Screw income, businesses can run on fairy dust, Tink!
> Read pmarca's blog posts on "product/market fit" to understand.
I read that when it was first posted, and it's nothing new, it's the same "make something people want". Which comes down to the same thing, income. "Product/market fit" is determined by exactly one thing, making money. It can be garbage, as long as you can get people to pay for it.
"Scaling up" translates to "increasing expenditures". And what is "traction", if not having an established customer base, i.e. people to make money off of?
Even if you're considering the case of startups which don't have a user base -- e.g. they are working on some cool technology in-house, as opposed to something with simple technology but a lot of users ala social news sites -- there's still a customer there: Google or Yahoo or whoever is doing the acquiring. Then you're finding one BIG customer instead of thousands of individual customers.
So it's still back to the same thing, money out vs. money in. I don't know why people like to mystify it with tales of startup lore.
Even PG's "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" doesn't specify a timeframe; of course if you have an unlimited amount of time and resources, you can eventually "succeed" -- except if you already have such staggering financial resources available to you, you're already rich, so it's a wash.
In any realistic consideration, it's possible that you keep changing your approach into one of the many other directions that also won't work, instead of one of the few that will. E.g. after 6 tries, you don't hit on a PayPal, but on failure #7. Then you run out of money. Oops, you didn't successfully implement the "don't die" principle.
Screw income, businesses can run on fairy dust, Tink!
> Read pmarca's blog posts on "product/market fit" to understand.
I read that when it was first posted, and it's nothing new, it's the same "make something people want". Which comes down to the same thing, income. "Product/market fit" is determined by exactly one thing, making money. It can be garbage, as long as you can get people to pay for it.
"Scaling up" translates to "increasing expenditures". And what is "traction", if not having an established customer base, i.e. people to make money off of?
Even if you're considering the case of startups which don't have a user base -- e.g. they are working on some cool technology in-house, as opposed to something with simple technology but a lot of users ala social news sites -- there's still a customer there: Google or Yahoo or whoever is doing the acquiring. Then you're finding one BIG customer instead of thousands of individual customers.
So it's still back to the same thing, money out vs. money in. I don't know why people like to mystify it with tales of startup lore.
Even PG's "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich" doesn't specify a timeframe; of course if you have an unlimited amount of time and resources, you can eventually "succeed" -- except if you already have such staggering financial resources available to you, you're already rich, so it's a wash.
In any realistic consideration, it's possible that you keep changing your approach into one of the many other directions that also won't work, instead of one of the few that will. E.g. after 6 tries, you don't hit on a PayPal, but on failure #7. Then you run out of money. Oops, you didn't successfully implement the "don't die" principle.