[HN Gopher] The golden era of being an open startup is gone
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The golden era of being an open startup is gone
Author : jeremylevy
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-02-03 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (testimonial.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (testimonial.to)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> they should have stopped posting about growth and revenue
| milestones much earlier, as there is little benefit to them.
|
| Well sure, if that's why you were posting. You could ask the same
| question about being a nice person "What's in it for me?"
|
| But if the goal is to pay to forward in thanks for the help you
| got along the way, this argument doesn't hold water.
| constantly wrote:
| Running a business openly seems to me to be what people do when
| they are Amazon sellers and discover a brand-new, lucrative niche
| before Amazon (or dozens of Chinese sellers) steal it and start
| selling it for themselves. Running a startup publicly, in my
| opinion, essentially validates ideas for others to do better,
| with more resources, with a competitive edge, or whatever.
|
| This was demonstrated lately using the AI Stable Diffusion
| Portraits. A thousand rivals arose right away after the original
| author stated their money was derived from doing nothing more
| than setting up a website connected to steady dissemination on
| the backend. It increases competition even if none of those
| rivals are inherently superior.
| xyzelement wrote:
| The world is a competitive place and we are seeing some folks
| lose their innocence.
|
| If what you are doing is a real business, then given the choice
| to protect your business or aspiring to be "open" (but with no
| benefit, just risk") - you focus on the business.
|
| It's really no different than releasing too much of your secret
| sauce as open source - can only hurt you and is a sign you aren't
| that mature about what running a business through various
| problems is like.
| [deleted]
| andygcook wrote:
| I wouldn't say there was no real benefit and only risk to being
| an "open startup". Sharing what you're doing and how it works
| is a marketing strategy, pure and simple. Up until recently, it
| was a low effort, high reward marketing channel to sell to
| other founders. Now with ruthless competition and the ease of
| cloning a service, it is becoming low value and even risky.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| "open" triggers people to think the other way, but it's
| actually the same as what we know really well, it's a popular
| strategy among scammers. 'Look at my expensive sport car'
| this is a success, thus, building pseudo trust.
| timr wrote:
| Low-effort, maybe. But it was always high risk, and the
| reward was unclear except for a few players who did it
| successfully ("successfully"...it's not like any of these
| startups became titans) and marketed it well. Probably the
| marketing was the secret there, not the "open startup" part.
|
| In the startup world, a lot of trendy ideas get repeated with
| little/no thought put into their actual risks and benefits
| for a particular situation. Remember when everyone was
| certain that feeding their team lunch in the office was the
| secret to winning? Today the hype is that you don't even want
| to _have_ an office.
|
| YMMV.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| People like to say something that's more harsh or cruel or
| greedy - almost any negative human trait - is more 'real', a
| sort of reactionary assertion, which assumes liberalism (used
| broadly) as 'unreal', fantastical, a silly dream. People like
| to say that about 'realist' international relations, but the
| truth is that countries that do good attract more allies and
| friends.
|
| But the truth is that people balance interests all the time,
| including businesses. Every decision balances many interests,
| some involving profit, some involving doing good. That is just
| as real, just as common a trait in humans.
| xyzelement wrote:
| Yup sure and I don't disagree.
|
| And I think the connection to "liberalism" is a good point.
|
| The difference is "doing something virtuous rather than
| maximizing revenue" vs "doing things that will clearly make
| your business/country unsustainable"
| elefanten wrote:
| Appreciate the upthread perspectives from you both.
|
| One thought that came to mind is that these are, in some
| sense, concentric frameworks that rely on each other: a
| society's values, a political economy's priorities and
| affordances, and how business is conducted.
|
| Gut level, I feel that the social and political pieces
| circumscribe how business can viably be run. So, I can see
| a (perhaps very presently-rooted) perspective that we
| should strive to uphold and/or fight for certain goals and
| outcomes on the higher levels, but that pragmatically
| running a business within the existing (functioning, even
| if dysfunctional) framework may not allow the same
| opportunities as trying to evolve the sociopolitical.
|
| Going further out on a limb, the higher levels evolve more
| slowly -- often intergenerationally - and that makes it
| hard to see (or _remember_ ) which rules interact with
| which kinds of trade-offs.
| inasio wrote:
| A startup I knew had someone take professional-looking pictures
| of new employees, and add them to the Who Works Here page, with a
| nice blurb. After years of employees being poached by Big Tech
| the Who Works Here page is gone. To me this is also part of the
| loss of innocence.
