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

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

#51

Post by senko »

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…

Great lessons, all.

I'd add: ARR is a metric, cash is king. (related to 2-4 from your list)

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

#53

Post by polote »

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…

> 1. Few business problems can't be solved by more sales.

This obviously completely wrong. The only problem that can be solved by mores sales is when your are not selling enough. And even in this case just having more sales not always work.

I'm the first to say that what matter most for a company is its ability to have more customers. But having more sales when you sales org is badly structured will make you loose a lot of money. Same products problems won't be solved by more sales, same for Marketing problems, or People problems or actually any problem.

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

#54

Post by lbayes »

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 apologize if this sounds harsh, but I can't see the /s anywhere and I want to clarify for others.

This post outlines how to destroy a new (or any) business.

There will never be anything approaching 100% clarity between different people talking about a thing that doesn't yet exist.

We all have to see it and feel it in order to truly understand it.

This experience almost always leads to creating new, better ideas, discarding old ideas and digging deeper on others.

That's all before we even leave the building and learn from customers.

I shudder to imagine trying to get a start up off the ground and needing to wait 3-6 months for the first commits only to then have to argue about change orders with my eng team.

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

#55

Post by armc »

polote wrote: post #53
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…

> 1. Few business problems can't be solved by more sales. This obviously completely wrong. The only problem that can be solved by mores sales is when your are not selling enough. And even in this case just having more sales not always work. I'm the first to say that what matter most for a company is its ability to have more customers. But having more sales when you sales org is badly structured will make you loose a…

> This obviously completely wrong.

You might familiarize yourself with Rule #6 before commenting on Rule #1.

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

#56

Post by vanilla-almond »

scandox wrote: post #25

Kind of well known but I think bears endless repetition. There will come a time when someone in a very large organization will take an interest in your product. You're going to feel very validated because now you can tell friends, family, investors, potential customers that X is using/piloting your product. They may or may not give you money, but it will certainly be less than your time is worth. They will definitely…

David Heinemeier Hansson (of Ruby on Rails and Basecamp fame) once wrote a blog post with related advice on per-seat pricing (for a SaaS) and how this leads to chasing the biggest companies. One you've gained a very large company as a client, that company's outsize influence will affect features, fixes and direction in your product (in a negative way according to Hansson).

The Basecamp pricing model (flat monthly fee) is not often emulated by other startups, but it's worked well for Basecamp.

Why we never sold Basecamp by the seat ( (2017): https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-never-sold-basecamp-by-the...

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

#57

Post by Oras »

From a software engineer's perspective:

*I don't know how to sell.*

Well, have you been to a job interview and got the job? That was a closed deal. You understood the problem, you showed them why you not someone else and you got hired. That is selling.

I had to do it to understand it.

*If your solution will change the user workflow or behaviour, good luck*

I learned this the hard way.

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

#58

Post by SMAAART »

Learn practical "Game Theory", everything we do is a Game, whether within the company, or between the company and the outside world.

Above and beyond the above, also read "Finite and Infinite Games", the ultimate goal is to continue to play Games, and win the majority of them; if you play to win all Games, you will win all the "battles" (Games) but lose the vast majority of "Wars" (Meta-Games).

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

#59

Post by anyfactor »

I haven’t seen success at all. That's because people is super hard. Selling to people and managing people.

Selling is super hard. Ideas are worthless if you can't sell. My thesis is that make sure you have the connections to make the initial sells and you have the personality trait to ask for referral and grow from the initial sales.

If you haven’t figured out a way to guaranteed sales yet, don’t hope for a miracle with marketing. When you start investing in marketing you will find yourself convincing yourself you are investing in the goodwill which might generate sales down the line which is a lie*.

I think many people take on investors hoping that will lead to sales leads or an "in" in the industry. Sometimes that backfires because the investors will setup metrics, KPI and goals which is often based on sales itself!

Don't build something that the world needs, build something that you can sell!

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

#60

Post by bajsejohannes »

When starting a greenfield project, the programming language will affect the culture quite a bit. At such a project, I chose C# because it's a reasonably good language and easy to hire for. What I found was that there's a culture of writing—in my opinion—overly abstract code. Our coding challenge could be solved easily in 50 lines of code, but most candidates would submit huge projects with dependency injection, type reflection, class hierarchies, etc. It was hard to create a culture of simplicity.

Now, this is highly subjective, but I think the general lesson applies: Programming language choice is important for culture.

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