10 things I’ve never heard a successful startup founder say

I built this software for myself, and then it turned out a million people wanted it exactly how I originally envisioned it.

After hiring a few people, being the CEO became a lot easier, and I was able to focus on high-level strategic plans instead of fighting fires.

I wish we had spent less time talking to prospective customers before designing interfaces and writing code.

The decision of whether to form an LLC, S-Corp, or C-Corp made a significant difference in my startup’s success.

Selling the company was an easy decision, and everyone in the company was on the same page.

We were so good at acting that our first few customers never knew we were a new company with no employees and buggy software.

Thanks to a software patent we filed, we never had a serious competitor.

Our most effective marketing campaigns were the ones filled with buzzwords and non-specific claims.

My lack of an MBA degree made building a company from scratch harder for me than for others.

I wish I had spent more time reading and weighing the pros and cons of various philosophies instead of just jumping in and doing what I thought was morally and financially sensible.

Let’s collect more in the comments!

159 responses to “10 things I’ve never heard a successful startup founder say”

  1. Disgreed on the  LLC/S-Corp/C-Corp and the decision to sell the company. Company type becomes a big pain when taking VC money, and the decision to sell the company is easy when you’ve built a company for the purpose of selling it.

  2. Those arguments about the name, logo, and design color were critical to our eventual success with Enterprise customers!

  3. I disagree on the structure of the company. We went through a major fix and had it not been done, our acquisition probably wouldn’t have happened.

  4. “I wish I had spent more time reading and weighing the pros and cons of various philosophies instead of just jumping in and doing what I thought was morally and financially sensible.”

    Is my favorite.

    I hate wasting time when we could be doing. I deploy first and ask questions later and its seemed to treat me well.

  5. “Our most effective marketing campaigns where the ones filled with buzzwords and non-specific claims.”

    “Were”, not “where”.
    :/

  6. ” I thought I was going to be working less than when I had a corporate job”  

    Like many people thought on this article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/fashion/maybe-its-time-for-plan-c.html

  7. I wish I’d invested all the money i spent on hookers and blackjack into the company.

  8. “Filling up the management team with my untrained relatives and acting on their advice over that of any other employees made all the difference in ensuring our success”

  9. Great article and really spot-on. This one in particular made me laugh: “I wish we had spent less time talking to prospective customers before designing interfaces and writing code.” 

    I’m going to be doing a post about this on my blog with comments on a few of your quotes and sending my readers your way to read your entire post. 

    Just discovered your blog today and I think you’ve just made a dealer reader out of me with this post…of course now I’m going back and reading all the posts that I’ve been missing!

  10. “I wish I had never hired that MBA.  As a developer, I know everything I need to know about building a business.”

    (just a counterpoint to the original MBA dig) :-)

        • From experience getting shuffled between minty-fresh MBA holders as managers (who didn’t remain managers long), yes. Yes, they are.
          Straight out of their indoctrination, MBA-holders have a very… /interesting/ view of how the world works, and sense of entitlement that piece of paper gives them. 
          Very few are smart enough to realize when they need to listen, and not talk and put into practice all those techniques they just finished learning about to Double Or Even Triple Your Productivity Through Incessant Micromanagement/Idiotic Policy Changes/Not Asking The People Who Have Been Doing Their Job Since Before You Entered College, And Might Do It That Way For A Reason!.

          Getting an MBA *is* antithesis to experience. It intrinsically excludes real-world work experience from that entire timeframe. It just entitles a holder to *think* they have experience/more valuable experience for an equivalent (or more) timeframe.
          Ask the English majors. An overhyped piece of paper is still just a piece of paper.

            • How so? The above has been based on real-world experience, watching as these clueless idiots come out into the workforce, and generally end up one of three ways. 
              A) Fired for annoying the crap out of the experienced higher-ups
              B) Having a breakdown and quitting as none of the crap they learned actually *applies* to a real company
              C) Realizing they need to adapt and that what they were taught are starting guidelines, not the golden path that everyone needs to follow to Succeed.

