I think the "Symptom: you're about to give up too quickly." should also be followed up with "Symptom: you're sticking with an idea that is dead"
if you had 3,000 people come through your site, without a single sale, it's probably a good idea to try something else.
it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are a hockey stick case. "oh yeah, we've had 2 sales @9.99 this month...but remember the hockey stick...a year later, we'll have 5,000 sales a day!"
if you are going to stick with an idea, you need to have consistent sales that are actually increasing. So that there is an indication that someone actually wants the product you have to offer.
personally I take a 3 step approach to this. 1) get actual people to the site and see if it actually converts(2-3000 people is plenty). Once you find out your starting conversion rate(even if it's 1:2000) 2) then your goal is to scale up so you get decent traffic to the site...100-200 people a day at least. 3) then you start optimizing...run a multivariate a/b test every week with 3-4 variations. Discard the crap and keep the better converting ones. Keep doing this every week, and by the end of the year, you'll go through 100+ different variations, and your 1:2000 conversion rate, will most likely be down to 1:50-1:100.
and with a/b tests you have to test EVERYTHING...don't leave anything to chance. You don't know your audience, until you actually test. You have no idea if you'll get more conversions with "buy" "buy now" "get it" "download it" "order" "order today" "give us your money" "stop being an idiot" or "insert coin"...not until you actually test it. For all you know that "stop being an idiot" order button will increase your sales 10 fold.
I'm glad this was pointed out. Doing a startup is definitely like doing a dance. You have to know when to step forward, and when to step sideways and when to step back. Do it at the wrong time and you'll end up in pain.
I know people who give up too quickly on an idea and I know people who stayed too long on an idea. The problem is usually that it's never so binary as to quit or keep going. It's easy to end up in a situation where you've spent 6 months or a year building a product. Over that next year you convince yourself that that NEXT feature is all that's needed for your product to explode. In the meantime you have a handful of users that give you validation that there's value to the idea.
A/B testing would be great but there's also a saying that A/B optimization too early is also a mistake. Time could be better spent understanding product-market fit.
Perhaps, more important than this was mentioned in the blog post:"spend a lot of your time thinking about customer acquisition (for me it's ~50%). Only very rarely will they come on their own early on."
What I find most interesting is that no matter how many times these points are brought up or given advice... a person who is just starting out will not take these in until experiencing them first hand, almost in a rite of passage way...
I recall doing every single one of these mistakes, and more. But it only truly registers fully when you actually hit them.
Not only that... When it comes to our startup (http://historio.us), I (I can only speak for myself) find that a small piece of negative critique, or a new, better funded startup launching that is remotely related to what we do, can lead me to becoming demoralised and think that it's not leading anywhere, even though we've hit 3,000 users in two weeks, have tens of subscribers already, lots of positive feedback from users and even some people asking to invest...
This post was very good for telling people things they might not already know, but which are indispensable. For example, when I'm demoralised, I regularly find myself saying "okay, it might feel bad but in reality people find the service very useful", and then the rational part of my brain kicks in and tells me to keep doing what I'm doing because it's probably worth it...
Many thanks to the author, the post was very encouraging.
It's very easy to fall for some of those, also if you're not a first timer!
Even big, established companies run by visionary or at least very experienced CEOs seem to get some of those wrong at times, especially the 'you build it, they will come' and 'you're about to give up too quickly'.
"You're about to give up quickly" is the hardest thing to judge really. Especially when you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur running out of cash, persistence becomes very tricky.
Would love to hear how fellow bootstrapped HN'ers dealt with such a situation.
In our case, we became profitable. When all you need is money to pay for a small server and can get consulting gigs to pay for food, becoming profitable at two weeks (so far so good, anyway) really puts your mind at ease that what you're doing will at least hopefully be self-sustainable.
I realise this is useless advice for most other startups, but hey, spend as little as you can (but not too little), and you're doing the best you can.
Yes doing consulting gigs is a great way to fill the coffers and we do that too but strictly speaking it's not your product which is profitable, right?
We are running at very bare costs but our biggest expenses are salaries for ourselves (which in an expensive city like Singapore) can drain your finances pretty quickly.
Oh, you misunderstand. The product itself is profitable, it makes more per day than the operating costs. Right now, actually, it makes the monthly operating costs every two days on average. Fingers crossed that this trend will continue.
The consulting gigs are so we can afford food. We aren't getting paid anything, but we don't count our time against expenses...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say the most important advice you can give someone just starting out, is to just go out and release something.That you are going to make mistakes is almost a given, so why not make them as quickly as possible
if you had 3,000 people come through your site, without a single sale, it's probably a good idea to try something else.
it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are a hockey stick case. "oh yeah, we've had 2 sales @9.99 this month...but remember the hockey stick...a year later, we'll have 5,000 sales a day!"
if you are going to stick with an idea, you need to have consistent sales that are actually increasing. So that there is an indication that someone actually wants the product you have to offer.
personally I take a 3 step approach to this. 1) get actual people to the site and see if it actually converts(2-3000 people is plenty). Once you find out your starting conversion rate(even if it's 1:2000) 2) then your goal is to scale up so you get decent traffic to the site...100-200 people a day at least. 3) then you start optimizing...run a multivariate a/b test every week with 3-4 variations. Discard the crap and keep the better converting ones. Keep doing this every week, and by the end of the year, you'll go through 100+ different variations, and your 1:2000 conversion rate, will most likely be down to 1:50-1:100.
and with a/b tests you have to test EVERYTHING...don't leave anything to chance. You don't know your audience, until you actually test. You have no idea if you'll get more conversions with "buy" "buy now" "get it" "download it" "order" "order today" "give us your money" "stop being an idiot" or "insert coin"...not until you actually test it. For all you know that "stop being an idiot" order button will increase your sales 10 fold.