Give it a little more time and ramp up the "degree of neglect". You'll find the point where yours begins to die. You just haven't tried hard / long enough.
It's not just about the durability of your business / value delivered. It's also about the number of people who know or can learn about your offering, competition, etc. Neglect can make you very vulnerable in those areas.
But, on second thought, I do agree about it not being about age or stage for different reasons. That is, neglect at any stage can ruin your business. It just tends to evidence itself more harshly and more quickly in startups--particularly those that have yet to gain traction.
Of course, a certain extreme degree of neglect can kill anything at any time. But that wasn't the author's point. And I've been running this business for the better part of 5 years now so if it was going to die from months of total neglect, it would have already.
If--before gaining any traction and in the very early stages--your startup continued to grow through total neglect, then I would say that it is a very rare exception indeed. Rare enough that the author's point holds.
Ah, yes, the classic: "If you're telling the truth… and you meet this new criteria I just added in order to exclude you… your story still doesn't mean anything."
What's traction, exactly? No really - exactly?
My story isn't rare at all. You talk to groups of people who are bootstrapping products -- not social startups, products -- and you will find many with similar stories. Because bootstrapping often means you have to do other work and things can't always balance perfectly.
The rest of the people with these stories simply don't bother posting on HN because nobody believes them, anyway. HN is fed too steady a diet of "startup" stories to understand that not all things are equivalent to a free bookmarking tool.
Hmm. Didn't know that was a classic technique. Seems pretty specific and esoteric. Do you get that much?
Anyway, I thought I'd restated (in summary form) exactly what you'd claimed. If not, then please correct me.
And, I didn't add new criteria to exclude you. In fact I was accepting your definition of traction, whatever that may be. Personally, I would beg to differ--given that you have a number of paying customers of which you are rightfully proud--but no matter. It's clear that you felt you hadn't gotten any traction to speak of (i.e. that you were in an "early stage" of your start-up according to your comment), otherwise, you would not have bickered with my initial post.
So, in all, my comment accepted everything you said at face value, then declared it rare. So rare that the OP's point holds as a general statement (though there may be exceptions and you may be one of them).
I see you're now pushing back on that. That's cool. I don't believe it though. I just don't buy that so many early-stage companies sit around neglecting their businesses, but growing in spite of it. If you ask those founders more carefully constructed questions, I think you would find that either a.) when they neglected it, it started to die and they quickly tended to it or b.) they didn't totally neglect it, but found some minimal level of effort to maintain and/or grow it.
And FWIW, I've bootstrapped a start-up to success, so I also speak from personal experience. Even today when we slow down our promotional efforts our traffic (and business) starts to wane. And, that's far from complete neglect. Still, given enough time in that "mode" it will die.
It's not just about the durability of your business / value delivered. It's also about the number of people who know or can learn about your offering, competition, etc. Neglect can make you very vulnerable in those areas.
But, on second thought, I do agree about it not being about age or stage for different reasons. That is, neglect at any stage can ruin your business. It just tends to evidence itself more harshly and more quickly in startups--particularly those that have yet to gain traction.