4 ms·

This is a classic case of where the kinds of technical founders that cruise HN shouldn't be trying to invent their own thing, but rather find a boring "business

by beat 13y ago

This is a classic case of where the kinds of technical founders that cruise HN shouldn't be trying to invent their own thing, but rather find a boring "business" subject matter expert as a co-founder. There are lots and lots of these things, where businesspeople see a gap that can be solved by tech but don't have the skills to do it. My advice to all the kids out of college who want to be startup founders - don't try to come up with your own idea, because you don't know enough about business or the world to get a good one (hence the plethora of cheap social knockoffs that will never go anywhere). Instead, go find some older, experienced businessperson who wants to solve a problem in a non-technical space they understand deeply, and work with them. You're much more likely to succeed that way.

fleitz 13y ago
Yeah, it's the Dirty Jobs of tech, fuck what's cool, do what pays the bills. The best part about doing what pays is that the next generation of college kids are trying to disrupt Facebook (Snapchat/IG, God I'm getting old), rather than fuck with your massively profitable app doing lead gen for mortgage origination, that no one outside of your outside sales team has ever heard of, nor do you have to deal with whether VCs like your biz plan, and you don't have to give up equity because you can actually pay your fucking employees and they don't even cost that much because what you're doing isn't exactly rocket science. The future is not evenly distributed, drive 100 miles from the coast and it's 1979. Go inside any office park and it's 1985. Btw, this is why I LOVE the idea of FarmLogs, those guys are going to make a killing IMHO.
- beat 13y ago
  Something I've said for many years, long before I decided to do my own startup... "Jobs suck. That's why they pay you. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have to pay you." It's advice I would give the friends of my teenage children, and friends of mine in their 20s who were trying to decide what to do when they grew up (lots of them artists/creatives who were frustrated with poverty). So if you're doing a startup, the question you need to ask yourself is "Why?". Why not just get a job? It's not hard for smart IT people to get good paying middle class work. A good place to start is Noam Wasserman's question "Rich or King?". If your goal is to get rich, then think seriously about doing what I'm recommending here, and latching onto a solid, reliable businessperson with good ideas to disrupt an existing business.
  - fleitz 13y ago
    Definitely agree, my goal is to be wealthy. eg. The rich have money, the wealthy have time. That's basically what I'm doing in the finance space, got a domain expert on the sell side with money, I know the compliance side and how to relate to both labour and money (as well as code). Hired a designer so it doesn't look like crap and a coder so I'm not going to be stuck at the keyboard forever. Btw, your company looks really interesting, just signed up for your list. As they say, don't dig for gold, sell shovels.
    - beat 13y ago
      It'll look a lot more interesting once the next rev of the website comes out, but right now I'm deep in coding mode. :) The code is telling me a lot about the product. Looking to go into beta in late spring at this rate. Drop me an email and I'll tell you more!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
graham1776 13y ago
So the funny thing for me is I'm the one who works in commercial real estate, know the problems deeply, and have little technical experience other than reading HN. So how do you reverse cruise HN to find the technical cofounder to build out the solutions to our RE problems? I literally sit within a company run by excel spreadsheets, talk on a phone with brokers, manage market information via printed pdfs of comps, mark up site plans by hand and scan them, and conduct all reporting via email and word docs to multi-billion dollar pension funds. At nearly every step of the way I see opportunities without the technical expertise to execute.
- gaustin 13y ago
  I'd suggest adding contact info to your profile and talking about your problems here. Hopefully you'll pique some interest and have some email waiting later.
  - graham1776 13y ago
    Contact Info done. Sorry about missing day-one stuff. Since ideas are a dime a dozen: Glassdoor for Apartment Rentals: Tenants give their address and rent amount per month in exchange for access to everyone else's data. Know what other people are actually renting for, not landlord asking rates. Why is there no data on what your neighbor just signed his lease for? Angelist for Real Estate Imgur for Excel Nextdoor for Office Buildings I got loads more...got to be something worth making in there... :)
    - d0m 13y ago
      You could definitely write some blog posts about these ideas. I think it could be a great way to find technical co-founders willing to contact you about them. Also, city tech events might be a good place.. such as startup drink and the like. Just going there and listening to ideas.. but being on the looking for opportunities. I.e. Someone is telling how his startup isn't doing that well and might be on the lockout for a new venture. Imgur for excel doesn't mean that much to me.. What's the context, the problem, the value proposition, the channels, etc.
lallysingh 13y ago
Commenting on two things here. First on beat's comment: In ~2001, I wrote a Palm Pilot app for real estate agents. My mom's one, and I watched what she did during the day and tried to make a simple, easy to use app that managed the entire sales process for her. <list-of-mistakes>It had a workflow for the entire sales pipeline, from prospects to closing. It kept every detail of every stage, with a field for everything, and even had a built-in mortgage calculator. I even put the majority of the stuff in a library, and made the app a thin configuration of the library's components, so that I could launch similar products to other kinds of sales agents. It had customized widgets that made great use of screen real estate.</list-of-mistakes> Sales were terrible (total in my life was $50). I learned, too late for me to listen, that most real estate agents at the time, in my area, were over the age of 50. Many couldn't read normal-sized text on the Palm Pilot without glasses, and few were likely to spend $400 on a handheld device when they could take notes with pen and paper. On the list of mistakes: First, clearly, I over-engineered against a very low-fidelity model. I only had one sample of data (my mom), and built too large a product against a small amount of data. Second, my data was biased, my mom didn't want to discourage me when she couldn't read the screen. I should've noticed that she had to stop and put her glasses on every time. Third, having over-engineered, I went further and tried to generalize the code to a library, even though I didn't know how applicable any of it was to even one market, much less the larger class of markets. Second comment. On the pegged webserver that's preventing me from reading the article: First, really, just loadtest your webserver. It's not hard, try apache bench ("ab") as a starting point. Second, shut off unnecessary parts when they're being slow (like analytics), a database access for comments, etc. Load them asynchronously from JS (putting the CPU load on the client), and let the page render when you get back an error or timeout. Unless the primary content on the page is dynamic, the page should get to the client without any I/O except for the NIC.
1986v 13y ago
Could not have said this any better myself!

