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Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

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Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#331
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Product is on autopilot, company ran out of money and couldn't raise further funding. I'm not offering help to find product/market fit and not showing these things to sell the product. Just offering help to fellow founders trying to get something off the ground. I managed to do that part. Btw sorry for your issues with the product. We were a small team, we raised $2m in 2019, but didn't launch that product until 2021…

Not a problem, it's a good idea and a good product, i hope you find a way to continue this adventure, but if you want to sell it you can reach me throug any social media platform that is on my profile

Not selling it but I am looking for someone to help maintain the infrastructure so if it's of interest let me know.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never apply through LinkedIn. It is so low-friction that the vast majority of applicants are nowhere near qualified, and hiring managers quickly learn to ignore anything that came in from LinkedIn.

What should one do instead?

Find someone in the company that’s a second order connection and ask for a warm intro. Most companies still have a recruitment bonus for internal employees and after a short conversation most will tell you they’ll tell the internal hiring manager to look at your resume.

The higher up on the career ladder you are, the better this works and more important it is if you’re not getting in via recruiter.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99.9% of startups never have a need for more scale/infrastructure than a single VPS. Maybe a dedicated server. Cloud infrastructure is great when organizations actually need it. But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more.

> But I think most startups would save money and time by keeping it simple until they really need more. Having done this several times I can definitively say given my experience it's best to start in the cloud with a cloud native architecture. I can run a fully containerized application in ECS or EKS for a few hundred bucks a month. Why would I incur all the costs and limitations of a VPS or even worse a server I hav…

I have to disagree. There is an initial phase where a startup can simply use docker to provide their service. Having prepared that initial layer they can easily "scale up" and move parts to cloud services as they require.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm often perplexed when I hear people complain about cloud costs. I can't tell if people just have really different workloads than I've experienced or if they just haven't considered cost when they pick their compute, databases, etc. If you use object storage, some serverless database, and some serverless compute a small company (by which I'm thinking "normally very low volume with occasional, very important, often…

These complaints mostly seem to come from folks who are spinning up lots of VMs and architecting solutions the same way they would build in a data center. If you're running VMs 24/7 of course it's going to be expensive.

This feels right to me. If you build with lambda, api gateway, and s3/dynamo a small business can stay pretty close to the free tier. Obviously this doesn’t work for every single application, but I’d bet there are a lot of VM applications that it would suit just fine.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to be close to it if you are willing to give up saving like you used to. If you can prove any traction I be you can raise a little money from FFF for a few months more.

Okay let’s play this out. A few months is 2. For the sake of this hypothetical let’s say it’s 3. You’re saying that someone can build a product that’s capable of having investor level revenue within a few months? Or not even revenue, but more than 5 companies using it? This one person is not only building a fully functioning software product that’s capable of being useful to companies, but also doing high levels of n…

I've built stuff in 2 months that was production ready indeed (3D apparel designer webapp) or I've built a video recording service that synced a PDF to your webcam over a weekend.

Long story short, you can start sooner than quitting with research, prototyping. The key is to get the scope right.

But I agree that "few" has a different meaning for us. I did suffer with sales, but that's another story.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#336
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a problem, it's a good idea and a good product, i hope you find a way to continue this adventure, but if you want to sell it you can reach me throug any social media platform that is on my profile

Not selling it but I am looking for someone to help maintain the infrastructure so if it's of interest let me know.

I do have interest, how can i contact you?

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#337

How does someone currently unemployed by choice with a good financial cushion take advantage of this if I don't have any startup ideas I'm deeply passionate about? I've kept an eye on the startup market and all I see are exceedingly boring ideas with mind numbing pitches around them. "Democratizing shipping!" "Disrupting the collaborative saas text editor market!" Edit: wow the ideas in OP are dumb as hell too.

Hey you and me are on the same boat. Feels like putting on the glasses from "They Live", but maybe I'm not that misanthropic about it..I've found that it's exceedingly hard for me to not look at the big machine around me as I'm 'doing my job' of cranking the lever. In my voluntary time off I've just been playing with sculpture, reading books, and generally trying to understand this entire thing from the outside, bein…

Hey thanks so much for sharing your experience. How am I faring? I’m faring OK. Since leaving my job I’ve drastically changed my environment, moving from a rural cottage to a bigger city with more going on, tech and otherwise. I’ve identified some volunteer opportunities I’m interested in but haven’t taken any steps to capture them beyond creating online accounts to see upcoming events. I’ve setup my environment to enable creative endeavors like writing, weight lifting, and playing some instruments, but similarly haven’t taken the steps of actually utilizing these spaces.

As is probably apparent, I’ve been dealing with depression for years. Despite the description, things are better lately but I’m still having a hard time finding an identity beyond what was wrapped up in work over the last decade.

Anyway, probably more than you asked for! I’ve always had a passion for 3d and gaming, and I feel like there’s some opportunity out there related to this that’d be perfect for me, but I can’t get around the exploitative nature of the industry. I’d make my own but wrestle with what I mentioned above: I just can’t find any ideas that I’m excited enough to work on.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote is hard to make work with juniors, unfortunately.

Tell me about it. I don't mind helping someone, but when they don't pay attention the first time and I have to have the same exact meeting again, it's kind of a bother.

We've had some success with recording meetings and using automated transcriptions, though we don't have any fresh out of college juniors now.

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#339
post #117

Happy to help anyone starting up. I raised a couple mil in seed funding for an open source project after bootstrapping for a few years. I'm sure the YC crew would be more helpful but I got rejected by YC like 8 times and took the direct route to funding. We built this https://M3O.com . It was based on this https://github.com/micro/micro Just happy to help given my own tough experiences. Pitch deck reviews, intros, et…

Have you got a spare 30 minutes to have a look at my pitch deck? How can I contact you?

Re: Tech layoffs are feeding a new startup surge

#340
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial institutions that own significant equity in twitter still publish their valuations https://www.axios.com/2023/01/29/fidelity-cuts-twitter-valua...

Ha! Interesting. Thanks for that, I stand corrected.

I expect Twitter to be worth even less than 40% with that $8B in debt on the books.
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