Building a Startup: 12 Priceless Tools for Launching Your MVP | Hacker News Reader

Building a Startup: 12 Priceless Tools for Launching Your MVP

nashcoding.com

147 pointstansey42 comments

Something he left out was CRM, and I would love some suggestions.

My marketing involves contacting individuals at various companies. I need to capture all the information I know about them, track email conversations, and record meeting minutes. I also need to keep lots of comments about the strategy for each customer.

So far, I don't know of any easy way to access this data in one place without lots of steps and clicks. I've been using the file system; one directory per company, and one text file per person. I paste emails and type meeting minutes into each file.

I dream of a simple time-line based view of all the interactions with a given customer. Inside that dream, I also dream of Gmail and Skype integration. Suggestions, please?

ZohoCRM is free for a single user, and you can upgrade later. It's not pretty but it works quite well for me. For Skype 'integration', I use the Skype Firefox plugin so I can click phone numbers to call people. It's not really 'integration' since you still need to manually enter a 'phone call' for your contact but you can do that while the phone is ringing, it works well for me.

I haven't found any other (free) CRM systems that worked for me. I tried vTiger installed locally but it's not very stable nor moving fast - not something I'd want to base business on.

When I was freelancing, I used Highrise (http://highrisehq.com/) for my CRM. They have a free account that's pretty good for a bunch of contacts.

Worth a mention.

not sure why so many people pimp 99designs. It's on the author's "priceless" list, but it's the only tip he spends 6 bullet points instructing how to overcome 99design crap. I tried them once, spent a lot of time collaborating with designers and was not impressed with any of the results. I had to file a chargeback with my credit card company because 99designs refused to refund my money outside their 60 day policy (I was unaware I had 60 days, you have to hover over their money back guarantee to find that out). I could be spoiled, as I've worked with a good designer in the past (http://rohdesign.com/) -- the benefit being more focused attention to your project, albeit for a few more $$, but not really when you factor in the value of your time.

I've been involved in projects that used 99designs.

I would not use 99designs for, say, a whole website.

I would be very wary of design submissions that are stolen or plagiarized from other sources.

But for simple transactional work, like a new logo or wordmark, I think it's the way to go. The fact is, most tech startups probably don't benefit that much from "focused attention" to small graphical flourishes. You are probably not Twitter, and the birdie probably isn't going to make or break you.

Also: how'd you end up needing your money back? Don't you have to accept a design to end up spending money?

You pay first, then get a refund if you do not select a winning design. The benefit of focused attention is not for "small graphical flourishes", rather it takes less of your time so you can move on to other things. This is where I think the 99design concept falls down. It takes less time and energy to work with 1 person vs many, especially when that 1 person has more talent and expertise. 99design is classic penny wise and pound foolish, ymmv as others have stated, sometimes you get lucky (I loose my ass at the craps table, so I tend to stick to black jack).

I used 99designs recently for a logo, and the experience would have been poor except for one huge tip that one of the designers gave me.

As the site is very busy, the best designers might be ignoring your contest. What you can do is visit lots of other contests, and pick out the artists whose submissions you really like. Invite them personally to submit in your contest.

The moment I started inviting the best artists I could find, my contest took off and the logo I ended up with is smokin' hot.

An alternative to 99designs that I've used successfully in the past is BrandStack.com; you can only choose from ready-made designs, but they are high quality and the designers usually are willing to adapt for your branding. They also have Upstack.com which is a similar service to 99designs but you get a little bit more of a warm fuzzy feeling since it's not "on-spec".

There's no such thing as fast cheap good quality. 99designs is a place for people who don't know that or think they will somehow win the lottery...

Not sure what's up with all the 99designs bashing. I used them twice so far and you get what you pay for. Sometimes you're lucky and get a lot more.

fast, cheap, good quality. Pick two.

99designs is for when you need just the first two. Choosing these can often be a reasonable choice for a lot of cases.

| This almost goes without saying these days, but Git is the clear winner in the battle of the source control versioning systems.

