5 ms·

Sorry, don't mean to be mean, but why is this upvoted so much? Seems like a lot of obvious things no? I agree it's a lot harder to spot when you're in the midd

Sorry, don't mean to be mean, but why is this upvoted so much? Seems like a lot of obvious things no? I agree it's a lot harder to spot when you're in the middle of it all, but in terms of material for a blogpost, these "learned lessons" are pretty common/generic, right? How would this be different from, say, "don't forget to file your taxes or you'll waste a lot of time if you get audited". Do you really have to go through an entire failed startup to learn these "lessons"? Some of the other better postmortems out there have rare insights like "don't talk to corp dev they have an incentive to pretend to want to acquire you to waste your time and distract you", or "don't be tempted to expand to too many geo locations too early or you'll be stretched too thin". Lessons that would be hard to learn without actually going through a startup yourself. Compared to those, the lessons here seems...generic Sorry maybe I misunderstood. Can someone whack me in the head and bring me back to reality? Maybe it's just me...

RKoutnik 12y ago
Apologies for the harshness but your comment makes it clear that you've never run a startup before. Regular office life is like juggling three balls - difficult, but manageable with practice (and they're given to you - so you never need to make a judgement call about what is important). Startup life is like having hundreds of items all thrown at you from different directions. Only `n` are valuable - and you have to decide which ones those are. Some can't be juggled, others look promising but are worthless, etc, etc. It's incredibly easy to get lost in the barrage of objects. Articles like this one help founders refocus and figure out what's important and what's not. Many things seem obvious in hindsight that are completely lost in the present.
- confiscate 12y ago
  Ah interesting Yes I absolutely agree with that. Maybe the 7 "lessons" in the article are not the real lessons--the real lesson is, as you said, focusing on the right/important items. Also, I think point (3) in the article qualifies as something that would have been difficult for the writer to learn without going through a startup. I would say, though, advice like "not choosing a confusing name for your startup", seems, well, obvious, no? I definitely respect the guy for starting his own company, but not sure how I should feel about someone who can't even choose a non-confusing name for it...
  - iolothebard 12y ago
    Lmao, find a "non confusing name" that has available .com, .net and .org (because you don't want to buy them after you've started). Good luck!
- birken 12y ago
  So you are saying that an article written by a person that ran an unsuccessful startup for 1 year contains wisdom so deep the original commenter can't possibly understand? Don't canonize startup founders. Many of them have no idea what they are talking about, even the successful ones. I'm not saying the OP falls into that bucket, but there is certainly no reason to dismiss that notion outright. Your description of startup life also is just your own experience, it doesn't apply to everybody and you have no reason to believe it does.
mnemonicsloth 12y ago
Human beings learn much, much better from many bits of concrete experience than from a single idea abstracted from that experience.
ddebernardy 12y ago
Hehe. You'd be surprised. :-) Many of the entrepreneurs I interact with are, sadly, in a situation that is very close to that of OP: 1. Little to no customer development 2. Lots of over-engineering 3. No co-founder when they'd actually need one
shaftoe 12y ago
Having made many of the same mistakes he made, I suspect you're not in the target audience. He's speaking to engineers who want to start a business. They frequently start by focusing on the engineering things and not on the things that matter to validating their idea is buildable and scalable in a business sense. It's easy to think "we're going to be in a world of hurt if we don't (have automated testing, pick the right framework, design for scalability, handle complicated edge cases, get the design right, etc)." Engineers will often focus on these aspects while missing the bigger problems like "will the people telling me this is a good idea write a check right now to get it?" and "what non-technical roadblocks have I completely missed and won't be aware of until I'm iterating with customers?" These don't seem obvious to people who haven't been in the business of selling something before. And launching with half-baked crappy hacked software goes against every instinct of a good engineer who has worked at more mature companies. Starting a business is about finding out, as quickly as possible, if anyone actually gives a shit and then building a business after you have determined that, yes, they actually might. The actual act of making the product feels like building a business but it is not.
free2rhyme214 12y ago
No you're not mean because I thought the same thing. The biggest mistake this guy made was quitting his job BEFORE validating whether there was demand for his idea or not.
cmstoken 12y ago
Some of the things are obvious, but others not so much. I upvoted it because I went through a similar situation where (like the OP) I built a product without first figuring out the market and hard to learn everything the hard way. I'm sure plenty of others here on HN can relate. But mostly, I think those who are just starting out and thinking about building a product can learn a thing or two from it.

