8 ms·

Startup failure stories: 20 months in, 2K hours spent and 200K € lost (2021)

57 points by takiwatanga 5y ago

Lamad123 5y ago
Great read!!! I had similar experiences though in a much smaller scale with some side personal projects for fun. Despite all the libraries and all the many things already done for you, if you really want to do anything slightly interesting that sets your work apart you will need to really work hard.. I end up abandoning most of these little projects because it quickly becomes stressful and like a job for which I'm and will never be paid! I can fix a bug here and there or add a feature while working as a part of a professional team and make my employer richer... There might be some ingredient that the rest of us miss.. Or maybe our motives are not quite right!! Becoming one's boss seems like a frivolous thing and might not be enough to push you forward in hard time.. Or maybe one can't be both a craftsman and a businessman at the same time..
- dSebastien 5y ago
  Interesting thoughts. I sincerely hope that we can both be craftsmen and businessmen at the same time. It boils down to the ability of lowering our standards and focusing on the right things at the right time. Because if the business doesn't take off, there's just no point. But as craftsmen, once it does we definitely need to circle back and make things better over time. And I think that the "over time" part is key.
dSebastien 5y ago
I'm the author of that article. I wrote this article at the beginning of 2021, a few months before I called it a day and stopped wasting time on that project. I submitted it to HN at the time and there were tons of useful feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627081 If you're curious, I also posted two follow-ups: - https://dsebastien.net/blog/2021-02-28-21-months-in-and-80k-views-later https://dsebastien.net/blog/2021-02-28-21-months-in-and-80k-... - https://newsletter.dsebastien.net/issues/developassion-s-newsletter-entrepreneurial-journey-825650 https://newsletter.dsebastien.net/issues/developassion-s-new... In summary, I would say that I was way too trusting. I found a startup coach who lured me into the project, and I was super naive. I had doubts along the way but continued playing the game hoping for a happy ending. There was none. I was embarked with a super confident but ultimately hollow CEO, and I was way too focused on the technology. I really did a good job with architecture, code quality, etc., but failed to avoid bike shedding for the longest time. Furthermore, I had no experience with startups, hoped that my co-founders really had a portfolio we could sell to and thus could focus on delivering high quality, even if it took longer. In reality, there was nothing but daydreaming and envy. My co-founder dreamt about the Silicon Valley and VC money, but wasn't ready to actually deliver and sell a product. My co-founders also refused to go and discuss with those potential customers for the longest time, and by the time they did, I had run out of money, was super stressed and couldn't go on much longer. Worse yet, those prospects of course had important requests, and we didn't have the energy left to implement those. And when that realization came, my co-founder just quit silently. From one day to the next, there was not a word, not a gesture. He went offline, and I never heard from him since. I was a tool. I made a conscious choice to invest that time and money, but could certainly have made a lot more money elsewhere, hence the title. But I managed to protect my family from harm. I went back half-time as an employee and continued to pay rent and put food on the table. So no harm done in that sense. And it wasn't useless. I learned a ton about myself, about how to actually go about and build something. I learned to recognize bike shedding and to be less naive. The most frustrating part for me is the fact that all this production-ready code is just rotting in place. And there's not much I can do about it...
mox1 5y ago
Feels like the classic Developer wants to start a business but doesn't really understand marketing, traction, product-market fit, etc. etc. Granted I've done the same thing 5 times now, but never again. Should have mocked up a bare UI in a week, then tried to sell it for a month or two.....
- hu3 5y ago
  As a dev, I want to learn how to sell. How do you sell a mockup? Are you upfront with the potential clients about the product not existing and the timeline? I imagine people would have a hard time buying a promise but that's probably because my sales skills suck.
  - avgDev 5y ago
    I have accepted that I need someone who can sell. I can do the tech but I'm just too honest and direct to be a good sales person.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - threefiftyone96 5y ago
      Would love to have a chat about what you'd like to sell. Let me know
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > I'm just too honest and direct to be a good sales person You’re going to have a tough time finding a good sales partner if you assume them to be dishonest. Liars aren’t generally good salespeople.
      - krageon 5y ago
        > You’re going to have a tough time finding a good sales partner if you assume them to be dishonest. It might be tough because most won't enjoy hearing it, but marketing is 100% lies. It is frankly dishonest to pretend otherwise.
slingnow 5y ago
This guy didn't lose 200K. He claims he lost 200K by "not doing something else". Putting opportunity cost as a hard loss is stretching it, and sure seems like it's just there to make the title more clickbaity. I guess I just lost something like $20 reading the article then.