It is? How so, exactly? It has a small lead over other systems as far as number of users goes, but i'd hardly call it a "clear winner".

WHO CARES. Hit this author over the head with Bitbucket or whatever and he's not going to disagree with you; in all likelihood he'll just say "anything that gets your code out there so that people can interact with it and build on it is going to build currency for your project".

We really, really don't have to get in a big Git vs. Mercurial fight over this. They're all fine. It does not matter. In fact, Patrick will tell you not to use any of them and host your own code, if you care about SEO.

> In fact, Patrick will tell you not to use any of them and host your own code, if you care about SEO.

Won't it be a non-issue if your repository isn't public which would be the case for most of the startups. Except for a couple of non-critical utilities, companies generally don't open source their code on their way up, and when they have reached the critical mass and are open sourcing big projects, they generally would have sufficient SEO weight to outweigh the repo effect.

The big thing here is "if you care about SEO".

I put up a single page with some very simple examples of doing computer vision in Python on my website three years ago. It's gotten enough links to give my site some authority in Google's eyes. I don't think it would be very difficult for a software company to find some code that others would find useful and post it on their website. And in fact, it would be a lot easier than generating other content, considering that software companies write software all day.

why is there a winner in source control at all? Is it a contest?

Admittedly, I'm not a source control or git expert by any means. However, in a lot of work environments, it is a contest. Your company decides at the outset that they will commit to use a set of technologies for the next project and that's that.

I am personally looking at it from the outskirts as a guy trying to build a startup. When I look around for a library or plug-in I need, I end up on Github. When I look at cloud hosting providers like Heroku and AppHarbor (even though they've since added support for other source control tools), I see support for git.

I'm a machine learning guy, so my goal is to find the tools that minimize my time developing software and maximize my time discovering new AI algorithms. From that perspective, it is a competition: I do not have time nor care to tinker with all the different source control methods. I just want what works, and what works is git.

While I agree with this statement very much, and I know various different source control programs, I still from where I am standing feel like Git is something that new startups and people in generally work with.

It is one of the first features touted when a newer service comes to town (sometimes alongside Mercurial, but generally support for Mercurial comes after git).

I personally really enjoy git, I love what it has to offer, and honestly it has a better community aspect to it, Github is simply amazing, with Gitorious a close second and yes BitBucket exists, but it is not even close. It doesn't have the same community feel, pull requests are practically non-existent, the online tools are not that great (the wiki being a mercurial repo is actually pretty nice), and overall it just seems to have stagnated since being bought by Atlassian.

As for the corporate world, if you want in house solutions either has some choices. You can go with straight Git/Hg without a web front-end, you can use their built-in web front-ends or you can get something like Kiln and Gitorious (being open source is kinda nice really, low barrier to entry).

Where Git still lacks is on the Windows side of things, someone really should come along and write a Git compliant client that is more windows centric and runs correctly rather than having to have MingW installed and a whole range of other tools and utilities. The version also lacks behind somewhat so sometimes you may run into a bug that you can't replicate using a newer version (had a nasty merge that caused that issue, worked fine on my Mac, no so much on Windows).

Mercurial since it is entirely written in Python will work great on Windows. The TortoiseHg and TortoiseGit will always leave something to be desired but at least they exist and can make it somewhat easier, other than the fact that Git's terminology doesn't match up with Subversion or CVS (what most devs have used before).

Exactly! Just use what you like the best. There is no contest, there is no winner.

Saying git is the "clear winner" over hg or svn or what have you is like saying that ruby is a "clear winner" over python or c++ or whatever. It makes no sense.

I feel like any of these compilation articles are just meant to generate discussion because people will disagree. Start up founders need to focus on making a good product with the tools they have available to them

This seems like the super-productive kind of disagreement to have on HN: "I tried this and it didn't work and here's what did work for me".

