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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

#261

Post by therealdrag0 »

meiraleal wrote: post #165
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…

> we need big companies to make GPUs, probably. we definitely don't need trillion dollar companies selling ads.

A lot of those ads support startups and small businesses.

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

#262

Post by presentation »

acuozzo wrote: post #239
presentation wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That said most developers don’t have any awareness of problems outside of those they experience… which tend to be developer tooling issues. So you get a ton of companies building dev tools startups despite an incredible amount of need elsewhere. I feel like a lot of value could be unlocked if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people…

> if there were some way besides random chance and networking for skilled developers looking to start something to discover people The main problem here is that non-programmers are often so entrenched in their workflow(s) that they fail to see what can be automated and wind up proposing nice-to-haves instead of tasks critical to their mission. Moreover, they're more likely to dismiss 80% solutions because the introdu…

Yeah, finding the right people with enough mental flexibility but who understand the challenges of a different domain is rare but super valuable.

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

#263

Post by gizmo »

geo88 wrote: post #259
gizmo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world has changed. Today you can sell software for $5000 or $10000 without any sales process. Not always of course, you have to find the right niche.

Curious to learn more about this, re pricing limits in today's corporate world. What do most managers have access to on their corp card in terms of spend limits, without needing to get VP/finance approval for their purchase? In my mind, I had the limit as $500/month (potentially from some old readings on the subject).

There is a whole non-corporate world of SMBs that employ 30 or 100 people total. Those businesses have no VPs or corporate cards, but they still have problems and are willing to pay good money for solutions. Family businesses in any industry, law offices, marketing agencies, boutique hedge funds/pe, etc.

Corporate approval for a 10k purchase doesn't need to be complicated either. As a software vendor it helps to have a web page/email with all the relevant info intended to be forwarded to accounts payable.

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

#264

Post by liontwist »

lazide wrote: post #236
liontwist wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probability models are an attempt to cope with a lack of information. But you not having complete information doesn’t mean the world is like that.

Do you think it’s possible for anyone to have all the information?

Never said that. But I fail to see when random processes start occurring

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

#265

Post by cj »

fsndz wrote: post #246
giva wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd pay to buy a bad house and then spend money to improve it, rather than paying a full rent for the same bad house and hoping that the landlord uses that money to improve it.

I don't get the comparison. are you comparing a SaaS that is doing 70% of the job and a shitty streamlit POC that no more than 3 people can use in parallel ??

They’re saying that they would rather pay a consultant because they would have control over fixing things that don’t work the way they want. Compared to the alternative of buying a SaaS product that is “rough around the edges” where you’re not able to directly control whether and how the product is improved over time.

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

#266

Post by jefftk »

zarzavat wrote: post #255
jefftk wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peopl…

For many people housing isn't part of a basket, it is the basket. If food prices go up, it hurts psychologically but it's not the end of the world. I can buy cheaper food, I can buy less food, I can eat out less. Most people in the developed world are very far from food price-induced famine. I can buy a year's worth of sustenance for a thousand dollars, it might not be healthy but I'm not going to die. Housing is qua…

> It's hard to adjust for increases in housing costs by buying cheaper housing

I think this is mostly not true? You can adjust for housing becoming more expensive by changing your consumption patterns, just as you describe with food. It's still rough, but unless your family is living in single room in a shared unit (or, if you're single, sharing a room) there are choices between "consume housing at your current level" and "be homeless".

The CPI-U table has housing as 37% of the overall basket: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm What do you think it should be?

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

#267

Post by lazide »

liontwist wrote: post #264
lazide wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it’s possible for anyone to have all the information?

Never said that. But I fail to see when random processes start occurring

What is the difference between ‘fundamentally unknowable/unpredictable’ vs ‘random’?

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

#268

Post by Loxicon »

What is absolutely wild to me is how many developers build "developer focused tools". That is the red'est sea to swim in as a small dev because it's easy to build things you can use every day.

I have a lot of friends who build tools in book shops, martech, payments and other niches.

There are so many markets people. Most of them are unknown, and therefore, low comp.

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

#269

Post by liontwist »

lazide wrote: post #267
liontwist wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never said that. But I fail to see when random processes start occurring

What is the difference between ‘fundamentally unknowable/unpredictable’ vs ‘random’?

Whether it’s inside your circle of influence (not control) or completely outside.

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

#270

Post by dagw »

brabel wrote: post #244
technotony wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know 5 unicorn founders? That seems pretty crazy given there's been how many in total since 2012, like around 60 from what I can find online?

Wikipedia says 1219 unicorns as of August 2023, with 702 of them being from the US.
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