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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?

#241

Post by systemvoltage »

pc86 wrote: post #237
systemvoltage wrote: post #200

Earlier 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.

Did he have a prenup?

No, I don't think so but my memory is a bit hazy, this was around 2013 time frame. All I remember is that he would prepare, spend a whole week planning for things he would do, and when the kid was with him, he'd most sincerely enjoy those 4 hours, every second of it. Makes me tear up just thinking about it.

His ex-wife was a trainwreck, they faught and for so long, lost $100k+ in just attorney fees and yet, the Portland judge wouldn't give him a break. I couldn't fault a single thing in his character and offered to be a witness. His attorney did their best to put forth a case, had a psychology auditor evaluate his mental health, everything is flying colors. Still, the judge wouldn't give more time with his child.

FUCKED UP. Makes me angry just thinking about it. It made me realize that there is evil in this world in the most visceral way.

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

#242

Post by throwaway2016a »

TruthWillHurt wrote: post #100
throwaway2016a wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Tests are for teams of contractors that don't know how the product works.

The opposite. Tests are for people who know exactly how the product works. It's very hard to write good tests if you don't understand the product (or at least your piece).

I really hope you are being sarcastic. Tests when done properly speed up development and make your product more robust and resistant to breaking changes.

For a proof of concept that will never see production, sure, by all means don't write tests. But in my 15+ years in CTO and Principal role at smaller companies, the most expensive projects with the most downtime are always the ones without tests.

Tests make software cheaper not more expensive. And the ROI isn't even that long... all it takes is for two to three iteration / release cycles.

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

#243

Post by warble »

pilom wrote: post #134

Charge more. Charge more. Charge more. Every problem you have gets easier if you charge more. Every metric you track will improve if you charge more (including customer satisfaction). Charging more: 1) gets rid of most toxic customers. 2) increases customer LTV which allows you to spend more on acquisition or get more money for the same marketing cost. 3) helps you pay employees more which makes it easier to hire. 4)…

This took me a year or so to learn when I first started. I was trying to bring value to the customer - fine. But to me that meant 'cheap work'.

This is terrible, bring value by providing good work and CHARGE for it. People will respect you more, you'll have more revenue to buy tooling, hire better employees, build better products and do R&D on the next step. If you don't have the money, your customers will suck you dry, and you'll never get to build anything new.

There's a limit of course, but figure out what that is and approach it.

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

#244

Post by mickael-kerjean »

alex_sf wrote: post #197
domenicrosati wrote: post #119

In 10+ years of startup experience on the science and engineering side. Sales fixes everything and is the hardest thing. If sales can execute then there is no problem. It seems obvious but it's really not and people make the business about the mission and product - that stuff is secondary seriously secondary. As a founder and early employee - you need to know if you can execute on sales or not and make it clear to bo…

> Sales isnt something you can learn to do Strongly disagree. There is a consistent overlap between strong technical folks and skills/personalities that make it more difficult to learn to sell, but you can absolutely learn it.

Spot on. As a techie learning sale for my side project, I will never be the best at sales in the same way someone out of a bootcamp doesn't match the skillset of a Bjarne Stroustrup or a Rich Hickey but quite often you don't have to be the best at something for it make the difference between 0 and something that grows.

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

#245

Post by paulcole »

azth wrote: post #239
paulcole wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Quite presumptuous of you to assume that.

You can check the HN guidelines, it’s right there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#246

Post by kennethh »

altdataseller wrote: post #129
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…

I'd modify 10 to: 10. You're only as happy as your wife. If she's unhappy, you're unhappy.

If wife is unhappy get a new one:)

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

#247

Post by benhurmarcel »

ehnto wrote: post #178
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.

I keep peddling this idea, but if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for small to mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. The reason for that is the same reason your idea works, most businesses outside the tech bubble stand to gain a lot form software. Currently they have no way to act on it except to hobble together a ruby goldberg…

> hobble together a ruby goldberg of SaaS services or try and cram their businesses into a monolithic piece of software that expects your business to run a certain way

In practice the most common option is to have everything run on massive Excel sheets, with spaghetti formulas and VBA coded by long-gone employees or interns. But it works.

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

#248

Post by slashnik »

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…

1a) and be sure you have those sales, and keep them

I know a startup that failed because they thought they were doing ok on sales, but it turned out: lots of people were signing up for the product, but then not using it, or not being able to, and un-signing soon after.

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

#249

Post by altdataseller »

kennethh wrote: post #246
altdataseller wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd modify 10 to: 10. You're only as happy as your wife. If she's unhappy, you're unhappy.

If wife is unhappy get a new one:)

Haha I’ll probably be cycling through hundreds of them in my lifetime if I followed that rule ;)

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

#250

Post by vagrantJin »

cosmodisk wrote: post #62
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.

This is amazing advise. People working in tech, especially in high tech orgs live in bubbles and often imagine that the whole world is like this. I know a multimillion £ business that probably gained hundreds of thousands in productivity by simply introducing shared mailbox. Some of those low hanging fruits are litterly on the ground ready to be picked up.

> Some of those low hanging fruits are litterly on the ground ready to be picked up.

Why we are talking about low-hanging fruit instead of picking them up? I have a hunch they aren't low hanging after all.

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