Which version control system you use, yeah. But cheap ways to get a decent-looking web app up quick? That seems relevant.

I'll agree with you on the relevance for getting a cheap decent looking web app. I feel that the version control system and text editor recommendations are just begging for flame wars because it's a subjective choice.

I feel like many of these compilation articles are just designed to get on the front page of HN.

For anyone else wanting to know what MVP stood for (besides the MVC alternative!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product

I thought they were talking about this at first:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_view_controller

The MVC alternative is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-presenter.

Not the tools I'd pin down, but in particular I am majorly against prefab themes like themeforest, and crowdsourced work like 99designs or crowdspring. You get what you pay for, and it's crap. I think both are a major insult to originality and craft that comes with quality design work - the exploitation of the latter, crowdsourced design work, just makes me flat out nauseous.

that said, WordPress, from that list, is indeed the best!

Could not possibly disagree more strongly about Themeforest.

Take the top 20 admin themes from Themeforest and compare them to the UI/UX of 20 randomly selected YC companies. Not the front page; the actual UI.

Reasonable people will disagree which one wins.

But what's crazy about that is that the Themeforest stuff costs twelve dollars†, and is available instantly.

Desktop software developers don't have inferiority complexes about how samey their apps look. In fact, refined sameyness is a point of pride among Cocoa devs! But for some reason, every web app needs to be designed by Shepard Fairey and Khoi Vinh to launch.

By all means, contract Fairey and Vinh. But do it after you launch the product and start making money. Your initial users do not give a fuck about this issue. If you are not a natural, fluent designer, you will lose tens of thousands of dollars of your time (and, worse, money) just so you don't look like someone else's CMS skin... which none of your real customers will notice.

† Admittedly more if you need an all-purpose license, but still 1/10th what a designer costs.

Great call on Themeforest. The added benefit of using a prefab admin skin is that you can actually build your entire concept before you need to think about paying a designer. Many of the themes have a built-in grid system (if they aren't using 966 outright) so that you can build UI workflows after creating mockups. I have made this mistake in the past but would now never hire designer if I hadn't already built a working prototype of every screen, and for that I use ThemeForest HTML5 skins.

As multiple designers will attest, I am more than happy to pay for design work (nothing we have up publicly came from Themeforest or 99designs). But unless your concept absolutely depends on graphical experience --- and look how shitty Pitchfork's site was for years and years and years in the trendiest most superficial demographic imaginable --- graphic designers are a terrible thing to block your project on.

Rather than wrack my brain and carefully come up with a scoping document laying out all the pages and functionality in my next application --- a document that will be out of date exactly one customer meeting after I write it --- I'm just going to point my next designer at a $12 Themeforest theme and say "do this, but way better".

I don't mind that it costs $5-10,000 to get "better than Themeforest", but I do mind losing weeks of release time sweating whether it's time to pull the trigger on a designer and what exactly to have them do.

99designs is a different story. I don't have the designer's moral problem with spec!work but the misgivings people have about quality and IP infringements are based on real issues. I still think it's a good tool, but I can see why some would avoid it.

Avoiding Themeforest though seems crazy.

The designers' aversion to spec work seems more like an attempt at collective bargaining than a true moral stance to me. I'm not saying that collective bargaining is necessarily a bad thing, but the success of 99designs and the like makes me think that they won't succeed in this age of globalization.

Exactly. The article presents tools for minimal viable products for which Themeforest make sense. It is only if the project gets traction and eventually money that the logo and theme should be worked out more seriously.

I recently got an item from themeforest (just a launching page). Even though it looks rather fancy, modern, etc.. (and I could never have made anything that nice looking by myself), I've found that integrating it into my project and tweaking it to be just right has taken far more time than developing something decent from scratch.

This doesn't square with my experience at all. You must be much better at HTML/CSS than I am (not at all unlikely).