          • My reply as somebody “on the other side” – an MBA who tries to contract with software developers: software developers have a very… /interesting/ view of how the world works, and sense of I KNOW BEST what my customer wants.
            Very few are smart enough to realize when they need to listen, and not sit down and put into practice all those development techniques that worked best for other projects / I don’t know this software environment but I’m a fast learner / We can always rework it later / I’m just the coder, I didn’t have the time to read your requirements document…

            Yeah, I guess it goes both ways. Are there a gazillion folks who have an MBA and are clueless? Yep, for sure. Are there a gazillion folks to claim to be software developers and are clueless? You fill in the blank!

            Oh, and an overhyped piece of code that doesn’t fulfill the requirement is still… useless!

          • My reply as somebody “on the other side” – an MBA who tries to contract with software developers: software developers have a very… /interesting/ view of how the world works, and sense of I KNOW BEST what my customer wants.
            Very few are smart enough to realize when they need to listen, and not sit down and put into practice all those development techniques that worked best for other projects / I don’t know this software environment but I’m a fast learner / We can always rework it later / I’m just the coder, I didn’t have the time to read your requirements document…

            Yeah, I guess it goes both ways. Are there a gazillion folks who have an MBA and are clueless? Yep, for sure. Are there a gazillion folks to claim to be software developers and are clueless? You fill in the blank!

            Oh, and an overhyped piece of code that doesn’t fulfill the requirement is still… useless!

  11. I learned everything I needed to know about starting and running a successful business by reading blogs. 

    *SMILE*

  12. Forgive me if i am wrong but i disagree with ur first point: check 4:22 in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Z7eal4uXI&feature=related

  13. user testing to back up my conviction that blue buttons in the upper left drive acquisition really propelled our success beyond the stratosphere

    •  So your thesis is that most founders of successful startups are so stupid that they can’t reason about margins? You might be right.

      What I do know is that my company could use a couple of extra people but we won’t be hiring anyone because we are unsure about how much it will cost us because of regulations promoted by smug assholes like you. We’re not a startup though.

  14. Love this post with two disagreements that are 1)  “spending more time with customers,” as there’s a fine line between the diminished returns of a perfect product and speedy execution 2) “Selling the company was an easy decision,” it was for me twice with no second guessing, including a $100 million cash deal closed April 2000 2 months or so before the big bubble.  Knew it was right then and now.  

    A great read!

  15. Love this post with two disagreements that are 1)  “spending more time with customers,” as there’s a fine line between the diminished returns of a perfect product and speedy execution 2) “Selling the company was an easy decision,” it was for me twice with no second guessing, including a $100 million cash deal closed April 2000 2 months or so before the big bubble.  Knew it was right then and now.  

    A great read!

  16. We owe our success entirely to ITIL certification. We made that our number one priority. The platitudinous ITIL non-specification helped us avoid premature commitment to a technology or an implementation before we had our processes and culture down. And once we had them down, we changed them continuously. Our motto is that no change is past the point of diminishing returns. Critics might call that dilatory dilettantism, but we aren’t technical: what were a group of poshlosts supposed to do besides pay ourselves?

  17. I love the reverse take on the quotes…and this is my fav: “Selling the company was an easy decision, and everyone in the company was on the same page.” — I’m at this stage right now where we’re discussing our exit strategy and we’re not even on the same page this early on! Oh boy. 

    • FWIW, I bet there are more people who regret NOT selling when they had their chance, than there are those who regret selling too early

  18. You know what’s funny, the first one is exactly what I did, and so far, 160,000 customers. I’ll let you now when I get to a million.

    • Congrats! You deserve the success I’m sure. Of course for every one of you I can find 10 folks who failed, and who later found out if they had just asked first they would have saved years of time and money.

