Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
feat: new blog post startups not lotto
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
@Chalks
Chalks committed Aug 18, 2024
1 parent 74c6305 commit 218c9ec
Show file tree
Hide file tree
Showing 5 changed files with 227 additions and 0 deletions.
3 changes: 3 additions & 0 deletions src/pages/blog/just-do-something-literally-anything.vue
View file
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -15,6 +15,9 @@ seo({
<template>
<article class="prose prose-red mx-auto py-12 px-4">
<h1>JUST DO SOMETHING LITERALLY ANYTHING</h1>

<p class="text-xs">January 21, 2024</p>

<p>
It's 5pm on a Sunday and I've knocked out a ton of tech debt on my
personal projects, written a blog post, updated my side projects,
Expand Down
222 changes: 222 additions & 0 deletions src/pages/blog/startups-are-not-lottery-tickets.vue
View file
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -0,0 +1,222 @@
<script setup>
seo({
title: 'Startups Are Not Lottery Tickets',
description: 'A side project won\'t become a unicorn by accident. Stop imagining yours will.',
imagePath: '/blog/death-of-formcake.jpg',
imageType: 'image/jpeg',
imageWidth: 800,
imageHeight: 511,
type: 'article',
published: '2024-01-21',
});
// https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
</script>

<template>
<article class="prose prose-red mx-auto py-12 px-4">
<h1>Startups Are Not Lottery Tickets</h1>

<p class="text-xs">August 17, 2024</p>

<p>
A side project won't become a unicorn by accident. Stop imagining
yours will.
</p>

<figure class="text-center">
<img src="/blog/is-this-a-startup.png" alt="Is this a startup?" class="m-auto" />
<figcaption>
Lottery tickets are not startups.
<a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-this-a-pigeon" target="_blank">Know your meme</a>.
<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/barbourians/8425673057" target="_blank">Photographer</a>.
</figcaption>
</figure>

<p>
We are all familiar with the lottery ticket nature of startups. If
your startup has the right tech, the right audience, the right
people, the right timing, etc etc, … you <strong>might</strong> hit
it big and become a multi-million or even multi-billion dollar
company. The initial investors, c-suite, and founding engineers make
a fuck ton of money and everybody rides off into the sunset on the
back of the unicorn. If however the startup fails
(<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=startup+failure+rate" target="_blank">which is by far the most common result</a>)
then everybody packs up and tries again on the next one. There are
huge rewards for the winners while the losers get little more than
some experience and a conversation starter for their resume.
</p>

<p>
I'd like to talk about this perspective as a founder of several
startups. While it can be applicable to employees (and I am an
employee of
<a href="https://parrot.ai/?utm_source=jdw.me" target="_blank">a startup</a>),
I'm focusing primarily on the founder's experience here. In
particular I'm speaking to the experience of software engineers who
start a side project while maintaining a full time job. In my
experiences doing just that, I've finally realized that
<i>as a founder</i> I have treated each side-project-startup like a
lottery ticket. I invest my time and energy into them with the
reservations of someone who is leery of the gamble. I don't allow my
startups to be too important to me because if (when) they fail no
big deal, it's just a lottery ticket! If it happens to explode in
popularity then great, I win. If it doesn't… who cares?
</p>

<p>
I am an optimist. I will occasionally buy a lottery ticket because
there's a part of me that goes "ooh, but what if" and I give into
that. I am a realist. When I buy a lottery ticket I roll my eyes a
little bit and know that my odds of winning the big prize are
virtually nil, so I don't really spend more than a couple bucks on
it every few months or so. I have never won the lottery. I doubt
that I ever will.
</p>

<p class="font-bold">
If I buy a lottery ticket with the expectation of losing, won't my
projects suffer the same fate when I work on them with that mindset?
</p>

<p>
So far… yes.
</p>

<h3>A Case Study: Formcake</h3>

<p>
Formcake was a platform for handling POSTs from html forms. Its
primary use case was connecting your form's submission data to you
without writing any more code than
<code>&lt;form target="https://formcake.com"&gt;</code>. It was
particularly useful for any static site that needed a contact form.
Three of my friends and I worked on it for about four years. A few
weeks ago we shut it down. We failed.
</p>

<p>
I failed.
</p>

<p>
This is not the first time I've failed. I have a long list of side
projects over the past decade that have all ended more or less
ignominiously. However, this one hurt and it hurt because I believed
that Formcake had promise. Hell, I still believe that.
</p>

