Beware of survivorship bias when reading success stories.
Beware of survivorship bias when reading success stories. It can lead you to make entirely the wrong decision.
For example, let's say you read a bunch of stories on Indie Hackers, and you see 95 founders who succeeded having done no preliminary market research, and only 25 founders who succeeded after doing lots of market research. What's your conclusion?
The tempting answer is to copy the 95 founders, but the right answer is that you can't safely draw a conclusion, because you don't know the denominators. You're only seeing the numerators — the survivors.
What if there were 950 entrepreneurs who didn't do any market research before starting their businesses, and so the 95 who succeeded only represented a 10% success rate? And what if there were only 50 entrepreneurs who did preliminary market research, meaning the 25 who succeeded represented a 50% success rate? You should obviously take the better odds, but you can't calculate the odds without knowing the denominators, and so you'll likely (erroneously) pick the option with the highest numerator.
Survivorship bias at work.
Who agrees with you? THIS GUY. Hahah.
In this specific case of market research, I think people (me) would weight one no-market-research success story higher than multiple market-research success stories, since the first is so much easier.
Might be giving too much credit to call this survivorship bias -- that's too rational of a bias ;). Market research is scary and hard -- coding is easy and fun. I want to code and not do research, so I'll weight those success stories way above the other. Confirmation bias, perhaps?
Everything you said is about feeling good vs getting results, though. If your goal is to feel good, definitely. If you want to build a business, not so much.
Yep this is another huge issue that a lot of Indie hackers face... doing what's easy or enjoyable instead of doing what's necessary or important. There are a few ways to get around this. I'll make a post about it soon!
great guidance! startup media coverage reflects this bias. who gets the coverage? survivors. without that denominator and more data points its hard to determine causal factors. basically a bunch of anecdotal evidence. valuable but not definitive.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Yep, and even if there are lots of these accidentally-stumbled-onto-success, that's not what really matters. What matters is the percentage of people who try the stumbling technique and succeed or fail.