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Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#31

Post by tomsaffell »

tom_rath wrote: post #4

The only tasks which I find stop me from working on my product are various administration and customer support chores. The one-time items like incorporation are trivial in terms of time-cost. Being forced to step away from development has actually saved me more trouble that it's taken away. Being forced to take a breather to tally up expenses or polish up some documentation takes my mind away from the development tas…

> customer support chores

This may sound trite: That's not a bad problem to have..

Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#33

Post by mellow »

pclark wrote: post #27

can't get my head around ruby on rails..

If you are struggling with RoR, I would recommend doing a 1-5 day online tutorial on Ruby (the length depends on how quickly you can pick it up). I skipped pure Ruby and went straight to RoR. In retrospect this was a mistake as a grounding in Ruby would have saved me a lot of pain.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#34

Post by unalone »

curiousgeorge wrote: post #21
unalone wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mocking up every page in HTML right now. My cofounder and I are scouring over all the details, trying to make absolutely gorgeous pages. (I know every person who makes an HTML thinks this, but I truly think that the few pages we've finalized are superb.) Next semester, I'm in an advanced PHP course - enough to really firm up the things I'm working on. I'll probably have a prototype made winter break, so I'll be a…

Unless you're certain about the UI elements, doing a hard design may be a bad move. I personally get better mileage from building the core architecture/functionality first, and working on the rest, ideally with public feedback on both after a certain stage. I've made significant changes in usability in the past as a result of this. If you end up hard-coding stuff before it gets scrutinized in the forge of actual use,…

I'm very good with frameworks - I've got several years' experience with Drupal - but this project I want coded by hand, because I want to be absolutely certain of what's going on on every page of the project.

The UI elements are pretty much set. This is an idea that's been a long time coming, and we've got ourselves almost entirely planned out.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#35

Post by pg »

aristus wrote: post #18
pg wrote: post #16

The two biggest time-sucks for YC alumni seem to be talking to investors and dealing with visa problems.

An interesting thing about YC is that it saves time spent securing funding at the early seed stage: a week on the application and a week preparing for the interview, with a definite yes or no by a certain date. Can you see later stage investors (100k, 500k, etc) doing the same thing?

They certainly could be a lot more efficient about it than they are now.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#36

Post by ivankirigin »

pg wrote: post #35
aristus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An interesting thing about YC is that it saves time spent securing funding at the early seed stage: a week on the application and a week preparing for the interview, with a definite yes or no by a certain date. Can you see later stage investors (100k, 500k, etc) doing the same thing?

They certainly could be a lot more efficient about it than they are now.

Do you think you would be closer to typical investors if you had "rolling admissions" like they do?

Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#37

Post by pg »

ivankirigin wrote: post #36
pg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly could be a lot more efficient about it than they are now.

Do you think you would be closer to typical investors if you had "rolling admissions" like they do?

Yes, in a sense. We just couldn't deal with as many startups if we had rolling admissions. So that would mean funding fewer, which would let us take longer deciding.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#38

Post by pclark »

mellow wrote: post #33
pclark wrote: post #27

can't get my head around ruby on rails..

If you are struggling with RoR, I would recommend doing a 1-5 day online tutorial on Ruby (the length depends on how quickly you can pick it up). I skipped pure Ruby and went straight to RoR. In retrospect this was a mistake as a grounding in Ruby would have saved me a lot of pain.

can you recommend any courses?
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