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| indymike wrote:
| Sharing and being open with the right people makes sense, with
| everyone it is all risk.
| paulftw wrote:
| The golden era of being a startup is gone
|
| FTFY What if general demise of startups (due to funding drought,
| covid, market saturation, bad timing aka world wasn't ready for
| our idea, or leave your favorite excuse in comments) also
| impacted open startups? And what if they weren't successful
| because open but because market was easier?
| mbesto wrote:
| The trend outlined in the article is that startups tend to ditch
| openness once they mature. I think the explanation is pretty
| simple - it's no longer a marketing advantage to do so. If your'e
| selling to a startup audience then being open gets you eyeballs
| early on in your career. Once you start moving into more mature
| markets, this becomes less interesting to those audiences so why
| do it? It's hard enough to be open within a company, I can't
| imagine the operational overhead to do this externally.
| crawfordcomeaux wrote:
| A reason to keep doing it is to maintain the value of openness
| within the internal culture through praxis. If it was only
| being done for marketing purposes, then it wasn't ever a value,
| but a strategy.
| holistio wrote:
| We are just about starting out with my company and I've literally
| just made our live analytics public at
| https://analytics.moonka.space - it's literally everything we
| see.
|
| We are using Plausible.io (kudos to them!), a privacy-first
| analytics platform that provides just enough data without abusing
| our users' data. This way, we don't even have to show a cookie
| notice.
|
| I'm planning to open up our financial details as well as soon as
| we have enough transactions so that our clients can't be
| identified based on our data.
|
| *edit: grammar
| pffft8888 wrote:
| It's not being an Open Startup that kills your chances. If you
| have an insurrmountable business advantage (it's who you know,
| not what you know) and you keep the how-to details of your
| solution hidden behind a generic description where the solution
| is really hard to pull off well, being open only helps you.
| Firstly, by using idiots who would steal your idea to create buzz
| in the market for you as they pitch their silly me-too, and
| secondly by inspiring confidence and showing lack of insecurity,
| with clarity and transparency. I mean you can't rely on NDAs
| anyway. Why act in fear unless what you're doing is just run of
| the mill and you have no particular advantage.
|
| I also argue that there is no net advantage to Apple's secrecy.
| If they had openly talked about the M1 (Apple Silicon) when they
| were working on it they would have just had more mindshare and
| the whole Apple ecosystem could have been preparing for it. By
| staying silent until they released it, it bought them nothing
| other than the element of surprise, which is like when little
| children don't want you to see what they're working on, in case
| you would take over their creative process, and instead want to
| surprise you with their brilliance.
|
| I very much doubt that secrecy in the absence of insecurity has
| any value.
| widdershins wrote:
| I personally find the lack of vaporware from Apple refreshing.
| With Apple, when you hear about the thing you can go out and
| buy the thing. From too many companies you hear about cool
| tech, only to find it disappointing or hobbled a year later
| when they actually get to release.
| pffft8888 wrote:
| There is a difference between promising and not delivering,
| and firing employees for leaking a photo of an upcoming
| product. I think Apple is on the narcissistic spectrum of
| wanting to induldge in the moment and show off their
| brilliance. It's good to have a policy of not promising
| specific products or features if they're not sure. But their
| secrecy policy goes far beyond that, and includes silencing
| employees for workplace abuses. Apple is not a good company
| in the moral sense. They are good at building stuff. That's
| all the credit they deserve.
| filoleg wrote:
| Yeah, fully agreed. I think it helps that Apple fairly
| recently reinforced their belief in that approach with their
| AirPower charger fiasco[0] as well. Everyone was excited for
| it, and then it got quietly canceled, with people still
| bringing it up occasionally. Announcing ahead of time ended
| up blowing up in their face, lesson learned.
|
| 0. https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/5/22611234/apple-airpower-
| wi...
| bordercases wrote:
| [dead]
| infecto wrote:
| I honestly had no idea what an open startup was. Spent the last
| 10 years working at startups and had to look that one up. For
| others wondering, it appears to be companies that publish their
| internal metrics for all to see.
| samsquire wrote:
| This is fascinating.
|
| Thank you for writing this and sharing this, I was oblivious to
| all the startups that were doing this and there were quite a lot
| going by this article.
|
| I think it is unfortunate that companies are deciding not to be
| open anymore. In a perfect world, do we want organisations to be
| open? It would mean investment would be easier and less risky,
| due to transparency.
|
| In the interests of transparency and openness, I share all my
| ideas and startup ideas in the open with the hope that someone
| can extend the idea and society can benefit from the ideas. I am
| up to 700+ computer ideas and 25 startup ideas links on my
| profile. Society progresses one idea at a time. Somebody invented
| calculus with an idea.
|
| If openness isn't safe, then we should normalise openness
| becoming safe and reject actions against open actors or anything
| that causes openness to not be safe. Reject behaviour that means
| openness is not safe. For a better world.
| amelius wrote:
| I make apps for the App Store, and instead of a startup founder I
| feel more like an Apple employee, with Apple commanding me around
| with what I should and cannot do.
| collaborative wrote:
| Same here. Would be nice to get an Apple salary...
