14
July
2013
|
05:45 AM
America/Los_Angeles

Good Luck With That: YC Founder's Advice To Startups: Go Out And Sell

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is a deity in Silicon Valley's startup communities and whenever and whatever he writes on his blog is closely scrutinized.

His latest post: Do Things that Don't Scale.

The word "scale" is code for software automation. His post is about startups that believe that all they need to do is launch their web service with sufficient attention and users will sign up and the business will grow (like a hockey stick). 

He points out that successful startups, such as Stripe did not sit back but went out "manually" to "recruit users."

"Sell" is a four-letter word in the geek engineering community, and that's why he doesn't use the word, but it's what he is saying.


The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can't wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.


Sell like hell.

However, …


They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them.


And there's the rub, or at least one of them, that's blocking startup success. Engineers don't sell – they code. If they wanted to sell they would be in a different career. Which is why only funding startups led by engineers is not a good idea.

He also reminds startups to focus on solving problems they know.


If you build something to solve your own problems, then you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward. 


Selling to your peers in the engineering community is even worse than selling to others. It's very gauche.

Isolationist innovation

Mr. Graham's advice to choose a business idea that they understand is a problem. The Ivy-league educated, mostly white and Asian males that makeup nearly all of the startup teams are running out of ideas for services they want for themselves.

That's why there are so many dating apps, to-do lists, email managers, map apps, music DJ, photo, video uploading apps, etc. Their experience of the world is very narrow, and it's not improving because they don't get out much, they aren't participating in their local communities. There's lots of ideas out there.

There's lots of problems to be solved just down their streets and around the corner, in the cities of Silicon Valley, in the public schools, in the daily struggles of local residents.

For example, there's an urban ghetto marred by poverty and violence in the heart of Silicon Valley - East Palo Alto. There were eight shootings there recently. There's plenty of hard problems to be tackled there.

Or in the public schools of Silicon Valley. They are basket cases instead of being showcases. Lots of work to be done there.

But the startup incubators keep their young teams isolated, they are often gropuped into dorms, and their workspaces are in featureless business parks.

Similarly, the large tech companies make sure to isolate their workers. Huge busses scoop them up in the early mornings and drop them back in the late evenings. They are kept inside the campuses with free food and gyms – deliberately isolated.

Little or no participation in the real world leads to a paucity of ideas. Which is why I occasionally write "Culture Watch" articles to remind startups that all businesses are cultural artifacts and they need to know how they fit in.

Despite their incredibly high failure rate, the isolationist culture of startups shows no signs of changing.

Innovation from necessity

The future innovative businesses will come from dense urban regions because that's where are aware and engaged in real world problems.

Silicon Valley's insular "echo-chamber" bubble-wraps its technologists from even their local communities. This insular culture is by far the biggest threat to the future of Silicon Valley.

Mr. Graham should tell his adoring legions of young engineers to "get out into your neighborhoods, find real problems, and solve them."

If you can make it here…

If they can be successful here, in solving key problems of education, urban living, administration of services, etc, that Silicon Valley communities face daily – they can be successful elsewhere too because the same problems are found in all other communities and cities the world over. That's scale. But they need to get out and about. They need to be in it to know it.

Do things that matter. Things that matter to a lot of people sell themselves.

Things that matter scale very well. 

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