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Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

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Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#241

Post by clairity »

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…

to expand on this, i'll trot out my little adage again: most startups are marketing problems, not technology problems.

marketing encompasses the 4 P's: product, price, promotion and place. product is literally the finding of the fit between your offering and the market's needs. price is the portion of the value you deliver to the customer that you capture. promotion is finding and providing potential customers with info about why your product is the shizzle. place is how you deliver the product to your customer (e.g., physical store, direct sales, saas, app store, etc.).

build things that support your marketing activities, rather than building tech that you hope you can market.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#242

Post by fauigerzigerk »

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…

What you're saying sounds reasonable but I think it is completely wrong.

I strongly believe that startups very rarely fail because they have chosen to build on a particular immature technology. Some fail or stall because they cannot bring themselves to stop redesigning and rebuilding on the next new technology or design philosophy every couple of months.

But these are completely different issues (related by psychology for sure but not by necessity)

My opinion is you should choose what you find coolest and most exciting now and then stick with it!

Of course the technology you choose should have some traction but don't choose technologies of the past! Whatever you choose will be the past soon enough and that is when you must find the strength to stick with it and get on with creating value for users.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#244

Post by ericd »

cocoa19 wrote: post #222
brightball wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's one thing if the Cool Tech actually gives you a competitive advantage by solving the problem better, easier, with lower costs, faster, more personalized, etc. Outside of that...it's all about the business. That's why so many successful businesses are built with Ruby and not "benchmark winner of the week" because Ruby tends to deliver on almost all of the business cases around solving problems and growth.…

I remember when ruby was the hot tech a few years ago, frowned upon by conservative developers. I learnt ruby back then. I'm glad ruby is now recognized as a more mature ecosystem that does things well, even though it is one of the boring technologies now.

Is Ruby/Rails faster now? I built a few simple sites on Rails 2.3 via Passenger, and my God, it was such a performance hog compared to every other web stack I'd ever used. Probably mostly a function of how heavyweight RoR was, but I never got deep enough to figure out what was so slow about it. It may also have been user error, but it seemed like others were bragging about getting it to levels of performance that would be frankly embarrassing on most stacks.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#245

Post by [deleted] »

cocoa19 wrote: post #222
brightball wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's one thing if the Cool Tech actually gives you a competitive advantage by solving the problem better, easier, with lower costs, faster, more personalized, etc. Outside of that...it's all about the business. That's why so many successful businesses are built with Ruby and not "benchmark winner of the week" because Ruby tends to deliver on almost all of the business cases around solving problems and growth.…

I remember when ruby was the hot tech a few years ago, frowned upon by conservative developers. I learnt ruby back then. I'm glad ruby is now recognized as a more mature ecosystem that does things well, even though it is one of the boring technologies now.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#246

Post by brightball »

toyg wrote: post #219
brightball wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It's one thing if the Cool Tech actually gives you a competitive advantage by solving the problem better, easier, with lower costs, faster, more personalized, etc. Outside of that...it's all about the business. That's why so many successful businesses are built with Ruby and not "benchmark winner of the week" because Ruby tends to deliver on almost all of the business cases around solving problems and growth.…

There was a time when Ruby was "the cool exotic and unproductive technology". A lot of wheels had to be reinvented (and new ones added) before it became what it is today, there is nothing special about it. All mature technology will come with a known set of tools and processes to tackle almost any problem very quickly, as long as you're familiar enough with the stack.

> there is nothing special about it.

One thing that's especially productive about it that helped to grow the 3rd party ecosystem is that the options you have for dependency injection in Ruby due to monkey patching give you an experience much closer to Aspect Oriented Programming.

It also makes it easier when you need to add functionality somewhere high up the inheritance chain without having to rebuild the entire chain around your new object base, or fork the library, use your fork as the dependency and make the change directly.

In the world of object oriented web development, Ruby was close to a miracle in time-reduction in WORKING with an ecosystem.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#247

Post by brightball »

ericd wrote: post #244
cocoa19 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when ruby was the hot tech a few years ago, frowned upon by conservative developers. I learnt ruby back then. I'm glad ruby is now recognized as a more mature ecosystem that does things well, even though it is one of the boring technologies now.

Is Ruby/Rails faster now? I built a few simple sites on Rails 2.3 via Passenger, and my God, it was such a performance hog compared to every other web stack I'd ever used. Probably mostly a function of how heavyweight RoR was, but I never got deep enough to figure out what was so slow about it. It may also have been user error, but it seemed like others were bragging about getting it to levels of performance that wou…

It is. Come a long way since Rails 2.

There are still much faster options out there but it's nowhere near the beast that it used to be.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#248

Post by crwalker »

fragmede wrote: post #152
cookiecaper wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the other hand I've encountered folks who claim to be forming a start up. They've got the name and the logo. They've got the whole pitch ready. They sound enthusiastic and passionate. But... they still have to find a technical person to actually build it. They basically have nothing. These people are usually imposters who are asking for things that are totally unrealistic or generating interest for a concept that…

> while the technology is important and can give an edge, it is not the main value in your business. Going out on a limb here, but I've been searching for a way to define this for a while, but... maybe those aren't tech companies? I'm talking about companies like Snapchat or Uber or AirBnB which, while they do exist as smarphone apps and lean heavily on the Internet, which unarguably involves a lot of technology, but…

SpaceX's technology is not building a >$10B launch backlog and pulling in over $1B in funding. The SpaceX brand and culture are bringing in the right people to build the technology and the right customers to buy it: this path towards success, by definition, started before the technology was complete.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#249

Post by crypto5 »

pavlov wrote: post #14

The 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…

> You need to get your company to 10k USD monthly product revenue within three months.

You probably need to add how much you can spend on customers acquisition to your equation.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#250

Post by jjeaff »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #242
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…

What you're saying sounds reasonable but I think it is completely wrong. I strongly believe that startups very rarely fail because they have chosen to build on a particular immature technology. Some fail or stall because they cannot bring themselves to stop redesigning and rebuilding on the next new technology or design philosophy every couple of months. But these are completely different issues (related by psycholog…

I don't think his comment says that they failed because they chose the wrong trendy language. They are failing because they are too concerned about the language and the process rather than the result.
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