171–180 of 229 posts
I mean, rich people get grants and loans (in the business name) for starting businesses because they don't want to lose their own money. That's how they stay rich.
I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care. 3. Managing devs generally requires u…
The best way to become a tech entrepreneur is either to start incredibly wealthy, or build a product yourself. I wince at the number of non-technical folks that have deluded themselves into thinking that they can "do the business side of things" when in reality that means bringing nothing to the table, save their money. OP's case is a warning to these folks. He actually brought negative, not zero, value to his startu…
The big problem is that founders have a really hard time understanding just how cheap ideas are, so they sincerely believe that they are bringing 90% of the company's value. They look at the big successes and assume that the process went something like this:
* Founder has an idea
* Founder recruits a bunch of people to build the idea
* Customers come because the idea is so great
* Founder walks away incredibly wealthy
What they never see is the dozens of companies that attempted and failed to execute the exact same idea in the decade before the big success.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: Even if you're a technical founder you should be sceptical about your own idea and putting all your eggs in one basket, and being played by VCs who spread all their eggs over different baskets.
What do you mean by that last sentence? I'm not familiar with startups.
I guess the first mistake was using your own money. You should always use someone elses!
If you have the means to "bootsrap it" you should. But here you are seeking someone else to bear all the risk for your sole benefit. It basically means you don't believe in the idea. Put your money where your mouth is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+10 on point 3. Even as a highly technical CTO, it is shocking what outsourced dev agencies will try to do. I've seen dev agencies try to conclude engagements with a "successfully working app" but havent delivered any source code, or when source code is delivered it cannot actually be compiled into the successfully working app. As a technical CTO I can smell this a mile away and work it into SoWs, but I wonder how ma…
It makes me shudder to think people actually hire dev agencies to build their early stage product. Having worked with some in the past in a different life I absolutely despised those people for being both terrible engineers and people (my experience working with big outsourcing companies). Why hire people who don’t care that much to build something the founders definitely care a lot about? Are there any examples of t…
The article is very nice, but I can't find OP saying how much money he has in the bank.. I am solo founder and invested literally all my money into this mad startup pursuit. There is a difference between loosing $200k with comfortable cushion and spending your last $10k.
If a person is hit by a car, does the car care for the bank account of said person?
> No one is going to invest in your business if you aren't willing to quit your day job. > If you aren't crazy enough to take the plunge, why should they be? Full stop. Money? As a consultant who helps startups build prototypes (used to, though still I still do from time to time) it was actually mostly people who worked day jobs but dreamed of being their own boss and building out their "crazy idea". For me, the "ris…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Don't think of it as a "loss," think of it as a "student loan." Now, losing $200K sounds like something you can benefit from in the long run (which you can, with enough introspection.). It's not as if you just went to Vegas and bet it all on black.
Betting on black probably has a higher success rate than the average startup though.
I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care. 3. Managing devs generally requires u…
> I'll never depend on a 3rd party dev as the main means of production again. He spent over half of his money on it as well. I've had more than one person come to me with their business idea, and they have a terrible website (or app) that they have spent 100, 200, or even 300k on. And it doesn't even work. If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-foun…
The other day I estimated how much I would have spent on development costs for my side business if I didn't know how to code and had to shop it all out. The number I arrived at was somewhere around $80-$120k depending on where I hired the devs (were about a year into development).
I get why non-technical folks go into tech but if you're not able to build the thing yourself or have a cofounder that can build it themselves, it's going to be prohibitively expensive and probably won't work.