You look at the peak from afar and you get excited. As you get closer to the base, you start to get a little scared. Half an hour after you start, your legs are already burning and you're thinking "wtf am I doing here, I could be having a pint on the patio I passed by earlier!" But you keep on eyes on the path and keep grinding, step by step, one foot in front of the other. Your mind goes blank and you get used to the discomfort. Occasionally you stop to rest and then you see "wow, I'm actually making progress, this is pretty neat. And the view! This is way better than some random patio.". You keep going and going for years.
Few climbers make it. Mostly you give up and walk back down (ie fail). Sometimes, someone likes your climb and sends a mule to help you on the way back (acquihire) and sometimes they even send a helicoper (product acquisition). And if you make it (IPO), you find out it's a fractal game - you always keep climbing, otherwise someone will come from behind and push you over the cliff. :)
Yes, I want to push myself to make the world's best next-gen GUI for a payroll or real estate database. I may be able to go to as many VC pitch meetings, strategy meetings, client sales meetings to make my GUI the best and deliver maximum shareholder value and live to write a blog post about it (with max. karma duh).
But I can't live on the top of the self-ingratiating peak forever. The higher the peak, the lower the oxygen level, alas I wish I could live on top of that mountain blasting inspirational posts to all my Twitter followers for all time.
I have to come down eventually and go home, eat, take a shit and go to sleep. Even if I make it down safely evading the bears, I wonder can I go to sleep peacefully, or would I dare "not go gentle into that good night"?
Great analogy - thanks for sharing.
"Easy. I stopped reading Techcrunch."
42Floors is a magnitude bigger than my company (http://periscope.io) and has always seemed like one of those runaway startup successes that we aspire to and occasionally despair of. Reading something this is incredibly motivating. Thank you for writing.
One of the reasons I wrote that post a year ago was that I had to own up to the fact that we looked better than we actually were.
How very un-Internet-y of you. :)
Couldn't help but notice one thing on your home page: the price is given in $/sqft/year. Did you A/B test with other representations? It doesn't feel intuitive at all to me. I would expect people to have an idea of the total budget they have (/month or /year).
Also I'm sure it's in your backlog already, but a lot of your listing prices are way off (http://42floors.com/?page=1&order%5Blistings_rate_per_sqft_p...)
Several of our A/B tests have used total size but it doesn't have a big enough effect on conversion to be measurable.
I know it's not the author who said this, but oh piss off with that self-congratulatory crap. How on earth do you know what most people do? Let's see, according to http://www.statisticbrain.com/world-poverty-statistics/ 50% of the world lives on less than $1.50/day. If you're lucky enough to be in the U.S. with the means and opportunity to become an entrepreneur, maybe put in a second's thought before you go off and say how uberman you are.
And next great thing? Seriously? Next great thing is curing cancer not a real estate site.
your designs assumes ( correctly I believe) that whoever comes on to 42floors already know what they are looking for. So no need for a video or marketing spiel.
Having thought about it even a new user should get it but have you checked it out, like asked a random to go to your site and track their experience. Or would you term such randoms to most likely not be your customers.
