Every once in a long while, I read a tremendous post about startups.
Paul Graham‘s recent essay “The hardest lessons for startups to learn” is one such post. It’s from a recent Startup School talk. I can personally vouch for so many of these counterintuitive lessons. Another great essay in his series is “How to fund a startup” – I often pass this one along to founders – it’s thorough and simple to understand.
I have followed Paul’s Y-Combinator project with great interest (and envy, man that sounds like fun) for a while now.
If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re not subscribed to Paul’s blog you’re missing out. You can also subscribe to an unofficial feed for his essays – another must read for entrepreneurs.
The points made by Graham are great material for my guys as we develop and launch an alpha software product; getting stuck on trying to do it right the first time without user input is the same as programmer cool-feature creep save it to delight your users when the ask for it (another of his points). We [A+GPS] are following the cyclical sell then build methodology. An unmentioned hard lesson to learn, a corollary to Make Users Happy, is maintain the buzz. We all need advocates passing the word.
The “hardest lessons” essay is required reading. It’s all valuable with no wasted words, and hits a bit too close to home in some areas. We’re definitely living some of those lessons and we need to avoid them instead. It’s definitely not been the entry of the big competitor that’s hurt us (McAfee made a $20 million acquisition to compete with us and it hasn’t had much impact) it’s having some of the bad attributes of a big company and not utilizing all of the benefits of being a startup. We’re working to fix that now, and we’ll be running as fast as we can…