Why not seduced by technology ? As a engineer we create new technology and try our luck if it makes business. If we compromise on that basic fact, we end up as that one of avg business guy
Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
191–200 of 325 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#192Surprised nobody mentions it. The #1 rule i needed to learn:
> Willingness to pay
Most people see it "charge as much people pay"
But the real lesson here is a different one:
You create a value. The value - costs is profit. Someone along the chain makes this profit. Might be the people you work with, your boss, might be the person sitting at your client looking smart for buying in cheap or your client's boss. Someone does. People are ok to pay as much as long as it's less than the value provided (and comparable to the rest of the market - sidenote: specialization)
Someone makes the money. Stop charging in hours. Charge based on the value. (obviously it should be more than the hour costs otherwise dont take the project)
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#193Some industries have incredibly long sales cycles and you will use up all of your savings and then some getting your first customers.
If I were to do it again I would focus on the creating a solution to the smallest subset of the problem I am solving and trying to sell that. Program that one feature and do not start on the next feature until you have a paying customer for the first one.
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#194All the false positives from perceived success.
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#195The best advice I've had (and seen applied in practice) is this: You need to get your company to 10k USD monthly product revenue within three months. If you can't, either the product, target market or team needs to be revised drastically. It's hard advice to follow, but it will save you a lot of time because you can't wait months and years doing unessential tweaks to the product and marketing, hoping that sales mirac…
This seems really aggressive, especially for bootstrapped companies. My startup took 31 months to hit $10k MRR, and now we're at ~$130k MRR. I'm really glad I didn't quit after three months. I barely even had the product built after three months. I think that for most people, if they abandon anything that's not already a huge success three months in, they'll just end up bouncing from one thing to the next and never s…
I think $10k MRR is a good target. It's basically a limit of ramen profitability for a small team of 2-4 (depending on the family etc. responsibilities of the team), plus a little bit of extra to run the business. When you hit that, it's possible to commit full-time without extra financing and you don't run out of your savings.
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's certainly not a hard goal -- I wouldn't pretend that even SaaS businesses are all that similar. (The degree of reassessment after 3 months is up to you, after all.) It's really a way to frame the product launch by forcing you to ask hard questions about what you're doing. If you don't even see a way for the product to reach $10k/month with a short-term plan, maybe it's a side project rather than a startup? Or ma…
Have you already accomplished such a goal?
Yes, but no thanks to myself. I wasted about a decade being a crap entrepreneur that didn't have such goals. It was easy to rationalize spending time on the work I liked doing under the pretense that I was improving the product's fundamentals. In retrospect, I would have been much better off facing my fears and doing clearly delineated 3-month efforts with revenue targets rather than persisting with products that don't quite work.
I'm still a crap entrepreneur, but I've become slightly better at teaming up with people who can make it happen.
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#197Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…
Couldn't have been said better. I'd like to add: if you find the time, try to have a side-project on your own time where you apply all these cool new things you were looking to apply in your company. This will help you keep your sanity and it will let you experiment with that technology so that you can make a better informed decision on wether to implement it in your company or not.
This, absolutely. And if you're not willing to spend your free time learning, then you're probably not really tuned in to be a business man either.
Yeah you can make a good business. Yeah you can make a living. But you're probably not going to make a unicorn.
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly agree. Let's do the math: With a brand new un-proven product with an unproven pricing model, how many customers does it take to get to $10K MRR? In three months, how many qualified leads can you find and reach, and what percentage of those will close? (with an unproven product in an unproven market, 2% is probably a realistic estimate). Of course there are scenarios where $10K MRR is possible quickly, but…
It's certainly not a hard goal -- I wouldn't pretend that even SaaS businesses are all that similar. (The degree of reassessment after 3 months is up to you, after all.) It's really a way to frame the product launch by forcing you to ask hard questions about what you're doing. If you don't even see a way for the product to reach $10k/month with a short-term plan, maybe it's a side project rather than a startup? Or ma…
(I can't edit the parent comment anymore, so a clarification: when I wrote "not a hard goal", I meant that the $10k number is just a rough ballpark -- not that the goal would be somehow easy to accomplish.)
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Technology is actually an advantage. I would look at it this way, if you used N tech, and it actually results in a faster, better app, meaning happier users and therefore more business. TLDR; use technology that gives you an advantage.
There are always tradeoffs, though. Using technology X instead of technology Y isn't free; maybe there is an additional up front engineering cost, or maybe it's harder to hire devs who know X, or something else. And it's impossible to generalize, of course, but usually the tradeoffs for using superior tech aren't worth it in the short-/medium-term, which is all that matters as a startup.
I think "opportunity cost" is the phrase for which you're looking.
Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers
#200Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…
I disagree. Technology is actually an advantage. I would look at it this way, if you used N tech, and it actually results in a faster, better app, meaning happier users and therefore more business. TLDR; use technology that gives you an advantage.
I don't think you and he are in disagreement. Obviously you should do what will give your business an advantage. He is just saying that it is easy to think that certain new technologies will give you an advantage, but then realize later that what they cost you in bugs/complexity/maintainability etc. make it not worth it for the business. So it's usually better to go with tech that is tried and tested rather than always reaching for the latest new thing.