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A Postmortem of a Startup

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Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#81

Post by shalmanese »

When I coach startup founders, I walk them through a very simple 4 step process when we meet:

1. What have you learnt since we last met and how has that altered your priors?

2. What do you now believe is the most important problem you should be solving?

3. What's currently blocking you from solving that problem?

4. How do we overcome those blocks?

Crucial to this process is that Q1 is not what have you done, it's what have you learnt. I do not give a shit about anything you've done if it's not in the service of learning.

I also run a retro every 3 months with founders where we ask the following questions:

1. What would you want to tell yourself 3/6/12 months ago (essentially, all the lessons learnt in italics) to save the maximum amount of pain?

2. When did you learn each specific thing?

3. When was the earliest you could have learnt that thing?

4. What changes can we make going forward to minimize that delta?

Extremely simple things but extraordinarily powerful when applied consistently over a long enough span of time.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#82

Post by mrweiner »

shalmanese wrote: post #81

When I coach startup founders, I walk them through a very simple 4 step process when we meet: 1. What have you learnt since we last met and how has that altered your priors? 2. What do you now believe is the most important problem you should be solving? 3. What's currently blocking you from solving that problem? 4. How do we overcome those blocks? Crucial to this process is that Q1 is not what have you done , it's wh…

Thank you — the way you frame this is helpful.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#83

Post by pavel_lishin »

Zambyte wrote: post #73
bombcar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that usually the moaners are not the loaners - they're not the ones making the purchase decisions. That's why you either get in via very small business (where the owner is the buyer and user) or guerrilla (like Slack et al).

The people moaning are the ones building things that can be built better, not the ones that you should try to sell to.

I'm a moaner, but I'm not building anything.

The software my school uses to communicate with parents is fucking awful. Based on digging around their website & linkedin, I suspect they have a team of offshore developers - which is fine - but my money is that they don't actually have a team, they're paying a company that gives them supposedly-fungible engineer-hours instead of an actual cohesive team that works on the product and is proud of what they've made. They just eat requirements and shit something approximating software.

But what am I going to do? Say I build a competitor, solo, for cheap. (It can be done. The software doesn't do much. The hardest thing would be ensuring the emails actually get delivered.)

Now I get to play salesman. I have to sell it to my school. Now I have to maintain it. Our school isn't rich; a local school paid $130k for an unrelated hardware+software solution, so I'm at most going to get that, and now I'm on call 24/7, now I'm training the teachers & administrators to use it, now I'm fielding support emails, etc., etc.

Fuck it. I'll keep moaning.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#84

Post by 6stringmerc »

_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…

Interesting! My concept isn’t a startup as a culture because the problem I am to solve isn’t a technology or hardware or access issue - it’s a content issue. AI can not begin to touch what my human brain can do to add value via consulting with a specific company in a regulated and legally sensitive business process. I can potentially teach another human being how to replicate my methodology, but as it stands, I’m going to fill a niche for a large market by providing an inherently subject service: talent.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#85

Post by froddd »

matt-p wrote: post #67
froddd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hous…

Holiday homes have quite the impact in many parts of Wales.

Occupancy ratings per house seem to be quite low on average [1], but weirdly I can’t seem to find any figures for overall occupancy.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

Edit: clarification

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#86

Post by macrocosmos »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #36
froddd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it not the dominant factor, at least in the short term? It's much faster for 150k people to enter/leave the UK than for a corresponding number of homes to built/demolished.

It’s obviously the dominant factor to anyone with the eyes to see it.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#87

Post by rhubarbtree »

automatic6131 wrote: post #54
rhubarbtree wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve posted this before, but I think the reason house prices are expensive in the UK is that they are an asset. If the rich can buy that asset and make a return, they will buy it. So price equilibrium is where rents are at an absolute maximum that can be born by tenants. As the price is determined the potential yield, the price then rises as high as possible. Building more houses won’t change this situation until the…

>Building more houses won’t change this situation until the number of houses is greater than the number of tenants. That's wrong though. Building more houses eases this situation as it approaches the number of tenants. It gets better! Better is good! And the (perceived) appreciation of houses is also part of the asset price, not just the rental income.

> Building more houses eases this situation as it approaches the number of tenants. It gets better! Better is good!

Why? I don't see any reason this should be true.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#88

Post by bombcar »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #83
Zambyte wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people moaning are the ones building things that can be built better, not the ones that you should try to sell to.

I'm a moaner, but I'm not building anything. The software my school uses to communicate with parents is fucking awful . Based on digging around their website & linkedin, I suspect they have a team of offshore developers - which is fine - but my money is that they don't actually have a team, they're paying a company that gives them supposedly-fungible engineer-hours instead of an actual cohesive team that works on the…

This is a perfect example. The school is suffering, but has nearly no budget. The users suffer, but have no say. Nothing changes, everyone cripples along.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#89

Post by rhubarbtree »

matt-p wrote: post #55
automatic6131 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Building more houses won’t change this situation until the number of houses is greater than the number of tenants. That's wrong though. Building more houses eases this situation as it approaches the number of tenants. It gets better! Better is good! And the (perceived) appreciation of houses is also part of the asset price, not just the rental income.

arguably asset price is built on scarcity vs demand everything else is all second order really.

No, asset price is built on yield, not on scarcity. That is exactly my point.

It's a bit brain-melting, but once you realise it, the talk of NIMBY-ism etc. is just irrelevant.

If you add more assets with a good yield, assuming that yield is better than bonds etc., then those assets will get bought.

The only other brake on that is diversity of portfolios, but it doesn't strike me as particularly important, especially if many landlords only own a few properties.

Re: A Postmortem of a Startup

#90

Post by mattmanser »

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…

Nottingham city, the pure "legal" definition, is actually quite small and not what most people think of when you say "Nottingham".

For example, it doesn't include Beeston, West Bridgford, Stapleford, Clifton, Ilkeston, Arnold, Long Eaton, Hucknall and more.

Even though no outsider could draw a line where Nottingham city stops and most of them start.

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