12 ms·

What you should know as a founder of a software company

276 points by nbaksalyar 9y ago

rmdoss 9y ago
Too much content without addressing the real problem with most startups: They do not solve a customer problem. Solve their problem, make their life better and you will do well.
- ivm 9y ago
  This is mentioned in the "Marketing" part as one of the core research questions. I agree that it should be addressed more but didn't want to overload the article – it's long enough already.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  How do startups exist without customers paying them to solve a problem? From convincing investors that the problem exists? It sounds like the investors are the real customers and a narrative is the product they produce.
  - yeukhon 9y ago
    Some startups do very well. Uber, Lyft, Square Cash/Venmo, Yelp, those really do solve problems many of us have/had. Then a few tech startups doing analytics I had some experience with, probably overpromised (?? perhaps it was my fault) what their engine could do. Requests are often in backlog and can take many months to roll out, which by then contract renewal is up.
    - ValentineC 9y ago
      I don't quite understand why Yelp's on that list — do you mind elaborating?
      - yeukhon 9y ago
        Sure. This is my view. I want to know nearby resturants and their reviews. I want see photos of the dishes. I want to see the decor. I want to see discounts if any. I want to see open hours. I want to search based on location, cusine, pricing etc. i know Google does this now, but Yelp was the first to make all the above well in one place. Google doesn’t have an app dedicated at all, just search. Yelp solved my problems. I think you can agree with me you would hear “let’s yelp it/check on yelp” when someone looks for resturants. I also use Yelp beyond just resturants. I was looking for a new dentist and I found him on Yelp after some reviews online. I got to see the good reviews and photos of his office. I was lucky those reviews were real. If I were new to a city I might check out Yelp and TripAdvisor for some reviews and recommenations.
  - bluetwo 9y ago
    The best ones ignore the "scratch your own itch" advice and look for a problem that is outside their comfort area that has not yet been attacked.
    - stephengillie 9y ago
      The best startups without customers? Aren't those the worst startups?
      - bluetwo 9y ago
        Nope. Areas where customers are currently solving their problems without the use of technology. Markets form around problems, not solutions.
idlewords 9y ago
One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap from 100 to 10,000 users is very hard, and I don't know of any advice about how to cross that gap.
- gr33nman 9y ago
  How did you determine that speed was what gave the site its first toehold? Did you collect some kind of data that supported your internal push to make that a priority?
  - daleco 9y ago
    It depends on the use case but loading time is very important. People will engage more with a site where they can move freely and focus on the content rather than a loading page. The longer the loading time the more likely users will click away.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Would that be covered under UX? Loading speed seems like something that would be under the UX heading, at least it is as I understand it. Also, when we started to model pedestrian traffic, we also began to start on the long road to releasing software so that we could sell the software and the companies could model their own traffic. (Many companies consider such data to be proprietary and it can be difficult working for them because of their protective nature.) We were able to get consultation through Jacob Nielson. He was still fairly new to the game (early 2000s) and things like eye tracking were just coming into the fray. I wasn't able to attend any of his meetings and didn't have much to do with the specifics. But, my employees were happy with him and our customers were happy with the results. He's mentioned in the article by NN Group, which is Nielsen Norman Group. The employees were happy and, as mentioned, so weren't our clients. They were also able to take what they learned and apply it to our internal applications and processes. (UX is much more than UI.) This, in turn, helped us more than what we'd expected. I distinctly recall QA being happy with a number of changes. But, it points to the value of good UX and the benefit of getting a professional to consult or, perhaps, directly on staff. Because of my lack of direct involvement, I'm not going to specifically recommend them - I don't feel as though I'm qualified to do so. I will say that the results were very good. We'd chosen them because one of our employees had been following their site and was very impressed with the work they were doing with regards to web sites. It was that same employee who had recommended we get a UX consultant in, in the first place. Given the results, I am happy to have listened.
BadassFractal 9y ago
Really, the key is solving something important that people absolutely need, and will overlook all these weaknesses for. Then something like a good UX is a can you can kick down the road for a long time. If instead you're doing Yet Another Pinterest, then good luck, you're playing a very different game.
- dualogy 9y ago
  > that people absolutely need A tough one. Asking myself what I absolutely need, I come up with air+water+meat+housing. And I'm a coder! =) but even for softer interpretations of "absolutely", haven't ran into any such non-niches (we're talking "people", not obscure-exotic-niche-use-case-prospects) in a long time lately.
