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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?

#451

Post by laurent92 »

urthor wrote: post #127
laurent92 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the code of the app is made by remote people in remote countries, how do you sell software to the US government? What do you answer to “What is the nationality of your developers?”?

I imagine the answer to that is, I've simply never heard of the US government buying from a software vendor with less than 500 employees. Surely it never happens?

I’m French and ahem, I’m selling to both US, Australian and Russian government entities. As in, .gov email addresses.

When I fill in forms, it’s often quite simple since we’re all French developers under regular employment contracts.

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

#452

Post by FridayoLeary »

coryrc wrote: post #423
joshfee wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you're earning some money, but I turned ad-blocker off to see how you incorporated ads on your site - honestly taking up a quarter of the screen with autoplay videos and blinking ads is some toxic 90s geocities stuff... ad-blocker going right back on.

Maybe that's because they haven't built a profile of you to give you better targeted ads?

Please! Won't somebody please give me better targeted ads!

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

#453

Post by urthor »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #392
urthor wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what happened with Twitter. It was at a company named Odeo. But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.

This is hard to achieve because generally good engineers are either working high pay tech jobs OR they work in a startup as founders / early employees with make-me-rich shares. Sure, there are exceptions who don't know their worth. In general it's hard to find mediocre technical cofounders and very very hard to find good technical cofounders.

I think the assumption here is that this is a Hackernews thread about someone asking how to make their startup succeed.

Therefore, I wrote the post with some sort of assumption that OP is the technical founder. Hence OP is supplying the stuff like the vision, the outline of the tech stack, OP probably made a lot of stuff themselves.

Hence, it was more a guide on how to find extremely dedicated and good engineers to work for you, the founder. And how to deploy them to take load off you as the technical founder.

As a technical founder you rapidly become far more important as a store of technical knowledge. You're off to customers doing technical sales, networking with people you know for hints at how to solve your technical problems, etc etc.

Hence,what OP needs is top quality execution while they go off and do all that stuff. And ye ole Ghanian FOSS committer is the tree I'd shake.

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

#454

Post by urthor »

fsloth wrote: post #271
urthor wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you can be elastic with the mids depending on how much AWS there is to configure or some-such. 2 juniors in a startup is a bit, probably not the right thing. You'll run out of junior work surely? The "two good ones plus exactly one junior to make them feel important, and to keep the show on the road for 2 weeks in case they both quit simultaneously" formula is pretty solid.

To be specific, my experience was from non-web software. I would consider "junior" here not as a person in non-critical role who cannot function as an individual contributor, but as a solid candidate that lacks industry experience but can be at the moment hiring be expected to quite fast grow into the role of a solid IC. I.e to use a bit too stereotypical characterization - not a "stablehand" but a "journeyman appren…

Oh well that's fine.

My brain just operates very strictly as:

Junior = apprentice, first job or similar.

Mid = journeyman, "worked another job before". Independent, trusted to be delegated to for specific things, but doesn't quite have a personal brand.

Senior = Master. Proven track record, proven reputation of delivering, capable of leadership inside a technical project. Has and maintains a reputation as someone you can trust.

Principal = Mentor to seniors.

Ofc there are shades of grey between junior and mid, because junior-ship takes like 2-3 years to grow out of.

The list of work able to be delegated to someone at the start is not all that large in many cases.

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

#455

Post by urthor »

lsferreira42 wrote: post #120
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…

I can confirm the use of south american engineers, as a Brazilian myself me and my IT friends receive a LOT of contact from north american companies

Brazil is the beachhead in many ways. Huge market, easier to sort out all the employment stuff because it's a path that's much more well trodden.

If you still want to get an edge these days, you have to be prepared to go to the global platforms that give you access to devs in the really obscure places.

Nobody is hiring from Trinidad and Tobago because of the legal barrier to entry. But you can if you are clever with Upwork and similar.

