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After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

dylanhuang.com

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Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#111

Post by johannes1234321 »

BartjeD wrote: post #99
lazide wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every step of the way. - right product? - right market segment? - right marketing? - right execution? - right scalability post basic execution? - right sales approach? - right post sales approach? All of these have 10 different paths (in reality), any of which if you take the wrong one could end up in some kind of expensive dead end or spectacular failure.

You are zooming out, and when you look at an abstraction from a distance it's easy to miss the details and just boil it down to probablities. The reality is that you measure and get information on all of these things to determine more accurately what odds you have. The act of measurement changes the probabilities, because if you do it right you will know more than you did before.

However the measurement has to be done right or it will mislead and will take time, which your competitor uses to overtake or at least counter you.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#112

Post by entropyneur »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #33
tptacek wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need funding to cover your monthly nut, you need a plausible path to hyper-growth; the portfolio math doesn't work for investors otherwise. If you set out to build a small-scale sustainable business, and you succeed , you can avoid funding. But if you're pivoting to something entirely new mid-to-late-ways through your company, you've probably burned down most of your reserves.

> If you need funding to cover your monthly nut You can get funding for that?!

Before 2022, that would have been series B material.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#113

Post by notforviewingit »

Sytten wrote: post #69
notforviewingit wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I have been wondering this myself as well. I'm one of 3 co-founders in a bootstrapped company doing consultancy for a few years in a LCOL area. We have been paying founders 50k/year salaries for the life of the company. We haven't been especially lucky and we haven't been super brilliant in our business decisions. Yet we are doing fairly well. This year we made 400k revenue, 150k profit and 40% growth. Our sales…

Product and service businesses are very very very different things. Service you get immediate cashflow but the thing doesn't scale past the humans. Software scales infinitely in theory, but it takes a lot of time to build before you even get 1$ out of it.

You can hire people into consultancy business and grow it like any other business. Sure it won't become the next magnificent seven, but you can grow it enough that you can make a lot of money.

For example, there exist plenty of consultancy companies that have 10million revenue. That would be 20x growth for us. In practice that would mean 500k - 1m yearly income for founders in our case. On top of that the company probably could be sold for 30m - 100m.

With typical vc dilution founders need to grow a very successful product company to earn similar amounts of money. There are plenty of examples of unicorn exits where the founder team has made less.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#114

Post by rkuodys »

Tostino wrote: post #77
mediaman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why people even think about selling $10/mo licenses. Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. Customer problem discovery is easier, you get reputation network effects within the vertical, you gain trust because you learn the industry lingo, you can actually solve peoples' problems b…

Hell, I went straight for 20k/mo (average) with my SaaS. The key is providing a good value proposition. My software would save my customers more than they would spend on it yearly, while outsourcing $50-300k/year in salary worth of work that previously had to be done in internally (usually incorrectly). You always need to solve an actual business problem that people are willing to pay to fix.

Would you be willing to share insights and help with mentoring in private. I'm going this path (building SaaS) and would appreciate someone with experience to share to discuss topic.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#115

Post by sfjailbird »

mediaman wrote: post #31
Sytten wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People say that but as someone trying to actually do that, it is freaking hard to commit to 3-5 years of virtually no salary to maybe get to the same outcome you would have had with a funded business. You need to sell a lot of 10$/month licenses for it to even viable to a 2-3 people startup in a developed country. There is also the cost of opportunity to consider in that.

I don't understand why people even think about selling $10/mo licenses. Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. Customer problem discovery is easier, you get reputation network effects within the vertical, you gain trust because you learn the industry lingo, you can actually solve peoples' problems b…

There's gotta be a name for this fallacy. "This enterprise software sucks and is extremely expensive, so we will build something that is actually good and become billionaires!"

This is the graveyard of engineer driven startups in the enterprise space, who make the mistake of thinking that software quality matters. The fact is it is not a top priority, if it is even a priority at all.

In the enterprise space, if you're not a Fortune 500 company, all that matters is 'relationships', by which I mean sleazy sales processes (or actual nepotistic friends-and-family relationships).

Joel Spolsky wrote a great essay once about why there is no software priced between $1000 and $100,000. Because above $1000 you need a sales team that takes purchasing managers to strip clubs and play golf with CEOs, and that shit adds up. On the plus side, your software can be dogshit, like the stuff you work with every day.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#116

Post by ndimares »

NetOpWibby wrote: post #35
ndimares wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Caveat that I work for Speakeasy, but there are a few tools you can look at: - Speakeasy - Fern - Stainless First SDK with Speakeasy is free and we also have discounts for companies who are just starting out. Feel free to shoot me an email if we can be useful: nolan@spakeasy.com :)

Typo in your email btw

I'd like to say this was a clever ruse so that real people could reach me and bots wouldn't, but that'd be a lie. I just fat fingered it.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#117

Post by ndimares »

bwood wrote: post #57

As a customer of Konfig, I am super bummed about this. I think we may even have been their first customer (referenced in the init commit). Dylan and Anh-Tuan solved a number of real problems for us, and they did it spectacularly. They essentially provided a one-stop-shop for generated SDKs and beautiful hosted docs/tutorials that would call our API and immediately allow users to start playing with real data. Prior to…

If you want a lightweight API docs replacement, I'd recommend Scalar. Simple and easy to use, but so much better than Swagger docs...

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#118

Post by Hendrikto »

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. […] We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business.

American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be huge. Businesses should focus more on sustainability, and not shut down after 2–3 years after pivoting three times.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#119

Post by lazide »

BartjeD wrote: post #99
lazide wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every step of the way. - right product? - right market segment? - right marketing? - right execution? - right scalability post basic execution? - right sales approach? - right post sales approach? All of these have 10 different paths (in reality), any of which if you take the wrong one could end up in some kind of expensive dead end or spectacular failure.

You are zooming out, and when you look at an abstraction from a distance it's easy to miss the details and just boil it down to probablities. The reality is that you measure and get information on all of these things to determine more accurately what odds you have. The act of measurement changes the probabilities, because if you do it right you will know more than you did before.

And sometimes you start in a place (or take directions into a place) which put you at such a disadvantage with competitors that you can’t ‘win’. It’s rare you can know that while it’s happening though.

In theory all these things are controllable and no problem is unsolvable. Sometimes it’s even true (post-facto however, more often than not). That view is often the best for succeeding (or more precisely, NOT having that view often puts one at a disadvantage when it comes to succeeding).

But the probabilities are often the more accurate model. That is often the best model for deciding if you want to take a bet, or for comforting yourself later if it doesn’t actually work out perfectly. It really doesn’t help though (most of the time) with actually doing successfully.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#120

Post by olavgg »

ianpurton wrote: post #106

The developer tools market is REALLY difficult. Nearly every architecture decision is "which open source tool can I use to solve [problem]". No one wants to pay for anything and that's ok.

Not really true, but dealing with 50x 10 USD invoices is not something I want to waste time on. Is there a business that can bundle different services with just one invoice? Or do I still have to use AWS, Azure, GCloud?
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