ukulele 9y ago
> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making that tradeoff correctly. In all likelihood, most startups would benefit from focusing less on UX concerns and more on selling, selling, selling.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Box is a good demonstration of what you describe.
- pier25 9y ago
  As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.
  - ivm 9y ago
    Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch. In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.
    - piptastic 9y ago
      Who do you use instead of craigslist?
      - pier25 9y ago
        Exactly
      - 9y ago
save_ferris 9y ago
How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"? I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering. While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has time to roll CSS when the project is months behind schedule? The founder with no sofware experience decided that bootstrap was terrible and that he'd roll an entirely custom app style. So he went into the codebase on a weekend and ripped out all the views/controllers/assets and replaced them with his own, which massively broke the test suite on Monday morning (which of course he didn't know how to operate or fix.) After a couple of other "executive audibles" like this, I took the next good offer and ran. It's weird to see 'visual design' as a mainstay of an article titled 'What you should know as a founder of a software company', as if managing a team and building solid engineering fundamentals and culture are either assumed or unimportant.
- ivm 9y ago
  It's not a mainstay, I wrote that you don't need to focus on design instead of functionality and that a $50 template will be ok. The goal is to develop a sense of good design, so you can pick a good template or hire good designers later and argue about the results of their work.
- john_moscow 9y ago
  It keeps on puzzling me why don't engineers ever speak up. Like "Hey, man, I understand the old design sucks and you want to make it better, but editing things directly would only make the delays bigger. How about you take a few screenshots of the product, photoshop it the way you would like it to look and then we, as a technical team, will use our best expertise to make it look this way without breaking everything in pieces?". That could have saved you from weeks of hell and would also increase your influence by a great amount.
  - throwawaydoom 9y ago
    Because "shut up or find yourself another job". I thought this too until recently -- got fired after trying to protect my employer from a toxic exec. There are some that do not accept anything but yesmans or silent codemonkeys. It sucks but it pays. If you are not willing to lose your position, just let it go.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
evanr 9y ago
What you should know is that the only thing that matters is solving big problems for real people problems. If you are solving real problems and you are constantly learning and improving based on your understand why your customers hire/fire you then nothing else will matter. If you are really customer-value-centric then your UX/Visual design, PR, marketing, SEO won't matter since all of your customers will be telling more & more people why you are awesome and they'll keep paying you for more.
- brightball 9y ago
  People buy pain relief :)
paulie_a 9y ago
Sorry to be harsh and disregard your legitimate content completely but it is misguided, it lacks the most important word: Sales
- ivm 9y ago
  Good point, I have a B2C bias.
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    I am curious about the bias. B2c still requires sales.
    - Klockan 9y ago
      What would sales do in a B2C shop? In my mind you just create a product people want, slap AdWords on it for revenue and add a marketing team for growth. I have a hard time imagining what for example Reddit would do with a sales team. Edit: Apparently Reddit have a sales team since they have their own ads platform, they wouldn't need it if they used AdWords.
      - autotypo 9y ago
        Adsense is for publishers, AdWords for advertisers. You are referring to Adsense, maybe?
        dennisgorelik 9y ago
        He meant AdWords - to help him find customers for his B2C product.
        autotypo 9y ago
        This makes more sense in the context of the GP comment if Reddit's ad network is found on sites outside of Reddit. I confess ignorance to these particulars.
cdevs 9y ago
Our CEO doesn't know what UX is and tried to get a marketing email designer to rebuild our whole tool. he figured the kid knows photoshop so he must know best.
emptybits 9y ago
Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands. #1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it. Sorry it's not more catchy.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- huhtenberg 9y ago
  Don't trivialize. The list provides a very good insight into specifics of making a product/company work. These aren't sufficient conditions, but they are often necessary. Product packaging matters. Customer relations matters. Resource management matters. As does the non-technical side of things. All of these are integral to making "companies or consumers willing to pay you for it."
  - emptybits 9y ago
    My intent wasn't to trivialize, only to prioritize. You're right; none of those alone are sufficient for success. But IMO the single most important priority for a founder of a software business was not mentioned.
    - huhtenberg 9y ago
      "Make something that people want to pay for" is an obvious priority for any commercial entity, small or large.
