Surely if I know the answers to these questions, but still fail over and over again, these answers aren’t that useful. 🤷♀️
So what’s a better question to ask? 🤔
💬 I often get Q’s like these:
How did you get your first customers for WIP? How did you grow BetaList’s traffic? Etc.
Makers are looking to reverse-engineer success. I see it everywhere.
I don’t think it works that way and the answers to those questions are mostly useless. 💥
Surely if I know the answers to these questions, but still fail over and over again, these answers aren’t that useful. 🤷♀️
So what’s a better question to ask? 🤔
🧠 This is known as survivorship bias.
Focusing on what survived, while ignoring what made it survive in the first place.
What makes @WIP, @BetaList, and to some extent @AllStartupJobs succeed where my countless other attempts failed?
What separates a failed product 👎 from a successful product 👍?
It’s like Steve Jobs said “I’ll know it when I see it.” 👀
Same is true when we make products. We don’t know upfront what will work. But once we see an inkling of a product that does have potential, it’s not that hard to spot.
👌 The right idea will pull you forwards.
👌 The right product will attract people wanting to use it. People will give feedback without you asking for it.
👌 The right product will give you the confidence to ship something embarrassing, because you know despite all its shortcoming it’s useful.
More from Startups
1/ If you want to find out what is in the Y Combinator S19 batch, @Golden has compiled (using public signals) a near complete list of truly exciting companies.
If we are missing any or you want to help improve the data you can edit the topics.
https://t.co/9QGLiEPsn3
2/ Here is the direct public query if you want to check it out:
https://t.co/aqb8qYN4y9
[Note: no off the record cos are in here unless they have been publicly launched already]
3/ Also, here are 2,000+ other YC companies we have generated information
4/ We used the Golden Research Engine to generate this information, which you can find out more about here and ping me if you want a
If we are missing any or you want to help improve the data you can edit the topics.
https://t.co/9QGLiEPsn3
2/ Here is the direct public query if you want to check it out:
https://t.co/aqb8qYN4y9
[Note: no off the record cos are in here unless they have been publicly launched already]
3/ Also, here are 2,000+ other YC companies we have generated information
4/ We used the Golden Research Engine to generate this information, which you can find out more about here and ping me if you want a
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The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.
In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.
In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.
This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
The story doesn\u2019t say you were told not to... it says you did so without approval and they tried to obfuscate what you found. Is that true?
— Sarah Frier (@sarahfrier) November 15, 2018
In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.
In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.
This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.
In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.