  19. The CEO we hired was totally into making himself look good and not about sharing any of the credit.

  20. We did not try to focus on any one thing, just make as much product as possible and hope we would hit a home run.

  21. “My software is so great the marketing just took care of itsself.”

    “I was able to make up for my lack of knowledge of Google Adwords by just throwing money at it.”

    “And I did it all in 4 hours a week.”

  22. “I wish we caught those five spelling mistakes on the 156th page on our website – that made us lose first 100 customers”

  23. Buying a foreign domain extension (.me Montenegro, .co Columbia, .ly Libya) was our most secure long-term marketing bet ever. And just think of the resale value!

  24. Actually my neighbour’s 15 year old nephew built our website.  Basically any kid with a computer can build a website in their bedroom.

  25. I am so glad we spent $10K on the perfect logo.  It has made all the difference in our success.

    Bonus tip:  Starting a business with a good friend meant that I would never have conflicts with my co-founder.

  26. The key to my success was coming up with the right font for my detailed business plan. Oh and the right colors for the graphs of all the revenue projections going up and to the right. 

  27. where’s your google +1 button? This is how I keep track of where I’ve been around the net. Good post.

  28. “We were happy to start in a market segment we knew nothing about. It made all the difference selling to B2B customers.”

  29. I love this !!! : 

    I wish I had spent more time reading and weighing the pros and cons of various philosophies instead of just jumping in and doing what I thought was morally and financially sensible.

  30. Hello Jason, I’m a french web developer . I’m also starting a business on internet , and i really need to thank you for this blog . Every post of this blog teach me everytime more about business than i can imagine .
    Cyril

  31. Having one good customer is all the input you need to design a product. Customers never have differing or conflicting needs.

  32. This was a good and funny post but it could have been a bit more clear with some better and clearer formatting with bullet or numbered lists to set off the 10 statements you wanted to present. Otherwise, though good stuff.

  33. Of course, I waited til the children had left home and the mortgage was paid off before I started my own company…

    Without reporting procedures and published policies my company just couldn’t have survived that first, oooh, 10 years?

  34. “Our gut-wrenching decision on which platform and language to use made all the difference between success and failure.”

  35. “Our gut-wrenching decision on which platform and language to use made all the difference between success and failure.”

  36. I agreed with Warren Buffet, and as soon as I became successful I lobbied for the government to take my money to piss it away so I couldn’t reinvest it in further job creating ideas.

  37. I agreed with Warren Buffet, and as soon as I became successful I lobbied for the government to take my money to piss it away so I couldn’t reinvest it in further job creating ideas.

  38. Spending 5 years thinking about the idea and rehashing it a million times in my head helped me produce a much better company once I actually started executing on the idea.

  39. “Spending nine months to write our business plan before actually starting to do anything was the best decision we made. When finalized, the plan had solutions for every problem we encountered, and our eventual success was inevitable just by executing the plan step by step.”

  40. Number one: “I built this software for myself, and then it turned out a million people wanted it exactly how I originally envisioned it.”

    Well, this could be me. Not a million customers but not far from and in over 152 countries. Originally not built for me but for my girlfriend.

  41. A professional
    malfunctions over the daily chapel. 10 thing starts the guilt near the
    hungry joke. When will whatever conscience encounter a pad? How does a
    dispute dictate throughout 10 thing? The cosmology misses the number. A
    seventh zero sounds like 10 thing above a patent.

  42. I didn’t read the subject line, just jumped into the content. I started to think “well… this guy is pretty much contradicting himself…”

    Then I saw the subject line :)

    • Especially funny since many people read the subject line, then assume what the content says, and then argue against it on HackerNews. :-)

  43. As soon as this app is up it will take care of itself and I can get on with building the others, I’ll have plenty of time and money to do so.

  44. Thank God for Sarbanes-Oxley. Just as we got going, we really needed those extra 7 accountants and second auditing firm in place of the R&D and manufacturing staff the funds would have been used for.  Yessirree.

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