Ask HN: What's up with these "I made ___ in ___ hours/days" posts
1) Persistance is one of the most important traits for an entrepreneur. We're in an ADD society, and things do not happen overnight. It's easy to throw together a website, but it's more difficult to stick with it, refine it, get people using it, and most importantly, get them paying for it. These posts often strike me as demonstrating ADD, moreso than anything else.
2) It feels like misplaced gloating. I think it's great that you're smart, entrepreneurial, and able to create prototypes quickly. But it's really not worth gloating about how fast you can put up a prototype, most people on this message board could do the same if they weren't working on their real ventures. If you absolutely insist on gloating, it would be better to do so about how many millions of users you have, how many millions of dollars you made, or how many days you were able spent on a beach last year. If your weekend project can achieve high marks in any of those categories, then I'd definitely want to hear about it.
3) Is it an attempt to demonstrate intelligence/ability? In today's programming landscape, there are so many automated libraries and frameworks that it's pretty easy to put almost anything together (want to put up a site that links satellite images, recent macroeconomic trends, and real time XYZ events, no problem). Combining some subset of available frameworks and libraries doesn't demonstrate intelligence or ability, even if you can do it in a weekend.
4) If it is really that brilliant of an idea, don't rush it. Go in stealth most for at least an additional weekend, and thoroughly plot out how you'll turn this into a feasible product.
5) Is it an attempt to demonstrate how entrepreneurial you are? A better way to do that would be to pick one random idea, have the confidence that it's so good that you are willing to commit yourself to it 100%, pursue it regardless of what other people are telling you, and make it work.
6) Is it an attempt to get into YC? If this works, then maybe I'd understand it more. There seems to have been more of these over the past few weeks, so maybe that's what's going on. Although, it seems to me to make you appear more ADD than entrepreneurial.
I'm completely behind your entrepreneurial aspirations, but I'd rather you really commit yourself to something, work out the kinks, get users using it, then post "Look at my startup". Then I can have faith that you've really thought it through, and it's more worth HN's time to really understand what it is you're trying to do so that we can make some valuable recommendations or questions.
30 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadNothing wrong with a bit of ego or wanting to show off something that you made.
This is because
1. This idea has been done before and usually done poorly. (No, I'm not letting on with what I'm doing.)
2. It's a side project. I have a reading list I want to make a dent in and I have school to finish.
3. My audience isn't going anywhere. I have strong incentive to launch with an excellent website because there are plenty of other people in other communities.
4. It's not going to make money until it's large if it ever gets there. I'm in no hurry to support a monster community by myself.
B) Technical interest. HN isn't just about getting in to YC or proving you're a great entrepreneur; much of what we discuss is simply "interesting". Being assembled quickly is one attribute that can make something interesting.
C) It helps us remember that not every problem is of the same scale, and not every solution has to be a multi-year startup-spawning VC-requiring system.
95% of discussion I have with non-entrepreneurs about my startup relates to things that they can see or grasp intuitively - for instance our design choices. Few understand that the code I write is just one of a myriad factors that will determine eventual success.
It seems they are doing it because they don't have the willpower to put the finishing touches on and have a shipped product.
The ones that grate are the ones that say "we built this startup in a weekend."
By adding the "in a weekend" / "in 24 hours" bit, you're automatically discounting the product you've built, as an easy way to deflect criticism. If it's shaky enough that you need to preemptively deflect criticism, don't post about it. If your app is quality, then it doesn't matter if you built it in a weekend or over three years. Let it stand on its own.
To reiterate the OP, build stuff. Share it. Get feedback and criticism, and iterate it to make it better. But claiming that you made "a startup" in a weekend is both ignorant and arrogant, unless your app has scaled so quickly that we've already heard about it by the time you post it to HN.
I also think it's a little bit of people trying to prove to themselves that they can do it, that some of the excuses they had before are just that, excuses, and they aren't insurmountable.
It puts a lower limit on the amount of time it takes to do, and it's useful to see that. If you were working something similar, but only had three hours a day to do it, but someone says they did it 40 hours straight over a weekend, it helps other people judge complexity (obviously, individual skill and experience comes into play, but at least one variable gets removed).
It also provides support for the position that it's not the technology that is necessarily the hard or time consuming part. If someone can implement Yammer in a week (I pick on Yammer here, rather than twitter, because the business model of Yammer doesn't need to be as scalable as twitter, technology wise, so the first version will most likely get more use before the implementation needs to be revisited), then the impetus is on the "business guy" to start selling it. I've actually been this situation a few times, having had the first beta, production-ready version ready in what seems like an extremely short time, and been waiting for the other half of the team to do their side of the work.
It's like how kids always brag how little they studied for a test, even before they take it. It's an excuse for failure.
Now you can claim you are cool cause of your lack of sleep and because you don't need to study.
Without a clear label, every time someone coughs around here it's interpreted as some kind of business plan, or an attempt to get into YC.
The title tells you that this submission is for fun. Either try to look like you're enjoying yourself when you read it, or take note of the warning label and skip the article.
*Zimbabwe dollars (approximate value in U.S. dollars: 0.00001
Then there are those that want to promote a platform or a technology showing how rapid they could develop a toy website, basically a functioning prototype. Most of those would fall apart under the first serious load (and some do right after posting here), but still, you have to hand it to the people that can push themselves like that just to have something to show off their favourite piece of kit.
Then there are those that really believe this is the way to do it, to whip out some site in 24 hours and to call it a 'start-up' instead of a one night project.
Usually the latter two fail as fast as they come, but every now and then one of them shows staying power.
pingwire.com comes to mind, after several iterations it now looks a lot better than the first announcement, and there are plenty of others.
Sometimes you just get in the zone and get a ton of work done in a short period of time. Like when vision, knowledge, and desire converge with free time. It feels awesome.
Also, for these little side projects it is nice to be able to see __ hours / days as a sunk cost and see what happens.
That kind of reinforces the claim... ;)
I'm quite into studying headlines as a hobby (yeah, I know) and http://delicious.com/popular is a great source of headlines that clicked with a large number of people. Today the number of "X ways to do Y" or "Z things about A" headlines is reasonably low, but I've seen it go over 50% of the links there many a time.. (HN's editors seem to have a policy of editing out the numbers at the start of headlines, FWIW.. but they don't tend to do with the headlines you're referring to.)
The spirit of the "__ in __ hours" posts is exactly the same. Developing the barebones of a product is infinitely quicker and simpler than most people believe. Many great businesses are trapped in people's daydreams because they just haven't overcome inertia and procrastination.
I would expect that most of us here follow the logic of agile, MVPs, iterative development and so on, so why do so few of us actually make a go of it? Look at Patrick of Bingo Card Creator - he's built a small and simple product in his spare time that has grown into something that he can quit his day job for. Any one of us could have built a working prototype of Bingo Card Creator in a couple of days, but Patrick did and we didn't. Too many of us understand intellectually that we just need to launch a piece of crap and start iterating, but not nearly enough of us have the guts to follow it through. It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it.
Ooooh I like this line.
That's all. You make a valid point though that these comments can rub some people the wrong way or be misinterpreted.