Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

I attended a startup event the other day. As a part of an event, there was a talk by a successful entrepreneur about PR and Marketing. This entrepreneur had recently launched his new startup and had received great buzz in the media within a short span of time. So his talk was mainly focused on – how he launched that startup with such a great buzz in such a short amount of time.

I was interested in this topic, but was disappointed at the end of the talk.

The thing is – this guy talked about how he launched a bare minimum application with some controversial idea and got the press members and tech bloggers to talk about it within few weeks. This controversial introduction apparently helped him to get more buzz from other press members and bloggers, and also from social media community. He showed more than 2 dozens press members and bloggers talked about his idea and new startup – and that helped them to get many users in early days because people were curious to see what it is. He also managed to let influential startup people talk about his startup (because they are his friends).

I’m not against of this approach. If it worked for him, great! As they say, any kind of publicity is a good publicity. But I’m against of advising this approach as a technique to first-time entrepreneurs to launch their startups to get more traction early on.

Using your brand to promote something is not a technique, it’s a leverage. So my request to such successful entrepreneurs is – please do not advice any techniques which were possible because of your successful brand. Not everyone who is just starting has that kind of brand. PR or tech bloggers won’t even entertain the first-time entrepreneurs, and especially if the idea is so controversial or early stage (without any traction). So please, don’t advice it as a technique – it’s not going to work for everyone.

I read this great paragraph from Paul Graham’s essay about why having MBA is not essential to start a technology business. I completely agree with this philosophy, so posting his thoughts again -

I found that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared. There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard, like tax law or the pricing of derivatives, but you don’t need to know about those in a startup. All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities.

If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.

via How to Start a Startup.

Again, the most important piece of advice – learn how to hack than get an MBA.