This link has been bookmarked by 21 people . It was first bookmarked on 11 Mar 2008, by Joel Liu.
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16 Oct 09
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01 Apr 08
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11 Mar 08
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The Two Truisms that Aren’t Lies
Now that I’ve finished saying that there’s no formula, I’m going to give you the two pieces of advice that (near as I can tell) EVERY successful founder has followed. Zero exceptions.
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- Build something people want. This will make or break you. Period. The success of your idea is a function of how much people want it and how many people want it. Make your product better on this front every single week. Every single DAY, if you can. Everything else is a distraction. If you can’t say, “What I’m doing RIGHT NOW will make [people want what we have more] or [more people want what we have]” you should seriously question how you’re spending your time. (Which begs the question, what the hell am I doing writing this blog post?!). FWIW, I think you should exhaust the former (increase the how much your users love you) before the latter (increase how many users love you)
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Don’t stop. Persist. Keep going. The idea of an overnight success is largely ridiculous, even if the press loves to tell you otherwise. (just ask Matt Mullenweg of WordPress). You’ll think you are on the verge of death early and often, but you aren’t– and you can make it through if you start with an idea that people want and keep working on #1. Read Paul’s Essay, “How Not to Die“– it’ll help!
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I’ve long been passionate about reading and digesting every tidbit of information about what it takes to build a successful startup. I’m an avid reader of people like Seth Godin, Paul Graham, Guy Kawasaki, the fellas at VentureHacks, Fred Wilson, Josh Kopelman, Andrew Chen, and more. As a participant in the YCombinator program, I have weekly dinners with entrepreneurs who have “hit it big” (Marc Andreessen, Ev Williams, Paul Buchheit, Chris Sacca, & Joe Kraus, to name a few).
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10 Mar 08
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09 Mar 08
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