Zero to Startup in 10 weeks | Hacker News Reader

Zero to Startup in 10 weeks

davidnicholaswilliams.com

46 pointsdavnicwil16 comments

Good luck with your project!

Others have already told you to talk to your future customers, so I'll skip that part. What I do want to impress is to think about not just who your users are, but who will be the stakeholder and purchasing decision-maker. Once you have a running product, it will have to both work well technically but also be a sensible (and safe) purchase for whoever makes that decision. As they will certainly research the company, I would make (planning/engineering for) operational stability and scalability a central part of your messaging :)

And, most of all... have fun building both a product and a business.

This is great advice, thankyou for taking the time, and for your kind words

Hi HN - OP here, thought this would be entertaining and hopefully useful for fellow hackers / bootstrappers in the community. Follow along if you're interested, I'll be posting progress daily (even when there is none ;-)

And hi to all the other people doing Startup School this year, hope to meet a lot of you over the next 10 weeks!

Livestream it!

You mean for the coding? As terrifying as this sounds I would definitely be up for this.. can't imagine a better way to avoid perfectionism and going down rabbit holes while writing the code. Going to investigate how easy this would be to set up for a first timer, and will totally do it if it makes sense. Great idea!

Hi do you have an RSS feed you will post updates on?

Great idea, I'll look into adding one!

The RSS feed is now live - subscribe link at the top - let me know if any issues (it's RSS 2.0 and I just wrote the XML manually)

Following this, as I have an idea I am working on that is suffering from 'perfectionism syndrome' and this might be the encouragement I need to actually ship.

Nonetheless, good luck on your journey!

Thanks :-) Yeah, I'm with you! This is probably the main driver for me trying this, I want to do everything possible to not make those mistakes. Hoping following the program and posting progress in public will give me the constant reminder to just do the simplest thing possible every day to move closer to shipping!

Good luck!

I'll be following as I'm in the middle doing something similar but a bit longer in length....Starting a Software Company in 100 Days via a daily video journal.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsBrSVYhydBgazekw-YixSA

Ah, cool - just checked out the first one and I'll definitely catch up and be following back. Vlog updates is a really good idea, too, I might try this for some of my updates.

Good luck to you too!

> Day 1 > What have you learned from users? > Nothing yet, haven't talked to any

There's your problem. You're building a pet/side project, not a startup.

I started on this on day 1 - it's quite literally from zero. It's an idea I got quite recently, and haven't done any work on it until starting this experiment. I guess every startup has a day 1 where you can't have spoken to any potential customers yet when you start :-)

But you're totally right, I should have spent day 1 speaking to people, instead of/before even starting building any of the prototype. Already trying to set that lesson into action and starting day 2 by talking to people about the idea!

This is not a Show HN, so we took that out of the title. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

Ah, sure, makes sense. A bit meta I guess but I was thinking the experiment itself might be enough of a 'thing' to warrant a Show HN -- I'll definitely be back with a Show HN when I ship the product :-)

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