The few paths to startup success

Nice heads up. It seems that most newbie entrepreneurs don't really want to get their hands dirty (which is obviously not programming).<p>Yet, success is a very abstract concept. With that in mind I don't think that, in general, success is rare. Failure and success are both abundant. A single outcome can be a success and failure, depending on what is your baseline.<p>For example, when I built a small financial firm my goal was to build something cool AND get bloody rich. I failed on that. Yet, we have millions of customers right now. My dream of retiring before 30 to work for fun didn't work out.

<i>Ask the right questions. Create hypotheses. Create experiments to test your assumptions. Measure, measure, measure.</i><p>This is what everyone always, consciously or unconsciously is trying. Taking a more scientific approach doesn't necessarily need to increase your chance.<p>The thing is: there is no pattern for success generation. This is against the nature of being exceptional. Stop seeking it.

Too bad the theory sometimes is hard to implement...For example, my startup don't have enough money to test our marketing theories, the only thing we can do is forever change our products, but that won't help, when you make mobile apps, you /need/ marketing, otherwise you /will/ fail.

I think the trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is trying to create the next billion dollar company. It's better to start small. Find your niche and solve an actual problem for that niche. If it really is a good product, it will eventually grow on its own.

Part of the problem with the backtracking analogy is that the graph changes while you're traversing it. It changes due to external factors. The act of moving to different nodes may cause the previous edge to be deleted. And so on.