Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned? • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by fxtentacle » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:14 PM UTC

algoatecorn wrote: post #190

fxtentacle wrote: post #63

1. Verify that co-founders are emotionally committed to stay. For my first startup, I lost half the founding team when things started getting stressful. Needless to say, that made things even more stressful. 2. Don't trust big companies to take you seriously. I've been burned by "lets use market leader XY" and then later "why won't market leader XY return our calls" and then "we're offline due to market leader XY not…

> 5. When you need money, banks will ignore you. When you have too much of it, you get flooded with additional offers for cheap credit. Plan accordingly, so you need to borrow long before you start the project and borrow enough to get you over the cash flow shortage. If you wait until you actually need the money, terms will be horrible. I've noticed this mechanism, but how do you go about it strategically? Which exer…

You can borrow money long-term and then use it to buy safe stocks, like ETFs. If done right, the stock yields will cancel out the interest rate payments, so then you have sort of like a pre-approved credit that the company keeps around.

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

#212

Post by machiaweliczny » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:18 PM UTC

shantnutiwari wrote: post #105

cj wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best advice in the thread so far. You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons than it is building the next new docker kubernetes react native infrastructure as a service. Unsexy sells.

> You’re chances of success are 10x higher trying to build technology for tanning salons Except tanning salons (or hairstylists or dog walkers or plumbers) usually a) dont have cash to spend b) Dont see their problems as software related c) are in many cases hostile to software, due to geniune bad software I remember some time ago when I used to hang out in bootstrapped.fm, every week a person would come in and say "…

Tell this to Booksy.com (valued ~1B)

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

#213

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

nullspace wrote: post #113

tnolet wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales fixes everything. Very hard to learn for engineers and designers often.

I don't know... I might be having a reverse-survivor bias seeing, being in and contributing to failure, but I've _never_ seen a case where "let's increase our sales headcount" strategy actually did anything (EDIT: i.e. when things are bad. Of course, if things are good, sales is a key driver to growth) If you need "more sales" to fix it, the problem often lies somewhere else.

"Sales fixes everything" means that when you look at any random problem like "turnout is really big, how we can keep people for longer?"¹, often the fastest solution is to answer "hey, how can we increase sales?".

Answering that later question can lead you into any direction. Maybe you need more sales people, maybe your product sucks, maybe you must spend more on marketing. The point is not on how, the point is that the later one is the one goal you can have more impact on, and it will lead you into solving the former.

1 - On this case, with higher salaries, but there isn't enough money to increase them, thus the actionable question.

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

#214

Post by fapi1974 » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

anonymousDan wrote: post #185

bwb wrote: post #169

23 years exp... My #1: Get really good at user testing so that you minimize risk every step of the way. I can't say this enough as it has totally changed how I approach startups, new features, and core assumptions (and weirdly my personal life). My #2: If you have co-founders, make weekly rituals to ensure you stay in sync over everything else. When you get out of sync, bad things happen. This can also be applied to…

How do you suggest to get good at user testing?

Also interested in this!

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

#215

Post by JohnWhigham » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:36 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #202

systemvoltage wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oregon state has destroyed my good friend’s entire life. Child taken away, only get 4 hours a week of time with his kid. My friend is smart, kind and nicest person you’ll ever meet. Personal net worth fucked. One of the reasons for me to consider leaving California.

> Oregon state has destroyed my good friend’s entire life. Sorry to hear that. > One of the reasons for me to consider leaving California. You do realize that California is not an administrative subdivision of Oregon, but a completely different state, right?

In the context of divorce court fucking over men, California is by and far the worst in the country.

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

#216

Post by JanisErdmanis » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:39 PM UTC

anyfactor wrote: post #59

I haven’t seen success at all. That's because people is super hard. Selling to people and managing people. Selling is super hard. Ideas are worthless if you can't sell. My thesis is that make sure you have the connections to make the initial sells and you have the personality trait to ask for referral and grow from the initial sales. If you haven’t figured out a way to guaranteed sales yet, don’t hope for a miracle w…

> Don't build something that the world needs, build something that you can sell!

A very sad reality :(

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

#217

Post by ehnto » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

ironlake wrote: post #198

ehnto wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep peddling this idea, but if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for small to mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. The reason for that is the same reason your idea works, most businesses outside the tech bubble stand to gain a lot form software. Currently they have no way to act on it except to hobble together a ruby goldberg…

>if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. Most mid-sized companies don't have the skills to manage and deploy software developers that can solve their problems. Those skills tend to be expensive, and the software project, historically, has a high chance of failure. So, yeah, the high price of…

I disagree. You can do software very simply, it's in an environment of excess that teams tend to over-complicate software and software deployment into complex monsters that are expensive to maintain. Small business software problems often lack the scale and public facing nature that causes problems for software infrastructure and increases it's complexity.

I speak from experience in executing some of these kinds of software projects, as I live in a market not influenced by the SV bubble. Our market has a bunch of bootstrapped software businesses too, because the economics of it are more favorable to that kind of enterprise and you're not competing with 200k+ wages. I'm talking about Australia as well, an expensive first world country.

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

#218

Post by nullspace » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:56 PM UTC

skeeter2020 wrote: post #120

nullspace wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know... I might be having a reverse-survivor bias seeing, being in and contributing to failure, but I've _never_ seen a case where "let's increase our sales headcount" strategy actually did anything (EDIT: i.e. when things are bad. Of course, if things are good, sales is a key driver to growth) If you need "more sales" to fix it, the problem often lies somewhere else.

>> I've _never_ seen a case where "let's increase our sales headcount" strategy actually did anything no one said hire sales people; rather if you've got a problem, first look at increasing sales before you put your efforts elsewhere. This will either fix the problem or explicitly identify it.

Yep! Totally agree. This is good advice.

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

#219

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, May 12, 2022, 3:57 PM UTC

ironlake wrote: post #198

ehnto wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep peddling this idea, but if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for small to mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. The reason for that is the same reason your idea works, most businesses outside the tech bubble stand to gain a lot form software. Currently they have no way to act on it except to hobble together a ruby goldberg…

>if tech wages came back to reality it would be affordable for mid sized companies to hire software developers to truly empower their specific businesses with software. Most mid-sized companies don't have the skills to manage and deploy software developers that can solve their problems. Those skills tend to be expensive, and the software project, historically, has a high chance of failure. So, yeah, the high price of…

Most large-sized companies don't have those skill either.

In fact, going into some market and solving a problem with software is almost always done by people not used to work in development that go and write something by themselves.

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

#220

Post by reubenswartz » Thu, May 12, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

Don't define your target market as "we just need to get 1% of this $100B market". Define your market as "for this $XM sub-niche of a sub-niche, we are the 800 pound gorilla that is the obvious choice."

You can always expand your target market over time, but start where you are strong.

Everyone understands this in theory, but it's hard to do in practice, because I think we have evolutionary aversion to "scarcity". So instead of thinking of it as "small vs large" market (when the small market is plenty to start with), think of it as "easy vs hard" sales and marketing. If sales and marketing is hard, shrink your market.