Where I was coming from with this was that I was sick of seeing all of these posts and podcasts where they were saying things in a very humblebraggy way like "Yeah, I only got something like 3,000 signups for that but was able to launch anyway" or "Yeah, I did a soft launch to $25K MRR just to my Twitter followers" or "I spent a weekend ranking #1 for this keyword and it took off from there" or "I've never spent a dime on advertising and I've never done any marketing and I don't spend more than 10 hours a month on this thing, but it pays for my awesome lifestyle."
I was referring to that kind of attitude when I wrote about how they do that to make you feel like they have some secret knowledge you have to pine for.
My approach was to say "That's total bullshit. Let me show you what it's really like." Because in my experience it's been nothing like that. In my experience, that was fairy tale land.
So I tried to write the guide as if I were the one it was written for - I wanted to put something out there that I wish I could have read 5-10 years ago that would have given me a brutally honest view of what was involved, just how bad it could be, and that would have shown me what the most important things to focus on were. And most importantly, to get me to think critically about everything I was doing. Hence the strong tone. I wanted to write something that would have gotten my attention and would have made me stop and think and avoid wasting time. So that's what I wrote.
> I wanted to write something that would have gotten my attention and would have made me stop and think and avoid wasting time. So that's what I wrote.
And that exactly what happened for me as a reader: I've read it because of this introduction. It was really eye-opening in a way ‑ it is so easy to forget how much work is behind the non-code side of a start-up project.
Hey everyone! Clifford here, the author of the article. Just thought I'd jump in and say thanks to everyone for all the awesome feedback - you've all seriously made my day (and probably even year for that matter)!
When I started out writing the guide, I actually didn't have any references to Tamboo - it was just me writing about approach using some fictional examples.
I posted Part 1 on Barnacles (https://barnacl.es) in October (I believe) and a lot of people gave me good feedback but one of the things they said was that it was really hard to find a link to my site and that I was nuts for not talking more about my direct experiences with Tamboo since that was something they really wanted to know more about.
So in the later parts of the guide I do talk about some very specific Tamboo things and went away from the generalized example in the first part.
I honestly wasn't planning for it to spread to a larger audience like HN (this is a total surprise that's just flooring me right now!), so I never bothered to go back and change Part 1 to use a more Tamboo-ish example.
OK this makes sense. I would really encourage you to do another write up of the full Tamboo story especially all the nasty warty bits that all real business stories have.
I just submitted that one since it was my favorite. Especially the image metaphor at the beginning. :) I just saw this comment but extra references can't hurt ya.
And yeah, I'll take that hit - kinda hard to compete with the Zuckerberg/Freeman power combo ;-P