Ignore Everybody

Didn’t really know what to think about this book. Started just fine–nice story about New York City and having fun. Author described his niche habit of drawing things on the back of business cards, and how people felt it’s ridiculous.

His faith in doing something he liked and believed in was one of the advices. This is a point of view not matching the iterative, incremental model of improvement and trying to walk over and adjust. He matched whatever he wanted.

Funny thing is that I saw so many contradictions to young entrepreneur bibles like “REWORK” and “Lean Startup”, that it gave me a broader perspective. Looks like just like within 2 engineers you get 3 proposed solutions, with people writing about business you get only theirs perspective. Here comes the strength of reading many books on the same topic – you get confidence factor.

Like making sure idea is yours. Personally I like: “it’s not the idea, it’s execution” model. Similarly, throwing ideas to other people and observing their reaction. Is you get 10/10 fail rate in terms of sharing and querying people about your idea, in my opinion this might turn out to be a valid customer interest representation. Yet I see the point. Being Opera browser users I look at w3schools.com statistics and I see ONLY 1.8%. So I look at the Wikipedia page of usage share among browsers and I see some random 160,000,000 number of hits per month. Now applying 1.8% to this gives you 2,880,000 hits done with Opera. How would you feel knowing 2,8M people have your program installed and actually do something with it?

How I ask?

…

Exactly. Anyway:

He touched an important point why was such a thing possible–model of starting a business as a side project. This gives you (1) inability of performing this 24/7 and (2) giving you freedom to innovate, since with another bill paying job you’re not limited to whatever customers request. Good luck dear H1B visa holders!

However the thing about not depending that after quiting your daily job things suddenly will become a road straight to Eden is true. I think starting small and doing market probing of some sort and figuring out whether people are interested is a better approach. Any good books on market probing? Huh? Anybody?

The thing I feel was purposefully placed in a book are sexually-intensive bridges between chapters, which act as a random thoughts brought and thrown on the reader without a major sense and connection to the context of the chapter. Personally I don’t like it. However bring pretty sure MacLeod did it to get more advertising and become more memorable–we can forgive that.