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Ask HN: Should I sell my house to fund my startup? Anyone with the same story?

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Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my house to fund my startup? Anyone with the same story?

#31

Post by mustafa_pasi »

You should never risk you personal wealth on startup ventures, ever.

Startups the SV way are hard to do, if you are not part of the bubble. As you said, you don't have an "in" so nobody is going to easily give you money. You have two options:

1. consider a different growth strategy, startups are not the only way to grow a business, focus less on growth and more on stable income, try to acquire at least one recurring client

2. build your reputation, then you will get capital, doing no.1 first will also help you with no.2.

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my house to fund my startup? Anyone with the same story?

#36

Post by taf2 »

atatatat wrote: post #13
throwaway2a02 wrote: post #3

No, you should not. Chances of it working out are probably slim. You probably don't need funding, as many solo founders can attest. Hiring should be done once the business is already generating an income, and should be scaled based on that income. What happens is that if you do sell your house, (assuming you'll pay rent) things will get a lot more stressful for yourself financially, and this will severely hinder your…

This is an oft repeated trope — here's my issue: I'm B2B, and my clients don't want to hear "get back to you this weekend!" What then?

Figure out how to solve the problems as fast as possible… yeah it’s hard maybe not the thing for you

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my house to fund my startup? Anyone with the same story?

#38

Post by icedchai »

atatatat wrote: post #30
cosmodisk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drop them. If some corporate cog thinks having you on a speed dial 27/7 is a good idea, just because they pay, you definitely don't want them as clients. Instead, tell them you are awesome, your product is the hottest shit in town and you work 4 days a week. The language may vary depending on a client, but setting boundaries is part of the game.

Just "business hour" support can take you out of eligibility to (morally) accept a role at another firm.

Morally, maybe, but not practically. You can send emails or answer the phone during your regular job. The odds of you being "caught" are near zero.

Re: Ask HN: Should I sell my house to fund my startup? Anyone with the same story?

#40

Post by quickthrower2 »

atatatat wrote: post #13
throwaway2a02 wrote: post #3

No, you should not. Chances of it working out are probably slim. You probably don't need funding, as many solo founders can attest. Hiring should be done once the business is already generating an income, and should be scaled based on that income. What happens is that if you do sell your house, (assuming you'll pay rent) things will get a lot more stressful for yourself financially, and this will severely hinder your…

This is an oft repeated trope — here's my issue: I'm B2B, and my clients don't want to hear "get back to you this weekend!" What then?

Pick a product/market that doesn't require such a level of support / contact.

Pick something also that doesn't need constant human hands/duck tape. E.g. if you are web scraping, and someone changes their site HTML structure on 3pm on a Wednesday, then you have to be hands on to fix it.

If you are running an app that is self sufficient - you put the hours in at the weekend to make it robust, it doesn't bother you during the week, most of the time.

In other words, build stuff that ... scales :-)

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