Nowadays founders have a lot of resources to learn what makes a startup successful. Whether it’s Paul Graham, Ben Horowitz or Peter Thiel - the advice from them are mostly consistent and even we founders acknowledge them as a universal truth. Yet, we don’t follow them. Why?
At first thought, it might look like we did not follow them because they were not applicable to our unique startup. But the reality is that most of the advice is generic and *does* apply to our startups. Then why don’t we follow them?
Let me give a couple of personal examples on advice I did not follow before and ended up following much later on, once I internalized what that advice meant.
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Example 1: I got an advice that only losers have an advertising strategy and winners have a product strategy. Dominant brands like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Zara, and WhatsApp have never needed to advertise to get dominance. Either your product has to be talk-worthy or at least stories about your product need to me remark-worthy.
This is an advice that sounds right. Yet, I did not follow it. I did not believe my product is as remarkable as Google or Facebook that it can grow just through word of mouth. That does not mean I can give up on my startup. I need to find quick ways of getting the word out and get traction.
So, I started advertising. Initially, it seemed fine. We then realized that we have to keep increasing our advertising budget to scale our business. We did not have that kind of money. So we started focusing on improving conversion and retention. We also simultaneously kept increasing advertising budgets in small increments. We somehow were getting the growth rates we wanted.
When I looked back after a few months, I realized that the big bumps in adoption came from product features and never from marketing tactics. I could have just focused on the product and I would have got the same growth, without needing to spend ad dollars. Actually, the growth could even have been better, as the energy, resources and focus from ads would also have been spent on product
I got the aha moment - I need not be a Google or Facebook; for any product, the growth is going to come from product changes and not from advertising dollars.
Example 2: Paul Graham’s advice that having few users love you is better than having a lot of users who sort-of like you.
Again, an advice that I chose not to follow. We started our service for both men and women (I also wanted to include kids ;) ). I wanted to launch it in all platforms - desktop, Android, iPhone, windows. I even wanted to go international.
The thought was that the word of mouth or ads are going to reach across the segments - why waste the reach that we got for a segment when getting the word out was the biggest challenge? For example, if there is a press coverage about us, 50% of those who read will be men and we will lose them if we don’t have products for men. That press coverage took a lot of effort from my side, why waste half of that reach? Similarly, the users reading the coverage might have a windows phone or iPhone and what if I don’t support that platform.
We learned the hard way that it was impossible to build a product that satisfies all the segments. We decided to focus only on Indian women and focus only on Android. Still, there are miles to go in addressing Indian women in android before we could move to other segments. Now I understand the meaning of starting small and having few users who love us.
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Nowadays, whenever I hear or read an advice, I smile - I know that I have just read the advice but don’t understand what it means until that “aha” moment arrives.