Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless the product you are selling is defective.
Assuming the product that has been sold actually exists!
Even if it doesnt. It generates cash (you can borrow against a p. o I think) and pressure to ship the product.
Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
91–100 of 256 posts
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#921. Verify that co-founders are emotionally committed to stay. For my first startup, I lost half the founding team when things started getting stressful. Needless to say, that made things even more stressful. 2. Don't trust big companies to take you seriously. I've been burned by "lets use market leader XY" and then later "why won't market leader XY return our calls" and then "we're offline due to market leader XY not…
> 1. Verify that co-founders are emotionally committed to stay.
Thank you for saying that. I would also add that being a solo founder has many advantages including avoiding flaky cofounders and dealing with painful equity negotiations.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#93Customers will pay late. Some never pay. Plan for that.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#94As 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 per…
In my case, I haven't really considered integrations tests, as I didn't have the time. Only the bare minimum unit tests "it('should render or shouldnt fail')"
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#95Maybe this is actually obvious, but it's still a common mistake in startups so I'll say it - you don't have to believe your product is good to start selling; you just have to be better than not having the product. You don't even have to believe it's the best, or believe it's complete, or even like it . People will happily give you money for anything that makes their pain point slightly less painful.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#96It's super easy to fall into the trap of working on things that don't matter. Most startups are busy toiling on features/partnerships/etc that don't actually impact their growth or move the needle in a significant way.
Ultra-successful startups are actually caught by some wave or catch the market at the right moment -- the business takes off and the team is trying to catch up to it.
It's possible to create that momentum, but you need to really understand your customers/market so you can make sure you're focusing on the right things.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#97GAAP is crap.
Cash is king.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#98- The decreasing barrier to ship products means sales & marketing is what differentiates successful products versus products with 0 users. - After building a high growth / high churn product, I am OK sacrificing decreased growth for a significantly decreased churn rate. Great product with high churn is a hard business to build, even when customers love the product. - One of the highest leverage decisions you'll make…
typo: great product with LOW churn is hard to build :)
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#991. Verify that co-founders are emotionally committed to stay. For my first startup, I lost half the founding team when things started getting stressful. Needless to say, that made things even more stressful. 2. Don't trust big companies to take you seriously. I've been burned by "lets use market leader XY" and then later "why won't market leader XY return our calls" and then "we're offline due to market leader XY not…
"Verify that co-founders are emotionally committed to stay."
You can stay around too long - I stayed following an acquisition of the company I had co-founded and other co-founders left. Was an utterly miserable experience winding down the team I had spent years building up.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#100As 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 per…
Tests are for teams of contractors that don't know how the product works.
The talented person that built the thing knows exactly what a change will require, and how to test it before pushing his code.
Don't be an enterprise too soon.