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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

#251

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

pavlov wrote: post #196
GoodbyeEarl wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you started a side project and after 3 months you were making 10k per month?

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#252

Post by cookiecaper »

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…

While I don't really agree, I do think that if one intends to work on a side project or a bootstrapped company, they need to do it in a way that is somewhat enjoyable for them.

It requires lots of energy to see these projects through, and it's hard to emit that energy on something that you don't enjoy doing. If using a less common technology is going to get you working on the problem enough to start getting some velocity, that may well be a worthwhile tradeoff (as long as it's not too out there).

The other thing to consider is that while a basic library supplied by a young language may suit your needs when you're starting out, larger ecosystems are likely to have more advanced libraries that have better performance characteristics, support more obscure use cases, etc., which will only become more valuable as one grows.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#253

Post by gressquel »

komali2 wrote: post #148
afshinmeh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, but I'm not entirely sure about this one: > * Sleep, exercise & healthy food > late night coding Looks like it's against other points. I have a full-time job and I'd like to create a brand, too. Thus. I have to do late night coding.

A full time job is a 9-5. Let's say you commute from 8-9 and 5-630. That means you can gym from 645 to 8 (including travel time), eat decently, do some coding, hit bed around 1030, and be sleeping around 11 (so you have enough time in the morning by waking up at 7). Cook on the weekends, code on the weekends, social life Friday and Saturday night... Do you work more than 40hrs a week? Why? Sounds like you're creating…

In my country I work from 08-15, excercise 1 hour. I still have 6 hours left for cooking food and coding before i go to sleep 22

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#254

Post by gressquel »

cookiecaper wrote: post #134
afshinmeh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, but I'm not entirely sure about this one: > * Sleep, exercise & healthy food > late night coding Looks like it's against other points. I have a full-time job and I'd like to create a brand, too. Thus. I have to do late night coding.

The principle is that you have to maintain health. I think late-night coding is a near-constant because of our brains automatically optimize us onto what pg describes as "the Maker's Schedule". Context switching is anathema to effective coding, so people automatically go to the time when they'll be least-interrupted, which is when the rest of the world is asleep.

You also need to maintain a social life and relationships with family and friends. It will boost the productivity more than you believe

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#255

Post by cdicelico »

germinalphrase wrote: post #119
cdicelico wrote: post #55

I have been walking the line between technology (working software engineer my whole career) and business (small business owner, technical cofounder, startup employee several times over) my whole life and if I had one thing that I wish I had known earlier it's this: trust yourself! Just go, learn, and repeat - action is king. Let me elaborate on that a bit. Seeking more and more knowledge and wisdom in an effort to le…

"There are maybe a handful of books and blog posts that are really worthwhile." Can you recommend one or two favorites?

Sure. I like Hello, Startup by Brikman and Zero to One by Thiel and follow Y Combinator's content on YouTube. I also love Disciplined Entrepreneurship - the book used in MIT's Entrepreneurship 101, 102 & 103 courses. There's a corresponding workbook, too. A lot of this stuff is subjective, though. That's the stuff that has proven useful to me, personally, but as always, ymmv! Anything on basic business & economics is probably enough for a smart person with a good head on her shoulders to get going & pick up the rest on the move.

Overall, the number one most valuable skill in my opinion, and the one that I keep coming back to over the years is critical thinking. For that, I love Understanding Arguments, the Philosopher's Toolkit & Ethics Toolkit by Baggini & Fosl, and anything "legal", which sharpens your critical thinking, like Farnsworth's Legal Analyst or even Intro to American Law on Coursera. But those three books on basic reasoning will serve you well for the rest of your life as a business and technical leader.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#256

Post by pavlov »

GoodbyeEarl wrote: post #251
pavlov wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you started a side project and after 3 months you were making 10k per month?

No, but I've been in a startup that got to $10k MRR in under three months after launching the product... And that opened my eyes to what all the talk about the mythical "traction" actually meant.

If it's a side project, that's a different game. A side project doesn't need traction to be successful for its creator.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#257

Post by rubenrails »

c0achmcguirk wrote: post #115

SHIP IT. Even when you are embarrassed about it. Ship it and try to sell your ugly baby. If you can't sell it, ask why and iterate on that. I've seen what happens when you keep the product secret, trying to perfect it before you show it to the world. You'll run out of money making a pretty baby that no one wants.

I agree. I developed a Pinterest-like app around the same year they launched. I even had a perfect domain name for it. Being a perfectionist, I never shipped. I was worried about things like scaling to support tens of thousands of photos, a "similar images" feature, etc. A few years after abandoning the project I discovered Pinterest. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#258

Post by jjeaff »

trimbo wrote: post #181
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…

Since hiring for engineers is so competitive, it is arguable that choosing fancy tech can give an advantage there. It has been done successfully (in a hiring sense)... Twitter pushing Scala, Jet.com on F# are two I can think of. The downside is it could backfire on who you're able to hire. It could just lure people who will either want to migrate to the next new-and-shiny or just leave quickly.

I think one thing a lot of startups think is that they absolutely have to be able to attract the best and brightest. In 90% of cases, average level programmers can build your product just fine. Unless you are building for enormous scale or your product is using cutting edge technology, you simply don't need a bunch of programmers from the top 1% or even top 10%.

In my company, we hire middle of the pack programmers for a bargain and use commonly known tech stacks.

The customers will not know the difference.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#259

Post by jjeaff »

inetknght wrote: post #197
josebama wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet, 99% of founders out there don't care about building a unicorn. It's just a handful in silicon valley doing anything they can to be the next big thing.

Most entrepreneurs are happy building a good product that helps their customers while making a good living at it.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#260

Post by andreygrehov »

the_bear wrote: post #84
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…

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 the $10k goal is sort of a brain hack. From my understanding, the real goal here is to force you think differently.
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