entrepreneurship

In tech start-ups, there are no tricks to success

I love this essay from Paul Graham of Y Combinator. It’s chock full of truths, as Paul’s essays typically are, and I encourage you read the whole thing. Here’s one of my favorite passages:

It’s not surprising that after being trained for their whole lives to play such games, young founders’ first impulse on starting a startup is to try to figure out the tricks for winning at this new game. Since fundraising appears to be the measure of success for startups (another classic noob mistake), they always want to know what the tricks are for convincing investors. We tell them the best way to convince investors is to make a startup that’s actually doing well, meaning growing fast, and then simply tell investors so. Then they want to know what the tricks are for growing fast. And we have to tell them the best way to do that is simply to make something people want.

So many of the conversations YC partners have with young founders begin with the founder asking “How do we…” and the partner replying “Just…”

Why do the founders always make things so complicated? The reason, I realized, is that they’re looking for the trick.

Read Full Article

Most Americans don’t download apps

I’ve written about the difficulty of doing a mobile apps start-up before, and this report from comScore only reinforces that argument.

According to comScore, in any given month, the majority of US smartphone users don’t download apps…at all.

Yet, mobile app usage continues to grow; apps now represent 52% of time spent with digital media.

The conundrum is that while apps are ever more important, users aren’t downloading more of them. It’s a situation where the top 1% of apps rule the roost while everyone else flounders, struggling to get discovered.

Read Full Article

Why hiring freelancers to build your app is a bad idea

I’ve got friends doing mobile app start-ups, and a couple of them rely on freelancers to develop their apps despite my advice not to. What I’m about to write is a generalization — not all freelancers are bad of course, but despite honest intentions, it’s usually not a good idea to hire freelancers to build your start-up’s app.

The reason is this: Incentives aren’t aligned. Entrepreneurs want a high quality product, one that will require many iterations. Freelance developers want to complete the project as quickly as possible. You will get a lot of unhappiness as a result of these two differences.

Prior to feecha, we built digital products for companies, so we understand the pressure freelancers face. The biggest cost is time: the more quickly a freelancer can complete a project, the sooner she can receive payment and move on to the next project. So it’s in her best interest to define the project brief as exactly as possible and deliver not much more. Every time the entrepreneur wants to change something, it comes at the direct expense of the freelancer; unless the freelancer can convince the entrepreneur to pay more. Not an easy conversation.

Read Full Article

Vurb wins TC Disrupt NY, yet their mobile app will probably fail

The winner of this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt New York is Vurb. First, please watch the start-up’s finalist pitch. Done? Impressed?

I can see Vurb working on the web, though I’d be more comfortable saying that if I can try the service first. Unfortunately, Vurb is still in closed beta.

Like Vurb, feecha is an aggregator, so there are insights I can share. They will inevitably face some of the same problems we faced.

Read Full Article

Why Stanford > Harvard

So TechCrunch Disrupt is going on right now in New York. One of the six finalists of the event’s competition is Mink, founded by a Harvard Business School graduate. I love her idea — DIY cosmetics from a printer — and if I had money to invest, I’d write her a cheque.

But. She had an epic fail in her presentation that would have been embarrassing for any person, much less a Harvard Business School alumnus.

Read Full Article

Before you start a company, better read this

Aspiring entrepreneurs frequently ask me one thing they should know before starting a company; and recently, a university magazine asked me to write an article about the same topic for their students.

I wrote my answer. The magazine didn’t like it.  Said it was too negative and so changed it to be made more palatable to wide-eyed teenagers.  Now here it is, in my little corner of the universe, the original in all its unedited glory.

So you are in school and want to be an entrepreneur. I was there too in 2007 after graduating with an MBA from Stanford University. My first start-up failed. The second one made money. And now I’m on my third riding the roller coaster that is entrepreneurship.

Before you take that leap, here’s my advice.

Read Full Article