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

A Postmortem of a Startup

buildwithtract.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 132 posts

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#41

Post by immibis »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #33
spacebanana7 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's curious to think about what house prices in the UK would be like without immigration. With a sustained negative fertility rate over the past few decades, there could've feasibly been stable prices with no new houses built at all.

The UK population would have started to decrease naturally I believe around 2024 without immigration. It so happens that the past few years have also seen record high immigration and population growth... Obviously the property market would be looking very differently if population was decreasing. The whole economy would.

Are you trying to paint a conspiracy here? It seems like people just move around if they can, and one pressure that drives people away is a lack of housing even worse than other places' lack of housing. If there's less of a lack of housing (relative to how bad it is everywhere else), of course a place becomes more attractive to move to.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#42

Post by ph4evers »

madmask wrote: post #37
belinder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now where to get a list of such companies and products to decide what to build...

A decent 3d CAD and multiphysics FEM (cheap comsol) would be a good start

Yes but the industry is so rooted and vendor locked that it is extremely hard. People pay for Autodesk, Ansys, comsol etc. because it is proven and engineers are trained to use it. I would not be eager to use something new if I’m a constructor or car manufacturer.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#43

Post by immibis »

AJRF wrote: post #23
AJRF wrote: post #4

Thanks for writing this! > Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult. Isn't the real problem that supply is artificially constrained because house prices and the economy are interlinked in a way in a special way in the UK economy, such that the majority of home owners don't want it changed (because more supply == downward pricing pressure) I think the only entity that could mean…

NIMBYism is not unique, but the importance of house prices to the UK economy is more severe than other countries. - The UK has a very strong household wealth affect (consumption is tied to house price growth / decline). The US and UK borrowers borrow at a rate against household wealth not seen in other nations (look at the chart on page 6 - https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1117.pdf ) - It has had dramati…

It's been said about the New Zealand economy that it mainly consists of five people trading houses with each other for ever bigger numbers.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#44

Post by spacebanana7 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #33
spacebanana7 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's curious to think about what house prices in the UK would be like without immigration. With a sustained negative fertility rate over the past few decades, there could've feasibly been stable prices with no new houses built at all.

The UK population would have started to decrease naturally I believe around 2024 without immigration. It so happens that the past few years have also seen record high immigration and population growth... Obviously the property market would be looking very differently if population was decreasing. The whole economy would.

> It so happens that the UK population would have started to decrease naturally I believe around 2024 without immigration

I think it would've been much earlier than that. Cumulative net migration since 2000 is around 8.5 million people. So the UK's current population would be radically lower today without immigration.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-fig... (annoyingly the per year figures need to be summed up manually on both this and ONS reports)

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#45

Post by drdrek »

dzonga wrote: post #17
andrewstuart wrote: post #2

>> After raising a £744,000 pre-seed round in April 2024, we explored several business models Capital after traction

to those who cry about 'BS' like diversity etc ask yourself if people without the same backgrounds, looks would have been able to raise the same amount without a business model.

The financial world is not equitable, its about results. People from privileged backgrounds are more likely to raise funds because their privilege makes them more likely to succeed. If Being raised in a trailer park raised the odds of a successful exit, you can be sure VC interns would be having business meetings over deep fried Oreos way more often.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#46

Post by razakel »

belinder wrote: post #31
margorczynski wrote: post #25

I think the problem with startups (from a business perspective) is that they're ego-driven and instead of looking at the business reality in an objective fashion they mostly try to "revolutionize" and "make a difference". It isn't as sexy as doing the next Facebook or disrupting global healthcare but just copying an existing archaic & expensive product and doing it better can yield a great and stable business. There'…

Now where to get a list of such companies and products to decide what to build...

People constantly moan about their jobs, stupid processes, broken software and tools... listen to them and build something better.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#47

Post by pyb »

AJRF wrote: post #4

Thanks for writing this! > Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult. Isn't the real problem that supply is artificially constrained because house prices and the economy are interlinked in a way in a special way in the UK economy, such that the majority of home owners don't want it changed (because more supply == downward pricing pressure) I think the only entity that could mean…

It's true that the general public have a revealed preference for the housing crisis to continue forever.

However in principle, as with many social issues, a motivated actor such as a startup could still have a chance of fixing it.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#48

Post by chippiewill »

froddd wrote: post #28
philipallstar wrote: post #24

> Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning permission is difficult. It's true that planning departments are very expensive, don't do much positively, and still seem to allow awful-looking things to be built, and I'd probably happily do away with them, but the fundamental driver is the incredible onboarding of people from overseas for years that crushes the combination of the existing population and th…

Reducing the problem to ‘people coming from overseas’ is an equally reductionist argument. There are properties going unused, for very many reasons. Second homes, holiday homes, etc. This also drives the price of properties up. This is one of the inputs to the problem. Planning permission laws is another input. The size and change of size of the people needing housing is another input.

It does, but occupancy rates in the UK are already incredibly high compared to countries like France.

There are simply too many people and not enough houses.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#49

Post by LurkerAtTheGate »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #33
spacebanana7 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's curious to think about what house prices in the UK would be like without immigration. With a sustained negative fertility rate over the past few decades, there could've feasibly been stable prices with no new houses built at all.

The UK population would have started to decrease naturally I believe around 2024 without immigration. It so happens that the past few years have also seen record high immigration and population growth... Obviously the property market would be looking very differently if population was decreasing. The whole economy would.

> Obviously the property market would be looking very differently if population was decreasing. The whole economy would.

Isn't this exactly what's happening in Japan? Govt practically giving away mostly rural homes, as owners died without heirs.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#50

Post by bagpuss »

belinder wrote: post #31
margorczynski wrote: post #25

I think the problem with startups (from a business perspective) is that they're ego-driven and instead of looking at the business reality in an objective fashion they mostly try to "revolutionize" and "make a difference". It isn't as sexy as doing the next Facebook or disrupting global healthcare but just copying an existing archaic & expensive product and doing it better can yield a great and stable business. There'…

Now where to get a list of such companies and products to decide what to build...

there's neoseed.io that sends out emails weekly with "ideas you can replicate"
Post reply on HN