Do you feel the crushing weight of the disadvantages facing every new company? No brand, no features, no customers, no money, no distribution, no search engine rankings, no efficient advertising, no incredible executive team, no NPS, no strategy.

How do the successful startups rise above all that? Do they solve all those problems at once, or at least quickly?

No.

I apologize in advance for using the dang iPhone as an example but… The iPhone is one of the most successful and important products of the past few decades. But the first version launched with a mountain of issues. It was a terrible phone, ironically. The whole idea was that it was a “smart phone,” yet everyone agreed their cheap-o Nokia flip-phone was ten times better at being a phone. Also, imagine launching an operating system that didn’t include “copy/paste.” Terrible!

But, the iPhone did something so well, that people wanted so badly, they would put up with all the other crap: You could actually use the internet. The real Internet with full websites and everything. The web actually worked (even if slowly). Email actually worked. In your pocket. It’s hard to explain the magic and excitement to a Gen-Z’er who takes it for granted. This was so compelling, all the other problems didn’t matter.

For more than ten years — an eon in tech-time — Heroku has been the dominate way that Rails developers launch public applications. When it first came out, it was rife with “deal-breakers” that developers continually winged about. “What do you mean I have to use Bundler — it’s broken half the time!” “What do you mean I can’t change the filesystem at run-time — I’ll have to change my algorithms!” “What do you mean it doesn’t support MySQL — everyone uses MySQL! My queries are going to break.” “Wow these websites are really slow.” On and on with the complaints, and all quite valid.