The Paul Grahm Checklist

Venture Capitalist Paul Grahm just wrote a great essay on his site about the 13 steps to startup success. I have been a long time follower of his thoughts and I’ve even thought about applying to Y Combinator.

It’s always good to realistically address these concerns as soon as possible. A lot of the startups that I have worked at that have digressed from these general principles were either a) too big to fail or b) doomed to fail.

So with that said, here is the list and here is where I think NewsTrendz stands.

1) Pick Good CoFounders (2/3 Done)

There are two of us working on NewsTrendz. It is not a full-time project but we hope it can be. The potential is there. We are leaving room for a 3rd founder. Our skill set is very technical from a technology, operations, creative, and product standpoint. No one on the team has a business education. Depending on if we can get a third teammember to help evolve the product, I’d say we’re 2/3 here.

2) Launch Fast (Done)

We launched NewsTrendz in 3 weeks, in RoR and Java. We’ve gone through the perfectionist death-march at multiple companies and Paul Grahm is right: no product ever succeeds that way.

3) Let Your Idea Evolve (Incomplete)

This is a work in progress. We are in the battle to get traffic and earn loyal users that appreciate and find our service useful. The more we grow, the more we want to evolve to meet our users’ expectations. We’re evolving right now on our own whims and dreams, but hopefully it can become our users too.

4) Understand Your Users (Done)

We’ve been bouncing this idea off our friends and family, and constantly trying to improve. Like (3), this is a work in progress too.

UPDATE 4/21/2009: I should’ve updated this sooner, but we’ve become big fans of Feedback Army. I think our use means we’re trying to understand our users.

5) Better To Have Few Users Love You Then A Lot Ambivalent (Incomplete)

We’re too young to know if our users love us or not. We agree with Paul that we would prefer the first then the second, in this Machiavellian trade off. Let’s see what happens when we get users.

6) Offer Suprisingly Good Service (Done)

We’re a two man team hoping to become 3. If you have ideas or thoughts, then we’ll execute them. Contact us at anytime. We’ve already gotten some great suggestions and our turn-around was very fast.

7) You Make What You Measure (Done)

We have two goals here at NewsTrendz. We want 1000 visitors a day that love our product and we want to break even on our server costs. This is our goal right now. No more no less.

UPDATE 4/21: We broke 1000 users a day today and we’re resetting our goals to 10000 users a day. Woo Hoo.

8) Spend Little (Done)

Our costs, other than our time, is $2.40 a day for a single Amazon EC2 instance. I don’t think we can get any cheaper without sacrificing operational flexibility. We’re also independently secure financially, so there’s no runway other than if we can’t reach our goals in (7) without killing ourselves.

9) Get Ramen Profitable (Incomplete)

I definitely like a good bowl of Korean Shin Ramen. That’s about $3.00. As stated in (8), our costs are little but we would like to make some coin. Neither of us will starve doing NewsTrendz.

10) Avoid Distractions (Incomplete)

Neither of work on NewsTrendz full time so we miss wide-right on this task. It’s hard because as Paul said, you need to work on what pays the bills. Hopefully we can keep our eye on the prize and keep trying to connect with our potential users.

11) Don’t Get Demoralized (1/2 Done)

I’m already a bit confused on how to grow in our Web 2.0 universe. This is the lesson I’ve tried to achieve in every company I joined after school. It’s hard and this might kill our passion if we don’t see traction. However, we ourselves use our own product and that helps. NewsTrendz had to work for 1 user as well as for 1000 users.

12) Don’t Give Up (Incomplete)

Our morale and commitment are here, and we don’t plan on giving for a while. But there is a mental runway and we hope we can achieve our goals before we hit (11).

13) Deals Fall Through (Incomplete)

We’re not even close to reaching this cross road. Hopefully we’ll keep chugging regardless of the environment