> If you aren’t sure what your cofounders are doing, trust your git instinct.
That's good advice to not lose your HEAD.
The side hustle from hell
101–110 of 146 posts
Re: The side hustle from hell
#102Everyone wants someone else to do the hard part, but wants to "own" something Bitches, owning something is doing the hard part !
This attitude is also very common. When I see a small company with lots of "leaders" and far fewer doers, it's a huge red flag.
Re: The side hustle from hell
#103“Look at the specification. It does not specify anywhere we were asked to support screen dimensions larger than iPhone 4s sized.”
I wonder how many outsourcing firms are going to be replaced by vibe coding. This response is pretty on par with many of the horror stories responses I've seen over the decades...
Re: The side hustle from hell
#104The first red flag is a startup that is contingent on a two sided marketplace... damn that's a tough place to be!
The only times I've ever heard of this working are when you have a huge war-chest to subsidize both sides of the marketplace to come out and play on your app. If you can offer better prices than normal to both sides (with the gap made up from your raises) it can work. Otherwise? I'm not sure it can.
Re: The side hustle from hell
#105This isn't so much about the Author's story but the space. He is correct that marketplaces are hell, and especially auto repair market places. I was one of the several devs that went through trying to make Openbay work (a US based market place for auto repair). We actually did have service providers signed up and we did have a way to acquire customers who wanted auto repair. So you had the illusion of product market fit - but the problem is that it's really really hard to get people to actually click "buy this brake job" and then, more importantly, they have no reason to come back to your app because 1) you don't need brake jobs all that often and 2) they can just go back to the service provider. And many shops are happy to still take phone calls as their default way of booking work.
The reason the company existed is the rich founder was upset that a shop wanted to charge him a fortune to get his BMW M5 repaired. He wanted better quotes. So we built a marketplace to get better quotes. But that's not what real customers want (because most people have Toyotas not M5s). And also we didn't do the customer development / research to understand how repair shops work. You want to know how my repair shop manages their repair schedule? They have a paper calendar and write down your phone number and the job. sure there are better ways to manage the work - but this paper mechanism has worked for them for years and why change it? And you know what - I go back to the shop all the time because I trust them. Ultimately people tend to have a fairly personal relationship with their local mechanic. You can build a leadgen product but the ultimate relationship is between the customer and the repair provider.
TLDR - everyone should understand the lean startup. /working backwards model and relentlessly focus on the customer.
Re: The side hustle from hell
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would even say it was a worthwhile experience. I've built my career off the startup I landed in, I probably wouldn't have got there without being burned here.
Any advice for leveraging a startup role to boost your career? I’ve seen friends turn their positions at early stage companies (Pre-Seed/Seed/Series A) into things like raising funding for their own ventures, hosting galas at SF museums, putting on international fashion shows with their alma mater, or even speaking gigs. And honestly, I have no idea how they pulled it off.
Feels like you might get better advice asking your friends who’ve done the thing you can’t understand?
Re: The side hustle from hell
#107This article reminded me of the time a guy wanted to pitch his startup idea for me to develop. He wanted me to sign an NDA before telling me, as the idea was so great that I would obviously steal it, which I refused. So all he would tell me is that it was “the next Twitter”, and from what I could gather, he would retain the majority of the equity and I would do all of the work, while he lobbed ideas at me from on hig…
This needs to be highlighted: Everyone who does anything at all in the realm of business or tech should basically never sign an NDA unless it is already positively guaranteed they are getting something out of it. You might be required to sign an NDA once you have been hired at a W-2 job if the company handles sensitive data. Or if you have already been offered a contract. Event then, make sure it is actually necessary, and run it by your lawyer.
But if someone wants you to sign an NDA just to hear about their idea or business, or as a condition of being interviewed for a job, ALWAYS say no. VCs don't sign NDAs and neither should you. It's plain and simple uncompensated risk.
https://blog.jpl-consulting.com/2012/04/why-i-wont-sign-your...
https://www.markwelchblog.com/2009/08/26/why-i-dont-sign-nda...
Re: The side hustle from hell
#108I've always been surprised at the sheer amount of work that's outsourced in software/IT.
Even companies that had staff of developers would often outsource work that should be part of their core competency. Without fail, every time, they ended up with a bill ~an order of magnitude higher than they'd pay if they were just hiring competent staff to deliver the project.
In many of these cases, these same firms would then hire another (lower quality) company to maintain it for them. This typically went as expected.
I could never understand the rationale for a lot of these cases.
"The existing staff is busy"--but they could have two hours of meetings with us daily?
"They don't have competence in those areas"--they're already using $CLOUD and $THAT_STUFF? It often was working with existing systems?
"Costs"--again, see above.
I really could not understand the motivation. I get it for clients that had no experience in what we were sent to do or got sold on something they didn't need, but a majority surely had or could get the resources to do the projects that were done, but opted not to, for whatever reason.
I've seen this kind of thing fail on many occasions.
If it's critical for your business, (ya know, not some LLM demo or something), you need ownership, otherwise you end up with a far larger cost of ownership and piles of logistical and quality problems.
I genuinely can't imagine a start-up doing this. Everything I've seen is private sector companies, most ~competent companies.
I'll say this, the cases where I have seen success in consulting (from the perspective of the 'buyer' is those that were intimately involved with the process from the start, providing feedback and pushing back when needed and taking initiative deliberately to "on board" so they could maintain and use whatever it was they got, and typically working alongside consultants)
You also have to basically avoid most consulting companies. I won't name them, but it's not hard to guess.
Re: The side hustle from hell
#109Extremely relatable. I was the first technical hire for a startup that ultimately failed last year. I did at least have a (below market) salary, and there were no outsourcing headaches, but I really did spend an inordinate amount of my time trying to perfect a product that the founders had no idea how to market. I certainly learned a lot, though it made me a little cynical about startups and the tech industry in general. Maybe in a couple more years I’ll feel more positively about the whole experience.
Re: The side hustle from hell
#110This isn't so much about the Author's story but the space. He is correct that marketplaces are hell, and especially auto repair market places. I was one of the several devs that went through trying to make Openbay work (a US based market place for auto repair). We actually did have service providers signed up and we did have a way to acquire customers who wanted auto repair. So you had the illusion of product market…
> Ultimately people tend to have a fairly personal relationship with their local mechanic.
This is the money line. And it goes for all skilled trade work. Mechanics, plumbers, building contractors, roofers. Most of the people doing this work are just surprisingly bad at it, especially for how much they charge for it. It takes a LOT of time and effort to find someone good. I'd even lump doctors and dentists into this.
I don't want a marketplace to tell me who's the cheapest, I want a marketplace to tell me who's the best. And unfortunately there's no way to build that. (Why is a long story, but the short version is: because there's no way to build the correct incentives into it.)