Do Not Start A Startup: Or, What I Learned At Startup School 2011

&#60;RANT&#62;<p>Why can't Justin.TV fix their platform so that people can find the videos?<p>Every single time there is a startup school thread on HN, there is a sub thread of Justin.TV urls passed around like dodgy bittorrent urls. Surely the platform should support this?<p>The titles on the URLs make it even worse: "Broadcasting LIVE on Justin.tv" - hours &#38; days after it isn't being broadcast, isn't live and is only on Justin.TV because they happened to record it.<p>&#60;/RANT&#62;

I read about whether or not to start a startup on hacker news often. In these discussions there's always the 'startups fail', 'billion dollar company'. I can say 2 things about these two things.<p>For myself, failure is quite okay. I spent the entire weekend at a hackathon where I failed to have anything to demo. My teammate and i were the only ones there to fail to have a demo. I had had success at other hackathons so this hurt. Ultimately it doesn't scare me though, as I'll explain later.<p>And on the billion dollar company, I have to say I can't relate. My friend and I come from middle class (blue collar working town middle class) families, so we've never had much money and we don't really chase it.<p>So for us, it's not about the money, it's always been about building great things that we want for ourselves. And with each failure and each success, we learn more, and what we make becomes better and better from our learning. I like the idea of failure because it's only ever made the things that I make better, and helped me to be sure that I am doing what I love. Ultimately every time I ready one of these articles, and I realize that I embrace failure as an opportunity, and see money as a distraction, i feel more right with myself that we should indeed be starting a startup.<p>Disclaimer: I am a student who has no idea what I'm talking about.

It's been said before in another thread, but Ashton Kutcher blew my mind at this Startup School.<p>Goes to show how good an actor he is too - I never would've imagined that the same person who played the doofus Kelso in That 70's show, or the guy from punkd would be giving solid, down to earth business advice at such a young age.

I have a better question: Imagine you have at least 15 competitors. Some of whom have been around for years. All of whom have more money than you, and same amount of reach (no... more than you). However you think they all suck and you can do better.<p>Why?<p>If you can answer the why, you have a solid idea. That why is what everyone is looking for.<p>Side note: When joining a startup you ask that question.<p>Basically think Google. Google was the first search engine to make search fast and accurate. They had probably 10 competitors, 1 of which, yahoo, was thought to be immovable.

Make things. (Hat tip Caterina Fake.)<p>And if those things need a company as a vehicle, make that, too.

I think one of the major reasons a lot of tech startups are failing is because so many of them don't even begin to focus on monetization and are still stuck on being acquired with a big exit. Even with the whole Lean Startup movement, I think so many startups are still far from thinking the way they need to to make a profit in a reasonable amount of time.<p>MVPs and customer interviews and everything else are great, but at the end of the day, what's most important is that you target a market large enough to sell to enough customers to make for a sustainable business model. Even a perfect product can fail if a market is too small or worse, completely non-existent.

Great writeup. BTW, I like it when I hear people (usually customers) talk about building a company that they want to run for a long time, wrapping their life around it (and vice-versa).

what are smart-ish jeans?

I think its ironic and hilarious that Ashton Kutcher preaches startups should solve a problem, and not jump to goal of being a billion dollar company, and then he invests in Likealittle, the company lambasted here <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/13/the-city-by-the-meh-thoughts-on-falling-out-of-love-with-the-valley" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/13/the-city-by-the-meh-thought...</a><p>Likealittle, with zero revenue model, exemplifies what everyone is complaining about.