Yes, if you have customers who need your software and are willing to pay for it.
Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
171–180 of 239 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I agree with sone of your points, there are many evidences that this happened in the past. One example is Microsoft creating teams to take on Slack.
Teams is still nowhere near Slack's features and usefulness. I wouldn't say it's a direct competitor, it's like store brand vs a mid-luxury item
Nobody really likes Teams, but it does seem to have more features than Slack in terms of integration with the rest of Microsoft's office software ecosystem. It's nice to be able to open up and edit Word/PowerPoint/Excel documents directly, view the Outlook calendar directly, etc. It is also integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive for file storage. Teams had video calls before Slack as well IIRC.
Teams, Slack and Discord all seem to be built as clunky web apps; but my experience is that Discord seems to work slightly better than Slack, which in turn works slightly better than Teams.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#173It’s still hard to create something successful. Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers and Facebook still has barely been able to create a new successful product on their own without acquiring it from a smaller company.
Facebook cannot make products, its that simple.
Or Google
Large companies struggle to launch anything due to their staff size.
They're as inefficient as a government
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Where did you find this tidbit Google it. There are pages and pages of sources. Here’s one: https://gregslist.com/ > Every company “cares about their customers” to the point where that’s how they make their money. And if they don’t make money, they fail and lose the opportunity to care about customers. It’s a boring tautology to say that companies care about money. The point is that @latexr is wrong about assuming…
It’s not at all a tautology. A company that cares about its customers can balance its need to make money and leave money on the table because it’s not in the best interest of the customers.
Agreed, that’s what I’ve been saying from the top. Again, you’re disagreeing with @latexr, and agreeing with me.
The tautology is that all companies care about money. Companies care about money by definition. Many companies and many people in companies also care about customers and product quality. However, there is an absolute limit to how much money a company can leave on the table, regardless of what the customer wants, and serving the customer’s best interest becomes a ‘bad decision’ and threatens the ability for the company to do anything for the customer the moment it’s unprofitable, as soon as costs exceed income. This effectively means that at some level, companies must prioritize profit over service, otherwise service will cease to exist. The balance must lean in favor of the company on average over time.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#175Yes, but not SaaS or services in general but products. And focus on B2B, not B2C because money in B2C is there only for huge companies whereas if you hit the right niche, you can make bank with B2B.
Also, disregard any "success stories", as they are 99.999% funded by a massive piles of money and immeasurable amount of connections in high and right places, that you never hear of.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#176It depends how surgical your product market fit is and how fast you capture the identified market.
Everything else is just details and it doesn’t matter if the idea is rehashed a million times.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re arguing something different than @latexr did, and picking a VC as your example makes sense here but fails to counter the fact that most startups aren’t VC funded. Still, you’re also like GP confusing VC motivation with founder motivation. It’s possible for founders to care deeply about the problems they’re solving, and for the company’s primary goal to be an exit, at the same time. Both can be true, contrary t…
There are an infinitesimal number of tech based startups that are “lifestyle companies” that were bootstrapped and use revenues to grow without taking investor money. There are even fewer that are “successful” - ie where everyone involved wouldn’t be better off just working as a LOB CRUD developer. The goal of the founders don’t matter even if they do “care” about the customer. The customer is at the whim of the stra…
These smaller companies are doing well, they just aren’t incentivised to tell you about it. The VC backed companies are, either targeting you as a consumer or an investor and n an eventual IPO.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#178There was never a statistical “advantage”, you just never heard about the 9/10 outright failures or even the parts of the 1/10 where people are toiling in obscurity and would have been better off financially “grinding leetcode and working for a FAANG” ((c) r/cscareerquestions) or even being an enterprise dev in a tier 2 city.
> being an enterprise dev in a tier 2 city.
Tangential to the question, but this is me and one of my top three regrets in life is not having been a founding engineer. For people without generational wealth or a safety net it takes a particular combination of executive function and youthful ignorance of the opportunity cost (a steady paycheck and obvious career trajectory) to be a founder. As soon as I grew enough of the former the latter evaporated as I realized how close I'd come to financial ruin and how I didn't want to ever again.
OP, if you're even thinking about it, you should just do it before wisdom sets in and you know better. Or maybe I'm romanticizing the startup experience too much - anybody with actual expertise care to comment?
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#179Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as Facebook was a silly and poorly coded site at the time, Zuck seemed to do better in like 2007 when it was pretty small. I wonder if increasing the capabilities of somebody who still has ideas left and isn’t burdened by a bloated organization is the real benefit here.
Successful people also tend to overestimate what portion of that success was down to timing/luck. Zuck had a lot of early-mover advantage in the social media space (especially in the university demographic Facebook started out in). A lot of his later ventures have been trying to break into markets that are already crowded by more established players, and that's just a lot harder to execute on.
Did you mean "underestimate"?