How My Fears Doomed My First Startup | Hacker News Reader

How My Fears Doomed My First Startup

dsdoes.com

83 pointsrmason31 comments

Here's a way to think about your fears that may help (easier to say than do, so if it doesn't work for you don't be discouraged).

If there were a fire in the corner of the room you'd rush towards it and smother it. You wouldn't wait. If there were a big fire you'd get out (bcause you can't even see the whole problem), get help, and figure out what to do.

Yet somehow we all (me included!!!) don't use the "obvious" (almost automatic) approaches with more abstract fears. The big fears are the worst, as we're often afraid to ask for help and are overwhelmed by the risk.

It has worked for me to think of them as literal fires, which eventually led me to convince myself that the sooner I deal with them the sooner they'll stop bothering me. I literally think of a problem with an employee as a fire burning in the corner of the room, which if not addressed will spread. Nobody wants to deal with a fire any more than an uncomfortable conversation (maybe the latter even less) but the visualization seems to work.

I am sure this doesn't work for everyone but I was given this advice years ago and was able to "trick" myself into dealing with many scary things.

I'm willing to do whatever it takes to take charge of my life. Right now, its the whole "well, I'm not dying" mentality that keeps us in our place. We get comfortable and never just move forward.

This sounds like a good technique to bring urgency back into the situation. We don't have forever to face our fears. We only have a lifetime and that's a pretty short time.

I'll see if it works.

It’s comments like these that keep bringing me back to HN. Love this, thank you.

Just passing it along -- got this advice about 25 years ago from someone else. If it works for you, I hope you pass it on again!

Thanks for sharing, that would help with many uncomfortable things that you don't want to deal with

Wow, top notch metaphor, can't wait to share it with someone else.

It may actually take a while for your mind to fully make that shift to putting out the fires immediately. After you do it x number of times forcefully it would become more automatic.

I wonder if this strategy would work with other sorts of abstract problems. The consequences of addiction seem abstract, until they're not, for example. Maybe envision yourself taking actual life threatening poison everytime you think about taking your drug of choice? It might work if you could really make it believable to your subconscious.

Edit: I know some thin people who act like any amount of junk food will destroy they're lives, so it does work for that, though I'm not sure the tradeoff is always worth it...

Thank you for the analogy. To apply it to my situation, I have several piles of stuff (my projects) and one of these piles is smoldering. Not a full-blown fire yet, but it already sucks plenty of oxygen (money) from the room, and the smoke is getting more dense. I must pay attention.

Somehow this reminds me of two of the memes that circulate endlessly on Twitter, the cartoon dog of "this is fine" in a room on fire, and "I'll just put this over here with the rest of the fire" from the IT crowd.

A product is one part of a business. It isn't everything.

I built a product, and I've managed to sell it to some companies and turn it into a small business. It's been making me some pocket money for about 18 months now. But still, when I think about it, I'm always excited to get up in the morning and hack on the project. What I'm not excited to do, is to pick up the phone and sell it to people.

I realised this towards the tail end of 2017, and decided I should co-found companies instead. I can take care of building the product, and my co-founders can do the business/sales/marketing stuff that I hate doing.

I've since started two companies with co-founders. I found all of them (or rather, they found me) through Co-Founders Lab (I have no affiliation with CFL, and I don't pay for my account, and they don't pay me).

One of the projects is bootstrapped; I put my time into writing the code, and my partner has put about £10k into various costs, and he's spent his time negotiating deals with companies.

With the other project, I am writing all the code (at least for now), and my partners are pitching investors and building business relationships with what will be our first beta users. We have funding committed from investors, and we have large companies who have agreed to be beta partners.

Would I ever have achieved this on my own?

No. Never. No chance.

> After a few late nights of coding Dave’s Debugger worked too! It helped users quickly diagnose PC blue screens.

