Great blog post by Eric Ries on Facebook’s hacker mentality.
As a developer at my core, I love the Facebook’s hacker mentality. However, what really stood out to me in Eric’s post was the very last paragraph
Here’s to the Zuck I admire, the one that had the courage to launch a simple, useful app in a week, celebrate his first 900 customers…
It is easy to get caught up in the Facebook’s impressive user numbers, but that wasn’t always the case. They, like you and I had to start some where. When we put our customer counter up on the KickoffLabs discovery page it was right around the 500 mark. That is a tiny number, but it was just a start. We passed the 3,800 mark earlier this week and will hopefully hit the our 5,000 customer goal in another month or so.
Your goals need be relative to where you are today. There is a lot inspiration in the stories behind companies like Facebook, but if you measure your own success against them you are doing yourself a huge diservice. Celebrate what you have acommplished and understand there is always more work to do….then celebrate again.
KickoffLabs is not likely to hit the 1 billion user mark, but we would have never hit 500, 3,800 or bigger without starting, shipping, iterating, and celebrating along the way.
Scott