Live data from Hacker News

Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

#21
Have you talked to your school about what you are doing? They may be able to 1) give you credit for what you are doing and /or 2) assign other students to help you for class credit.

Also count your blessings, there are a lot of people your age who would love to have your problem.

Re: Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

#22
Gauge your level of passion in the product. If you really care about it and find it rewarding, by all means leave school and hire a 2nd. If not, possibly hire a second anyway and leave the day-to-day to them while you focus on school or turn the project over to one of your users--sell it.

Re: Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

#24
You have two effective options unless you can make school & the project management more efficient.

1) Put the project on hold until you're done with school

2) Put school on hold until you're done with the project or can afford to hire people to deal with it while you're in school.

Unfortunately, there's only so much time in a day and you need to sleep some. Priorities suck.

Re: Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

#25
I think you have a problem most people your age would love to have. That being said, I get it. It's easy to get burnt out - especially when you're trying to continue your education at the same time. If I were in your position, I would definitely look to my fellow classmates or any friends I had that would be a good fit. I'd probably bring on one more person (maybe two, depending on what they could help me with) and split everything evenly between the two of us. If the tool you've created is that popular, everyone working on it will be in a great position down the road. You'll either be able to turn it into a full-time business, or leverage the crap out of it when you go out looking for a full-time position elsewhere (companies will love hearing about it). Either way, you've been hit with a blessing - I wouldn't give up on it just because it got too popular for you to handle. That's a great thing. Congrats!

Re: Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

#27

4-5k a month is more than enough to make a hire. Think of it this way: What is your time worth to you? Would you rather work your ass off and make 5k, or have a sane workload, make 2k for a while, which then rises as you have adequate internal infrastructure to support growing sales and users? It sounds like you have a good thing going, and I'd strongly recommend at looking to get another pair of hands involved - or…

As he apologised for his English (which as an aside is perfectly acceptable) I'd assume that figure isn't in dollars or pound sterling. Possibly euros but that again would seem to be enough to get someone else involved in the project.

As we know there not just 3 currencies in the world. It could be Yen, Rupee or Ugandan shilling or any one of the 180 currencies.

Re: Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

#28

I agree with some of the other commenters that a hire sounds like the way to go. Unless something is lost in translation, such as the currency, 4-5K is plenty. If not a developer, then someone in sales, which can potentially be a commission based system. Also, think about switching to ramen for a few months. Thats the part of startup life that you tend to not see in the movies and magazines. Pre-seed tends to involve…

think about switching to ramen

Though it's temporary, and somewhat romanticized (I still eat ramen), that's a terrible suggestion health-wise :-) I think dry beans + crock pot + rice is a better, low cost diet.

Re: Help Me HN: I am getting overwhelmed

#30
What a great problem to have.

I can't tell you much about managing the coding part, but I've got experience getting solid support systems up and running for developer-type products. Feel free to drop me an email if you'd like to bounce ideas back and forth on what you're doing and what might help make the load more manageable. I may be able to help with some of it too for cheap/free time permitting. Good luck either way!

Post reply on HN