The Startup Rollercoaster

First, a great post from Tim Ferris’s blog on the “Transition Curve” of being at a startup (written by Cameron Herold).

• Stage 1: The first stage of the concept is called “Uninformed Optimism”
• Stage 2: The second stage is called “Informed Pessimism”
• Stage 3 – The third stage is called “Crisis of Meaning”
• Stage 4 – Informed Optimism.

Check out the full post, worth a read. Tim talks about entrepreneurship manic depression, with the rise and falls of your product, attitude and company.  I found myself having more ups and downs working in politics personally, but find this to be spot on.  Generally, the more mentorship you have, the fewer free falls you have.

Yesterday there was a fantastic post from randomwalker: Lessons from the failure of Livejournal: when NOT to listen to your users:

In the last couple of months, there have been multiple developments that seem to indicate that the combination of a blogging platform/commenting system and social network is finally becoming widespread: Google added the “follow” feature to Blogger, Facebook switched to a feed-focused redesign, and WordPress acquired IntenseDebate, a commenting system.

…  What you might not know is that Livejournal had this winning combination of features 5 years ago.

Another great post illustrating the rollercoaster ride of risks and calculations.

It is all part of being in a startup: knowing you are wrong, knowing when your users are wrong, and knowing that you are on a rollercoaster, with unknown ups and downs.