Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
What is the main thing that made your business take off and start to see success that you're kicking yourself you didn't start doing it much earlier?
Thanks HN!
Thanks HN!
491 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 400 ms ] threadWhen I chose to specialize, not compete with the general consultants, but make all of them clients, that’s when business took off.
Historically speaking, building your practice as a specialist consultant is difficult. It works for certain niches only.
Reach out to customers with the MVP and just incorporate the feedback until the feedback changes from “we can’t use it because…” to “we need this integration” to “we need this pricing”
Hire salespeople! It will be obvious when you need to do it. You will put it off by saying that the entire sales industry is made up of needless gatekeepers and leeches, and that those fat commissions are better invested elsewhere in the business. Except you will see your self-serve funnel dry up and your well-funded competitors will start eating your lunch unless you take that leap.
It doesn't matter how smart your engineers are and how fully featured and bug free your product is. Unless you have a stellar sales team with the right leads who are pushing it on people with all their might, it is going nowhere.
My experience here: https://twitter.com/paulstovell/status/1389881033470869504
This talk by Paul Kenny is a really good talk here about the value of the sales function even if you don't want the revenue:
Paul Kenny: Selling Sales to Techies (2010): https://vimeo.com/96703844
edit: why am I getting downvotes...
Second is to join sales calls or watch the recordings (Chorus.ai is great for this). Put yourself in the buyer's shoes and coach based on those recordings - I always listen from the point of view of "If I was the customer, do I think they really care about my problem, and is it credible that they will help me solve it?". Right now I watch 1-2 recordings a week and then chat with the team about what they think went well and where we might improve, and we are figuring it out together. That continuous process is what reinforces the culture. When the CEO is focussed on helping customers, and revenue as a secondary concern, it becomes the culture.
Third is probably for the sales team not to be an island. So get the engineering and product leaders to join the calls or watch the recordings too, so that the tiny features or friction points make their way onto the roadmap eventually.
Depending on your product you can control it with comp as well. For example, for an enterprise product, especially one that renews annually and/or has milestone payments, comp the sales person as the cash comes in (and pay out for the renewals same as you would for the initial deal). Unhappy customers don’t pay. I have also paid out commission on time (when customer should have paid, when the delay was due to engineering, and not manageable by salesperson. Sometimes engineering delays are due to sales people though :-(.
Have engineering work out the milestones and deliverables with the customer. Have the CEO sign contracts, nobody else. Count as sales only deals that have both customer P.O. and signed contract (so common to have only one and have the sales person argue that the deal should be booked anyway. Amazing how they could get both in on the last day of the quarter though).
Etc. When I was about 20 my dad told me he’d fired half the sales people he’d ever hired. I shook my head and thought, “what an idiot”. A couple of decades later I looked back and it was about the same for me. I mean table stakes for a sales person is selling themselves. And getting canned isn’t always a bad mark against a sales person. So it’s hard to judge up front, but if they don’t sell “right away”* shove them out the door. It’s not like an engineer for whom you want to invest extra time to help them get into the groove; that’s part of the sales person’s way of life and the good ones are proud of it.
Pay the good sales people well. At your annual sales shindig have the CEO show up for a day, or half a day, to give a pep talk, enthuse about the VP of sales and the top sellers (who made it by following the rules) and then bow out. Maybe have the CFO talk about how many commission checks they had to cut. And have them mention that the top sellers make more than the CEO.
Another tip: have every member of the exec team, yes even CFO, VP of Manufacturing or whomever, go on a customer sales call every quarter. Sometimes a first visit, sometimes a sales person “check in” call or or whatever. It will make the execs understand how the customer views your product, not what marketing and the sales folk think the product is.
* right away depends on your sales cycle. Could be the end of the second month (but you’re already breathing down their next after two weeks), or first quarter, or six months (ugh). And if you sell semiconductor manufacturing gear with a sales cycle of 48 months, good luck.
Welcome to being a founder. If you don't want to do it, you need a co-founder who will, but they must have the same values you do.
It is easier as a tech person to do the sales yourself than to find a good sales co-founder that mimics your customer-centric values. Both are of course very hard, but relatively speaking doing it yourself initially is easier between the two.
And those who don't want to do that should work for a company where those functions are handled by other people, but if you start a company, expect to do sales.
Are you selling basically an as-is product? Is there customization required (preloading data, training, etc) to 'make the sale'?
I'm asking because I'm in an interesting position where I have a very nice platform, but it requires solutions specialists paired with salespeople, so outstripping specialists with sales growth isn't as productive.
Example product of mine: https://damonverial.com/the-gap-gameplan/
Funny that you mention this. Because I remember it as the exact opposite of organic growth. So much, that I consider pets.com the first public example of how millions of marketing budget are far more important¹ than engineering.
> A high-profile marketing campaign gave it a widely recognized public presence, including an appearance in the 1999 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and an advertisement in the 2000 Super Bowl. Its popular sock puppet advertising mascot was interviewed by People magazine and appeared on Good Morning America. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pets.com
¹ Edit: for growth. I don't like this and I'm still not convinced marketing is worth more than engineering; I hope to believe the opposite turns true in the end. But alas, I'm afraid I'm wrong, as can be seen in any new tech-field. Crypto being the latest: don't build actual cryptography, just set up a multi-million marketing scheme and run off with the money, if you want to make money there in 2022.
