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Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

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Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#41

Post by wheels »

As everyone else has said, don't bank on funding.

I think starting to put feelers out for consulting work is probably the best strategy. Even though we've got a bit more runway, some customers and some VCs that have approached us, I've been trying to do the same for the what if case.

The upshot is if you can organize enough cash to keep yourself running through the downturn and do just enough consulting to stay afloat and start growing a revenue stream, if your company is still alive on the other side of this downturn it'll have cleared out a lot of the market and it'll put you in a pretty good position to try to raise a round if things are rosier in a year or so or if you can keep costs low to make a transition to living off of the revenue.

That's been the focus of the planning that I've been doing for us at the moment: "How do we make sure that we're alive in a year, and how much revenue will we need at that point to be self-sustaining."

Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#43

Post by dkd »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #27

Move to Thailand and chill for awhile. It will help you get your priorities back in line and that 5-7 months (if based on NYC living expenses) could last a few years.

why thailand? do u know that thailand is now having political instabilities?

Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#44

Post by jwilliams »

dkd wrote: post #43
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #27

Move to Thailand and chill for awhile. It will help you get your priorities back in line and that 5-7 months (if based on NYC living expenses) could last a few years.

why thailand? do u know that thailand is now having political instabilities?

Thailand is always unstable politically. Doesn't make it unsafe.

Right now the tourist industry there is under a lot of pressure. It would be quite easy to live there very frugally.

Thailand is quite cheap, very friendly and a good atmosphere. It also has surprisingly good access to wifi (not fast, but quite prevalent).

p.s. I was thinking Thailand is a good place to work - holiday is good too.

Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#45

Post by greatreorx »

recession wrote: post #4
ksvs wrote: post #3

One thing you could start doing now is lining up potential alternative jobs. You could even start working part-time somewhere else. One good thing about startups is that they can be flexible about things like that. And the founders who recruited you can hardly blame you.

How do you find (decent) part-time work in technology? That may be what I have to do, but I have no idea how to go about it.

Go to events and talk to as many people as you can there... http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/ and other smaller tech meetups http://nextny.org/

Nate Westheimer (http://innonate.com/) is the new organizer of the NY tech meetup. He has started an experiment doing office hours to have short (15 minute) meetings with people. http://innonate.com/2008/12/15/office-hours/ Sign up and go talk to him, I can almost guarantee he knows a handful of people who are looking for part time programming help.

Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#46

Post by benn »

Go for a long run every day, hang out with your good friends, read a book on zen buddhism and get your head straight. It only seems bad because you have a bad take on it. Once you've managed to stop panicking (which is an art in itself) - take a look at things rationally and the right course of action will make itself apparent. You're (probably) in the 10% of employeeable people, you should feel sorry for the highschool dropouts working at burgerfuel.

Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#47

Post by jyothi »

ars wrote: post #16

What will you do after 5-7 months? If your money did actually run out what would you do? Whatever that is - do it now, not in 5-7 months. For example: say you'd stop paying rent, and get evicted, where would you go? Whereever that is - go there now. What else would you stop paying for? Phone? Cable? Pretend you have no money, and act that way. As a side suggestion to where to live, see if you can live in the startups…

Great advice. A friend was in a similar situation. I started suggesting he go frugal on everything. When you are running out of gas 5-7 months will happen in a jiffy. Ensure you have more run way like get the 5-7 to 10-12 at least and then either do one of these:

a) Leave everything and bet on getting funds

b) Ditch funds and bet on execution to start breaking even on operations.

Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#48

Post by jyothi »

vaksel wrote: post #10

cut your living expenses...have a car? sell it for a beater. Have high rent? Move to Bronx or Brooklyn or Queens or Jersey City(if your work is close to penn station). Or if your parents live locally, move in with them(I did this). Switch to a ramen diet....stop going out, stop buying shit. Stretch every penny. You won't believe how little you can live on, if you cut out all the bullshit. Start working on your contac…

Good advice. Live on bare minimum. Soon you would realize life isn't all that bad with half the expenses. At the same time, if you do enjoy spending or in other words for many these days getting frugal makes you feel inferior, insecure, might give a sense of failure in that case I would advice you get these feelings out first by speaking it out to someone as to why this is necessary and why this is good.

List down your expenses today, sit down and cut out everything that is not necessary. Scale down everything that can. And it doesn't matter if you don't sit in the Starbucks cafe or if your friends find you odd when you don't buy a fancy meal when you go out.

For rent see if you can pack it in a home office, or on a sharing basis.

Get all of these done in a month, if it gets dragged the feeling as i mentioned before gets too bad and pulls your spirit down as you would keep thinking of every penny.

Once you are lean, just put a expense plan and a plan for the company for the expected run way. Go crazy on execution. Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#49

Post by fauigerzigerk »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #27

Move to Thailand and chill for awhile. It will help you get your priorities back in line and that 5-7 months (if based on NYC living expenses) could last a few years.

What about the visa? My experience is that cheap countries get incredibly expensive if you need broadband and a reasonably secure neighbourhood. Or are you talking about living in a hotel on a tourist visa? That only works for 3 to 6 months and I'm not sure it's possible continue working for a NY startup whilst in Thailand.

Re: Ask HN: 5-7 months of living expenses left; terrified. Advice?

#50

Post by oakmac »

terpua wrote: post #36
ellyagg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend sticking with ramen. There's zero chance that fruit is cheaper anywhere on a cost per calorie basis, ramen is easier to find everywhere, ramen is pretty tasty and you can take more calories of ramen before you want to throw up, you can take more calories of ramen before you have diarrhea, ramen stores compactly and easily, ramen doesn't go bad, and the health benefits of fruit and vegetables are greatly…

ramen + exercise > fruits/veggies + no exercise

That is neither good nor accurate advice.
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