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How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

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Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#91

Post by SwellJoe »

rdouble wrote: post #75
SwellJoe wrote: post #24

I reached the end of this story and thought, "These guys have not fully learned the lesson of product failure. Nor have they learned to recognize product success." You made a product no one wanted, and in order to market it, you stumbled onto a product that lots of people wanted in a market where billions of dollars are spent each year (we spend about 10 grand a year on conferences, and we're a tiny company with a ti…

In the post it said they were only making $50-300 a conference. That sort of business is tough to scale. It's like those guys who take your photo at Disneyland. It doesn't sound like they were leaving that much money on the table.

"In the post it said they were only making $50-300 a conference."

That's nobody's fault but their own. That's one of my primary points about them not really learning a valuable lesson. If they were booked solid by prime conferences at those prices, and people were calling them from all over the country, I'd suggest they were undervaluing their service by at least an order of magnitude.

I believe they should have begun charging sooner and much more than they were, especially if they didn't particularly love the project. When I started hating my previous company and the work I was doing, I doubled my prices. It didn't hurt sales, and I put more money in the bank for my next venture.

I think my intent is being misunderstood quite a bit. I tried to clarify in another response, but it seems like people think this is an either/or thing; that they had to keep working on the label business to be living according to the Gospel of SwellJoe. And, that's not what I mean, at all. I mean that if you're going to build/run a business to bootstrap another business, you should charge enough to make it worth the effort you put into it. They built something that people really wanted, and then grudgingly started charging a tiny bit of money for it (when I'm doing stuff I don't love, I won't even leave the house for less than $500; seriously, when I was doing contract IT work, I billed $125/hour with a four hour minimum), and flipped it for probably much less than they could have.

I'm not suggesting they should have stuck with the label printing business forever, just that they did not capitalize on the label printing business on anywhere near the scale they could have, and probably in the same time period.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#92

Post by SwellJoe »

mmcdan wrote: post #73
mkramlich wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're both right. But SwellJoe's argument was basically, "A hundred thousand dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? Ten million dollars!" The OP was lucky enough to find a vein of gold underground, mined like 5% of it, then stopped so they could go open a restaurant. They could've mined out the rest of that vein and with the extra cash started ten restuarants and bought a yacht, etc. That said it's always hard to…

I honestly don't think that was his argument. His argument was more like: "You started off with a cool idea that no one wanted, accidentally found something people were willing to beg for, then got rid of what people wanted to work more on the cool idea." It would have been just as valid to stick with the idea people begged for/made money and add features that made you happy. Wouldn't it have been valuable to test/ma…

I think his...oh, wait...I think my argument isn't really any of that (though they're interesting thought exercises).

I haven't suggested they should have stuck with label printing or that they should have sold it and started something new; my advice applies no matter what path they chose. I suggested that I don't think they learned the lessons that the market was willing to teach them.

In my wizened old age, I think back on similar situations in my own life, where I missed the signs and missed opportunities that would have had very low costs and very high pay outs. This is one of them for this team.

Since everyone wants me to have actually made recommendations for what they should have done (rather than what lessons they should have learned, which is all I covered to start with):

1. When you have a business that takes off on a run like this, and you know you're going to cash out and run; raise your prices. Raise them a lot. Double them. If volume doesn't drop, double them again. Rinse and repeat until you have found the point at which customers stop coming to you. Conferences are huge cash cows. They have money; if you solve one of their problems in a cool, social, way, they will pay for it. So, OP should have started charging earlier and more (a lot more).

2. Learn from failure. It sounds to me like they're back on the same sort of project as the one they couldn't convince people to like to start with. If they're passionate about social mobile apps, that's fine. But, you have to be willing to listen when the market says "We do not want this."

