Sunday, November 13, 2016

4 Lessons from the dotcom bubble crash via Peter Thiel's 0 to 1

How could I have not blogged about this.. the later part of this blog's tagline was inspired by Mr. Thiel.
My props for this man, just went higher.
Dude backed Donald Trump's election with $1.24million and won his bet. An investor indeed, his mouth is there.

The lessons:


  1.  Make incremental advances, grand visions inflated the bubble,so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small incremental steps are the only safe oath forward.
  2. Stay lean and flexible, all companies must be lean..which is code for unplanned, you should not know what your business would do., Planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead, you should try things out, iterate and treat entrepreneurship as agonistic experimentation.- Lean my people..lean! PS: It's doesn't mean cheap. People get confused.
  3. Improve on the competition. Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.

    And number 4.. got me thinking. I've always known you should engineer your user acq, but the importance, I never really paid attention to.

  4.  Focus on product, not sales. If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.
Focus on product not sales.

Goodbye. :)
Update: 17th April 2017

Give product 50%, and Sales/Marketing 50% (Your best option if your product lacks an internal growth engine)

Great product need great marketing.