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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

#61

Post by huhtenberg »

emptybits wrote: post #60
huhtenberg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't trivialize. The list provides a very good insight into specifics of making a product/company work. These aren't sufficient conditions, but they are often necessary. Product packaging matters. Customer relations matters. Resource management matters. As does the non-technical side of things. All of these are integral to making "companies or consumers willing to pay you for it."

My intent wasn't to trivialize, only to prioritize. You're right; none of those alone are sufficient for success. But IMO the single most important priority for a founder of a software business was not mentioned.

"Make something that people want to pay for" is an obvious priority for any commercial entity, small or large.

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

#62

Post by olavgg »

I work at a startup, which is around 15 months old now. We have no UI/UX designer, and have not focused on creating a good UX. We would love to have one, but have not found the right candidate yet.

But we are doing very well, we are now over 40 employees and have several of biggest names in the nordic countries as clients and our software is being interacted with hundreds of thousands of individuals every day.

Good UX is important, but it doesn't have to be "perfect". The most important thing by far for a startup is getting out of your office and talk with potential clients.

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

#63

Post by Illotus »

fastbeef wrote: post #54
jszymborski wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Funny thing about inifi-scrolling is that it's designed to save bandwidth, but I'd wager that most of the time the extra JS packages are bigger than the content actually being "saved"

Sorta, it does save bandwitdth, but more importantly it is used to keep users on your site longer by removing the decision point of browsing to the next page. Though for the best effect you need to do it background so that user never really realises that the feed/list never really ends.

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

#64

Post by cupscale »

huhtenberg wrote: post #61
emptybits wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intent wasn't to trivialize, only to prioritize. You're right; none of those alone are sufficient for success. But IMO the single most important priority for a founder of a software business was not mentioned.

"Make something that people want to pay for" is an obvious priority for any commercial entity, small or large.

To OP's credit, it's something that people forget semi-frequently.

I can think of quite a few products that look nice and the workflows are quite easy, but at the end of the day they're just not solving a problem I'd be willing to pay money for (and, often, they disappear later).

It's very hard to admit that you were wrong about the fundamentals of your product, and very easy to think that re-designing the homepage will fix everything.

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

#65

Post by kuschku »

jszymborski wrote: post #31
pier25 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Actually, due to the way commenting works, HN breaks the back button.

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

#66

Post by kuschku »

piptastic wrote: post #19
ivm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch. In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.

Who do you use instead of craigslist?

Ebay has a Craigslist competitor, too, in Germany running as ebay Kleinanzeigen.

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

#67

Post by golergka »

throwawaydoom wrote: post #45
john_moscow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It keeps on puzzling me why don't engineers ever speak up. Like "Hey, man, I understand the old design sucks and you want to make it better, but editing things directly would only make the delays bigger. How about you take a few screenshots of the product, photoshop it the way you would like it to look and then we, as a technical team, will use our best expertise to make it look this way without breaking everything i…

Because "shut up or find yourself another job". I thought this too until recently -- got fired after trying to protect my employer from a toxic exec. There are some that do not accept anything but yesmans or silent codemonkeys. It sucks but it pays. If you are not willing to lose your position, just let it go.

In my experience, it's "shut or find yourself another engineer".

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

#68

Post by ivm »

paulie_a wrote: post #40
ivm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, I have a B2C bias.

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

It's not a separate long process because there's only one decision maker. You basically need a good landing page and a working product's demo. Sometimes a client asks a question in support before a purchase but most of the purchases are without direct communication.

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

#69

Post by dharma1 »

olavgg wrote: post #62

I work at a startup, which is around 15 months old now. We have no UI/UX designer, and have not focused on creating a good UX. We would love to have one, but have not found the right candidate yet. But we are doing very well, we are now over 40 employees and have several of biggest names in the nordic countries as clients and our software is being interacted with hundreds of thousands of individuals every day. Good U…

I agree with this. Though if you are at the stage when you want an updated design, I could probably help you. Contacts in my profile
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