The 10 Mistakes I've made...so you don't have to

http://www.slideshare.net/missrogue/the-10-mistakes-ive-madeso-you-dont-have-to

by brianl • 15 years ago

238 42 15 years ago

lien• 15 years ago

these are good slides. just realized that buyosphere is the same as pinterest.

one succeeded and one didn't (or maybe hasn't yet?). my first observation about buyosphere is that the name itself drives users away. to the user, it kind of sounds like spam, a site where they have to buy stuff.

and..."pinterest" is resonates better with the user.

so give a choice, i'd probably choose pinterest, even though the two sites you could say are similar.

jeromeparadis• 15 years ago

For the record, I'm the CTO and co-founder of Buyosphere.

Yes, for the moment, Buyosphere may at a first glance look a lot like Pinterest. At the moment, the main visible difference is: we focus around products people want or have... and the site is much slower (that will be solved soon). The end goal is to help people discover products they want. Hence the name Buyosphere.

We're working on a nice twist that will be released at the end of the month. It will make our unique value proposition much clearer. Stay tuned!

dasil0033• 15 years ago

I disagree on the connotation.

rottendoubt• 15 years ago

Love it! Great words of wisdom.

happyfeet• 15 years ago

Gems! I just went through this & felt compelled to thank - dropped a note to author.

Very nice presentation with plenty of pictures & amazingly good words of wisdom all through.

One thing that stood out for me is this: "just because your competitors have raised more $$ doesn't mean they will win. (we've watched 10 competitors raise oodles of dough and then shutter or pivot)". (paraphrased it).

geekytenny• 15 years ago

pdfs please.... i loved it.

shadowsun7• 15 years ago

There's a download link at the top of the presentation - though you'll need to log in to do so.

TheSOB88• 15 years ago

Cofounders need good conflict resolution skills. Sounds pretty obvious, but this is the first piece I've seen that says it outright.

j_col• 15 years ago

Excellent presentation, I love the slide with the Gartner-esque magic quadrant!

Hitchhiker• 15 years ago

Awesome. Like the Venn diagram particularly ;-)

phzbOx• 15 years ago

Take guts to do that, thanks.

Hisoka2• 15 years ago

I like the point about how being in covers of tech blogs doesn't mean much. It's all mostly noise, and if one did a study, I bet they'd find the failure rate of startups covered by tech blogs to be around the same as the overall failure rate of the average business. E

Joakal2• 15 years ago

Confirmation bias.

par• 15 years ago

I think there is a lot of refreshing stuff going on in this slide deck, thank you for sharing!

robjohnson• 15 years ago

“Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” - Thomas Edison. I've never seen that quote before but I love it. Great slideshow and thanks for sharing.

pothibo4• 15 years ago

Very nice presentation, loved the tables, very helpful

pothibo4• 15 years ago

Would be cool to have this presentation on http://speakerdeck.com/

scrrr• 15 years ago

why?

pothibo4• 15 years ago

Because it's a new service that focus on slides designed by tech people, so it would be nice to have another tech presentation to live there.

wmeredith2• 15 years ago

Normally I would down-vote such a comment, being that it's all promotion and no contribution...

But I clicked the link and have to say that site is gorgeous. I signed up to give it a try.

pothibo4• 15 years ago

I'm no where affiliated with the site, I like, like yourself, how clean their service is compared to slideshare.

wmeredith2• 15 years ago

69 slides? How long was the presentation?

zecho• 15 years ago

They're all brief. I imagine she flew through them.

magsafe• 15 years ago

She obviously didn't get the memo about the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html

If I had been in a room where she presented this live, I would've fallen asleep in about 5 minutes.

wink• 15 years ago

To quote from that article:

"this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement"

And that's exactly it. This seemed like a talk people attended because it sounded interesting or insightful (and I found very interesting indeed) and not a pitch.

