Letters Remain

Tag: startups

  • Entrepreneurship and the Possibility of Real Failure

    In 2007 Vinicius Vacanti quit his highly-paid job in finance to take on life as an entrepreneur. In a short post describing his reasons for doing so, Vacanti says that most of us haven’t faced the possibility of real failure, and entrepreneurship is a way to test your limits by attempting to create something of…

  • Marketing Lessons for Startups

    When Ilya Lichtenstein offered free marketing advice to startups (as a way of thanking the Hacker News community) he received over 150 requests and set to work. Certain patterns started to emerge in his advice, and so he decided to produced a three-post ‘startup marketing lessons learnt’ series (parts two and three). There’s some fantastic…

  • Preventable Startup Mistakes (That Caused the Downfall of Seven Startups)

    Verifiable, Wesabe, Storytlr, TwitApps, Vox, Swivel and EventVue: All companies or products that no longer exist after preventable problems caused their downfall. 37signals collects their stories so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes, presenting a set of brief post-mortems on failed startups. The recurring issues seem to be: solving problems that the world isn’t…

  • Developing a Web App on a Shoestring Budget

    As the title suggests—and the tips prove—this brief guide to getting a web app up-and-running on a small budget requires, well, a budget (as opposed to no budget and doing it all yourself). The steps: Create a clear wireframe model Outsource the development Use an open source content management system Start a design contest Leverage…

  • Microsoft, Google and Startups Compared

    After visiting both the Microsoft and Google campuses to discuss Stack Overflow (Google Tech Talk: Learning from StackOverflow.com), Joel Spolsky discusses the similarities and differences between the two corporations and his own small company. What I’ll probably remember most about the trip is what I learned about company culture and how it’s affected by scale. Giant corporations…

  • Don’t Implement Ideas, Solve Problems

    Taking inspiration from Paul Graham’s Ideas for Startups essay, Martin Zwilling offers some further thoughts—to wit, don’t start with an idea, start with a problem. Potential startup founders are always looking for ideas to implement, when they should be looking for problems to solve. Customers pay for solutions, and there is no market for ideas.…

  • Entrepreneurs Not Learning From Mistakes

    Entrepreneurial failure is an integral part of eventual success and an important opportunity for learning, or so goes the conventional wisdom (hence in some part the quote—commonly attributed to Lisa Amos—that entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before success). Ignoring the anecdotal success-after-failure stories that stick in peoples’ minds, a team at Harvard Business School decided to…

  • In Defence of Branding

    By comparing and contrasting the “two worlds” of direct marketing and brand marketing, Andrew Chen discusses why metrics-driven marketing shouldn’t usurp that of ‘branding’. The nature of internet marketing makes it easy to have a highly accountable, metrics-driven view – but companies that are highly metrics driven easily overlook hard-to-measure issues like brand and user…

  • Frugality and Entrepreneurship

    Inc. Magazine has a (possibly too lengthy) profile, complete with the expected insights, of Paul Graham—author of Hackers and Painters, co-founder of Y Combinator, and all-round entrepreneurship guru. Cheap meals are, in a strange way, part of Y Combinator’s formula for start-up success. Graham wants founders to spend as little money as possible. Live cheaply…

  • 17 Startup Mistakes

    John Osher is the epitome of the “serial entrepreneur”. After selling his toy company – CAP Toys – to Hasbro in 1997 for more than $120 million this is what he did: “I decided I’d make a list of everything I’d done wrong and [had] seen other entrepreneurs do wrong, I wanted to make a…