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

#456

Post by urthor »

smus wrote: post #187
urthor wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine the answer to that is, I've simply never heard of the US government buying from a software vendor with less than 500 employees. Surely it never happens?

You aren't looking too hard then, 2/3 start ups I worked for less than 50 ppl sell to the gov

Ah. The more you know I guess.

I assumed they went in for platinum enterprise grade support contracts and the like, only.

Or else they got contractors to make them software that they owned.

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

#457

Post by detritus »

holgersindbaek wrote: post #443
detritus wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blimey, well done you! . Tell me, have you set the difficulty on the first played game to some level that might artificially encourage further play? I only ask as I've not played solitaire in literally 20 years or so and everything on the game I just played on your site seemed to fall in to place remarkably easily... . ed - spelling, grammar

Thanks . Yes I have. Most solitaire games these days have an option of playing a fully random game or a winnable deal. The automatic deal when a user comes to the site is a winnable deal.

Bravo!

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

#458

Post by urthor »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #252
urthor wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh well yes I agree. There are problems that genuinely take more people. That said, Palo Alto Semiconductor was hardware, which has a far higher barrier to entry than software engineering does/can.

It was a fabless company so you basically write code and send it off to get built. There's more details to it, but a single person could write a very small CPU and put it on an FPGA (or ASIC if they have the tools) in a few months. That's just one example though. There's lots of software examples. Compilers, browsers, OS kernels, database servers, hypervisors. A single person can write any of those, but to make a com…

One of the most interesting things about hardware vs software is the barrier to entry.

Hardware intellectual property has an insane number of working parts and "factors" (electrical resistance, photo-lithography, metal layers, silicon is amazing) all have to be solved.

Software by contrast, follows the open source model. All those things you mentioned, are being done by people and academics in their space time on the internet. You're essentially assembling pre-configured tools

Hardware is more difficult, because the laws of physics are FAR harder to account for, than tying together APIs. Because APIs are after all, designed for humans to be able to understand and configure.

Software is also complex, but the good people in FOSS have already assembled their shit for free and are giving it to you.

Additionally, basically no hardware IP and blueprints are open sourced. Because of the free flow of goods (and not services), someone in an IP disrespectful country will clone you and sell your goods internationally. You have basically no resource to pursue that individual.

Launching an IP disrespecting internet business at scale however? That is almost impossible. As soon as your IP disrespecting competitor gets going, you can hamstring them.

Hence for hardware, create a develop, release, iterate cycle, and keeping the money flowing, you essentially need to employ a LOT of people to get your startup going.

Hence VS fund about 10 SaaS startups per hardware one.

Mostly I was talking about SaaS with the "make your first two engineering hires like this" guide. Clearly for photo-lithography with silicon on leading edge nodes, you just cannot do that.

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

#459

Post by 11101010001100 »

willis936 wrote: post #419
quacked wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask why you don't just move somewhere else?

For similar reasons as the parent: my SO's research group moved. Their PI then got diagnosed with a terminal illness and the department leaders are taking the lab space and grant money. To quote a friend of mine, we got "hyperfucked". It's a tough crossroads. I am applying for work I really care about far away while my SO may still have a path to finish. No good answers, but we'll stick together through thick and thi…

I'm sure this occurred to you, but is remote work an option?

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

#460

Post by kcplate »

exclusiv wrote: post #424
kcplate wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once upon a time when it was Fog Creek, no, no, no… I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.

Product sells itself outside of enterprise though. I'm just saying that it is possible to have a product that sells itself, and reaches great success without having to have salespeople. Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop mar…

I think you have definitely proved me wrong with Trello. Upon reflection I have been on that platform since perhaps day one of its release (I was reading Joel on Software blog posts usually same day back then). I know for sure since the first month (Sept 2011 Trello tells me that) and I am pretty sure I have had a paid plan for nearly a decade, probably dating back to late 2012 when I authorized Zapier to connect to my boards for automation.
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