4 ms·

Friends, you do NOT need business cards. You spend your time creating and learning and meeting interesting people instead of obsessing over unimportant detail

by logjam 18y ago

Friends, you do NOT need business cards. You spend your time creating and learning and meeting interesting people instead of obsessing over unimportant details like business card designs. You meet someone. You want them to know they are personally important to you. You want them to be able to contact you. Just take out the simple, elegant, paper notebook you habitually carry to record thoughts, names, lists, etc. Keep talking. Print your name and the way you would prefer to be contacted. Add the date. Hand the piece of paper to your "contact". Immediately you have something beyond the trading of little uniform squares of bland cardboard.

wheels 18y ago
I disagree. If you're going to mixers for startups, which for us is how we're hoping to stir up customers, it's good to be able to give them something to hang onto. It's a lot less clumsy than having to reach for a pen and paper. Why do I say this? Because I tried pen and paper at the last one that I went to. Yesterday I ordered business cards. That said, I don't think it's important that they're impressive early on. If we're going to impress people it's going to be with what we say, not with our cards. The card has one function: so that they still have our contact info when they get back to their office. I got the cheapest ones I could find (50 for €12) and spent all of about half an hour sorting that out.
- wanorris 18y ago
  > If we're going to impress people it's going to be with what we say, not with our cards. Good design is important, especially for a website. If your business card is ugly, what is your site going to look like? But exotic materials or obviously expensive printing techniques don't signal frugal, which ought to be an important quality in a startup founder.
  - wheels 18y ago
    The business cards that I ordered are all just text, black on white, in Times. On the left in bigger print is our name and slogan, on the right is my name, title, email address, phone number and our website. I'd love to have something well designed, but if you stay minimal, you can usually avoid being overtly ugly. Clean design is important, but impressing people with our design skills is less core for us than most news.YC readers since we're providing tools to integrate to other sites (at the data-level) rather than user-accessible components. We just need to look professional, not so much exciting. Plus I think that having a design that makes a notable impression is possible, but to get above the run-of-the-mill nice looking cards, you're going to pay. That's fine if you're Guy Kawasaki. For us, I'm just hoping that the people that would remember me anyway remember me plus have my email address. I couldn't tell you what any of the cards that I collected at my last outing looked like. I copied them into my address book at home, synched to my phone, connected to the folks on LinkedIn / Xing, and threw them in the recycling bin. :-)
- logjam 18y ago
  I understand. Maybe I figure we're in a slightly different forum here. I'm under the impression most folks here are the creators, not the salespeople. Some cheap business cards simply printed might be useful for the latter, and I guess in some circumstances for the former too - but what your describe seems a little like leaving a flyer under somebody's windshield wipers in the parking lot. But if hacker or engineer or physician or writer or anyone else who actually does the hard work pulls out some fancy-dancy-designed cards and seems to be all about "mixing" rather than building, I start to wonder.
  - wheels 18y ago
    Well, when you've just got a couple people ... I'm development, marketing, sales, investor relations, quality assurance, public relations, human resources, customer service and janitor. I suspect most people are in the same boat. ;-)

by logjam 18y ago

wheels 18y ago

I disagree. If you're going to mixers for startups, which for us is how we're hoping to stir up customers, it's good to be able to give them something to hang onto. It's a lot less clumsy than having to reach for a pen and paper. Why do I say this? Because I tried pen and paper at the last one that I went to. Yesterday I ordered business cards. That said, I don't think it's important that they're impressive early on. If we're going to impress people it's going to be with what we say, not with our cards. The card has one function: so that they still have our contact info when they get back to their office. I got the cheapest ones I could find (50 for €12) and spent all of about half an hour sorting that out.

wanorris 18y ago
> If we're going to impress people it's going to be with what we say, not with our cards. Good design is important, especially for a website. If your business card is ugly, what is your site going to look like? But exotic materials or obviously expensive printing techniques don't signal frugal, which ought to be an important quality in a startup founder.
- wheels 18y ago
  The business cards that I ordered are all just text, black on white, in Times. On the left in bigger print is our name and slogan, on the right is my name, title, email address, phone number and our website. I'd love to have something well designed, but if you stay minimal, you can usually avoid being overtly ugly. Clean design is important, but impressing people with our design skills is less core for us than most news.YC readers since we're providing tools to integrate to other sites (at the data-level) rather than user-accessible components. We just need to look professional, not so much exciting. Plus I think that having a design that makes a notable impression is possible, but to get above the run-of-the-mill nice looking cards, you're going to pay. That's fine if you're Guy Kawasaki. For us, I'm just hoping that the people that would remember me anyway remember me plus have my email address. I couldn't tell you what any of the cards that I collected at my last outing looked like. I copied them into my address book at home, synched to my phone, connected to the folks on LinkedIn / Xing, and threw them in the recycling bin. :-)
logjam 18y ago
I understand. Maybe I figure we're in a slightly different forum here. I'm under the impression most folks here are the creators, not the salespeople. Some cheap business cards simply printed might be useful for the latter, and I guess in some circumstances for the former too - but what your describe seems a little like leaving a flyer under somebody's windshield wipers in the parking lot. But if hacker or engineer or physician or writer or anyone else who actually does the hard work pulls out some fancy-dancy-designed cards and seems to be all about "mixing" rather than building, I start to wonder.
- wheels 18y ago
  Well, when you've just got a couple people ... I'm development, marketing, sales, investor relations, quality assurance, public relations, human resources, customer service and janitor. I suspect most people are in the same boat. ;-)