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Founders share the challenges of running a tech business
- taylorjacobson 7y agowow, love the honesty of some of these, killer compilation really liked this --> "From the start, I was aware that I was taking on a huge project that other companies have devoted entire teams to, but I chose to look at it as more of a mental challenge than a technical one. I knew I had the skillset to pull it off, I just had to keep myself motivated and on track."
- c-smile 7y agoHeh, that's mine and about my Sciter project. Sciter is pretty full implementation of HTML5 and CSS, has scripting engine on board, etc. So, indeed, I am personally competing with teams behind WebKit, Trident, Gecko, V8 (JS Engine), Chakra (MS JS Engine) and bunch of others. And recently with ReactJS (Sciter got Reactor - native implementation of ReactJs), Angular and others. And that is really a fun project to work on - many different paradigms on the same code base.
- throway1n 7y agothat’s the one project in the list that caught my eye - looks pretty neat. shame it doesn't gain the attention of the electron hating mob on HN - they all want people to work for free and give them stuff for no money but in the name of foss. keep up the good work, your project is an example of going against what the mob wants and building a successful product.
- taylorhou 7y agoenjoy how there's perspective given from the responders with their current MRR as well. as a founder of a bootstrapped tech-enabled service startup with $135k+ MRR is cash flow. Accounts Receivable is a PITA and it still hasn't been solved (even with the likes of bill.com, harvest, stripe, paypal, qbo, etc...) - i'd almost pay for a company to outsource our AR to completely to represent us on initial AR, 30-90 day AR, collections, demand letters, and ultimately lawsuits if needed. bleh.
- blizkreeg 7y agoat that size, would it be better to just hire an in-house accounting/book-keeping person?
- jermaustin1 7y agoI was going to recommend the same thing, but I also know there are plenty of AR companies out there. YC even funded one called YayPay. I know my accountant will chase down invoices for me if I asked him (for a fee of course), thankfully QuickBooks Online handles this reporting, and has a one click solution to resend Invoices. I don't do $135k/mo, and only send a handful or two of invoices each month, so I cannot comment on how well it scales.
- tortasaur 7y agoThis exists; invoice factoring companies make this process relatively straightforward.
- taylorhou 7y agoInvoice factoring doesn't solve the root collections issue. It's just a really expensive bandaid...
- julianlam 7y agoThese manual back office tasks is exactly why I hired an office manager. She chases down invoices and handles back payments for all of our clients. The mental overhead of handling these things was significantly hampering my technical work, and the moment she took over, a huge weight lifted off my back. Part of the aggravation is that you can't automate chasing down invoices, yet. As a person who likes to automate all the things, this would just not do. So I sourced it out.
- RileyJames 7y agoWhen I worked at Xero, AR automation was by far the most common partner / integration to approach us. There are thousands of solutions in this space, focused on every niche imaginable, with a huge range of products. Everything from simply reminders, to outsourcing, to discounting / incentives, to debt collection. I’d be very surprised if you can’t find a suite of tools that automate / optimise the portions of your AR process that you’re having difficulties with. https://apps.xero.com/au/function/bills-expenses https://apps.xero.com/au/function/bills-expenses (Most of these are multi-platform, or completely independent applications, they do not require using Xero)
- Alex3917 7y agoIs IndieHackers completely fucked for anyone else right now in Chrome 80.0.3987.106 on MacOS? The js and CSS static assets are getting blocked for some reason, even after disabling all my extensions and refreshing the page in incognito and without cached assets. edit: Works fine in Safari, but the same thing is happening in Firefox.
- HelloFellowDevs 7y agoI had the same issue with the link on both safari & firefox, I used the readerview on firefox as a workaround.
- chirau 7y agoThe site is not working/rendering properly in both Chrome and Firefox.
- haidersf 7y agolove the honesty
- userium 7y agoI'd add the struggle / time it took to really deeply comprehend what 'build, measure, learn' means in practice. And realizing that there is a more scientific approach to building good products. For example by using Hypothesis-Driven Development [1]. We wasted lots of time (and money) at the beginning with our own stupid assumptions. [1] Hypothesis-driven development (HDD) https://teamsuccess.io/hdd https://teamsuccess.io/hdd
- hhs 7y agoWith respect to each company, what do the numbers in the parentheses mean? Is that profit, revenue or something else per month?
