101–110 of 154 posts
OT, but referring to the article: why are so many websites allergic to serving basic HTML these days? You get a lovely white page with a Javascript blocker if you try to open this article. What's particularly offensive about this one is that all the raw data is loaded in correctly anyways - the JS appears to just fiddle with making it look right, and there's no default style for if that doesn't happen.
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I met my largest side client while at a baseball clinic my son was attending. I was reading a very thick book studying for a certification when a local business owner approached me and said, "Are you in IT?" Four years later of 15-20 hours per week side work and that chance encounter had an amazing impact on my life.
Just curious: What do you charge them?
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So basically she worked hard on her skills and invested a lot of time and effort to talk to a lot of people to meet the persons that allowed her to grow her business. Most people don't do that and complain. ;-)
For me the point here was, that the meeting of that person the most crucial step and also pure luck. Writing about "Starting a Software Business" which boils down to "just know the right people" is a bit demotivating :\
This is a person who obviously has a lot of talent and a lot of specialised knowledge. I doubt most people can get properly paid consulting work or get to product stage as fast as she clearly could.
Many developers believe that conversations "just happen" for some elite breed of networked/famous/etc developer that excludes them. Sales conversations generally don't "just happen", for anyone. You write some pitches and make some calls.
Interesting about the 50-50 split. If you talk to most people in the valley, they would probably tell you this is the worst thing you can do. That is, if you're looking from the perspective of a VC.
It's not the 50-50 split that's bad, it's the part where you don't talk about vesting. I have a friend who confounded a startup with another guy. It started with my friend agreeing to put in $20K and some advice, the other guy working full time, for a 50-50 split. After one year my friend has put in $200k+, worked full time building business, marketing, etc, while the other founder does his own job poorly. They agree…
Consulting doesn't scale, software does. One pragmatic strategy to find product/customers: 1) Pick an industry 2) Ask someone in that industry what they use spreadsheets for 3) Build something better There is a lot of 'cybernetic' processes that are a mix of humans with domain knowledge and machines with spreadsheets for schemaless storage and querying. Generally the move is to encode the domain knowledge into code a…
Talk to the users, try to find out how many others are also using it. Rewrite it in modern technology, sell it back to all the current users (and ideally, also sell to others in the same line of business who might need it).
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YCombinator advises equal splits. https://blog.ycombinator.com/splitting-equity-among-founders... I've also read a bunch of articles that suggest unequal splits, and the reasons they cite seem to boil down to the idea that the split should reflect the proportional risk taken, and not much else. There are times when founders truly take the same amount of risk, and an even split is justified under the common VC thinkin…
I've done both equal and non-equal, but I've yet to have or observe a business where both the risk, contribution, and effort put in by the founders is actually equal. Sometimes it's just a conversation founders want to avoid having because it's uncomfortable, but that in itself is a bit of a red flag.
Consulting doesn't scale, software does. One pragmatic strategy to find product/customers: 1) Pick an industry 2) Ask someone in that industry what they use spreadsheets for 3) Build something better There is a lot of 'cybernetic' processes that are a mix of humans with domain knowledge and machines with spreadsheets for schemaless storage and querying. Generally the move is to encode the domain knowledge into code a…
This is exactly what I did!
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Not sure if you're making a jab at the fact that the Bay Area is relatively small compared to most of the world, but I thought it was a relevant comment because HN is disproportionately located in Bay Area.
Is it really? Do we have data for geographic distribution of HN users?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905
That poll indicates that the significant majority of HN readers reside outside the Bay Area of San Francisco in the US.