YCombinator

Comments Change – Using Disqus!

Just a short note to let folks know that I’ve switched my commenting system over to Disqus.

Disqus is a hosted commenting system (free) that offers a few clear benefits:

  • 2 way communication with people who comment. This is the one I care about. Very often, someone leaves an interesting comment on my blog that I want to respond to. I usually do, but it’s unlikely that that commenter will ever know about it… Disqus allows the commenter to be alerted to any replies to their comment, which can continue an interesting conversation.
  • Threaded conversation. No-brainer. No longer will I have to say “@PersonName:” to make it clear who I’m responding to.
  • Persistent reputation. The biggest problem (IMO) with conversation on the Internet is that the average Joe has trouble being polite– and some people are being impolite and just cruel. I love the idea that Disqus saves everything you say and you can vote up (and down) any comment. If Disqus gets big enough, you could imagine being able to set rules like “no comments from non-registered users who have an average comment vote of less than 1″.
  • SEO Benefit. To be fair, Disqus (right now) hurts your SEO on one front. Given that I don’t really care too much about traffic to this blog, I’m okay with that (they are working on an API version that calls the comment content with their API rather than JavaScript)… It’ll be interesting to see if there is an effect on search engine traffic. But it’s not often mentioned that Disqus drops links to your blog (and each post) on your community page (mine is at http://tonywright.disqus.com/ ), which provides some nice positive SEO juice.

Disqus offers quite a few other benefits– the above are the ones I care most about. If you have a blog, check out their tour or just take it for a spin. It’s a breeze to set up!

Reading the Lines, Not Between Them (PG & Coding Horror)

There’s quite a flap over Paul Graham’s recent essay.

The attacking author quotes a comment on Reddit (always a good sign) as a good summary of the essay of why we should all be terribly offended.

“I work with young startup founders in their twenties. They’re geniuses, and play by their own rules. Oh… you haven’t founded a company? You suck.”

I kinda feel like there is a reading comprehension problem here. Paul added a “Cliff’s Notes” version of the article to clarify, but I’m going to boil down what I got.

The point I got from the essay is:

“I work with young startup founders in their twenties [note: he works with me and a mess of other founders who are also in their thirties... at least 1 or 2 are in their forties]. They seem stressed, but they seem happier and more alive. I think it might be a socio-biological thing– human beings are meant to be working in smaller groups, with clearer goals, and more ‘on the line’. Small businesses and startups seem like the best place to find this environment.”

Period.

Saying stuff like “happier and more alive” (which PG did not– I’m paraphrasing) does not mean that everyone else is miserable and dead inside.

Anyways, this isn’t a wild idea. There are piles of studies out there that have found a correlation between self-employment and satisfaction/happiness. Incidentally, there’s also a strong correlation between self-employment and making less money (but that’s good news, because there are ALSO studies that show that money doesn’t do much for happiness once you manage to have enough coming in to cover the necessities)

Every Piece of Startup Advice is a Lie (including mine)

Well, not all of it. That title was blatant click-bait. You’re here and I’ve won. Nyah!

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).

All of the things I’ve learned are incredibly useful and all of it (paradoxically) can be incredibly wrong.

Let me explain my thinking here. Human beings love formulas. Human beings who succeed naturally think that they’ve stumbled onto a magical step-by-step guide on how other people can succeed, too. They blog about it, speak about it, and generally spread their wisdom far and wide.

The funny thing is that when you read/hear enough of this stuff, you start hearing brilliant and successful people presenting advice that directly conflicts with the advice from other brilliant and successful people.

Here are a few examples:

The list goes on. Find me a startup truism and I’ll find you a successful startup which is a living and breathing counter-example. All of the advice that you read and hear is incredibly valuable– but it’s very situational. Add it to your “startup utility belt” and whip it out when you hit a bump in the road that looks familiar. “Andreessen ran into this and solved the problem thusly. That’s what I’ll try!” But don’t think that you can arm yourself with a list of platitudes and expect to build a startup.

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.

  1. 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)
  2. 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!

I can’t think of a single startup that has died from an over-emphasis on these two points. Can you?

Half-assed Startup – How to Start your Company and Keep Your Day Job

Someone posted an interesting “Ask YC”, asking:

“How to start becoming an entrepreneur while still being an employee?“

Having done this twice (started a company that eventually turned into a full-time startup), I settled in to reply. Before long, it was clear that my response was long enough to justify a blog post.

