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What you should know as a founder of a software company

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Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#31

Post by jszymborski »

pier25 wrote: post #6
ukulele wrote: post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.

I'd argue while perhaps they are examples of brutalist functionality, the wikipedia, reddit and HN offer a very nice UX and a simple, easy to learn UI.

HN/Wiki/Reddit don't: break the back button, take forever to load 1000 JS/CSS files, have broken "infini-scrolling", or even break when JS is disabled (well, reddit kinda does now).

Compare that to the majority of over-engineered SPA-style webpages that employed many, many front-end engineers and UX designers, and Wikipedia, Reddit, HN as well as old-school Gmail and FB start looking amazing.

Man oh man do I miss old Gmail... that was a great interface. I exclusively use FB on mobile, no-js mode.

Web brutalism should be the new hotness.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#32

Post by yeukhon »

stephengillie wrote: post #27
rmdoss wrote: post #15

Too much content without addressing the real problem with most startups: They do not solve a customer problem. Solve their problem, make their life better and you will do well.

How do startups exist without customers paying them to solve a problem? From convincing investors that the problem exists? It sounds like the investors are the real customers and a narrative is the product they produce.

Some startups do very well. Uber, Lyft, Square Cash/Venmo, Yelp, those really do solve problems many of us have/had.

Then a few tech startups doing analytics I had some experience with, probably overpromised (?? perhaps it was my fault) what their engine could do. Requests are often in backlog and can take many months to roll out, which by then contract renewal is up.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#34

Post by vacri »

ukulele wrote: post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

> are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create

Isn't this what "their clients often have no other choice" means?

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#36

Post by vacri »

save_ferris wrote: post #12

How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"? I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering. While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has…

Apple got to where it is (=more liquid cash than the US government) off the back of good looks and fashion.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#37

Post by jchanimal »

lostcolony wrote: post #10
ukulele wrote: post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

Yes and no. The UX -is- part of the sell. You can sell the implementers on features, but to sell to a business (especially a traditional risk averse enterprise), you have to wow non-technical people. To do that, having an amazing UX for the features the non-technical people care about goes hand in hand with a sales pitch ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make be…

Also a good experience tells developers you value their time and attention.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#38

Post by DonnyV »

pier25 wrote: post #6
ukulele wrote: post #4

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making t…

As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.

Yes they have good enough UI but also there free to use. I know if I'm going to pay for software. It better look nice and function well or I'm not buying.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#39

Post by shostack »

idlewords wrote: post #2

One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap…

This is also important for SEO these days. If you have site speed issues, particularly on mobile, you could run into issues.

Re: What you should know as a founder of a software company

#40

Post by paulie_a »

ivm wrote: post #35
paulie_a wrote: post #33

Sorry to be harsh and disregard your legitimate content completely but it is misguided, it lacks the most important word: Sales

Good point, I have a B2C bias.

I am curious about the bias. B2c still requires sales.
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