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I love the discussion about all this. For a bit of context, I kept the article focused on the technical because that is the primary audience of my website. There is a criticism that I focused too much on the technical side in the article. That's entirely possible. My choice to focus on the technical is because my lessons basically boiled down to: 1. Don't focus on the technical (#1 YAGNI, #2 Ignore software upgrades,…
Is this a postmortem postmortem?
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The only problem with not caring about the technology, is if your solution is trivial to replicate then anyone with a bunch of cash can come in with hired gun coders and out advertise you. Hard to replicate technology gives you some kind of a moat to at least slow down copy cats. edit: Oh, I see, the guy in the article was just throwing together random open source stuff not actually developing anything of value. Neve…
I'm not sure "hard to replicate technology" is a moat I'd often bet on, given that by definition that does not deliver any specific advantage to your customer. User Experience. Developer Experience. Community. Those are moats you can bet on primarily because it takes so much dedication, expertise, and work. That's not easy to buy.
While I do not have experience of running my own start-up, I have with keen interest seen people build start-ups around me and by far the biggest leading factor to their success is the team. The team is everything. Sure, you can maybe sketch up a decent app and maybe sell it to couple businesses but then what? You'll be over your head with work and maybe hire some of your friends and if things work out well, it could work. But why didn't you hire those great friends then in the beginning? Why didn't you cofound the company together?
See there's something about people working cohesively in groups that just outmatches anything that a 1-man team could do. Now I'm generalizing here a little, but the fact of the matter is that alone, without your peers to constantly revalidate, build and improve your business-idea, you'll be miles away from those teams that are actually doing it. And if the idea sucks, you'll just pick another one. It's just that easy. When you have a group of friends who are that driven and capable as you are, it's only matter of time when your start-up actually takes off. There are so many would I say "mediocre" folks running perfectly good companies because they had great co-founders, had those social skills and networks to grow larger and eventually it became self-sustaining.
Hmm it's still a bit hard to pinpoint the exact reason why I think it is so. Maybe if I put it in this way: you are creating a machine made of humans. In the heart of it is the dynamo, the moving force. That is what keeps it moving. And even if it would one day be gone for some reason the machine will keep running, by its inertia, for who knows how long. But to build this starting unit, this dynamo. It is what starts this whole process.
In this case, sure you made the wrong calls with your tech choices. Understandable. But if you had a good co-founder, or even better a good team, I'm sure you'd have together figured out in no time that this was a dumb way of doing this, and picked up something you knew and were able to execute with quickly. It could have been just jQuery and PHP5 and be just as fine as any new framework (with a massive technical debt waiting, sure) but that alone would have not killed your start-up.
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> native JS works just fine for most simple interactions like startup apps Oh god please don't. I worked with a startup whose "lead" (i.e. the person with the most seniority, not the smartest) insisted the whole front-end could be done with plain JS ("angular, jquery, etc... just useless bloat!!!" said the lead developer). What resulted was the biggest rats-nest soup of untraceable mess I've seen in a while. The only…
Plenty of people create rats nests using frameworks, too. Would forcing the “most senior but not the smartest” person to use a framework they don’t like really have fixed your problems?
Adding to this with what one can focus on...
Start with an empty mind identifying your customers’ or audience’s problem.
Then answer with the technologies that make the most sense to solve it.
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Businesses don't exist to save money. They exist to deliver value. Your goal in a startup shouldn't be all about saving money like some cheapskate penny pincher. Penny wise, pound foolish. Worrying about $100/mo in heroku bills instead of $10/mo "bobs budget webhost" bills is a waste of time. If your startup cannot afford $100/mo or even $1000/mo in infrastructure costs you probably should exist. Especially given sma…
You are so clueless and off the mark I wonder if you're trolling or are some teenager that watching a lot of entrepreneur videos. A dollar saved is a dollar earned. AWS is a terrible choice unless you have a huge amount of free credit. Also, an income of $4000/mo puts you into the average American household income bracket. Why would you throw away 25% of that on infrastructure to save 2 hours on the front end? Not ev…
I think many people's corporate jobs don't prepare them well for the world of startups. You tend to focus on optimizing some subset of a feature/product etc. With a startup you need a much broader skillset and need to ship quickly. So you need to master some subset of tools to be full stack and be able to launch something in 2-4 weeks. Taking more time than that and you're just setting yourself up for failure. The ha…
When I talked about a startup I worked at, and how most of our backend was written in Node.js, and about how we tried to improve our UI to make it more customer friendly. He quickly dismissed all of it, blamed Node.js for failing our startup, and told me customers don't care about a pretty UI.
It was then when I realised why his startup failed, at no point in time did he ever talk about the actual product they were building, or what problems he was trying to solve. He only talked about technical work, and about how that was his main focus. He even thought making our UI customer friendly equalled in just making it pretty.
We just did something crazy. We dropped the Ember app that was 3/4th's done in favor of plain JQuery and Rails 6. I'm just done maintaining two apps instead of one and all the hell that involves. And the Javascript ecosystem can keep rolling that Sisyphean upgrade treadmill with deploy dependencies and promises everywhere and I promise to use it as little as possible. Because it is just a giant time suck. Tut tut if…