161–170 of 171 posts
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We're building a company in a similar, but different space ( http://www.massagejoyspa.com : in home and office massage therapy), and I'd love to spend 15 minutes on the phone with you picking your brain - can you add a contact email on your HN account, or shoot me an email at lexsebro@stanford.edu? Thanks!
Best of luck with your new business lex. Michael Scharf will be reaching out to you shortly.
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We're building a company in a similar, but different space ( http://www.massagejoyspa.com : in home and office massage therapy), and I'd love to spend 15 minutes on the phone with you picking your brain - can you add a contact email on your HN account, or shoot me an email at lexsebro@stanford.edu? Thanks!
Are you the person who runs this site? I think it could be streamlined a lot; there is just so much information on the front page. Who's really going to read all of that? Also, I'm not seeing any FavIcon and the Lobster icon just doesn't resonate with me at all. Joy is a really powerful word, but it just gets lost in your typeface logo. Just some friendly advice.
Yip - I need to add a favicon, and I've been playing with the amount of content to figure out if shorter pages convert better than longer pages - the jury's still out on that one. Each content section is meant to answer a question that people asked themselves when looking at my site and talking out loud.
I always appreciate advice - thanks for taking a second to look things over and give me yours.
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Well...I can't speak from an "MBA's" perspective, because there isn't 1 MBA perspective. In terms of the way the world works, I can say that politicians are not in the business of running the world the way it should be run - they are in the business of politicking. It has become fanciful in the last decade or so, to blame bankers, wall street, the 1%, capitalism, etc. for all the worlds ills - but that's just not the…
"they are in the business of politicking." This can in my experience as well be said about MBAs "They are in the business of MBA'ing or business" It's the title not the skills that gives you access to a higher salary. Those MBAs I met that where great where already great at what they did and clearly didn't need one. They just thought they did.
As of late, I tend to be very cautious of people who are mentioning their titles all the time.
I love this story. This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company. I never understood this. For a group of people (programmers) that presumably have been ostracized, shunned, and picked on in their formative years, why do so many in the valley do this to 'MBAs'. It's ignorant at best. The fact is, as has been shown time a…
"This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company." "I wish we all, on HN (at the very least), would stop painting with a broad brush and bashing large swathes of people." Pretty conflicting statements. Asking HN not to disparage people while disparaging people in Silicon valley himself. If a non-technical founder wants to…
What makes a good founder IMHO is the ability to see what kind of skills are currently missing. The next trick is to get these skills somehow.
Excellent story. Thanks, mkbrody.
For people interested in starting a similar business, there is a subreddit on this: http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/ where someone shows how he builds a service business from scratch.
I'm not convinced the web site drives the revenue. Alexa rank of 1 million. That means there's probably less than 30,000 visitors per month. I bet the company does most of their marketing offline, and the site is more of a brochure. So it's a bit misleading to say that a $20k bootstrapped web site led to all the growth in this business.
Yes it will be a lot less than 30k unique visitors but don't take the 1 million+ alexa rank too seriously. In this case it probably just means that a lot of their traffic are non-technical users that don't use the Alexa plugin. Just installing the alexa plugin in their own browsers could get their alexa rank to 700,000. Just speculation from my experience.
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"This is also why I bristle when many in the Valley - PG included - keep disparaging non-technical people when they want to start a tech company." I realize this is probably just semantics but I want to chime in on one little tidbit here. These guys didn't start a technology company in the sense that they needed technology innovation to succeed. They started an innovative cleaning business that uses some technology.…
This equally true for a bunch of YC companies, like AirBnB and Dropbox, where the technical challenge is in dealing with scaling, but the actual innovation is in the product.
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Do you have an MBA? I'm not trying to sound like a dick- that's an honest question. I do have an MBA and while I definitely think it was overpriced, the relationships with top faculty, in-depth case studies, and lasting friendships that I got out of it is definitely beyond what you will get from a book. That said, experience is and always will be the best teacher. There is only so much you can get from relationships,…
No I don't have an MBA and I wouldn't want one even if it was given to me. But I did start a design agency built it to 60 people and ran it successfully for 6 years working for client all around the world of all different kind of sizes. I have more case studies than I care for. I also build friendships and a great great network of connections. And I made money while doing it. Business is simple (not easy)
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Like http://thumbtack.com ?
Yeah that's pretty close to what I was thinking. Or the Taskrabbit as mentioned by jonathanjaeger. I noticed you are a technical co-founder at Thumbtack. I had an idea for a similar service that helps people with particular skills make themselves available for hire to their neighbours. Were there many business or technical challenges trying to reach so many localities across many different types of services?
It's a two-sided marketplace, which means we had the chicken and egg problem and the network problem. To add on to it, we had to figure out how to build trust using a medium (Internet) that has been traditionally untrusted.
We had to figure out how to scale customer service for a business where we quickly found out that people expect good customer service. The Google model for support wasn't working.
Further, the field is littered with the corpses of, sometimes well-funded, ventures that have failed in the same space.
And finally, our initial marketing plan involved boots on the ground, kind of like a political campaign (all the founders met in DC on a political campaign). That one failed quickly.
The latest, hardest part is scaling the matching engine without using humans. Not sure I'm at liberty to say exactly how we solved that.