That would be illegal in a lot of countries
1) YOU DON'T KNOW THAT YET (s)he was discriminating minorities. And given you already made a sentence the person it's likely to not tell you now. For example at my current company we almost hire exclusively non-white people. We in fact discriminate positively in hiring non-white because generally they provide more value for money because OTHERS discriminate them and lower their range of offers. We are taking advantage of other people's racism and in doing so we are also fixing the salary gap caused by racism. We will still hire minorities/non-white when the salary gap will be gone but we'll stop discriminating them positively.
2) PEOPLE WON'T SPEAK OF THEIR MISTAKES ANYMORE IF YOU JUDGE THEM
In the case where the person was indeed racist in the past the person said it was a mistake (s)he wish that (s)he would have not made and (s)he informing others of the mistake so they won't do the same. You're actively punishing sentencing someone that came clean on it's own. If you do this less people will come out saying they were wrong. Example: When I was a teenager I found out I was mistaken in throwing contact lenses in the WC when they expir because they end up in the ocean and add plastic. TOILET !== GARBAGE I posted the article that had informed on not doing that on Facebook and said I had done it wrong to inform also others that might not know yet. One guy came after me with "You are dumb, you should not throw anything in the toilet". Yes definitely I had made mistakes, I had just told so. The guy had not helped me become better. I had become better already thanks to the article. The guy was just there to insult me for my previous shortcomings. Maybe someone else would have took that negatively and stopped reporting the mistakes (s)he made in fear of being told (s)he was stupid. Luckily I've enough self-worth to not be afraid to show my mistakes if I know it will help others.
> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are you saying that you're paying non white people less because of their race? That should be illegal in a lot of countries.
2. For some reason or the other, we have always had delays in announcing our fundraising rounds: both Seed and Series A announcements were delayed by 3-6 months. The moment we announced, we got a step magnitude more inbound customers. Lesson here is to not be a perfectionist and be willing to share the company/product publicly earlier, so you can incorporate customer feedback early.
PS: If it helps provide context for (1) above, our domain is fraud prevention; and we focused on payment fraud for Fintechs/Crypto instead of going after generalized fraud prevention across all categories like ecommerce.
I can’t think of a single product in this world that truly sells itself.
Microsoft absolutely has sales people for the B2B side of Microsoft Office constantly shilling Office 365. This absolutely doesn't sell itself.
Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world.
Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work. Google has a long term channel based sales model, and a newer but rapidly growing direct enterprise sales team. They're constantly trying to get GApps in against the aforementioned behemoth MS team.
You’re confusing google for work or whatever it’s called now with Gmail.
I'll submit Craigslist and Wikipedia as other options. Also Plenty of Fish.
Communities and knowledgebases can be built without salespeople.
Trello sold itself. Explosive growth. Great product. Whether they have given up market share is irrelevant.
Gmail had explosive growth. You use it, you're sold on how good it is.
I'm not sure why some of you think having a salesperson means a product doesn't sell itself. Everyone layers on sales to capture more of the market share at some point.
I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.
Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop market so pushing Office and getting users to use it was easy. And once you try it, it does sell itself.
But I think Trello, Craigslist and Wikipedia are great product examples. You need not have a sales team to scale everything.
You can achieve that with a great product, great customer support, digital marketing and word of mouth.
In a sense it's the perfect advertising (by both being 'free' and 'covert'), supporting the perfect industry, perfect only in the sense of a feedback mechanism ostensibly designed to stamp it out, only ends up perpetuating its profitability, by squeezing the product between its free advertising and its illegality, inflating prices and profits.
I know this is a potential flamewar topic--I'm sorry. I tried to just state what I think about it here. If you downvote/flag I'll delete it...I don't want to start another flamewar.
Fits the MS culture perfectly.
So it was third party selling instead of first party selling.
https://youtu.be/7SKUw3w2FEg
“Hi I’m thinking of upgrading my Apple Watch 1 but the 7 is quite expensive”
“Can I speak to your daughter for 30 seconds”
(Yes there’s a salesperson in the story but in my case there wasn’t and I know I’ll need another one of these things one day. For her.)
Fiat currency.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1129924410339495937
They have an enormous B2B sales team.
Sales reps are for B2B, not B2C.
Generally speaking, business to business customers expect a certain amount of investment from your company into integrating with them when they offer you a contract.
Sales is part of this.
You of course need people to sign contracts & complete the purchase, that's irrelevant to how well the product is able to raise awareness without advertising, i.e. people interested in buying Tesla's didn't hear about it through any of their advertising.
What do you think putting a Tesla on a rocket and launching it towards Mars is?
What do you think PR pieces talking about the latest Tesla tech are?
Elon tweeting about Tesla is advertisement. It's not because it's not a pretty picture in a magazine page that it isn't.
I do agree that virtually every product needs marketing, and many need salespeople as well. But for plenty of products, salespeople don’t make sense - for example high volume, low price SaaS.
