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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

#301

Post by heartbeats »

aguyfromnb wrote: post #227
heartbeats wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything is better than nothing, isn't it? Savings rate goes up with income. On a percentage basis, the 10% are going to be spending more money at restaurants, shops, etc. This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market.

> This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market. Arguably is the right word. The global economy is a closed system, so money put anywhere makes its way elsewhere. Spending money in restaurants and shops is most easily visible, but not necessarily any better than other investment. Even in your example, the 1% putting money in the stock market provides capital for companies as well as income…

What about tax havens and such? As you said, if I put some money into the stock market,

* my broker/bank takes some. If my broker is a public company, some of the money goes to pay operational expenses, and some of the money goes to their shareholders as dividends.

* the stocks I bought go up slightly. They get cheaper capital, and their owners get an unrealized gain.

Schematically, we can assume all bank employees put all their money into the stock market. So the end result is that the benefits accrue to shareholders of public companies, regardless of which stock you buy.

But if money never exits the financial system to go back into the real economy, none of this matters. If a large chunk of the public stock market is held by buy-and-hold investors who just never liquidate their investments nor pay tax, this money will never come to benefit ordinary folks.

Some of it will, by way of pension funds and whatnot. But it's worse than spending it on normal consumption, as I see it.

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

#302

Post by jhrf »

Shacklz wrote: post #93
pjc50 wrote: post #73

SoftBank invested something like $24bn in WeWork, which went to the real estate bubble plus free beer for techies. There is an astonishing amount of money out there. In the case of the Saudi investment through SoftBank, it's practically a moral imperative to relieve them of it. Enjoy it while it lasts. Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes.

> Voluntary redistribution through loss making startups is the comfortable alternative to wealth taxes. That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.

What about services like Uber which are used extensively by lower income people and only exist due to VC subsidy?

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

#303

Post by goatherders »

wpietri wrote: post #247
goatherders wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every conferencing solution shares one trait: at least one person on a call of N+1 people will have trouble joining and getting everything to work. I have been making the same "joke" for years on calls that everyone on the call should join me in quitting our jobs to create a teleconference solution that works. Hardyharhar. (The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes e…

> (The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes early) If everybody has to join early, then "early" is the new "on time". It's just sacrificing a different n minutes for setup issues.

Well, sure. My point is that showing up "on time" to an appointment and THEN making sure your tools work is backwards. No one says "I was on time except for needing to park, walk in, turn on the lights and sit down".

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

#304

Post by tptacek »

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…

It would be beyond weird for an IT department to have any say whatsoever in whether a development team used Postgres or Mariadb.

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

#305

Post by gnud »

vpEfljFL wrote: post #253
gnud wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They got the product right in the areas my IT department cares about - included in O365 license, and the illusion of integrated account management.

As I hinted at in my comment, account management is a pain point for us users - but probably not for the ones managing the users in a company.

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

#306

Post by stickfigure »

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…

Huh? AFAIK I'm getting billed by the (employee) seat for Intercom, irrespective of the number of customers. It's been great.

Their pricing page is pretty confusing, I'll be disappointed if I hit some sort of hidden price cliff.

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

#307

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #304
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…

It would be beyond weird for an IT department to have any say whatsoever in whether a development team used Postgres or Mariadb.

Not if the IT department is responsible for all vendor relationships and a support vendor exists.

This is not a operating mode I’d encourage but I’ve encountered it in companies in the past.

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

#308

Post by _pdmk »

vasco wrote: post #226
siftrics wrote: post #172

It’s interesting how hard it is to gauge the value of tools you don’t yet use. I’m the founder of a startup that recently subscribed to Gripeless ( https://usegripeless.com ). If you look at the Show HN thread and the other threads about Gripeless floating around the internet, you’ll see a lot of commenters saying “this is too expensive”, “I don’t see anyone buying this” or something along those lines. I was skeptica…

Hotjar does this (collect user feedback in the page) and more and has a free plan. I work there so I'm biased, but yeah.

I'm also biased because I work on Gripeless. Our product isn't really about broadly collecting feedback as a whole, but it instead focuses specifically on the negative feedback part and tries to make it as pleasant and friction-less as possible for the end user to submit.

HotJar's feedback tool is built around getting all kinds of feedback, both positive and negative, which is generally fine if you want to improve your product satisfaction when comparing "happiness" at different time frames, but it does come with some caveats.

Since people don't want to be rude by nature it's less likely that they'd explicitly pick the most angry face option on HotJar's happiness slider and submit their complain then - as they, again, would have to explicitly state that they're dissatisfied.

Submitting a gripe through Gripeless on the other hand takes just a single text field, no emotions, no decisions - users can simply quickly fire out their issue(s) at the product owner without any suspected judgement - since complaints are very clearly solicited.

Again, I'm super biased because I'm the solo founder of Gripeless and competing against a much more established company like HotJar is not easy, as an early stage company we can't afford to give out our product for free just yet (apart from OSS projects which we always give out our product to for $0), but I try very very hard to satisfy our current customers' specific needs, something that a larger company can't offer at scale.

Also if anyone reading is interested I'm doing demo's and answering concerns via quick 5 minute calls, feel free to reach me at [redacted]

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

#309

Post by wpietri »

goatherders wrote: post #303
wpietri wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (The practical solution for teleconferencing issues is to get people to join a couple minutes early) If everybody has to join early, then "early" is the new "on time". It's just sacrificing a different n minutes for setup issues.

Well, sure. My point is that showing up "on time" to an appointment and THEN making sure your tools work is backwards. No one says "I was on time except for needing to park, walk in, turn on the lights and sit down".

And I'm saying that if everybody is using unreliable tools, especially mandated ones, then it's not particularly backwards. E.g., during a consulting gig in Manhattan, it was not uncommon for a subway failure to cause the majority of people to be late for the first meeting of the day.

Similarly, I've seen a few companies where it's just assumed that a 9:00 meeting really starts at 9:05, so everybody has time to travel from their last meeting. I think the videoconference nonsense is effectively the same. It doesn't really matter if you designate 8:57-9:00 as your "make sure your tools work" time or 9:00-9:03. It just matters that everybody has the same expectation.

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

#310

Post by wpietri »

chapium wrote: post #300
wpietri wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good description. I'll also talk about "corporate feudalism", where you have the Duke of Engineering fighting with the Duke of Product, and the King/CEO must mediate the conflicts. The peasants, of course, are basically property of their various nobles. But I really like "soviet capitalism", as it points at a key contradiction. Somehow, fans of capitalism, which maximizes surplus value by freeing individuals…

At the end of the day, everything is a tree.

Nah. Humans, who evolved in dominance hierarchies, are very inclined to see everything as a tree.
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