It's hard to draw lessons from your own failures (DHH's reaction to the losing $10M tweets)

The "war with Asana" part rings true for me. Why try to out-compete a major player instead of just making your own unique product and serving your own unique niche?

I do think Andrew came close to realizing this in his tweet thread where he says, "If you are in a competitive VC-funded space, it’s foolish to compete without raising money. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight."

My takeaway is the "it's foolish to compete" part rather than the "without raising money" part. Stop competing and do your own thing instead.

What a lovely way to respond to someone who looked up to you and was inspired by you.

If I had a nickel for every time someone said they were inspired by someone's path, but upon looking found that they didn't actually follow the core practices and principles of whoever they claimed was their inspiration, I would have a fuckload of nickels.

It's especially interesting how often people claim to be copying Basecamp specifically and then fail to even try to copy Basecamp except in their own head.

Amy Hoy also did this great teardown of this example from some years ago https://stackingthebricks.com/37signals-isnt-mythical-youre-not-paying-attention/

Speaking personally, I stopped counting the number of people who loved what we've done with Indy Hall and then promptly did the exact opposite, failed, and blamed our approach 😂.

It's a big part of why I don't worry about competition, because even when I give away the steps to do what we do successfully people willfully misinterpret the approach. 15 profitable years later I'll keep sharing cuz I absolutely love when people DO learn from and apply the experiences we share.

"It's hard to draw lessons from your own failures" is why I never pivoted IH from a "success stories" website to a "failure stories" website, despite 10000000 requests to do so. It's very hard to learn why something didn't work unless you subsequently changed it to get it working. Mostly you're just guessing.

This piece resonates with me.

This was my first reaction when everyone was immediately nodding in agreement with the conclusion,
https://twitter.com/YounglingAndCo/status/1377601664673255428?s=20

I think I could relate to Andrew on this. He started on the right grounds but probably was carried away by VC posh.

I'm too attracted to these ways sometimes, thanks to an extensive network of VC entrepreneurs, business trainers, and accelerators around me.

But then I check my company account and that brings me back to reality and luckily I don't have 10 mils of personal money to burn as well.

Yup, once I read he spent millions, I said to myself, that's the very opposite of what it means to bootstrap.

I don't normally agree with DHH, but I must admit, when I was reading that thread from Flow's founder, my initial sympathy went out the window with a "What??" when he mentioned burning through over $100K per month. That is just crazy to be spending that much as a bootstrapped company without the income to justify (at that stage).

The most important point that David makes is that "they fell in love with the funding model, but not the principles that go along with that". So instead of spending VC money freely, as most companies do, they were spending the founders (hard earned) money instead.

Sounds like Asana baited Flow into a chase that would suck up all their cash reserves for no real gain. This is one of the main reasons why I refuse to even glance at what our competitors are doing, and rely purely on our customers to give me feedback as to how to improve our product.