Similarly Ruby on Rails was great brand awareness for 37 Signal's Basecamp who AFAIK doesn't believe in advertising, and has made a point to pay for a "non Ad" against companies selling ads against their Basecamp trademark
https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016
If you want to sell into enterprise then you are going to need sales people and hence an expensive product that covers that cost. Those big deals need a lot of hand holding to go through.
There are plenty of counter examples though, where marketing is doing most of the work and the offering is mostly self service. Signing up for a $25/month Saas is never going to warrant a visit from a salesperson.
(There's nothing wrong with it, it just veered a bit offtopic.)
Our latest learning that we retrospectively should have seen earlier is to get rid of our fear of becoming consultants. We come from a consultancy background and have seen to many startups around us wanting to build products, but taking on consultancy assignments leaving them no time to build their product. We have been so determined not to fall into that trap, realizing now that we have missed out on some great opportunities when selling to enterprises.
Also the contracts and my product don’t have anything related to each other :(
I know a handful of people who started with creating websites, then took some consultancy work and now have an entire different software company. They used those two things as a bootstrap to get going with opportunities that presented.
But we chose to forego the "consultancy" jobs. Reason is that we optimize for learning (we're at that stage). And while consultancy may look like a good opportunity for learning, that it allows you to get paid for investigating the real problem domain of your customers it is not optimised for that.
Far from it. My decades of consultancy and freelancing experience has told me that it always takes longer to implement the solution than to identify the problem. Implementing is a great opportunity for learning the details of the problem, sure. But Implementing also eats vast amounts of time to "Horizontally center that Div on the Dashboard": any non-trivial, time-consuming but utterly uninteresting for our startup.
I really don't want to spend two weeks implementing another authz/authn integration and login flow for a consulting customer. When in those two weeks I can interview at least three other customers. Esp. because authn/authz is but a detail to our startup, and has nothing to do with our domain.
I've worked at a startup which, bootstrapped, was struggling with income flow. So off-and-on we, the programmers, would be outsourced to gigs that would generate some income. I've always found this the worst of all options and decided to never get into this with my own startup.
It takes away the most valuable resources. It's a negative investment. It advertises the "panic-mode" you are in, to all stakeholders and most to the engineers involved. It lands your engineers (me, in that case) in crappy jobs, which they did not sign up to at all (a few engineers left because of this). It creates misaligned relations in the team.
The last was for me the most frustrating. At one point, I was bringing in ~60% of all revenue, alone, by doing crap work, in stressfull projects, and commuting for hours a day. While at least two of my co-workers, whose wages I was subsidising, turned up at 11:30 to drink coffee and play some FIFA on the company x-box.
What I learned from this, is that hiring too early is a thing too. That, especially when bootstrapping, the income stream must be certain enough to warrant paying another wage for years.
The only alternative to consultancy should be to close. If you can let go of 1-2 unproductive employees, that should happen before taking on consultancy work. It should happen in any circumstance anyway, but taking on work to pay for other peoples wage and not getting value for that is a recipe for failure. If on the other hand it was high performance developers that really made progress on the core focus on the business it's probably okay.
To the point where I legitimately don't know who or in what situation all these businesses are that are spending so much money on 'consultancy'. When do these businesses seek consultants and what for? I know that might be a far reaching question, so any examples would be appreciated.
Could you share more insight on the shift from D2C to B2B? What challenges did you face while making this transition and how did you combat them?
Beyond that, scaling up a GTM engine (sales, marketing, customer success, etc) is a multi-year effort but it's a bit more formulaic than product, so there are a lot of resources and people out there you can hire to help you with that. Not a strength of mine so I lean on our COO and the rest of the team for that part so I can focus on product.
The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales.
No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/.
In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html
I was actually overwhelmed last year (my first as a freelancer on the side) and will scale back a bit to strengthen the foundations a bit better this year - but actually talking to people and when doing so always trying to create a little bit of value for them (and be it by 'oh now you mention that you need x, Paul over there is great and is actually looking for a way to sell x).
I am part of a business network and currently am working on providing a free short workshop for the people with online shops in basics about usability and conversion optimization. It will already provide them with the tools to make their shops better and also act as a marketing tool for deeper work on that topic with them (or a few of them).
And in parallel, as I am compiling the materials nonetheless I also will create additional ways to use the content in blog posts, Instagram and by creating checklists for others as a way to build an email list.
So this next to a day job and client work will probably be enough for me this year in marketing and business development work.
Let's see what comes of it.
[Edit typo]
I think it just comes down to fear of rejection in the end. Making a product, adding features, working on things and even showing your "cool" demo to friends isn't same as asking strangers for money.. because people can say a million nice things about what you have to offer until you ask them to put in their credit card number. Then the you get to know what they really think.
Some of it may be "morality" component, for lack of a better word. Some people want the world to be one where people and ideas advance on merit rather than via popularity or "knowing the right people", and act upon that hope subconsciously or as a justification for avoiding unfamiliar risk.
I'd wager it's also a bit more common among software developers.
Life in a society... where people are divorced from all material realities and only interface with the social... but that's not life in general. There are, for example, wars.