Especially technical talks (and let's be generous and file it as technical under entrepreneurship, but much more so about programming/etc topics) aren't bad just because of an abundance of slides. To the contrary, I very much appreciate elaborate slides on slideshare/etc so I can get something out of the talk without having attended.

mhartl4• 15 years ago

10/20/30 applies to a very specific kind of presentation—investor pitches to raise money (and other things in that vein). This presentation wasn't in that category.

sixtofour• 15 years ago

I clicked the first 2 or 3 slides, and did not see all ten mistakes listed at once. I am NOT going to click through 60 odd slides to see if it might be worth my time to click through 60 odd slides.

Probably decent advice in here, the comment is more on attracting views. Let me know it's worth it.

e1ven• 15 years ago

I really enjoyed the presentation. It's designed more like a paper that's spread across 60 "pages" than a keynote speech, but there's quite a bit of good advice there.

gojomo2• 15 years ago

Not every presentation is (or should be) written with the impatient online info-grazer in mind.

ethank• 15 years ago

Bone - pick:

Please, if you are going to upload a presentation online after giving it, have a version tailored for Slideshare or Speakerdeck.

Please for the love of all that is holy in the world: stop with the meme's, stock photo + funny/ironic text. Getty Images et al have some funny stuff, and if you type "guy frustrated with the world with frizzy hair" you'll likely find something, but it's over-played.

For the most part, presentations work better online as a visual accompaniment to a really well thought out and concise blog post.

With no info graphics please.

gojomo2• 15 years ago

I would rather speakers upload exactly what they presented, as soon as possible after a presentation, than spend time (and perhaps never actually complete) making a custom version 'tailored for online' or 'reduced to blog post'.

It's great if they want to make other versions, but it's no knock against them for sharing what they've got, in the form they've got it.

TL;DR: Commenters' peeves, in a totally different forum, are not the presenters' problem.

ericmsimons• 15 years ago

"Stop thinking about the big picture. Start thinking about creating value NOW."

Learned this one the hard way.

mhartl4• 15 years ago

I'd add "know when to quit". Determination by itself is great, but sometimes the right thing to do is to abandon your current startup and work on something else. How do you know when to quit? Unfortunately, there's no formula for that. (My tendency, if anything, is to quit too late.)

Joakal2• 15 years ago

From what I read, it seems like there's always a time to quit. She kept pivoting, changing, adapting, etc until she hit it right. Do you know when she should quit?

dasil0033• 15 years ago

When is it better to quit then to pivot? Seems like with pivoting you are able to make better use of your experience then if you quit and start something completely new.

mhartl4• 15 years ago

I can't say in general, but I can share my own experience. I did a YC startup, struggled, quit, and made the Rails Tutorial (which has gone extremely well). There wasn't any way to pivot from the startup to the tutorial; they are completely different kinds of businesses. Among other things, my startup had a cofounder and investors (i.e., YC), whereas the Rails Tutorial is a solo enterprise. Developing an intuition for when to shut things down and move onto something new is an invaluable skill, one I'm only beginning to master.

Fliko• 15 years ago

I think knowing when to quit is like predicting the stock market. Many extremely successful companies were in positions where they should've quit but didn't, and then ended up successful because they managed to pivot correctly (either by pure luck or good observations).

Means you shouldn't worry if you messed up if you didn't 'quit at the right time', but you should be more concerned if you acted rationally and took an objective view on everything, and most importantly took the time to judge how your company/startup is doing and how you can improve it.

tarahunt• 15 years ago

Wow. Thanks for putting my presentation on Hacker News. I believe this is my first appearance here. :) If you have any questions, feel free to ask! (p.s. thanks Jerome for jumping in! that's why he's an amazing cofounder!)

And point taken re: stock photos, not putting all of the points up front (more for the audiences sake) and using Guy Kawasaki's stuff...

dasil0033• 15 years ago

Very strong deck even without the presentation. Rivals some of Ries' stuff.

alperakgun• 15 years ago

I m afraid there are uncountable number of possible mistakes, on top of the ten you have stressed. And all those mistakes usually occur due to sticking to rigid rules rather than trying to be flexible at different stages of business lives, but some occur due tho being flexible rather than having rigid principles.

The 10 Mistakes I've made...so you don't have to

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