We at Levels.fyi are also a two person team at the moment. We use free versions of most services (helps that we’re only 2 people) and essentially are only paying for AWS. We’ve always found that there are cheap high quality alternatives to a lot of well known tools. We pay less than $30 / month.
A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
351–360 of 468 posts
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you mind sharing the name of your startup?
Lol. I doubt they'd be careless enough to do that. As soon as they do, you can then put names to all the people mentioned. Which is obviously not their intention otherwise they'd have done so.
If it were that easy you could probably just find several cyber security startups and work backwards to find out which one he’s talking about.
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
The person you replied to pointed out where leaders were failing them. Rather than empathizing, you skipped to pointing out what they should be doing instead. They made a hyperbolic comment (“literally shooting out knives”) and you’ve focused on dissecting it and accused them of using inaccurate language. Of course they’re just exaggerating when they said that even if people were losing eyes management wouldn’t care.…
> rather than empathizing, you skipped hmmmm... I had tried to convey "hey, not being listened to really sucks" but now that I re-read "That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem." that's a pretty damn sterile way to express that. Also you're right that it should come first before the "here is this other perspective you should consider" bit. > You switched to firs…
I'm sympathetic to your concern about the use of the word "literally". It's sort of a special, meta word.
But there's a subtle difference here in how they used it. They said "even if the UX is ... 'the software literally shoots knives'".
They're speaking in hyperbole, not metaphor. So "literal" is somewhat appropriate. They're not directly saying that their boss wouldn't care about a bad UI. They're exaggeratedly saying that their boss wouldn't care about literal injury.
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is Discord always ignored in discussions of slack alternatives? It's literally a slack clone. Are you all just put off by the marketing or the fact that it's not exclusively used by 'professionals'?
Discord doesn't have threads. That's a deal-breaker for us.
That could be seen as an advantage
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#355You also use desks, and chairs, computers and displays. Cups for drinking water. Plates for eating. This is an interesting list, but it thinks of software as somehow fundamentally different from non software products, which is a mistake IMO. It makes it seem like Software is super expensive or something, when in reality, if you think of all inputs into your business, these costs are trivial.
True but you don’t pay subscription for your chairs. You do pay rent, but in many case the sum of SaaS subscription is in the same order of magnitude as the rent.
> True but you don’t pay subscription for your chairs.
But in reality you kind of do - chairs are still a depreciating asset that require upkeep and maintenance. I recall at my last medium-sized company (500ish people) that every quarter they had guys come in to fix the broken chairs. I don't think the chairs were bad quality, it's just that in a company that size where the chairs got a ton of use that every quarter you'd have 10-20 chairs that needed fixing.
Startups tend to have a desire to keep capital costs as low as possible because the need to be nimble and respond quickly and deploy capital efficiently is much more important than the meager savings you'd get from buying vs. subscribing. You rarely if ever see startups buying their office space vs. renting for similar reasons.
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
> rather than empathizing, you skipped hmmmm... I had tried to convey "hey, not being listened to really sucks" but now that I re-read "That lack of weight given to your experience as a signal of real business cost is a real problem." that's a pretty damn sterile way to express that. Also you're right that it should come first before the "here is this other perspective you should consider" bit. > You switched to firs…
I'm sympathetic to your concern about the use of the word "literally". It's sort of a special, meta word. But there's a subtle difference here in how they used it. They said " even if the UX is ... 'the software literally shoots knives'". They're speaking in hyperbole, not metaphor. So "literal" is somewhat appropriate. They're not directly saying that their boss wouldn't care about a bad UI. They're exaggeratedly sa…
An exaggerated hypothetical as a way of saying "Here is what I'd predict about their behavior. Here is how much I trust them."
Hmmmm... I'll chew on that for quite a while...
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#357I am the CIO of a mostly remote, cybersecurity startup (50 FTEs). I balance between not single-threading all choices through me and not letting things get too out of hand. That means no one is every really happy. E.g., we use Uberconference for videoconferencing. We thoroughly looked at a bunch of others and chose UC for its functionality, price, and simplicity (every conference gets a simple phone number, no stupid…
Never heard of Uberconference. Everyone has Zoom though, so that's sort of the default choice for that sort of thing - to the point where it's becoming a verb. And the product is pretty good.
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#358> FounderPhone (free) - Send and receive texts and calls directly in Slack. Free since we built it ourselves :)
Can you tell us more about this? Is this part of your product?
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#359Not exactly the same, but I have sometimes wondered how many startups are just burning other startups' money, and would collapse if VCs tightened the belt. For instance, startup X seems profitable but all revenue is from other startups not making money yet. Like a big ponzi scheme of sorts. Most products mentioned in the article are now mainstream, but for lots of them a few years back they were small and only used b…
PG talks about noticing the same phenomenon - when at Yahoo during the dotcom bubble - in the beginning of this article: http://www.paulgraham.com/bubble.html
Thanks for linking that, interesting read and funny to see my showerthought having some merit.
Re: A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
> executives want to believe in magic solutions that give them all the feelings of control with none of the actual work Corollary: R&D wants to believe they can build magical solutions that solve all the problems--solutions that will scale better and cost less to keep up than off-the-shelf ones made by people with extensive domain expertise--in a week or two, promise. As with most things, the problem is complicated,…
I agree with this wholly. I very much doubt that many people are building tools in bad faith to consume money. It’s just that in the end, “solve everything” means implementing 10:1 weird hacks for edge cases vs actual features that companies all have in common.
That works both ways. 70% of features are common with other businesses, but the feature set is pretty diverse. My experience is that internal folk with a good understanding of the business hit 90-95% of the requirements without implementing the 200% of non-relevant broader industry requirements. YMMV.