I think this post is great but the period after launch is seriously underexposed in all these 'how to start-up' articles.
Typically, if you're a hands-on person with the right attitude sooner or later you'll figure this part out. Posts like this can help you ease the pain a bit but then what?
You've just launched, you have a few paying customers (but not enough to be profitable), your initial press powder has been shot. Traffic collapses to near non-existent levels and your first customers do not seem to be going out of their way to tell their friends about your product.
That's a much harder problem to solve than just to get to the launch date.
Launching something is like a marriage, the first honeymoon period with a new fledgling company.
If it works out during the 'dating' period you might end up marrying the wrong company, or it may be the right one but it will require skills and expertise that you do not have that go way beyond coding or talking to your existing circle of potential customers.
That's when the real work starts. Getting to launch is the easy bit.
The articles are ok though (but quite a few got posted here as well).
But the discussion is just about non-existent. I've gotten a bit wary of HN split-offs, they tend to be very short-lived.
I don't know what the main reason for that is, possibly it is simply that HN is 'good enough' and that a splinter of it does not carry enough volume for long term sustainability.
I agree, there aren't enough people on techstartu.ps, but there were even fewer earlier and it seems to be picking up. I'd guess that this one is here to stay, especially since it's run by DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg.
I see your point, but the request was for "a library of the 'best' startup focused articles written across the net", not commentary on those articles.
The comments will come with time; right now there aren't many contributors, but the site has been around long enough and been updated frequently enough that I believe it will stick around. HN was kind of slow moving when it started, too (although not that slow, to be honest).
With Stormpulse we "launched" with a post on Hacker News that got us a whopping 200+ visits in a single day! Then we lingered at 50-100 visits per day for over a year. Then we figured out distribution (embeddable widget) and traffic is no longer a problem (we did get a TC mention a few months after the widget launched).
So freemium really worked for us in getting through that post-launch desert plain. Aside from the cost of supporting the free users, our out-of-pocket advertising expense has been <$100 since the start of the company to present day.
I believe your POV is fairly subjective - I've run e-commerce ops with $15k+ in revenue from "month one".
It matters how much effort you are putting into marketing - SEO, Blogging, Affiliates, SEM, Display ads, PR, Retargeting, A/B Testing (& direct mail, telemarketing if they're the right fit for your product)...
Testing & optimizing these before launch is critical to gaining a steady flow of traffic & customers. If you don't do this & focus only on the "launch post" on TC/Mashable/TNW/RRW then you can easily fall flat after launch, otherwise you definitely have a fighting chance.
I think that e-commerce is a bit different if it deals with physical goods. $15k in revenue may or not be significant depending how much you are investing in acquiring the goods, and how expensive they are.
Making $15k in revenue from HDTVs might mean you are in trouble. Then you take into consideration costs of direct marketing, telemarketing, display ads, SEM, etc., and you may be in a really tough spot.
However, if you make $15k in the first month for a scalable software product, then you are in a good position to start growing.
I think it's not so much about the launch, but about your first 10 or 100 customers. Regardless of the TC/M!/RRW/HN posts, if you manage to get 100 or even 10 customers, you already have mitigated a lot of the risks that make companies fail: Finding someone that will pay for your product.
I think it was on a steve blank presentation that said something along the lines of:
The reason of why most companies fail, 90% of the time, is not their technology but failure to find paying customers.
Thus, if you launch AND you have paying customers, it means you must be doing something right. Launching alone does not mean anything.
The one thing I feel it's missing is the major step of vetting an idea. Is it WORTH doing? I literally get cold emails every day from entrepreneurs who say, "I've spent a big chunk of my life building this thing and none of the ways I've found to acquire customers is working in a scalable way" (they generally don't word it that way, but you get the gist). It's gut-wrenching.
Maybe that's a different post, but if you're building a startup for growth, you could be running that company for years (remember, avg. time to liquidity for a venture-backed startup is 8.7 years!). You should be careful to chase ideas that aren't merely viable but GREAT market opportunities (or at least products/markets that you LOVE). It's easier to swim downstream.
I'm working on the vetting an idea post for OnStartups. It's a huge topic and a very important one. A lot of entrepreneurs seem to vet their idea like VCs. The criteria is somewhat similar, but it's not the best way to go about it. We're talking vetting an idea internally before even going after simple MVP/customer validation, correct?
Yep-- vetting the idea/market. (verbal) Customer validation can be a part of that, I imagine.
I think you're right-- it's a big topic and people have radically different frameworks ranging from "I just want some side income" to "I eventually want my own island". The biggest thing that seems to trip people up is figuring out (before they build it!) if there's a way to scalably acquire customers. Unless people have a well-understood distribution channel they can tap and an ARPU obviously high enough to buy customers through it, entrepreneurs generally have to hustle (sell 1 customer at a time, beg for coverage, write targeted linkbait, etc). And hustling doesn't scale. Hell, with some products/markets, it doesn't work at all.
Great list, but I don't think you need the detailed spec. Same problem as usual in developoment: the spec will be outdated by the time you're even half done, when you're finished with the first version of the product your detailed spec will be so woefully out of date (or a huge time sink to keep updated) that you'll end up rewriting it.
What you do need is a defined documentation of your internal/public API's. If the developers don't know how modules talk to one another that's a recipe for fail. Then just to keep everything coherent, a rough skeleton to keep everyone on track. Basically a mix between your step 2 and step 5.
If you're doing a developer heavy app that requires an API, the API documentation is insanely critical. I don't think I emphasized this enough. I've been a complete lunatic (in a good way) about the API docs, response calls, etc. You can have things ghetto at first I guess, but having detailed responses is very important.
Also, Jason, for an app (padpressed) that promises increased usability, the text on the homepage is awfully hard to read. Here's how it renders in Chrome for OS X:
Good stuff. We're at step #3, and we're trying to strike the right balance between gathering customer feedback (which brings waves of great ideas) and making sure we're delivering only what we need to learn quickly. Step #4 might be the hardest so far.
It's a service that tracks lean startup metrics for SaaS products. We're currently inviting folks to sign-up for the beta test when it's available. We'll also be sending a few customer development surveys.
I only read the comments. Usually the number seven is the magic number of steps. There are many ideas and few paying customers for then. So there must be some magic. How to transform sand into gold in five glorious steps, with an introduction by Harry Pottter.
If you know me, I could really care less about the traffic one article brings. Here's what I do care about: the comment I would have gotten - "Give us examples please" So I gave everyone examples of what we did.
I do know you - you're the type of person that calls people who try to do you favors & curse them out for not being able to get your startup on techcrunch.
That's what I love about HN. It's not just the "How I made a bazillion dollars and so can you" its experiences, however limited, even failures, from entrepreneurs - as they are growing. Wonderful. I love seeing specific examples.
Typically, if you're a hands-on person with the right attitude sooner or later you'll figure this part out. Posts like this can help you ease the pain a bit but then what?
You've just launched, you have a few paying customers (but not enough to be profitable), your initial press powder has been shot. Traffic collapses to near non-existent levels and your first customers do not seem to be going out of their way to tell their friends about your product.
That's a much harder problem to solve than just to get to the launch date.
Launching something is like a marriage, the first honeymoon period with a new fledgling company.
If it works out during the 'dating' period you might end up marrying the wrong company, or it may be the right one but it will require skills and expertise that you do not have that go way beyond coding or talking to your existing circle of potential customers.
That's when the real work starts. Getting to launch is the easy bit.