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Comment by savrajsingh | Hacker News Reader

Getting paid a lot of money to build something that never gets users is draining and not fun. There are tons and tons of people — super naive entrepreneurs — that are willing to pay a lot of money to build the complex castle in the clouds they imagine, and are then surprised when no one switches over to use it. I’ve literally heard people say “no we can’t build an mvp, it only works if everything is there.”

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Correct, this is definitely very draining. My solution was to add a marketing wing to my consultancy. That marketing wing is hyper focused on launch and growth strategy. A high percentage of my clients purchase this "upsell" and the projects go much better post launch. Win/Win. More successful projects = better case studies + more tech work on those successful projects + more marketing work, etc etc etc. It becomes a virtuous cycle.

If you don't feel up to adding this offering, partner with another agency who already does it.

I wore out my throat telling entrepreneurs that they needed money, users, or someone who could bring in either. I responded to the pain of selling shovels to people doomed to get stuck underground by going to established, profitable businesses only but I love the idea of having a marketing service.

Maybe you could get affiliated with some investors too? Why not?

This literally happens all the time. Build it, nobody shows up. Naive entrepreneurs often think people will simply flock to their SaaS app. "All we need to do is build it!" Forgetting about the other parts, like marketing, sales, support, documentation. Building it really isn't even half of the equation. The other parts are just as hard, often harder...

Its probably still more interesting than bug fixing other peoples crappy code.

I think it’s ok if you get paid a lot of money. Just don’t get sucked into working for cheap building the castle in the clouds.

you're wrong. you can only ignore your conscience for so long if you have a particular set of morals/principles and fighting the urge to push back on decisions is exhausting because it creeps into every other decision you end up making on a project.

You are providing a service in exchange for money. As long as your service is good you have done your part. It’s not your business to decide whether your customers are doing the right thing. It’s up to them to decide what they want do. Maybe they just know what they are doing?

>Maybe they just know what they are doing?

the GOP is exactly about stupid money

I have no idea what you are talking about

>Getting paid a lot of money to build something that never gets users is draining and not fun. There are tons and tons of people — super naive entrepreneurs — that are willing to pay a lot of money to build the complex castle in the clouds they imagine, and are then surprised when no one switches over to use it. I’ve literally heard people say “no we can’t build an mvp, it only works if everything is there.”

I guess in my years as consultant I have not met a lot of people who could afford my rates and were clueless at the same time. Maybe I didn’t understand what they were after and what their business situation was but I almost always found out that they had spent much more time thinking about their business than I had so I learned to mind my own business and do a good job.

I wonder if you are trolling us, as you are wrong across several important dimensions.

First, your opinions about what you're working on are at least as important as your development contributions. Good clients light up when someone smart shows up and pushes back against their dumber ideas. It's unfortunately true that most leaders have unintentionally created social structures around themselves where, for several reasons, they are rarely disagreed with. Someone offering a compelling and assertive telling you not to do something before you do it will be regarded with the passion of a new lover. People inside of an organization are hamstrung by harsh social, political and personal setbacks if they are perceived as disagreeable and frankly, most employees need to believe their founder has a clear vision. Result: no honest feedback.

Second, even if you're totally fine taking a sociopathic view and accept money for work that you know in advance will fail, the people who work for you that trust you to find them projects where they can contribute to something meaningful will become depressed and resentful. They will do terrible work until they leave to find something more satisfying.

Finally, this is subjective but experience has led me to conclude that even the most confident and successful people never "just know what they are doing". Entrepreneurs are plagued by imposter syndrome and the vast majority of decisions they make are confident wild guesses based on incomplete data under stress.

The smarter the leader, the more energy they will put into surrounding themselves with smart advisors. And if you're good at your job, you're one of these key advisors and that's why they hire you: to have strong opinions and give a shit about them and their company.

We are talking about consultants here. They get hired for a job and are supposed to do it well. I have hired guys to do stuff that would be needed in case another idea didn’t work out. They did a good job and were appreciated for it but their work got thrown out. I still would hire them again because they did a good job.

I don’t really want a consultant who just came in and thinks he understands the whole situation. As consultant you should do the job you were hired for really well. You can make suggestions but in the end you should assume that the people who hired you know what they are doing until clearly proven otherwise.

It seems as though you are a client and not a consultant, which gives us a little bit of charity when trying to understand why you appear to be utterly clueless about how to be a great consultant.

Answer: you're not a sociopathic consultant, just a client who sees the hired help as a commodity chattel. That's you're perogative, but if you woke up today willing to be humbled, what you haven't realized is that by definition, you're working with below-average consultants who only care that you pay them.

The optimism is that an entirely wonderful future is possible if you accept that you just might be doing it all wrong.

This discussion is getting way out of hand and I really don't like your tone (“humbled” “sociopath” “clueless”) but do you really disagree that as consultant you should be doing what you are hired to do first? If you have been hired to give business advice do that. If you have been hired to do coding do that. Why would anyone listen to you if you haven’t demonstrated some ability and also have learned something about the business that has hired you?

Probably a designer. Gets asked to design a banner ad and ends up trying to rebrand the entire company.

On a serious note it took me a long time to understand that some clients do only want you to execute and do not want you to provide a more holistic professional assessment at every stage.

Your moral obligation is to do what's in your contract to the best of your ability, and not to put anything in the contract that you can't be certain you can deliver on.

i'm not talking about morals here. i'm talking about the nitty gritty of building things in a stupid way simply because the customer so demands it because they have an immature notion of their business or product.

Who are you to judge that? Sure make suggestions but in the end we are all adults and are responsible for our actions.

why are you responding to my comments to other people?

If you are good at this job - understanding, caring about, clarifying, refining, building, integrating and maintaining someone's aspirational vision - then you are exactly perfect to make these judgements. Good clients appreciate and expect strong opinions and trust that their expensive advisors genuinely give a shit about their success.

If any of my clients suspected that I was only maximizing my consulting returns, I would have no clients.

I like what you're saying, I got into making software to build new valuable things not to extract money from the next greater fool.

Sure a contract is a contract but a contract represents a minimum legal obligation, and I like to do and receive a little more than the minimum legal obligation.

I'll add don't get emotionally invested in the project or client. You'll end up working for free helping to "just get us over the finish line".

My problem is now I have a resume full of failed projects. Not super great track record for getting new clients or getting a full time job.

That’s a consideration. But if you phrase it correctly, your part actually succeeded. You are not responsible for the whole company, only for your own part.

building a website that no one uses doesn't really demonstrate your skills at building scale-able systems.

It doesn't demonstrate you wrote maintainable clean code and it doesn't demonstrate that you wrote something that scaled more than 1 user.

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