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Ask HN: Share a learning & a happy moment from your startup in 2013

17 points by jyothi ↗ HN
With the year ending & many a startup founders around the world working on their dreams through the midnight - it would be great to celebrate it with your best moments and share a learning to help others

PS: One liners preferred

12 comments

[ 12.6 ms ] story [ 1658 ms ] thread
jyothi
Learning: Single Focus. Speed. We digressed a bit and we lost the game both ends a bit. Wish we had focused on one thing.

Happy Moment: We were 17 people and we went out for a trip from the company, stayed in a good resort, had a time-off. It made me happy to think back from where it started.

edit: going by what I said on the post - one liners. removed rest.

lshemesh
Best moment: Tutorialize getting its first paying customer

Learning: If you're going to use a technology like MongoDB make sure you're using it the way it was intended to be used.

kranner
Localization matters for mobile apps.

addendum: this might be even more true for niche apps. My $5 iOS app sells way more in non-US/non-English stores.

jasonkester
Happy, unexpected moment: Added a stupidly expensive "Enterprise" pricing tier as a polite way of declining business from users who were taking up too many resources to bother trying to service.

And people started buying it.

lshemesh
shit I need to do this ASAP!
georgespencer
Learning: if you ask your users to help you improve your product they will give you bad ideas. If you ask them to tell you stories about what keeps them up at night they will give you gold.

Happy moment: growing way faster than we did the year before. Rentify now transacts with more landlords than nearly every brick and mortar letting agent in the UK.

JoeAltmaier
The old story is true: ask a farmer at the turn of the century (next last anyway) what they wanted, they'd say "a horse that pulls harder and eats less hay". They never said "a tractor".
Kiro
Remove the PS.
moootPoint
The heart warming satisfaction of convincing my company to use unit tests, and seeing them come online for the first time.
JoeAltmaier
Quality experience translates into repeat customers and steady growth. Not features; not highly-paid sales teams; not flashy design. Just support the customers you have with good empathetic skilled staff, beef up the quality of your pipes and codecs, make the on-boarding experience clean and clear, and the customers get on board.
collin128
Testing a new hypothesis after 18 months that resulted in 5 new paying customers AND an exciting new direction for our startup.
pardner
Hitting ramen profitability and being able to click the "donate" button on many of the gems and plugins that helped us get there.