betterlabs

Thanks for sharing - I might go. Sounds interesting.

Thank you!

Its "Gandhi" and not "Ghandi".

Peldi, I think your product rocks which is what counts. I am not sure how partly taking a homepage design from another site is a big deal and not relevant to this conversation.

Exactly. There are a lot of circumstantial aspects that leads to success which cannot be captured in advice at all. Those cannot be recreated, of course. 37Signals' advice is solid, but many times when they imply that its the best way to do something, I tend to disagree.

Great article! All the points are right on the mark - but open to interpretation as I can see from the comments so far. We meet a lot of founders and I see them pointing out to Outliers all the time. Getting Real book and stuff like that. If one could write a book to build a successful startup or emulate Outliers, we'd all be running billion dollar companies. There's a lot more to success than a single recipe.

Most importantly, I think you can learn from Outliers and apply but think of your OWN WAY TO BUCK CONVENTIONAL WISDOM and do it in a way that you believe it and are passionate about making it happen.

Good point, I guess there's stuff you can learn from the past and the rest is really dependent on your particular scenario where iterative development is the best way to find a version that "works".

Thanks.

You are right that its not new per se, but I am not sure if founders are leveraging all the knowledge one can gain from archives of successful sites to learn from them. For example, I was looking at Etsy's homepage when they launched and I think it was very clever for a community/marketplace site that has the classic chicken and egg problem.