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Comment by shadowsun7 | Hacker News Reader

There's something about this that makes me slightly uncomfortable. It seems to me that there's a very fine line between perseverance and mediocrity (probably the same fine line between self-belief and self-delusion). I can, for instance, think of a number of startups that 'languished in mediocrity' ... until they got acquired. Blogger and Gravatar, for instance.[1]

Has anyone a better measurement for knowing when it is mediocrity and when it is perseverance?

[1] Funnily enough, both acquisitions freed up the respective founders to do bigger, better things: Evan Williams to Twitter, and Tom Preston-Werner to Github.

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Sam Altman had a pretty good litmus test for this:

"If no new or current users/advertisers/customers/etc care about what you're doing, and no one in the company has a plan (or, more commonly I think, a desire) to fix it, you are probably in bad shape."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95876

This sounds like a pretty high bar, but there are lots of startups in this position. Mine was when I folded it up - my cofounder had just left for business school, we'd been rejected by YC 3 times, we had basically no users, and I had run out of ideas for how to get users. I've met other founders in their mid-30s who've been working on their "startup" for the past 10 years, and are still in this position.

In contrast, Blogger and Gravatar both had thousands of happy users, and were growing, and had attracted the attention of some fairly important people (Dan Bricklin, anyone?) They weren't smash hits, but they were clearly on the right path in the dimension that matters - do people want what you make?

Ironic presence of Dan Bricklin, given the goals of The Software Garden.

There is really no way to know. Your product might be just one iteration away from making it big. There are products which take time to hit the up-curve on the hockey stick - case in point gmail.

This is the hardest part about entrepreneurship and as Ben Horowitz puts it in one of his posts - no amount of pattern matching can help. These decisions can only be made from the gut - and basically need to align the entrepreneurs longer term motivations with 'his' understanding of the individual merits of the business.

I don't think Blogger was languishing in mediocrity.

They had a lot of users, and more importantly lots of people cared about the services. You can always tell if people care by the volume of complaints when the service fails.

I don't know enough about Gravatar to comment on that case sensibly.

If there were a good measurement for that, I'm sure that entrepreneurship would be a much easier business.

Has anyone a better measurement for knowing when it is mediocrity and when it is perseverance?

It's not perfect, but this is somewhat a function of the person's knowledge of history and the current landscape of both competitors and technical tools.

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