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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

#91

Post by ivm »

mbesto wrote: post #90
ivm wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SalesForce was founded in 1999. Are there any examples that released after 2010 and got a significant part of their markets? Except for maybe Snapchat which is not too bad, just weird.

> SalesForce was founded in 1999 Why is that fact relevant? Care to elaborate?

Because in the last years all the markets have become extremely competitive, including the niche ones. Even if you find an "easy" market and make a product with weak UX for it – it's only a matter of time before a competitor redesigns your idea into something better (example: HipChat and Slack).

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

#92

Post by john_moscow »

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.

Protecting your abstract "employer" from a toxic exec is a political suicide. The right thing to do is sniff out who's the exec's political enemy and what move is he planning next against him and aid that person in his move without directly confronting the toxic exec. It's dirty politics, but it works.

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

#94

Post by ivm »

mi100hael wrote: post #93

> Writing is the part where non-native English speakers like me are in a disadvantaged position. While reading the article, I had no idea you weren't a native speaker until I reached that line. So: congrats.

Thank you! Though my editor still fixes 2-3 issues in each paragraph.

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

#95

Post by mi100hael »

john_moscow wrote: post #18
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…

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…

At my last job, my sort-of technical director liked to edit live prod deployments when someone came to him with a "fire" (which wasn't ever actually a fire anyway). After the 2nd or 3rd time, I locked him out.

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

#96

Post by mi100hael »

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.

Plenty of software jobs pay and don't involve working for someone who expresses outright contempt for your role.

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

#97

Post by mi100hael »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #53
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…

Yeah, especially your landing page. My site is a mix of Rails and static generators, but I scrape the Rails pages with wget --recursive, and then upload everything to S3, and put it all behind CloudFlare. You can put your Rails app behind CloudFlare too, but this way your site will never, ever go down.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/28/amazon-aws-s3-outage-is-br...

:p

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

#98

Post by throwawaydoom »

john_moscow wrote: post #92
throwawaydoom wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Protecting your abstract "employer" from a toxic exec is a political suicide. The right thing to do is sniff out who's the exec's political enemy and what move is he planning next against him and aid that person in his move without directly confronting the toxic exec. It's dirty politics, but it works.

Yeah.. Lesson learned I hope...

Am I naive to think that in a business setting, problems should be constructively confronted proportionally to the extent of their damage potential directly with their author? Wouldn't the business be able to grow more efficiently and be able to keep a peaceful environment free of backstabbers if people could accept that everyone makes mistakes, that they don't really matter as long as they are fixed quickly, and that they are all learning opportunities that can become valuable assets? I feel like am I throwing buzzwords around and that to some extent I have always heard this in a form or another but for some reason, never seen it put into practice.

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

#99

Post by steamer25 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #43
lostcolony wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> ("Look at how beautiful those charts and graphs are. You can really visualize the data to make better decisions!") That's one of my pet peeves. This literally is goes in the opposite direction most of the time - the prettier the graphs presented, the more useless they are. They show less, take more space, omit units, scales, or well... even useful data. Not to mention connecting things that should not be connected,…

Best presentation of your point I've seen:

http://www.darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-nak...

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

#100

Post by autotypo »

Klockan wrote: post #56
paulie_a wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What would sales do in a B2C shop? In my mind you just create a product people want, slap AdWords on it for revenue and add a marketing team for growth. I have a hard time imagining what for example Reddit would do with a sales team. Edit: Apparently Reddit have a sales team since they have their own ads platform, they wouldn't need it if they used AdWords.

Adsense is for publishers, AdWords for advertisers. You are referring to Adsense, maybe?
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