That was a very heart-warming story. I really love your story and your product (both amazing). Webflow helped me get back into coding. I will always be grateful for that. :)
Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
181–190 of 194 posts
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#182Had the pleasure of using Webflow for a COVID related project early last year that had an incredibly tight timeline. It was the only way we saw to do what needed to be done and it went very well. Thank you so much for creating such an amazing platform.
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression is that "privilege" has by now taken on that meaning of "unfairness". It seems to be the most common modern use ("check your privilege" and so on). It sounds as if those people don't deserve it. It's a shame, because I think it used to mean exactly the opposite, having a privilege was an honor. Is the phrase "it was a privilege to have known you" still being used?
You should recognize your privilege along with your strengths, and not overtly hide your privilege to appear on equal footing. I have intimate knowledge with writers, specifically offspring of well known writers who do their best to hide this fact, yet will still use their parents agent. And yes, it is unfair for them to believe they are on equal footing with any other writer. That doesn't mean they don't try hard, b…
Pretty sure that every good writer can make it, though. Perhaps the mediocre writers have an advantage if they have relations. No doubt a lot of awfully bad books are being published every year, and some even are successful.
I used to think about this, "only people with relations can make it". When I got older I realized that if you care about some subject, you will probably end up making relevant connections on the way.
And I also think this way of thinking about privilege is self-defeating. If you don't have "privilege X", find another way.
Some writers now got rich without ever having an agent, self-publishing.
I'm sure people will find some other alleged privilege they had, which allowed them to do that. That's not the point.
If you are dead poor and have no connections whatsoever, you have the "privilege" to write authentically about being poor.
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#184Congratulations! I'm just playing around with it this morning and it seems really cool so far.
Just a note, the link to report issues for experimental browsers (which was in the warning I received when opening the editor in Firefox) results in a 404.
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at upsides on their own is meaningless. The mega millions jackpot is currently at $550 Million dollars in cash. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to spend 2$ on a ticket. So sure, it’s possible to become a billionaire by writing books just look at J.K. Rawling. Hell someone got 10,000 bitcoins for the price of 2 pizza, which in theory are worth 366,790,000$ today. In the end the upside of being the founder i…
If you live in a state where you can play jackpot only, which is 2 picks for $3 and no eligibility for partial matches, there's a positive EV anytime the cash payout is more than $453,863,025.00 Accounting for taxes ruins it a bit, but once the jackpot gets high enough it's dumb not to buy a ticket.
The expected utility of buying that ticket is quite poor though which is the thing that really matters for most people. You get a sense of this when you consider that the vast majority of the time you lose your initial investment. If you have any other options to get returns on your money you are going to have the opportunity cost of that to deal with too and that's what makes the lottery ticket unappealing from a utility point of view.
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
> still one of the most reliable ways of [...] becoming financially independent (if not outright wealthy) There's just no way this is true. For people with the skills needed by SV startups, working at one of the startups is almost certainly financially worse than using those skills at a large company.
The comment said "one of the most reliable ways", not the only reliable way. Furthermore the two are not mutually exclusive. I worked at Microsoft and Google before starting my own company, mostly as a way to pay off student debt. A few of my co-workers at Google also left to start their own companies as well. There's no reason why you can't put in a couple of years at a large company to make some early cash, then le…
But it's not reliable at all. Particularly when you consider the longer and longer time to exit, the greater dilution due to those huge late rounds, the fact that you get hit with the tax burden when you exercise (which can easily be a decade before that stock is liquid), the fact that the late rounds have significantly raised the bar on what a 'successful exit' is.
Now that startups tend to stay private so long, the value of employee equity has absolutely tanked.
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean survivorship bias? Interesting to think how many web flows does that were so close. The difference was 1 mere hacker news post. Crazy to think how big of a factor luck plays
> You mean survivorship bias Yep, fixed :) > Crazy to think how big of a factor luck plays Indeed! Although I think it's best to focus on the things we can affect: persistence, hard work, grit.
Very true, life is a never ending chicken egg problem
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#188Congratulations on your success! This is really amazing!
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me it's ironic to say that greater automation is threatening the livelihood of devs. That's what good devs should do, automate themselves out of their job and move up one tier of abstraction. Maybe those devs who feel threatened should start writing webflow extensions
ReRe's Law of Re petition and Re dundancy [3] agrees with you: A programmer can accurately estimate the schedule for only the repeated and the redundant. Yet, A programmer's job is to automate the repeated and the redundant. Thus, A programmer delivering to an estimated or predictable schedule is... Not doing their job (or is redundant). [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192
Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
#190Lean startup dogma dictates that if you’re not embarrassed by v1, you took too long to build it. Had you followed that advice and posted it to HN, you’d have been torn to shreds and wouldn’t be telling this story. Congrats on building a product so good that met and exceeded the standards of the HN community and went on to be a successful business.
Worse than being torn to shreds. Ignored.