[jeffreportmill1]

Having a corporate job is usually a 'mediocre success'. If you strike out on your own with something that involves your passion and you earn a comparable income, you are a stellar success. Don't let a nepo baby tell you otherwise.

[alephnerd]

I agree, but this blogpost is NOT about professional trajectory. It's about sales and GTM success criteria for startups

> That’s the danger of the mediocre success. The point of startup experimentation isn't the success itself; it’s the learning that comes with clear-cut success or failure. You don't really care about the sales revenue generated by your first two reps; you care about whether this is a strategy you can scale to dozens and then hundreds of reps, or whether you need to use a completely different strategy. It’s all about the learning. And mediocre successes don’t give you any learning.

[dahart]

Yes if you earn an income comparable to a corporate job, yeah that’s a big win. “Mediocre success” unfortunately isn’t well defined here, but I assumed the author wasn’t suggesting a corporate salary. It seemed like he was talking about a few early sales but not enough to sustain the business. Imagine starting a company with two other people and grossing $12k the first year and $22k the second year, and then running low on funding. Should you keep going? Should you seek investment, assuming you can even get it? What if the growth remains linear, and it will take at least 10 years to reach sustainability?

[taneq]

Wouldn’t “not enough to sustain the business” be failing? I’d think “mediocre success” would be doing well enough that you can’t just throw in the towel, but not well enough that you can escape the grind.

[dahart]

The author defined mediocre success to be the relative outcome of an experiment, such as an A-B test, he wasn’t talking about income levels or overall success. It might be assumed that, since we are talking about startups and experiments, that we are not discussing self-sustaining businesses? Either way, which interpretation makes the rest of the article make the most sense?

[ansible]

> Having a corporate job is usually a 'mediocre success'.

Eh, that is doing OK to me, which is better than some nebulous "mediocre success". If you are at least saving for retirement, and able to support a family, that's actual success in my book.

The typical startup outcome, where you try for a couple years, it fails, and then you move on to a corporate job is not terrible.

What's really bad is when you make enough to just barely get by, paying yourself a sub-market-rate salary, and keep limping along for a long while. Waiting for that "success", that big breakthrough, "just around the corner". You can be stuck doing this for years, out of a misguided sense of loyalty, determination or whatever. And then you are not saving for retirement, and letting the best family-creation years (if that is a life goal) pass you by.

That, to me is "mediocre success".

Ask me how I know. On second though, no, don't ask me how I know.