Am I the only one getting a blank page on Firefox, Chromium and Opera included the google cache and archive.org versions ?
On Starting a Software Business
121–130 of 154 posts
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#122This 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.
I was thinking a bay area network, as in "got a call from Netflix," but yes.
According to the article she was in rural Oregon at the time, and now she appears to be in Seattle.
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah it's not foolproof just a way to start. Here is one random example that comes to mind. "Risk Management" is something every company needs to do or pretend to do. So someone gets stuck with this responsibility and they create a spreadsheet that looks like: Department | Risk | Likelihood | Impact So this is a fairly mediocre solution but it kinda works and "risk management" for "Small Company Co" becomes "Bob's th…
Odds are probably worse for the startup unless you have actual experience in Risk Management.
Proper risk management is serious business. "Risk" "management" in smaller businesses may just be pretended. This illusion will cost some time, focus and money to keep up. I believe that's the market referred to.
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#124I stopped reading after the "lol". I tend to do not get advice from lols lmaos & company...
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#125Consulting 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…
I can bootstrap consulting, can't software.
On top of that consulting opens door, you get very valuable insight inside certain industries and get paid for it.
Also, I'm sure I'm not the only one who is not interested in the slightest in building a unicorn or dealing with investors/VCs.
Building software with no clients requires capital, I'd rather keep mine for my family rather than burn it in the wind into something that is most likely to fail.
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#126This 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.
20 conversations; 5~8 coffee dates; 2~4 proposals; 1 gig. 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.
I'm not saying that. I ran a software business for 14 years and made a lot of pitches. However, it can be tough to get projects that end up being seriously profitable and give you space to think and plan. Those clients take a while to find. However if you are highly specialized then obviously that clientele can be identified more easily and are less price sensitive and more focused on getting what they need.
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#127I stopped reading after the "lol". I tend to do not get advice from lols lmaos & company...
That might be a decent quality filter if you're reading comments on YouTube or Disqus, but you shouldn't apply it to articles on the front page of Hacker News.
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#128Interesting 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.
I've heard that you should have a split of 49/51, in favor of the CEO. There needs to be one person who can have the final say for hard decisions.
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#129OT, 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.
The article loaded fine on my old iPhone 5s. I leave JS enabled tho because I don't believe in the Fake Idea that the web should work for me without it.
Re: On Starting a Software Business
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :\
Did you miss the part where they intentionally spoke to lots and lots of people?
I read it that the "talk to lots of people" part was independent of her knowing Rich in the first place.