I came to this post literally 2 minutes after rage quitting doing some UI design for a startup idea I have. I was trying to make it look too shiny. Thank you for reminding me to be more authentic.
Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
21–30 of 135 posts
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#22I see the same in the consulting space - people who've barely ever talked to a prospect let alone had an actual customer (I happen to know from talking to folks like that) have a shiny website with pricing packages talking about "their team" and what not. Feels like pure hustle culture. I started my business a year ago, and there is no "we". There's me and (at this point) enough clients for comfortable living. I went…
In a past role, one of the things done was to create an IVR system that had all manner of different menus for sales, support, or technical questions and they were split by whether you were a casual or enterprise user. There was just one person answering, no matter what you selected. The goal was to seem sophisticated and thus more reliable and trustworthy.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#23I see the same in the consulting space - people who've barely ever talked to a prospect let alone had an actual customer (I happen to know from talking to folks like that) have a shiny website with pricing packages talking about "their team" and what not. Feels like pure hustle culture. I started my business a year ago, and there is no "we". There's me and (at this point) enough clients for comfortable living. I went…
Some feedback:
If im a prospective customer I dont care about
“Over time, I aim to use this income to bootstrap a software business based on one of my side projects.”
Tell me how you can help me make more money or save more money. Your side project ambitions are not relevant to your customers.
Instead I would recommend personal info on an about page or a separate site for your side project.
For your background info this should come later, please tell us what skills you have and recent projects you have done straight away so I can understand if you are the right consultant for me, I dont want to first read your life story!
Note: feedback can be hard to receive and give, please treat feedback as a gift, I am trying to be kind, but also nice and kind are not the same thing, so if my feedback is unwanted or seems blunt that is why!
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#24With the advent of ChatGPT & its brothers, it's easy to generate fake text and visual effects that are eye-catching.
And companies look for more experienced/bigger companies rather than startup-level ones, which have less trust, when it comes to cooperation/business.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#25There's some irony and conflicts of interest.
People make slick landing pages and try to get interest to decide if enough people sign up for a thing that doesn't exist yet, then "it may be worth building it"
But also potential customers are fed up of such tactics and want to actually try a product before signing up to another thing which may or may not ever exist.
So what happens in the end sometimes is that the developers may think "nobody signed up for it so I will pivot".
Would love to hear opinions and experiences about it though for success and failure.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#26Haha check our scrappy website https://opral.com
We got a bug report once that „the website is not loading“.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#27Next time you read the testimonial section, copy paste the author's name into Google. You'll find that they're made up.
They also share the same stock photo of the smiling woman in red.
It's borderline fraud.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#28Yeh. Makes it intimidating to try to make a startup until you realise it’s just generic polish over some cobbled-together SaaS APIs and docker containers. That’s what depresses me. You don’t need good tech, you just need business sass, marketing, and networks.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#29I see the same in the consulting space - people who've barely ever talked to a prospect let alone had an actual customer (I happen to know from talking to folks like that) have a shiny website with pricing packages talking about "their team" and what not. Feels like pure hustle culture. I started my business a year ago, and there is no "we". There's me and (at this point) enough clients for comfortable living. I went…
Some feedback: If im a prospective customer I dont care about “Over time, I aim to use this income to bootstrap a software business based on one of my side projects.” Tell me how you can help me make more money or save more money. Your side project ambitions are not relevant to your customers. Instead I would recommend personal info on an about page or a separate site for your side project. For your background info t…
Thanks for the feedback! I was actually pondering about that sentence. I don't think it helps sales in any way, it's just me trying to be transparent, but it's probably too prominent for how irrelevant it is.
In an interesting plot twist, at this point, I enjoy my consulting work more than working on my own projects, so I'm not even sure this is still my strategy. There's something about genuinely helping people that I find more rewarding than building things nobody asked for by myself.
Edit: Ah, you added some more thoughts - thanks for those too! I might revisit the content of that site and maybe even add a sub page one of these days I think.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#30All the low-hanging fruit has been picked. You can't start with just a crappy app that solves a problem, you have to get all the packaging around it right too.