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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

#221

Post by matesz »

barelyauser wrote: post #176
matesz wrote: post #83

The article is very nice, but I can't find OP saying how much money he has in the bank.. I am solo founder and invested literally all my money into this mad startup pursuit. There is a difference between loosing $200k with comfortable cushion and spending your last $10k.

Why does it matter? A failed business is a failed business. If a person is hit by a car, does the car care for the bank account of said person?

It’s important from transparency point of view - loosing $200k when $500k laying around in a bank is like a non-issue. So what that 200k is lost if his life is basically exactly the same as it was before?

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

#222

Post by bemmu »

pc86 wrote: post #191
firefoxd wrote: post #167

I had two customers. One came to me after he couldn't get a company in the Ukraine to cooperate. He had already paid them $25k and the website was barely useful. This was an san fransisco exGoogle product manager with more money than sense, zero coding skills, and in love with subscription services. I charged him half for 2 months of work and got the website in front of paying customers. Then $1000 a month for mainte…

Probably bogged down by downloading too many pixels ;) On a serious note though there is something extremely impressive about someone with no coding experience creating a website that makes them money. Even if they're not coding. It'd be like asking someone who can't cook to open a successful restaurant. If it happens at all it's impressive, but doubly so if you don't even hire a chef you just figure it out as you go…

They probably still knows more about computer terminology than I know about hairdressing terminology.

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

#223

Post by iopq »

ipaddr wrote: post #29
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?

Start where your customers are

So I can't use your app because "your customers" are on iOS and I don't have an iPhone?

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

#224

Post by bob_theslob646 »

EleanorKonik wrote: post #220
greyhound_7 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, sell her the "hacker news hug of death plan" and put her website on the Cloudflare free plan. It's like an hour of work...

I'm still immensely grateful to all the HN folks who helped me recover from my hug of death a year or so ago by teaching me the Cloudflare tricks. I'm with Ghost Pro now instead of Wordpress, but man, IDK what I would have done without the Cloudflare advice in the meantime!

May you reference what they are talking about? Does cloudflare prevent you from DDOS?

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

#225

Post by kevstev »

sbilstein wrote: post #196
kevstev wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they are coming from tech, the fact that they couldn’t convince a former colleague to work with them means they’ll be a terrible manager. I kind of disagree here. I have been a manager at F*NG and just below those places in terms of pay, and getting my guys to jump to a startup without market fit, for the pay that those types of places tend to offer, I don't see how they would make the jump. The product/idea wou…

Well, in this scenario, you are actually the 'former' colleague getting recruited to be a co-founder while the other folks stay stable. You just admitted you would and I wouldn't be surprised if there is a PM or even another engineer who would want to join forces. That's different than a complete stranger recruiting you -- I would be very wary.

This was a real scenario I faced and the company/founder was a complete stranger to me- I forget if he just found me on LinkedIn or it was through angel list- I would not have been a cofounder just their CTO. Either way I ended up taking another offer with somewhat lower risk- they were extremely successful but turnover there was on the order of 25% per year. And I did end up taking some people with me and lasted about 5 years there so it all worked out.

I check in to see if the other company ever made it anywhere and nothing ever comes up so I guess I wasn't missing out on startup riches.

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

#226

Post by mlboss »

Octokiddie wrote: post #40

> There's a reason everyone has a clever idea for a marketplace - they don't require you to actually build a standalone, unique product. And the technical barriers to entry are lower than high tech (like cybersecurity). 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…

The simplest online business to start is making plugins/addons for other big softwares like wordpress/shopify/saleforce/atlassian products etc. We easy to start with and help you in developing coding/deployment/marketing/sales chops. Once you are comfortable start a SaaS and then marketplace.

People starting marketplace as first business are just delusional.

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

#227

Post by exadeci »

idopmstuff wrote: post #120
bluedino wrote: post #14

> I'll never depend on a 3rd party dev as the main means of production again. He spent over half of his money on it as well. I've had more than one person come to me with their business idea, and they have a terrible website (or app) that they have spent 100, 200, or even 300k on. And it doesn't even work. If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-foun…

I would wager heavily that this could've been a Shopify store. A few hundred bucks for a premium theme, a few hundred a month to run it, and maybe some overseas VAs at a few bucks an hour to help fill in the vendor/event details. OP's LinkedIn shows he's never worked at a very early stage startup. I really can't recommend that enough before starting a company - being immersed in a culture where things are scrappy hel…

Definitely! And the migration to a proper custom-made platform would have been easy, just a matter of migrating the database instead of getting developers to start on a mess of tech dept.

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

#228

Post by FrontierPsych »

danielvaughn wrote: post #21
bluedino wrote: post #14

> I'll never depend on a 3rd party dev as the main means of production again. He spent over half of his money on it as well. I've had more than one person come to me with their business idea, and they have a terrible website (or app) that they have spent 100, 200, or even 300k on. And it doesn't even work. If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-foun…

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

I got $1,000. What am I going to get from you? Nothing is not an acceptable response.

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

#229

Post by rwallace »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #67
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…

In general of course you're right, and this is a very good point.

> 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.

But I would've thought that way of doing things, sounded pretty ironclad. If in every fortnightly review of progress so far, they thought things were going well, how did they end up retroactively changing their mind after a year? Can you go into a little more detail about how things went wrong? Was it a case of 'they were a startup selling waterproof teabags, you built them an online store, turns out there is no market for waterproof teabags, and they were looking for someone to blame'?

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