Bootstrapping / startup-life-hacks we’ve learned (so far) | Hacker News Reader

Bootstrapping / startup-life-hacks we’ve learned (so far)

maplebutter.com

90 pointsturoczy28 comments

"Work from a founder’s home"

Works great unless you're married or have a significant other at home. Trust me on this, after a week of seeing your face constantly even the most beloved becomes the most revolting.

Been working from home for six months and this echoes a bit too painfully close to the truth. My wife kicks me out daily right now.

My wife and I have worked from home together for years. We have a roommate who also has his own start-up and works from home. Different strokes...

Same here. Husband and I have worked from home together since 2006, and hope to never have to work apart again.

Agreed, my wife would go nuts if I was home ALL THE TIME. People need their own space. You need time away from each other to have something to talk about

You got to extremes with budgeting for food but you spend up on hiring a design firm for your frontend?

Your priorities are out of order. Some of the most successful sites on the web had completely shit designs.

The Google guys didn't even know html.

It's not 1998 anymore. While I agree that design is not key to the success, I believe that when people see site with bad (like 1998-bad bad) design, they automatically distrust it.

I also don't think that what they are doing is 'extreme budgeting'. It seems like pretty reasonable thing that everybody does where I live.

I'm a co-founder at Uniiverse (and the guy coding up a storm in the photo for #2!).

I will agree that yes, we go to extremes when budgeting for food, please understand that _budget_ has very little to do with the _quality_ of food that you can eat when you're bootstrapping. Truthfully speaking, I'm eating more healthy, tasty, and cheap meals than I've ever eaten in my life. As a former "lazy programmer" who would opt for a morning bagel + cream cheese for breakfast, then a fast food lunch, and a restaurant dinner every single day (usually keeping an empty fridge at home), I'm much happier with my meals than when I had plenty of budget for food. Oh, and I've lost weight in the right places too :) Food can be wonderful at any budget. Plus, restaurants taste so much sweeter when you're taking $0.00/yr salary :P

Design-wise, myself and my co-founders are more than capable of fully designing & coding a sufficient application skin / theme, and we started out with that route, but the results we got by going with our "top-notch design shop" were far superior and well worth the investment. Design is extremely important, and not something we wanted to skimp out on. Spending the extra few dollars up front for a kick ass design is something that can have an immeasurable positive long-term impact if done right.

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."

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Just for the authors' edification, Scriptlance is very "meh." I found the providers to usually be at least a tier below Elance, oDesk etc in terms of quality. $5 dollar-esque bids are the norm, which usually translates into that level of quality when it comes to code, imagery etc. But as with any freelance site, it's about the providers first & foremost. Pay close attention to the portfolios & ask detailed, focused questions before beginning any job.

Also watch out for North American middlemen that go out and farm your projects out to programmers in India, Bangladesh etc whose quality (or lack of quality) you may have no awareness of. Not that I haven't been burned in the past or anything...

"We also truly believe in spending on hiring the right talent, contractors or agencies (and paying them competitive rates along with rewarding them with bonuses)."

And yet you recommend crowdsourced design sites like 99designs.com?

I don't find that mutually exclusive. Having a high priced contest on 99Designs is the best way I know of to get in touch with great designers. You can work with them further offline as well.

A great designer would not be seen near such a place. Heck, any self respecting designer would do their best to avoid it. You're buying the time of kiddies equipped with photoshop, nothing more.

Agreed - in order to get a nice logo from 99Designs, I had to wade through ten tons of utter crap, but after doing that I both ended up with a nice logo and a relationship with a solid graphic designer that I've been working with directly to make additional assets.

A Rogers bill! You're missing out... Teksavvy is a rogers reseller that is cheaper with no caps... since you're in the GTA you may be able to save a couple bucks through them!

Good tips - I find that the heat of all the PCs/equipment isn't that bad, but why not opt for somewhere all-inclusive (a ton of condo's have this, since it seems you're in a condo building)

The ping pong desk is a cool idea, I'd want to make mandatory chill out times though where say every thursday at 5pm you have a ping pong tourney or something.

Adam here. Actually, we're with Rogers because they've got a discount available for condo residents, so it's better value than Teksavvy, all things considered. I'm a huge Teksavvy fan and have them at home as well! But we opted for the Rogers deal instead.

The all-inclusive condo option is an interesting idea as well :)

Regular ping pong matches was something we originally wanted to do, but now it would require moving our monitors, laptops, all-in-one printer, etc. and that's just too much work! hehe.

If I had to add an 11th point, it would be "SSDs should be mandatory". I've found a huge productivity increase since switching to one, and will never go back to anything else for the primary disk on my development machine. That said, we're bootstrapping, so not everyone has one _yet_ ;)

A solid alternative to working from an apartment is to find coworking spaces in your city. In Atlanta, myself and my cofounder work out of a place that has plenty of space, tables, printers, etc. and only costs $80/month/person. Also a great networking tool, as you meet other bootstrapping entrepreneurs!

Additionally, if your city has an entrepeneurship society or network of any kind, go for the food if nothing else - aside from meeting other entrepreneurship-minded people, nothing better than a free meal.

I'm based in Atlanta and would love to hear more about that.

Check out this page:

http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/16583399/CoworkingAtlanta

Or for more general info look here: http://coworkingregistry.org or the wiki linked above on the frontpage has a list of directories: http://wiki.coworking.info/w/page/16583831/FrontPage

There's also a very helpful Coworking Google Group if you want to explore deeper and find the community.

Sure - check out http://strongboxwest.com/

Highly recommend it - very affordable, and plenty of space to work with.

The bag of rice propping the door open brought a smile to my face. I can just imagine someone needing to cook some rice then realizing the quantity needed may tip the balance in favor of the door. A second of hesitation before the aha moment and finding a new door prop...till the next day when someone goes "Where the hell is the rice?"

ya.....I need to get back to work!

That is a nice apartment. Maybe rent is just really cheap in Canada, but to my limey eyes that place looks distinctly lavish.

I'm looking at the pictures of your office and thinking you're being penny wise and pound foolish.

My favorite bootstrapping-startup-life-hack is to eat your own dogfood. I'm not talking about using your own software, I'm talking about eating actual dogfood. It saves a lot of money.

I don't know how to say this - but, are you for real?

Its very important to eat well. Yeah, eat cheap food thats fast to cook, but also make sure its healthy. Vegetables and noodles, pasta, are cheap and quick.

The safety standards and quality of product that goes into dogfood is very different than food for human consumption.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_food "As well, cow brains and spinal cords, not allowed for human consumption under federal regulation 21CFR589.2000 due to the possibility of transmission of BSE, are allowed to be included in pet food intended for nonruminant animals."

This is just one example, but you do not want vCJD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_disea...

Its crazy to eat dogfood, don't do it.

I'm not sure if you're being serious, but I believe he was referring to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eating_your_own_dog_food

I was replying to this: "I'm not talking about using your own software, I'm talking about eating actual dogfood."

Really? Besides dry dog foods and cheap ones, I find actual dog foods more expensive than human food.

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