And, let's add a bonus third point:

3. Leverage past successes to enable future successes. As you note, it sounds like View could have been launched as a cool feature of the label business, getting it into the hands of all of those CEOs and investors that passed through their system. It started as a marketing ploy, and it would have been an effective one for the new product...I don't know that it makes the new product any more awesome or wanted by people, but it is still a valid avenue for marketing the product to thought leaders.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#93

Post by BalancedThought »

SwellJoe wrote: post #24

I reached the end of this story and thought, "These guys have not fully learned the lesson of product failure. Nor have they learned to recognize product success." You made a product no one wanted, and in order to market it, you stumbled onto a product that lots of people wanted in a market where billions of dollars are spent each year (we spend about 10 grand a year on conferences, and we're a tiny company with a ti…

It seemed to me that they went back to the original application and pivoted. They didn't go back a build the same people to people proximity app. They built the people to environment proximity app which let them know about things going on in their environment (example from website : the Bart train is not running for the next two hours).

So, I don't think they gave up something successful to pursue something less successful. Rather, they decided to continue to work on something about which they are passionate.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#94

Post by mdda »

soulclap wrote: post #88
MichaelGG wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Feb. 31 doesn't exist." Maybe they are using MySQL? http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html#1_14

One of my previous jobs was coding software for banks that handles financial transactions. And I am not entirely sure any more if it was Feb 30th or 31st but one day the product manager came to my office and asked me to change the validation routine in the library that handles the date-related calculations and consider Feb 31st as a valid date. Can't exactly remember what it was about but I think some banks or other…

Different markets have different day count conventions. For instance is a 3 month deposit rate the same as a 90 day CD? When it comes to 'wholesale size', it's not about gouging clients for a day of interest, it's making sure that everyone is talking about the same dates and penny-accurate amounts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_count_convention

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#96

Post by rdouble »

SwellJoe wrote: post #91
rdouble wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the post it said they were only making $50-300 a conference. That sort of business is tough to scale. It's like those guys who take your photo at Disneyland. It doesn't sound like they were leaving that much money on the table.

"In the post it said they were only making $50-300 a conference." That's nobody's fault but their own. That's one of my primary points about them not really learning a valuable lesson. If they were booked solid by prime conferences at those prices, and people were calling them from all over the country, I'd suggest they were undervaluing their service by at least an order of magnitude. I believe they should have begu…

The type of business makes a big difference. They couldn't have charged much more. Beyond a fairly low price, it makes more sense to just bring your own printer.

It's much different from something like contract IT where nobody knows how to bring the network back up and they can't do any work while it's down.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#97

Post by petercooper »

ascendant wrote: post #34
axod wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because HN used to be above that linkbait BS. The story is interesting and useful and stands up on its own without having to resort to "in only 300 lines!!!".

Why is it every community ever is awesome until that third person joins? Then suddenly it's all about how things "used to be". Are linkbait BS titles the cancer that is killing /HN?

No. It's people not being in /new enough and voting up good stories after actually reading them. That way, the "linkbaity" stuff is more likely to get voted up. But this is a problem most vote-based link sites have, alas.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#98

Post by smbwrs »

ck2 wrote: post #62

Wait, those were simple black-and-white "HELLO MY NAME IS" badges printed on a mailing label? Event organizers paid how much for this? At first I though maybe this was the 1990's but then I read netbooks. Very confused. How dumb/lazy/cheap are conference organizers?

Came to post this. Well, this, and, "It took you 300 lines to do THAT?" A dozen or so lines of Javascript + CSS would do the trick. I say this from experience, having built a system to auto-print thermal labels from a browser. It's reeaaallllyyy easy. Heck, most of the time was spent fighting with Windows' print settings. While I'm happy for your success, I'm kind of dumbstruck that anyone would pay for such a system.

[Edit] In the interest of not just poopooing on the badge thing, I want to mention view.io actually seems like a pretty interesting idea. One of those so-obvious-why-hasn't-anyone-done-it-yet types, could be big if it works well. Good luck!

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#100

Post by chipocabra »

What boggles my mind is that tech events in San Francisco don't print name badge automatically on admission. 0_0

I live in South Africa and pretty much any trade show or event I have gone to in the last 4 years have had name badges printed at the door on admission. Or am I missing something here?

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