Were we successful because or despite of all of these did-nots?
I think that's a legitimate thing to ask, as the proverb goes:
Many people will seek credit for success, but few will accept responsibility for failure.
The issue is that a valuable blogpost would go through each of those things they listed; and consider whether it was a good thing to avoid or not. It's fine to say "Don't stress about it" when you succeed, but there are plenty of start ups that fail because they don't have a business plan or they didn't successfully manage their network. What would be valuable is to share the insights you learnt on your journey rather than to flippantly celebrate your success. Anything succesful innevitably involves skipping things that turned out in retrospect not to be important - but the useful advice is how to figure out what was important ahead of time.
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, maybe "you can still have a viable business even if you screw up lots" is something someone needs to hear. It's certainly true - you can actually succeed if you get the core elements right even if you get a whole load of things wrong.
OP is not claiming those things are ineffective, they can be[1], he is rather trying to say they are not absolutely essential, you can succeed without them too .
[1] he cannot really comment on their effectiveness as he didn't use them anyway.
Yeah, given their level of success without marketing expenditure (ie, its likely to be a good product) you have to wonder if they would have been able to multiply that success with some marketing effort.
On the other hand, putting (apparently) 100% of their effort into product is maybe the reason it worked.
I personally think a great product is table stakes for success, but I’m repeatedly shown to be wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think there's a lot of things that I have ignored in my career and come back to and then said "Oh, yeah, that was a massive net negative, I should've just done it right in the first place". Those are really valuable insights. Where can you skip the "best" method, and where is it really going to screw you.
Comments
I think that's a legitimate thing to ask, as the proverb goes:
The issue is that a valuable blogpost would go through each of those things they listed; and consider whether it was a good thing to avoid or not. It's fine to say "Don't stress about it" when you succeed, but there are plenty of start ups that fail because they don't have a business plan or they didn't successfully manage their network. What would be valuable is to share the insights you learnt on your journey rather than to flippantly celebrate your success. Anything succesful innevitably involves skipping things that turned out in retrospect not to be important - but the useful advice is how to figure out what was important ahead of time.
Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, maybe "you can still have a viable business even if you screw up lots" is something someone needs to hear. It's certainly true - you can actually succeed if you get the core elements right even if you get a whole load of things wrong.
OP is not claiming those things are ineffective, they can be[1], he is rather trying to say they are not absolutely essential, you can succeed without them too .
[1] he cannot really comment on their effectiveness as he didn't use them anyway.
Yeah, given their level of success without marketing expenditure (ie, its likely to be a good product) you have to wonder if they would have been able to multiply that success with some marketing effort.
On the other hand, putting (apparently) 100% of their effort into product is maybe the reason it worked.
I personally think a great product is table stakes for success, but I’m repeatedly shown to be wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s not what they did either:
“We did not focus 100% of our work hours on only one business.”
well, I’d like to know what percentage of the time they spent on this particular business, was spent on product.
I think there's a lot of things that I have ignored in my career and come back to and then said "Oh, yeah, that was a massive net negative, I should've just done it right in the first place". Those are really valuable insights. Where can you skip the "best" method, and where is it really going to screw you.