by beat 13y ago

fleitz 13y ago

Yeah, it's the Dirty Jobs of tech, fuck what's cool, do what pays the bills. The best part about doing what pays is that the next generation of college kids are trying to disrupt Facebook (Snapchat/IG, God I'm getting old), rather than fuck with your massively profitable app doing lead gen for mortgage origination, that no one outside of your outside sales team has ever heard of, nor do you have to deal with whether VCs like your biz plan, and you don't have to give up equity because you can actually pay your fucking employees and they don't even cost that much because what you're doing isn't exactly rocket science. The future is not evenly distributed, drive 100 miles from the coast and it's 1979. Go inside any office park and it's 1985. Btw, this is why I LOVE the idea of FarmLogs, those guys are going to make a killing IMHO.

beat 13y ago
Something I've said for many years, long before I decided to do my own startup... "Jobs suck. That's why they pay you. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have to pay you." It's advice I would give the friends of my teenage children, and friends of mine in their 20s who were trying to decide what to do when they grew up (lots of them artists/creatives who were frustrated with poverty). So if you're doing a startup, the question you need to ask yourself is "Why?". Why not just get a job? It's not hard for smart IT people to get good paying middle class work. A good place to start is Noam Wasserman's question "Rich or King?". If your goal is to get rich, then think seriously about doing what I'm recommending here, and latching onto a solid, reliable businessperson with good ideas to disrupt an existing business.
- fleitz 13y ago
  Definitely agree, my goal is to be wealthy. eg. The rich have money, the wealthy have time. That's basically what I'm doing in the finance space, got a domain expert on the sell side with money, I know the compliance side and how to relate to both labour and money (as well as code). Hired a designer so it doesn't look like crap and a coder so I'm not going to be stuck at the keyboard forever. Btw, your company looks really interesting, just signed up for your list. As they say, don't dig for gold, sell shovels.
  - beat 13y ago
    It'll look a lot more interesting once the next rev of the website comes out, but right now I'm deep in coding mode. :) The code is telling me a lot about the product. Looking to go into beta in late spring at this rate. Drop me an email and I'll tell you more!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

