Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

thebluehouse.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 156 posts

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#121

Post by scourge »

VLM wrote: post #96
thebenedict wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just think! When you've built the app and captured 100% of the diesel fishing boat mechanic rating market, you'll make dozens - nay, hundreds - of dollars! Users could search, sort and filter all 6 diesel fishing boat mechanics in town! I'm being sarcastic but you're right. I live in a small town (in a small country) and there are a lot of unmet needs that software could address, and minimal technical competition. Th…

Oh I wouldn't say its a small market... Some googling around shows 8 million people in NYC. Figure about 1% are in the 1%, so you've got maybe 80K possible customers to split among all home automation startups. On the other hand, some googling around shows 4 million commercial fishing boats worldwide. If your diesel boat engine microphone troubleshooting crowdsourced social network repair app drew in only 10% of ship…

you're right. go find a country where producers and true capitalists are rewarded and powerful, instead of just the middlemen and managers, and you'll be a millionaire.

That time will come. And once technology starts being targets are making these SMEs (fishing boats, smallholders, etc) lives easier, the world will make a big shift for the better.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#122

Post by scourge »

metra wrote: post #77
tinco wrote: post #40

Where are the pictures of the lodgings? It sounds very interesting, but it's also rather expensive. I've never been to Morocco, but from what I've heard I bet it's possible to sleep in a four star hotel and eat every meal in a restaurant for under 500 euro per week. Of course you are offering extras like being networked in with the other residents, and you are marketing to Europeans so it's not crazy to charge this a…

Just got back from 5 weeks in Morocco, 2 of which were in Taghazout. My girlfriend and I were living very, very simply -- shared bathroom, toilet didn't have a tank, no meals included, internet only in the restaurant downstairs -- but we were paying 10 euros a night, each. You can actually see the place in the pictures they've put up, it was very beautiful, right on the beach. There was a surf hostel that we also sta…

What, you didn't go to Essaiouira? newb :)

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#123

Post by drcomputer »

atmosx wrote: post #6

Hm, sorry but ages of experience show that what mostly works is the other way around: You want to be a big city because you can find clients (users), meet people (e.g. possible investors) and generally speaking do any sort of networking that would be otherwise impossible. The internet is what it is, but you can never match the face-to-face relationship with an online approach. I totally understand that this is a drea…

I think there are ways to understand people using written language that do not translate well face to face. It's a fairly subjective evaluation, but consider the whole spectrum of human writing, rather than the tendency of conversation evoked by the contemporary internet.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#124

Post by scourge »

mr_luc wrote: post #120
dysoco wrote: post #91

I too live in a fishing town, yes, it's nice being a small town without any traffic or people on the street (except in Summer when we get tourists) but honestly I can't wait to move out. I can't get fast internet, power/internet goes down when it gets a bit windy or starts raining; and it rains quite a lot, making you really unproductive. Let's not talk about 3G/4G, we are lucky to have 3G on a good day. If I wanted…

Just wanted to say that I lived in a small ecuadorean fishing village for 7 years, and my experience was the opposite ... but I'm not starting a startup! My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee…

Do you contract for a few months at a time in $first_world_country?

I'm asking because I've been contracting in London for a couple years and I'm considering doing half the year here, then half the year something like what you describe. But I'd have to move the wife and (soon) kid twice a year. She says she's fine with that.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#125

Post by cpwright »

noelwelsh wrote: post #17

Sounds nice and fun for a short break. I think the copy needs some work though, which might relate into tweaking how they target their market. For instance: "Getting far away from your family" <=== If you have a family, that's not how it works. You signed up for the responsibility.

I'll further that as, I read this something like "Get away from your family, because they are a distraction"; but you have time for "surfing and yoga", because that lets you decompress. Seems totally contradictory to me; as if it is somehow OK to be distracted by your family, but if its yoga then somehow it is all good.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#126

Post by icebraining »

metra wrote: post #77
tinco wrote: post #40

Where are the pictures of the lodgings? It sounds very interesting, but it's also rather expensive. I've never been to Morocco, but from what I've heard I bet it's possible to sleep in a four star hotel and eat every meal in a restaurant for under 500 euro per week. Of course you are offering extras like being networked in with the other residents, and you are marketing to Europeans so it's not crazy to charge this a…

Just got back from 5 weeks in Morocco, 2 of which were in Taghazout. My girlfriend and I were living very, very simply -- shared bathroom, toilet didn't have a tank, no meals included, internet only in the restaurant downstairs -- but we were paying 10 euros a night, each. You can actually see the place in the pictures they've put up, it was very beautiful, right on the beach. There was a surf hostel that we also sta…

