Day 11: A game of numbers

Most startups don’t end up succeeding. But what happens to the people at those startups? Are their careers suddenly over? No. When a startup fails, its people don’t disappear when the domain name expires. Those employees and founders go on to join other companies and some even try their luck again at another startup. They’re now equipped with a detailed example of what not to do when founding a startup—knowledge that their peers might not have.

The projects of mine that have succeeded in the past were never the ones I’d expect to make it big. Given this unpredictability, it’s better to keep playing the numbers game. Build a project that seems useful, release it, and its success will be another roll of the dice. It’s all a matter of rolling the dice more often and learning from each attempt to skew the odds ever so slightly in your favor. All it takes it one win, and the odds of getting at least one win increase with the number of rolls.

A level of detachment is needed to keep that cycle going. Spending too much time on a single idea before release or lingering too long on a failure slows down the iteration time. I’ve struggled with both of these issues many times, to the point where I’ve worked for a few months on projects that never saw the light of day. Now, I’m actively trying to release no matter what imperfections exist.

What I’m working on

I revisited a project I had made almost 5 years ago that still garners about 100 visits per day, mostly from Google searches. It’s one of those projects that I never expected to be useful to anyone except me. Looking back on it now, it’s baffling how anyone would want to use a website so dysfunctional, but I took it as a signal that there’s a real need to be solved. I’m working on polishing the implementation, SEO, and other quality of life changes so that those 100 people are just a tad bit happier when using it.