(as I spent the bulk of my 20s discovering) This is not your typical rails app that you can bang out in a weekend.
One thing I ran into over and over again was products that half worked. I promise you, if they did, I wouldn’t be here, I would be using that instead. But these were the guys who launched early. And now most of them are dead, not because of Dropbox but largely by self inflicted wounds.
So, launching early and joining the pigpile of halfassed storage products was not terribly appealing
So shipping code was out of the question YC app – ship in 8 wks vs 18 mos Prototype worked; video could show product in best light; get much of the same feedback as if we shipped working code
YC’s motto
As engineers
We ran a bunch of experiments; adwords example -- everybody else is doing it
- SEM is an example, but others – guilt to do what everyone else is doing -- to hire a product person, or a VP of whatever, or make an analytics dashboard, or a PR firm, etc. Often these are great things to do but that’s not a license to blindly do them
To do something well in general you’ll be doing something else poorly
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