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Do “Shitty” Work

ryanhoover.me

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Re: Do “Shitty” Work

#21

Post by birken »

Don't go overboard though. The whole world doesn't play out with a hindsight bias, and just asking yourself in the morning "why is this important" wont necessarily actually improve your choices. I have seen some incredible successes coming from very unexpected places, places where had somebody asked themselves "is this likely a giant waste of time" the answer would have been yes.

At the end of the day, if your startup is going to succeed then you are going to have to do something amazing. If you are spending all your time stifling your own instincts to follow somebody else's playbook, you probably are in trouble anyways.

Re: Do “Shitty” Work

#22

Post by nthj »

beat wrote: post #6

Something I learned over the years... if your code quality is too high, it means you're sacrificing productivity.

The real magic is that after you sink enough hours into high-quality code, you can write the high-quality stuff just as fast as low-quality code.

Re: Do “Shitty” Work

#23

Post by weixiyen »

charlieirish wrote: post #4

This really echoes with me - I see too many startups focusing on the wrong things or more importantly forgetting that they need to do everything... 1) You still have to do the things that you're bad at You're a developer/designer/architect/[insert profession] so that's what you do. You build great apps or you design beautiful pixels. That's probably what people have paid you to do and that's also what you're good at.…

Doing the unscalable things only works if the LTV per user is very high. You can't just apply that every single startup.

Re: Do “Shitty” Work

#26

Post by RogerL »

beat wrote: post #18
philbo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't disagree with this sentiment more. Of course, it depends on your definition of quality, but for the sake of argument I'm assuming that we're including things like test coverage, code complexity, code cleanliness/readability, structural soundness (cohesion over coupling, the single reponsibility principle etc) and so on. The point with all of these things is that as much as they might seem to be a waste of…

It is dependent on the definition of quality. I'm not saying just throw crap code over the wall as quickly as possible! I've seen the consequences of that often enough. But I've also seen a lot of premature optimization masked as "quality", and at a certain inflection point, it becomes so time-consuming that it threatens the project. For example, do you really need 100% unit test coverage of all corner cases?

If it is the front end to a banking app, or otherwise involved with account security, then yes. If it is an "Angry Elves" game with no login, then probably not.

As always, these memes are useful to guide/test our thinking, but not very useful if used without reflection.

Re: Do “Shitty” Work

#27

Post by Game_Ender »

weixiyen wrote: post #23
charlieirish wrote: post #4

This really echoes with me - I see too many startups focusing on the wrong things or more importantly forgetting that they need to do everything... 1) You still have to do the things that you're bad at You're a developer/designer/architect/[insert profession] so that's what you do. You build great apps or you design beautiful pixels. That's probably what people have paid you to do and that's also what you're good at.…

Doing the unscalable things only works if the LTV per user is very high. You can't just apply that every single startup.

I always thought the idea was that the LTV is in getting a lot of users and you do that by making as good an impression as possible on your first users. Even if you are spend several times what your initial users bring in supporting them, if that creates enough traction to get a lot of users down the line you come out ahead.

Re: Do “Shitty” Work

#28

Post by sgold515 »

weixiyen wrote: post #23
charlieirish wrote: post #4

This really echoes with me - I see too many startups focusing on the wrong things or more importantly forgetting that they need to do everything... 1) You still have to do the things that you're bad at You're a developer/designer/architect/[insert profession] so that's what you do. You build great apps or you design beautiful pixels. That's probably what people have paid you to do and that's also what you're good at.…

Doing the unscalable things only works if the LTV per user is very high. You can't just apply that every single startup.

I think the main point about doing things that don't scale is so you can really understand what's going on in your market. No point in scaling a system that doesn't work.

Re: Do “Shitty” Work

#29

Post by pattisapu »

charlieirish wrote: post #4

This really echoes with me - I see too many startups focusing on the wrong things or more importantly forgetting that they need to do everything... 1) You still have to do the things that you're bad at You're a developer/designer/architect/[insert profession] so that's what you do. You build great apps or you design beautiful pixels. That's probably what people have paid you to do and that's also what you're good at.…

"The problem is that you focus too hard on what you can do and not on things you can't do."

Well put.

Re: Do “Shitty” Work

#30

Post by jmngomes »

weixiyen wrote: post #23
charlieirish wrote: post #4

This really echoes with me - I see too many startups focusing on the wrong things or more importantly forgetting that they need to do everything... 1) You still have to do the things that you're bad at You're a developer/designer/architect/[insert profession] so that's what you do. You build great apps or you design beautiful pixels. That's probably what people have paid you to do and that's also what you're good at.…

Doing the unscalable things only works if the LTV per user is very high. You can't just apply that every single startup.

It doesn't apply with to every startup, but it does to most.

Getting early adopters is usually a very "manual" process, even more so in B2B startups.

My business' sales will be entirely online once (if) it gets into cruise speed. Then, the CAC will lower and the LTV will rise.

But until then, I have to spend a lot of) time cold calling, getting intros and doing the first B2B sales myself.

If I don't do this, I won't have any customers from where to compute a CAC or a LTV.

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