Re:Ask HN: Should you release many products to see what take...
by jacquesm on Saturday September 05, 2009 @04:01AM
(#806331)
I know several very successful companies that followed this route, but you have to be pretty ruthless at the moment you realize that one thing has significantly more momentum than the rest, and you have to have a nicely filled war chest to get started.
Let's take one of them as an example. The company launched with 7 different websites, was self funded by a previous successful exit of one of the founders. After about 6 months it became clear that one of the sites was becoming the leader in terms of growth.
So they divested 3 of the remaining six and literally killed the other 3 to be able to focus on the one that mattered.
They ended up doing very well on the last one.
The catch here is that this company was started with a lot more money than most start-ups and could afford to run effectively 7 start-ups in parallel.
For most other parties this would have translated in on average three failures before scoring a hit, and even that figure is way above the industry average.
Let's take one of them as an example. The company launched with 7 different websites, was self funded by a previous successful exit of one of the founders. After about 6 months it became clear that one of the sites was becoming the leader in terms of growth.
So they divested 3 of the remaining six and literally killed the other 3 to be able to focus on the one that mattered.
They ended up doing very well on the last one.
The catch here is that this company was started with a lot more money than most start-ups and could afford to run effectively 7 start-ups in parallel.
For most other parties this would have translated in on average three failures before scoring a hit, and even that figure is way above the industry average.