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

61–70 of 132 posts

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#61

Post by matt-p »

djoldman wrote: post #35

I looked for a source for this statement in the article: > Granting permission takes the median hectare of land from £20,000 to £2.4 million - a 139x uplift. I couldn't find one. However, I did run into some interesting viewpoints by a certain Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics... "one of the world’s pre-eminent housing economists" He has this to say about "Green…

I have not researched this but someone I know at one of the big house-builders pegged the cost of building a 3 bed at around £35-40,000, so in the south east land with PP is 10X more valuable than what's sat on it.

"Farm" land, even in the SE is about 12K an acre, and you get 6-8 houses to the acre so you should be able build a three bed and sell it for £50K on the outskirts of London, Cambridge, Oxford or Brighton (just by example) still making a profit if we liberalised planning in those areas. That shows you how extreme this situation of fake constraint is.

It could therefore never be allowed to happen. The big house-builders wouldn't build and sell at that price, the locals wouldn't allow it as they've bought their houses for 500K, 10X as much and would literally all go personally bankrupt...

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#62

Post by ejsdev »

I wrote something similar to this last year - it was an incredibly cathartic writing experience. It's extremely weird to realise that you're hung up on a business venture from years before, but made a lot of sense.

FWIW I am never doing a 3-way marketplace again, hellish.

If anyone is interested - https://edjs.dev/blog/my-first-startup/

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#63

Post by gnfargbl »

djoldman wrote: post #35

I looked for a source for this statement in the article: > Granting permission takes the median hectare of land from £20,000 to £2.4 million - a 139x uplift. I couldn't find one. However, I did run into some interesting viewpoints by a certain Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics... "one of the world’s pre-eminent housing economists" He has this to say about "Green…

> I couldn't find one.

A parliamentary publication from 2018 estimated the uplift factor to be 93x outside London and 287x inside [1]. Found via ChatGPT.

I would think that the north-south variation has flattened a little bit by now, but I can't immediately find any similar document from the last couple of years.

[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/..., page 12.

[2] https://www.progressive-policy.net/publications/gathering-th...

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#65

Post by dazh »

razakel wrote: post #46
belinder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this true? I've tried for months to get people to talk to me about their problems and the most common answer I get is "everything's... fine?".

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#66

Post by _fat_santa »

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'…

> There's a plethora of software products (offline & online) which cost way too much and work like crap - all you need to do is do it better for a more reasonable price (where those old companies have a big headcount and lots of mouths to feed producing a hard price floor for them).

Our startup is basically doing this right now. Our thesis is basically if we can make a product marginally better than our massive competitors and be able to peel away just a sliver of their customer base and get rich by virtue of having just 2 people and not 2000.

The business itself it not sexy at all but there are still loads of interesting technical problems to solve from building the app to marketing.

I would say our biggest strength right now is just having me and my co-founder and no other folks to pay. When your burn rate is your monthly digital ocean bill (which runs ~$50), you can burn practically forever.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#67

Post by matt-p »

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.

reductionist in this case is not a bad thing. We need a major change to fix this situation and doing some little tweaks like increasing taxes on second homes or holiday homes does not actually fix this (we already tax those specific cases, with things like second home stamp duty or in some areas second home council tax).

You have

A - Demand (immigration of 1 Million per year)

Or

B - Supply (building only 120,000 houses per year)

We MUST fix one or both of these sides of the equation. Holiday homes aren't going to add up to a row of beans quite frankly (and will have very negative effects on the tourism industry, not so bad in London - but might be quite an impact in cornwall for example).

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#68

Post by _fat_santa »

bad_username wrote: post #9
pyb wrote: post #3

A good question to ask before starting a startup is : "Do I see myself working 10 years on this problem?". Looks like they ran out of steam, rather than out of runway.

Why 10 years? Is it not typical with startup founders to plan a lucrative exit in a much shorter time frame?

It seems high at first but take a look at practically any successful startup (Slack, Dropbox, Notion, etc) and they all were around for 8-12 years before the founders cashed out.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#69

Post by mickael-kerjean »

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...

A dirty secret I recently learned about: look for public contracts in your area, to find some of those, google "contract register filetype:pdf".

Tons of crazy shit in there waiting to be disrupted. The tricky part is to get the right financials to bid on the interesting stuff, a good pathway there is to combine multiple companies together and make a shared bid, reach out to me if you're interested.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#70

Post by c_hastings »

_fat_santa wrote: post #66
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'…

> There's a plethora of software products (offline & online) which cost way too much and work like crap - all you need to do is do it better for a more reasonable price (where those old companies have a big headcount and lots of mouths to feed producing a hard price floor for them). Our startup is basically doing this right now. Our thesis is basically if we can make a product marginally better than our massive compe…

As long as you remember to pay yourselves too!
Post reply on HN