Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 256 posts

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#41

Post by informal007 »

a_c wrote: post #19

You don't know what you don't know. Iteration is king. Experience can't be shared to team member. I don't mean that experience can't be documented and read. But that readers don't have visceral feeling upon reading. It goes both way. First, team members with limited experience don't internalized why certain things is done certain way. They "know" it through indoctrination. It could be cultural or technical. This lead…

It depends on people, some people can get more information from document than others.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#43

Post by a_c »

bartread wrote: post #40
germinalphrase wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using parenting metaphorically in #10?

No, they aren't. They're literally saying you should be a good parent to your children. Your children - their physical wellbeing, emotional and mental health, behaviour - have a profound impact on you that, for good or for ill, will absolutely colour your own behaviour and decision-making at work.

Can confirm. Have a stable family is key to work success. Or put it other way, always put family first

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#44

Post by thyrox »

Mine is a bit meta, but don't take advice from random people about creating million dollar businesses. Always check the profile of the person giving the advice first.

Same applies for people teaching about SEO and marketing. It's very important to check who is giving the advice as a lot of advice seems to make sense in theory but doesn't translate that well practically.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#45

Post by throwaway2016a »

andreisbc wrote: post #28

As a dev i've always known my hunch when it comes to compromises. Never let the business team ruin your experience building cool rock-solid code. I'd rather resign than to compromise anymore. I know there should be a sweet spot between "perfect" and "working". Even a junior can pull-off a "working" app. But when it starts to scale, all those hasty bad decisions will bite your ass. Never skip planning, plan as long as…

I would say a related point to that is: don't skimp on unit and integration tests. It's easy to rush code out but tests will force you to think through it and give you a way to quickly test if a change is a breaking one.

But as a counter point, early in a product lifecycle you don't even know if the product you are building is what you are going to find a market fit for. So spending a lot of time getting the tech perfect is sometimes a waste. It's a constant calculation of balancing the risk of not scaling with the risk of taking so long you never get to the point where you can scale.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#46

Post by tnolet »

armc wrote: post #33

Here's 30 years of experience for you: 1. Few business problems can't be solved by more sales. 2. Cut expenses when the storm is approaching, not when you're soaking wet. 3. You can't eat assets or inventory. Don't get emotional about what you own, only about your cash balances. 4. Banks are your friend only when you don't need them. Corollary: One bank for borrowing, one for cash balance accounts. 5. 70 completed ca…

Sales fixes everything. Very hard to learn for engineers and designers often.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#49

Post by tnolet »

andreisbc wrote: post #28

As a dev i've always known my hunch when it comes to compromises. Never let the business team ruin your experience building cool rock-solid code. I'd rather resign than to compromise anymore. I know there should be a sweet spot between "perfect" and "working". Even a junior can pull-off a "working" app. But when it starts to scale, all those hasty bad decisions will bite your ass. Never skip planning, plan as long as…

Good luck with that trying to find PMF and first 100 customers. Later stage, I get it sort of. Seed and A series you will kill your company by being too slow. Waterfall does not work for this.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#50

Post by cj »

TamDenholm wrote: post #36

Apply your technical skills to a non-technical business. Dont start a tech startup in a tech hub. Run a business completely unrelated to tech and use your skills to improve that business, theres SO much low hanging fruit out there. The venn diagram of tech skills and a non-tech business is where the opportunities are. This applies to many other unrelated skills.

Best advice in the thread so far.

You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons than it is building the next new docker kubernetes react native infrastructure as a service.

Unsexy sells.

Post reply on HN