90% of startups don't take off? Not really! 🚀
90% of startups don't take off. These are the most demotivating words you can hear. And it's as absurd as saying: 90% of books don't take off, 90% of songs don't take off, 90% of movies don't take off.
If an app has 1 user, it's already taken off. If a book has 1 reader, it's done. If a song has 1 listener, it's successful. If a movie won the heart of 1 viewer, the creative team worked hard for a reason.
You may have an audience of 1 person, and this person needs to be valued. Give them the best you can. The measure of success is not the amount of money you make, but the audience's involvement in the result of your creativity.
"Prince of Persia" would remain "Prince of Persia" even if only 1 person played it. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is a novel for the Nobel Prize, even if its circulation was 1 copy.
Failure is not that you did not make a profit. Failure is when you create an abstract product, not focused on specific consumers. Any business should know its user by face.
If you know for whom you work: programming, writing, making a movie, your work has already taken off. Success is winning the battle for the heart of one user, reader, listener, or viewer.
There could be something here about the fact that a quality product is the first prerequisite for future scaling. But my philosophy is different. Each person is a whole world. You can conquer billions of minds, or you can get a place in one. In each case, I will say that your work has conquered the world.
Dmytro Skorokhod