I'm reminded of the story of Abe Wald: <a href="https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...</a><p>He ran a statistics office during WW2, and collected data on surviving airplanes. To paraphrase his findings: reinforcements don't go where the bullet holes are. They go where the bullet holes _aren’t_.<p>Similarly, when none of these mistakes killed the company, so to the extent that all companies are the same model of airplane flying in unfriendly skies, they shouldn't consider these mistakes necessarily existential.
> <i>Most things in life are win-lose — someone gains, and someone loses. But networks are one of the few things that are win-win.</i><p>That's one of the saddest things I've read all week, and I think profoundly wrong. Does one party or the other really lose in <i>most</i> things in life? Surely it must be the opposite - both parties in a voluntary transaction or interaction have gained something by it.<p>I once had a friend who explained a similar idea this way: "There is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. Whenever anyone gains wealth, it always means that someone else has to lose wealth."
I really enjoyed this article, but calling "being sales driven, not product driven" a mistake doesn't make any sense to me -- had they not made the call to be unit-economics-focused, they might have gotten into some product-perfecting rabbit hole and failed to generate the traction needed to actually keep their company afloat. This is something I notice in a lot of articles like this; they say "we should have done X instead" without acknowledging that doing X would have exposed you to a bunch of unknown unknowns, any one of which would have sunk you. I agree though that in general "make something that people love" is sage advice, but using the fact that your company succeeded, though not quite as quickly as you would have wished, as evidence for it just seems invalid.
Usually these articles are nothing but fluff, but this was an interesting one.<p>I realize that's (ironically) a fairly empty statement to make, but I'm sure the author will be pleased to hear it.
>>> ... in purchasing SoapBox for the entire company. They’re an old school business. 500M Revenue and 23 people.<p>Err, wow. that's 20M per employee ... I am astounded - is that real? 100,000 to 300,000 is common in consultancy style services, I mean even Google has ~100k people on ~100bn which is 1M per person<p>So really 20M per employee is stupidly "out there".<p># google numbers - yeah ok I mean Alphabet, but more accurately 90k people vs 110bn but few years ago it was 40k vs 50bn so not changed much - ratio of about 1.1M per seems consistent - and Google is rinsing the productivity making the 23 people at 500M seem even more ridiculous. Maybe some obscure fintech? maybe big revenue low income? would love to know more
Point #2 about being sales focus instead of product focused reminds me of a town hall that Jobs had when he came back to Apple...<p><a href="https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-demonstrated-the-perfect-w.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/20-years-ago-steve-jobs-de...</a><p><i>The hardest thing is: How does that fit into a cohesive, larger vision, that's going to allow you to sell eight billion dollars, 10 billion dollars of product a year? And one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it.</i><p>And doing the opposite led to the Apple Watch.<p>If Apple had been a smaller company, it wouldn’t have had the chance to right the ship by version 3.
The money quote for me was when he said:<p>"In today’s tech, you definitely want to scale your business with electricity, not people. Let your people figure out how to do that."<p>Liked it so much I tweeted it.
This is a really insightful article. However, I feel like point 2 somewhat contradicts point 1. I.e. In my opinion, being product-driven often forces you to <i>innovate</i> in some way. I guess there is a balance to be struck here and in the end it comes down to feedback-loops from customers directly rather than pondering over what they may want to use.
I think in our startup we are at the part where we are making all kinds of mistakes. We are Starting our third year next month however we are still making mistakes.
Wow. This is spot on.<p>I am the CTO of growing startup and every single point resonated with me.<p>I wish I'd read this 3 years ago and heeded your advice.
My learning from this article:<p>1. An app for 1:1s is a <i>real</i> business!<p>2. You need 30 people to run this business!<p>3. Stay away from articles titled "M things for N things". You will find pointless regrets like "Not trusting my gut". So what's the solution? Trust your gut all the time?