21–30 of 348 posts
This thing about not noticing that you weren't paying payroll taxes wasn't a "mistake." It was pure head-in-assery.
How can you "miss" the fact that you weren't being subtracted for payroll taxes? One quarterly / annual review after another, for 3 years? It's like running a personal budget, and "missing" the fact that you aren't paying rent.
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
1. In my limited experience with pitching/salesing when you say "Yeah I think we can probably build that" the customer/client will take it as "We already have this". There is no amount of rational talking and explaining you can put in place to prevent this. If they ask for something, and your answer is anything but an unequivocal "No." they will think you already have it.
2. Isn't the whole concept of MVP and lean basically going out to people and saying "We have this" then seeing if somebody pays, and if they do, making it?
Mistake 1: Taxes This thing about not noticing that you weren't paying payroll taxes wasn't a "mistake." It was pure head-in-assery. How can you "miss" the fact that you weren't being subtracted for payroll taxes? One quarterly / annual review after another, for 3 years? It's like running a personal budget, and "missing" the fact that you aren't paying rent.
Amazing article. As advertised, it's not a self-aggrandizing "mistakes" post that points you at the end to the author's next venture. It's full of the kinds of things that keep me up at night. It reminds me of something similar that happened to me: I was running Adwords for the first time. The dashboard wasn't showing that any of my ads had run, and it kept telling me to up my bid amount. I kept upping it and upping…
Mistake 1: Taxes This thing about not noticing that you weren't paying payroll taxes wasn't a "mistake." It was pure head-in-assery. How can you "miss" the fact that you weren't being subtracted for payroll taxes? One quarterly / annual review after another, for 3 years? It's like running a personal budget, and "missing" the fact that you aren't paying rent.
Except that if you miss paying rent, they let you know, and quickly.
Mistake 1: Taxes This thing about not noticing that you weren't paying payroll taxes wasn't a "mistake." It was pure head-in-assery. How can you "miss" the fact that you weren't being subtracted for payroll taxes? One quarterly / annual review after another, for 3 years? It's like running a personal budget, and "missing" the fact that you aren't paying rent.
Except that if you miss paying rent, they let you know, and quickly.
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me. Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've…
Amazing article. As advertised, it's not a self-aggrandizing "mistakes" post that points you at the end to the author's next venture. It's full of the kinds of things that keep me up at night. It reminds me of something similar that happened to me: I was running Adwords for the first time. The dashboard wasn't showing that any of my ads had run, and it kept telling me to up my bid amount. I kept upping it and upping…
Thank you so much for posting this. We all make mistakes, and for each of those, there could be ten thousand HN'ers who would come along behind us and say something like "But how could you do X? That's stupid!"
Everybody wants to read business porn. Nobody wants to sit down and hear the ways they will likely screw up. Guess which one is more effective. We need this.
This took guts to do. It is one of the more useful posts I've read, and it will have a positive impact. Congrats.