- short_sells_poo 5y ago
  If he has good certainty that he could've made 200k in the same period, I think it is useful to count it as money lost. People very often lose sight of the power of "money in hand". Had he done "something else", he'd have a nice and cool 200k in his pockets right now. 200k which can be put to further work, which will compound over time. Even more, while those 200k are working, the dude can be working too accumulating further wealth. Compound returns are truly the 8th wonder of the world, but many people just see the promise of 0 to billionaire through some unicorn startup, while there are countless people going 0 to millionaire even if they play it comparably safe. Don't scoff at the person who works a relatively ordinary corporate job but manages to accumulate a respectable wealth over a decade or two. There are countless startup bros who go through a dozen failed attempts in the mean time with nothing but experience to show for it. That experience may be useful at some point in the future, but it's entirely unrealized value. On the other hand, having 500k wealth to your name which is invested and growing is tangible value right now which itself can be used to fund future endeavors.
  - dSebastien 5y ago
    You're 100℅ right. I'm the author, and I would definitely have made that money had I continued to work as a consultant. I had secured a high paying long term contract and I broke it to work on that project. Money in the bank is money that I could have invested, money that could have improved my family's quality of life, ...
ratsforhorses 5y ago
Pretty sure this has been posted before....
ZetaZero 5y ago
2k hours and 20 months later: "But we were still not there with the MVP. And we already trimmed it down to the bare essentials."
avgDev 5y ago
I enjoyed the article as I'm planning on doing consulting and then pivoting into a SaaS project. However, the writer has not lost 200k and has gained a mountain of life experience, which doesn't seem to get enough attention.
- dSebastien 5y ago
  Indeed, that's the other (brighter) side of the coin. But the impact is not the same when you're nearly 40 or only 20 :p Those were costly lessons to learn.
dgellow 5y ago
It might be a bit weird to say this but I love to read about that kind of “failure stories”. Thanks to the author for sharing openly such a personal experience.
- dSebastien 5y ago
  Indeed, we don't find enough of those, so I wanted one more story to be out there. It was also a good exercise to take the time to look back and clearly point out the mistakes. Many thanks!
biztos 5y ago
It's an interesting post-mortem and a reminder of the pitfalls of the "bootstrap" model if you don't have other income. But I take exception to the "200K EUR" part. Money you didn't make is not the same as money you spent. For starters, the former is infinite! That the author is so concerned with this opportunity cost -- a cost that is radically different for different people, dependent largely on circumstances that have nothing to do with their value to the startup -- is, I guess, part of the self-doubt he describes. I can relate, I did a failed startup when I was younger and many times I thought about whether I should just suck it up and get a job instead. Probably everybody does. But half the point of it was to not be doing the thing that would have given you the 200K.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  >Money you didn't make is not the same as money you spent. For starters, the former is infinite! Cost is short for opportunity cost. If you have a high probability of earning 200K EUR as your second best option, then what you choose to do does incur that cost. Young people not accounting for their costs properly is an especially big problem in the US when they decide to spend time in their valuable 20s going deep into debt pursuing higher education with low probabilities of ending up with high pay (assuming their goal is high pay and/or some sort of financial security). They should be adding up all the lost pay and compounded returns from their savings, because their eventual pay needs to be sufficiently high to make up for it. And it is not just money. Opportunity cost also includes quality of life, for example, slaving away the best years of your life working for someone else (or one's self) should have an acceptable probability of netting you something commensurate to the sacrifice.
  - reitzensteinm 5y ago
    Opportunity cost is absolutely as real as you describe, but the title is double counting it. They didn't spend both 2000 hours and 200k worth of hours.
davidkuennen 5y ago
Reading this gave me the constant feeling he waisted way too much time on technical stuff. For an MVP with an uncertainty of success it's important to get it out of the door with minimal effort and time.
fhrow4484 5y ago
Previous discussion (Jan 2021 - 235 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627081
xwdv 5y ago
IMO startups aren’t worth it anymore if you’re not clearing at least twice the salary of two remote developer jobs (annualized). Reason being, it is easier to work two remote jobs simultaneously than it is to build a successful startup. It is also far more enjoyable and calls on your direct expertise instead of requiring many skills, some of which you may not do well at all. Given that two developer jobs will have you clearing at least $300-400k in income per year, this is a sobering heuristic of how successful you have to be at building a startup to consider it being worthwhile. If the author was working two jobs instead of doing this failed startup, after 20 months he would have roughly $600k+ in earned income to show for it, instead of a ~$200k loss.
