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A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

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Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#251

Post by GordonS »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #33

I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid…

OT, but as the founder of a microISV selling B2B, I'd love to hear something about how you do sales and marketing? It's unquestionably our biggest pain point.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#252

Post by rossdavidh »

danpalmer wrote: post #153
matsemann wrote: post #24

Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt. For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used b…

This is part of the reason why I like working in a B2C company. B2C has it's own set of problems, but we aren't dependent on a small group of unprofitable companies. One thing that's been really interesting is seeing how many SaaS tech companies products just don't work for us at all, for example Intercom. Intercom is a great product, but all of their pricing is centered around how many people use your site. If you h…

You may be correct, but I'm just throwing out the idea that perhaps, the needs of these two different kinds of companies are so different that it is a good idea to specialize in one or the other, else you become mediocre at serving either one?

But the flaw in my logic is that the one, sometimes evolves into the other.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#253

Post by vpEfljFL »

gnud wrote: post #157
moksly wrote: post #41

I’d personally drop gsuite, trello and slack and get a office365 essentials plan. I know, because I did, and it’s so much easier to manage and it’s also cheaper. I’m not going to say the tools are better with Microsoft, because to me it’s really much of the same where I genuinely don’t really like any of the options. But because it’s not worse either, you kind of get used to it. I think if you got the full teams/one-…

The Teams UI has some huge blind spots. Now, you can finally sort-of-almost-reliably switch between different accounts. This used to just not work, for me. But you still can't see what account you're actually logged in with. I can only see my initials and name - and my initials and name's the same for all 4 MS accounts I have (private/family, employer, client 1, client 2). When you press "back" from an open document,…

You can look at such imperfections from another angle.

Think about it, you don't like the product because of issues you've described. You're still using it. Maybe, M$ got the product right on the parts you're really care about? Like office integration, price and so on.

Messengers is a very competitive space: slack, m$ teams, zulip, mattermost, skype, telegram and so on and so on.

My point here is issues you described just minor inconvenience and they wouldn't bring much value.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#254

Post by rossdavidh »

edanm wrote: post #29

You also use desks, and chairs, computers and displays. Cups for drinking water. Plates for eating. This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality, if you think of all inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.

You don't normally have to do security reviews of your cups and plates, is one difference that comes to mind.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#255

Post by afarrell »

ryandrake wrote: post #198
afarrell wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bootstrapping, and small budgets, force discipline. This is only true in the evolutionary sense -- Example: "parachuting forces people to be good at checking their gear." Telling someone that they are going to jump out of a plane won't magically give them a skill like meticulousness.

It’s a skill like any other, and requires study and practice. There is a reason why half of pilot training is checklists and drilling procedures until they are permanently encoded into your muscle memory.

Right. But I often see people ask "how can I learn to X" and get advice like "Go do Y. It will force you to X". But jumping into to the situation unprepared is not how pilots learn skill X. They learn it through particular methods of study and practice.

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#256

Post by rossdavidh »

I wonder if the $$ emphasis is the wrong way to look at this list. I'm wondering about: - time to train on how to use it * every employee you ever get (some of them it's trivial, others not so much) - time to do security reviews of any of them where sensitive information might ever pass through it (which is most of them) - the risk of lock-in to something that gets bought by a competitor, turned into adware, or acquihired and shut down (in some cases switching is trivial, in others not so much without losing a lot of valuable history)

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#258

Post by louwrentius »

omnimus wrote: post #75
apk-d wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this only true for US-based companies? Where I'm from, I rarely see use of subscription services (especially ones that incur per-seat costs). Developers here tend to earn roughly the same number , but in a different currency , which makes all software and services several times more expensive. This results in preference of OSS alternatives and free tiers whenever possible. We use Discord for communication, Gitlab…

Lackrack is magnificent. First time i am seeing this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ServerPorn/comments/2rbwlh/home_lac...

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#259

Post by [deleted] »

moksly wrote: post #41

I’d personally drop gsuite, trello and slack and get a office365 essentials plan. I know, because I did, and it’s so much easier to manage and it’s also cheaper. I’m not going to say the tools are better with Microsoft, because to me it’s really much of the same where I genuinely don’t really like any of the options. But because it’s not worse either, you kind of get used to it. I think if you got the full teams/one-…

[deleted]

Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

#260

Post by zbentley »

wpietri wrote: post #231
calmworm wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your CFO got sold ... twice. Concur and NetSuite are both enterprise level software that a company with 50 FTEs does not need. NetSuite is a never ending money pit with varying results. I dealt with a very similar situation, in which a project manager("VP") talked our owner into using NS, but it was over $100k/year and commitments were 2 years per seat at something like $5k. He ALSO wanted to do the roll out himself.…

Weirdly, almost exactly 20 years ago, I sat next to somebody at a wedding who had an almost-identical story about cleaning up after an SAP rollout, but all of the numbers had an extra zero or two. It amazes me that what the SaaS shift appears to have achieved is that now much smaller companies can get stuck in the same "solve everything" money pit. But I guess the fundamental problem hasn't changed: executives want t…

> executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the actual work

Corollary: R&D wants to believe they can build magical solutions that solve all the problems--solutions that will scale better and cost less to keep up than off-the-shelf ones made by people with extensive domain expertise--in a week or two, promise.

As with most things, the problem is complicated, deeply human, and answers lie somewhere in the middle.

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