<p>
There are a litany of reasons why Formcake died… poor marketing,
lack of focused product niche, scammers abusing the platform (a
surprisingly pervasive problem that attracted attention from
government agencies across the world), lack of integrations, and a
lack of interest from its creators. Yet despite all those issues we
had a core group of users who liked the product and used it
religiously, myself included.
</p>

<p>
There were many things we could have done to turn Formcake into a
success. I won't speak for the other founders, but for myself, by
the end I couldn't bring myself to do that work because I had firmly
placed Formcake into lottery ticket status. Fixing any of its issues
required significantly more work than a lottery ticket deserves.
To be honest, I hadn't even realized that I was thinking about it
that way until after we had shut off the servers.
</p>

<p>
Consider marketing. I would need to build out social media presences
on at least one platform, probably several. I would need to spend
some money on targeted ads. I might have to hire someone to write
copy and build out a marketing strategy. No way am I doing any of
that for a lottery ticket.
</p>

<p>
Consider scammers. We could do some naive testing against submission
data and flag anything with the word "password" in it for review. We
could have thrown sampled data at some AI service and asked it if it
looked like phishing (I actually did this a little bit manually and
it was detecting phishing submissions surprisingly accurately).
Guess who's not doing that work for a lottery ticket.
</p>

<p>
And on and on and on.
</p>

<h3>Mindset Shift: You Don't Have to Build a Unicorn</h3>

<p>
Startups do not just magically become unicorns. They're not actually
lottery tickets. If you want to build a company that looks like a
lottery ticket to the outside world, you have to invest a huge
amount of time and energy in it. Like, a staggering amount.
Imagining your side-project-startup will become a unicorn is like
expecting to have a bodybuilder's body because you did one pullup
last Tuesday. In my professional life I have worked for companies
that have unicorn status as a stated goal. It is a full time job for
many people across many disciplines. It's exhilarating work and I
love it… but it's not easy, it's not accidental, and it's really
not luck.
</p>

<p>
I do not have the time, energy, or skill to build a unicorn as a
side project.
</p>

<p>
Holy shit! I don't have the time to build a unicorn! Why am I
worrying about unicorn problems? I am not making something that will
turn into a lottery ticket, and I am not making something that might
one day be worth a billion dollars. I'm not! I want to make useful
tools that solve problems for real people while making a few bucks.
I don't need millions I just want vacation money, you know?
</p>

<p>
For the software engineers who are making things on the side please
consider this: we often put "startup" on a pedestal and associate it
with everything Silicon Valley. I know I did. Even when my stated
goal was "make a bootstrapped startup" I had an idealized version of
what a "startup" was in my head. I also had a naive idea of what it
took to win the lottery of startups. I adjusted the level of effort
I put into things based on these ideas and it has killed my projects
over and over and over.
</p>

<p>
I'm going to make more things. It is fun, satisfying, and fulfilling
to create. But this time, next time, I won't let it be a lottery
ticket.
</p>

<p>
Stop 👏 treating 👏 startups 👏 like 👏 lottery 👏 tickets
</p>

<hr />

<!--
<p>
<NuxtLink to="/blog">Discuss on Reddit</NuxtLink>
</p>
-->

<NuxtLink to="/blog">Blog</NuxtLink>

<hr />

<figure class="lg:mt-0 text-center">
<img src="/blog/death-of-formcake.jpg" alt="I spy bears and cars" class="m-auto" />
<figcaption>
I feel some kind of way about the death of Formcake.
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvNSXS4x9nc" target="_blank">Mood</a>.
<a href="https://unsplash.com/@jetztabertempo" target="_blank">Photographer</a>.
</figcaption>
</figure>
</article>
</template>
2 changes: 2 additions & 0 deletions src/pages/index.vue
View file
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -28,10 +28,12 @@ seo();
- An authentication/user service that is currently in closed beta
</li>

<!--
<li>
<a href="https://Formcake.com?utm_source=jdw.me">Formcake</a>
- A backend service for any HTML form. It's fast and easy to use
</li>
-->

<!--
<li>
Expand Down
Binary file added src/public/blog/death-of-formcake.jpg
View file
Loading
Sorry, something went wrong. Reload?
Sorry, we cannot display this file.
Sorry, this file is invalid so it cannot be displayed.
Binary file added src/public/blog/is-this-a-startup.png
View file
Loading
Sorry, something went wrong. Reload?
Sorry, we cannot display this file.
Sorry, this file is invalid so it cannot be displayed.

0 comments on commit 218c9ec

Please sign in to comment.