Just came along this awesome post by Dan Norris, author of the 7-day startup. Very useful for this group.
It Doesn't Fucking Matter by Dan Norris
Beware of anyone who speaks in certainties. It's easy to get seduced by how self-sure this guy sounds but only you can decide what your entrepreneurial journey looks like.
His thesis boils down to "If you have product-market fit, your product will prosper". Well, the entire fucking point of a startup is to find product-market fit!
He shows us examples of Netflix and Uber but conveniently forgets that Netflix itself has had to pivot from sending DVDs from hubs to streaming content. Maybe they didn't post of forums asking which shade of red to use but I can almost imagine their sleepless nights - much like our own as entrepreneurs - wondering what to do about the coming streaming revolution. I believe they tried to sell themselves to someone before going into streaming. Imagine that for a name like Netflix.
Uber was a limo service in SFO before it became a ride-share. Again, maybe they aren't worrying about accounting software but given their legal troubles, I can see the Uber leadership worrying about which exact law firm to hire to protect the company from its worst excesses. If they hadn't found the right legal strategy, there would not be any Uber today. How is that materially different from an immigrant indiehacker wanting to start a side business and wanting to stay on the right side of tax law?
Do what you have to to make your product sticky in your customers' minds. Read articles like these because you need a mid afternoon break, not because they speak unheard of truths.
I think the general point of the article, the fact that many entrepreneurs tend to focus on shit that simply doesn't matter, instead of focussing on actually getting to product-market fit, does have a lot of truth to it.
Your logo, your business plan, your accounting software, your style guide, your product name, are all examples of stuff that won't bring you any closer to product-market fit. And with that, Dan Norris does make a good point.
Kudos to this!
You're right...in a way. Each item in your list may not doom your startup but taken together, these items are a representation of your feelings towards your business in the real world.
Bear with me while I make a slightly involved point.
When someone asks for advice online for seemingly trivial stuff, they are trying to make sure their mental model of what they think will happen and the lived experiences of others before them are in alignment. Many founders are afraid of dissonance or ambiguity - they might get paralyzed if what they expect and what others tell them are out of sync. Or not knowing THE best accounting software for a service based business run by a digital nomad in Thailand may hold them back. We have to respect that, not deride it as unnecessary.
Each of your bullet points has the same feature -
Your logo and the business plan you slog over has to be an extension of your idea. Your account software has to make you comfortable that it won't bomb if you throw some complicated transaction at it, your URL and TLD has to represent your mental picture of your business and its future. Dissonance or ambiguity in these areas can hold people back.
We hear a lot about being authentic. What is authenticity? It is when your inside and outside are in alignment. People have the right to feel that their vision for their business and its external manifestations are aligned, i.e., authentic.
Some Examples -
You may say that a logo is a just a logo. To me, a logo represents your business' attitude towards the world. Just yesterday @csallen asked for logo suggestions for IndieHacker. Why? Probably because in his head, IH was starting to gain its own identity and he wanted to capture that (or maybe his corp bosses asked him to..in which case, THEY feel IH needs an identity.)
Your styling can be thought the same way. Would you give your credit card to a business with a shady looking site? If, otoh, an Amazon web property with its easily identifiable styling asks for your credit card, you'd be a lot happier handing it over. In fact, Amazon Pay relies on this exact relationship of trust with their customers to entice businesses to try Amazon Pay.
While I get your point, I'm with @chillyorange on this one. You mentioned it yourself: Allen is looking for logo suggestions, but only after IH became a success and stands on its own 2 feet. Moreover, we as a community have never complained about the IH logo.
Dan Norris is not saying that a logo, accounting software, and other stuff doesn't matter but he's simply pointing out that all these things should not occupy your day-to-day thoughts as a founder. Especially not when you still need to find growth.
And because these problems are relatively easy to tackle, in the sense that they can be outsourced to the opinion of a community, it's easy to occupy ourselves with those problems. But we shouldn't :-).
Let's agree to disagree.
Yes, a logo is indeed just a logo and is often non-trivial when it comes to a business' early success. It almost always matters more to the founder(s) than to the customers. People buy stuff from companies with shitty logos every single day. The same goes for crappy styles and badly designed websites. With Pagestead we did $30,000 in pre-orders with both a horrible website and an even crappier logo :)
I understand all of these things matter to you, the founder/developer. And therein lies the problem.
I am not saying a business should never spend time on designing a nice logo, or coming up with a proper style guide, cool name and all the bells and whistles. But what I am saying, and what I firmly stand by, is that all of these items are not contributing to bringing your closer to product-market fit.