RKoutnik 12y ago

Apologies for the harshness but your comment makes it clear that you've never run a startup before. Regular office life is like juggling three balls - difficult, but manageable with practice (and they're given to you - so you never need to make a judgement call about what is important). Startup life is like having hundreds of items all thrown at you from different directions. Only `n` are valuable - and you have to decide which ones those are. Some can't be juggled, others look promising but are worthless, etc, etc. It's incredibly easy to get lost in the barrage of objects. Articles like this one help founders refocus and figure out what's important and what's not. Many things seem obvious in hindsight that are completely lost in the present.

confiscate 12y ago
Ah interesting Yes I absolutely agree with that. Maybe the 7 "lessons" in the article are not the real lessons--the real lesson is, as you said, focusing on the right/important items. Also, I think point (3) in the article qualifies as something that would have been difficult for the writer to learn without going through a startup. I would say, though, advice like "not choosing a confusing name for your startup", seems, well, obvious, no? I definitely respect the guy for starting his own company, but not sure how I should feel about someone who can't even choose a non-confusing name for it...
- iolothebard 12y ago
  Lmao, find a "non confusing name" that has available .com, .net and .org (because you don't want to buy them after you've started). Good luck!
birken 12y ago
So you are saying that an article written by a person that ran an unsuccessful startup for 1 year contains wisdom so deep the original commenter can't possibly understand? Don't canonize startup founders. Many of them have no idea what they are talking about, even the successful ones. I'm not saying the OP falls into that bucket, but there is certainly no reason to dismiss that notion outright. Your description of startup life also is just your own experience, it doesn't apply to everybody and you have no reason to believe it does.

mnemonicsloth 12y ago

Human beings learn much, much better from many bits of concrete experience than from a single idea abstracted from that experience.

ddebernardy 12y ago

Hehe. You'd be surprised. :-) Many of the entrepreneurs I interact with are, sadly, in a situation that is very close to that of OP: 1. Little to no customer development 2. Lots of over-engineering 3. No co-founder when they'd actually need one

shaftoe 12y ago

Having made many of the same mistakes he made, I suspect you're not in the target audience. He's speaking to engineers who want to start a business. They frequently start by focusing on the engineering things and not on the things that matter to validating their idea is buildable and scalable in a business sense. It's easy to think "we're going to be in a world of hurt if we don't (have automated testing, pick the right framework, design for scalability, handle complicated edge cases, get the design right, etc)." Engineers will often focus on these aspects while missing the bigger problems like "will the people telling me this is a good idea write a check right now to get it?" and "what non-technical roadblocks have I completely missed and won't be aware of until I'm iterating with customers?" These don't seem obvious to people who haven't been in the business of selling something before. And launching with half-baked crappy hacked software goes against every instinct of a good engineer who has worked at more mature companies. Starting a business is about finding out, as quickly as possible, if anyone actually gives a shit and then building a business after you have determined that, yes, they actually might. The actual act of making the product feels like building a business but it is not.

free2rhyme214 12y ago

No you're not mean because I thought the same thing. The biggest mistake this guy made was quitting his job BEFORE validating whether there was demand for his idea or not.

cmstoken 12y ago

Some of the things are obvious, but others not so much. I upvoted it because I went through a similar situation where (like the OP) I built a product without first figuring out the market and hard to learn everything the hard way. I'm sure plenty of others here on HN can relate. But mostly, I think those who are just starting out and thinking about building a product can learn a thing or two from it.