Ask HN: How did you start your business? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?

#141

Post by slipwalker » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 12:07 PM UTC

Hope you are not looking only for success stories... I left a stable job at a small consultancy, with one-year-worth of salaries on the bank, armed with my tech skills but no sales expertise ( or commercial talent ) whatsoever. The results, 14 years later: bankruptcy, lots of debt, a couple labor-related lawsuits and back to full time employment for a large corporation... Lesson learned: as an entrepreneur you can buy tech skills ( and it's cheaper than most would imagine ) but nothing is more valuable than sales (soft)skills. A competent, well related, sales person is the most valuable asset on your company.

( BTW, my company was developing J2EE/JEE/JavaEE small/mid-sized projects for finance&insurance companies in Brazil )

Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?

#142

Post by shostack » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 12:13 AM UTC

csallen wrote: post #3

I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe. I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answ…

I was just listening to an older episode of Indie Hackers today as a matter of fact. Thank you for contributing something valuable to the ecosystem. A lot of similar podcasts/blogs focus on a lot of fluff, but you do/did a great job of directing the conversation, and summarizing long-winded guest comments that may not use the proper business jargon into concise and interesting tidbits.

One thing that was always interesting for me as a listener is that I'm actually the opposite of a lot of your audience. I'm a senior marketer who knows the marketing world inside and out, but I'd consider myself an "early" programmer[1]. It is a very different set of challenges. But one thing I noticed was the true lack of basic marketing skills many of your guests had in the beginning of their journeys.

Would you say that the "baseline" for that knowledge among engineers has increased over the last couple of years as the "indie hacker" movement you and others like Patrick McKenzie have helped foster has grown in awareness and popularity? Ie., given the propensity for developers to spend a lot of their time researching solutions online, do you find they are starting with more of the basics in place than they did maybe 5-10 years ago?

[1] https://zedshaw.com/2015/06/16/early-vs-beginning-coders/

Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?

#143

Post by arthurBrooks » Thu, Mar 22, 2018, 9:44 AM UTC

Before i was hired i went through around 150+ rejections. Every time i would go for an interview or interview candidates in my current role as technical team lead.

I will seriously wish for some resources which can teach me and others about the full interview process. what to do and what not to do. What kind of questions to prepare and what not to prepare.

And moreover a self assessment tool which can tell me how good i am as a developer from the interview perspective.

So i started http://www.codespaghetti.com

currently i a, working on an AI based self assessment tool. Hoping to launch it by the end of this year.

Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?

#144

Post by zerr » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 7:36 AM UTC

Radim wrote: post #53

abrichr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you negotiate doing a PhD remotely?

I feel like I'm not helping you guys much, because my circumstances may have been unique, but the honest answer is: Not much negotiation needed. My uni had what I'd call an "old school AI department", grounded in linguistics / semantic web and RDFs / expert systems, that type of research. I was more into statistics, Bayesian inference and vectors. The mutual impact was lukewarm, and completing my thesis remotely not…

Did "PhD" pedigree help in anyway? I mean you could do your research outside academia, since your department was not helping you (in research). But I guess US PhD stipend could be considered as a good salary in Thailand.

Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?

#145

Post by rorygibson » Fri, Mar 23, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

I got tired of (only) working for other people as a consultant. Started a side project 14 months ago to create a small scale integration tool, and it turned into a full-on search indexing tool for digital product companies - https://getctx.io

(Basically you connect it with your Slack, Trello, Google Drive, email and GitHub and it indexes the content & lets you search via web or our Slackbot)

I've got multiple clients in trial and a couple of promising community installations for large tech bodies, hoping to get some decent revenue on the scoreboard soon :-)