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How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

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Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#21

Post by sizzle »

michaelochurch wrote: post #12

The biggest take-away for me was that, at the least, he acknowledged that it's irresponsible to gamble his family's well-being on a long-shot startup idea. Tech culture right now prizes irresponsibility. The youth fetish is one aspect of it, but more generally, it's founded on unrealistic (irresponsible) promises and mostly bad decisions (drop out of school to work for a startup! move to the most expensive city in th…

So will you ever play the startup game again? or are you focused on climbing the ranks to your tier 1 dream job?

lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job, as opposed to an average person who has much more to gain from a startup being successful?

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#22

Post by emrgx »

miles_matthias wrote: post #14
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

I really wish we knew what the site was and it wasn't anonymous. Maybe the post was premature because the author still needs to "fake it till they make it" - but I would imagine that it would be a little bit of good press if nothing else. Without knowing what the product is though it is hard for folks to compare where they are with this narrative. For what it's worth I am in almost the exact situation, only I have a…

Agreed. I wish I could reach out to the author, learn more, and see where his product went. This is the stuff that fascinates me and something we see all the time at work - people with ideas they can't shake and are willing to take risks in order to see it become a reality. I don't necessarily think building something was the right first move though. I'm a big fan of PG's "Do Things that Don't Scale", so I created ht…

At first I thought this was a slimmer version of launchrock but it appears this for use cases where you already have a product to sell... I think?

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#23

Post by anonauthor »

dmk23 wrote: post #20

TLDR version: "I was lucky to have friends who built a successful product for me on their own time and money"

Actually, quite the opposite. I told them that they wouldn't have to do shit unless I established traction for the idea first (as I mentioned in the post).

Tough to do a TLDR version for everyone else without reading it yourself.

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#24

Post by anonauthor »

miles_matthias wrote: post #14
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

I really wish we knew what the site was and it wasn't anonymous. Maybe the post was premature because the author still needs to "fake it till they make it" - but I would imagine that it would be a little bit of good press if nothing else. Without knowing what the product is though it is hard for folks to compare where they are with this narrative. For what it's worth I am in almost the exact situation, only I have a…

Agreed. I wish I could reach out to the author, learn more, and see where his product went. This is the stuff that fascinates me and something we see all the time at work - people with ideas they can't shake and are willing to take risks in order to see it become a reality. I don't necessarily think building something was the right first move though. I'm a big fan of PG's "Do Things that Don't Scale", so I created ht…

I'll reach out to you.

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#25

Post by ritchiea »

anonauthor wrote: post #24
miles_matthias wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I wish I could reach out to the author, learn more, and see where his product went. This is the stuff that fascinates me and something we see all the time at work - people with ideas they can't shake and are willing to take risks in order to see it become a reality. I don't necessarily think building something was the right first move though. I'm a big fan of PG's "Do Things that Don't Scale", so I created ht…

I'll reach out to you.

I would also love to hear what your product is and how you're succeeding.

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#26

Post by Theodores »

anonauthor wrote: post #11

I'm the author of the piece. I can appreciate that it's difficult to walk away with any point of action without knowing the who and how, but I'd prefer to stay anonymous. My intention in sharing the story was simply to say that even if you're broke, non-technical, over 30, etc., you can still make it happen. It was meant to be more motivational than informative. I'm not looking for the recognition, only to hopefully…

It is an interesting way to go, most people on here would have the code "fully unit tested" with at least the latest in Twitter Bootstrap 3 for the frontend and good ideas on how to scale the thing before showing the product to potential customers/users.

A solid product kind of helps with the success of things and there is always the ever-present risk that a software project will take aeons longer than intended. A software product should be understandable to the target audience within seconds of seeing it. Not having at least a prototype to show (as above, without it being optimised for scaling up) is not really going to make that easy - there is a lot to explain that could be simple to just 'get' with the prototype up and running. So, from the programmer perspective you took a lot of risk!

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#27

Post by michaelochurch »

sizzle wrote: post #21
michaelochurch wrote: post #12

The biggest take-away for me was that, at the least, he acknowledged that it's irresponsible to gamble his family's well-being on a long-shot startup idea. Tech culture right now prizes irresponsibility. The youth fetish is one aspect of it, but more generally, it's founded on unrealistic (irresponsible) promises and mostly bad decisions (drop out of school to work for a startup! move to the most expensive city in th…

So will you ever play the startup game again? or are you focused on climbing the ranks to your tier 1 dream job? lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job, as opposed to an average person who has much more to gain from a startup being successful?

So will you ever play the startup game again?

Maybe, but in a different way.

or are you focused on climbing the ranks to your tier 1 dream job?

I have no taste for "climbing the ranks". I want to get better at stuff. Corporate dysfunction irritates the hell out of me. It'd be so much better if work was about work and not interpersonal manipulations.

Right now I'm looking to level up on machine learning. I'm on par with your 95th-percentile professional data scientist, but there's a lot that I still don't know.

lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job

I spent almost 3 years building the backend for a graph-based, distributed database in Clojure (for a startup). We ended up not getting any clients; that was above my pay grade. (Mistake #1. In a startup, take responsibility for all parts and run from founders who try to go alone.) If we had, though, the stuff I'd built would have made it really cool.

Then I ended up on legacy maintenance at Google. In other words, that 3 years bought me fucking nothing.

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#28

Post by Theodores »

miles_matthias wrote: post #14
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #2

I really wish we knew what the site was and it wasn't anonymous. Maybe the post was premature because the author still needs to "fake it till they make it" - but I would imagine that it would be a little bit of good press if nothing else. Without knowing what the product is though it is hard for folks to compare where they are with this narrative. For what it's worth I am in almost the exact situation, only I have a…

Agreed. I wish I could reach out to the author, learn more, and see where his product went. This is the stuff that fascinates me and something we see all the time at work - people with ideas they can't shake and are willing to take risks in order to see it become a reality. I don't necessarily think building something was the right first move though. I'm a big fan of PG's "Do Things that Don't Scale", so I created ht…

You should also get some information about the computer through on the email. If someone is on IE8 with an 800x600 monitor then they are a different class of customer to someone running - say - Chrome on Linux. Knowing someone is 'a Mac user' is also a telling signal if you intend to sell them something.

Also time on site is useful to know. Did they read the page? Maybe if they spent a good few minutes with the page open.

IP address - GeoIP to city with country - is also a useful thing to know. Do you really want to respond to that guy where shipping prices mean that a sale is effectively unrealistic?

Such mild-deep-stalking would be helpful to your customers and make your service appeal to a wider audience.

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#29

Post by avalaunch »

Hit up every piece of press I could possibly get. Started with less known publishers and continued to upgrade by leveraging the previous write-up.

Does this work - leveraging previous write-ups to get better press coverage? That would be the most interesting take away for me if it's true.

Re: How a non-tech, thirty-something with kids started his company

#30

Post by digikata »

anonauthor wrote: post #15
digikata wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share a little more detail re: the signup/how it works pages? Did they just describe the product and say signup if you're interested? Did you let on that there was no product yet, or that it was "in development", or no status at all? What does one do with 20k interested customers between lining up investment and actually delivering product?

What I didn't mention in the post is that we didn't have a backend programmer until we had 20k people signed up, so no code was a byproduct of our situation, not a matter of pride. Because we had so much hype before our product we had a miserable launch. We tried to delay it as long as we could, but feared losing interest if we waited too long. In terms of signup/how it works, we gave people a storyline that we felt…

Thanks for sharing what you could. It was certainly interesting for me.
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