      - cupscale 9y ago
        To OP's credit, it's something that people forget semi-frequently. I can think of quite a few products that look nice and the workflows are quite easy, but at the end of the day they're just not solving a problem I'd be willing to pay money for (and, often, they disappear later). It's very hard to admit that you were wrong about the fundamentals of your product, and very easy to think that re-designing the homepage will fix everything.
nathan_f77 9y ago
That was a really great article. Here's a few notes from my experience with FormAPI.io: > One of the best ways to do it is to watch people interacting with your prototypes without giving them any hints. This is so true. My product has a lot of very complex features, but after watching some early users, I realized that people were struggling to figure out some of the most basic things - even just adding and removing fields. I had made the 'delete' icon only show when you hovered over the field in the sidebar, but I made it more obvious by always showing it when the field was selected. I also added another 'Delete' link to the field option in the right sidebar. And then I also added a welcome modal that explain how to add and delete fields with animated GIFs. (Including the "delete" and "backspace" keyboard shortcuts.) Now that there's 3 separate ways to delete fields, people figure it out almost immediately. Even adding fields was hard to get right. My initial version just had click-and-drag, so you had to first click, then drag to adjust the field width. I saw that new customers were just clicking on the page, and nothing would happen. So I added support for single clicks as well, and now it adds a field at that position with a default width. It's scary that I might not have realized these UX problems if I wasn't paying attention. > Nowadays it’s easy to get amazing stock templates for less than $50 instead of spending thousands on a custom design. I strongly recommend https://pixelarity.com https://pixelarity.com. I've used 3 of their templates now, and I think they're very good. Some of them even have jekyll versions that you can download. http://unsplash.com http://unsplash.com is incredible for stock photos, and I have a subscription to https://thenounproject.com https://thenounproject.com for vector icons. There are a lot of free icons out there, but the Noun Project has a ton of variety, and lots of things you can't find anywhere else. > When doing the development yourself, it is easy to slip into a false productivity when you increase the amount of code without achieving your business goals. The most infamous examples are building tools instead of a product or overthinking a complicated architecture "for the future." This is really tough, but I'm actively trying to avoid this. Not just the fun tools and side-projects you want to build, but even some feature requests from customers. Certain might end up taking weeks or months, and they'll over-complicate your product, or they just won't be a good investment of your time. > New and trendy technology usually means bugs, breaking changes, immature tooling and lack of documentation. "Boring" mature tech will allow you to achieve the same goals much faster and make it easy to find developers for hire. I used Rails and React, since I'm very familiar and productive with those. I was tempted to try Elixir, but I think it would have taken me so much longer to build an MVP. I have a friend who started building their startup with Elixir, but switched back to Rails for the better productivity. > Depending on the country, your experience with these business aspects can range from mildly unpleasant to the absolute worst. I've almost finished setting up my company with Stripe Atlas, and I can say that it has been the absolute best experience. I can't recommend it strongly enough. I'm going through the post-incorporation stuff now with UpCounsel, and everything is just so easy.
olavgg 9y ago
I work at a startup, which is around 15 months old now. We have no UI/UX designer, and have not focused on creating a good UX. We would love to have one, but have not found the right candidate yet. But we are doing very well, we are now over 40 employees and have several of biggest names in the nordic countries as clients and our software is being interacted with hundreds of thousands of individuals every day. Good UX is important, but it doesn't have to be "perfect". The most important thing by far for a startup is getting out of your office and talk with potential clients.
- dharma1 9y ago
  I agree with this. Though if you are at the stage when you want an updated design, I could probably help you. Contacts in my profile
minton 9y ago
> The market doesn't care what's under the hood as long as it works and solves problems. This is a hard truth.
- mkez00 9y ago
  Very true. However, software engineers care about what's under the hood. And the longer your company is operational you are bound to encounter engineering turnover. Attracting promising talent could get very difficult (and extremely costly) if your software stack and/or code base is antiquated.
nestorherre 9y ago
Good article. Concise and to the point with the key elements. Thanks for sharing
ccvannorman 9y ago
*founder of a B2C software company. If you're B2B the strategy may be somewhat different.
mi100hael 9y ago
> Writing is the part where non-native English speakers like me are in a disadvantaged position. While reading the article, I had no idea you weren't a native speaker until I reached that line. So: congrats.
- ivm 9y ago
  Thank you! Though my editor still fixes 2-3 issues in each paragraph.

