I love it! Jason Freedman, who calls himself “humbled MBA,” (which is right-there brilliant, before I go on) writes Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice.:
Just stop
He explains more than he has to in a brilliant piece of short smart statements. He has explanations in between, and they’re work reading, but for that, go back to the original. I love the raw power of these bullet points (all direct quotes from Jason)… and I agree with every one. On a couple of them, the explanations are so rich and delightful that I can’t resist including them.
1.) Execution is more important than the idea
2.) Someone else has the exact same idea.
3.) Totally unique ideas generally don’t make it
4.) The most likely cause of failure is your incompetence, not losing to the competition.
The likelihood that you execute beautifully but then lose out to someone that stole your idea is so incredibly low, you shouldn’t think about it. The likelihood that you build a product that missed the mark, is an almost certainty.
5.) You desperately need real feedback
6.) First mover advantage is just silliness
The obit has been written on first mover advantage. It rarely helps. Facebook wasn’t the first to social networking, Google wasn’t the first to search, YouTube wasn’t the first to video, yada yada. First mover advantage was a flawed theory that helped pre-product internet companies raise billions of dollars in the 90s.
Jason concludes: “I could go on, but this is a fool’s errand.”
And, to his credit, he also softens a bit at the end, suggests that annoyed stealth-mode-startup readers should just prove him wrong.
Well done. Good stuff.
Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software and Bplans.com. Follow him on Twitter @Timberry.