- altdataseller 5y ago
  That all makes sense but in practice, it is hard to calculate how much you will make in a startup (if we could, we obviously would either give up or go on) For instance, you can easily go through years 1-4 making 1/2 your income. But all of sudden in years 5-6, you gain more credibility, your product starts to achieve PMF, word of mouth takes over, etc. And maybe in years 7-8, you attract a big company that buys your company, and all of a sudden you just earned the equivalent of 25 years of a salary.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Except most entrepreneurs aren't looking to get rich, they just want to replace their job with something a bit less shitty. http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.html http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.html
- distances 5y ago
  Mind expanding about the "two remote jobs" part? As an internal your contract likely prohibits you from taking another job, and as a freelancer you're billing time. So I don't see how that would work out without screwing the company or forgoing all your free time.
  - xwdv 5y ago
    You are not prohibited from taking another job. Also, because developers really only do 4 hours of work a day on average and spend the rest of their time thinking, it is easy to multi task two jobs.
fhrow4484 5y ago
I missed the first time this post got on HN front page, but my main takeway is same comment from jiofih (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25630241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25630241): >> the project needed to be (almost) re-created from scratch >> the build system, Docker/docker-compose, continuous integration, authentication, internationalization, etc >> created a wiki, migrated the code to a monorepo, created/cleaned up the backlog, etc. >> created a story map, devised a roadmap, and clarified the scope of the MVP >> replaced Angular Material by Tailwind, created our own theme, refactored the data model > This is why. A year went by and no product work was done, none of this was necessary. The very first thing that should have been built is a MVP, that main screen that was only tackled 9 months in. Strongly recommend studying “The Lean Startup” and learning how to be stoic about tech. That’s how people deliver working products in three months. in addition to that, the author mentions, still in a Startup/MVP context: "The focus on took care of release automation, created the production infrastructure (switched to Kubernetes)", "The NoSQL database was making us lose a ton of time". None of this should matter at MVP stage!
- jamil7 5y ago
  I completely agree and had the same thoughts reading that. K8s for an MVP?! Throw that thing on a PaaS and forget about ops altogether until it's too expensive. I think it's really good advice for developers wanting to launch their own project to do at least one or two tiny projects first and try to release and sell them. It makes you much more aggressive with cutting fat at an early stage. It was an enjoyable read though and I imagine the author learned a whole lot regardless of the outcome.
- fellowniusmonk 5y ago
  There's a reason so many successful startups launched with some form of rails stack. Less time making decisions means more time to build customer value prop/interactions. An MVP for a web sass should be "core UI/UX value prop" for the main selling point (s) and what I call "marketing brutalism" for the rest. With the most boring and reduced use cases you can convince everyone else involved to agree to.
- adampk 5y ago
a1371 5y ago
The thing that stands out to me the most is the sentiment. This reads like a big rant as in saying "I did all the things textbooks say, why didn't it work out?" That is as if to say "I've gone to the music school, why am I not a k-pop mega star yet?" A lot of people will not look at the 200k this person didn't make as "lost"; rather the cost of learning expensive lessons. The first lesson should have been that we're not in 2007 anymore. Sprinkling tech on random things has a small chance of working out. They did not have any domain knowledge or connections to schools nor restaurants. They were just users of them, like everybody else. Building a startup is a beautiful thing but it requires relentless optimism and actually feeling the problem. Enough to say that's how YC finds its cohort.
blipvert 5y ago
Quits an otherwise great job because of frustration with meetings … … to do a start-up that’s all about meetings <golf-clap>
- dSebastien 5y ago
  There's a big difference. I wanted to help people ultimately do less stupid meetings and get more value out of the remaining ones. Long term my hope was to kill meetings, not multiply those. Plus I did not work in the corporate world anymore. I was standing aside, working on my own terms.
lnxg33k1 5y ago
My take for this is: - if one wants to experiment and learn new tech or approaches one should not leave the job and create maybe some side experiments - I can see why people would just leave the fleet if there is not a steady path forward towards an mvp - we have project managers around with the capability to manage plan and prioritise projects of a chair? As a dev is frustrating One either win or learn

