The startup culture is filled with people with ADD
It seems like the startup culture is filled with people with ADD.
They come out with a project, see little or no traction the first few weeks-month, ..and then abandon it to go work on something else.
Everyone needs to take a moment and realize that there is no such thing as overnight success. Putting out a project, getting covered in TC, getting millions in VC, and then becoming a top 1,000 web property doesn’t happen overnight.
And even when it does, the # of companies who it happens to can be counted on one hand. Really, the only one in recent years that even comes to mind is Mint.
The reason is survivor bias. You read TC, and mostly hear about the successes. Even when you hear about a failure…it’s still about a company that was successful enough to raise money and reach some decent traction. What you don’t hear about, is the thousands of sites that didn’t even get TC coverage. What you don’t hear about, is thousands of sites that do get TC coverage, that hit deadpool.
The dirty little secret, is that starting a new website is always slow. You always start out with 0. And you always start out by getting only a couple of people a day. The thing though, is if you stick it out, eventually you’ll upgrade to 10-20 people a day. Then 100-200. Then 1000-2000. Then 10000-20000. Then 100000-200000. You just have to stick it out to survive long enough to hit those numbers.
Remember the old hockey stick, you just need to survive long enough to pass the hockey stick threshold.
I’ll give you an example. Remember twitter? This little known web app that is now the #14 site in the world according to Alexa?
Well here is their early traffic graph(source:techcrunch), this is the earliest graph I managed to find. As you can see according to the graph their December 2007 traffic was about 100K uniques.
100K uniques…that’s nothing right? Well here is another fun fact.
Twitter was founded March 2006, and launched July 15, 2006. That means it took them 6 months after launching to reach 100,000 uniques a month.
So stick it out, you never know….that little app you want to abandon after 1 month, might be the next twitter.
Obviously not everything works out that well, you need to figure out if it’s a service that people actually want, never the less, you should at least give it 6-7 months to prove itself, before you decide to kill it.
