Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

I have not started a startup:

1. $1,000 / month / person sounds sufficient, living with family.

2. I think paying off the loans are good idea, since the loans carry interest.

3. Your username is "trynabootstrap". What would it take to know your product either falls flat or bringing in regular revenue? Do you need to raise money for that? Before you raise money, you will continue to have the option to go back into full time work to "recharge" and work on this part time, and then quit the job a year later and work on it again. Once you've raised money, this option won't be on the table anymore.

4. No, I don't think tapping into 401(k)s and Roth IRAs is a good idea. That's the kind of thing I rely on in case my own money making schemes fail.

> What would it take to know your product either falls flat or bringing in regular revenue? Do you need to raise money for that?

We will likely need to raise money. My cofounder and I have a wide variety of experience, covering machine learning, data science, and site reliability engineering. We would like to hire a data scientist with deeper and narrower experience to handle some of the most difficult mathematics.

We can build the first version of the product by ourselves, but our product (enterprise SaaS) is not likely to gain traction until someone much better can performance-tune our algorithms. We would also need a strong UI / UX engineer, a designer, and a corporate salesperson -- but we can probably hobble along for longer without those roles.

Until you have at least one but probably both of these people identified and "recruited" it sounds like your dead in the water to me. Unless, you have someone that's willing to give you money to find and recruit the missing pieces. I'm not trying to be negative just suggesting what you need to focus on.

A good product can gain traction with mediocre algorithmic performance because it provides business value. Same holds true for mediocre UX. The killer feature for a B2B application is business value.

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