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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

#121

Post by Rastonbury »

matrix wrote: post #26

Not mentioned in the article: the market which this person was trying to enter is saturated with competition. These tour operators are bombarded with pitches for these things every day, and of course every one of them wants a cut of their hard earned revenue. It's a bad deal for a small business owner. They take all the risk, invest all the capital, while some SV firm comes along and kindly offers to scoop all the cr…

To add a marketplace is doubly hard, you have to acquire both demand and supply sides, running sales and marketing to 2 different groups. Targeting tourists/last minute is even harder because you need to be there at right place at right time. To make matters worse, there is a plethora of options for tourist, speak to locals or google or TripAdvisor

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

#122

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #98
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

Sure. Nevertheless, the "App development" budget for a startup with no users/clients should be $0, otherwise it's not a start-up, but more of a start-middle.

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

#124

Post by pc86 »

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.

At least 70K spent on development before a penny in bookings - and probably closer to 100K given the relative 2020 vs. 2021 bookings. Absolutely insane, and it's no wonder this guy lost almost a quarter million.

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

#125

Post by modo_mario »

robertlagrant wrote: post #37
newbie578 wrote: post #17

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…

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

Not having used it but having recently considered it what's so bad about the web output?

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

#126

Post by O__________O »

swyx wrote: post #68

> And finally, I ended up landing my first CFO role at a venture-backed tech marketplace. uh, what? without knowing more, and without insulting the author... this is a surprising outcome given the surface facts

LinkedIn appears to show the as CFO of PartsTech, which appears to have raised 16.5M+ according to Crunchbase.

Related links:

- https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/partstech-inc

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948

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

#128

Post by twawaaay »

cccybernetic wrote: post #114
twawaaay wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a technical founder, I agree with you to a degree, but not completely. I've come to appreciate sharp, non-technical founders with business acumen and who can see the "forest for the trees". There are times where being "technical" is actually a crutch, because you're more likely to: 1. Waste time / obsess over small technical details that in the grand scheme of things don't really matter, or at the very least, don'…

It is a bit like saying there is a risk to having technical knowledge and the risk is that the guy will actually try to use it.

You can't have a person that is an expert in everything. The best you can hope for is to have a person that is an expert in a key area for your business and then intelligent enough to be able to cover for a lot of additional stuff and wise enough to understand and work around his limitations.

For example, if I was non-technical founder but we decided to divide responsibilities so that technical matters are still my area, I would make sure to use whatever technical knowledge I have primarily to hire good technical people and to check their claims.

In a lot of modern startups, software development and business development are two key areas so it makes sense to have two founders, one with technical chops and another understanding business development. But that's not always how things play out in real life.

One thing is that there is a lot of range for "non-technical". We can be talking about non-technical person being able to understand how AI works in principle and what it can or cannot do but not being able to do anything in practice or write a line of code. Or a person that doesn't appreciate programming at all and has not even slightest clue to how computers work.

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

#129

Post by code_runner »

matrix wrote: post #26

Not mentioned in the article: the market which this person was trying to enter is saturated with competition. These tour operators are bombarded with pitches for these things every day, and of course every one of them wants a cut of their hard earned revenue. It's a bad deal for a small business owner. They take all the risk, invest all the capital, while some SV firm comes along and kindly offers to scoop all the cr…

I also want to say that an industry doing things on paper and in person isn’t always in need of a high tech overhaul.

Why would a scuba shop want to take on the burdens and issues of your tech solution? They are running a shop already. I don’t imagine they planned on becoming billionaires. Maybe they just like scuba and want to facilitate other people enjoying it too.

Telling ann established business owner you have a “better way” to do something is so arrogant. Not everything has to be hyper technologically advanced.

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

#130

Post by goldenchrome »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #123

126k out of 209k was spent for an android, iOS app, and a website. So 83k overall if you knew app development Basically this is telling me that I could be making side money building CRUD web apps apps with Flutter!

The 126k is not for standing up a Flutter app, it’s for putting up with questions and possibly being micromanaged by someone non-technical who’s very stressed out about how much money they’re spending but not versed in technology enough to ask the right questions. You’re getting paid for going through the relationship, not building the technology.
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