写给创业者的13句话 | Startups in 13 Sentences

February 2009

One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be?
我经常给创业者讲的关于创业的一个原则是:尽你的所能,使得少数人获得百分百满意,这样比让大多数人获得一半的满意来得更为重要。这是我从保罗·布希海特(Paul Buchheit)那里学到的。我最近接受了一个记者的采访,他让我说出创业者应该注意的十件事情,我说,这就是其一。但是其他的九个注意事项又是什么?

When I made the list there turned out to be 13:
于是我简单罗列了一下,发现原来有13样:

1. Pick good cofounders.
1、选择一个好的搭档。

Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard.?[1]?And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.
对于创业者来说,一个创业搭档的重要性就有如地点对于房地产的重要性一般。一间房子,你怎么改都行,就是不能改它的地点。对于创业者而言,要改变想法是很容易的,但是要改换创业搭档就很难了。[1] 而每一个草创之业能够取得成功,皆离不开其创立者的共同影响。

2. Launch fast.
2、及早出笼。

The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you're wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.
及早出笼的意思不是说让你的产品第一时间推出市场,而是说,只有当你真正将想法付诸行动之后才表明你在工作了。而这一个过程中你也学会了该做什么样的产品。在此之前,你都只是在浪费自己的时间。这时候,不管你拿出的是什么东西,都不过是用来吊客户的胃口而已。

3. Let your idea evolve.
3、让你的想法自己进化。

This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It's a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementing.
这是及早出笼的第二部分。及早出笼,而后反复改进。不应以为创业就是把某个很美的想法从头脑搬到现实。就和写作一样,大多数的精彩想法都是在实施的时候出现的。

4. Understand your users.
4、理解你的用户。

You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives.?[2]?The second dimension is the one you have most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed.
你可以把一个新兴企业所创造的财富想象成一个长方形,其一边是用户数量,另一边是你改变用户生活质量的程度。[2] 而后者是你可以最大限度的加以把握的。事实上,这个长方形的一边的长度将取决于由你控制的另一边的长度。科学上的难题往往不在于答案,而在于问题的提出本身。同样,创业者应该思考用户需要什么新的东西。你对这方面了解多了,你就越有可能满足用户的需求。很多成功的企业都是靠做一些其创建者需要的东西而起家的,这也是同样的道理。

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
5、让少数的用户深爱你的产品,而不是让大多数用户对你的产品口带微词。

Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have.
能让大多数用户热爱你的产品当然是最好的,但是在开始的时候你不大可能做得到这一点。你应当在以下两者中间作出选择:满足一部分用户的全部需要,或者满足所有潜在用户的一部分需要。我建议你选择前者,因为扩展用户群比扩展满意度来得更容易。也许更重要的是,这样做,你会难以向自己撒谎:你以为你已经做到85%的完美了吗?谁告诉你的?说不定那是70%或100%呢?而要是你想知道自己有多少用户,那就是很容易的事情了。

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.
6、提供让人意想不到的优质客服。

Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service. Your own ideas about what's possible have been unconsciously lowered by such experiences. Try making your customer service not merely good, but?surprisingly good. Go out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn't scale, because it's a way of learning about your users.
我们都经常遭遇劣质的客服。我们经常跟那些垄断色彩浓厚的企业打交道,他们的客服实在是太糟糕了。也许你内心关于客服的想法也因此类经历而降格,不,你不但要把你的客服做好,还要做到让人意想不到的好。想尽办法去让用户过得更开心吧,他们一定会很惊喜的。在创业的早期,你可以在成本范围内提供一些优质的客服,这也是探索用户需求的一部分。

7. You make what you measure.
7、给自己做一个记录表。

I learned this one from Joe Kraus.?[3]?Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You'll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.
我是从乔·克劳斯(Joe Kraus)[3]那里学到这点的。一个人要是他会去记录某样东西的发展,他就会有一种潜在的意识去改善那样东西。要是你想增加自己的用户数量,那就在办公室里挂一个草图,上面就记录用户数的变化,并且你每天都要作记录。要是那个曲线正在上升,你必然会高兴;要是曲线在下滑,相信你肯定会感到失望。很快你就会明白用户到底需要什么,并且你也会懂得去在某个方面去作出改进。需要注意的是,你要搞清楚到底该记录什么东西的变化。