Wars don't end when people put down the guns, it's when people can reconcile their differences.
My point is that war involves people directly interacting with physical reality in ways that aren't mediated socially. Modern high tech people live in a world where popular illusions and perception are much more important than gravity and inertia, but reality still exists somewhere, and sometimes it matters.
Seneca once said "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Too many people focus on the preparation and not nearly enough on increasing the likelihood of opportunity.
My biggest struggle so far is: How do I find those people to "sit and talk" to? Any advice on that?
So, you should go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter. It's pretty good:
https://www.shoto.io
What did one AAA battery say to the other?? Always be celling.
Who do you expect to use this product day in and day out? And then make it even smaller and go look for those people on LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, etc.
Then just hit them up. You don't have to be selling necessarily, you can simply be asking about the problems they might have or looking for feedback on something.
Obviously this depends a lot on B2C or B2B, but there exists a community of people somewhere with the problem you're trying to solve or a company which is kind of a community :D.
If you can't find an audience, then I think that also answers your question.
How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product?
Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.
If so, how can the founding team save the relationship? If someone is motivated enough to tell you your product sucks, they’re potentially great beta users!!
Maybe the first 10 will leave while you figure out where to go. That sucks, but it’s fine.
Crystal Pepsi was another example. Budgets couldn’t overcome the fact it tasted like nutmeg.
Modern era, I worked for a startup that got national media coverage before it was ready. I’m not convinced it was the right product and I know the founder could have spent way more time talking to customers in the ideation stage. But national media coverage created some bad months. I remember a several week stretch with more than 100 support requests in queue.
Fun times, in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the term.
In gaming industry you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. Anthem, Marvel Avengers, Fallout 76, that game with 2042 at the end, Amiga CD32, Ouya. A lot of games as a service(and for most of them you pay upfront and afterwards). Everything is so much hyped to be the best thing since sliced bread.
There is always a risk that the market won't like it. If you want a steady paycheque then entrepreneurship isn't for you (or isn't for you right now).
If you’d have mentioned marketing a couple of years ago, someone would have shared the Bill Hicks post by now.
Marketing (not just advertising) really is an essential part of building product as it forces you to confront who might actually want the product and how you best go about talking to them and finding them.
He did a routine with a joke that worried Letterman, so Letterman made sure the segment didn’t air. In response, Bill Hicks went on public access television - there’s a really good show from Austin on YouTube - and used that as part of his own pitch.
A number of years later, after Bill Hicks died, David Letterman had Bill Hicks’ mom on his show. They talked about Bill Hicks and aired the routine. Bill Hicks’ impression of his parents was remarkably good.
I’ll share links then make my overwhelming point:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbHYqfYnhg
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B1NTmnG0hmA
When I watch Bill Hicks on marketing, I take it as being about ethics. We don’t have to monetize every little thing. And we don’t have to do awful things for pay.
Thanks for posting those.
> Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
As a developer-turned-founder, a lot of marketing feels sleazy. Was it always this way? So much link-bait, fluffy posts that are really big ads, shallow content just for SEO, upvoting-rings on platforms, etc. There's so few who seem to put in an honest effort. I'm sure part of this is because Google is letting all this low quality stuff rank.
From day one, we've focused on honestly taking care of customers. Pushing customer visible bugs to the top of the list, following up when requested features are released, reprioritizing the roadmap to accommodate growing pain points, etc. It has has paid dividends over the years in the form of very strong referrals. Which are effectively pre-sold trials.
[1] https://enchant.com
It strikes me as imprudent to split it between Google, FB, and Twitter ads when I don't know what I'm doing.
Google Ads is complicated. Avoid it unless you are prepared to put in serious time learning how it works.
I tried Twitter ads a few years ago. Their demographics (knowledge of their customers are) was total garbage. Waste of money.
In general, do lots of small experiments and measure the results (clickthroughs, time on page, sign ups etc). If you can't measure anything meaningful, think carefully before handing over any cash.
A few accelerants:
1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US.
2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me.
3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.
These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans.
Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months.
You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer.
--------------------------------------------------------
Startup engineering management is so simple.
Buy a copy of Mythical Man Month.
Read it, read it again. Then re-read chapter 3.
Get two of the best, your Captain and your Copilot.
Encourage them to hire a pimply faced minion to edit the config files so they feel important, and so you avoid single point of dependency.
These days, get someone else who lives in Estonia/Ukraine/Sri Lanka for follow the sun support.
If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers.
-------------------------------------------------------
Your secret path to success with international hiring is to avoid any country you know the name of.
Don't think you're thinking out of the box hiring from Brazil/Israel. Hunt down a decent dev from Ghana or Georgia.
If my Slack/Discord buddies are anything to go by, there's an extraordinary amount of gems out there who've made the choice to raise their kids in their home countries.
There's good talent in Thailand as well. RIP my friend the Thai data/cloud principal eng banking 14k USD.
Oh, I half thought you were serious until this point. I still don't get the joke though.
In fact if you take any of this offhand advice as gospel, well I wouldn't.
Maybe I should have scattered "probably" and "often" about the place.
