5) It’ll Show You How Little You Know About Money

To launch our web development magazine, Treehouse, we gave out the first issue for free in order to generate a little buzz. Even though thirty thousand people downloaded the free issue in its first week, only about 300 of them felt it was worth paying for. According to Ryan Carson, cofounder of Dropsend, that’s a lot closer to the norm than we previously believed.

“If you’re offering a free plan to your customers then expect to get around 98% or 99% of your customers on that plan. That means that you can only really bank on 1% or 2% of your total customers on the paying plan. In our experience this is true and other major players in the web app industry have agreed. This is about the industry average.”

Getting customers to pay for your product is hard work, and it’s no surprise that startups often fail due to poor budgeting and cash flow. According to SCORE’s, Top Reasons Why Businesses Fail, misguided financial expectations often explain why companies call it quits.

  • 82% Poor cash flow management skills/poor understanding of cash flow
  • 79% Starting out with too little money.
  • 77% Not pricing properly - failure to include all necessary items when setting prices
  • 73% Being overly optimistic about achievable sales, money required and about what needs to be done to be successful.

While Treehouse didn’t necessarily fail, the experience taught us an important lesson on estimating cash flows. That knowledge was pretty important in determining how much angel investment we decided take in order to ensure we could make it to break-even with Wufoo.

五、它会告诉你，你对钱其实一无所知

推出Web开发杂志Treehouse时，为了赚取一点人气，我们提供了免费版。尽管第一周就有3000人下载，可只有300人左右认为值得付费。事实离我们之前的想当然有很大差距，正如Dropsend的联合创始人Ryan Carson所言：

“如果你提供了免费版，就得预计有98%-99%的用户会一直使用。也就是说，只能指望1%-2%的用户付费。我们的经验就是如此，同行业的其他网站也都同意。这大约是行业的平均值。”

让用户为产品付费很难，创业公司也经常因为预算不足和缺乏现金流失败，这不稀奇。SCORE的调查《公司失败的最大原因》（Top Reasons Why Businesses Fail）表明，错误的财政预算经常导致公司失败。

  • 82% 缺乏现金流的管理技巧/缺乏对现金流的理解
  • 79% 起步时资金太少
  • 77% 定价不合理：制定价格时未包含所有必需物品
  • 73% 对可实现销售额、所需资金和成功需要的工作量过于乐观

即使Treehouse并不一定会失败，这个经验也给我们上了重要一课：估算现金流。这门学问至关重要，我们就是根据它决定了Wufoo吸收多少天使投资以达到收支平衡。

Conclusion

The moral of the story is that now is a great time to begin your first startup because there is usually a lot to learn before your first real success. The act of starting a business will help to solidify your ideas, weed out bad co-founders and give you a feel for the time commitment required. Marc Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, had this to say about his early business experiences,

“With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake and failure, not only mine, but of those around me, I learned what not to do. I also got to study the success of those I did business with as well. I had more than a healthy dose of fear, and an unlimited amount of hope, and more importantly, no limit on time and effort.

Even successful people often fail at first, so right now now is the perfect time to get those hiccups out of the way.

结论

这篇文章就是想说，现在是创业的大好时机。因为在你真正成功之前，会有很多东西可以学。开始创业能使你的想法成形，能筛选掉不良的创业伙伴，还能让你把握时间/精力的投入度。达拉斯小牛队的老板Marc Cuban（htmlor注：喜欢NBA的朋友对他应该很熟悉），谈到他早期的商业经验时这样说道：

“经过每一次努力，我都学到了很多。从自己及身边人的错误与失败中，我汲取教训。在同我有过来往的成功者们那里，我学习经验。这样，我既体会到了无法承受之恐惧，也感受到了不计其数之希望。更重要的是，这突破了（一个人）时间和精力的极限。”

即使成功者们起步时也经常失败，所以你还犹豫什么？把忧心忡忡抛到九霄云外，现在就开始创业吧！