276 points by nbaksalyar 9y ago

Too much content without addressing the real problem with most startups: They do not solve a customer problem. Solve their problem, make their life better and you will do well.

ivm 9y ago
This is mentioned in the "Marketing" part as one of the core research questions. I agree that it should be addressed more but didn't want to overload the article – it's long enough already.
stephengillie 9y ago
How do startups exist without customers paying them to solve a problem? From convincing investors that the problem exists? It sounds like the investors are the real customers and a narrative is the product they produce.
- yeukhon 9y ago
  Some startups do very well. Uber, Lyft, Square Cash/Venmo, Yelp, those really do solve problems many of us have/had. Then a few tech startups doing analytics I had some experience with, probably overpromised (?? perhaps it was my fault) what their engine could do. Requests are often in backlog and can take many months to roll out, which by then contract renewal is up.
  - ValentineC 9y ago
    I don't quite understand why Yelp's on that list — do you mind elaborating?
    - yeukhon 9y ago
      Sure. This is my view. I want to know nearby resturants and their reviews. I want see photos of the dishes. I want to see the decor. I want to see discounts if any. I want to see open hours. I want to search based on location, cusine, pricing etc. i know Google does this now, but Yelp was the first to make all the above well in one place. Google doesn’t have an app dedicated at all, just search. Yelp solved my problems. I think you can agree with me you would hear “let’s yelp it/check on yelp” when someone looks for resturants. I also use Yelp beyond just resturants. I was looking for a new dentist and I found him on Yelp after some reviews online. I got to see the good reviews and photos of his office. I was lucky those reviews were real. If I were new to a city I might check out Yelp and TripAdvisor for some reviews and recommenations.
- bluetwo 9y ago
  The best ones ignore the "scratch your own itch" advice and look for a problem that is outside their comfort area that has not yet been attacked.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    The best startups without customers? Aren't those the worst startups?
    - bluetwo 9y ago
      Nope. Areas where customers are currently solving their problems without the use of technology. Markets form around problems, not solutions.

idlewords 9y ago

One thing not on this list that is an easy win is to make your pages fast. This will separate you from 90%+ of competitors. A lot of the bloat in modern web apps and web pages is easy to remove, and people will love you for it. I never mentioned it in Pinboard marketing, but I moved heaven and earth to keep the site fast for everyone, and it was speed that gave the site its first toehold. That said, I think the leap from 100 to 10,000 users is very hard, and I don't know of any advice about how to cross that gap.

