Startup Britain: a small step forward | Hacker News Reader

Startup Britain: a small step forward

swombat.com

32 pointsswombat12 comments

Well I guess somebody had to play devil's advocate and defend it.

Personally I'd be staggered if the government made anything other than positive noises on entrepreneurship. And some of what they do in future might have a positive impact. But we're a critical bunch even when it comes to weekend projects here, and I think we had a right to expect an initial offering announced with such fanfare to be more than a link list apparently less thought out than your typical Mashable "top 10" blog post.

List bloggers wouldn't claim to be dragging the economy out of the doldrums, and they also would entitle a link to Dotmailer.co.uk "Google Analytics", or put staff incentives in a "creating a brand" list - the sheer randomness is a little amusing. After you've crowdsourced your logo and built your free template site on Moonfruit you apparently need a $10/month heatmap to monitor where people are clicking. And some discount glasses c/o one of the site's backers.

Hard-up freelance designers also have a right to be irritated by the suggestion than small businesses should eschew their services in favour of setting up a competition for people overseas who consider £400 a major prize rather than enough to cover rent.

Well at some point heavily critisizing it is be the best way to impove it. There's a start, and that great. Simply the fact that they can point someone to 99designs might just make his day and be a big problem resolved for him/her.

They don’t point to 99designs any more but to the Design Business Association ( http://www.dba.org.uk/ ).

Which is probably a worse thing to do. They're supposed to be making it easy and appealing to start a business. This makes it seem more complicate and expensive that it really is.

There are thousands of successful businesses that don't have logos.

Well the fact is that, at least there is a reference and while we have to critisize it in order to impove it, we have to achknowledge the fact that they are trying something compared to many others. Just take a look at the TechCrunch post where they talked about how bad the Startup Visa was and later a new redefined version of the US Startup Visa is in the works. There's a start with StartupBritain, why not contribute?!

This is probably a better place to continue from our discussion on Twitter...

What is the benefit of describing http://jfdibritain.com as first "cynical" and then a "negative reaction"?

Like Start Up Britain, JFDI Britain is positive about startups in all industries. You can JFDI it with any business. We are a response to Start Up Britain, our only direct reference to them is that we say they "inspired" us to create the site.

We think Start Up Britain should continue to do what it's doing and we hope that it evolves to highlight that the only real barrier that exists to starting any kind of business is the time you have available to get on with it.

Our only real criticism the prominence and potential damage of the 1:Idea 2: Biz Plan 3:Kit 4:Logo approach. We're suggesting a positive alternative.

That's your opinion (that you can JFDI any business). I think most businesses are not suitable to this approach.

More importantly, you set this opinion in opposition, not as a complement - it's clearly presented as an opposing reaction to StartupBritain. So yes, it's a negative reaction, one that fits under the "StartupBritain is not good enough advice" stream of thought.

Sorry you feel that way.

It wasn't our intension to come across like that. How could we have got our message across more positively?

Perhaps providing more context (even if you follow it by declaring that you believe it's for pretty much any kind of business - the reality is there are many business types for which jumping in with no thought is a very bad idea[1]), and not being so aggressive (the very name is an attack, because of the swear word). If you then also included a mention of StartupBritain in a positive way (rather than the veiled "popular belief" reference), it would probably come across as complementary, rather than opposed.

Ultimately, you do disagree with StartupBritain's message, which is perfectly fine - I don't see why you feel bad about it. It's ok to disagree and have strong opinions! Just... stand up for them and accept the fact that others will disagree with you too :-)

[1] To take an extreme example, an airline. To take a less extreme example, heh, a B2B SaaS startup.

I too don't think you can use JFDI, taken literally, for any business. Just as you can't use 1,2,3,4 on StartupBritain for any business.

Therefore I don't view JFDIBritain as a negative reaction. Indeed it's a very constructive contribution, being simple and practical. It is extremely useful for some types of start-up businesses: Certainly for many, but not all, of the businesses that I have done, or do, work with.

Have a look here: http://www.bl.uk/bipc/index.html

Why were resources spent on this new and empty initiative, where there are perfectly good resources that exist already? Why not promote those? Why not build on those?

Okay, well, as revealed in another post here on HN, the BBC has revealed that the Startup Britain website links you to a fake site stuffed with malware.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12904585

"According to Paul Baccas, a senior threat researcher at Sophos, the link featured in an article about US investor Warren Buffet and took users to a fake banking site.

""It went to a third-party site, bankling.com, where users were redirected to a fake anti-virus page given a prompt saying their computer was infected and encouraging them to download a fix," he said.

"In reality, the fix contained malware.

"The exploit only affected users of Internet Explorer, including the most recent versions. Other browsers, including Firefox, were not affected.

"The slip will be embarrassing for the government, especially as Prime Minister David Cameron had helped launch the site and the Number 10 website linked prominently to it."

A small step forward, sure ... but I don't like the direction that step has taken us so far.

HN discussion link:- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387009

Reply on news.ycombinator.com