There are many who peddle stuff which is not their primary source of wealth. Suze Orman became wealthy not by saving for 401k and 'paying herself first' as she preaches. She became wealthy by selling her books, shows and other stuff.
Many an entrepreneur, when their products failed to get the traction they expected became:
- social media consultants
- lean canvas experts
- marketing experts for startups
I would like to hear from them how they are different from the late night infomercials who teach you to become rich from real estate and government grants.
It depends on what you do at the startup. If you are coding away just like you would at the electronic trading firm, you wouldn't learn much about running your own startup.
Are you involved in customer development, talking to investors, making connections as part of the startup? If not, there's not much upside.
I do not know if wakemate made any improvements lately but after giving it a try several times after I got it, I gave up. It sits in a box alongside old power adapters and other cables.
The main problem for me was when I toss and turn at night, it loses contact with the phone (sitting on the end table) and starts screaming 'Lost contact, lost contact'.
If I continued to use it, my wife would have thrown me out onto the patio to sleep.
There were several other occasions where wakemate never woke me up.
I would have loved to see wakemate work, I wanted to root for a startup, see them succeed. You only get so many chances with a single customer. In my books, they failed badly on their promise. continuously. starting with their delivery of the product and then later with the product itself.
I find Rand Fishkin incredible in sharing all the details of SeoMoz. It takes guts to do that.
Balsamiq, Bingo Card creator and a few others on HN are transparent when it is not a great deal of money.
(I haven't seen Balsamiq post detailed revenue and their breakup lately.)
I would say do what feels comfortable to you. Most likely, it is to keep revenues etc. secret. Revealing those details might get some eyeballs in the short term but not customers.
I think the distinction is between getting some eyeballs who are easy to convert into customers, like Balsamiq or SEOMoz, and something like BCC, where the publicity is less obviously useful, because no one at HN would buy it. LiberWriter is definitely in the latter category.
* But we relied too much on others' self-assessments.*
Can you explain? Do you mean customer development brings in everyone's biases into the picture and not the truth?
What do you think is a better way to do customer development?
Not all customer development, but the flavour we practiced, which mostly involved just asking people how/what/why they did what they did.
Imagine a scale that represents the strength of positive signals you get from data collected during customer development. At one extreme, you have weak signals from potential customers who just say they'll use your product. At the other extreme, you have strong signals from potential customers who part with cold hard cash and sign multi-year contracts (despite not having a product yet).
When we first tested our concept, we focussed on the following:
* Just doing customer development (it was a big step and an exciting new world)
* Building a big sample set ("if we're going to do it, let's do it right")
But, in retrospect,
* We were oblivious to (the lack of) positive signal strength
* We too quickly dismissed negative signals as "people outside our market"
So the intention was there, and man we worked hard at it, but the data was useless and our analysis was heavily biased. Sounds harsh to say it was useless, but it really was. We learned very little from talking to hundreds of people. Of course we learned how to better do customer development next time, which was/is invaluable.
I think when you ask people about their behaviour and whether they'd use your product, they're likely to err on the side of politeness. That's a serious problem for concept validation. But ask them for cash, and politeness takes a back seat.
Also, just asking if someone will use your product introduces bias already. It's a leading question.
You could instead ask the following:
* "What are your top 5 interests?"
* If they mention your industry or niche, continue with...
* "What are your top 5 problems relating to X-interest?"
* If they mention a problem your concept solves, then record a weak positive signal
* Describe your concept/solution/product...
* If they're willing to provide an email address, increase signal strength
* If they're willing to sign-up for a trial, increase...
* Pay deposit, increase... etc
Long story short, I think signal strength and honest analysis is the key to validating a concept. It takes some real hustle to get financial commitments for non-existent products, but hey, that's what differentiates founders.
Blog post from housekeeper of Mr. Steve about how exacting he is on some occasions and how kind he is on other.
I think Steve Jobs and his contributions to the tech world are extraordinary. I wish him well and hope he lives happily for a long long time. Just as I wish for anyone I know or do not know, that they live happily.
Steve is not a friend of either you or me.
I do not need to know how he was as a neighbor, his driving record, his family life or anything that does not concern his work.
I am not interested in those details of Steve or Salma Hayek or Steve Ballmer.
Can we stop senselessly idolizing people in areas that are not their expertise?
There may be some idolizing, but I think it's more about premature eulogizing of a man who's made huge contributions to technology, whether you buy Apple products or not. Ballmer isn't even in the same realm.
Personally, I'm interested in his life beyond Apple. He was an out-of-the-box thinker who went through many serious failures and successes. How could he NOT be interesting? I feel I could learn a lot from him. I certainly learned a lot from his now-classic Stanford(?) speech.
We all really do hope for the best for his health, but we all have this unspoken belief that his days are very numbered.
I suspect that like me, many others feel the need to thank him for what he's accomplished, and reviewing and celebrating his life is the next best thing to shaking his hand.
I mentioned this to a friend the other day. If I only read all of the stories coming out about SJ I would have assumed he died and not just left his CEO position.
There's still a difference though - he's not a vegetable; he's very much alive today. Pseudo-eulogizing a person who is still alive isn't good taste - save them for when he is gone. It's not like the story will change, or will be any different then.
The debate over whether your complaint is valid could seriously span volumes. Frankly, if you truly respected Steve Job's contributions and simultaneously found his personal life of zero interest, I would find that extremely odd.
Most, probably the vast majority of, people become very interested in every aspect of their hero's lives. I'm sure you can think of many reasons why this might be the case, both evolutionarily and practically. The fundamental attribution error notwithstanding, discovering what relationship a particular aspect of genius has to other traits of a person is powerfully interesting to human beings.
Perhaps you literally don't have any curiosity over your heroes beyond their strict niche. Perhaps you have no heroes. Perhaps you don't think Jobs deserves to be anyone's hero. But don't be surprised at everyone else's outpouring of interest, because most people aren't like you.
I personally think that its sometimes the small details that make up the man (sorry, or woman!) and because Steve Jobs is seen as such a success people want to look at what he does partly to look for traits to emulate and naturally partly as curiosity. Yes, there are elements here which are purely 'celebrity' but the interesting thing for me about some of these stories is just how 'ordinary' the guy is. I read one article about his house which is not ostentatious at all. There's a lot that can be learned from people like this and you have the choice to read (or not read) them.
Maybe so, but in today's era of celebrity gossip, I'm thankful for someone to be famous for actually doing something memorable than the endless stream of minutiae about a sequence of borderline NPDs whose only talent is capitalizing on media exposure.
This is exactly the reason why I've never been interested in working for a startup. Learning experience? Yeah, I've got that working during the dotcom boom/bust cycle.
Your reasoning is spot on but the numbers get even more unappealing once dilution in future rounds of financing kicks in.
If you have the experience, be a co-founder at a startup with pretty big upside. If you can't find that, the 150K/year salaries are a much better deal than <5% equities.
Many an entrepreneur, when their products failed to get the traction they expected became: - social media consultants - lean canvas experts - marketing experts for startups
I would like to hear from them how they are different from the late night infomercials who teach you to become rich from real estate and government grants.