57 points by takiwatanga 5y ago

Great read!!! I had similar experiences though in a much smaller scale with some side personal projects for fun. Despite all the libraries and all the many things already done for you, if you really want to do anything slightly interesting that sets your work apart you will need to really work hard.. I end up abandoning most of these little projects because it quickly becomes stressful and like a job for which I'm and will never be paid! I can fix a bug here and there or add a feature while working as a part of a professional team and make my employer richer... There might be some ingredient that the rest of us miss.. Or maybe our motives are not quite right!! Becoming one's boss seems like a frivolous thing and might not be enough to push you forward in hard time.. Or maybe one can't be both a craftsman and a businessman at the same time..

dSebastien 5y ago
Interesting thoughts. I sincerely hope that we can both be craftsmen and businessmen at the same time. It boils down to the ability of lowering our standards and focusing on the right things at the right time. Because if the business doesn't take off, there's just no point. But as craftsmen, once it does we definitely need to circle back and make things better over time. And I think that the "over time" part is key.

dSebastien 5y ago

I'm the author of that article. I wrote this article at the beginning of 2021, a few months before I called it a day and stopped wasting time on that project. I submitted it to HN at the time and there were tons of useful feedback: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627081 If you're curious, I also posted two follow-ups: - https://dsebastien.net/blog/2021-02-28-21-months-in-and-80k-views-later https://dsebastien.net/blog/2021-02-28-21-months-in-and-80k-... - https://newsletter.dsebastien.net/issues/developassion-s-newsletter-entrepreneurial-journey-825650 https://newsletter.dsebastien.net/issues/developassion-s-new... In summary, I would say that I was way too trusting. I found a startup coach who lured me into the project, and I was super naive. I had doubts along the way but continued playing the game hoping for a happy ending. There was none. I was embarked with a super confident but ultimately hollow CEO, and I was way too focused on the technology. I really did a good job with architecture, code quality, etc., but failed to avoid bike shedding for the longest time. Furthermore, I had no experience with startups, hoped that my co-founders really had a portfolio we could sell to and thus could focus on delivering high quality, even if it took longer. In reality, there was nothing but daydreaming and envy. My co-founder dreamt about the Silicon Valley and VC money, but wasn't ready to actually deliver and sell a product. My co-founders also refused to go and discuss with those potential customers for the longest time, and by the time they did, I had run out of money, was super stressed and couldn't go on much longer. Worse yet, those prospects of course had important requests, and we didn't have the energy left to implement those. And when that realization came, my co-founder just quit silently. From one day to the next, there was not a word, not a gesture. He went offline, and I never heard from him since. I was a tool. I made a conscious choice to invest that time and money, but could certainly have made a lot more money elsewhere, hence the title. But I managed to protect my family from harm. I went back half-time as an employee and continued to pay rent and put food on the table. So no harm done in that sense. And it wasn't useless. I learned a ton about myself, about how to actually go about and build something. I learned to recognize bike shedding and to be less naive. The most frustrating part for me is the fact that all this production-ready code is just rotting in place. And there's not much I can do about it...

mox1 5y ago

Feels like the classic Developer wants to start a business but doesn't really understand marketing, traction, product-market fit, etc. etc. Granted I've done the same thing 5 times now, but never again. Should have mocked up a bare UI in a week, then tried to sell it for a month or two.....

hu3 5y ago
As a dev, I want to learn how to sell. How do you sell a mockup? Are you upfront with the potential clients about the product not existing and the timeline? I imagine people would have a hard time buying a promise but that's probably because my sales skills suck.
- avgDev 5y ago
  I have accepted that I need someone who can sell. I can do the tech but I'm just too honest and direct to be a good sales person.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - threefiftyone96 5y ago
    Would love to have a chat about what you'd like to sell. Let me know
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > I'm just too honest and direct to be a good sales person You’re going to have a tough time finding a good sales partner if you assume them to be dishonest. Liars aren’t generally good salespeople.
    - krageon 5y ago
      > You’re going to have a tough time finding a good sales partner if you assume them to be dishonest. It might be tough because most won't enjoy hearing it, but marketing is 100% lies. It is frankly dishonest to pretend otherwise.

slingnow 5y ago

This guy didn't lose 200K. He claims he lost 200K by "not doing something else". Putting opportunity cost as a hard loss is stretching it, and sure seems like it's just there to make the title more clickbaity. I guess I just lost something like $20 reading the article then.

