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Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

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Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#141

Post by philsnow »

berkes wrote: post #115
k8sToGo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering, how do you sell a company? It's not like there is an eBay or craigslist for companies, right?

John Warrillow’s book Built to Sell has some good advise. My main takeaway: first ensure the company is optimised for sellability. And your question is answered too: agents. There are people and companies specialized in selling companies. Just like there are people specialized in buying companies.

> first ensure the company is optimised for sellability

there are a lot of things you can do easily early on but become very hard later:

  - ensure the culture of the company doesn't require you to be there for it to function
  - make sure your incorporation structure is amenable to selling easily
  - separate out the accounts (both bank account and SaaS/PaaS/Iaas accounts) from day one, separate from any of your other projects
the Warrillow book goes into far more breadth and depth than this comment, but I just wanted to highlight that there are strong reasons to act now to shape things in a way that make it easy to sell, even if you don't currently intend to sell. being prepared to sell at any given time increases optionality / makes it so that in case you suddenly _need_ to sell, you don't have to put in 6 months of work before you can even put the thing up for sale.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#142

Post by tonyedgecombe »

tpetry wrote: post #44
paxys wrote: post #5

Not my own business but from my experience at the B2B SaaS company I work for – Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will star…

Hiring sales people is easy. But finding good sales people is really hard!

I've worked in a few sales led organisations and it seemed to me it was just as difficult as hiring programmers. The only difference was it was easy to see who wasn't performing. You could quickly spot the poor performers and deal with them.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#143

Post by mkl »

rventure wrote: post #84
urthor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works. These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans. Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months. You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer. -------------------------------------------------------- Startup engine…

TCE Delta?

Total Cost of Employment: https://support.remote.com/hc/en-us/articles/4406888078733-W...

"delta" = difference.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#144

Post by trhway »

endymi0n wrote: post #137

To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people…

Building MVP and finding and tuning your market fit early - those Lean Startup ideas were popular here 10 years ago. The money flood of the recent years seems to allow that 'Build it and they will come' as well as just bulldozing your way into market.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#145

Post by [deleted] »

kcplate wrote: post #78
mythz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sells itself" means the product able to stand on its own and raise awareness without paying for advertising to do it. You of course need people to sign contracts & complete the purchase, that's irrelevant to how well the product is able to raise awareness without advertising, i.e. people interested in buying Tesla's didn't hear about it through any of their advertising.

I imagine Shannyn Sneed must sit around all day doing nothing then.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#146

Post by rozenmd »

trhway wrote: post #144
endymi0n wrote: post #137

To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people…

Building MVP and finding and tuning your market fit early - those Lean Startup ideas were popular here 10 years ago. The money flood of the recent years seems to allow that 'Build it and they will come' as well as just bulldozing your way into market.

Nah there's more nuance to it than that - it's more that customers expect a better featured solution before buying now.

It's still an MVP, but the goalposts have shifted as more folks put up "drop your email here if you're interested in uber for dogs!" type pages.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#147

Post by jacobmischka »

konschubert wrote: post #135
sebastiangraef wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD." Don't know from when this is but tech salaries in Thailand are much higher and it's hard to find people. This would be fresh grad level at most.

It's heartening to hear how remote work is helping to even out global wealth inequality.

I wouldn't call "hire people from countries with low wages so you can pay them literally 1/10 of the US equivalent haha" heartening.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#148

Post by berkes »

hvidgaard wrote: post #138
antoniuschan99 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying to take on the consultancy contracts? I fall into that trap as the consultancy contracts are essentially my day job. Also the contracts and my product don’t have anything related to each other :(

Until your startup is a full on company with multiple hires, consultancy work is revenue and can be a source of other business ideas that you might hire people for and make into another reliable revenue stream. I know a handful of people who started with creating websites, then took some consultancy work and now have an entire different software company. They used those two things as a bootstrap to get going with opp…

We've recently come across this conundrum too.

But we chose to forego the "consultancy" jobs. Reason is that we optimize for learning (we're at that stage). And while consultancy may look like a good opportunity for learning, that it allows you to get paid for investigating the real problem domain of your customers it is not optimised for that.

Far from it. My decades of consultancy and freelancing experience has told me that it always takes longer to implement the solution than to identify the problem. Implementing is a great opportunity for learning the details of the problem, sure. But Implementing also eats vast amounts of time to "Horizontally center that Div on the Dashboard": any non-trivial, time-consuming but utterly uninteresting for our startup.

I really don't want to spend two weeks implementing another authz/authn integration and login flow for a consulting customer. When in those two weeks I can interview at least three other customers. Esp. because authn/authz is but a detail to our startup, and has nothing to do with our domain.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#149

Post by berkes »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #63
brtkdotse wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share a few examples?

Pets.com, Webvan, or Flooz.

> Pets.com

Funny that you mention this. Because I remember it as the exact opposite of organic growth. So much, that I consider pets.com the first public example of how millions of marketing budget are far more important¹ than engineering.

> A high-profile marketing campaign gave it a widely recognized public presence, including an appearance in the 1999 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and an advertisement in the 2000 Super Bowl. Its popular sock puppet advertising mascot was interviewed by People magazine and appeared on Good Morning America. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com

¹ Edit: for growth. I don't like this and I'm still not convinced marketing is worth more than engineering; I hope to believe the opposite turns true in the end. But alas, I'm afraid I'm wrong, as can be seen in any new tech-field. Crypto being the latest: don't build actual cryptography, just set up a multi-million marketing scheme and run off with the money, if you want to make money there in 2022.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#150

Post by fxtentacle »

"Commoditize your complement"

I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?"

But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates the AWS and Heroku APIs if possible, to make using their servers as easy as possible for me. And now I can offer managed hosting to all of my consulting clients. For them, it's slightly cheaper prices and (in contrast with AWS and Heroku) they can just call me when things don't work. And for me, it's reliable high-margin revenue.

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