20€/person/night is cheap, but you can definitively find the same prices in many of the cheaper European countries. Here in Portugal you can rent a double bedroom in a nice rural house with all the commodities (AC, pool, etc) for that price, and when I went to Budapest in April, we rented a 3-person apartment (with heating, Internet, etc all included) for a week for less than 400€.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#127

Post by [deleted] »

dysoco wrote: post #91

I too live in a fishing town, yes, it's nice being a small town without any traffic or people on the street (except in Summer when we get tourists) but honestly I can't wait to move out. I can't get fast internet, power/internet goes down when it gets a bit windy or starts raining; and it rains quite a lot, making you really unproductive. Let's not talk about 3G/4G, we are lucky to have 3G on a good day. If I wanted…

[deleted]

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#128

Post by CalRobert »

banino wrote: post #43
tinco wrote: post #40

Where are the pictures of the lodgings? It sounds very interesting, but it's also rather expensive. I've never been to Morocco, but from what I've heard I bet it's possible to sleep in a four star hotel and eat every meal in a restaurant for under 500 euro per week. Of course you are offering extras like being networked in with the other residents, and you are marketing to Europeans so it's not crazy to charge this a…

Hey Tinco, I'm one of the cofounders. Morocco is no South East Asia. A 5 star hotel is expensive in Morocco. Morocco can be really cheap if you go to a small secluded village in the mountains or in a sketchy town, on the coastside, it's whole other story. We'll upload the pictures as soon as the constructions are over! But, believe me it's going to be great (you can checkout our pinterest to see what we're going for)

Spending money which will eventually support a government that throws gay people in jail is probably less than ideal for a lot of people as well.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#129

Post by mr_luc »

scourge wrote: post #124
mr_luc wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wanted to say that I lived in a small ecuadorean fishing village for 7 years, and my experience was the opposite ... but I'm not starting a startup! My internet was even more limited (EDGE), power went out sometimes (two power bricks were enough for my mac air, though, and the cell towers never went out, so I could make it through even a multi-day outage without losing internet!), and comfy fast wifi in a coffee…

Do you contract for a few months at a time in $first_world_country? I'm asking because I've been contracting in London for a couple years and I'm considering doing half the year here, then half the year something like what you describe. But I'd have to move the wife and (soon) kid twice a year. She says she's fine with that.

Congratulations, I noticed a lot more Commonwealth types than Americans doing that sort of thing as still-working professionals (but a heck of a lot of Americans doing things as investors).

Yes, you've probably done the math and know that it would work, and can lead to a great work-life balance, to take a few projects for a few months, and then be almost completely off the radar for your clients during the other months.

I did that at first. Now I'm 100% remote with my best clients -- not that I wouldn't be able to make a certain amount of face time if it was necessary any more. But it was slapping us in the face just how unnecessary my physical presence is; it feels almost unflattering, in fact. For a while I was making it a point of coming into their offices during a busy or critical week, but after the first couple of years of our relationship, it just seemed absurd to us; I'd walk into a physical meeting and say "hey," and they'd say "hey," and we'd laugh at how silly it was that I was physically in Minneapolis over just a few minutes or hours of face time a week. My 'home base' in the US is several hours away from their offices, all of our meetings could be done over the phone, and the most interesting conversations between engineers to me seem to happen better over chat anyway.

So I'm just always remote; sometimes I'm in South America, sometimes I'm on the west coast or the midwest visiting family. I change location a lot, and it never makes the slightest bit of difference for clients; I just always call in to meetings instead of physically walk into the room.

Re: Why you should move your startup to a small fishing town

#130

Post by kasey_junk »

legulere wrote: post #105
patio11 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a new appreciation for the advantages of being in a big city since moving to Tokyo recently. That said, my while I'm an occasional visitor in Silicon Valley I hold a passport from Bootstrapistan, and most of its population resides in the capital city of A Small Town In The Middle of Nowhere. [+] A representative sampling of locations of the "head office" from small software businesses that I'm socially close t…

Nürnberg isn't that small if you count in the other directly adjacent cities (1.2 million inhabitants) or even the whole metropolitan area (3.5 million inhabitants) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Metropolitan_Region And you are in 1 hour 20 minutes in Munich via train. So I would argue that this is already pretty central

Philadelphia is also not a small town and is a short train ride to NYC and Washington D.C. I think more generally Patrick's point is that they aren't from tech hubs and that there is a reason for that.
Post reply on HN