Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

From his bio it says “Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer.” He co-developed the “first web-based application, ViaWeb.” He also sold that web-based application to Yahoo, described the spam filter basics used by most filters today, is writing a new programing language, and also helps run a venture capital firm specializing in seeding small web tech companies.

What you have to focus on from all that is that he is an essayist. For a guy with that much programming experience I wouldn’t have expected wonderful essays to spill forth on his web page but I would have been wrong. Using his obvious experience he has written and published to his webpage many essays, most notably for this blogs audience are his essay’s on startups.

One that jumped out at me that everyone could stand to read that claims to be heading down the road of startup is his article titled 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups. I’ll list them below and give why I think they’re important but it’s a long long article that you should surely read. Some pertain just to programming application startups but most are applicable across all startups.

1. Single Founder - This one is currently the most interesting me. Although I wouldn’t really call what I’ve done so far a startup, as I have no set business plan, no real budgetary spending and I lack direction, I have learned that there just isn’t enough time in the day to do it all on your own.
2. Bad Location
3. Marginal Niche
4. Derivative Idea
5. Obstinacy
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching
9. Launching Too Early - Most “entrepreneurs” are starting content based startups these days and the biggest problem is launching a site without enough content. If you have an audience in place to launch a site to and you have no content, what’s going to make them come back to your site?
10. Having No Specific User in Mind - Find a Niche and Hammer It!
11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
13. Raising Too Much Money - Makes sense after you read it
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
17. Fights Between Founders - Makes you worry about number 1
18. A Half-Hearted Effort - You have to put in the time and effort, which is a lot, no matter what the startup or it’s just gonna fizzle away.

It’s a great list and a great read. Now you just have to re-read the list 100 times so it’s burned into your mind and you can avoid the potential pitfalls of startups.