What if successful startups were just lucky?

From the translator: I made a translation of an interesting article from Vianney Lecroart, a 38-year-old French programmer and entrepreneur. He reflects on what is needed for the success of the project, shares his experience.

When I was 25, I joined my first startup as a developer. I was convinced that if we create an attractive product, people will talk about it, use it, and it will bring us success.

From 2000 to 2004 we received $ 10 million, hired experienced people and worked for 4 years on the MMORPG Ryzom . That was before Blizzard Entertainment released World of Warcraft.

With a team of 15 developers, we created an amazing 3D engine, a real-time distributed computing system for server clusters that could process information from thousands of players, an amazing monster and NPC artificial intelligence system, lots of tools for game designers and artists, and much more. We got 3 million lines in C ++ . We had a great team of level designers and games in general, who came up with an amazing universe with 4000 years of history and original gameplay. We had an amazing team of artists who created gigabytes of textures, 3D meshes, animation, and particle systems .

The long-awaited release turned into shock and complete failure. You may not be surprised, because today it is obvious that you should not combine high-profile product launches and covert development. As I said, we were confident that people would talk about the game if it was as good as it seemed to us.
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Of course, this is not the only reason Ryzom failed. Running the game a few months after World Of Warcraft also did not really help us, as well as many other reasons that I will not discuss here.

However, after this failure, I changed my thinking style and began to ask myself questions. What is needed for a good product to succeed? I started reading a lot about marketing, especially input marketing and everything related to social networking.

I tried to follow all the tips that successful entrepreneurs gave, explaining their achievements.

For example, I started writing a blog. Some people say that content marketing is the key to success, because you can create a community that will come in handy after a product is released. I also began to learn some methods of running startups, for example, “lean startups”. I quickly started and quickly failed . I went to a startup conference to find a co-founder, because they said that without him there was no way to succeed , and so on ...

I read so much about successful entrepreneurs that they all mixed up in my head in one pile. All gave opposite advice. When someone says that you need to do X, another notices that you can't do X. It seemed to me that their advice was suitable only for themselves.

After discussing with my friends this amazing article on survival trends, I discovered Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable . Everything about what I read and what I went through, it became obvious.

What if startups succeed completely by accident?

Maybe not as accidentally as the mathematical definition says, but still there are too many parameters that neither you, nor anyone else can control. In the end, even if success is not accidental, it is too difficult to manage.

You can take one parameter, for example, the number of founders, do some research, do an analysis and extrapolate the results. However, in the end, all this is not suitable for your project, because you need to take into account many other parameters. What works for someone will not work for you, because you are not someone.

I know you all think that you are smart, experienced, qualified and know what to do to create a successful start. But please imagine for a second that this is not the case. Imagine that this is a matter of chance.

This is interesting, because in this case, your vision of how to succeed will really change. You will begin to think about how to increase the chances of winning in a random game.

Think of a startup as a lottery. In this case, the obvious solution is to buy more tickets in order to get a better chance of winning. In the startup world, this means trying out as many different projects as possible. In each project you have to experiment and try different things in order to see what the best feedback comes from.

It is important to always be up to date with the news, to be ready to use every small opportunity that you get. Here is an example: at the conference you met a good person, you like his idea, your skills complement each other. This can be an excellent opportunity to try to develop a project together. The second example: you are talking to a person who has a problem, and you know how to solve it. Do it and see what happens.

You may not know where you will be in 3 months. Just be alert, experiment and use as many features as possible. The more you do, the more chances you have of success in one of these projects.

In the world of economics, this thinking means that you need to invest in the maximum number of startups. You increase your chances of getting something unusual, and that’s what YC , KIMA or The Family do .

However, in order to clarify everything, if I suggest you use all the possibilities, this does not mean that you need to agree to the first draft that you have come across. Of course, you must like him, but he does not have to seem successful. There are many projects started with a small or crazy idea that never seemed to be successful.

Do not wait, start! Release something!