How to Survive Your First Year As An Entrepreneur | Hacker News Reader

How to Survive Your First Year As An Entrepreneur

techcrunch.com

84 pointssbashyal9 comments

"If a client says, “I’d rather have this conversation in our offices,” then listen to me: DO NOT EVER go to their office. Don’t go there ever again"

I'd love to hear additional detail about that.

Me too, although my impression from one of the comments on TC implied that the client was going to fire you.

Here is the author's response from TC: "Oh, and the meeting in clients offices was tongue-in-cheek. in the example i provide they are about to fire you."

If a client going to fire you, i'm sure there is a more way than having a conversation in his office. I think in face-to-face conversations there is a always a way to rescue your "relationship" with the client but you got a little chance over the phone or per brief.

ps: i guess you're not in a business with someone who can shoot you in your foot !!

There are good arguments against some of these tips, too. For example, having your high-value founders doing menial tasks is a poor use of resources. There is a good argument for hiring an admin assistant with decent marketing coordination skills, etc. Most small teams I know who have done so say it was incredibly helpful at freeing them up for more important tasks.

We were a team of 2 programmers and then we hired someone (from our community) to run our Twitter and Facebook accounts. It provided a huge bump in engagement (and sales) plus freed us up to do more programming.

Getting people to share the burden with customer support, engagement, and outreach can be a huge help.

One of the best article I've read on TechCrunch since it got sold and everyone jumped ship.

This is in line with "The Lean Startup" from Eric Ries. It's Lean Startup for people who succeed in raising money

There's some good stuff here but like most advice givers it's fairly dogmatic. The trick is to figure out the uniqueness of your own business so that you can take "You should always do X" and "You should always do Y" from different confident successful people and figure out when you should sometimes do X and sometimes do Y.

Wow 11 links back to his blog, twitter account and book. Where do I signup to write for TechCrunch?

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