You can't please everyone.
Whether it is implemented features or design choices (e.g. product logo, etc.), the more people you ask, the more differing opinions you will receive.
Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
201–210 of 256 posts
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
11. Get a prenup. No, really, do get one. While true, unfortunately in many (blue-leaning) states, they're starting to become at the judge's discretion. Absolutely sickening to be honest.
Oregon state has destroyed my good friend’s entire life. Child taken away, only get 4 hours a week of time with his kid. My friend is smart, kind and nicest person you’ll ever meet. Personal net worth fucked. One of the reasons for me to consider leaving California.
> Oregon state has destroyed my good friend’s entire life.
Sorry to hear that.
> One of the reasons for me to consider leaving California.
You do realize that California is not an administrative subdivision of Oregon, but a completely different state, right?
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#203- The cheaper you price your product, the cheaper customers you attract. I get a lot more support tickets for customers that paid $45 than those that paid $1500. Discounts often lead to the same issues. - Your competition is not better. Even if your competitor has 1000 employees, that doesn't make them better, they more likely work a lot slower and less efficient than a smaller company. Also, a big company is more li…
A good client can provide more than revenue. All the staff that have contact with them will be exposed to their expertise, inspired by their high standards, and bring back their good business practices.
A bad client can poison a company culture with their own problems and cost more than money.
It's as important to have good clients as it is to have good employees.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#204Here'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…
All excellent advice. Damn - I'll just skip that MBA now! I'd expand #9 a bit:
9a: Don't hit on your co-workers
9b: Don't sleep with your co-workers
9c: Don't date your co-workers
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here. I think it's useful for us to get a glimpse into your thought process and start a discussion. Though I empathize with the overall desire, you sound inexperienced to me, as in, you might have had some failures that you attributed to lack of planning or business decisions, etc, but you haven't learnt from successes, because some of the stuff you're saying is just extreme counterpr…
You have it completely reversed, a rock solid codebase is much more important in an agile environment than a waterfall one. In waterfall you just need to tick the feature boxes. In Agile you not only need code that readily accepts changes, but you need to provide visibility to the business side about the state of your technology so they know not only the opportunities but also the costs of the problem. The only reaso…
Well, I don't disagree that a rock solid codebase is important in either environment. It's the cost of change that is usually at stake, like you mentioned, and that's why I'm arguing that flexibility is more important.than code quality in an agile environment, particularly at the beginning of a project when there are the most unknowns.
You're hitting the nail on the head about burning out though. I suppose it's just the way the cookie crumbles.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#206Apply 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.
Which industries do you consider as the lowest hanging fruits?
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#207These are more enterprisy: If you sell through a channel, that channel is your customer, not the end user. They have needs and actually those needs (not desires, needs) are more important than the end users' -- if your channel doesn't sell the product it doesn't matter how much you've worked to add that end-user feature. Have the entire exec team go on a sales call once a quarter (not all together on the same call!).…
Is it really a bad thing if you hyper-grow by just focusing on one client? It takes time to get a lead, so why not focus on the leads you don’t need to get?
If you have no customers you'll work on your project and eventually give up. If you have multiple customers you have a business of some sort. If you have only one you are in a dangerous place.
A case study from last year. I'm on a board of a company that had a small product under way but got excited by a much larger market. They even got a customer who paid a small down payment (~75K). So they spent more than a year developing the new product (several engineers on staff) in close partnership with this customer. We board members kept urging the CEO to find a second customer but he was more interested in engineering than sales. You can guess what happened: after a year the customer declined to make the second payment of ~75K. So I called the customer and he said he wouldn't pay but would just buy the company for a pittance (less than had been spent on development). The board declined, and as I predicted the customer attempted to recruit the development team, so we just fired the customer. He was quite irate because he had built this into his own development plans, but fuck him. The one fun part was that he couldn't re implement what he needed himself as we had patents they would need.
If that wasn't bad enough, the customer's use case was quite specific and not adequate for the broader market. So further development was needed (development that would already have been done had there been marketing and product management) before the company could even try to enter the market.
In the end I had to come in and do a restart and spin out. A regular starup would have died.
It doesn't have to be as bad as that. But a big company can be committed to you and then cancel a whole product for whatever reasons that have nothing to do with you.
And I wasn't kidding with the Google example. They have struggled to develop new lines of revenue, even pulling puny old Nest back onto their balance sheet for an extra percent or two of non-advertising revenue. With a more diversified revenue stream wall street analysis would drive the stock price up. If there's a secular change in the advertising market they really would suffer. So this advice isn't just for startups.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oregon state has destroyed my good friend’s entire life. Child taken away, only get 4 hours a week of time with his kid. My friend is smart, kind and nicest person you’ll ever meet. Personal net worth fucked. One of the reasons for me to consider leaving California.
> Oregon state has destroyed my good friend’s entire life. Sorry to hear that. > One of the reasons for me to consider leaving California. You do realize that California is not an administrative subdivision of Oregon, but a completely different state, right?
> One of the reasons for me to consider leaving California.
It's required on HN for rich tech guys to threaten this from time to time.
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#209[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?
#2101. 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…
> And some people change their character 180 degrees when they are drunk. Not sure how to defend against that, though. maybe not letting people coming to work drunk? Or forbidding drinking while at work?
People used the company PCs on the evenings and weekends to play LAN games. Disallowing alcohol would have seriously reduced morale for the rest of the team. But actually I was referring to friendships between people who met at work and then when the work became too stressful, their personal relationships suffered for it.