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Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#14

Post by unalone »

liuliu wrote: post #8
unalone wrote: post #5

The only thing stopping me is that I'm not entirely confident with PHP yet. I'm working on small sample projects until I'm certain I can go out and build everything optimally.

Prototyping fast, then start the second edition. Don't wait until you are confident enough to start. I find that whatever I do whatever language I use, I always do the best in the second version.

I'm mocking up every page in HTML right now. My cofounder and I are scouring over all the details, trying to make absolutely gorgeous pages. (I know every person who makes an HTML thinks this, but I truly think that the few pages we've finalized are superb.)

Next semester, I'm in an advanced PHP course - enough to really firm up the things I'm working on. I'll probably have a prototype made winter break, so I'll be able to fix up the beta and stabilize it as part of that class, and have a working model in time to apply for YCombinator this summer.

I'm working with other PHP projects so I can get confident enough in PHP to make my site. The code for it is really simple: one of the things that makes me certain about my idea is that it's an incredibly basic one that hasn't been used in the way I'll be using it. I'm not too worried about it getting complex, so I'll know exactly when I'm ready to dash it out. But HTML first.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#15

Post by aschobel »

Just work on the product!

It's way too easy to spend time on things that aren't core to your business.

Don't worry about where to open a bank account, where to incorporate, etc. This can all be fixed later on, and won't prevent you from making something people want.

Re: Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

#18

Post by aristus »

pg wrote: post #16

The two biggest time-sucks for YC alumni seem to be talking to investors and dealing with visa problems.

An interesting thing about YC is that it saves time spent securing funding at the early seed stage: a week on the application and a week preparing for the interview, with a definite yes or no by a certain date.

Can you see later stage investors (100k, 500k, etc) doing the same thing?

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