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Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

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Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#21

Post by DoreenMichele »

altdataseller wrote: post #17
onion2k wrote: post #4

Maybe this is actually obvious, but it's still a common mistake in startups so I'll say it - you don't have to believe your product is good to start selling; you just have to be better than not having the product. You don't even have to believe it's the best, or believe it's complete, or even like it . People will happily give you money for anything that makes their pain point slightly less painful.

This is definitely nonobvious and also consoling to someone that is a perfectionist

There's a video where Michael Seibel of Y Combinator says something like "Don't treat your MVP like it's precious. Treat it like an old t-shirt you plan to wear to paint the house in and throw it away afterwards."

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#22

Post by bemmu »

Success on platforms that have a recommendation system (YouTube, Roblox, Google etc.) is nonlinear.

Because results are ranked by some metrics, if you make your thing 10% better (watch time, play time, CTR etc.), it will not only reap the direct benefits of being that much better, but the indirect benefits of now outranking others whenever the situation arises where it can get recommended vs. others (recommended videos, games, search results).

So it can make sense to put in more time into making something just a little better than would seem intuitively reasonable. MrBeast and Tim Urban of WaitButWhy both talked about this in their podcast interviews.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#24

Post by andi999 »

altdataseller wrote: post #13
readtolive wrote: post #6

1. If the idea / product is any good, it'll probably catch on quickly and sales will be easy. 2. Expect your startup/business/product to morph into something else, and that you'll change names and domain names, maybe multiple times. 3. You need an origin story, especially if you want any press. It also helps to be good looking.

Completely disagree with 1 and 3. Attention is scarce and there are already lots of good alternatives for almost any product idea. You better be good at sales and marketing if you want to cut thru the noise. A good product is not good enough. Most startups don’t need press - unless you are asocial media app, chances are customers won’t pay simply because TechCrunch or CNN mentions you. They pay to get their problems…

Yes, the build it and they will come is missing the ', after you cranked up advertisment/sales'.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#25

Post by scandox »

Kind of well known but I think bears endless repetition.

There will come a time when someone in a very large organization will take an interest in your product. You're going to feel very validated because now you can tell friends, family, investors, potential customers that X is using/piloting your product. They may or may not give you money, but it will certainly be less than your time is worth. They will definitely take a very long time to make any kind of decisive move. It is very likely that they will destroy your focus and never actually become a real customer. The longer you engage with them, the more you will want to make something come out of it and the worse the impact will be.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#26

Post by andi999 »

uuyi wrote: post #15

Know when to shitcan a bad idea rather than death march your company into oblivion by not concentrating on the core business and customers to deliver the bad idea.

Dilbert on this: https://dilbert.com/strip/2012-09-19

The sad thing is that the boss is right.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#27

Post by petrovna »

scandox wrote: post #25

Kind of well known but I think bears endless repetition. There will come a time when someone in a very large organization will take an interest in your product. You're going to feel very validated because now you can tell friends, family, investors, potential customers that X is using/piloting your product. They may or may not give you money, but it will certainly be less than your time is worth. They will definitely…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#28

Post by andreisbc »

As a dev i've always known my hunch when it comes to compromises. Never let the business team ruin your experience building cool rock-solid code. I'd rather resign than to compromise anymore. I know there should be a sweet spot between "perfect" and "working". Even a junior can pull-off a "working" app. But when it starts to scale, all those hasty bad decisions will bite your ass. Never skip planning, plan as long as you need. Nowadays i start coding only after i have 100% visibility into what i'm building: diagrams, dependency graph, schemas, types and data structures, documentation, user flows, everything. As the say goes: if i have 24h to chop a tree, i'd sharpen my axe 23h. And we haven't yet taken into account infrastructure, devops, ci/cd, security, releases, logging, and all sorts of tooling. I need around 2 months just for initial planning, setting everything up and laying out the codebase structure.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#29

Post by c16 »

As an employee learn to manage expectations. You can push back projects with deadlines if you manage expectations early enough. Fail that and you'll have pissed off stakeholders.

Trying to convince managers to do something won't always work. Presenting them with a growing problem and a solution will help convince them.

You might think your product is bad, but there are likely people making more money than you with worse products. Start selling early.

Re: Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

#30

Post by nickfromseattle »

- The decreasing barrier to ship products means sales & marketing is what differentiates successful products versus products with 0 users.

- After building a high growth / high churn product, I am OK sacrificing decreased growth for a significantly decreased churn rate. Great product with high churn is a hard business to build, even when customers love the product.

- One of the highest leverage decisions you'll make is deciding what to build. You can achieve a 1x, 10x, or 100x outcome with the same blood, sweat, and tears depending on what market you decide to build in.

- Choose something that aligns with your strengths. A good idea for me, might be a terrible idea for you if it doesn't leverage your specific knowledge (Naval calls this product / market / founder fit).

- Product is really freaking hard and relying on external contractors sucks, give someone technical a significant % of your company to own product development.

- Google Search & YouTube are likely one of your most important acquisition channels, because these are the only two platforms that consistently surface old content. Chances are, G can distribute your content better than you can yourself via email / social / copromotions, etc.

- High performers are cool, but high performers that document what they know so junior level team members can execute at the same level, or better is even cooler. Document everything you expect to hold someone accountable to doing in a specific way.

- Email recaps let me skip 10-15 meetings per week. I get the agenda, notes, and decisions that were made, and can jump in (but usually don't) at my leisure without sitting through the meeting.

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