For my part, it takes me roughly two hours to:

* Copy all the static assets to their Rails-appropriate locations

* Take the "demo" pages and get them to display reasonably as Erb templates of a Test controller

* Convert the HTML to Haml

* Move content to layouts/application

* Break each feature in the demo out to a partial

There is no other two hours I can spend that gets me as much UI functionality, so I'm a fan.

I have done this three times, and each time found the work of integrating a Themeforest template to be easier than integrating work from graphic designers.

I am careful to work with templates that are HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and that use a grid framework. I can imagine there are many hundreds of themes there that fail one or more of these checkboxes, and that might thus be a nightmare to work with.

Cosign, I find it takes me the same amount of time to fold in a full theme into an ASP.NET MVC site using Razor. It's all just markup in the end, and whatever angle-bracket tax you're paying for server-side includes. Normally the most time intensive part is replacing paths to statics in CSS and HTML.

new to HN so not sure who sees my replies or who don't, but I should've clarified - what you're saying is what I agree with, in terms of prefab themes.

it's just the spec work that gets me. that stuff isn't being sold multiple times like prefab themes. college students do spec no matter how much I yell at them and then end up (in terms of time spent) making so little an hour that it's just atrocious.

but, time and a place, etc.

and the type of work I do is very front-end heavy.... tends to go from mvp to beta launch quickly... and we have designers on staff. so, just spoiled. bad bias!

I am advocating prefab themes.

The price point for a very solid HTML5/CSS reasonably-semantic gridded admin theme is $12 to use and $600 for unlimited license. Even the license is a tiny fraction of the cost of any design project.

I am very specifically saying that samey prefabness isn't a liability for web app UI; in fact, I think UX outcome is likely to be superior, since samey prefab admin themes that people will like enough to pay for are all the Themeforest designers tend to build. They're developing palpable expertise.

The liabilities of these themes --- for instance that they are highly non-optimized --- are things that (a) do not matter until you have lots of customers and (b) are not particularly expensive to remediate with contractors after-the-fact.

The liabilities of the DIY approach --- often, a devil's bargain between either waiting weeks or months to get a pro designer to pick up and complete a project, or going to market with a manifestly poor design --- are much higher.

I think for most app devs, not using Themeforest is an expensive, irrational point of pride. It's not good business.

This is a fairly recent revelation for me, so I'm being noisy about it.

>I think both are a major insult to originality and craft that comes with quality design work - the exploitation of the latter, crowdsourced design work, just makes me flat out nauseous.

The cup I am drinking from would properly also have been considered a major insult to some craftperson a couple centuries ago, but I am perfectly happy paying less in return for something that just works.

As for 99 designs, can we please stop this exploitation bullshit? These people choose to offer their service there.

What most people (not necessarily you) mean when they talk about the exploitation of the designers is that they press down the price - to which all I can say is, welcome to capitalism.

Good design is valued for it's impact. In other words it sells. Products, services and most importantly ideas. The thing that bothers me most is that people completely miss this point. They just want to order "some design". Witch is completely useless no matter how much u pay. Services like 99designs encourage this behavior in "designers" as well as clients. Or maybe it's better to say that they exploit it. There's nothing good about this, especially for clients.

Thank you for having brains. (designer)

I hope you're not being sarcastic! :)

I wish I could do a general reply to everyone (new to HN) but I think I temporarily confused themeforest with themegarden (and similar.) Well, they are all similar, but it's mostly in WordPress that the prefab stuff really bothers me. For quick 'gotta get the point across' for html5 or trans to ruby or whatever, yeah, themeforest definitely makes sense.

We deal with mostly very design-heavy, frontend-ish startups, where I work, so that may be why we hate spec and prefab work so much. We value originality but YES most definitely agreed, there's a time and a place for it!

Good article I can attest that we have done most of the points on the list in growing our startup (http://infostripe.com) we were not aware of 99designs and might check them out.

I would also suggest submissions. Look for indexes, review sites and bloggers in your area and submit your MVP.

Also don't give up on the first try when contacting busy people. Don't slip through the cracks.

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