gr33nman 9y ago
How did you determine that speed was what gave the site its first toehold? Did you collect some kind of data that supported your internal push to make that a priority?
- daleco 9y ago
  It depends on the use case but loading time is very important. People will engage more with a site where they can move freely and focus on the content rather than a loading page. The longer the loading time the more likely users will click away.
KGIII 9y ago
Would that be covered under UX? Loading speed seems like something that would be under the UX heading, at least it is as I understand it. Also, when we started to model pedestrian traffic, we also began to start on the long road to releasing software so that we could sell the software and the companies could model their own traffic. (Many companies consider such data to be proprietary and it can be difficult working for them because of their protective nature.) We were able to get consultation through Jacob Nielson. He was still fairly new to the game (early 2000s) and things like eye tracking were just coming into the fray. I wasn't able to attend any of his meetings and didn't have much to do with the specifics. But, my employees were happy with him and our customers were happy with the results. He's mentioned in the article by NN Group, which is Nielsen Norman Group. The employees were happy and, as mentioned, so weren't our clients. They were also able to take what they learned and apply it to our internal applications and processes. (UX is much more than UI.) This, in turn, helped us more than what we'd expected. I distinctly recall QA being happy with a number of changes. But, it points to the value of good UX and the benefit of getting a professional to consult or, perhaps, directly on staff. Because of my lack of direct involvement, I'm not going to specifically recommend them - I don't feel as though I'm qualified to do so. I will say that the results were very good. We'd chosen them because one of our employees had been following their site and was very impressed with the work they were doing with regards to web sites. It was that same employee who had recommended we get a UX consultant in, in the first place. Given the results, I am happy to have listened.

BadassFractal 9y ago

Really, the key is solving something important that people absolutely need, and will overlook all these weaknesses for. Then something like a good UX is a can you can kick down the road for a long time. If instead you're doing Yet Another Pinterest, then good luck, you're playing a very different game.

dualogy 9y ago
> that people absolutely need A tough one. Asking myself what I absolutely need, I come up with air+water+meat+housing. And I'm a coder! =) but even for softer interpretations of "absolutely", haven't ran into any such non-niches (we're talking "people", not obscure-exotic-niche-use-case-prospects) in a long time lately.

ukulele 9y ago

> Weak user experience design makes people hate your product. Big companies can get away with it because their clients often have no other choice, but it’s a crucial point for a new market player. This is not a generally true statement. Big (aka successful) companies with a poor UX are likely focused on selling or some core feature set that is hard to create, and if they're big then it means they are or were making that tradeoff correctly. In all likelihood, most startups would benefit from focusing less on UX concerns and more on selling, selling, selling.

hkmurakami 9y ago
Box is a good demonstration of what you describe.
pier25 9y ago
As a front end dev / designer I used to agree with the author, but now I think it depends. Wikipedia, Reddit, even HN are great examples of successful projects with good enough UI. Even Gmail or Facebook had terrible UI when launched. If you are solving a unique problem, UI is not so important.
- ivm 9y ago
  Author here, I agree that "good enough UI" will do but I can't remember Wikipedia or Gmail having a terrible user experience on launch. In case of Reddit and HN, I started to use them many years after I learned about them – mostly because of the weird UX. I still prefer hckrnews.com for HN.
  - piptastic 9y ago
    Who do you use instead of craigslist?
    - pier25 9y ago
      Exactly
    - 9y ago

save_ferris 9y ago

How many TechCrunch articles can you find where an acquiring company says "the software we're buying doesn't really work, but it sure looks good!"? I just left a job where the founder (who didn't have any software background) deeply ingrained himself with this philosophy and wound making life a living hell for engineering. While building a full-stack prototype, we slapped bootstrap 4 on the front end because who has time to roll CSS when the project is months behind schedule? The founder with no sofware experience decided that bootstrap was terrible and that he'd roll an entirely custom app style. So he went into the codebase on a weekend and ripped out all the views/controllers/assets and replaced them with his own, which massively broke the test suite on Monday morning (which of course he didn't know how to operate or fix.) After a couple of other "executive audibles" like this, I took the next good offer and ran. It's weird to see 'visual design' as a mainstay of an article titled 'What you should know as a founder of a software company', as if managing a team and building solid engineering fundamentals and culture are either assumed or unimportant.