graham1776 13y ago

So the funny thing for me is I'm the one who works in commercial real estate, know the problems deeply, and have little technical experience other than reading HN. So how do you reverse cruise HN to find the technical cofounder to build out the solutions to our RE problems? I literally sit within a company run by excel spreadsheets, talk on a phone with brokers, manage market information via printed pdfs of comps, mark up site plans by hand and scan them, and conduct all reporting via email and word docs to multi-billion dollar pension funds. At nearly every step of the way I see opportunities without the technical expertise to execute.

gaustin 13y ago
I'd suggest adding contact info to your profile and talking about your problems here. Hopefully you'll pique some interest and have some email waiting later.
- graham1776 13y ago
  Contact Info done. Sorry about missing day-one stuff. Since ideas are a dime a dozen: Glassdoor for Apartment Rentals: Tenants give their address and rent amount per month in exchange for access to everyone else's data. Know what other people are actually renting for, not landlord asking rates. Why is there no data on what your neighbor just signed his lease for? Angelist for Real Estate Imgur for Excel Nextdoor for Office Buildings I got loads more...got to be something worth making in there... :)
  - d0m 13y ago
    You could definitely write some blog posts about these ideas. I think it could be a great way to find technical co-founders willing to contact you about them. Also, city tech events might be a good place.. such as startup drink and the like. Just going there and listening to ideas.. but being on the looking for opportunities. I.e. Someone is telling how his startup isn't doing that well and might be on the lockout for a new venture. Imgur for excel doesn't mean that much to me.. What's the context, the problem, the value proposition, the channels, etc.

lallysingh 13y ago

Commenting on two things here. First on beat's comment: In ~2001, I wrote a Palm Pilot app for real estate agents. My mom's one, and I watched what she did during the day and tried to make a simple, easy to use app that managed the entire sales process for her. <list-of-mistakes>It had a workflow for the entire sales pipeline, from prospects to closing. It kept every detail of every stage, with a field for everything, and even had a built-in mortgage calculator. I even put the majority of the stuff in a library, and made the app a thin configuration of the library's components, so that I could launch similar products to other kinds of sales agents. It had customized widgets that made great use of screen real estate.</list-of-mistakes> Sales were terrible (total in my life was $50). I learned, too late for me to listen, that most real estate agents at the time, in my area, were over the age of 50. Many couldn't read normal-sized text on the Palm Pilot without glasses, and few were likely to spend $400 on a handheld device when they could take notes with pen and paper. On the list of mistakes: First, clearly, I over-engineered against a very low-fidelity model. I only had one sample of data (my mom), and built too large a product against a small amount of data. Second, my data was biased, my mom didn't want to discourage me when she couldn't read the screen. I should've noticed that she had to stop and put her glasses on every time. Third, having over-engineered, I went further and tried to generalize the code to a library, even though I didn't know how applicable any of it was to even one market, much less the larger class of markets. Second comment. On the pegged webserver that's preventing me from reading the article: First, really, just loadtest your webserver. It's not hard, try apache bench ("ab") as a starting point. Second, shut off unnecessary parts when they're being slow (like analytics), a database access for comments, etc. Load them asynchronously from JS (putting the CPU load on the client), and let the page render when you get back an error or timeout. Unless the primary content on the page is dynamic, the page should get to the client without any I/O except for the NIC.

1986v 13y ago

Could not have said this any better myself!