short_sells_poo 5y ago
If he has good certainty that he could've made 200k in the same period, I think it is useful to count it as money lost. People very often lose sight of the power of "money in hand". Had he done "something else", he'd have a nice and cool 200k in his pockets right now. 200k which can be put to further work, which will compound over time. Even more, while those 200k are working, the dude can be working too accumulating further wealth. Compound returns are truly the 8th wonder of the world, but many people just see the promise of 0 to billionaire through some unicorn startup, while there are countless people going 0 to millionaire even if they play it comparably safe. Don't scoff at the person who works a relatively ordinary corporate job but manages to accumulate a respectable wealth over a decade or two. There are countless startup bros who go through a dozen failed attempts in the mean time with nothing but experience to show for it. That experience may be useful at some point in the future, but it's entirely unrealized value. On the other hand, having 500k wealth to your name which is invested and growing is tangible value right now which itself can be used to fund future endeavors.
- dSebastien 5y ago
  You're 100℅ right. I'm the author, and I would definitely have made that money had I continued to work as a consultant. I had secured a high paying long term contract and I broke it to work on that project. Money in the bank is money that I could have invested, money that could have improved my family's quality of life, ...

ratsforhorses 5y ago

Pretty sure this has been posted before....

ZetaZero 5y ago

2k hours and 20 months later: "But we were still not there with the MVP. And we already trimmed it down to the bare essentials."

avgDev 5y ago

I enjoyed the article as I'm planning on doing consulting and then pivoting into a SaaS project. However, the writer has not lost 200k and has gained a mountain of life experience, which doesn't seem to get enough attention.

dSebastien 5y ago
Indeed, that's the other (brighter) side of the coin. But the impact is not the same when you're nearly 40 or only 20 :p Those were costly lessons to learn.

dgellow 5y ago

It might be a bit weird to say this but I love to read about that kind of “failure stories”. Thanks to the author for sharing openly such a personal experience.

dSebastien 5y ago
Indeed, we don't find enough of those, so I wanted one more story to be out there. It was also a good exercise to take the time to look back and clearly point out the mistakes. Many thanks!

biztos 5y ago

It's an interesting post-mortem and a reminder of the pitfalls of the "bootstrap" model if you don't have other income. But I take exception to the "200K EUR" part. Money you didn't make is not the same as money you spent. For starters, the former is infinite! That the author is so concerned with this opportunity cost -- a cost that is radically different for different people, dependent largely on circumstances that have nothing to do with their value to the startup -- is, I guess, part of the self-doubt he describes. I can relate, I did a failed startup when I was younger and many times I thought about whether I should just suck it up and get a job instead. Probably everybody does. But half the point of it was to not be doing the thing that would have given you the 200K.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lotsofpulp 5y ago
>Money you didn't make is not the same as money you spent. For starters, the former is infinite! Cost is short for opportunity cost. If you have a high probability of earning 200K EUR as your second best option, then what you choose to do does incur that cost. Young people not accounting for their costs properly is an especially big problem in the US when they decide to spend time in their valuable 20s going deep into debt pursuing higher education with low probabilities of ending up with high pay (assuming their goal is high pay and/or some sort of financial security). They should be adding up all the lost pay and compounded returns from their savings, because their eventual pay needs to be sufficiently high to make up for it. And it is not just money. Opportunity cost also includes quality of life, for example, slaving away the best years of your life working for someone else (or one's self) should have an acceptable probability of netting you something commensurate to the sacrifice.
- reitzensteinm 5y ago
  Opportunity cost is absolutely as real as you describe, but the title is double counting it. They didn't spend both 2000 hours and 200k worth of hours.

davidkuennen 5y ago

Reading this gave me the constant feeling he waisted way too much time on technical stuff. For an MVP with an uncertainty of success it's important to get it out of the door with minimal effort and time.

fhrow4484 5y ago

Previous discussion (Jan 2021 - 235 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627081

xwdv 5y ago

IMO startups aren’t worth it anymore if you’re not clearing at least twice the salary of two remote developer jobs (annualized). Reason being, it is easier to work two remote jobs simultaneously than it is to build a successful startup. It is also far more enjoyable and calls on your direct expertise instead of requiring many skills, some of which you may not do well at all. Given that two developer jobs will have you clearing at least $300-400k in income per year, this is a sobering heuristic of how successful you have to be at building a startup to consider it being worthwhile. If the author was working two jobs instead of doing this failed startup, after 20 months he would have roughly $600k+ in earned income to show for it, instead of a ~$200k loss.

