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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

#91

Post by ed25519FUUU »

> Partnering with store management systems made it easier to hack the supply side, but dictated our development efforts and unit economics. We had massive platform risk. If any of our partners cut us off, we were screwed. Data couldn’t be our competitive moat, because we didn’t own it.

What’s the other option for these guys? They’re not generating any of their data. There’s no way to own it unless you own hotel or tour operators which is not likely. Even licensing the data doesn’t qualify as “owning” it for this purpose.

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

#92

Post by acdha »

twawaaay wrote: post #35
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 don't think they necessarily need to be technical. But there is a huge advantage to being a person that can just roll up their sleeves and do pretty much anything that needs to be done, whatever it is. It does not have to be technical. It is a mindset of being open to researching stuff, trying to figure things out, accepting and learning from failures and doing 20% to get 80% of benefit. A person with this kind of…

Someone needs to be technical or they’ll get hit by a number of problems which are almost always fatal: consulting companies (especially the large ones) will take them for a ride, burning budget and likely failing to deliver something viable; they are likely to make bad hires because it’s hard to tell people who can’t deliver or, more commonly, who aren’t capable of building what the business needs right now; and the more general version of that last point, someone needs to be making sure that you’re building something secure, reliable, etc. which is compatible with both your budget and the kind of app you’re building.

That doesn’t strictly have to be a technical cofounder but if not that’s a significant degree of trust placed on an early hire.

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

#93

Post by robertlagrant »

lib-dev wrote: post #82
robertlagrant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be a happy Flutter convert if the Web output was better.

I think they're working on it. There seems to be an HTML renderer now in addition to the canvas implementation.

If they can survive the cuts then I definitely have hope. I liked Dart enough to be happy with using it; I like the Flutter ecosystem in general as well. It'll be interesting times in app development if they can make a better cross-platform solution than currently exists.

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

#94

Post by moneywoes »

xivzgrev wrote: post #72

This is sad. This was a large risk they decided to take with unfortunately not a lot of upside. As they learned the hard way, there are far cheaper and quicker ways to figure out if a business is viable. Namely, talk to users. Build a landing page and show it to users, or spend a little money on paid ads. Try to get email addresses. Etc I’ve made bad investments too so I know the feeling of seeing the upside while di…

Have you seen any guides on this? Are emails enough?

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

#95

Post by ekidd »

luckylion wrote: post #76
Aromasin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but agree. Technology is hard to grasp without study. Study takes time, which founders don't have. People with technical expertise are expensive. If you don't have the expertise yourself, you have to hire it. He's got 200k and he's bled 125k of that just to make his MVP. That's utterly insane to me.

App studios are often quoting high prices though. I have no idea about app development, but I regularly hear about quotes for relatively simple apps (i.e. you could do it with Wordpress and a custom theme as a web app) that are 30-50k euros. I don't know if these agencies just make insane profits or if they really make everything super complicated and need three developers working for a month to produce a simple crud…

The basic pitch that I've heard a (competent) app development shop make was, "Look, we have a reputation for doing this right. And it's cheaper to pay us to develop an app than it is to open up a coin laundromat."

I'm not sure if it's actually a good idea for a solo, non-technical founder to hire an app shop like that. Too many founders are deluding themselves, and will just lose all their money no matter what they do. But if you're the sort of founder who can get several B2B customers to sign non-binding letters of intent saying, "Yes, we would totally buy X if it actually existed", then those app development costs would be totally reasonable.

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

#96

Post by tripdout »

TuringNYC wrote: post #89
yolo3000 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've consulted in this sort of role for a startup which hired a dev agency. A few months in, we were behind schedule. I've asked them access to their git repo and built some graphs with the commits and LOC changes of every dev we paid for. It became clear that these devs were working on multiple other assignments and were not really dedicated to us. Without these sort of insights, it's hard to judge if they are hones…

I'll make suggestions to anyone doing this: - For slightly more legal protection, the code should be in YOUR OWN git repo, not the dev agency's repo - If you are giving some upfront $ or milestone payment, you should also contractually now own the code up to that point in time - You should not declare a milestone success (and should not pay) until you can independently compile the app straight from git (front end and…

If you can do all this, you're either already a developer and don't need to outsource it, or you have the ability to learn how.

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

#98

Post by jrochkind1 »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #24
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…

Those 126K spent on "App development". Plenty of money in CRUD APIs apparently.

Software development is much more expensive than people predict, including software developers.

Let's say you're paying $200/hour to a software consultancy -- which isn't as much as it sounds, the engineers doing the work will not be making anything close to HN-bragging-level of take-home at that rate, although they'll be doing okay.

120,000 is 600 hours of work at $200/hour billed. So that might be two engineers working about 8 weeks.

Does two engineers working 8 weeks seem so crazy for developing a novel app, full-stack from back-end to design? Not at all.

Software is expensive.

Which means, sure, there's plenty of money in developing it!

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

#99

Post by 300bps »

TuringNYC wrote: post #89
yolo3000 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've consulted in this sort of role for a startup which hired a dev agency. A few months in, we were behind schedule. I've asked them access to their git repo and built some graphs with the commits and LOC changes of every dev we paid for. It became clear that these devs were working on multiple other assignments and were not really dedicated to us. Without these sort of insights, it's hard to judge if they are hones…

I'll make suggestions to anyone doing this: - For slightly more legal protection, the code should be in YOUR OWN git repo, not the dev agency's repo - If you are giving some upfront $ or milestone payment, you should also contractually now own the code up to that point in time - You should not declare a milestone success (and should not pay) until you can independently compile the app straight from git (front end and…

Excellent but dangerous advice. I really hope non-technical people don't read the tips here and think they're now prepared to navigate this process.

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

#100

Post by ghaff »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #77
jrochkind1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OT, but I thought I'd ask, since you seem to have experience with this sort of work... In your experience, is it possible to negotiate work at a rate where one would only be working 2d / wk? I'd imagine it's hard to negotiate such an agreement with a company because they want work done on a faster timeline?

For contract work in general, both technical and non-technical, the answer really is "it depends."

Sometimes a company really does need something yesterday and you're the bottleneck in getting something released/getting revenue/etc. Bit I've also taken on writing and video projects for example that were components of a marketing campaign that was scheduled to launch some months down the road so it was a pretty part-time thing. Mostly I've worked on internal projects but the same principle applies.

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