Such a true statement. The sad part about this john is that many people leading the charge have no recollection of ACT 221 and they write off the people like us that do as haters or non-believers.
I remember going to Denali in high school and the mosquitoes you have up there in Alaska shouldn't even considered in the same genus as the mosquitos most people deal with.
We bootstrapped our company as well and did not get (couldn't afford) health insurance for the founders until about 1.5 years in. By that time I was too embarrassed to go to the dentist and put it off for another 2 years. Worst decision ever. By the time I did go last year, it had been over 5 years since my last dental visit. I needed a root canal and I'm still getting my cavities I piled up in that time period filled (though I'm almost done).
Our insurance plan is not cheap, (we live in Hawaii and pay about $500/month each) but its essential. You worry about so many things when choosing the startup life, your health shouldn't be another thing on your mind.
This is the unfortunate entropy of any online community. I've seen it in the community I managed as well.
First you have the founder(s) of the community and the early adopters. These people all are like minded, and all appreciate the mission or goal of the community. They contribute great things which makes it an awesome place to hang out all the time.
The next group of people who come in hear about how cool this small community is. They for the most part have the right idea but sometimes they are too enthusiastic and want to contribute right away instead of building cred slowly. This causes them to do things that doesn't quite fit with the original intent of the community. This annoys some early members and they leave.
The next wave are people the enthusiastic 2nd wave people bring in through evangelizing the community. Unfortunately the 2nd wave choose to highlight not the mission of the community but the benefits of it. This 3rd wave group are often in it for self gain and promotion rather than to be contributing members of the community. The original mission of the founder(s) is lost in the shuffle as the number of people who "get it" are quickly being outnumbered by those who are new and "don't get it". More of the early community members, people who made the original community so great, leave leaving the 2nd generation as the elder members. The remaining original members get into confrontational debates about what the community is supposed to be with the newer members.
After that, the community continues to degrade, eventually most of the original community resort to just lurking instead of engaging with the community which is now pretty much filled with self promotion and self serving. The community from the outside looking in appears to be the same on the surface but is a shell of its former greatness and actually quite sad for the original members and the founder(s).
The sad thing is there are people who come in the new waves that do get it, and have appreciation for the original mission and purpose of the founder, but they are always outnumbered by the others.
One thing I don't understand is why didn't the buyer just contact the seller directly and try to return the violin for a full refund? Was it sold under the terms all sales final?
This is actually a very solid insight, the value of the problem you're solving with your app can be determined by the amount of time someone will complain to you about it, especially busy people.
Sound so simple but its amazing how many "entrepreneurs" are terrified of talking to potential customers and end up wasting a ton of tie developing things nobody wants.
Cognitive dissonance. Dan ariely talks about it in "predictably irrational". It's the same reason people don't often change dentists because changing dentist after putting up with all the pain and discomfort that comes with a dentist means you made a wrong decision. Same thing with hazing etc for Frats, sororities. You go through it and because it was so miserable you equate the end result to having more value and justify the hazing. Great book for entrepreneurs as you can really see just how often our ego comes into play with our decision making.
I was just discussing this with my wife last night. My 2 friends and I bootstrapped our company for $300. Knowing that all the success we are enjoying now came from our hard work and that no one else can take any claim to our any part of our success is such an awesome feeling. I talk to a lot of local angels and VCs now and what they offer really doesn't seem that interesting to me anymore. The business I have now will probably never make hundreds of millions of dollars, but I don't feel the need or desire to hit those kind of numbers if it means I have to sacrifice my lifestyle now (a very awesome lifestyle).
This is so true, especially in areas outside of the hot tech scenes. Social media is such a buzz word these days you have people coming out of the wood work to cash in on it. These "experts" take advantage of the more traditional companies who are looking to develop a social media strategy simply for the fact they they alway hear about it on traditional media. Most of these "experts" have no social proof or reason to be called experts, they just lable themselves. You can say the businesses hiring these people are to blame, but when you know absolutely nothing on a subject how do you even know if you're teacher is bad?
As was said once by Tim Feriss, in China they have a saying that roughly translates to "If you can fool them, fool them". This saying was confirmed by a few people that I know that grew up in China.
However, the big elephant in the room is the fact that many of the factories there just don't have a good grasp of English. You can explain exactly what you want and they will always say they got it even if they don't get it because they want the business.
I have one friend who has had a lot of success manufacturing in China but its because he has someone who grew up there and can speak the language fluently and understands the culture of negotiation. They give her the "Chinese pricing" instead of the "American pricing".
They have the capability to make good quality stuff in China, its just that you won't get it without some know how (and someone who can speak fluent mandarin and doesn't have an American accent).
The irony of this post is that Jason would most definitely not want you in his company.
In a startup, which his companies are, there really is no room for people want normal jobs and want to work normal hours. Startup life is a very fast paced constant swim upstream. You're trying to cram years worth of work into months to create enormous value as quickly as possible. ALL startups want "rockstar" employees as they help this process exponentially. What he's stating is not really anything different than any other start up founder would say he/she wants, its just he says it in a very inflammatory way.
I run a site with fairly high traction with teenagers specifically teenages from california and tumblr is very popular with that demographic. From the outside looking in, they seem as excited about it as I was about friendster circa 2003, like this blogging thing was just invented. My take on the success of tumbler, for this demo at least is that it successfully implements standard blog tools that were once too nerdy for the masses (rss subscriptions, auto posting to twitter / fb, making it easy to post any type of media, making it easy to theme their blogs). In fact most of them use it like a twitter on steroids, posting pics and videos and viewing them without having to click on a like to a seperate service.
As a former GoDaddy hosting customer, let me tell you all that these attacks are not new business. There was a point in May where our sites were attacked weekly with massive damage done. We would perform all the fixes they recommended yet the next day our site would be hacked to crap again. It is obviously a huge vulnerability on their side (from what I remember it was with their phpmyadmin implementation) yet all they did during this time was blame their customers saying it was security flaws in the php software installed by their customers.
I've had many unsuccessful start up experiences, however it's hard for me to call them failures. It takes a lot of effort to truly fail, most of these times I just quit. I quit before I gave these ideas a real chance to grow.
Growing a real business is like growing a tree from a seed. If you stop watering too soon, you never know how big the tree could have grown.
On the note of how to move forward from these experiences. It's important to analyze each project and figure out the exact reason they weren't successful. For me I had to realize I thought I knew more than I did and that my ego was getting in the way. I had to realize I couldn't do everything on my own. I learned that cash is king and there are almost always ways to get what you need done on the cheap or free (exchange). I had to learn to delegate tasks that I shouldn't be wasting my time on.
It sucks really bad to think of these past projects and it often took me months or years to bring myself to think about them seriously without blowing their lack of success to exterior conditions out of my control.
Don't sleep on these hip hop guys. They're born hungry. Look at Russell Simmons, Diddy, Jay-Z and 50 Cent, and (technically not a rapper) Usher. They all have pretty impressive business portfolios.