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After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

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Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#211

Post by zarzavat »

jefftk wrote: post #193
bigfudge wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US. In part, I’d argue this is because hyper scaling and overoptimising are squeezing the humanity out of most economic life, and most people are not benefitting from these trends. There are exception: we nee…

> Median incomes are stagnant But they're not? Adjusted for inflation, median US household income is 18% higher than fifteen years ago and 32% higher than it was thirty years ago: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N You could say it was stagnant from 1999 to 2015, though.

What about wages compared to house prices?

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#212

Post by gspencley »

Hendrikto wrote: post #118

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. […] We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business. American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be hug…

There's a couple of factors that play into why companies in the west tend to scale vertically rather than horizontally.

The first is looking for a return on investment. If you're going to attract other peoples' money, those "other people" are obviously looking for companies that are going to provide a return. And since a wise investor diversifies their portfolios, they know that a lot of their investments are going to fail, so one way to hedge that is by encouraging all of their investments to grow as much as possible. That way a small number of hyper-performers will make up for the losses.

But we also see vertical growth happen with major corporations as well. Not just startups. And I suspect this has a lot of to do with red tape, over-regulation and bureaucracy. When you need to jump through tons of hoops including getting licensing and permits, setting up tax and payroll accounts... not to mention if you want your company to be publicly traded and the hoops you need to jump through for that ... it can be way cheaper and lower-risk to expand the activities of an existing, already established company than to spin off a new one.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#213

Post by runako »

jefftk wrote: post #193
bigfudge wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth pointing out that something being bad for the economy, from this perspective, isn’t necessarily the same as being bad for the population. Median incomes are stagnant and quality of life is declining in the US. In part, I’d argue this is because hyper scaling and overoptimising are squeezing the humanity out of most economic life, and most people are not benefitting from these trends. There are exception: we nee…

> Median incomes are stagnant But they're not? Adjusted for inflation, median US household income is 18% higher than fifteen years ago and 32% higher than it was thirty years ago: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N You could say it was stagnant from 1999 to 2015, though.

However, because big-ticket items we all buy (housing, healthcare) and items many of us buy (education, childcare) have increased much more rapidly than inflation, the overall impact has been a deterioration of financial stability for many Americans.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#214

Post by realce »

palmfacehn wrote: post #210
realce wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Value creation" is not the same as the monopolistic paradigm of a winner-take-all 100m race. Hyperscaling is a system where potentially profitable businesses are destroyed because they weren't profitable ENOUGH for some singular VC investor class. I agree with you that profitable businesses add value to everyone's lives, but there's a maximalist limit to the relationship where they start extracting value and opportu…

Similarly, almost all of the track and field athletes always cross the finish line, regardless of placement. If your business is genuinely profitable, you should do the same. You don't have to be gold medalist if it means compromising your vision or values. If you object to the whims of investors, it may be better to focus on things you can build without their assistance. It isn't as glamorous and it may not make you…

> It is a symptom of an overly financialized economy. We should distinguish these cynical scenarios from genuinely profitable value creation.

1000% agree, thanks for the thoughtful reply

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#215

Post by burnte »

Hendrikto wrote: post #118

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. […] We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business. American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be hug…

> American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be huge. Businesses should focus more on sustainability, and not shut down after 2–3 years after pivoting three times.

This is just the culture in unreasonable VC scenarios. Most new companies are not VC backed and have realistic expectations on the new business.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#216

Post by technotony »

redeux wrote: post #138
brabel wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you never take big swings and big risks and are happy with small wins and stable growth you'll never win the big prize. If you do, you still won't win the big prize. The people who do win the big prize are so few, even in the US, that it's an almost certainty you won't do it. Perhaps you're right that there must be thousands of losers for even a single winner to come up, but that seems so inefficient I doubt tha…

I’m not going to look for stats but as someone who’s been in the startup scene for a long time, it’s true and the stats are probably even worse than that. It’s totally inefficient for the entrepreneur but very efficient for the VC. One of my other observations is that the ones who do make it often come from families that have already made it and are able to leverage those connections and experiences.

This has not been my experience at all. I moved to the bay area in 2012 and 5 people I met living there have built unicorns/have net worth now around > $1BN. None of them leveraged family connections. this might be true in Europe but the best folks figure out how to move to america.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#217

Post by pdntspa »

dagw wrote: post #124
Hendrikto wrote: post #118

> While we gained some traction with some startups, we ultimately weren't able to build a hyper-growth business. […] We then decided to pivot into a vertical B2B SaaS AI product […, but] we haven't been able to find enough traction to make us believe that we were on the right track to build a huge business. American startup culture is so weird. Not everything needs to be a hyper-scaler, not everything needs to be hug…

American startup culture is so weird On the one hand, sure. On the other hand this relentless focus on "hyper-scale" or bust is what has pushed the US startup scene to where it is and probably why it is so far ahead of the rest of the world. If you told most European startup founders that in 5 years you'll have plateaued at 15-20 employees, a steady income flow, and you'll be paying yourself $200-250k a year, they'd…

It also means that, as a customer, you are utterly fucked because almost everyone you want to do business with or buy things from could potentially disappear in a few years because bootstrapping isn't exciting enough for the VC fucks. "Enshittification" runs rampant because literally EVERYONE is swinging for the fences, even when they shouldnt be.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#218

Post by morkalork »

brabel wrote: post #136
jf22 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just go sell $2-4k/mo SaaS to a medium sized traditional industry that has ancient, crummy software with a target customer employee size of 50 - 1,000 people. As if that is easy.

The guy is so out of touch it's like a cartoon. Like, right, why did they think of that?! Just create something that's worth several thousands a month instead of a small value product!!! And get all the big companies who can actually afford that kind of thing to buy your product!!! How hard can that be?

The only times I've seen anything remotely like that work, it's a situation like this: Two engineers work together at company A, become friends and gain experience in the domain. Both move on, progress in their careers and work other companies in the same domain. They meet for coffee and person 1 says: "hey remember that problem we had at A? I see it again at B", person 2: "me too and I've been working on a side project to fix it, you should totally buy the solution from me". And voilà. Could a kid right out of school build the same thing? Sure. Would it have ever succeeded? No. They lack the domain experience and the social connections to do it.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#219

Post by jefftk »

zarzavat wrote: post #211
jefftk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Median incomes are stagnant But they're not? Adjusted for inflation, median US household income is 18% higher than fifteen years ago and 32% higher than it was thirty years ago: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N You could say it was stagnant from 1999 to 2015, though.

What about wages compared to house prices?

Some things in the "basket of goods" we use to compute inflation have gone up more than others, and housing is definitely one of them.

You can compute exactly how much by dividing https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N by https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS Here's a sheet where I've done this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14NVqsKXnswG27TiwENpi...

But note that some of the change here is people building and buying larger houses as we get richer, which inflation calculations account for and this division does not.

Re: After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code

#220

Post by morkalork »

siva7 wrote: post #167
j45 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using B2C pricing for B2B SaaS is a big headwind.

Recipe for your SaaS always being a hobby

Just gotta find that price point within discretionary spending where a manager can OK the cost without having to get a VP to sign off on it. It's definitely way higher than $10/mo.
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