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I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business

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Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business

#61

Post by sarchertech »

mstade wrote: post #48
danielvaughn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, sign me up for that contract. Give me 100k-300k for a single website? That website is gonna be a thing of beauty.

You say that now, but in my experience most people able to shell out this kind of money very often doesn't really have a clue about what it is they actually need and have no reasonable go to market strategy beyond "let's just build it and they will come", and then it fails spectacularly. I've been on the receiving money end of this kind of project several times in the past and as much as you try to help and guide, th…

I’ve had the same experience. It’s almost never 100-300k to build an app where the client knows exactly what they want.

It’s $100-$300k to spend a year helping the client figure out what they want to build.

Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business

#62

Post by HideousKojima »

prakhar897 wrote: post #56

Shameless Plug. How do you sell before you build if what you're building is a game? I created https://diffudle.com/ a few months back without knowing what marketing, Idea Validation etc means. Wherever I posted, the overall sentiment was positive but the traffic to the site was still very low. Its peak was 1000 users but generally it hovered around 100 users a day. This is not enough to even sustain itself. Lately, p…

Playable prototypes, and sharing them with other game devs and/or people in your potential target audience to get feedback is the best way.

Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business

#63

Post by DeusExMachina »

> Lesson #4: Don't make everything reliant on code if you can't code.

I beg to differ.

I worked for a client a few years ago. The company was started by two non-technical guys. They outsourced their product to a freelance web developer.

They told me tales of how that guy was slow to fix problems and how the website went down for extended period of times when he made changes.

And yet, they grew the company because their customers wanted their product.

They first were able to hire their own web developer. From there, they added more employees. Now they have dozens of them and multimillion yearly revenue. They run ads on TV and are recognized nationally as the leader in their field. They are now expanding to other countries.

The problems of this guy were business related, not code related. It's evident from his lesson #1.

Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business

#65

Post by TuringNYC »

sarchertech wrote: post #61
mstade wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that now, but in my experience most people able to shell out this kind of money very often doesn't really have a clue about what it is they actually need and have no reasonable go to market strategy beyond "let's just build it and they will come", and then it fails spectacularly. I've been on the receiving money end of this kind of project several times in the past and as much as you try to help and guide, th…

I’ve had the same experience. It’s almost never 100-300k to build an app where the client knows exactly what they want. It’s $100-$300k to spend a year helping the client figure out what they want to build.

> It’s $100-$300k to spend a year helping the client figure out what they want to build.

This is one aspect, and having a CEO/Founder with a Product Manager hat on is critical to cost-effectiveness (MVP, low fi design, phasing, derisking, etc.) I cringe every time I see a founder spend money on design before the MVP is figured out and before functionality exists.

But another is cycling thru multiple dev agencies, each of which exploit them in different ways (see my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34595540)

Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business

#66

Post by amelius »

blagie wrote: post #9

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…

> I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets:

Even if you're a technical founder you should be sceptical about your own idea and putting all your eggs in one basket, and being played by VCs who spread all their eggs over different baskets.

Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business

#67

Post by jrochkind1 »

blagie wrote: post #9

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…

So, if it's very hard to start a software company based on paying contractors for software development -- which seems true to me -- there's another warning here for software contractors/consultants.

If someone is paying you, as contracting engineering talent for hire on a consulting/hourly/iteration basis, to develop an app or product they hope will be the foundation of a new business -- chances are high this won't actually work out for them (despite your competence and best efforts), and chances are high they will end up angry at you for taking so much of their money to develop something that didn't end up developing the business they wanted, with possibly legal action to try to claw back some of those funds.

I have some personal observation of this. Even doing work agilely with review every two weeks and the client only paying once they've reviewed and approved the work in that two week period, and approved your work plan for the next two week period, even with all that -- after a year or two they can still threaten or carry out legal action to try to claw back of some or all of the money they've paid you.

So, these can be very dangerous clients. And that you are trying to do your best and give them a quality product -- you aren't trying to exploit them or take advantage of them, you think you were delivering what they asked for (if they asked for the wrong things is that on you? turns out, they may think it is) -- will not necessarily keep you out of these difficulties.

Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business

#69

Post by swyx »

newbie578 wrote: post #17
thegreenswede wrote: post #6

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…

and Flutterflow is a pretty decent low code solution for nontechnical types
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