I recently wrote a post about this concept you describe at the bottom: https://medium.com/swlh/the-unreliable-startup-69461f629383#.j2voezuqm

I'm not talking about absolute numbers, I mean relative. As in X% of businesses shut down within Y amount of time. My assumption is that X is much higher for venture-backed startups than it is for any other business. While I also don't have data to back this, it's almost certainly the case because of the nature of venture capital, as explained in the article.

I don't disagree. My point here was that venture backed startups are significantly less reliable than most other businesses.

I don't entirely agree here. Most VCs are not ok with startups doing "fine", they want to only back companies that are massively successful because of the way they calculate risk patterns. If you are doing ok as a startup, even well enough to be profitable, you can still be forced to sell (then usually shut down the product), because doing just ok is not good enough for VCs to continue investing in, so they would rather cut their losses. So a lot of products that are entirely solid are removed from markets this way.

Also I don't think its so clear of a difference between "early" and "late" adopters as you outline it here. I think it's just straight up number of adopters. I hardly think that if you ask anyone they would classify themselves as an early or late adopter. It's more along the lines of simply how many people see and use the product. And if they don't have a certain number of people, or specifically a certain exponential looking growth pattern of people, VCs are not interested and that's the end of the business, as mentioned previously.

I also disagree that all people that use startup products are "earlyvangelists", for the same reasons outlined in my previous reply. I also don't think that these people are not too upset and are content to wait for the next one. I think the interest in this article alone shows that many people are actually concerned about this issue. While I currently lack the data to back up this assumption, I do think it would be interested to do some sort of post-mortem survey when a startup shuts down, and figure things like this out.

All in all, this is kind of a silly back and forth as neither of us have any data to back up what we are saying and its based purely on assumptions. But with that in mind it would be pretty fascinating to get some more data on this area!

Wow, what a great response Mitch. You definitely nailed it here. I would love to have you add this as a response on medium so more people could see it. There's a lot of really solid points in here that are worth considering for anyone reading the article.

That being said, I don't feel like it's really only "crazy people" or techies and early adopters that are using these startup products today. Most tech startups that take on VC money don't market themselves as half-baked or exploratory, they typically feature slick professional designs and bold claims about functionality and features. Many of them genuinely offer good and well-crafted experiences. I have used a number of startup products that have been crafted in a truly professional manner and offer me tons of value and a great experience, some of which have been shut down and others which have been not. Hell, this very post is written and distributed by one, and there are plenty of non-crazy people who use it as well as me.

While I certainly don't deny that the nature of startups is that many will fail, in this article I was merely aiming to outline a point about responsibility and trust. I am not proposing a solution, nor am I claiming that the world could be coerced into working in a different way. The piece is really just presenting what I see as a problem, and something that we can and should think about and discuss.

Thanks for checking out this article and for the feedback guys! Shameless plug -- if you enjoyed my writing, I would encourage you to check out my primary medium blog Pragmatic Life, where I tackle larger concepts on the path to living a happy and healthy life.

So conflict aside, I just want to see if any photographers out there have found a better solution than Lightroom. I've been looking everywhere for one, but have been unable to find one.

Related, Sketch now ties me to Mac. I couldn't switch to windows or chromeos because I'm dependent on Sketch, and they will never build for anything other than mac. This feels a little limiting, honestly.

What is your recommendation on how to improve for them? This is the only thing your comment is missing, without this its just complaining and a blanket insult.

Wallpaper link?

Hey there,

I'm sure you guys have had a chance to check out bop.fm as well. What are your thoughts on the difference between bop.fm and the service you are building?