Golden tickets

When I was a new founder, as much as I don't want to admit it, I think I believed that success was somehow gated behind a small number of "golden tickets." If I could just get my hands on the right one, growth would follow and my anxieties would finally disappear.

The first was the golden ticket of hiring. I believed that if I could find a marketing co-founder or a marketing jack-of-all-trades, growth would "unlock," as if they were my missing piece to success.

But after many attempts, I failed to find this person. And over time it became clearer to me that the role itself was largely imaginary — or rather, the expectations behind it were unrealistic.

If the person who built the product can't clearly articulate how it should be sold, it's unreasonable to expect someone else to solve that problem independently. What I mean is that hiring can't provide direction where there is none. It amplifies whatever heading you've already set.

The next was the golden ticket of audience. The belief that if you build a large audience on social media, your chance at an overnight success becomes inevitable. With enough followers, any product launch should convert, right? But in practice, this very rarely happens, because followers are typically there to observe, not to buy.

Attention and distribution are not interchangeable, and confusing the two often leads to frustration, disappointment. and self-doubt.

Then there's the golden ticket of luck. This can take the form of a top Product Hunt launch, a front-page Hacker News post, or some other viral moment. These events are often treated as holy inflection points that'll transform a lowly business overnight.

And while these events can generate a temporary boost in traffic, you'll quickly find that most of these visitors are cut from the same cloth as the prior group: they're there to observe and take notes on how you got lucky so that they can get lucky too.

Last but not least is the golden ticket of product. This is the idea that an idea-firehose coupled with frequent and early failure will inevitably lead to success — and even worse, that a lack of early traction means the idea itself was flawed.

Unfortunately, as a result, products are abandoned quickly in favor of the next attempt, and the next attempt, and the next. What's often missed is that execution, packaging, and persistence matter just as much as the underlying idea.

I've seen many founders give up on products that were genuinely good, only for similar products to succeed later under different leadership. It makes me sad. In those cases, the failure wasn't the idea but the founder's determination to see it through.

Over time that's resulted in the realization that many so-called product failures would be better understood as founder failures — not in the sense of incompetence, but in the sense of inexperience and a lack of direction and determination. Founders grow over time (on the order of years) and ideas often require that growth to succeed.

After more than ten years of growth as a founder, it's become clear that there's no golden ticket for me. Not the golden ticket of hiring. Not the golden ticket of audience. Not the golden ticket of luck. Not even the golden ticket of product. And that's fine.

Chasing golden tickets often seems to increase failure rate, anyways. Relying on a following or on luck encourages a cycle of spinning up and spinning down new ideas, which erodes trust over time.

What I mean by that is even with a following, repeatedly searching for a golden ticket of product at their expense makes success less and less likely because nothing you build lasts for very long.

Instead, stop looking for shortcuts, focus on sound business principles, and survive long enough to reap the harvest.