Finally, let me point out that I would never, ever, disrespect a starting entrepreneur due to the questions he/she is asking. I do my best to help out as much as I can and to give answers to questions when I feel I can contribute. But, yeah, I do occasionally, gently, ask wether spending several days on designing business cards when you haven't got a single customer or haven't launched for that matter, is the correct approach ;)
Good point.
Good article. He's generally addressing people seeking shortcuts, or are otherwise afraid to just get going, and who also tend to focus on things, that initially aren't important.
Make something people want, that's it. The rest will sort itself out.
Being an entrepreneur is a spiritual thing. Revenue, profit, user acquisition costs... those are really just numbers. What really counts is how you feel on the inside. If you feel like you're an entrepreneur, then you are an entrepreneur. And who's going to stop you anyway, other than your parents?
People who use strong language aren't desperately trying to shake you out of your slumber, they are compensating for something that is wrong with them! For example, if you're crossing a street blindfolded, and somebody is shouting at you, they're probably just a mean an angry person. Why else would the resort to such violence?
Beware of people who speak in certainties! Nothing is 100% certain, so you are free to dismiss anything you don't like on that basis. He doesn't know for sure that spending 4 weeks obsessing over which font to use is going to help your business or not. Maybe a famous typographer looks at your site and offers to buy it? Just because that has never happened doesn't mean the effort isn't worth it. What is more important: Actual wealth, or the wealth of doing the things you love, compulsively, to distract you from the much more important things you should be doing? See, it's all very subjective and there are no clear answers.
That's a certainty as well :)
hahah
"Netflix didn’t replace Blockbuster because they had a better logo. The Netflix logo is shit, it’s red letters. It took off because it provided a much better product. More convenient, more engaging, cheaper, higher quality the list goes on."
You can format links within words. Here's the above mentioned article
cheers :)
What's the shortcode for that? There is not mention of it in formatting tips.
It's just Markdown. Like Reddit. You can also use Markdown lists, italics, bold, etc, etc...
[title of the link](https://mywebsite.xyz)This is the gem that resonates with me: "The reason your business is not taking off is because your product is not good enough. Period." Just don't lie to yourself and try to see it as your customer; there is a reason why the word doesn't spread much and the product doesn't sell. And no, it's not marketing.
When I compare my experience to this article, my motto has always been "Less is more." My goal was to set up a successful business. I kept a log of business ideas and waited for it, I didn't go after all of the (mostly stupid) ideas that I wrote down. The list kept growing and one day (after ~1 year of logging the ideas) I decided that this was the one and went after it. The idea was unique enough, solving real pain, difficult to deliver (i.e. high entry barrier) and also with a big potential market.
great article
"Uber did not take off because they chose the right invoicing software." Hahaha!
A worthwhile read for all us newbies, thanks for sharing the article.
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I respect your dislike of profanity and I agree with your points about alienating potential markets but the tone of the article was deliberate - it was meant to be an angry rant. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
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I'm pretty sure he knows his audience.
It's Medium. Startup fiends are there.
They generally "don't give a fuck" about an occasional F Bomb.
Re "The point I made consistently was that you should know your audience before you inflict your values on them, especially if those values are unlikely to be shared ones." - maybe you are not a typical representative of his intended target audience, we can't tell what his intention was. I can only speak for myself but I wouldn't mind if people didn't read my blog posts because we didn't share the same values.
I don't agree with this take, but it's completely reasonable and doesn't deserve to be flagged.
I don't think it's "flagged" I think it's automatically hidden because it's fallen below the score of
@csallen it may be a good idea to change the wording of hidden posts, just to be clear as to why they've been hidden, and not 'flagged'.
I'll change it to say, "This comment has been voted down."
I think the way it works here is that if you downvote something below 0, it gets flagged automatically.
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Wasn't me but it's funny when you asses someone as having nothing to say and then you write a lengthy comment that can be shortened to "I'm a Christian and don't like profanity." I honestly didn't get any other value from your comment.
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My bad, I've never heard an atheist mentioning "blasphemy", which is an alien concept to me as an atheist. And no, I didn't get that message from your comment. As they say, the proof is in the pudding - if you look at the downvotes of your comment, I might not be the only one who struggled with that.
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I was not implying that you were wrong, I was pointing out your form, how you wrote and structured your initial comment. This was an answer to your question, why anyone would downvote it or flag your comment.
In your response to me, you were able to shorten it to one sentence. So back to your original question, you wrote a long comment and the majority of it was not related to that one important point, that is why the message wasn't clear.
Btw. swearing is also cultural - per country and also per company. I don't think that the blog post was meant for potential customers so really don't see how your comment about profanity was to the point. If I don't like something, I just don't f*cking read it ;-)