Getting hacker news'd is also contact w/ reality for your website/hosting platform :-D
Running a business means contact with reality
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#12Getting hacker news'd is also contact w/ reality for your website/hosting platform :-D
Crazy... 15 years after nginx solving the c10k problem...
Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#13After 20 years building software for other companies, I started my own thing a few weeks ago. The reality check hit fast. When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market. When it's yours, every signup or lack of one is direct feedback. No buffer.
> When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market.
You can still blame the market. A good market makes everything easier, a bad market makes everything harder.
But here’s the catch: You choose the market.
To share an example: When I started my react teaching side business in 2015 it was so easy. Growing 2x year over year, I thought I was some kind of business genius. Then one day it stopped. React became old, no longer the exciting new thing, the market consolidated into 2 or 3 big players with The Default resources and my stuff wasn’t one of them. I totally missed the land grab aspect of the early market phase and didn’t go hard enough on pure growth. Not a business genius after all.
Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#14Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#15Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.
I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.
Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#16Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.
Contact with paying customers, or eyeballs who refuse to pay is reality.
Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.
Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#17[deleted]
Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#18Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.
Contact with paying customers, or eyeballs who refuse to pay is reality. Contact with curious internet traffic crippling a non cloudflared webserver might not be.
Computers are fast now. You can serve five million hits a day with a webserver that's a shell script running from inetd. You don't need Cloudflare unless you're getting DDoSed.
Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#19Running a business means contact with people's opinions. Having your server fall over when you post it to Hacker News means contact with reality.
I suppose one could argue that both are equally real.
I remember one time at summer camp in the teen dorm I claimed that pain was an illusion, because it was subjective. A girl named Lisa picked up a wooden block and threw it at me. It hit my lip, which started bleeding, and she was immediately horrified at what she had done; but I had to acknowledge that subjective "reality" has an importance to me that objective reality does not.
Re: Running a business means contact with reality
#20After 20 years building software for other companies, I started my own thing a few weeks ago. The reality check hit fast. When you're an employee, you can hide behind process and blame the market. When it's yours, every signup or lack of one is direct feedback. No buffer.
Bad business people have been blaming outside forces for their failings forever. Taxes! Regulations! China! The Algorithm! It’s a symphony out there.