Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If only someone told me this before my first startup

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 88 posts

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#41

Post by smcin »

ttymck wrote: post #14

3. Don't chaise investors, chase users, and then investors will be chasing you. 4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. 5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup > My experience at multiple startups from 2017-2020 suggests differently. I wish it weren't the case, but it seems there is a certain type of company that can focus solely on hype and fundraising and headcount, and make it quite fa…

That used to be true in 2017-2020 for certain sectors of company and funding source; where did they raise funding from? And is that funding source no longer investing?

> and make it quite far

Is that measured by funding rounds and valuation, or by paid users/revenue?

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#42

Post by johnrushx »

sokoloff wrote: post #31

> 5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. > 8. Do SEO from day 2. As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years. It's my biggest regret. Those seem pretty directly in conflict. (I suspect that #5 is the one that's in error.)

in #5 I mean the design of LP. founders often put too much attention on design, logo, and pages.. Should put all attention into SEO parameters (research keywords and write the page copy accordingly)

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#43

Post by johnrushx »

x0x0 wrote: post #23
watters wrote: post #21

> There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. First, yikes. Also, I'm quite curious about how productivity was measured here. For a (successful) software business, the work output of developers is highly productive because the marginal cost of selling another copy of the software is so low. SaaS delivery models may result in somewhat higher marginal costs compared to non-SaaS distributio…

Team / interpersonal communication overhead, planning overhead, and dealing with less skilled members of the team can easily make 4 engineers roughly as productive as one very skilled engineer, just at 4-5x the cost once you include the increase in product/project management required by multiple people. We tolerate this generally because eg upskilling peers is important to scale a company, but pre-PMF it's a huge adv…

yes. this is what I meant

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#44

Post by johnrushx »

ttymck wrote: post #14

3. Don't chaise investors, chase users, and then investors will be chasing you. 4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. 5. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup > My experience at multiple startups from 2017-2020 suggests differently. I wish it weren't the case, but it seems there is a certain type of company that can focus solely on hype and fundraising and headcount, and make it quite fa…

you're right, there is this type. however, it's a very rare type. We see them often in the news, but it's less than 1% of the startups

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#45

Post by johnrushx »

brigadier132 wrote: post #7

I find it insane that in many interviews of "founders" it was common for founders to say their job was to raise money.

yeah, and this seems like a common thing, but the reality is that most startups are actually bootstrapped and never raised money and never even tried. But the media covers mostly VC funded startups and their stories, that's why it feels like this is a typical story, but it's just 1% of the reality

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#46

Post by johnrushx »

MattGaiser wrote: post #28
brigadier132 wrote: post #7

I find it insane that in many interviews of "founders" it was common for founders to say their job was to raise money.

A lot of companies, most notably Facebook, Uber, Doordash, and Amazon, took a ton of time to not lose absurd amounts of money, so I can see why that was the job. They literally had ideas that wouldn't have worked as companies without billions of dollars.

yes, true, but this is 0.001% of the startups, which won't happen to a typical founder

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#47

Post by johnrushx »

tester756 wrote: post #19

>6. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers. While I can agree that hiring full stacks may be better at the beginning, then I dont understand 2nd part "There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers." WTF?

there is huge overhead when having more than one dev. most software is simple, and having one person building the whole things is actually very productive. There are lots of other potential issues, but I talk about startups in my post. Not about corporate software. Startups mostly have simple software products

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#48

Post by marcosdumay »

henning wrote: post #35

"Ask existing users if they want this feature" is a bad idea because users are going to say "yes" to everything, especially in a B2B SaaS app. It means nothing.

Have you never say "no, I don't care about it" when asked such a question? I say that a lot of times, and get that from users all the time too.

The thing is, you can't confuse a "yes" with the user actually wanting it. But there are plenty of ideas that everybody clearly do not want, and people will answer you a "no" if you ask.

Re: If only someone told me this before my first startup

#50

Post by johnrushx »

drewcoo wrote: post #36

> There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers Ever met people with "brilliant ideas" but no skills to make them concrete? They're not only nonproductive, but usually sap everyone else's productivity with their "expertise."

oh yeah
Post reply on HN