Ask HN: What's 'Due Diligence' when vetting co-founders? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's 'Due Diligence' when vetting co-founders?

#31

Post by cdvonstinkpot » Sat, May 18, 2013, 7:07 PM UTC

ericabiz wrote: post #25

cdvonstinkpot wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a credit card, but in the next 90 days, I expect to have access to enough funds to buy server #1. I'll get on a way to sell it in advance. I had an idea to market a special where I would sell an annual deal on the server for 25-33% off which wouldn't make much money for that year, but would provide enough capital up front to buy another server & expand right off the bat, so I wanted the website to featur…

> I'll get on a way to sell it in advance. Awesome. Really glad to hear you're ready to take the initiative. > where I would sell an annual deal on the server for 25-33% off You may not get people to commit to a year up front if you're brand new, but 3 months in advance can be pretty effective and still pay for most of the server. > I also wanted the website to feature a permission marketing campaign & collect email…

I have hosting, but it's static hosting only- no server-side apps on the backend, it's with Fastmail & it comes with my email service, so I want to use that for the site. It limits me to a static only site, but I'm okay with that.

I like Ribbon for payment processing https://www.ribbon.co because it works on any website, especially my static site. It's expensive, but the user experience it provides is worth it to me, I like that there aren't any hoops for customers to jump through to check out, its as simple as I'd like my own checkout experience to be. To me that's high-end & matches the image I have for the company to project.

I'll look into both Mailchimp & Aweber & see which I like. Thanks again for all the valuable info. I appreciate that you've taken the time to post such a detailed reply for me.

Re: Ask HN: What's 'Due Diligence' when vetting co-founders?

#32

Post by surfearth » Sat, May 18, 2013, 7:32 PM UTC

A minor nit about your ad copy is that you have misspelled Calvin Klein. I would encourage you to remove this whole sentence since it is irrelevant to the business of building a high-end hosting service. Hope this doesn't come across as negative, I'm just trying to help.

Re: Ask HN: What's 'Due Diligence' when vetting co-founders?

#33

Post by melbourne_mat » Sun, May 19, 2013, 12:11 AM UTC

cdvonstinkpot wrote: post #21

melbourne_mat wrote: post #16

I read about your business proposal on the tech co founder sites. Please don't take this personally but you come across as naive and amateurish. Hosting is a very easy business to get into, unfortunately it's a very difficult business to make money out of. Why will your business compete effectively with something like AWS - which has such enormous scale and brand recognition? You mention that you've done some work fo…

Maybe I _am_ naive, I'm not educated by any business school, and am just an ambitious guy with a few thousand dollars and a desire to ship. As for my experience with the previous high-end experience, it's unfortunate that I ended my term with 1 of the companies on not-so-great terms, and I wouldn't feel comfortable contacting them for help with anything, and they wouldn't be able to help anyway except with maybe a pa…

There's nothing wrong with being ambitious and only having 5k startup capital, it's just that these don't seem enough to serve the target market you're aiming at.

I would describe 'Big data' to mean the size at which traditional database technology stops being useful in your project. It's usually when the volume of the data is large.

I recently worked on a low end big data project. They had 4 very large, traditional database servers and the workload wasn't suited to that kind of server. They rearchitected, spent a bunch of money and moved to a 20 node hadoop cluster (each node was small - perhaps a few $k each). Because the workload suited hadoop they are now able to scale up easily and to great advantage.

Note that I describe that project as low end. 20 nodes is small in the big data world.

So when you say "I think it's possible to get a foot in the door with 5k", I think that perhaps you don't know enough about your market to make that statement.

Don't do anything further on this project until you've fully validated your business plan. There are some good ideas on how to do that in the other comments here.

Re: Ask HN: What's 'Due Diligence' when vetting co-founders?

#34

Post by cdvonstinkpot » Sun, May 19, 2013, 12:17 AM UTC

melbourne_mat wrote: post #33

cdvonstinkpot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I _am_ naive, I'm not educated by any business school, and am just an ambitious guy with a few thousand dollars and a desire to ship. As for my experience with the previous high-end experience, it's unfortunate that I ended my term with 1 of the companies on not-so-great terms, and I wouldn't feel comfortable contacting them for help with anything, and they wouldn't be able to help anyway except with maybe a pa…

There's nothing wrong with being ambitious and only having 5k startup capital, it's just that these don't seem enough to serve the target market you're aiming at. I would describe 'Big data' to mean the size at which traditional database technology stops being useful in your project. It's usually when the volume of the data is large. I recently worked on a low end big data project. They had 4 very large, traditional…

So I ought not mention 'big data' until I can be running the ScaleMP phase. In the meantime I'm just a run-of-the-mill dedicated server vendor.

Re: Ask HN: What's 'Due Diligence' when vetting co-founders?

#35

Post by cdvonstinkpot » Sun, May 19, 2013, 12:21 AM UTC

ryanSrich wrote: post #23

cdvonstinkpot wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't put anything on the web because I don't have a web dev. I certainly would like to have something up on the web, but I can't afford to at this stage of the game. I can barely afford the server #1 I need to get off the ground renting. I don't know if that means I need access to more capital but I like to think I can do this without more than $5k. If I had a web developer onboard with me, I envision there bein…

> I haven't put anything on the web because I don't have a web dev. Well you certainly don't need to be a web dev to get a site up and running[1,2,3,4]. To me it seems you're still in the customer discovery phase. How many interviews with clients have you had? 50? 150? I'd be willing to guess that you've still got a lot of work to do before you go looking for a web dev/technical co-founder. Without a thoroughly valid…

I wouldn't know where to begin to find the right customers to interview right now. At the moment I'm having second thoughts as to whether I can rightfully market myself to big data customers with just 1 server, no matter how fast it is. Apparently I need at least 20 servers to run small big data workloads, I have a bit to learn obviously.

I could try a Google AdWords campaign to ask some questions in a poll maybe, but that's all that comes to mind when I think of getting customer opinions- I'm really at a loss in that respect.