I've been involved in a couple of startup companies, ChristianAudio.com
and LetterPop.com. Neither have made me a Web 2.0 hero. And for now,
my Schwab advisor checks in once a year. Yet neither of my first two
startups have been a failure. ChristianAudio.com is profitable and
growing well. LetterPop.com has a nice following and sufficient
potential. So in the grand scheme of things, I'm doing better than
most. With that as my platform, I'd like to say something about
successful startups. First, a question.
How
do you cook linguine? Yesterday, I made linguine. I cooked the pasta
while my wife made a delicious lemon basil sauce. After about eight
minutes, I tasted the linguine to see if it was done. It wasn't, so I
cooked it for a couple more minutes. Now some people don't taste pasta
to see when it is done. Some people throw it all around the kitchen to
see if it sticks on the walls. That seems odd to me. The point of
cooking pasta is to make it edible, not sticky.
Attitudes
about starting companies, especially web companies, are not unlike
methods of cooking linguine. Some people think that you "throw
something out there" and see if it sticks. If it sticks, it's done and
you've cooked up a startup success. Figuratively speaking, there are a
lot of awful-tasking starchy strands of uncooked linguine sticking all
over the web.
The best way to get a startup right is to cook it for a reasonable amount of time and then taste it to see if it's done.
All
metaphors break down if you push them too far. So I'm not going to
keep stirring the pot here. Startups that make news and make people
happy are cooked to taste. The founders are personally interested in
the product. They don't throw the idea out to see if it sticks (i.e.
see if millions of people happen to think it's done). Founders of
successful startups know that if it tastes good, people are going to
like it.
Here's a lesson learned. Entrepreneurs need to learn how to cook.
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