Notices by Startup Lab (startuplab@mastodon.social), page 2

Decided to compile a list of my favorite non-fiction books:

https://medium.com/@startuplab/my-favorite-non-fiction-books-7d000993fa6d

You can expect society to perform suboptimally and find low-hanging unsolved problems in areas where:

- Decision-makes have little to lose or gain personally from making improvements.

- Decision-makers can’t reliably learn the information they need to make decisions, even though someone else has that information.

- Systems that are broken in multiple places so that no one actor can make them better, even though some magically coordinated action could move to a new stable state.

Furthermore, the relationship between a founder’s age and the probability of a successful exit increases monotonically until about age 60. Founders in their early 20s have the lowest likelihood of achieve a successful exit, and a founder at age 50 is almost twice as likely to achieve a successful exit than one at age 30.

Most successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young.

- The mean age across all 2.7 million founders [in a study] is 41.9.
- The mean age of high-tech founders is 43.2, VC-backed founders - 41.9.
- For the top 10%, top 5%, top 1% and top 0.1% (1 in 1000) of upper-tail growth, the mean founder ages are 41.6, 42.1, 43.7, and 45.0 respectively.
- The mean founder age of startups with a successful exit, through IPO or acquisition, is 46.7.

https://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2018/08/31/silicon-valley-myths-aside-time-is-on-the-side-of-aging-entrepreneurs/

#startup #business #tech

It's okay to feel confused when you're learning. Instead of being frustrated about that, recognize that this is how learning is *supposed* to feel like.

You look at a new thing, you're feeling confused because it's new, then you get used to it and understand it better, and you aren't confused anymore.

Signs of a successful startup:

- A product so good people tell their friends about it.
- Easy to explain/understand.
- Market that will undergo exponential growth.
- Riding a wave of a real trend - like a new platform that people use obsessively, many hours every day (think iOS, not VR).
- Meaningful mission that makes people excited to help/join/contribute.
- Enthusiastic founder with an ambitious vision. Confident and definite view of the future.

read more:
https://medium.com/@startuplab/signs-of-a-successful-startup-43416a9a9c13

#startup

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing whats not working.

When your project is not a hit, don't keep pushing it as is, get back to improving, present each new idea and improvement to the world, until people are shouting "shut up and take my money!"

Dont waste years fighting uphill battles against closed doors. Improve/invent until you get that huge response.

Optimizing for the right values

https://medium.com/@startuplab/optimize-the-right-values-2479768fcb46

#startup #business #tech

One way to know that you have product market fit is that you’ll get growth by word of mouth.

One way to know that you have product market fit, is that you’ll get growth by word of mouth.

Focus on taking over a small market that will be big in 10 years. Build a product that a small number of people in a rapidly growing niche will really love.

It’s much easier to expand from something that a small number of people love to something that a lot of people love, than to grow something that a large number of people kinda like.

Create something so cool that it will spread through word of mouth.

Emulate practice, not performance. When you see someone do something amazing(art, public speaking, whatever), instead of copying what they're doing right now, copy the path they followed to get to this level of skill.

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.

Who wants to work with me and @dajbelshaw, developing the #ActivityPub based #federated back-end for #MoodleNet?

We're looking for a #developer familiar with #Elixir (or transferable skills like #Erlang and #RubyOnRails).

The whole project will be #FOSS and you can work from home, what's not to love ;-) Please RT!

https://blog.moodle.net/2018/hiring-backend-developer/

#tech #job #programming #jobs #software #remote #federation #decentralised

You probably radically underestimate:

- How much you know that other people don't.

- How valuable it is for you to publish it.

The goal of B2B companies is to make some common business process less expensive, the goal of B2C companies is to develop new habits among consumers.

The key defining factor of a startup is growth. This is what investors invest in when they fund your company, because tech startups are one of the very few sources of growth you can purchase.

Don't be afraid to charge more:

- Most founders severely underprice their products/services. If your product is valuable - people will be willing to pay for it.

- Higher margins will allow you to invest into improving your product. It's better to compete on quality than on price.

- It's easier to sell 10 $100 products than 100 $10 products.

- Higher prices filter for better customers.

- If doubling your price won't lose you more than half of your customers - that's free money.

#startup

Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset .

People with a 'fixed mindset' believe that abilities are mostly innate and interpret failure as the lack of necessary basic abilities, people with a 'growth mindset' believe that they can acquire any given ability provided they invest effort or study.

Our abilities are shaped both by our decisions and by our genetics/environment, but people who believe they have more control end up sticking with their goals for longer and are less likely to give up.