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

Corollary #1 - Marketing /sales is hard. Relative to tech / code it's at least 10x more difficult. Code / tech v human behaviour?? Which is easier to predict and sort out.

Corollary #2 - Nobody cares. You might love your baby (i.e., idea / product / startup) but nobody cares. At all. See Corollary #1 for more details.

When signing up for marketing/SaaS specialized blog/aggregator article submissions, don't use an email address you want to keep using, because you will end up on thousands of marketing lists.

Also, just don't do that anyway. It was a total waste of time, focus on legitimate grass roots sales activities. I thought I might as well give it a go, as they said they'd get the app on ProductHunt and so on. I was skeptical of that, but no harm if it doesn't work. It didn't work and it was a generally scummy experience, and some of the submissions they made on my behalf were very embarrassing for me. Wrong place, wrong tone, wrong words, that kind of thing.

Agenda, timeboxing and action items for meetings is absolutely the biggest, best, low hanging fruit in the modern workplace.

I disagree, and that's why I responded. I've seen too many "we'll do whatever we need to do to get sales" turn into salespeople making unrealistic promises on impossibly tight deadlines.

So then the sale is made, but in a way that ends up destroying the long (and even medium) term health of the business. Product/engineering goes on a death march to get things done, by the end of it many of those folks are burnt out, customers are unhappy, and sales folks see the writing on the wall and are happy to bail with their fat commission.

It's like saying "do whatever you need to raise your stock price." There are healthy and unhealthy ways to do that, and the advice is useless if you don't carefully distinguish between the two.

23 years exp...

My #1: Get really good at user testing so that you minimize risk every step of the way. I can't say this enough as it has totally changed how I approach startups, new features, and core assumptions (and weirdly my personal life).

My #2: If you have co-founders, make weekly rituals to ensure you stay in sync over everything else. When you get out of sync, bad things happen. This can also be applied to investors, board members, spouses, etc etc etc...

My #3: If you are making a bet write it out in detail about what the bet is, what the assumptions are, and then write in detail why you are doing each piece and examine it from multiple POVs. Writing that down over a period of weeks ensures a good thought process most of the time. Write it out as if you are giving a presentation. This has helped me in so many ways.

Those are the big ones that have been huge with startup/business/life.