- randlet 7y agoThis is almost always (and frustratingly!) Monthly Recurring Revenue.
- nif2ee 7y agoNever trust anything that comes from indiehackers, this is a community of professional indie astroturfers and manipulators of everything from renaming the same product and launching it every couple months on ProductHunt and buying upvotes, to baiting HNers with "How I made $X by doing Y". It's a pump and dump scheme on sub-million dollar levels.
- gumby 7y agoNot sure why a coffee company is a “tech startup”. (Though TBF Amazon didn’t feel like a tech company in the 1990s)
- Wordball 7y agoIt has a live chat and five different tracking solutions implemented. What about this doesn't look like a tech business?
- gumby 7y agoThat’s just table stakes for a generic retail store Just because I drive a car wouldn’t make me a car business. I think of tech businesses primarily as those that develop novel technology and secondarily as those who use technology in a novel and unexpected way. In both cases technology is the differentiation. The only novelty of this business is its message and while that might make a perfectly respectable business (I am not part of the target market so I can not judge) there’s no “tech” in their business plan. Think of it more like Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein: the clothes are made in the same factories by the same workers; the only differentiation is market positioning. Nobody would criticize them as not being “business” or even “clothes business” but their differentiator is marketing.
- Axsuul 7y agoI'm pretty sure Wordball's response was meant as sarcasm.
- 7y ago
- madengr 7y agoWow, a coffee company is now a tech company. I didn't bother with the rest of the list.
- tylerrobinson 7y ago> The biggest challenge was a very naive understanding of how the modern internet economy works. The idea that good software is easy to promote is just as silly as the "good software sells itself" myth. I would definitely spend more time learning marketing. This resonates for me as a bootstrapped founder in the early stages with my company. Cutting through the noise and getting the attention of my leads is hard work. Way harder than coding.
- geuis 7y agoI’m running into these challenges right now. After my last job, I’m finally trying to turn a 10yr+ project into a product. I’m currently serving a bit over 2 million requests per day for the free service I’ve run for years. Now that I’m focusing on turning it into something more I’m realizing how slow it is to build a product by yourself. For example, I’ve been working on transitioning to a much more scalable k8s architecture for the last few weeks. While I’ve had some experience over last few years as a developer, I’ve never had to set the whole thing up from scratch. It’s been tedious and draining but I am making progress. The biggest issue is not having anyone to talk to on a peer basis. In January I completely revamped the product website from being a crap page running on Launchrock to a self-hosted site with a new design and incorporating Mailgun to handle email. The issue with that is I get people every day submitting their email addresses to sign up, but to date no one has clicked the confirmation link in the emails being sent to them to confirm the signup. I researched this heavily before writing code and the consensus is that double opt-in is the correct way to go. So I did that, but no one is following up with the confirmation part. Last week I found a minor bug that was preventing confirmation signups and I fixed it asap and manually sent emails to the 3 people that I would manually add them to the confirm list and remove them if they wanted. But I’ve had more signups after that who also did not complete the signup process. I’ve tested the flow heavily and it works. But since I don’t really have a coworker environment anymore, I don’t have anyone to do peer review right now. Very frustrating. I guess overall I’m used to building services very rapidly but being responsible for the entire thing is someone time consuming. I’m still adjusting to the process.
- bavell 7y agoI can definitely relate to this. No colleagues for peer review is tough. I'd recommend sticking with the managed k8s services unless you have a team. In my experience as a solo dev k8s has been a huge help and very hands-off once setup. It was a bit of a struggle at first but IMO worth it.
- dankohn1 7y agoI would encourage you to try to find a low-cost developer in the developing world (perhaps via Fiverr) who could serve a QA function for you. It might take you 4 or 5 tries, but you might be able to find someone very low cost who would be able to work with you on QA and debugging.
- ketchupfanatic 7y agoThis site is top notch, thumbs up
- andrepd 7y agoIt weighs several megabytes and downloads and runs scripts from multiple domains. All to serve a text page. God's sake it even has its own reimplemented loading bar...
- H8crilA 7y agoAll of those could be applied to non-tech businesses with very minor modifications.