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Before You Grow

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Before You Grow

#121

Post by rsp1984 »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #118
arikrak wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any data on the success rate of companies that aim small? A lot of the allure of the startup is a chance to strike it big. If one isn't doing that anyways, might make more sense to join a big company since they offer a considerably higher expected return on your work. (Also if one can get funding, it lets one get paid an actual salary more quickly.)

I have no clue, it seems uncommon in software, but personally I'd choose working 3 hours a day over 200k/yr any day. IMO having a small team constraint is powerful too, you really have to optimize things otherwise you're screwed. Basically the opposite of a startup, where you'd toss money at the problem while you try and attract more people, making the product increasingly brittle.

working 3 hours a day over 200k/yr any day

A business that you own and which makes you any money on 3 hours a day may be even more rare than a unicorn. In most cases you'll be spending those 3 hours per day on administrative stuff alone.

Re: Before You Grow

#122

Post by robryan »

euph0ria wrote: post #82
lincolnq wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're standing in front of them with a notebook in hand, it's hard for them to avoid saying something . So that's step one. Step two would be to interpret nothingness as (negative) feedback that your product wasn't interesting enough for them to bother commenting on. Which probably means you're not solving a deep enough problem. This problem is really hard for whatsapp-like products, since people already have the…

On a product I worked on we emailed every user that didn't engage with the product after sign up and requested feedback on how we could improve the service, what is lacking etc.. tried many different phrases but it was about 1 in 500 that replied and gave serious feedback. Making current users even more happy is one way to go, they are more likely to provide feedback but it skews the perspective since we don't get an…

I suspect a lot of people that never replied would be people the signed up but never got around to trying the product properly or people that immediately saw that it wasn't ever going to solve their problem.

Would be interesting to correlate the emails with how engaged the user was after signup.

Personally as a user the only time I would try to engage the creators is if the product was very close to my use case but certain aspects didn't work the way I would need. This being for B2B where a potential customer is going to be more engaged, B2C the reply rate to those emails is likely always going to be tiny.

Re: Before You Grow

#123

Post by [deleted] »

logicallee wrote: post #41
morgante wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're obviously parodying the "one neat trick" trope.

I don't think so because they're not talking about a marketing gimmick, but rather talking about an actual business strategy - I just found it distracting. They could have at least put it in quotation marks if they really meant to include it in their writing for some reason. I've withdrawn the criticism.

[deleted]

Re: Before You Grow

#124

Post by lacampbell »

brianwawok wrote: post #17
user5994461 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of room for other Facebooks. In fact, there are major competitors to the likes of Facebook & Linkedin & Google. They just happen to be national companies (russia, china, some european). If anything. The thought that they have no competitors/alternatives is just a display that SV totally ignore the local non-english competitors (no matter how engrained they are in their market) and generally disregards…

This is only for ad base products. Tesla has far under a billion users and SV loves it. Many b2b startups have a few hundred to thousand users. If you want to sell Ads and be free, you need billions. If you have an actual product you charge money for, you need far less.

What if you want to sell users data? Isn't that what most free web and mobile apps are really selling?

I have a lot of great software ideas (great in that I wish they existed and want to use them), but no clue which could actually be monetized effectively. Billions of users seems like a tall order, and not a sensible thing to pursue.

Re: Before You Grow

#125

Post by calchris42 »

coffeemug wrote: post #88
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

> don't get funding from clueless VCs Usually if people put money down and there is an entire industry around it, the collective mindset of that industry is close to optimal. They might be wrong on a couple of important issues. They also might be very wrong, but they're still close to optimal by definition because nobody's doing it better. TL;DR: calling entire world-class industries clueless implies naiveté.

In finance this is called efficient market hypothesis. And as I understand, generally considered false.

From Efficient Market Hypothesis: Is The Stock Market Efficient? | Investopedia http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/04/022004.asp#ix... "Conclusion It's safe to say the market is not going to achieve perfect efficiency anytime soon. For greater efficiency to occur, the following criteria must be met: (1) universal access to high-speed and advanced systems of pricing analysis, (2) a universally accepted analysis system of pricing stocks, (3) an absolute absence of human emotion in investment decision-making, (4) the willingness of all investors to accept that their returns or losses will be exactly identical to all other market participants. It is hard to imagine even one of these criteria of market efficiency ever being met."

Re: Before You Grow

#126

Post by aacook »

web007 wrote: post #33

Who finds actual value from Net Promoter Score? It's a vanity metric, just like asking "would you pay $10 for this?" instead of getting someone to actually pay $10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter#Criticism_of_NPS

I think a good NPS survey asks why instead of just collecting a number and a great founder follows up to learn even more about why.

Re: Before You Grow

#127

Post by EGreg »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

Another alternative: use this compensation model and you may not need VC

https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2016/11/properly-valuing-con...

Re: Before You Grow

#128

Post by rajacombinator »

EGreg wrote: post #127
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #83

Another alternative: don't build something huge, don't get funding from VCs, build a comfortable business for yourself instead of a gimmicky trend that will be irrelevant in a few years. I feel like this is really underrated these days, if you spend the time truly earning it, not only is it more rewarding but the company may last more than 3-4 years. Build a small focused product to generate some revenue, then hopefu…

Another alternative: use this compensation model and you may not need VC https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2016/11/properly-valuing-con...

Have you actually implemented this idea in contracts? It sounds cool in theory but a PITA/unrealistic in practice.

Re: Before You Grow

#129

Post by brianwawok »

lacampbell wrote: post #124
brianwawok wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only for ad base products. Tesla has far under a billion users and SV loves it. Many b2b startups have a few hundred to thousand users. If you want to sell Ads and be free, you need billions. If you have an actual product you charge money for, you need far less.

What if you want to sell users data? Isn't that what most free web and mobile apps are really selling? I have a lot of great software ideas (great in that I wish they existed and want to use them), but no clue which could actually be monetized effectively. Billions of users seems like a tall order, and not a sensible thing to pursue.

Easiest is b2b. Are any of your ideas something a business would pay to use? Start with a product that cost say $50-$500 per month.

Much easier to sell 100 copies of something than get 100 million people to use your software.

Re: Before You Grow

#130

Post by gl338 »

rsp1984 wrote: post #121
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no clue, it seems uncommon in software, but personally I'd choose working 3 hours a day over 200k/yr any day. IMO having a small team constraint is powerful too, you really have to optimize things otherwise you're screwed. Basically the opposite of a startup, where you'd toss money at the problem while you try and attract more people, making the product increasingly brittle.

working 3 hours a day over 200k/yr any day A business that you own and which makes you any money on 3 hours a day may be even more rare than a unicorn. In most cases you'll be spending those 3 hours per day on administrative stuff alone.

That's definitely not true. There are only a few dozen unicorns, and hundreds of self-sustained businesses that "print" small amounts of money. If you join any large city's small business CEO groups (in NYC, SF, Toronto, London, etc.) you'll find a lot of one-person, bootstrapped companies that just run themselves.

It's not easy, but there are dozens or hundreds in many large cities.

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