a lot of the twitter startup and indie dev are totally phoney. they share numbers saying they making money but what they really sell is their course or discord channel or whatever scam they can use to milk their base
Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
61–70 of 135 posts
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#62All 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.
I'm not a businessman, but I don't think so. Case in point: Beeminder. Their web app has a bit of an "unfinished" feel to it – definitely not a "modern SPA", rather a traditional Rails web app (not that it's something bad, quite the opposite!), but it solves a real problem and has stayed afloat for over 10 years now.
I don’t know Beeminder. But if they launched 10 years ago, they are not a case in point. By now, they probably stay afloat despite feeling unfinished, because they have established marketing channels and word of mouth. Would the same service with the same presentation be as successful if they launched today? Hard to tell.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would suggest to fix the orthography to “PS: Nothing is broken about this page. It's just simple on purpose. :)”. Simplicity is nice, but correct punctuation and capitalization is also appreciated as a proxy indicator for professional diligence.
fixed the capitalization https://github.com/opral/monorepo/commit/6127c6899290b35442c...
Kudos for the transparency of your monorepo, and in addition to its simplicity, the lack of tracking on your homepage.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#64I 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.
Did it at least ring through to that person differently depending on menu selection or did they want to seem properly enterprisey by immediately asking all those questions again?
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#65If you look at our product metrics, then numbers are anemic. Constantly, I get messages from all the corners not to publish the numbers that make us look bad. But that's the reality. That's how most of the startups start. https://blog.neeto.com/p/neeto-marketing-updates-for-decembe...
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
inlang's website is beautiful
thanks. do you understand what inlang is by looking at the site?
No
Mainly because:
> The globalization ecosystem for software companies. Plug inlang's products together for market expansion and a broader customer reach.
I have no idea what that means and who it’s for.
I don’t know if this is exactly what your product does but maybe a heading like:
“The developer platform that makes data integrations easy”
That at least tells me who is the buyer and what benefit I will get
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#67[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#68I agree that in many cases people are puffing their feathers to try to be something they're not (at least not yet). Some believe in the fake it until you make it mentality. With NeuML ( https://neuml.com ), the website is a simple HTML page. On social media, I'm honest about what NeuML is, that I'm in my 40s with a family and not striving to be the next Steve Jobs. I've been able to build a fairly successful open sou…
I love your website. It's awesome.
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#69I worked with a startup late last year and they were prerevenue with a small amount of investment. They hired an agency build everything for them. This is why all startups look a like. Founders fear looking messy. The tradeoff is massive. You trade polish for intimately understanding your product and customers. To get there you need to be willing to sit through the mud and dirt of a unpolished product. It is painful and many do not want to do that. So we end up with vanilla products which still can be successful but yea that's basically it
Re: Ask HN: What happened to startups, why is everything so polished?
#70All 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.
A crappy app that solves a problem would be an upgrade in a lot of cases, rather than a company engineering a problem to justify an app that’s been created.