I’ve done two part-time-to-full-time startups (one resulted in a startup the sold, the second is RescueTime– currently a YC-funded company– cross your fingers).

At the end of the day, I think Paul Graham is right when he says:

“The number one thing not to do is other things. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with “but we’re going to keep working on the startup,” you are in big trouble. Bob’s going to grad school, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re moving back to Minnesota, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. We’re taking on some consulting projects, but we’re going to keep working on the startup. You may as well just translate these to “we’re giving up on the startup, but we’re not willing to admit that to ourselves,” because that’s what it means most of the time. A startup is so hard that working on it can’t be preceded by “but.”"

In the beginning, however, it’s not always practical to dive in full-time. And sometimes when your idea is off-the-wall and also easy to build a prototype for, it’s smart to whip something out just to see if what you’re building is as cool as you think it might be before you take the plunge.

So if you’re too poor or too unsure to do the right thing for your business and dive in full-time, here are a few things that seemed to work for us when we did it part-time:

  1. You need a co-founder and some cheerleaders… If you can’t find 2-3 friends who are really excited to be beta testers for what you’re building, ponder changing your direction. The arguments for a co-founder are many and varied. For a part-time effort, they are essential to keep you on-track and working. At some point, you’ll hit a motivation wall… If you have a partner who is depending on you, you find a way past that. If you don’t, you’ll often lose interest and find something else to entertain you.
  2. Pick a day or two per week where you ALWAYS work, ideally in the same room as your co-founder(s). ALWAYS, no exceptions. We did 1 weekday evening and 1 weekend day. That doesn’t mean we weren’t working other days, but having a fixed schedule helps you through the phases of the project that might not be so fun.
  3. Have a boat-burning target. What will it take for everyone to dive in full-time? 5,000 active users? 10,000 uniques a week? Funding? That should be a shared understanding. You don’t want to have one founder ready to go full-time when another has reservations. This is easy to gloss over, but you should really nail it down. I’ve lost 2 co-founders to this issue (they weren’t ready to dive in full time and I was). It wasn’t fair to them and it wasn’t fair to me.
  4. Pick an idea that is tractable. Every business is a theory. If your theory is, “we can build a better web-based chat client”, that’s something you could test quickly. If you’re theory is “we can build a car that runs on lemonade”, that’s just not going to work as a part-time effort. The scarcity of available time should force you to distill the idea to the absolute essence that is necessary to test the theory. No extraneous features!
  5. Understand that your v1 ia probably going to suck. Read David of Weebly’s post on persistence. It’s a long road. My first startup was a ridiculous fluke (2 months and then sold). 99% of the overnight successes you read about were slogging in the muck for 5 years before the night in question. Be prepared for a long journey and be surprised if your startup is an immediate hit. So with your v1, look for the tiny little flicker than you might be on to something to motivate you to make it better. Every week, make it better than last week and see if that flicker of light can be fanned into a tiny flame.
  6. If you’re going to screw off at work (everyone does), spend it getting smarter about the stuff you don’t know. If you’re a coder, read a few design/usability blogs. Read up on what motivates angel investors. Research competitors and write down what they do well. Get brilliant at SEO (it’s not hard). Write a LOT more (blogging helps). Think about virality and research the heck out of it. This is all more valuable (and hopefully just as fun) as looking at LOLcats on Reddit. All that being said, be aware of the fuzzy line between using your cool-down time at work for your startup and stealing time/resources from your employer. If you’re paid to do a job, you need to do it.
  7. [edit: Thanks to Ivan in the comments] Be sure you own your startup. I’ve had the fortune to work in places and companies where there was very clear ownership of “after hours” work. If ownership of your personal IP is not clear, do NOT rely on the good will of your employer. Greed can do funny things to people, even if they were initially big supporters of your startup.

    8. At the end of the day, you want to prove whatever you need to prove as quickly as possible, so you can dive in full-time. Near as I can tell, there are plenty of startups that have started as “hobbies”, but you need to take it out of that phase as soon as you can. There is nothing that drives a team forward like the fear of public failure, debt, and starvation. Leap off the cliff and start building the airplane on the way down and you might be surprised with what you can pull off.

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