1: ------------------------------------------------------------
When you read the book, ole Fred is not a fan of large engineering units. Forget two pizzas (Bezos is from New York, two pizzas for him is ~10 people).
Fred's view is actually:
1x captain/tech lead,
1x co-pilot,
1x ops guy equivalent,
1x business analyst equivalent who can be sent to meetings (he worked for IBM).
(And then two secretaries. And an copy editor for the documentation, because no internet.
No internet! The documentation must be written!
The lead developer needs to follow my favorite advice of all time:
Can't write? Imitate Hemingway.
And a full-time librarian for the punch cards. And a full-time employee just to maintain the minicomputer that was your debugger.
Because hey, the book was written in 1975.
The internet doesn't exist, email doesn't exist, the engineers almost certainly can't touch type. And anyone without an attractive female secretary was nobody.
The pimply faced youth's job as config wunderkid and unofficial court jester fills most of those roles these days)
2: ------------------------------------------------------------
If you think of all the amazing software that has been made by one person...
How many people do you need to make amazing software?
What are you even making?
I sympathize with the argument that one engineer can be sufficient but am doubtful about them being an employee as opposed to founder.
But yes, I think you can have two high quality employees make good software? I mean they're employees, you're going to give them marching orders to do something presumably.
Sure, there are exceptions who don't know their worth. In general it's hard to find mediocre technical cofounders and very very hard to find good technical cofounders.
Therefore, I wrote the post with some sort of assumption that OP is the technical founder. Hence OP is supplying the stuff like the vision, the outline of the tech stack, OP probably made a lot of stuff themselves.
Hence, it was more a guide on how to find extremely dedicated and good engineers to work for you, the founder. And how to deploy them to take load off you as the technical founder.
As a technical founder you rapidly become far more important as a store of technical knowledge. You're off to customers doing technical sales, networking with people you know for hints at how to solve your technical problems, etc etc.
Hence,what OP needs is top quality execution while they go off and do all that stuff. And ye ole Ghanian FOSS committer is the tree I'd shake.
I wasn't taking it as gospel and I agree some engineering outfits are (or at least appear to be) overstaffed or inefficient, and a small number of very driven and talented people can produce some incredible things. But when it comes to making a product it can take a radically larger amount of engineering effort than it would appear.
PS Semi is an example of an ARM-beating company which was founded by a visionary engineer who almost certainly had the big ideas himself or within a small group of technical leadership. It still took a hundred engineers 4 years to bring out their first product.
That said, Palo Alto Semiconductor was hardware, which has a far higher barrier to entry than software engineering does/can.
There's more details to it, but a single person could write a very small CPU and put it on an FPGA (or ASIC if they have the tools) in a few months.
That's just one example though. There's lots of software examples. Compilers, browsers, OS kernels, database servers, hypervisors. A single person can write any of those, but to make a competitive product it's often a very different story.
Hardware intellectual property has an insane number of working parts and "factors" (electrical resistance, photo-lithography, metal layers, silicon is amazing) all have to be solved.
Software by contrast, follows the open source model. All those things you mentioned, are being done by people and academics in their space time on the internet. You're essentially assembling pre-configured tools
Hardware is more difficult, because the laws of physics are FAR harder to account for, than tying together APIs. Because APIs are after all, designed for humans to be able to understand and configure.
Software is also complex, but the good people in FOSS have already assembled their shit for free and are giving it to you.
Additionally, basically no hardware IP and blueprints are open sourced. Because of the free flow of goods (and not services), someone in an IP disrespectful country will clone you and sell your goods internationally. You have basically no resource to pursue that individual.
Launching an IP disrespecting internet business at scale however? That is almost impossible. As soon as your IP disrespecting competitor gets going, you can hamstring them.
Hence for hardware, create a develop, release, iterate cycle, and keeping the money flowing, you essentially need to employ a LOT of people to get your startup going.
Hence VS fund about 10 SaaS startups per hardware one.
Mostly I was talking about SaaS with the "make your first two engineering hires like this" guide. Clearly for photo-lithography with silicon on leading edge nodes, you just cannot do that.
Again, fabless companies don't have to do any of this. You get a PDK from the factory which provides all these parameters and even standard cell libraries so you don't even have to do circuit design. You just feed your logic into "compilers". You need "physical" designers to optimize the output of those stages, but these are not people looking at the physics, they just optimize P&R and floor plan according to the PDK specs and tool output basically to close simulated timing.
In practice once you get to a large enough and high performance product, you would need custom circuit designers. And step up even larger again and you'll likely be working directly with the manufacturer on defining and tweaking the process. At Apple scale, you probably even define your own custom process node. Once you get to this scale though it's pretty much like big software houses writing their own libraries or OSes or compilers or asm code because the standard available stuff is not quite enough. That all takes a lot of engineers too.
But that's not _required_ and almost certainly PA Semi would not have had a whole lot of engineers on that work, it would have been logic, analog, PD, V&V, power, primarily. And almost all would just work on the standard package they get from their fab. So mostly writing "software". And you don't need any money for a develop,release,iterate cycle on most of the hardware stack because it can be and is simulated.
