Lessons That Might Have Saved Our Business Had We Learned Them Earlier | Hacker News Reader

Lessons That Might Have Saved Our Business Had We Learned Them Earlier

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42 pointsjacobwg11 comments

Summary - (1) make money fast, (2) say no to new features unless necessary, (3) dominate small core markets, then expand, (4) really listen to feedback, (5) really listen to your team, (6) trust your users.

Every time I see one of these letters, it saddens me to think how strongly the current SV model pushes growth before value. You might say it's best for VCs but not for founders, but does even the VC see the upside they might have gotten with more patience?

What these stories seem to say...Groupon isn't a deviation; it's the most successful incarnation of a broken and widely promoted growth model whose typical end state is this.

Groupon's created a ton of actual value with their product. Groupon's issues have less to do with value delivered and more to do with competition and their stock being over-valued.

Agreed.

Inside of that (formerly) $16 billion company is a really wonderful $2 billion company fighting to get out.

The principle problem with Groupon wasn't the competition or the stock being overvalued. Groupon's main problem is that their acquisition costs were so high that they couldn't make money.

Competition only became a drag on them when users began to get fatigued with daily deals. But even if users didn't get tired of daily deals, their business model simply wasn't on the path to profitability.

CPA is closely tied to competition.

Its the same story but when you're knee deep, its easy to forget the fundamentals.

TLDR: we made nearly every rookie mistake in the book.

“A ‘build it and they will come’ mentality has taken over the startup space."

I don't want to sound patronizing (but I will anyway). "Has taken" is the wrong verb tense. It's been that way for over a decade, particularly for early stage startups with technical founders. Find yourself some better advisors next time around, if you failed on rookie mistakes, you'll have little hope of solving the "level 2" problems without some seasoned counsel.

Back in the late 90s people used to walk around saying "GBQ": Get Big Quick.

Changing the name of the concept to "traction" doesn't change that cashflow matters.

For anyone like me who would mostly hit the link to check, this is a recruitment service rather than the app-based social network by the guy with the day and night iPhones.

Do you chalk it up to a failure of execution? Or was the core concept not viable?

I've always thought some kind of OkCupid approach to matching job seekers and employers would be very useful. GroupTalent seems to be doing something similar, but mostly focused on developers.

There's definitely believe there's room in the market to displace contingent recruiters, create efficiency, drive down costs, and create a much more pleasant experience for both sides of the transaction.

One key with job seekers: there's a narrow window of opportunity to make matches. If you have quality talent, but you lack intent to switch jobs, nothing happens.

Likewise, if you have a huge pool of talent - and only some of it is good - you create too much work for the employers to filter/sort, and they are better off just using LinkedIn/Entelo/TalentBin to play spray & pray game - also known as guess & check - at a lower cost.

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