There are a few paragraphs that are so true. This means I have experienced it myself.
Morale is tremendously important to a startup—so important
that morale alone is almost enough to determine success. Startups
are often described as emotional roller-coasters. One minute you're
going to take over the world, and the next you're doomed. The
problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that it makes you
unhappy, but that it makes you stop working. So the downhills
of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than
the uphills. If feeling you're going to succeed makes you work
harder, that probably improves your chances of succeeding, but if
feeling you're going to fail makes you stop working, that practically
guarantees you'll fail.
and here is another:
There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important
may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in.
Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out
what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable
information.
Because I just experience it myself this week. We launched ecbattle.com at the end of last week. There are lots of feedbacks from users and a lot of features/improvements/bugs need to be deal with. But it is so amazing that users are willing to register, try it out, and keep coming back. We do want to make a good product that people truly enjoy.
It's even the answer to questions that seem unrelated, like how to
convince investors to give you money. If you're a good salesman,
you could try to just talk them into it. But the more reliable
route is to convince them through your users: if you make something
users love enough to tell their friends, you grow exponentially,
and that will convince any investor.
After having met with some investors to pitch them about our project, I realized at the end, the biz plan really doesn't matter much. Either they don't get it or they don't believe it works. So finally it comes down to 2 questions: How much money are you making? (well, hmmm.... we are still in product development stage) How many users do you have? (hopefully I can answer this question better next time it comes up :)
Finally,
I think
everyone knows now that
good hackers are much better than mediocre
ones. If you can attract the best hackers to work for you, as
Google has, you have a big advantage.
I didn't really buy into this saying before: that good programmers are 10x more productive than the bad one. But now I am more and more into this saying. Good hackers could write 500 lines of code per day, and probably bad programmers do too. But good programmers write good codes. Bad programmers write bad codes. Good codes run efficiently, are maintainable, and are extensible. This save a lot of time in the long run. Bad codes mean someone need to fix it up later. You probably need to review his code also. And when bugs occured, you need to track it down and debug it. Finally, bad codes could get checked in and sit in the repository until users report it.
