Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

Post by lprubin » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 7:47 PM UTC

Tenhundfeld wrote: post #161

lprubin wrote: post #39

If you choose to run a software development agency: - Shoot for between 3 and 10 clients. Any less and you'll be very stressed about losing a client. Any more and you'll be overwhelmed with juggling too many balls. - Fire bad clients. They aren't worth the stress, frustration, and opportunity cost. - Work on your process. Doing an hour of client works earns you one hour of revenue. Improving your agency processes can…

>Be a solver of a specific business problem for a specific type of business. Totally agree in principle, but I've found it's very hard to do this in practice. Unless you have a priori knowledge of an industry, before your first consulting gig in it, it's hard to just step into a business domain and know what specific problems an industry has that can be improved with better software and which of those specific proble…

Post by aaronbrethorst » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 7:54 PM UTC

sho wrote: post #206

wyc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrote about this here in an article titled Just Build it in Django or Rails: https://www.wyc.io/posts/just-build-it-in-django-or-rails/ It's just really hard to beat the reliability, community, ecosystem, and features that are table stakes when using a competent web framework. When you're poking at a new market, you really don't have time to give a shit about writing CSRF middleware. That's one less customer intervie…

I have a couple of criticisms of your article. Firstly, you give a list of successful companies who made the "safe choice" you're advocating, but you fail to mention that at the time the companies adopted those projects they were actually the cool, risky new upstarts. Your first example, Twitter, started in 2006 - a mere 18 or so months after Rails 0.8. If Twitter had followed your advice of using a 13 year old web f…

Post by pbiggar » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

Post by rayalez » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 8:05 PM UTC

exceptione wrote: post #171

codebeaker wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak highly enough about http://tractionbook.com/ which I recently came into - it has pragmatic advice on marketing approaches and systems justifying with real data how and why to do what. It's co-written by the DuckDuckGo founder, and as an engineer who is thoroughly tired of marketing "hackers" who justify expensive campaigns with hand-wavy nonsense, this book changed the way I view marketing in general.

A lot of the reviews are positive about the first 2 chapters, but complain that the remaining chapters lack depth. I would like to own a good marketing book for techies written for this age, but I like to see concrete advise. How do you feel?

Post by personjerry » Wed, Apr 19, 2017, 8:07 PM UTC

taneq wrote: post #162

mattjaynes wrote: post #112

Since 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…

> Do not be seduced by the technology! I want to emphasize this, and expand on it: Your cool tech startup is not about the tech . You exist to solve a problem. Sure, you might use your Cool Tech(TM) to solve the problem. But the salient point is that the problem gets solved. Your customers don't give a rats ass if you solve it with automatic hyperparameter selection for LSTMs, or if you solve it with an Excel macro.…