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, being just ramen-profitable isn't everything. I'm past
| that stage though, but in retrospect would have made an order
| of magnitude more money by being a regular employee in IT
| compared to trying to make a fortune in the App Store. I hope
| to reach a break-even point sometime in my lifetime, but I'm
| not entirely optimistic about it.
| version_five wrote:
| Other posts have touched on this: when times are good and you're
| not in a competitive environment, this sort of nonessential fluff
| accumulates because there is no countervailing force. I'm sure
| everyone can think of non-value-add activities that companies get
| caught up in because they have too much time on their hands. This
| is just one of them. Now we're reverting to the mean
| reidjs wrote:
| I don't really agree or maybe I have misunderstood the author's
| thesis here. Is he saying it's harder to grow a business by
| building in the open nowadays because so many people have already
| done it, so now consumers are weary of it? Or is he upset that
| many of these companies that were once open have stopped being
| open once they found success?
|
| Just because many established companies have stopped doing it,
| doesn't mean it's the end of some kind of golden age. The reason
| these companies built in the open is in the first place is for
| selfish reasons - free promotion for their business while they
| ship. Once they have figured out the business, why should they
| keep putting in the extra work to tell others about it?
| trynewideas wrote:
| > Is he saying it's harder to grow a business by building in
| the open nowadays because so many people have already done it,
| so now consumers are weary of it?
|
| From the blog post:
|
| > Why are some of the main evangelists and pioneers of this
| trend leaving now?
|
| > Because bad examples and negative stories are now becoming so
| common, everyone thinks twice before disclosing things openly.
|
| > From envy and toxic feelings dividing teams and friends to
| businesses copying other businesses completely, the scene is
| getting spotted by more and more cases.
|
| ...
|
| > Unfortunately, the build-in-public culture couldn't stand
| things like competition and bad business practices.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I think you've hit on some of the issues. One of the challenges
| is that it is hard to know what the company was getting out of
| being open.
|
| That is hard because there is what folks say, and there is what
| they really think, and in the startup business the gap between
| those two realities can be really big. Also, the most
| successful startup CEOs seem to be really good at crafting a
| narrative out of very cherry picked "facts" in order to achieve
| their objectives (funding, growth, recruitment, whatever). As a
| result the "information space" around startups is usually way
| more complex than it appears on the surface.
|
| That won't stop people from looking at that information space
| and drawing conclusions of course, people do that naturally. I
| agree with the above comment that the author is not (at least
| in the article) asking themselves if their belief of the
| motivations for being open are well supported by all the facts
| or not. Doesn't mean the author is wrong of course, things can
| be just as they seem, it just seems like some additional care
| should be taken prior to acting on a belief in why they are
| doing what they are doing.
|
| Of course a certain level of disclosure is required by the SEC
| if you want to be traded publicly, and practicing those
| disclosures prior to an IPO can help set IPO expectations more
| accurately. And for that reason, understanding GAAP and what
| disclosures are required are good things for the startup
| leadership.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| Peldi (Balsamiq) did this well, but in reality it was all
| pretend. He pretended like had this massive groundswell of
| people who loved his app but it was an incredibly well-
| executed PR campaign and he deserves mad props for it. He
| didn't make it clear at the time, but eventually it came out.
| Of course, people did love his app but he engineered that
| incredibly well.
|
| So if being open makes sense for PR, do it, but learn from
| people who have done it successfully.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Was there a twitter thread about this or something? I'd
| love to read more. I actually don't think I've heard the
| name Balsamiq in 10 years
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| No, I was just obsessed with how he did it, so I
| swallowed every piece of info I could've until it was
| clear. It was manufactured, which is the best approach.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Of course a certain level of disclosure is required by the
| SEC if you want to be traded publicly...
|
| This is what I find confusing, there isn't some magic switch
| that gets pulled when you are required to disclose financials
| which protects you from the downsides to being open.
