Although, YC wouldn't attempt giving 'real' advise at this point. (advise that would end up being labeled elitist, misogynistic etc.) They're under the spotlight, and have to be politically correct.
As startup advisors and accelerators go, they are google/microsoft. Held back by their own weight.
I bet the next 10 years will see a lot of celebrity-driven startups. Will.i.am, Tom Hanks, Justin Timberlake etc.
Looking for your 3rd co-founder? Talk to your local celebrity agent.
Something about the term 'popularizer' annoys me. Why not just call them 'marketers'.
IMHO, the perfect startup team: 1 technical co-founder, 1 technical co-founder who loves analytics and online marketing, 1 celebrity. Followed by celebrity investors.
Until I discovered deep meditation (http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Meditation-Pathway-Personal-Freed...).
Summarized: Repeat a chant, such as 'I am' (or any phrase of your choosing) for about 5 minutes, focusing on what the chant-phrase sounds like in your mind.
With the phrase 'I am', you would try to feel the sounds 'A-Y-A-M' being pronounced in your mind, without ever vocalizing it.
Gets me napping within 5 minutes, wake up charged up for a massively productive session. I hope you'll give it a try sometime.
I like the way you've responded to some of these comments. You're a class act.
Interesting blog too (the bootstrap frontpage confused me for a moment though). found the post about the conversation with your co-founder rather interesting. so I think i've had a peek at how you plan to generate ideas.
What I'm about to outline might seem obvious to you, though might seem blasphemous to lotsa folks out there.
I'd like to outline the one thing (most) founders ignore during their idea process.
IMHO, younger founders who're thinking of startup life as a career (long haul), should work on maximizing (2), (3) and (4) primarily.
There's a lot of perception hacks that can be applied to get ahead with those three.
Now, here's the ONE thing:
I'd like to suggest that founders imagine the kinds of people they'd like to connect with during this span of time: women(yeah!), movie stars(?), other founders, journalists, scientists, atheists, social workers.
Don't just think it though, get it down on paper, turn it into a goal of sorts: I must form connections with these people!
It's possible you wouldn't cross off that entire list with a single startup.
You'll have to imagine yourself answering the 'what do you do' question to these people. (maybe you'd have to do some research into what they might likely want to hear)
Now, regardless of the traction you have (ideally > 0, for mental reasons),
that fact that you're running a 'startup' can get you places these days.
Before I get carried away,
answering 'what you do' can get you massively different reactions varying with the audience, locality etc.
we're usually just thinking about what investors want to put money into.
so yeah, think about the money, what's trendy, but also the kinds of people you want to connect with OUTSIDE the startup community.
I think the above holds extreme importance, especially if you're going on an 'what would you like me to build for you' marathon.
Good luck. Looking forward to updates on your blog.
Though, habits like these (suggested by the article) early-on could shape the startup's perception of their commitment to their customers. It could end up being a costly 'culture' thing.
It's still debatable whether dealing with customers daily, makes for productive use of an executive's precious time, even if the startup's value proposition revolves around exceptional customer service.
I've witnessed a few small companies getting infinitely better, once they started hiring the right people to fill sales and customer relations positions, that were usually handled by the founders themselves.
Agree that it feels like a waste of executive time.
Although, there's probably a bit that the exec could learn from early users, perhaps initiate conversations over features, gather pain points and so on.
But there's no reason why this can't be handled by someone else on the team.
And '1000' is just a ridiculous arbitrary number. How quickly did the company get to 1000 users? Imagine replying to a 1000 early adopters who've signed-up over 5 days. It's absurd.
I feel dedicating a % of the day for this, might make a little more sense.
Lastly, it's astonishing you find time for the stuff you've listed.
"It's the only link that appears at the bottom of my emails."
Personally, I've noticed an increasing affinity for the 'tag as spam' button.
It takes a certain amount of effort to scroll down, and find the unsubscribe (I'm not even sure if it's there), vs. having my inbox cleaned up by just clicking the darn 'tag as spam' button -- dead easy. Also, there's the uncertainty about how daunting the unsubscribe experience might be. These days, quite many startups get their users to go through tedious surveys before they can unsubscribe completely. This results in a sticky association that's hard to undo: 'unsubscribe' is a hassle.
Are there ways around this?
How about a large button above the fold that says 'Don't mail me.', 'Junk!' or similar. Something that indicates they'll have their intended results: less of this sorta mail, and a cleaner inbox.
On the other hand, this might result in more unsubscribes.
'startup tree' -- Neat idea for a weekend project.
It's hard for early employees not to be inspired by high-energy, inspirational organizations.
I feel startups should work into their biz-plans, the fact that greater than 50% of their early frontline force would want out, within 12 months even. Some of them competing too. 'Scratch an itch' often stems from environmental input.
I like the idea of hiring and nurturing early employees with these thoughts in mind: http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2011/10/03/creating-an-entrepr...
You'd be lying to yourself if you think your employees would give their best to your gig alone, indefinitely.
I find it hard to agree, that despite the nanosecond latency times and the terabytes of throughput we can wring out of single computing devices(gpu's etc), we couldn't simulate brain-like AI faster than a billionth of what it should be.
In reality, daily deals aren't allowing brands to develop deeper, more engaging business to customer relationships.
Couldn't agree more. Businesses need to pursue metrics around customer-lifetime-value with a vengeance. Once they do, they'll realize non-incentivized campaigns convert better.
The Groupon trend reminds me about this anecdote from 'Switch' (by the Heath brothers), about how given a larger bucket of stale popcorn, the audience always ate more. I know of folks who now find it painful to buy something (services, food etc.) at full price. The implications are immense -- there's been a permanent & massive shift in consumer behavior.
Also, there's tons of folks starting small businesses increasingly, to keep re-fueling the groupon's of the world.
I'd really appreciate it if you could suggest why we couldn't implement similar algorithms as the brain, that possibly require a massive number of fetches & executions simultaneously (guessing this is where memory bandwidth plays in), but have the results show up much slower.
Shouldn't it be possible to have artificial AI mimicking human brain algorithms at 1/100th the speed, where perhaps a single thought based on learned information takes hours, instead of seconds?
You make an excellent point about how early imperfections in the algorithms could be fixed as they evolve through feedback, and that this step-process running faster would get us the desired (evolved) algorithms quicker.
But couldn't we accomplish this with distributed processing rather than faster hardware?
Sifting through the day's top-list on the AI appstore... WTH's this? "Newton AI. The power of a 1000 research assistants at the click of a button, and they'll run all day tirelessly.". "99c launch deal, just for today -- get it now!" Hmm. Click.
You're now waiting for it to download to your little AiPod that'll beam 'brain bits' to
your home-bots, that're now busy sketching out the next monalisa onto a couple of shiny new dreamPads.
Why wouldn't those startup dudes down the street try and build a beefier/faster "runs at 50x universe speed" AiPod for the AI platform you just bought your
Newton AI app for?
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Why wouldn't AI be able to simulate 'regular universe time/ human time' faster? Why couldn't AI have stronger, more varied randomness?
The bottleneck would be interactions that require a peek into regular universe time: live human input (phone calls, emails), weather, biological data etc.