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Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#151

Post by dang »

staunch wrote: post #25

Congrats on the startup success and (more importantly) I hope your daughter is well. There's a really valuable lesson here for would-be YC founders: > We had high hopes about getting into YC for the winter batch, but were rejected since we only had a non-functional demo of a product and zero traction. ... > This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later... Same founders - traction = YC rejected Same…

Plenty of YC startups have been funded without traction. Thousands, surely. Many haven't even launched yet.

I don't know what the difference was in this particular case, but you're overgeneralizing from it, and underestimating how much emphasis YC places on founders (a lot).

YC funded Dropbox before it launched, because they believed in Drew—so that's a counterexample, no?

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#152

Post by [deleted] »

TAForObvReasons wrote: post #42
dumbfounder wrote: post #41

I have mixed feelings about this story. I applaud your resolve, and you have certainly had a tremendous amount of success that should be celebrated! But I can't help but think about the 9 founders of other companies that had the same resolve in the same situation, but things did not work out so well. All you other people thinking about going for broke need to be ready to hit bottom and build yourself back up afterwar…

*younger people with family wealth. Some of my friends were unable to take risks because they needed to support their parents as well, and that puts a huge pressure to go with the safe money

[deleted]

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#153

Post by dang »

grecy wrote: post #20

[flagged]

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before, especially the nationalistic aspect. Please don't post flamebait and especially please don't take HN threads into entirely off-topic, entirely generic classic flamewar topics. That path leads to the hell we're trying to avoid here.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#154

Post by ativzzz »

Scramblejams wrote: post #145
ativzzz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my experience with a different but similar tool, it follows the pareto principle. It will do 80% of the work very effectively, but as your business grows and you need more niche functionality, you will need a developer to figure out a way to make the platform behave in a way which it doesn't expect, which can be time consuming. So great for MVPs or getting a business bootstrapped quickly and cheaply, but once yo…

For a business, I agree. I should have clarified, I'd be happy with something that works pretty well at the hobby level.

Ah, these are more for making standalone simple frontends. Think more landing pages with built in email conversions or some payment integrations and not front end connections to a back end API. I've had to make some backend api connections on the different service and it was a PITA.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#155

Post by hn_grenade »

dang wrote: post #151
staunch wrote: post #25

Congrats on the startup success and (more importantly) I hope your daughter is well. There's a really valuable lesson here for would-be YC founders: > We had high hopes about getting into YC for the winter batch, but were rejected since we only had a non-functional demo of a product and zero traction. ... > This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later... Same founders - traction = YC rejected Same…

Plenty of YC startups have been funded without traction. Thousands, surely. Many haven't even launched yet. I don't know what the difference was in this particular case, but you're overgeneralizing from it, and underestimating how much emphasis YC places on founders (a lot). YC funded Dropbox before it launched, because they believed in Drew—so that's a counterexample, no?

I concur doctor dang. And well i blew that in my first YC application. Told how i got 50-100k euro seed, but didn't achieve anything after 1 year, and the review crew has seen me as one of those who just wants money but won't do anything to be worth it ever since, so hasn't considered my 11 applications since then. Heavy sigh

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#156

Post by hn_grenade »

munificent wrote: post #92
dumbfounder wrote: post #41

I have mixed feelings about this story. I applaud your resolve, and you have certainly had a tremendous amount of success that should be celebrated! But I can't help but think about the 9 founders of other companies that had the same resolve in the same situation, but things did not work out so well. All you other people thinking about going for broke need to be ready to hit bottom and build yourself back up afterwar…

I agree with your point that we shouldn't idolize people who make very risky personal sacrifices without framing it in the truth that most who do fail. At the same time, I read this particular post as much less about "look how hard I hustled and because of that I'm a winner" and much more about gratitude towards the HN community and the appreciating the luck that enabled them to be one of the rare winners. It's more…

Come on, sheep, don't idolize them at all, just go back to being cautious and in place, it's what you were born to do.

Tell yourself that it was because they were given such and such a "privilege", or had such and such an easier thing, and you had a hard thing, and therefore it never could have ever been you, and therefore feel better at your own failed dreams. Or tell yourself that you are smart, and they are dumb and simply lucky, because most fail. Either way, find a way to spin it so you are right and they wrong, and definitely don't actually reflect on how you could get some of what they have, nor improve yourself in any way. Remind yourself instead why their success is not actually so good, or so special, and especially remember to tell yourself that it's not and it's never your fault if you don't succeed. Align with your true nature and surrender to the inevitability of your powerlessness. This is right, for you, oh sheep. This is your good path. Don't fall into the trap of hoping, or idolizing, or being inspired. Never dream. Remember to always be critical and find fault with another's success, in order to protect yourself. This is your way. Go forth and just be.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#158

Post by spockz »

ativzzz wrote: post #116
Scramblejams wrote: post #28

Amazing story, glad you made it. Potential customer here, and I have a question. I'm a programmer, very happy making backends, setting up the infra, maintaining it, and so on. I often want to make web pages, but I just hate dealing the web front-end stack. Is this product a good fit for me? I could visually design the website, avoid getting my hands dirty with HTML/CSS/JS, then have an easy way to connect it with a b…

From my experience with a different but similar tool, it follows the pareto principle. It will do 80% of the work very effectively, but as your business grows and you need more niche functionality, you will need a developer to figure out a way to make the platform behave in a way which it doesn't expect, which can be time consuming. So great for MVPs or getting a business bootstrapped quickly and cheaply, but once yo…

I often wonder how much of that 20% of functionality is really needed. What if we as society spend the 80% effort that goes into customising things into building more that uses the readily available features? This is not an argument of quantity over quality. It’s just that I’ve seen so much effort going into doing the last 20% with so little outcome that it has me made skeptical.

Of course, for products deeper in the stack we should strive to implement that last 20% because the quality of the stack depends on it. I just don’t think it’s worth it for leaf/end-user projects.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#159

Post by sub7 »

nomadtwin wrote: post #14

Been using Webflow for years almost daily. Still a big fan but seeing round after round of VC money and little improvement on the actual tool (Webflow Designer) something feels off...

You can't see the admin dashboards or the cac/ltv numbers, round after round doesn't show up unless there's real growth happening.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#160

Post by berkes »

zenbryo wrote: post #16

Great to hear about your success story! However the number one ingredient must have been a good idea to start with. I hope to get the same viral success sometime for one of my projects, but its near impossible to foresee. Just work hard, keep afloat and hope for the best.

The usual warning against 'good idea' as most important ingredient, is apt here.

In fact, I read the story as a shout out to perseverence. More than 'an idea'. (Belief in) A good idea can help you persevere, sure. But execution is king. And for that, you need hard work, ability to push through, and perseverance.

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