenedella.com
cenedella.com
"You are asserting that, despite the presence of 7 billion other people on the planet, ... you have come up with an idea, a business, a company that none of those other wonderful human beings have thought to invent yet."
Tell that to the Chinese immigrants running the convenience store around the corner. Their unoriginal idea is putting the kids through college.
M
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Plenty of companies had the same basic idea as an existing company and still made it big. Sometimes execution really is the most important part ex: Dropbox.
If each day you're making progress towards the things that will make you're specific venture sustainable then you're on the right track. otherwise its time to adjust.
Not really. Most entrepreneurial ventures are not based around ideas that nobody else has done yet. They usually involve a known business model or idea done better, in a different place, or at a more opportune time.
After lots and lots of progress and zero results, then you are probably on the verge of failure.
"I've decided on which web framework to use, so yes."
"My tests now have 100% code coverage, so yes."
"I added a new feature that I think may or may not help 1% of my hypothetical customer base, so yes."
As someone who hasn't launched yet, it's easy to wrap yourself in the security blanket of "progress". But progress that doesn't involve customers paying you more money than yesterday is bullshit.
/me leaves to lock himself in his office until he launches.
launch, launch, launch, launch.
marc
And then there is that whole thing about results...
- product development progress
- market/customer development progress
Not having launched the product (esp. in the consumer market) as early as possible is definitely one such factor.
The problem is that successful companies have layers upon layers of processes and refinements, all of which (in a healthy company) play some role in their ongoing success. But the marginal benefit of 99.99% of these things is irrelevant to a startup, and the assets that an (internet) startup has to protect are nil at the beginning.
This is one of the reasons very young people are often successful despite inexperience; they can focus on building a compelling product—something they've known very intimately for their whole lives growing up with the internet and mobile phones—rather than the trappings of "business".
To get back to your point:
> if you discover that people don't like the product you rushed out the door, it might be because you rushed it out the door.
If you built the wrong product up front, then it's better to learn that by getting real feedback, rather than laboring on a false premise in secret. I think stealth mode has pretty much been debunked by now. The bottom line is that you can launch a shitty product, and it doesn't matter because know one fucking cares. You may have all these grandiose dreams, but getting attention and traction is a huge ongoing uphill muddy slog. If you have a seed of a good idea, but it's very poorly implemented, at least you will pick up a few very early adopters, and they will be the ones providing the most valuable feedback to make the next refinement and layer on the next batch of slightly-less-early adopters.
It is those people that only see 12 months or 2 years through an idea that often fail. The realization that comes with experience is that if you want anything to be HUGE is takes more than 2 years. I'm really only coming to grips with that after 5-6 years on naively planning and following dreams.
I think what separates real entrepreneurs from wantrepreneurs is how they handle the barriers and low periods that are natural with any startup.
marc
How do you measure against those goals?
If you know what success is supposed to look like for you, then it should be easy to tell if you're failing or succeeding.
"Released a product" isn't a metric for success. If you haven't released you can't start measuring.
If you are doing a bad job, they will scream bloody murder. If not, they don't care, and you are doomed anyway.
It's been my experience that purposeful founders do not fail. Patience is always reqired for success and politeness costs you nothing. If a founding team has a sense of purpose, a realistic idea of the amount of work it takes to succeed (patient), and is able to encourage others to assist them (polite) I normally see these as markers for success.
I think the behaviors he is actually highlighting are perfectionism (not patience), an unwillingess to test your vision by getting out of the BatCave and talking to prospects, and being afraid to take prudent risks.