31–40 of 229 posts
Sales, sales, sales. It's all sales. And when there is feature development, it's because you've sold an improvements to a customer (but make sure they commit first).
I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care. 3. Managing devs generally requires u…
To me, the key lesson is a modified version of 4: the founders must be able to build their tech themselves (buying off the shelf products as needed).
They do not have to do it. They can, and often should, get developer help. If founders have the skills to do it themselves, bringing in a developer is buying time. On the founders terms. They can pick the biggest pain they want to outsource at the price they can afford. If they cannot outsource something at a good price or fast enough they can always do it themselves.
If founders do not have those skills, they are buying capability, which puts them at the mercy of someone else when developing a critical piece of technology. This is a huge risk. Life does not always work like this, but if at all possible, startup founders should, giving infinite time, be comfortable developing the technology from A to Z. My 2c.
I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care. 3. Managing devs generally requires u…
A person with this kind of mindset will IMO almost inevitably become at least a little bit technical. Just enough to be dangerous and look silly a bit when they are out of their depth. I have enormous respect for people like that when they dive in into application development with no prior coding experience or can understand complex development ideas because they are truly open and willing and working to understand rather than put artificial barriers before them.
My key take from the article is the above line. It's hard to build a profitable software company when you are not coding yourself from the start, rather you are a visioneer and lead rented developers on what you want.
You mention to not build the website, iOS app, and Android app all at once before getting market fit. Which of the three would you start with to quickly iterate and get feedback? When you mention that you had to often walk into like a scuba shop to try to get a sign on, were people more receptive if you 'had an app for that' already?
Do Flutter and cover all 3. Okay Flutter Web is pretty bad, but if you are cash strapped and need to move fast, Flutter is the way to go. I expect more and more startups to embrace Flutter, it is easily currently the best solution on the market (for 99% of app ideas). Yes native will always be better, but if you are a startup, your focus should be building an MVP and getting to product-market-fit as fast as possible…
Don't start a marketplace without doing your homework.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do Flutter and cover all 3. Okay Flutter Web is pretty bad, but if you are cash strapped and need to move fast, Flutter is the way to go. I expect more and more startups to embrace Flutter, it is easily currently the best solution on the market (for 99% of app ideas). Yes native will always be better, but if you are a startup, your focus should be building an MVP and getting to product-market-fit as fast as possible…
Curious, why not React Native? I never heard anything bad about it in Android and iOS (except maybe the resource usage) and at least Microsoft is putting RN as first-tier framework in Windows nowadays.
This wasn't one of the lessons in the article, but hopefully it was learned: marketplaces are by far the hardest kind of online business to succeed at. The reason is simple: you must satisfy not just one but two entirely different sets of customers: buyers and sellers.
It's not 1 + 1 but more like 2 x 2 thanks to the bootstrapping problem. Buyers will only go where the sellers are, and sellers will only go where the buyers are.
So I kind of disagree with the author about the mote. A successful marketplace has a gigantic moat - its successful bootstrapping phase where the founders accomplish the extremely difficult task of attracting enough buyers and enough sellers to create an actual marketplace.