8. Spend little.
8、花最少的钱。

I can't emphasize enough how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly.[4]?But it's more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.
开支最省这一原则的重要性无需多言。大多数的企业还没能做出用户需要的东西之前就垮了,而其中最常见的原因是他们资金短缺。开支最省几乎等同于不断的、快速的改进。[4] 而事实上,这一做法的重要性还不止于此。开支最省能够让一个企业保持活力,这一点跟运动能让人保持活力乃是同一道理。

9. Get ramen profitable.
9、有饭吃就好。

"Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. It's not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It's also great for morale.
“有饭吃就好”,就是能让企业的创始人满足其基本的生活所需。这不是一种迅速让企业成型的方案(尽管理论上也是可以的),而是一种创意投资的过程。只要你做得到“有饭吃就好”,你就可以彻底改变你与投资者的关系。同时,这也是鼓励士气的好办法。

10. Avoid distractions.
10、排除干扰。

Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you'll always interrupt working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. Paradoxically,?fundraising?is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too.
干扰是新生企业的天敌,这包括各种形式的干扰,而危害最大的就是那些赚钱的副业:白天去上班、搞咨询、以及其他利可图的副业。搞副业也许能让你积聚更多资源,有利于长远发展,但是你却必须经常放下手头上的事情去应酬你的主顾。而募集资金也算得上是干扰的一种。还是尽量避免吧。

11. Don't get demoralized.
11、不要泄气。

Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as you'd be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box.
新生企业走向死亡,其表层原因是缺乏资金,其实深层原因是他们失去焦点。要么是一些无能之辈在控制着企业(他们根本不听别人的意见),要么是那些还在掌控的聪明人开始泄气了。要知道,创业需要巨大的心理承受能力。所以,你要认识到这点,告诉自己不要被难题吓倒。

12. Don't give up.
12、不要放弃。

Even if you get demoralized,?don't give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn't true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea.
即使是你感到泄气,也千万不要放弃。留得青山在,哪怕没柴烧。当然,这不是放诸四海而皆准的真理,有些人再努力再坚持,也还是不能成为好的数学家。但是创业就不一样了,只要你努力,并经常改进你的想法,就完全有可能成功。

13. Deals fall through.
13、失败的交易就让它们过去吧。

One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don't, but because it makes them less likely to.
我们在 Viaweb 学到的最有用的一个经验就是不要老是希望每一桩交易都获得成功。我们那时有20桩交易是失败的,我们开始还坚持跟到底,希望能挽留住我们的客户。可是做了十个之后我们决定不干了,就把那些失败的交易当成是一些后台程序,让其自然消亡吧。不要寄希望于让每桩交易都成为现实,事实上这经常是不可能的,而这样做你自己也得不到什么好处。

Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one.
写完以上13条法则之后,我问自己,要是只能选一个,我会选哪个。

Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.
我选“理解你的用户”。这是关键。企业之中心任务就是要创造财富,你能给用户的生活带来多大的改观,就决定了你创造的财富的大小。而最困难的就是去探索用户需要什么。一旦你知道该为用户做什么了,剩下的就只是一个做的问题了,而大多数的程序员高手都能很轻易的做到你要的东西。

Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going.
在上述的13条法则里,有半数的都包含了“理解你的用户”这一点。这是及早出笼的理由;让你的想法自己进化,这正是理解你的用户的现实体现。要是你能理解你的用户,你就能做出一些让少数人高度满意的产品。而提供优质客服的一个重要的理由是那样子你可以更好的理解你的用户。理解你的用户还能有助于提示你们的士气,因为在你遭遇巨大挫折,一切都在分崩瓦解之时,有十位忠实的用户粉丝将鼓励你继续前进。

Notes
注释

[1] Strictly speaking it's impossible without a time machine.
[1] 准确的说,没有时间机器,那是做不到的事情。

[2] In practice it's more like a ragged comb.
[2] 事实上那更像是一个破烂的梳子。

[3] Joe thinks one of the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, but he doesn't remember which.
[3] 乔说那是HP的两个创始人其中一个最先提出这一点的,但是他不记得是谁了。

[4] They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still. Since they don't, working twice as fast is better than having twice as much time.
[4] 假如市场是静态的话,这两者是可以相互转换的。而事实上并非如此,因而工作快两倍,就比拥有两倍的时间更强。

via: http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html


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