altdataseller 5y ago
That all makes sense but in practice, it is hard to calculate how much you will make in a startup (if we could, we obviously would either give up or go on) For instance, you can easily go through years 1-4 making 1/2 your income. But all of sudden in years 5-6, you gain more credibility, your product starts to achieve PMF, word of mouth takes over, etc. And maybe in years 7-8, you attract a big company that buys your company, and all of a sudden you just earned the equivalent of 25 years of a salary.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Except most entrepreneurs aren't looking to get rich, they just want to replace their job with something a bit less shitty. http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.html http://reactionwheel.net/2019/01/schumpeter-on-strategy.html
distances 5y ago
Mind expanding about the "two remote jobs" part? As an internal your contract likely prohibits you from taking another job, and as a freelancer you're billing time. So I don't see how that would work out without screwing the company or forgoing all your free time.
- xwdv 5y ago
  You are not prohibited from taking another job. Also, because developers really only do 4 hours of work a day on average and spend the rest of their time thinking, it is easy to multi task two jobs.

fhrow4484 5y ago

I missed the first time this post got on HN front page, but my main takeway is same comment from jiofih (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25630241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25630241): >> the project needed to be (almost) re-created from scratch >> the build system, Docker/docker-compose, continuous integration, authentication, internationalization, etc >> created a wiki, migrated the code to a monorepo, created/cleaned up the backlog, etc. >> created a story map, devised a roadmap, and clarified the scope of the MVP >> replaced Angular Material by Tailwind, created our own theme, refactored the data model > This is why. A year went by and no product work was done, none of this was necessary. The very first thing that should have been built is a MVP, that main screen that was only tackled 9 months in. Strongly recommend studying “The Lean Startup” and learning how to be stoic about tech. That’s how people deliver working products in three months. in addition to that, the author mentions, still in a Startup/MVP context: "The focus on took care of release automation, created the production infrastructure (switched to Kubernetes)", "The NoSQL database was making us lose a ton of time". None of this should matter at MVP stage!

jamil7 5y ago
I completely agree and had the same thoughts reading that. K8s for an MVP?! Throw that thing on a PaaS and forget about ops altogether until it's too expensive. I think it's really good advice for developers wanting to launch their own project to do at least one or two tiny projects first and try to release and sell them. It makes you much more aggressive with cutting fat at an early stage. It was an enjoyable read though and I imagine the author learned a whole lot regardless of the outcome.
fellowniusmonk 5y ago
There's a reason so many successful startups launched with some form of rails stack. Less time making decisions means more time to build customer value prop/interactions. An MVP for a web sass should be "core UI/UX value prop" for the main selling point (s) and what I call "marketing brutalism" for the rest. With the most boring and reduced use cases you can convince everyone else involved to agree to.
adampk 5y ago

a1371 5y ago

The thing that stands out to me the most is the sentiment. This reads like a big rant as in saying "I did all the things textbooks say, why didn't it work out?" That is as if to say "I've gone to the music school, why am I not a k-pop mega star yet?" A lot of people will not look at the 200k this person didn't make as "lost"; rather the cost of learning expensive lessons. The first lesson should have been that we're not in 2007 anymore. Sprinkling tech on random things has a small chance of working out. They did not have any domain knowledge or connections to schools nor restaurants. They were just users of them, like everybody else. Building a startup is a beautiful thing but it requires relentless optimism and actually feeling the problem. Enough to say that's how YC finds its cohort.

blipvert 5y ago

Quits an otherwise great job because of frustration with meetings … … to do a start-up that’s all about meetings <golf-clap>

dSebastien 5y ago
There's a big difference. I wanted to help people ultimately do less stupid meetings and get more value out of the remaining ones. Long term my hope was to kill meetings, not multiply those. Plus I did not work in the corporate world anymore. I was standing aside, working on my own terms.

lnxg33k1 5y ago

My take for this is: - if one wants to experiment and learn new tech or approaches one should not leave the job and create maybe some side experiments - I can see why people would just leave the fleet if there is not a steady path forward towards an mvp - we have project managers around with the capability to manage plan and prioritise projects of a chair? As a dev is frustrating One either win or learn