|
| If your product can be trivially copied, like an AI email
| writer, I'm going to guess the problem wasn't how open you
| were during the development process. Everyone has come out
| with their own "Do X with AI" at this point with zero hope to
| monetize beyond charging for compute time as the market is
| fully saturated.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| I am also a bit confused by some of what the author has said
| here. On the one hand he talks about not disclosing things
| because others are ripping off designs, etc, but in other
| places he's referring to things like employee salaries and run-
| rates, etc.
|
| Maybe I'm dumb and not connecting the dots, but why would
| sharing things like your costs allow others to steal your
| business? I genuinely don't understand this, so I think I'm
| misreading the article.
|
| > From envy and toxic feelings dividing teams and friends to
| businesses copying other businesses completely, the scene is
| getting spotted by more and more cases.
|
| The first part of this reads like the traditional reason that
| "don't talk about your salary with other employees" was a
| commonly accepted thing. Is the author (/community at large)
| deciding that going the other direction is a bad idea?
|
| Maybe someone can TL;DR in a better way to save my Friday fried
| brain?
| safety1st wrote:
| This Damon Chen guy seems like a nice guy but like an
| independent journalist or something. He seems like he could be
| a great evangelist.
|
| He started some websites, wrote about Open Startups, and in
| this article he mentions he had his own 'revenue bar' on
| Twitter which went from $0 to $1 but he took it down because
| the age of Open Startups is over.
|
| I look at all this and wonder where the actual dudes going to
| work at jobs are (no disrespect to those Open Startups who have
| made bank).
|
| I am an entrepreneur so here is what the job looks like to me.
| I get up every day and I grind. Mostly that means working on
| new deals. I close as many of those as I can. When I have time
| I will call someone on my product team and ask them to walk me
| through what we're working on delivering next. I have a lot of
| feedback on that stuff because I come from a product
| background, but if I indulge that too much, I won't spend
| enough time on sales.
|
| Sometimes I will look at what the couple of Ops contractors I
| have on payroll are doing (accounting HR etc.), and spot check
| their work for issues.
|
| I don't know how any entrepreneur has the time to be off
| working on "movements." Some of the businesses in his post have
| higher ARR than me so maybe there's something for me to learn
| here. But in my reality being an entrepreneur basically means
| you're closing sales, making deals to increase your
| distribution, and trying to keep your product or service on
| track. I just don't get it. Maybe I'm getting old.
| [deleted]
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I agree with you and likewise am somewhat confused. My initial
| read suggests that author bemoans that he needs to scale down
| how open ( here meaning transparent ) he gets to be. I think it
| is just a realization that business is cut-throat and
| information is, indeed, power. Being open can put you at a
| disadvantage in such an environment.
|
| I certainly don't think it was some sort of golden age. Best I
| can say about it is that it had benefits.
| aquinas_ wrote:
| Who is Damon Chen and why should I take this commentary
| seriously?
| last_responder wrote:
| Apparently he is the founder of testimonial.to which this link
| is going to so this looks like self promoting blog spam.
| imiric wrote:
| Thoughts and ideas stand on their own merit, and are worth
| sharing or criticizing regardless of who produced them. You
| shouldn't need to know the background of the author to agree or
| disagree with them, just as credentials aren't required from
| you to participate in this forum.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| He's a prolific indie creator with a history of building a
| successful business in the open.
|
| More than enough credibility if you ask me.
| gowld wrote:
| Who are you?
|
| This may be true but without evidence is sounds like exactly
| what the OP is complaining about.
|
| His LinkedIn doesn't even claim any business building before
| 2.5 years ago. https://www.linkedin.com/in/damengchen It only
| claims he built 2 things.
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Does it matter?
| joelfried wrote:
| Of course it matters when you attempt to use your own
| social backing to boost someone else. That you're a
| commenter who has been around since 2018 who is also an
| "an ambitious full-stack software engineer, with a deep
| passion for design, user interface and front-end
| engineering"[1] is definitely a point in your favor,
| though. What made you personally feel so strongly about
| the original author? Your reasoning is more likely to
| help convince others especially if you have sources you
| can point to.
|
| [1] I'm hoping he'll notice but for everyone else, I
| pulled this quote from the About page on the website
| linked from his profile.
| schnebbau wrote:
| Who are you to make those kinds of statements?
| aquinas_ wrote:
| It ought to behoove us to ask this question for every blog
| post of this nature thats posted.
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