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Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

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Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#71

Post by neltnerb »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #56
neltnerb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really... I wonder what the spare cycles are doing, whether it's truly waste and bad coding or if it's doing some kind of sophisticated predictive algorithms that we're unaware of. I do try to assume engineers did something smart, maybe there's a good reason... I really hope the reason isn't "so we could run the mainline linux kernel" or "because we needed a RTOS" or something similarly bloated.

There is tons of human value in doing things good enough rather than perfect. Why implement quicksort when bubble sort will give you the result you need just as "instantly" and be easier to verify? Why bother procedurally iterating line by line through a 1GB of text in python, when you can call f.read().split("\n") inside a list comprehension and probably have it run just as fast because you have a 64-bit 4Ghz supers…

Ah, I would have thought it was more like "feedback loop" going to "feedback loop with DSP" going to "feedback loop with DSP with wireless" or similar.

I think I am thinking more specifically about the flight feedback example compared to what you are describing, but I'm definitely all for using cheap powerful ARM chips in place of obsolete stuff. I'm just hoping that most of that spare computing power was used for something cool and not just spinning the wheels.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#72

Post by leptons »

neltnerb wrote: post #39
Fordec wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just getting hardware upgraded from very early 2000s PICs to ARM chips has been a pretty big win for me

Ah, I had the good fortune to at least run through Atmels with C compilers first ;-) I definitely never expect to use a PIC or Atmel chip though, wow those were terrible. I guess small quantities really hurt.

PICs and assembly are honestly pretty great, if you know how to use them like that. I've never actually used C on a PIC because they are so resource constrained, but they certainly do have their uses.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#73

Post by guytv »

soneca wrote: post #52
vincnetas wrote: post #46

Has any of commenters read the article? Looks like everyone talks about using bleeding edge tech in startup and how its bad, but this article is about building a bleeding edge product and how difficult is to sell such product (probably because everyone know that using bleeding edge products is dangerous :) )

Thanks for this comment! I usually read the comments before the article and though it would be a Captain Obvious advicicle with snarky comments as are the comments here. So I wasn’t even considering reading it. Glad someone took the time to read the damn article lol Interesting reading by the way.

I actually started reading the article, which sparked my interest at start, but then faded away. so I thought: "This is going to be one of these articles where the comments are more interesting than the piece itself" and came here, just to find the excellent: "did any of the commentators even read the article?"

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#74

Post by benjamaan »

This reminded me of the early days of launching SnapScan. Firstly, it was about the 4th time we had rebuilt and relaunched a payments app. Then, we launched it for online payments which got absolutely zero traction.

Eventually we went and sat at weekend markets and coffee shops and spoke to customers and merchants one-by-one to explain to them everything about it: why we built it, who we were, how the security worked, where they could find us if we lost their money, how to download a mobile app, how to link a bank card to an app. We manually did this with probably over 1000 customers.

And then we gave them R50 to use it, and for the first year gave merchants the product for free.

This set us up for success. We deeply knew how customers perceived our app and using their phone to pay. We had also deeply educated a small army of people. And we had personal relationships with them, they had literally saved my number on their phone and could call me.

This article was a great reminder of the mental strain that took.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#75

Post by leptons »

viraptor wrote: post #23
Fordec wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just getting hardware upgraded from very early 2000s PICs to ARM chips has been a pretty big win for me

That sounds like a huge jump! Now I'm curious what kind of solutions where PIC is viable isn't an overkill on Arm? (Or are there really tiny Arms?)

PICs have extremely low latency interrupts compared to ARM, as well as the assembly language being really simple. 8-bit MCUs can be really great at some things where ARM isn't just overkill, it can almost be a problem.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#78

Post by warent »

vincnetas wrote: post #46

Has any of commenters read the article? Looks like everyone talks about using bleeding edge tech in startup and how its bad, but this article is about building a bleeding edge product and how difficult is to sell such product (probably because everyone know that using bleeding edge products is dangerous :) )

Not even about bleeding edge products. It's a lengthy article about the pitfalls of entering a market with no market validation, which the author slapped lipstick on and gave this sexy title.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#79

Post by hn-hipsters »

renewiltord wrote: post #12
bobwall wrote: post #4

But we have to use kubernetes. Jk. But yea, especially if your startup is not really high-tech, but merely a good business that needs tech.

Kube is great. Abstracts away lots of problems. If you make a single kube cluster (which is trivial with eksctl) you can iterate on a number of startup ideas pretty quickly on it. The kube API (the pod/deployment/service/ingress structure) is where the magic is, imho. Sure you could just make an EC2 instance, and swap in your Rails, and redirect the ALB and fix your domain CNAME, but whatever man, you can do like 4 o…

Outdated stuff.

I use the Jojoma framework to abstract away all that Kube stuff. It's trivial to use through Baobab, especially if you use the Wazabi framework-as-a-service framework (which you should). All you have is to deploy the proclets through a DMVC and it's all automagic.

I iterate through 17 startup ideas a day using that setup.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#80

Post by [deleted] »

manigandham wrote: post #16
willio58 wrote: post #2

You have to toe the line a bit in startups, you want to use proven technology but leave room for the employees to feel like they are contributing to something new and unique.

Why? I would advise finding better employees who respond to contributing to a solid business, and in return their own paychecks and bonuses.

[deleted]
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