PMF matters more than anything, and scaling up or raising lots of money before you truly have it is one of the worst things you can do. I’m now hyper aware of this but it’s so easy to delude yourself in the early days
Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
181–190 of 256 posts
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good sales people are critical to success. Most sales people aren't good, pick them with care.
Hire sales people 2 at a time. If you hire just 1, they will have an endless list of reasons they aren’t making sales (product doesn’t demo well, not enough marketing, bad leads, etc). sales will always say this, but with more than one, you can tell how real of an impediment to closing deals those actually are
This applies to nearly any team, you ideally always want to have 2+ people at similar levels competing for the promotion.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#1831. Verify that co-founders are emotionally committed to stay. For my first startup, I lost half the founding team when things started getting stressful. Needless to say, that made things even more stressful. 2. Don't trust big companies to take you seriously. I've been burned by "lets use market leader XY" and then later "why won't market leader XY return our calls" and then "we're offline due to market leader XY not…
> And some people change their character 180 degrees when they are drunk. Not sure how to defend against that, though.
maybe not letting people coming to work drunk? Or forbidding drinking while at work?
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scaling sales is a very different thing from getting sales, and I'd argue you won't know how to scale until you find a channel that works but is not cost effective. Otherwise you're essentially shooting blind, but at scale, which doesn't hit much but uses a lot of ammo.
I'm thinking more from the low-touch, low-margin perspective. If you are trying to make money with ads, calling 70 people to get 70 ad views is a terrible ROI no matter how persuasive you are. If you're selling a subscription SaaS product and expecting a lifetime value in the thousands per customer, then cold calling is a pretty decent way to bootstrap.
> calling 70 people to get 70 ad views is a terrible ROI
But calling 70 people to get 70 new advertisers is OK, or if it's early days 70 people who can get you some traffic.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#18523 years exp... My #1: Get really good at user testing so that you minimize risk every step of the way. I can't say this enough as it has totally changed how I approach startups, new features, and core assumptions (and weirdly my personal life). My #2: If you have co-founders, make weekly rituals to ensure you stay in sync over everything else. When you get out of sync, bad things happen. This can also be applied to…
How do you suggest to get good at user testing?
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#186Here's 30 years of experience for you: 1. Few business problems can't be solved by more sales. 2. Cut expenses when the storm is approaching, not when you're soaking wet. 3. You can't eat assets or inventory. Don't get emotional about what you own, only about your cash balances. 4. Banks are your friend only when you don't need them. Corollary: One bank for borrowing, one for cash balance accounts. 5. 70 completed ca…
11. Get a prenup. No, really, do get one. While true, unfortunately in many (blue-leaning) states, they're starting to become at the judge's discretion. Absolutely sickening to be honest.
was just going to mention that prenups really no longer carry the weight that people think it does. For 2 years, whether you are married or not, exposes you to the same liability a married individual would face in the event of a break up here in BC which is crazy.
> Couples who have been living together for two years share the same legal rights as married couples in BC, including a 50/50 split of debts and assets—excluding pre-relationship property, inheritances and gifts.
With a rate of 40% for divorce, a pre-nup may no longer be just for marrying couples, it may be needed for any relationship where cohabiting occurs. Also, there is absolutely no chance the judge will side with the men in places known.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#187These are more enterprisy: If you sell through a channel, that channel is your customer, not the end user. They have needs and actually those needs (not desires, needs) are more important than the end users' -- if your channel doesn't sell the product it doesn't matter how much you've worked to add that end-user feature. Have the entire exec team go on a sales call once a quarter (not all together on the same call!).…
> That mild-mannered A/R clerk is the real difference between paycheck and no paycheck. What's A/R?
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Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#188- The cheaper you price your product, the cheaper customers you attract. I get a lot more support tickets for customers that paid $45 than those that paid $1500. Discounts often lead to the same issues. - Your competition is not better. Even if your competitor has 1000 employees, that doesn't make them better, they more likely work a lot slower and less efficient than a smaller company. Also, a big company is more li…
Your first and third points are areas I've found open source companies pleasant to work at. The cheap customers go to the open source code; the ones looking to actually pay buy support contracts. Customers that you can't please also switch to open source; meanwhile ones who find a good fit but want some guidance, end up paying a support contract.
Doesn't work for lots of businesses, but where it does it's quite nice.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That mild-mannered A/R clerk is the real difference between paycheck and no paycheck. What's A/R?
Accounts receivable. The people who handle payments, and who hound delinquent accounts to pay up.
We used to have all hands meetings in which everybody talked (not the CEO yakking) explaining what they were doing and what they planned to do.
Our A/R clerk explained what she did. She managed to get almost everybody to pay on time (cough not the assholes at Sun though). Her avg was something like 35 days (we wrote everything net 30 or less). The next quarter she reported that she'd gotten the average down to something like 23 days, and got a standing ovation! For a ~60 person bootstrapped company that meant a lot, and this exercise meant everybody appreciated her work.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#1901. Verify that co-founders are emotionally committed to stay. For my first startup, I lost half the founding team when things started getting stressful. Needless to say, that made things even more stressful. 2. Don't trust big companies to take you seriously. I've been burned by "lets use market leader XY" and then later "why won't market leader XY return our calls" and then "we're offline due to market leader XY not…
> 5. When you need money, banks will ignore you. When you have too much of it, you get flooded with additional offers for cheap credit. Plan accordingly, so you need to borrow long before you start the project and borrow enough to get you over the cash flow shortage. If you wait until you actually need the money, terms will be horrible.
I've noticed this mechanism, but how do you go about it strategically? Which exercises or workflows can you use to determine how much to borrow and when?