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Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

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Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#181

Post by trimbo »

mattjaynes wrote: post #112

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

Since hiring for engineers is so competitive, it is arguable that choosing fancy tech can give an advantage there. It has been done successfully (in a hiring sense)... Twitter pushing Scala, Jet.com on F# are two I can think of.

The downside is it could backfire on who you're able to hire. It could just lure people who will either want to migrate to the next new-and-shiny or just leave quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#182

Post by sudhirj »

yks wrote: post #170
mattjaynes wrote: post #112

Since this is an audience of passionate technologists, here's the top piece of advice I have: Do not be seduced by the technology! I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way. It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical. Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend techn…

what if the customers are engineers?

All the more reason to stick to tried and tested tech. Engineers like to experiment themselves, not have the foundations they stand on be experimental.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#183

Post by SomewhatLikely »

slinger wrote: post #163
jargnar wrote: post #20

It's a skill that can be learned like every other skill. You can take the "in 21 days" route or the MOOC / University course route, or constantly read business articles, Steve Jobs videos, etc. But some top tips stand out for me over time: * Talking to people, networking > Not talking to people * Bug free > Elegant code * UX > UI * Simple products that do one thing well > Complex products * Understanding entire marke…

> It's a skill that can be learned like every other skill. You can take the "in 21 days" route or the MOOC / University course route Sorry, what did you mean by "in 21 days route"? Also, do you have any MOOC on doing business to recommend?

There's a trope of technology learning books whose titles fit the pattern "Teach yourself X in 21 days".

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#184

Post by ChuckMcM »

mattjaynes nailed it pretty much. On a slightly different spin though on the 'wish you knew vs what you know' my journey was a bit different.

When I came to the Bay Area I knew I wanted to be entrepreneur but I also knew I had a lot of gaps in my understanding. The two big ones were sales and marketing, and the other end production and release. I took positions at established companies (Intel and Sun) to learn what these functions do in "real" companies. I then joined as an early employee a start-up, and learned everything I could about funding and equity and the unique environment of small groups tackling big problems. Then did it again and got to learn about the whole acquisition process, the challenges of taking things public (or not), and learned I still had a huge gap in what MBAs called the 'business model.' I went to work at a company that had an excellent leader and business model at the time (NetApp) and started internalizing what adds value, what doesn't, and what is and what isn't a reasonable way to look at things.

If I had to do it again, I would probably have gotten an MBA while I was at Sun (my second job). While there is a lot to dislike about 'MBA culture' that would have been a faster way to accumulate an understanding of how to evaluate a business to see where it could be improved.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#185

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

komali2 wrote: post #148
afshinmeh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice, but I'm not entirely sure about this one: > * Sleep, exercise & healthy food > late night coding Looks like it's against other points. I have a full-time job and I'd like to create a brand, too. Thus. I have to do late night coding.

A full time job is a 9-5. Let's say you commute from 8-9 and 5-630. That means you can gym from 645 to 8 (including travel time), eat decently, do some coding, hit bed around 1030, and be sleeping around 11 (so you have enough time in the morning by waking up at 7). Cook on the weekends, code on the weekends, social life Friday and Saturday night... Do you work more than 40hrs a week? Why? Sounds like you're creating…

That's so unreal it hurts

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#187

Post by dorianm »

jargnar wrote: post #20

It's a skill that can be learned like every other skill. You can take the "in 21 days" route or the MOOC / University course route, or constantly read business articles, Steve Jobs videos, etc. But some top tips stand out for me over time: * Talking to people, networking > Not talking to people * Bug free > Elegant code * UX > UI * Simple products that do one thing well > Complex products * Understanding entire marke…

Reminds me of https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/

Beautiful is better than ugly.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.

Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.

Sparse is better than dense.

Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently.

Unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never.

Although never is often better than right now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.

If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#188

Post by dkural »

If I had to pick one piece of advice for software developers looking to jump into entrepreneurship, it is that most companies fail because they build something no one wants. In fact they build it really well.

Thus technical debt, scalability etc. simply don't matter until you iterate your way to solving a problem other people care about. That's much better than solving a problem well, a problem that not enough people have.

Ie. in short, stop engineering software and start figuring out what people actually need. Not just 'nice to have', but a real need that causes real pain. To see if enough people need what you are planning to build - you don't need to built at all, just draw it out, explain it in a doc, and go ask people. You have to really ask them and push beyond their initial "sure yeah, it'd be nice to have". Ask them how they do the task / fulfill the need now. Ask them how much that costs. How much would they pay if you built a better one, etc. Really try to get a "no i don't actually need it" instead of being content with the polite lie of people wanting the product.

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#189

Post by GoodbyeEarl »

pavlov wrote: post #94
matrix wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree. Let's do the math: With a brand new un-proven product with an unproven pricing model, how many customers does it take to get to $10K MRR? In three months, how many qualified leads can you find and reach, and what percentage of those will close? (with an unproven product in an unproven market, 2% is probably a realistic estimate). Of course there are scenarios where $10K MRR is possible quickly, but…

It's certainly not a hard goal -- I wouldn't pretend that even SaaS businesses are all that similar. (The degree of reassessment after 3 months is up to you, after all.) It's really a way to frame the product launch by forcing you to ask hard questions about what you're doing. If you don't even see a way for the product to reach $10k/month with a short-term plan, maybe it's a side project rather than a startup? Or ma…

Have you already accomplished such a goal?

Re: Ask HN: Best business advice for software developers

#190

Post by chuckus »

We've already established that the main thing to know what makes your customer tick so I'm surprised this isn't mentioned yet:

Your first MVP is simply a static website describing problem, solution and signup, with Google Adwords and analytics.

* Given that your target market are going to be ideally using Google to search their problem or solution, with Adwords, you can test exactly what they are actually searching for when they are looking for your product.

* Analytics will be powerful to measure the engagement of the user to your desired product. Have buttons or measure scroll for engagement. Do they read your problem and leave? Obviously not relevant. Do they continue onto your solution but leave? Wrong market-product fit. Have options on the website for easy A/B testing to figure out your demographic.

* Static website is super easy to change and make pretty as so many templates out there, and even if you don't use A/B testing tools, you note when you make changes, so you can compare sets of user analytics data.

This approach was popularised by lean startup methodologies, but what I love about it is it takes a couple of hours to setup, and an hour each week to tweak and monitor, and you'll know early on whether it's worth even developing the software from the very beginning. The saved time is worth the adwords cost (you can set a budget per day on their dashboard) and cost of static website hosting.

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