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Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

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Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#211

Post by urthor »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #209
urthor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I mean I don't want to judge all startups. In fact if you take any of this offhand advice as gospel, well I wouldn't. Maybe I should have scattered "probably" and "often" about the place. 1: ------------------------------------------------------------ When you read the book, ole Fred is not a fan of large engineering units. Forget two pizzas (Bezos is from New York, two pizzas for him is ~10 people). Fred's vie…

Your comments are difficult for me to understand, although you do have a fun and whimsical style! I wasn't taking it as gospel and I agree some engineering outfits are (or at least appear to be) overstaffed or inefficient, and a small number of very driven and talented people can produce some incredible things. But when it comes to making a product it can take a radically larger amount of engineering effort than it w…

Oh well yes I agree. There are problems that genuinely take more people.

That said, Palo Alto Semiconductor was hardware, which has a far higher barrier to entry than software engineering does/can.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#212

Post by pettycashstash2 »

jacobmischka wrote: post #147
konschubert wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's heartening to hear how remote work is helping to even out global wealth inequality.

I wouldn't call "hire people from countries with low wages so you can pay them literally 1/10 of the US equivalent haha" heartening.

What are you talking about. IBM and other corporates defined the word outsourcing in the late 90s. I remember managing folks with 2 phds that were 1/2 if not less of my salary and I was fresh out of college. I watched as quality of folks went south over time as pay increased for them. My biggest frustration in the end was trying to train new person every 6 months because corporate wanted the same budget. They literally went from a 2 phd guy to barely out of coding shill within 2 year period. Market economies will sort this out.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#213

Post by berkes »

hvidgaard wrote: post #189
berkes wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've recently come across this conundrum too. But we chose to forego the "consultancy" jobs. Reason is that we optimize for learning (we're at that stage). And while consultancy may look like a good opportunity for learning, that it allows you to get paid for investigating the real problem domain of your customers it is not optimised for that. Far from it. My decades of consultancy and freelancing experience has tol…

The main driver of consultancy is revenue. If you can survive without that, don't do it if it isn't core to your business, just like you wouldn't do in an established company anyway.

Yup.

I've worked at a startup which, bootstrapped, was struggling with income flow. So off-and-on we, the programmers, would be outsourced to gigs that would generate some income. I've always found this the worst of all options and decided to never get into this with my own startup.

It takes away the most valuable resources. It's a negative investment. It advertises the "panic-mode" you are in, to all stakeholders and most to the engineers involved. It lands your engineers (me, in that case) in crappy jobs, which they did not sign up to at all (a few engineers left because of this). It creates misaligned relations in the team.

The last was for me the most frustrating. At one point, I was bringing in ~60% of all revenue, alone, by doing crap work, in stressfull projects, and commuting for hours a day. While at least two of my co-workers, whose wages I was subsidising, turned up at 11:30 to drink coffee and play some FIFA on the company x-box.

What I learned from this, is that hiring too early is a thing too. That, especially when bootstrapping, the income stream must be certain enough to warrant paying another wage for years.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#214

Post by simmo9000 »

Establish what "trust" is. The play-by rule-book.

My approach has mostly been to get out of the way of what I don't know and hold on whilst having blind trust.

Like riding a horse, hold on and give direction of the course with balance of freedom to run. Give more freedom and get more trust and enjoy the exhilaration, however hold the reins too tight and you will be fighting all the way.

Walk the tightrope so to speak. Know if you give too much freedom it will buck you off and run for the hills, however, if you can maintain the balance of direction and trust, good things will come.

One go I had was a communications service provider in the naughties that went from zero to 20 mill revenue in one year and it did alright in the end, but with hindsight, I can see so many better ways that almost everything could have been handled.

In my opinion, the main problem that most businesses experience is TRUST. (On every level)

Without it there is no business. Business by definition is about more that one person so trust is imperative.

Is trust equally mutual within your business? Can you quantify that trust? Can other staff in the business? And the customers? The board? The shareholders?

If it is there with all parties than the world will be you oyster!

If not, well that is just business. (But you should mitigate it to take care of your own future)

Wicked growth makes the green eyes shine... Greed comes through the cracks everywhere. Not sure what can be done about this. Company Constitution? Culture?

These are just ramblings of a semi-serial pseudo-successful entrepreneur. I apologise. I don't know any answers but I do know that 'trust' is one of the crucial key elements of a successful business. Trust between every party.

Find the balance of trust between ALL steak-holders and get it ALL in writing. +2cents.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#215

Post by urthor »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #195
urthor wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I mean I don't want to judge all startups. In fact if you take any of this offhand advice as gospel, well I wouldn't. Maybe I should have scattered "probably" and "often" about the place. 1: ------------------------------------------------------------ When you read the book, ole Fred is not a fan of large engineering units. Forget two pizzas (Bezos is from New York, two pizzas for him is ~10 people). Fred's vie…

Can you think of any amazing software written by one person who was working for another person who owned the company that owned said software? I sympathize with the argument that one engineer can be sufficient but am doubtful about them being an employee as opposed to founder.

That's exactly what happened with Twitter. It was at a company named Odeo.

But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#216

Post by ChrisRR »

amelius wrote: post #202
throw8932894 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.

Wasn't there a waiting list for Hotmail/Gmail in the beginning?

Gmail users initially had to be invited by existing gmail users.

That in itself is marketing.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#217

Post by ChrisRR »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #204
throw8932894 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.

They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though. Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something…

Gmail didn't just offer 1GB, it also offered the ability to search through emails which I don't think any free service allowed you to at the time

In 2004 that was pretty amazing

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#218

Post by marginalia_nu »

eej71 wrote: post #194
raverbashing wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember the ABCs A - Always B - Be C - Selling That is, seize the opportunities of presenting your work and your company.

I'll be that guy. Actually it's Always Be Closing. Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s

It actually depends on if you are using ecclesiastical marketing mnemonics (soft c like in contemporary Italian marketing) or reconstructed classical marketing mnemonics (hard c).

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#219

Post by SXX »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #208
pawelwentpawel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second that. SEO is a slow growing channel and it takes some time to get effects. Starting earlier can help out. Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you…

> Also, make sure that your page loads fast To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?

Actually this isn't always the case. Some people just make mistake of using few mbs of some high-quality PNGs on their landing pages which can be much worse than just mere JS framework bundle.

Also both Angular and React are not as heavy as one might expect, but 3rd-party components might bring tons of unnecessary deps.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#220

Post by martin_a »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #208
pawelwentpawel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second that. SEO is a slow growing channel and it takes some time to get effects. Starting earlier can help out. Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you…

> Also, make sure that your page loads fast To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?

There's more to it, but I've focussed on WordPress pages in the past.

Some things I'd start with:

  - Minimize images (tinypng/tinyjpg)
  - Deactivate/Remove what you don't need (Plugins (!!!), RPC, Emojis, stuff like that which is ON by default in WP -> will strip down the code)
  - Strip down & combine scripts
  - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics)
  - Minify scripts and CSS
  - Use caching on the client-side through htaccess rules
Normally those things are enough to get a 85+ score on Lighthouse, GTmetrix and alike.
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