51–60 of 84 posts
i don't think anyone i've ever known owned a house by 25.
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?
At the $1bn company I would get vendor responses quickly, because we paid for enterprise support. At the scrappy startup I just got used to responses coming a day or so later (especially since I was working with USA vendors while I was based in Taiwan).
If a customer wants a 1-2 hour response time they'll pay much more for it.
I don't think it's the craziest idea, and in some circumstances I would probably do that, e.g if I had an extra house or two. But even in that case I would try to take advantage of the frothy market before selling a house. Raising money is hard and takes a lot of effort even for people with connections and good credentials. But if you succeed it's probably going to be more money and much less financial risk for you.…
Which one did you join?
Even if you don't build a successful business/startup, you are going to learn so much that making the money again is going to be a piece of cake!
You're 25 and working in this space for 8 years?
You're 25 and working in this space for 8 years?
(Also my vote is no. If you’re already technical, just bootstrap the engineering work yourself. Unless time to market is an existential risk, there’s no reason to hire more engineers. If need be find another cofounder or two to split the work.)
Here is an idea. Take debt on CC or a line of mortgage. Pay a contractor or two for a while to develop the product a bit and see how it goes.
Successful founders are great communicators. If you aren’t one, it’s unlikely you will make it to a senior position - whether it’s your own venture or not.
Signal you are looking to sell your house is on when investors tell you - “I understand what you’re building. It’s great. You even have customers MOUs signed and maybe even have paying customers, but I can’t fund you because market size is too small. Good luck.”
Our brains are not equipped to predict the money it takes or time it takes for a business to become successful, because the variables are too great. Selling your house would be like me raising $200k. It’d buy you a year. But at the end of that year, it’s still very unlikely that your business will be paying for itself, let alone paying you a salary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm mostly failing to pitch investors, potential customers are excited.
There’s a huge difference between “potential customers are excited” and “customers are paying for the product“. And the other thing: it’s seems like you put part of the blame on not being born in the USA and not graduating from the Ivy League. That’s not a pre-requisite for success though. If you don’t have connections, maybe it’s you and not the place where you live or your social class.
This video from yc explains how most of our conversations with (potential) users are at best useless and at worse misleading, and how to do it better. Based on the book, “The mom test”