A little bit more readable: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1382351985584721926.html
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The first 18 months of a startup
71–80 of 92 posts
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#72Good Lord this makes me feel old. mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users." I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as…
Any website can benefit from analytics, not just advertising-supported ones. You still want to know what pages and links are getting clicked on.
Here's a way to find startups that make something: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?industry=Consumer%20El...
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#73> Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work. There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
It really depends on the person. The people who naturally focus and can ignore distractions excel at WFH. A second category of worker benefits from the rituals of getting ready in the morning, context switching to office mode, seeing their peers in person (however briefly), and sitting down at a separate workstation that is dedicated to work and nothing else. In my experience managing mixed on-site and remote teams,…
> The people who naturally focus and can ignore distractions excel at WFH.
Depends on whether there are more distractions at work or at home. Some live alone and have no distractions at home, but at work must try to ignore some really loud people in an open-office and/or engage in constant, impromptu, relatively unimportant meetings at work.
People that can focus instantly on demand and ignore distractions excel at this type of office.
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#74Good Lord this makes me feel old. mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users." I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as…
Any website can benefit from analytics, not just advertising-supported ones. You still want to know what pages and links are getting clicked on. Here's a way to find startups that make something: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?industry=Consumer%20El...
Eh, no, I really don't think so.
I was at a start-up with a website that had exactly one page. The page had a photo of a bank vault, a company logo consisting of 2 letters, and a phone number.
That was perfectly fine. The business was not a website.
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#75No opinion on the thread, but his current startup involves streaming a chrome instance from the cloud, which feels very "Internet in 2021"
Why would people want this? With the recent concerns of censorship and getting locked out of platforms this just feels like handing even more power to some central authority that can suddenly decide who can and cannot browse the web.
Maybe testing? Companies like Browserstack offer that sort of thing as their core business.
Say that you just made a big frontend change to your website. Before you release it, you can open it on the last 10 major versions of desktop and mobile Chrome/Firefox/Safari/etc. Any rendering failures that you find are the sort of bugs that can be very frustrating to debug from occasional user contacts.
But it can be tricky to automate the detection of visual bugs. And what if you have to make a few clicks and execute some javascript to get to the screen that you want to test?
Anyways, that's one use of browsers-as-a-service.
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#76No opinion on the thread, but his current startup involves streaming a chrome instance from the cloud, which feels very "Internet in 2021"
Yeah...I'm skeptical to be honest. If you're running Chrome on a server, you have to fetch the website to the server, then send back to the client. Now I suppose the server could be in some datacenter with really fast internet and include some aggressive caching, but that's still two trips instead of one. I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembl…
Besides complicated apps, I think this could be useful for dumb web pages that are making a bunch of requests. Instead of having all those requests go from the browser to the provider to the pile of services, advertisers, and spies, and back again, they'll just go from the Mighty data center to the provider and back. I'm thinking FB and pretty much any news/old media site.
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#77Wasn’t this guy the CEO of the unnamed startup in Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley”? https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/uncanny-valley-brand-names...
It's definitely him. Having read Uncanny Valley, I'd take his advice with a grain of salt. Having met him in person, i'd say don't take it at all.
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any website can benefit from analytics, not just advertising-supported ones. You still want to know what pages and links are getting clicked on. Here's a way to find startups that make something: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?industry=Consumer%20El...
Eh, no, I really don't think so. I was at a start-up with a website that had exactly one page. The page had a photo of a bank vault, a company logo consisting of 2 letters, and a phone number. That was perfectly fine. The business was not a website.
Alright – I don't know what that business actual was, but surely it was a business – that's great. That's one type of a business.
Another type of a business is software products. A business like that can basically be a website. Or more fancily, a web app. Or a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a CLI, or a smart TV OS, or anything else written with code that gets used by people.
Now, people need different things, come from different backgrounds, just behave differently. Analytics software simply helps you learn how your thing actually gets used. Do people drop off somewhere in some flow? How do people use this feature you just built? How many users do you even have? Plug in an analytics service's library and find that out with minimal effort. The basic advice for startup founders is: talk to users. That's qualitative research – product analytics is just the quantitative counterpart. Both have value.
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#79> Rolling out of bed in my pajamas and getting back to work with things precisely as I left them was the most underestimated superpower that brought me joy, focus, and speed—I had forgotten how much goes into getting ready for work. There will be so much resistance to going back to the office.
It really depends on the person. The people who naturally focus and can ignore distractions excel at WFH. A second category of worker benefits from the rituals of getting ready in the morning, context switching to office mode, seeing their peers in person (however briefly), and sitting down at a separate workstation that is dedicated to work and nothing else. In my experience managing mixed on-site and remote teams,…
Perhaps even contextual. I find as an employee I’m the second and as a founder I’m the first.
Re: The first 18 months of a startup
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, no, I really don't think so. I was at a start-up with a website that had exactly one page. The page had a photo of a bank vault, a company logo consisting of 2 letters, and a phone number. That was perfectly fine. The business was not a website.
Alright – I don't know what that business actual was, but surely it was a business – that's great. That's one type of a business. Another type of a business is software products. A business like that can basically be a website. Or more fancily, a web app. Or a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a CLI, or a smart TV OS, or anything else written with code that gets used by people. Now, people need different things, come…
The business was software products, built to order, delivered on CD-R media, starting in 2005. The company grew pretty well, doubling in size every 20 months, eventually to be acquired by a large defense contractor. The website probably wasn't needed at all. Getting customers was simple: look for a SBIR contract that is interesting, then bid for it. Analytics software would have angered the customers enough to kill the business, and it may have been prohibited by contract or by law.
I've seen other software and mostly-software businesses where analytics software was out of the question. One example was a company that made an underwater device. Another example was a company that made an OS that got used in military equipment. (add analytics software if you want to live in prison) Not everything is on the internet.