The assistants aren't assistants - you hire them with minimum pressure, but try still to find the most talented junior you can find.
2 juniors in a startup is a bit, probably not the right thing. You'll run out of junior work surely?
The "two good ones plus exactly one junior to make them feel important, and to keep the show on the road for 2 weeks in case they both quit simultaneously" formula is pretty solid.
I would consider "junior" here not as a person in non-critical role who cannot function as an individual contributor, but as a solid candidate that lacks industry experience but can be at the moment hiring be expected to quite fast grow into the role of a solid IC. I.e to use a bit too stereotypical characterization - not a "stablehand" but a "journeyman apprentice".
At the moment of hiring you don't count on it that they can deliver (but guess and hope), whereas the seniors will have shipped products under their belt.
My brain just operates very strictly as:
Junior = apprentice, first job or similar.
Mid = journeyman, "worked another job before". Independent, trusted to be delegated to for specific things, but doesn't quite have a personal brand.
Senior = Master. Proven track record, proven reputation of delivering, capable of leadership inside a technical project. Has and maintains a reputation as someone you can trust.
Principal = Mentor to seniors.
Ofc there are shades of grey between junior and mid, because junior-ship takes like 2-3 years to grow out of.
The list of work able to be delegated to someone at the start is not all that large in many cases.
You won't need more than 2 engineers at the beginning for 99% of the startups. Almost nobody is making anything technologically significant - and if they do they raise millions and act like a disorganised mid company.
In order to do your typical backend + frontend work you won't need much more, unless your developers can't code.
"delta" = difference.
Don't know from when this is but tech salaries in Thailand are much higher and it's hard to find people.
This would be fresh grad level at most.
As a person they're very opinionated about not working for a "product company." And have worked at the same company their entire tech career after bailing out of some traditional engineering discipline (I think 6 yoe?).
Sweetest person ever. Never really followed up that conversation when I asked them if they were considering remote.
Edit: I reread my comment and I can see how I wasn't clear. I was actually replying to the parent of the comment I actually replied to, my mistake. I am glad the Thai wages increased, but GP was straight up flexing about paying people nearly nothing because they came from a poor country.
If you still want to get an edge these days, you have to be prepared to go to the global platforms that give you access to devs in the really obscure places.
Nobody is hiring from Trinidad and Tobago because of the legal barrier to entry. But you can if you are clever with Upwork and similar.
Surely it never happens?
I assumed they went in for platinum enterprise grade support contracts and the like, only.
Or else they got contractors to make them software that they owned.
When I fill in forms, it’s often quite simple since we’re all French developers under regular employment contracts.
Warning, they might need increased PTOs starting tomorrow.
And there is also https://microacquire.com/
Also there was a lot of promotion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1396904507871793154
edit: https://microacquire.com/
There's a few of these sites. Just search for them.
I have only looked around in guest mode/logged out and haven't paid or anything to actually speak to the seller and get a fuller picture.
Are you happy with your purchases so far? What advice can you give me as a person that has a similar plan?
Lots of people simply like to jump from project to project so being able to exit a business is great for them. Other people are retiring or get sick. Sometimes the business plateaus and they have owned it for several years and are tired of planning more articles for that niche. Some built it recently for the purpose of selling and it has terribly quality content and will likely tank in traffic in the next 12 months.
You also can't trust the seller when they say how many hours they work or believe they account for all their expenses (which is sort of a joke for content businesses anyways because almost all the expenses are added back in when accounting for the sale price anyways).
But for the type of businesses on there it doesn't really matter what the seller says, most of it is noise.
You can get all the insight you need into a content business using Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and manually looking at it.
I built a content site from scratch for ~1 year before buying any and was looking at ones for sale during that time so by the time I went to pull the trigger I was "relatively sophisticated". Actually I only bought them in the last few months but so far so good, everything has been as expected. I'm strategically merging them into a single larger site and that is going well (one already successfully merged but waiting for ad network approval for the second)
My main takeaway: first ensure the company is optimised for sellability.
And your question is answered too: agents. There are people and companies specialized in selling companies. Just like there are people specialized in buying companies.
there are a lot of things you can do easily early on but become very hard later:
the Warrillow book goes into far more breadth and depth than this comment, but I just wanted to highlight that there are strong reasons to act now to shape things in a way that make it easy to sell, even if you don't currently intend to sell. being prepared to sell at any given time increases optionality / makes it so that in case you suddenly _need_ to sell, you don't have to put in 6 months of work before you can even put the thing up for sale.Just want to second this.
I've read several books on this topic. Warrillow's is easily the best.
It sounds planned in hindsight but it was pure luck. None of us had any idea how to do it. The reason luck was in our favor was because it wasn't a 1-man show, our location, aiming our communications not just at customers but always keep in mind our competitors and potential investors will (and should) hear us too.
We started eating our competitors lunch so they did have no choice but to take an interest. First we were an annoyance a few years later we had offers to discuss, then it became once or twice a year. We took every opportunity to engage but only for getting to know them but didn't take it further.
We were very visible because there were 3 of us in 3 different countries "making lot of noise" about our product.
