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If only someone told me this before my first startup

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#21

Post by watters »

> There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers.

First, yikes.

Also, I'm quite curious about how productivity was measured here.

For a (successful) software business, the work output of developers is highly productive because the marginal cost of selling another copy of the software is so low.

SaaS delivery models may result in somewhat higher marginal costs compared to non-SaaS distribution models, but I'd be surprised to learn that it makes developer work the least productive component of the SDLC.

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#22

Post by gojomo »

tester756 wrote: post #19

>6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. While I can agree that hiring full stacks may be better at the beginning, then I dont understand 2nd part "There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers." WTF?

If shipping something requires a 'team' – coordination between specialists (or worse, multiple 'owners') – it'll be harder than when each cross-cutting feature can be done by a broadly-capable/empowered 'full stack' person.

(At least, that's how I interpret the OP, and don't understand your perception of any tension between 'full stackers best' & 'teams unproductive'.)

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#23

Post by x0x0 »

watters wrote: post #21

> There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. First, yikes. Also, I'm quite curious about how productivity was measured here. For a (successful) software business, the work output of developers is highly productive because the marginal cost of selling another copy of the software is so low. SaaS delivery models may result in somewhat higher marginal costs compared to non-SaaS distributio…

Team / interpersonal communication overhead, planning overhead, and dealing with less skilled members of the team can easily make 4 engineers roughly as productive as one very skilled engineer, just at 4-5x the cost once you include the increase in product/project management required by multiple people. We tolerate this generally because eg upskilling peers is important to scale a company, but pre-PMF it's a huge advantage to have just the one outstanding engineer.

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#24

Post by smitty1e »

tester756 wrote: post #19

>6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. While I can agree that hiring full stacks may be better at the beginning, then I dont understand 2nd part "There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers." WTF?

See the author's developers; raise him a faculty lounge full of academics.

Then defenestrate myself.

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#25

Post by smitty1e »

ttymck wrote: post #14

3. Don't chaise investors, chase users, and then investors will be chasing you. 4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. 5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup > My experience at multiple startups from 2017-2020 suggests differently. I wish it weren't the case, but it seems there is a certain type of company that can focus solely on hype and fundraising and headcount, and make it quite fa…

That's not a company; that is a scam.

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#26

Post by johnrushx »

watters wrote: post #21

> There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. First, yikes. Also, I'm quite curious about how productivity was measured here. For a (successful) software business, the work output of developers is highly productive because the marginal cost of selling another copy of the software is so low. SaaS delivery models may result in somewhat higher marginal costs compared to non-SaaS distributio…

the difference in productivity between 1 and 2-person teams isn't in 100%, but in maybe 50%. The more people you add, the smaller the productivity gain.

From my own experience, my most successful products have been built by one single full-stack dev. Who did everything

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#27

Post by from-nibly »

watters wrote: post #21

> There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. First, yikes. Also, I'm quite curious about how productivity was measured here. For a (successful) software business, the work output of developers is highly productive because the marginal cost of selling another copy of the software is so low. SaaS delivery models may result in somewhat higher marginal costs compared to non-SaaS distributio…

They aren't saying developers are unproductive. They are saying teams of developers are unproductive. In the words of my great grandfather. "one boy is one boy, two boys is a half a boy, and 3 boys is no boy at all"

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#28

Post by MattGaiser »

brigadier132 wrote: post #7

I find it insane that in many interviews of "founders" it was common for founders to say their job was to raise money.

A lot of companies, most notably Facebook, Uber, Doordash, and Amazon, took a ton of time to not lose absurd amounts of money, so I can see why that was the job. They literally had ideas that wouldn't have worked as companies without billions of dollars.

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#29

Post by Oras »

Good list but I don’t agree with all of them.

For example, post on Twitter everyday. It might have worked for some people before but I always found Twitter as noise and pointless. You can see startups getting likes for dump screenshots of revenue or milestones but it doesn’t really get you customers or real users.

The corporate one is spot on, I’ve had lots of interest from large companies but I couldn’t close any as I was a solo founder. They require lots of paper work, sales cycle is months, lots of stake holders … etc

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#30

Post by satvikpendem »

This is a good list (except for 11, survivorship bias means that investing in startups is not as universally profitable as investing in VTI). All of these though have been covered extensively in lots of books over the years that I'd assume even a cursory search of "how to get started with entrepreneurship and startups" would uncover, like Lean Startup, Mom Test, etc, for those who don't want to learn the hard way as it seems you have.
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