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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

#311

Post by abakker »

zbentley wrote: post #260
wpietri wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I agree with this wholly. I very much doubt that many people are building tools in bad faith to consume money. It’s just that in the end, “solve everything” means implementing 10:1 weird hacks for edge cases vs actual features that companies all have in common.

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

#313

Post by teach »

krilly wrote: post #208
bad_user wrote: post #151

IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't worth it in a small startup: 1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype 2. Notion ($16 / month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app — just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder 3. Sentry ($26 / month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a hig…

Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?

Discord doesn't have threads. That's a deal-breaker for us.

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

#314

Post by danielvinson »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #296
tinza123 wrote: post #170

IMO startups, especially small ones should use as many tools as possible, because it is way cheaper than having to develop and maintain a similar thing in house, OR hiring a new person just to cover that. $200 a month is really very small cost compared to the alternative of hiring and spending many hours on that. You can always come back and replace the vendor once the company gets funded and has more resources.

On the flip side of that, we use three react libraries at my job: react-table, react-dates, and react-select. If we had been OK just using whatever styles they gave us, it would have been fine. But we have a designer who designs how everything is supposed to look. And even the "style-less" react components have been a nightmare. Just a constant train of bugs to fix, and they still barely function. It would have been…

As a frontend dev, this really pains me. I’ve worked at many places with the same problems - first of all, pushing back on the designer is incredibly important if something is hard to develop. Most designers are doing their best to make things easy to code, but aren’t developers, so they just don’t know. It’s the engineers job to tell them no when things are exceptionally difficult. If they understand that the style change they want is a 3 month project, maybe they would be happy to design something different.

Secondly, frontend is hard. Having a senior react dev who can accurately weigh the trade offs of using external components like that would have been invaluable here. People underestimate how much different in skill level a junior react/frontend dev is from a senior engineer with experience in multiple frameworks. 6 months is long time in terms of dev hours - writing a table from scratch for your use case that works with design is usually a 1-2 sprint task, and that’s absolutely the hardest one there. But more reasonably, work should have been done to make a reusable style library to make this even easier.

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

#315

Post by afarrell »

travisjungroth wrote: post #268
afarrell wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the problem here is that there is a balance to be struck with these sorts of things: Cost, User experience, Mange-ability, and time spent shopping around rather than just going with the industry-default or one with the best sales-team. Responsible decision-makers have to make trade-offs. When you say > Reports...are roundly ignored That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost…

You’re giving advice on how to be persuasive, and it’s rare I find comments as off-putting as yours.

I'm curious why, if you have any insights.

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

#316

Post by luord »

I was shocked by the headline, then I noticed that only over a third of the tools are used for development.

I was again shocked by their monthly spending, considering the stage they're at[1], but then I noticed that over two thirds are spent on marketing.

So all in all, it makes sense; they're paying for what they deem required to use. I couldn't justify to myself using half of these tools, at least, at that stage.

[1]: Which highlights how good we, in general, have it for at least prototyping stuff freely, or very cheaply.

On that note, I got so confused by a couple of their bills that I had to stop and see if the tools had some sort of restriction for businesses. Nope, so I don't understand why they're paying for some of them. I mean, they certainly should if they want to, after all, such tools are damn good services worth paying for, but they don't strictly need to.

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

#317

Post by teach »

_pdmk wrote: post #308
vasco wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

I'd never heard of Gripeless before this thread, but I can agree with your reasoning.

We use HotJar's free plan on an interal (engineer-facing) tool and we get very very few reports through it because engineers don't realize there's a text field AFTER the happiness slider.

We get an order of magnitude more feedback via Jira even though creating a ticket that way takes 10x more clicks.

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

#318

Post by specialist »

gmueckl wrote: post #299
specialist wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we'd all do better de-digitizing our processes. Return to paper. -- I've been struggling to articulate a thesis, for way too long. But here it goes. Complexity catastrophe occurs when cost of change outweighs benefit. Or simply can't be done in time to make a difference. Whereas databasization makes processes inflexible, humans are relatively more flexible. Like being able to make notes on forms, or quickly mod…

One of the first things I got told about databases is that you may build the most beautiful database schema for the domain, but it will never be able to be complete. For the applications that I designed so far, that meant that I always made room for intentional loopholes like free-form comments or ways to override hardcoded processes. It is not 100% perfect and foolproof, but it made using these applications a lot le…

Superior strategies like this are like hidden lore. Why is that? I'm certain there are dozens or hundreds of these hard won lessons.

I had to rediscover the "INSERT only, no UPDATEs" trick on my own. Changed from separate truth and historical tables to a single table which is groomed over time. Major simplification. A few extra benefits: like scaling, testing and auditing.

And my peers absolutely lost their minds. A senior VP rolled back my architecture the moment he could. (We were acquihired, so this meant major upheaval of systems which had be in use for over 3 years.) My solution was just too weird looking, too unorthodox.

So while there's lots of things we can do to mitigate databasization and buy ourselves some head room, we don't.

Square peg, round hole?

My radical (unoriginal) thought is the problem is the people, not the tools.

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

#319

Post by chapium »

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…

Sounds like your CFO (also CTO?) is performing two huge roles. If he keeps focusing on managing the tech your finances are probably not in good hands (since he/she is probably doing neither job optimally).

It sounds like a toxic mess.

> It’s because no matter how smart you folks are as individuals, in the aggregate you are like toddlers. You dump all your toys on the floor and then chase after some other kid’s shinier toy. Your poor CIO is left cleaning up your mess in the middle of the night after stepping on a Lego brick.

Viewing your underlings as toddlers probably isn't helping matters much. Everyone has very specific needs. They are interested in meeting their needs and need to make local decisions that look dumb from high level. Aka greedy choices.

Its a bit academic, but "Cognitive Structure of Emotions", Ortony might help you break down some of the people issues in your org.

There is a balance. How do you give lower parts of your organization autonomy to make local decisions and at the same time make choices that are sane from a higher level. 40-50 people is typically a tipping point for human social structure. This is where tribal systems break down and require a strong leader and more well defined roles.

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