Also timing wasn't good yet (why sell today when you know you'll be worth 5x in 2 years).
We went for ~5 years without considering selling and always positioned ourselves to eventually sell from the day we founded the business. If you think about selling when you're just starting, you end up constantly thinking if the company can be easily understood by an auditor and explained to an interested party.
We (3 partners) were already present in 3 countries/sites from the beginning so there was potential of messy "organic growth". And the only way to fix this do this was with a holding company.
- holding company to keep things simple and easy to explain and audit, e.g.:
- No difference in the contracts with our individual CEO's / sites that have to be negotiated individually when the company is acquired/sold
- an investor that takes over the holding has the keys to the kingdom
- all important negotiations done in the holding
The holding also made sense because it allowed us a presence in a 4th jurisdiction that is known to have a high density of investors and none of us would feel the main site is in one of the 3 jurisdictions that the partners were. So it kept things neutral.
Another thing we did right was never touch things we weren't experts in at least not until we had the first hire to move this forward internally, so we hired one of the big 4 to help with controlling & finance.
We had lots of internal bickering, I hated the idea of all this complexity with the holding, and the whole thing almost went tits-up before we even started. But implementing a holding within the first few months was the single most important decision for us. We might have gotten lucky without but not for the same returns.
I had meetings with potential buyers and received a LOI (letter of intent) at a price I was comfortable with.
After that came 6 or 7 months of due diligence! I wasn’t expecting the process to last that long, but the buyer took time to interview my employees and secure a loan. At the end of each month I’d have to update my complete financial statements and the buyer would have to review them and they’d get submitted to the loan application.
Finally, the sale closed and I received a wire transfer.
I stayed on working for free (or maybe minimum wage?) FT for about a month, then part time for another month or two, and then finally on call for 1hr/week but no official office hours for another few months, just to make sure all the operations and handoff went smoothly. 6mo after the close I was officially done.
4) Optimized for SEO. About 50% of my business came from referrals, the other 50% SEO.
For us it was Show HN. But can be anything - Product Hunt, Redit, etc.
After all this, if I have a weekly user retention hovering around 30%, I can't be more happy. Then it's time to grow.
So, I can't help but think you missing the most important changes if your not actually talking to the end users about what they are thinking or why they are doing particular actions that aren't always what you expect.
When we develop products we (all the team) tend to get used to knowing where is each functionality and how to use them, but someone unfamiliar might just not find what we "simply" find.
Find and interview people who aren’t YET your customers and ask them why they aren’t.
What made us take off is I and my cofounder running through our savings. I did it for ~15 months.
One thing I had to start doing earlier is not trying to get everyone buy our product (we sell news articles published online as a source of data for insight mining) [0]
I’ve lost so much time on people who’d never be able to use what we have unless we completely change our product.
And yeah, marketing is super important. And, it’s going to take some time.
[0] https://newscatcherapi.com
SOC2 is one of those non-functional requirements that can open up markets for you but you're going to pay for in time and energy. If enterprise-y is on your horizon I suggest at least understanding it so you don't make decisions that are counterproductive. But wait until you start to hear the music before you get up to dance with that one...it can be a pain.
We audit a lot of things but it'd be a good idea to improve that if we can.
Thanks enterprise-y person. :)
AWS CloudTrail is far from perfect but it has been battle tested as much as any SaaS audit log out there.
Who: userIdentity.arn
What: requestParameters.*, responseElements.*
When: eventTime
Where: sourceIPAddress, sourceVpce, userAgent
Why: userIdentity.issuer/rolesession
How: eventName, eventSource
Baller move is to include internal ops actions in your log.
Main thing is to think of it as a product rather than an a feature. People don't want 10 different audit logs...everything should flow through it. With CloudTrail this extensibility comes through the requestParameters/responseElements sections. Most of the schema is fixed but in these sections its service-specific.
In terms of integration, push audit via webhook or various cloud event/message brokers is ideal, but at bare minimum the customer needs to be able to ingest that data wholesale to integrate with their security stack.
I'm also working on a solution to make part of this easier, specifically audit logs (https://apptrail.com).
I would think everyone with a legitimate need for an audit trail is a paying customer, in fact would prefer to pay so there is a contract around the audit trail, and “free tier” would just be a drain on your support resources.
Our free tier can cover low TPS usecases. We offer a free tier because we believe audit logs are too hard to build & consume and would love to see even smaller companies adding audit logs to their products.
I less than 40% percent of potential customers balk at your rate, it's time to give yourself a raise.
Now, on with the first two.
"Hiring the best you can afford" doesn't mean hiring the best brand (Skadden. PwC etc). Find the person with the best technical expertise relevant to what you're pursuing. They're often stars from those shops who've gone out on their own -- just like you did.
Why? Don't you want to spend your money on a star engineer or great marketing?
No. Because you're in this game to win. And winning these days (whether going for an exit or, you know, an actual profitable business) needs you to have at least the following:
(1) Not make (or, more likely, not know how to avoid) stupid mistakes or ill-advised moves legally. (2) Not screw up the administration of your business
Even if you do everything else right, errors in either 1 or 2 can prove fatal. Like, literally, you will lose everything.