Dang! I actually would have paid for this. We run repair shops and it would be useful as a tool to train our techs with. We train non-technical people in our shops, so having something for them to go off of instead of spending time Google searching and reading through forums would be useful.

It's a good reminder to anyone reading this who has built something but hasn't launched it--if it solves a problem, there's probably someone out there willing to pay for it.

Startups aren't for everyone, and especially if you haven't worked in one or understand what it means to "hustle". The odd thing is, his next startup will be a rocket ship because now he knows the most important fact - have someone willing to pay for what you're doing.

Actually, he might have had a successful startup in between 2010 and now, because he's now an angel investor: https://dsdoes.com/behind-the-scenes-my-angel-investor-check...

I wonder if he was an early bitcoin investor - his tag at the bottom says bitcoin (heart) before it says "father" so maybe his path was paved with that?

Who knows.

It doesn't take much to be a qualified investor (angel investor). And I don't mean to downplay it or anything either. Really just making the point that good on him for realizing you have to get out and sell. I cheer for anyone that can be an engineer and sales lead. Powerful combo.

I've got a similar timeline as the OP, however in my case it wasn't fear that held my startup back initially, it was a reliance on 'old school' methodologies.

In my case, I built an app about 15 years ago that was purely Windows based, and it sold like hotcakes into the small/medium business market. I then thought I could do the same 3 years ago by writing it as a cloud based system that worked on the web, and sales were way off what the previous system sold for.

Reason? Because I was trying to sell it the 'old' way, and customers had moved on and were more informed now and had far more choices. It took me a while to re-learn how to do it the new way, and now sales are picking up at a steady clip.

> I avoided what I didn’t know. I avoided what scared me.

Startups are hard, but it's even harder to fight human psychology even if you knew you should be doing the complete opposite.

Kudos to the author for writing this up.

I have been toiling away at a side-project and recently realized I postponed talking to customers all the time.

As a test I forced myself to include a demo of that side-project in a presentation on a related topic to product managers (my side-project's target audience).

What I found out is that the fear that kept me from talking to customers is the fear of feeling exposed.

It's fascinating how strong and immobilising that fear is. It's stronger than the will to help people, improve the world and/or earn more money.

My view is also that selling developer tools is a really hard road. Developers always want stuff for free, people would rather work an hour a day all year than figure out how to get a $50 tool through purchasing.

Not when your employer is paying. And your employer will usually be happy to pay, as from their point of view buying things off the shelf is cheaper than having their devs build it from scratch.

My experience is different - I've often seen employers be ridiculously "penny smart and pound foolish", saving $50 here and $100 there at the expense of hours and hours a week wasted.

Over the past decade or so that "want" turned into "require". I would much rather go with a slightly inferior FOSS alternative than depend on the whims of the investors of whoever sold me proprietary software. Pretty much the only non-free "core" thing I use is GitHub, and I could easily drop it if Microsoft gets uppity about anything.

I have no problem buying tools up to around $1000. $50 is a total no brainer for which I don't need any approval. I often buy stuff that's only used once but it still is worth it because it saves time.

I think there is more willingness to pay in the Windows and Mac world than in the Linux world though.

The challenge can be the company but really you should be able to raise your request to your boss who can navigate the system for you.

I'm personally always happy to pay a premium for the tools of my trade.

i wouldn't even call this a startup

It could have been a startup if he wasn't too afraid to market and sell the software.

Not necessarily, it could be also just a piece of software, OSS, or just a flop. There’s a long way to startup, escpecially when OP is a nerdy man without startup mindset.

I just dont like that nowadays “any potentially useful software project = startup”.

There are plenty of hustlers out there who would love to become the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, so I suggest teaming up with one of those. However when the team grows, make sure there's at least 10 engineers for each "business" person.

You did what you loved, that's not wrong.

The wrong part is, you should have handed with a buddy who loves to sell and do marketing.

I believe you still have a chance for a v2.0!

Great to see more folks in Michigan!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com