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Overnight Success – Not Just Unrealistic, But Dangerous
By Anna Johnson on October 20th, 2009Daniel Ek, the co-founder of Spotify – a U.K. based provider of streaming music – recently wrote a nice blog post emphasizing the dangers of counting on an overnight success as an online startup.
Whilst focusing specifically on the online music industry, I think Daniel’s comments apply to Internet businesses in general, especially his comment that the “notion of overnight success is very misleading and actually rather harmful to any hope for long term and sustainable growth.”
In relation to the online music industry, Daniel Ek says that even the most successful companies tend to have rough starts. The mighty iTunes missed its revenue target by 30 percent in its first year, whilst there are plenty of startups dead and buried in the ‘digital music graveyard.’
Spotify itself is, according to Ek, probably Europe’s biggest paid subscription service with hundreds of thousands of paying users and advertising revenues exceeding millions of Euros per month. Yet, the company is approaching its expansion – including into the U.S. and other countries – with caution.
Smart approach. And one which we’d all do well to heed.
Source: Daniel Ek, “Overnight success takes a long time…” Spotify, October 8, 2009
