alt Hacker NewsI read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.
With Elon, I think one of his is “build it as cheaply as possible, and then you can afford to only sell to people who are purely excited about the tech.” I don’t know when he learned this (I actually wonder if it was a lesson he learned from Eberhard/Tarpenning at Tesla, who were only selling the roadster to sports car enthusiasts who cared more about 0-60 than fit & finish, or range, or cost, or anything else).
Anyway, my current interpretation is that the pizza guys shouldn’t have sold to pepepizza (or friends and family, probably). I know startups do this all the time, but whenever I’ve seen it, it always seems to turn into a distraction from the Big Idea that is the company’s thesis. Then Big Customer gets hung up on ancillary requirements and Cool Startup doesn’t really get to test their thesis at all. Maybe the key is to stay small, focus on finding people who really care about the new oven tech, and size the company to that market until you’ve solved enough problems to expand to people for whom the cool tech is concern #2 or #3.
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> I read somewhere that almost every very successful person’s results can be attributed to 2-3 tricks that they consistently apply to great effect.
This entirely. I've been CTO at a handful of startups, most recently one that sold for a very large sum of money — and the successful ones are almost always led by people who keep things dirt simple: focus on the customer, execute quickly, communicate clearly, keep costs low, and keep the technology simple. That's basically it. Just a few simple things, applied relentlessly.
The ones that failed were always the total opposite — not listening to their customers, poor communication across the org, blowing their runway on "we need Google-scale infrastructure," switching languages or frameworks halfway through the project, and so on.
Every startup/SmallCo I worked for seemed to fall into this trap. Sales finally finds a BigCustomer, and the company instantly transforms from a product company into a custom engineering contractor for BigCustomer. We're no longer building our own product vision: We're cramming everything BigCustomer is asking for while they hold a carrot tied to a stick in front of us. We no longer have a general product that can be sold to anyone. We have BigCustomer's wish list and they still haven't bought more than a handful of units.