71–80 of 180 posts
Moving everything to the cloud would be far more efficient. But the corpus of legal text captured in Word and Legal's preference for redlining email attachments is the status quo.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on what I read, it wasn't that there was no way to make this work - as you state here. It's that you didn't want to stake your future on an uncertain outcome. Nobody can argue with you that such a decision was a bad idea. If you, the founder don't want to do it - it will fail. So I think this just wasn't your passion play and you can't go down this road without being passionate and come out the other side in on…
> Based on what I read, it wasn't that there was no way to make this work - as you state here. It totally was! He had no way to solve the fundamental problem of the software - making people use it ALL the time, for multiple (paying) users. If the software was doomed to be one licence for an office of 20, where it is used sporadically for one or two infrequent use cases, it was doomed, and the only hope was a pivot. N…
There are other examples in this thread. A pivot is exactly that, something you need to re-engineer or change the market on to make viable.
Reddit is a good example. Burbn/Instagram another. Flikr even better.
If your whole business plan is "raise cash and hope we pivot to a good idea", is that really a solid plan?
As with most things, the answer is "It depends." Taking money can be a forcing function on a pivot. If you have a solid team and know that there is a market, then you seek hard for a solution - if there is no solution in the market then you take the company in a different direction. That's why team is so important - ideas fail.
Hi. Tim here. I'm delighted that this article struck such a chord. I'll try to answer the most common questions here. I wish I could answer everyone directly. 1) I called it off before anyone sent money or quit their jobs. The only one who lost money or a job because of ContractBeast was me. If the money was in the bank and the team on board we would have gone ahead. That's why I had to make that decision when I did.…
Well, I thought I was crazy some times in my life (when I pulled the plug of my own company) for putting my life and my sanity on par with money. I was getting broken, I had a constant flow of ... 70+ /hrs job paid 35 hrs a week and even though I had customers but I was chaining more and more burn-in on burn-out. I was seeing my benefits diminish and my life sucked out.
But I did the right choice retrospectively. When clouds of stress disappears emotional reactions loosen up, then most of the time it shows you that rational thoughts such as the one you are exposing are right.
Risks have to be rationalized else you can get sucked in a gambler attitude. I guess some entrepreneurs are not guarded well enough against the "gambling/irrational risk" addiction that can be fired up.
It is hard because we are driven to entrepreneurship by emotions, and business decisions are best done in a cold sociopathic kind of state of mind.
You have all my regards and I wished I could have written such a concise and clear essay on the difficulty to live with decisions that are right and seem wrong because we human have doubts, emotions, dreams...
"It would have been different if we had been debating which plan among several to implement or how to shore up specific weaknesses, but we had nothing." I don't really understand "having nothing" -- you're either creating value or you're not. You guys spotted a real problem, but your v1 solution was meh. There were certainly multiple ways out (and not just tack on gamification), and even if some were long-shots, the…
He assumed that if he personally couldn't solve a problem in a few weeks of hard work, then nobody coudl. This is kind of naive or possibly arrogant. It also sounds weak to me, coming from academic research, in which people work very hard on problems for years, and sometimes even succeed at solving those problems (famous example: Fermat's Last Theorem).
This bit resonates the most with me. I worked on a project worth little traction where we'd keep getting feature requests from the client facing team members for things that were of minor value but sometimes major effort. It grinds you down over time as you realise there's no real demand. Eldorado isn't over the next hill.
Sometimes it feels like the people giving feedback are just too eager to please you with positive feedback.
Moving down market is tough. The reason why enterprise ecosystems can flourish is that consultants have a symbolic relationship with software, act as a silent sales force, drive legitimacy and solve the soft issues that make software projects fail. Creating a simple CRM system isn't that hard, but getting mass adoption AND offering a customizable product takes hand holding. Content alone doesn't hold hands, nor does…
My understanding is that people seem to resist change in corporate environments because it is a high stakes environment where, for example, the ability to hold onto work "flow" achieved over a long period can make the difference between thriving and failing. Thus software becomes more of a political tool, not necessarily in the sense of office politics, but in the sense of being part of a strategic toolbox by which people grapple with the networks of power they participate in at work.
So corporate users are not necessarily resistant to change; they are just strategic about whether and what changes are to their advantage; if the introduction of new software can strengthen their work-related strategies, they can become its champions. I have seen this myself when I used to work for big multinational corporations.
To model software adoption in the corporate space, therefore, one might need to employ a theory of power such as Actor-Network theory (in which terms one might think of software as an actor that can be "enrolled" for various ends)
A theory of work and instrumentality, such as Activity Theory, is what most people (sometime without knowing it as such) apply to analyze work environments; but paradoxically it is usually the wrong approach to analysis. I see this failure of analysis all the time.
In a nutshell, the more instrumental and work-oriented software is, the more necessary it is to analyze it through a power-relations lens.
startup = a newly established business
Hi. Tim here. I'm delighted that this article struck such a chord. I'll try to answer the most common questions here. I wish I could answer everyone directly. 1) I called it off before anyone sent money or quit their jobs. The only one who lost money or a job because of ContractBeast was me. If the money was in the bank and the team on board we would have gone ahead. That's why I had to make that decision when I did.…
You mention that you might write an article on distinguishing the tangential feature requests from the useful ones. I would really like to read that :) Especially if I could send it to our product managers, because our product has been in a cycle "we need an enterprise sale" > "potential customer mentions a feature they would have liked" > "we scramble for a month to write the feature and close the deal". To be hones…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the situation were really "take the money and do 70+ hours a week for a year" versus "shut down the business" then I'd agree, but that's a false dichotomy. You can run a startup putting in far less time than that; putting in long hours is a choice. You can bring in a team or outsource the parts you don't like. It makes it harder to succee but it's an option. You could (depending on lots of caveats) simply hand the…
but that's a false dichotomy It's a false dichotomy for self-funded/bootstrapped businesses. But if you consider yourself a startup, you have to deliver growth . It's that pressure that leads to the 70+ hour weeks. It's entirely possible to own and run a business while still putting in reasonable hours. But it's unlikely that business is a startup , by Paul Graham's definition of the word. For reference, Paul Graham…
After this, I'd never give this guy time or money and I doubt anyone else will either. No matter how shitty you feel about your start-up, if you have a willing team and cash, you should see it through. Being an entrepreneur isn't always about having all of the answers. It's very often about not knowing the answers and figuring things out. Especially if you have a team and cash flow and investors. I think this guy nee…
It's only a matter of time before this kind of thinking results in founder suicide. I've read multiple cases where investors, including Y Combinator, forced founders to pivot, which caused serious mental distress to the founders. If the idea won't work, drop it, and drop the founders too, until their next project can be properly assessed. Dropping a project doesn't mean the founders are bad founders or that they are…
I don't think you should sling this kind of thing around so lightly. It's trivial to post charges like this on the internet and have many people just believe them. But this is a serious thing to say right after you've invoked the idea of suicide, and doesn't remotely resemble anything I've observed at YC. In my observation, YC partners don't "force founders" to do anything; they couldn't anyhow, and they don't think that way in the first place.