ivm 9y ago
It's not a mainstay, I wrote that you don't need to focus on design instead of functionality and that a $50 template will be ok. The goal is to develop a sense of good design, so you can pick a good template or hire good designers later and argue about the results of their work.
john_moscow 9y ago
It keeps on puzzling me why don't engineers ever speak up. Like "Hey, man, I understand the old design sucks and you want to make it better, but editing things directly would only make the delays bigger. How about you take a few screenshots of the product, photoshop it the way you would like it to look and then we, as a technical team, will use our best expertise to make it look this way without breaking everything in pieces?". That could have saved you from weeks of hell and would also increase your influence by a great amount.
- throwawaydoom 9y ago
  Because "shut up or find yourself another job". I thought this too until recently -- got fired after trying to protect my employer from a toxic exec. There are some that do not accept anything but yesmans or silent codemonkeys. It sucks but it pays. If you are not willing to lose your position, just let it go.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

evanr 9y ago

What you should know is that the only thing that matters is solving big problems for real people problems. If you are solving real problems and you are constantly learning and improving based on your understand why your customers hire/fire you then nothing else will matter. If you are really customer-value-centric then your UX/Visual design, PR, marketing, SEO won't matter since all of your customers will be telling more & more people why you are awesome and they'll keep paying you for more.

brightball 9y ago
People buy pain relief :)

paulie_a 9y ago

Sorry to be harsh and disregard your legitimate content completely but it is misguided, it lacks the most important word: Sales

ivm 9y ago
Good point, I have a B2C bias.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  I am curious about the bias. B2c still requires sales.
  - Klockan 9y ago
    What would sales do in a B2C shop? In my mind you just create a product people want, slap AdWords on it for revenue and add a marketing team for growth. I have a hard time imagining what for example Reddit would do with a sales team. Edit: Apparently Reddit have a sales team since they have their own ads platform, they wouldn't need it if they used AdWords.
    - autotypo 9y ago
      Adsense is for publishers, AdWords for advertisers. You are referring to Adsense, maybe?
      - dennisgorelik 9y ago
        He meant AdWords - to help him find customers for his B2C product.
        autotypo 9y ago
        This makes more sense in the context of the GP comment if Reddit's ad network is found on sites outside of Reddit. I confess ignorance to these particulars.

cdevs 9y ago

Our CEO doesn't know what UX is and tried to get a marketing email designer to rebuild our whole tool. he figured the kid knows photoshop so he must know best.

emptybits 9y ago

Founder here. That list is a lot of cart before a horse. You could master all those points and still not have a company on your hands. #1: Solve an important enough pain point that companies or consumers will pay you for it. Sorry it's not more catchy.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
huhtenberg 9y ago
Don't trivialize. The list provides a very good insight into specifics of making a product/company work. These aren't sufficient conditions, but they are often necessary. Product packaging matters. Customer relations matters. Resource management matters. As does the non-technical side of things. All of these are integral to making "companies or consumers willing to pay you for it."
- emptybits 9y ago
  My intent wasn't to trivialize, only to prioritize. You're right; none of those alone are sufficient for success. But IMO the single most important priority for a founder of a software business was not mentioned.
  - huhtenberg 9y ago
    "Make something that people want to pay for" is an obvious priority for any commercial entity, small or large.
    - cupscale 9y ago
      To OP's credit, it's something that people forget semi-frequently. I can think of quite a few products that look nice and the workflows are quite easy, but at the end of the day they're just not solving a problem I'd be willing to pay money for (and, often, they disappear later). It's very hard to admit that you were wrong about the fundamentals of your product, and very easy to think that re-designing the homepage will fix everything.

