Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#161

Post by RainManDetroit » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 7:10 PM UTC

timoth3y wrote: post #49

Hi. Tim here. I'm delighted that this article struck such a chord. I'll try to answer the most common questions here. I wish I could answer everyone directly. 1) I called it off before anyone sent money or quit their jobs. The only one who lost money or a job because of ContractBeast was me. If the money was in the bank and the team on board we would have gone ahead. That's why I had to make that decision when I did.…

No one manages his money as carefully as his own. If you were as clear and succinct in your description of the situation to stakeholders as you just made plain here, and they were willing to pay for the chance of success or the effort toward success, the project should have gone forward.

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#162

Post by kornish » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 7:26 PM UTC

RainManDetroit wrote: post #161

timoth3y wrote: post #49

Hi. Tim here. I'm delighted that this article struck such a chord. I'll try to answer the most common questions here. I wish I could answer everyone directly. 1) I called it off before anyone sent money or quit their jobs. The only one who lost money or a job because of ContractBeast was me. If the money was in the bank and the team on board we would have gone ahead. That's why I had to make that decision when I did.…

No one manages his money as carefully as his own. If you were as clear and succinct in your description of the situation to stakeholders as you just made plain here, and they were willing to pay for the chance of success or the effort toward success, the project should have gone forward.

He made it clear, though, that it wasn't just his stakeholders' money he was worried about - it was investing his own valuable time and energy in a problem he believed to be fundamentally unconquerable. That, to me, is a far better reason to not go forward.

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#163

Post by clickbyclick » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

CPLX wrote: post #108

LionessLover wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "salient point" as you put it suffers from a huge acute case of selection bias and survivorship bias, two deadly diseases that kill the argument immediately after it's born.

Indeed. Not to mention the Internet was basically a wide open green field to build companies on in those days. There is no shortage of B2B focused web-based software in 2016.

Changing behavior is hard, many startups try only a select few can. Adjusting behavior an easier but less rewarding outcome.

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#164

Post by gmarx » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 8:23 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #75

"When users are unhappy but can’t explain exactly why, they often express that dissatisfaction as a series of tangential, trivial feature requests." This bit resonates the most with me. I worked on a project worth little traction where we'd keep getting feature requests from the client facing team members for things that were of minor value but sometimes major effort. It grinds you down over time as you realise there…

One of the frustrations of working under a boss with little software experience; they keep believing this

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#165

Post by gmarx » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 8:26 PM UTC

encoderer wrote: post #20

I have to say, I don't agree with this part at all: "But most of the time, customers don’t really want the the features they are asking for. At least not very badly." Customer feedback drives an absurd amount of our roadmap at Cronitor. We have a good idea of the many shortcomings of our product and are constrained primarily by resources in developing it faster. When a customer -- especially somebody on a trial -- pu…

If paying customers are asking for features pay attention. If non customers suggest features, you should be extremely skeptical that implementing those features will result in sales

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#166

Post by a-saleh » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 8:30 PM UTC

timoth3y wrote: post #70

a-saleh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention that you might write an article on distinguishing the tangential feature requests from the useful ones. I would really like to read that :) Especially if I could send it to our product managers, because our product has been in a cycle "we need an enterprise sale" > "potential customer mentions a feature they would have liked" > "we scramble for a month to write the feature and close the deal". To be hones…

That's a bad place to be stuck in. I'll see if I can put something together that makes sense and is fairly comprehensive. At the moment, a lot of it is "I know it when I see it" but that's not exactly helpful.

Fortunately we seem to be moving away from that now-days :)

And I have talked with our guys and I can sort of see it from their view-point. from their point of view it often is the hunt for the last `checkbox`, the last necessary tick somewhere on the customers requirements page.

In their mind it often seems as a simple calculation, on one hand potentially so much $/year from big-corp vs 2xManxMonth to get a new feature over the line? No brainer.

An I am struggling to somehow explain that you need to add much more to those two developer months, because with every feature there are bugs and regressions and customer tickets, e.t.c. and suddenly it takes one developer in perpetuity.

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#167

Post by spectrum1234 » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 9:32 PM UTC

Great article. However given its by a ~4 time founder the logic to shut it down doesn't apply to most people reading it (first time founders).

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#168

Post by scott_s » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 9:56 PM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #66

a-saleh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mention that you might write an article on distinguishing the tangential feature requests from the useful ones. I would really like to read that :) Especially if I could send it to our product managers, because our product has been in a cycle "we need an enterprise sale" > "potential customer mentions a feature they would have liked" > "we scramble for a month to write the feature and close the deal". To be hones…

The key is to ignore the feature request, and focus on the problem. Users don't come to you with problems, they come to you with shitty solutions. You need to take their solution, reverse engineer their real problem from that, then work out a good solution for that problem that fits well with your product.

"My job is not to give the users what they want, it's to give them what they need."

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#169

Post by Ftuuky » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

kentlyons wrote: post #23

zer00eyz wrote: post #6

The underlying idea behind what he did here is sometimes called Ethnography. There was another great article a while back on this going on at adobe/photo shop: https://medium.com/startup-study-group/my-two-years-as-an-an... As far as tools go, ethnography can be very powerful in the right hands.

Ethnographers tend to be rather hands off (/against) directly changing who they're observing. Contextual Inquiry ( http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/contextualinquiry.htm , http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In... ) is a fairly light weight method and I think would benefit a lot of startups.

Depends on their school of thought. You could go full gonzo anthropologist.

Re: Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup

#170

Post by timoth3y » Thu, Jun 09, 2016, 10:20 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #153

timoth3y wrote: post #49

Hi. Tim here. I'm delighted that this article struck such a chord. I'll try to answer the most common questions here. I wish I could answer everyone directly. 1) I called it off before anyone sent money or quit their jobs. The only one who lost money or a job because of ContractBeast was me. If the money was in the bank and the team on board we would have gone ahead. That's why I had to make that decision when I did.…

If team & investors wanted to move forward, did you discuss letting them (without you)? Basically just walking away, with no/low strings attached. I'm just curious, because sometimes I pick up on an "if I can't have it, nobody can" type attitude. If you made that offer and they refused, it's not on you. I think you made the right choice, I would have done the same and don't think you should be judge worse for it. The…

I would have been OK with it, but I don't think it would not have worked. I developed most of the code and was the only one with significant startup experience. That said, I don't know if the rest of team ever discussed it with the investors. They did not bring it up with me.