Startup Lessons - a manual for aspiring entrepreneurs

There are infinite number of ways to fail a startup but in my experience, there is only one way to recover which is similar to getting up after a fall from riding a bike. You must first decide if you want to ride again. In another words, you must first make a binary decision, which is whether or not you want to try again. If you believe that being a successful entrepreneur is in your destiny, then there is no point of crying in the dirt (or even writing a post-mortem). But on the other hand, if you believe that you have had enough and don’t want to be an entrepreneur again, then you can do whatever you want and heck with what other people think. Either way entrepreneurship is a lonely business. Good luck, everyone.

I wish there were more detail to some of these points. For example, "Have an office, not someone's living room." This sounds reasonable, but why? What is it, specifically, about having an office that makes it so important? What if what he really meant to say was, "Have a space where your team can work without distractions; an office is ideal, a living room is not, because roommates will be walking through, the casual atmosphere is too distracting, and phone calls will disrupt the atmosphere." Otherwise, someone could read this manual, then go ahead and fill an office with couches, video games and other distractions that make it just as bad as (or worse than) an apartment.

This article seems a bit stupid. Most of those are not lessons, but pieces of advice, and they're generally unsubstantiated. Some of them I would outright disagree with. For example:

Have an office.

This should not be someone's apartment. It should not be a bunch of couches, though a couch for naps is good. It can be a coffee shop, though that's far from ideal. It should have tables and good wifi -- and some whiteboards if possible.

How is that a start-up lesson? Or even a valid piece of advice? Maybe the author(s) needs an office, but not everyone does.

Other pieces of advice are borderline useless:

Don't take too many shortcuts. Brute-force algorithms should be used judiciously. Encourage modularity when possible. Remember that ultimately components of your product might be worth money independently of the whole.

If you need this specific piece of advice, you can't understand this description of it.

All in all, this seems like a pot-pourri of oft-rehashed advice from blogs about starting up.

Probably this "article" seems to bad because it is not actually an article, but a wiki page where people have added their pieces of advice. Not a great strategy for writing a good article.

I think this kind of post is more interesting when presented as a detailed post-mortem, rather than a HOWTO. If you've just failed at X, don't try to teach others how to do X. Instead, write up your failure, dust yourself off, and have another go.

I read this post with great interest thinking, "This all pretty much makes sense, good advice, but nothing really earth shattering." Then a strange thing happened. I went back and reread the first paragraph under #1...

Be able to name names of users or potential users. They need to have a specific problem or pain point. Master that before moving on to bigger or better things, even if those bigger and better things are really tempting. If your product can serve multiple purposes, make sure it serves one of them completely before moving on to the others.

I realized that this is the most important advice that my mentor ever gave me. If you do this well, you really don't need to worry about anything else in this post.

I understand that this is tough in a B2C web app; you're not always sure who your consumer will be. But in a B2B app, this is the same advice as, "Find a Customer."

Working for a consumer (or consumers), busting your butt focusing on what is important to them, cures most of the other ills that the rest of this post addresses.

Just take a look at the rest of the bullets:

  - Have a clear and consistent vision, but refine it as often as needed.
  - Design is important.
  - Build your product well.
  - Iterate often.
  - Do your homework.
  - Work (mostly) normal hours.
  - Have an office.
  - Have a budget.
  - Be direct when dealing with personal differences.
  - Hold one another accountable.
  - Leaders need to handle company resources impeccably.
  - Provide communication channels.
  - Use your human resources wisely.
  - Poke your users often.
  - Build a solid and regular communication network.
  - Co-author any outgoing messages.
  - Use language your users (and potential users) can understand.

These are all important, but if you think about it for a moment, having a customer automatically forces you to do most of these already. You won't even have to think about them. Your customer(s) will make you do them well.

Even if what you build for your first set of consumers isn't exactly what you final product will be, it doesn't matter. They will make you get good at delivering something and that will be a good starting point for a more "industrial strength" product for everyone else.

Refining something built well for your early consumer(s) will be a lot easier than constantly thinking about what you're doing and how to do it. Do #1 well and the rest will follow.

a little fluffy.

Some good advice I think, though I would hardly call it a manual. A manual is all encompassing, not just a few tips.