原文：
http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
February 2009
09年2月
One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be?
熟悉我的创业者都知道，我经常说：让一小部分人很高兴，好过让大多数人半高兴。如果我只能给创业者十条忠告，这会是其中一条。你会问其他9条是什么。我也认真思考过这个问题。
When I made the list there turned out to be 13:
当我最终将它们写下来的时候，变成了13条：
1. Pick good cofounders.
1. 选对合伙人
Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. [1] And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.
选合伙人就如同选地段，地段不对，房子再好，也是白搭。创业的时候，换想法是家常便饭，但是换合伙人？呵呵[1 严格来说，你想换合伙人，得靠穿越]。成功的创业就像是靠谱的合伙人组合之后的必然。
2. Launch fast.
2. 快发布
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you're wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.
让你快点发布不是因为要早点抢占市场，而是想让你早点真正开始。人生都是从犯错那一刻开始的，刻骨铭心都是从失恋那一刻开始的。创业也是从第一次发布产品那一刻开始的，那一刻你才知道你需要提供什么东西。
3. Let your idea evolve.
3. 让点子飞
This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It's a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementing.
这是“快点发布”的下半句：快速发布，赶快迭代。有人觉得创业就是让一个牛逼的点子变成现实的过程。这可真是大错特错。创业如同写散文，多数的灵感都是在写作过程中产生的。
4. Understand your users.
4. 懂用户
You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. [2] The second dimension is the one you have most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed.
你可以将你的事业想象成一个矩形：矩形的一条边是用户数量，另一条边是你对他们生活质量的提升。你只对第二条边有掌控力，而且，对第一条边的提升都是通过对第二条边的提升完成的。如同在科研中，最难的是提出问题而非回答问题，在创业中，最难的是找出用户缺乏的东西。你越懂你的用户，你成功的几率就越大。这也是为什么很多成功的创业者最初做的东西都是自己需要的东西。
5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
5. 小部分人的爱强过大部分人的喜欢（脑残粉）
Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have.
理想的情况是世界人民都爱你，但这是不太可能的。在最开始的时候，你得做一个艰难的抉择：是满足一部分用户的所有需求，还是满足所有用户的一部分的需求？选择前者。一个脑残粉顶得上一万路人粉。用户用得爽，总会越来越多。用户不喜欢，你能说别走啊我这就增加功能？还有，你可能会欺骗自己：你觉得自己已经完成伟大产品的80%了，你怎么知道不是70%？但用户数量就客观多了，70人就是70人，80人就是80人。
6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.
6. 提供好到令人流泪的服务（他们家服务好棒，我竟泪流满面）
Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service. Your own ideas about what's possible have been unconsciously lowered by such experiences. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. Go out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn't scale, because it's a way of learning about your users.
消费者已经习惯了被虐待。大多数公司的服务都很粗暴。你的金点子可能会不自觉的被这种经历拉低体验。你家公司的用户体验好，还不够，得是及其特别的好。在这条路上努力一些，用户会受宠若惊。在创业早期，如果你的服务质量不能让用户口口相传，那将会是一个悲伤的故事。
7. You make what you measure.
7. 看着长
I learned this one from Joe Kraus. [3] Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You'll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.
这一招我跟 Joe Kraus 学的：仅仅是测量什么东西，就能让这个东西增长。如果你想提升用户数量，就把用户数量写得大大的贴在墙上。数量上升，你就高兴，数量下降，你就不高兴。很快你就发现用户数量提升了。当然：小心挑选测量值。
8. Spend little.
8. 花小钱
I can't emphasize enough how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. [4] But it's more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.
低成本创业，再怎么强调都不为过。大多数创业失败的原因是在钱花完之前没有作出大家想用的东西。所以，省钱的重要性仅次于快速迭代。不仅如此，简朴文化能让公司保持活力，就像锻炼之于身体一样。
9. Get ramen profitable.
9. 饿不死
"Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. It's not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It's also great for morale.
“拉面利润线”指的是赚的钱刚刚够创业者的生活花销。这并不意味着快速构建商业模型（当然，你这么想也可以），而是一种避免资本欺压的方式。一旦你跨过了这条拉面利润线，你面对投资者的时候就有底气了，团队的士气也有了。一瞬间面子里子就全有了。
10. Avoid distractions.
10. 别分心
Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you'll always interrupt working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. Paradoxically, fundraising is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too.
分心是创业者的天敌。杀伤力最大的是那些能带来钱的分心：正式的工作、咨询、赚钱的支线任务。你的项目可能很有潜力，但你不能总是忙于应付那些能给你小钱的人。有趣的是，赚风投也是一种分心，所以在风投上花最小的精力吧。
11. Don't get demoralized.
11. 别灰心
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as you'd be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box.
虽然创业失败的原因大多数是没钱，但是根本原因通常是不再关注。要么公司由蠢人掌管：这人扶不起来；或者由聪明、但很低落的人掌管：这种人也很难扶起来。创业的精神压力很大。站好了，不要被打倒。俗话说的好，搬金子得有个好腰，买iPhone还得要个好肾呢。
12. Don't give up.
12. 别放弃
Even if you get demoralized, don't give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn't true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea.
就算你灰心也别放弃。只要别放弃，你能跑多远可能会超乎你的想象，我可不只是在谈马拉松。这不是鸡汤：在数学领域有好多人坚持一辈子都不可能成为一个数学家。所幸创业不是搞数学。当然，仅仅坚持是不够的，你还要经常改变自己想法。简单得说：竭尽全力，不择手段。
13. Deals fall through.
13. 正视失败
One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don't, but because it makes them less likely to.
我从 Viaweb 学到的有用的技能就是：不要有太高的期望。我们大概有20次交易失败，其原因各不相同。我们渐渐明白，不要再关注这些失败的交易了。如你的士气依赖于这些交易，那可是太危险了。不仅因为它们通常会失败，而且是因为如果你太关注，它们就更加可能会失败了。
Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one.Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going.
如果这13个句子，只能留一个，我会选哪一个？懂用户。这是终极秘籍。创业的本质是赚钱，你只能通过改变用户的生活来赚钱，而最难的部分就是找出他们需要什么。一旦你知道你该做什么，怎么做就不是大问题了，最差劲的黑客也做得出来。懂用户其实占了13句中一半以上的句子，它就是早发布、懂用户。创业过程中迸发的点子，就源自于你对用户的理解。懂用户使得你作出令一部分人极度喜悦的东西。感动用户的服务也让你更加深入的理解用户。用户也能保证你的士气，就算是你一败涂地的时候，只要还有10个人用你的产品，你就不会停止前进。