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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

#151

Post by fragmede »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #142
moomoo11 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me shudder to think people actually hire dev agencies to build their early stage product. Having worked with some in the past in a different life I absolutely despised those people for being both terrible engineers and people (my experience working with big outsourcing companies). Why hire people who don’t care that much to build something the founders definitely care a lot about? Are there any examples of t…

One of the reasons that I am working on the project that I'm on now (for the last couple of years), is because a friend of mine had set up a 501(c)(3), and was looking to develop an app, out of his own pockets, and through solicited donations. The main problem was, he didn't really know what he wanted (non-technical). He asked me to sit in on a couple of his enquiries to developer agencies. It was a shitshow. I had r…

Sounds more like you got suckered into working for cheap by someone you know. Unless the app is drastically different than the last CRUD app the firm did, 3 months is plenty of time to run find-replace on a codebase.

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

#152

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

moomoo11 wrote: post #145
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons that I am working on the project that I'm on now (for the last couple of years), is because a friend of mine had set up a 501(c)(3), and was looking to develop an app, out of his own pockets, and through solicited donations. The main problem was, he didn't really know what he wanted (non-technical). He asked me to sit in on a couple of his enquiries to developer agencies. It was a shitshow. I had r…

Nice good luck to u and ur friend

Knowing exactly what you want is really important, and where most non-tech people fall down.

It's very easy to come up with vague, hand-wavy "big pictures," and a different matter, entirely, to make it happen. Those "details" will kill you.

That's why having not just a technical founder, but one that has experience shipping is important (IMNSHO).

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

#154

Post by pc86 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #142
moomoo11 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me shudder to think people actually hire dev agencies to build their early stage product. Having worked with some in the past in a different life I absolutely despised those people for being both terrible engineers and people (my experience working with big outsourcing companies). Why hire people who don’t care that much to build something the founders definitely care a lot about? Are there any examples of t…

One of the reasons that I am working on the project that I'm on now (for the last couple of years), is because a friend of mine had set up a 501(c)(3), and was looking to develop an app, out of his own pockets, and through solicited donations. The main problem was, he didn't really know what he wanted (non-technical). He asked me to sit in on a couple of his enquiries to developer agencies. It was a shitshow. I had r…

This speaks to me. Around 2012 or so I had a semi-technical friend (PM, could tell when there was a lot of bullshit being thrown around but not a dev by any stretch) with an idea and he needed a Facebook page/app. Remember this was back when people were building a lot of brand experiences inside of their company's FB pages, and this was similar. I quoted about 30-40k. He got a quote from one of these offshore places for about half that and went with them. 60k in billings and change orders later, he comes to me asking for help. It's an absolute shitshow. Code was terrible, absolutely no organization, no error handling, no logging, obviously not a single test anywhere. It was a pretty stereotypical example of offshore devs trying to do as little as possible to show "progress" while billing day rates because everything now was considered a change. Multi-page emails listing out problems and asking for status on 15 different tickets would get a response 23 hours later of "will look into this quickly thank you :)", etc.

I offered to rewrite the entire thing from scratch for a flat rate 15k and some equity but was turned down. Last I heard they were about 100k in by the time it "launched" and it shuttered maybe 6 months later. So this guy burned 100k but more importantly about 2.5 years of his life on this thing while a bunch of terrible devs and a charlatan CEO made off like bandits.

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

#155

Post by nicbou »

amelius wrote: post #66
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.

What do you mean by that last sentence? I'm not familiar with startups.

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

#156

Post by nluken »

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…

The best way to become a tech entrepreneur is either to start incredibly wealthy, or build a product yourself. I wince at the number of non-technical folks that have deluded themselves into thinking that they can "do the business side of things" when in reality that means bringing nothing to the table, save their money.

OP's case is a warning to these folks. He actually brought negative, not zero, value to his startup because he grossly misread the market he was trying to enter. I worked at TripAdvisor for a while on their tours product, and even years ago we were already doing what OP was talking about.

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

#157

Post by pnut »

gowld wrote: post #144
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…

#2 is highly suspect. Technical people create all tech debt.

Hard disagree.

Nontechnical micromanaging founder demands feature goes live by end of day, find another job if you reply with impotent nerd excuses. Tomorrow will be the same, you will not be circling back to clean anything up.

It may be strategically or tactically acquired, but tech debt is fundamentally a business decision.

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

#158

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #142
moomoo11 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me shudder to think people actually hire dev agencies to build their early stage product. Having worked with some in the past in a different life I absolutely despised those people for being both terrible engineers and people (my experience working with big outsourcing companies). Why hire people who don’t care that much to build something the founders definitely care a lot about? Are there any examples of t…

One of the reasons that I am working on the project that I'm on now (for the last couple of years), is because a friend of mine had set up a 501(c)(3), and was looking to develop an app, out of his own pockets, and through solicited donations. The main problem was, he didn't really know what he wanted (non-technical). He asked me to sit in on a couple of his enquiries to developer agencies. It was a shitshow. I had r…

> "Get back to me, when you know exactly what you want."

This is so important if you want to maintain a good relationship. I'm working with a client who has very little money and while the system he wants is almost trivially simple, he's funding it out of his own pocket. After he initially was bouncing from "cool idea" to "cool idea" and had a heart attack at my very reasonable price, I told him to take a step back and write down the most important features and I'd quote that.

He did that, I built it and he loves it. Now he wants version 2 and we're back to the "wouldn't it be great if..." all over again. Sure, it would, but you already said you can't afford all that crap. Now I'm back to the "stop. Think about what you really need, forget the cool IoT features and focus on the basics then get back to me."

Sorry, needed to vent :-)

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

#159

Post by actionfromafar »

fragmede wrote: post #151
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons that I am working on the project that I'm on now (for the last couple of years), is because a friend of mine had set up a 501(c)(3), and was looking to develop an app, out of his own pockets, and through solicited donations. The main problem was, he didn't really know what he wanted (non-technical). He asked me to sit in on a couple of his enquiries to developer agencies. It was a shitshow. I had r…

Sounds more like you got suckered into working for cheap by someone you know. Unless the app is drastically different than the last CRUD app the firm did, 3 months is plenty of time to run find-replace on a codebase.

I read it he volunteered to work for cheap for a friend, out of charity, or pity even. Your second sentence I don't quite understand, you mean the original shop did a bad job? Well, yes.

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

#160

Post by johnward »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #86
nonrandomstring wrote: post #49

Lost is a wobbly word. If we put $200k on the table, in stacks of crisp clean bills, and said "This money is going to found a start-up", then four years later there's nothing left.... that stings. On the other hand, suppose you (foolishly) frame things like the RIAA/MPAA do, that every lost opportunity is a real financial loss. And suppose you're smart enough to go and work for BigTech pulling in $100k/pa. But instea…

Exactly. Don't think of it as a "loss," think of it as a "student loan." Now, losing $200K sounds like something you can benefit from in the long run (which you can, with enough introspection.). It's not as if you just went to Vegas and bet it all on black.

Betting on black probably has a higher success rate than the average startup though.
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