Good lawyers are like good soldiers these days. You don't go to war without soldiers. And you don't do modern business without the best legal help you can get. Even in the most advantageous, optimistic, friendly scenario, run it by an attorney who knows their stuff. First. During. Last. Or wander onto the battlefield with people who outgun you. You've been warned.
Next: good business administrators are worth their weight in gold. It is a distinct skill and some people really are called to love and be good at book-keeping, accounting, cash flows etc. Do not screw yourself on taxes, audits, book-keeping, invoices slipping through cracks, agreements not being fulfilled or anything in the "admin of business" that keeps you from staying laser focused on you do well -- which is not business admin.
Finally -- remember, business is business. Repeat it to yourself early and often. Business is business. The VC who seemed really friendly and just "gets you"? Business is business. That particular contract term that just doesn't sit right with you -- but the person on the other side keeps telling you not to worry about it? Business is business. Your cofounder is your best friend but now they're not pulling their quota? Business is business. This isn't being machiavellian. It's that everyone will be applying it to you.
Ultimately, good lawyers and good business administrators will ensure that you remember "business is business". Don't leave things to chance. Don't trust. Don't be emotional . Business is business and if you're not controlling your agenda, someone will be controlling it for you.
There's enough sh*t in business you can't control. At least stay in control of what you can.
And that kind of hustle is a prerequisite to solid business success anyway. So, get after it!
As for paying, there are some law offices that offer startup-friendly packages and are probably good enough to get you going, at least they should prevent foot-gun mistakes.
And in the SF area you’d be surprised how many people will do stuff for “low fees but equity” if you show any promise.
[1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...
https://learningseo.io
Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you ahead. Use https://pagespeed.web.dev to check how fast your website loads.
To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?
Also both Angular and React are not as heavy as one might expect, but 3rd-party components might bring tons of unnecessary deps.
Some things I'd start with:
Normally those things are enough to get a 85+ score on Lighthouse, GTmetrix and alike.But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking).
Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs.
For most SaaS, there aren't a few valuable keywords, there are hundreds of valuable pages representing thousands of keywords to drive a qualified audience.
This means after you learn how to create highly valuable content, the next step is to scale your publishing velocity to increase your footprint in the SERPs.
I've brought 4 websites from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month by focusing on creating more reader value than any other page of content Google could show for the keywords I want to rank for, and publishing hundreds of pages of content.
Here is the playbook we used to grow a website from 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month: https://workello.com/0-to-1-500-000
IMHO actually good UX metrics mean as low time on-site and pages visited as possible. An ideal user experience (I would, as a user, be glad to pay for) is when you visit the page, immediately find what you want, do you job as quickly as possible and go away.
A good valuable website caring about users rather than ad-spamming them would optimize for this, not for users to waste huge amounts of time wandering through pages until they can achieve their goal.
Recipe related searches will have different UX metric gradient than "creating a PTO policy"
I also kindly disagree with your assessment.
All things being equal, if you're Google, and you want to keep users coming back to Google Search, and you could show one of two pages for any search query, I think the only reliably metric to evaluate whether one page adds more value to the user than another page is through UX metrics.
Generally, if you can't find what you're looking for - you'll bounce and look somewhere else.
But if you Google something, then get drawn into the website because the writer knew the 'intent' behind the search, the writer/website should ALSO know what you need to know next, or likely questions to have, and serve you that content after they finish answering whatever is you originally Googl'd for.
For example, if someone searches "content writer job description", I can guess that
1. This is an employer that is actively in the hiring cycle
2. The next things they might need to know are average comp for content writers, the best place to find content writers, the best way to evaluate / test / interview them, etc.
So, if I'm competing with a page of content that is just strictly about "content writer job description", and I go above and beyond to educate you on what you'll need to know next - I should end up with better UX metrics that reflect an increase in value I provided over the page.
I'd add that third-party dependencies are sometimes useful. Especially when they aren't served from the same location which gives and opportunities for the browser to open more HTTP connections: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-does-your-browser-limit-n...
That's not what I meant. With optimising page speed, there is a diminishing curve of returns from the perspective of time invested and the improvement that you make.
My idea, adding to the top comment mentioning the SEO, was to make sure that you don't slow down your landing pages / content unnecessarily which might lead to less organic growth and discovery.
While I wouldn't argue that this is the most important thing that will take your business off, a fast website and good content with keywords might provide you nice boost long term.
It doesn't have to be that way though. If you want to use React, there are tools to help you easily make something like a static site generator (SSG) which will transform your React code down into pre-rendered HTML pages. Two popular ones are Gatsby (https://gatsby.dev/) and Next.js (https://nextjs.org/) which also supports Server Side Rendering (SSR).
So out of the box plain HTML / CSS might be more optimized than a fresh create-react-app repo, but if you prefer to use the toolset provided by React to build your site (or Vue or Angular, etc), there are plenty of options to make that equally performant.
I'm asking, because every time I read up on these topics, or interact with an "expert", I get the feeling, that it is one of the more snake-oiley fields around.
Additionally https://www.sitelint.com/sitelint-vs-lighthouse-comparison/