[abc-1]

There are companies out there that probably do none of these things and are x1000 more successful from a revenue or market cap perspective. Seems like the biggest successes are simply being at the right place at the right time and not being a complete idiot. Nobody wants to hear that though.

[light_triad]

Sure luck plays a role. There are techniques to increase your odds of getting lucky though.

Sam Altman argued a startup's chance of success is “something like Idea times Product times Execution times Team times Luck, where Luck is a random number between zero and ten thousand”

A lot of the success in startups is not due to getting the initial idea right, but what founders do once they realize that their initial idea is wrong.

[mannyv]

Salespeople are what make a successful company, from a revenue point of view. There's only one company that I know of that's been successful at that level without sales: Atlassian. Everyone else has salespeople.

If you if you don't have salespeople then you need to make a product that works and fulfills user needs. And it has to be good enough for word of mouth...which is where posthog's experience comes in.

[re-thc]

> There's only one company that I know of that's been successful at that level without sales: Atlassian.

It's not precisely so. They do and have had partners that did sales / consulting work.

[mannyv]

Yeah, but I doubt third party partners can get you to an IPO-level scale.

In my limited experience partners are usually small integrators that do maybe a small urban area. Did they get a big consulting partner/implementor or something?

[re-thc]

> In my limited experience partners are usually small integrators that do maybe a small urban area. Did they get a big consulting partner/implementor or something?

Those do exists. Partner was a gray area for them. Some services like certain support was also outsourced to partners. In a way the partners grew with the company so at some point (when it peaked) there were a lot of "large" partners.

That's why I said it is confusing. There was a time when you contact them on the website looking for a solution someone would redirect you to a partner. It was essentially outsourced sales / solution team(s).

[throw16180339]

Does JetBrains have sales people? I'm not sure how big the company is, but they've been around for 25 years and the founders are billionaires.

[AznHisoka]

Yep, I really don’t want to read any articles from any company that built their success during the SaaS greenfield period from 2008-2016. Plus, you already have had the brand and market share to built even more upon that foundation.

Now if you’ve built something big that grew in the past few years organically, there’s more to learn from that success.

[morkalork]

What, you're saying the secret to success isn't just coming up with cool brand name that ends in -ify or -ly in that era?

[ozim]

"Your website is the first impression your product is making" - unless your company does not operate in market where no one cares about your website.

We get serious leads only via networking of our C-levels and sales no customer cares about our landing page and leads when we cared about landing page were not serious and waste of time.

[dowager_dan99]

I always look for the post with the "success formula" in this situation and can never find it, but luck and timing are components. Also skill, resourcing, execution, and what I'll call "grit". The ratio is not defined but you need components of each.

[giancarlostoro]

I was reading the wikipedia page for WhatsApp this morning and indeed, right place, right time, right talent pool.