nathan_f77 9y ago

That was a really great article. Here's a few notes from my experience with FormAPI.io: > One of the best ways to do it is to watch people interacting with your prototypes without giving them any hints. This is so true. My product has a lot of very complex features, but after watching some early users, I realized that people were struggling to figure out some of the most basic things - even just adding and removing fields. I had made the 'delete' icon only show when you hovered over the field in the sidebar, but I made it more obvious by always showing it when the field was selected. I also added another 'Delete' link to the field option in the right sidebar. And then I also added a welcome modal that explain how to add and delete fields with animated GIFs. (Including the "delete" and "backspace" keyboard shortcuts.) Now that there's 3 separate ways to delete fields, people figure it out almost immediately. Even adding fields was hard to get right. My initial version just had click-and-drag, so you had to first click, then drag to adjust the field width. I saw that new customers were just clicking on the page, and nothing would happen. So I added support for single clicks as well, and now it adds a field at that position with a default width. It's scary that I might not have realized these UX problems if I wasn't paying attention. > Nowadays it’s easy to get amazing stock templates for less than $50 instead of spending thousands on a custom design. I strongly recommend https://pixelarity.com https://pixelarity.com. I've used 3 of their templates now, and I think they're very good. Some of them even have jekyll versions that you can download. http://unsplash.com http://unsplash.com is incredible for stock photos, and I have a subscription to https://thenounproject.com https://thenounproject.com for vector icons. There are a lot of free icons out there, but the Noun Project has a ton of variety, and lots of things you can't find anywhere else. > When doing the development yourself, it is easy to slip into a false productivity when you increase the amount of code without achieving your business goals. The most infamous examples are building tools instead of a product or overthinking a complicated architecture "for the future." This is really tough, but I'm actively trying to avoid this. Not just the fun tools and side-projects you want to build, but even some feature requests from customers. Certain might end up taking weeks or months, and they'll over-complicate your product, or they just won't be a good investment of your time. > New and trendy technology usually means bugs, breaking changes, immature tooling and lack of documentation. "Boring" mature tech will allow you to achieve the same goals much faster and make it easy to find developers for hire. I used Rails and React, since I'm very familiar and productive with those. I was tempted to try Elixir, but I think it would have taken me so much longer to build an MVP. I have a friend who started building their startup with Elixir, but switched back to Rails for the better productivity. > Depending on the country, your experience with these business aspects can range from mildly unpleasant to the absolute worst. I've almost finished setting up my company with Stripe Atlas, and I can say that it has been the absolute best experience. I can't recommend it strongly enough. I'm going through the post-incorporation stuff now with UpCounsel, and everything is just so easy.

olavgg 9y ago

I work at a startup, which is around 15 months old now. We have no UI/UX designer, and have not focused on creating a good UX. We would love to have one, but have not found the right candidate yet. But we are doing very well, we are now over 40 employees and have several of biggest names in the nordic countries as clients and our software is being interacted with hundreds of thousands of individuals every day. Good UX is important, but it doesn't have to be "perfect". The most important thing by far for a startup is getting out of your office and talk with potential clients.

dharma1 9y ago
I agree with this. Though if you are at the stage when you want an updated design, I could probably help you. Contacts in my profile

minton 9y ago

> The market doesn't care what's under the hood as long as it works and solves problems. This is a hard truth.

mkez00 9y ago
Very true. However, software engineers care about what's under the hood. And the longer your company is operational you are bound to encounter engineering turnover. Attracting promising talent could get very difficult (and extremely costly) if your software stack and/or code base is antiquated.

nestorherre 9y ago

Good article. Concise and to the point with the key elements. Thanks for sharing

ccvannorman 9y ago

*founder of a B2C software company. If you're B2B the strategy may be somewhat different.

mi100hael 9y ago

> Writing is the part where non-native English speakers like me are in a disadvantaged position. While reading the article, I had no idea you weren't a native speaker until I reached that line. So: congrats.

ivm 9y ago
Thank you! Though my editor still fixes 2-3 issues in each paragraph.