Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?

11 pointsiseff36 comments

In my own experience, and from reading Hacker News, I've noticed that there is still a lot of friction when starting a startup. Things like incorporating (choosing which type, what state, actually filing, etc), payroll, taxes, and so on. These are all tasks that just seem to take founders away from working on their real goal.

I was wondering what tasks take you away from working on your goals -- what things do you wish you could just quickly take care of and get back to work?

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The two biggest time-sucks for YC alumni seem to be talking to investors and dealing with visa problems.

An interesting thing about YC is that it saves time spent securing funding at the early seed stage: a week on the application and a week preparing for the interview, with a definite yes or no by a certain date.

Can you see later stage investors (100k, 500k, etc) doing the same thing?

They certainly could be a lot more efficient about it than they are now.

Do you think you would be closer to typical investors if you had "rolling admissions" like they do?

Yes, in a sense. We just couldn't deal with as many startups if we had rolling admissions. So that would mean funding fewer, which would let us take longer deciding.

Those experiencing visa problems may benefit from getting a lawyer involved (if they don't already). I can recommend mine (in SF): Richard Kolomejec.

I have nothing to gain from making this recommendation.

It's actually quite possible to just ignore those tasks, work on your goal, and then retroactively take care of them once your goal's on it way.

There's a big task that has to be done beforehand, though, and is a huge pain: figuring out what people want (and will pay for). It's much harder than it seems.

Heh, I totally agree.

Unfortunately, these tasks do have to be done at some point, and they aren't the goal of your startup, so they do take you off-course. Minimizing the time they take would be a good thing, I think.

Not starving in the street: AKA full time job.

vote one on this.

The only tasks which I find stop me from working on my product are various administration and customer support chores. The one-time items like incorporation are trivial in terms of time-cost.

Being forced to step away from development has actually saved me more trouble that it's taken away. Being forced to take a breather to tally up expenses or polish up some documentation takes my mind away from the development task at hand and helps give me a better perspective on things when I return. On far more occasions than I'd care to admit, I'll find myself thinking about the 'absolutely essential' work I was intently doing to improve my product and realize it was either completely unnecessary or else could be done in a better manner.

Those insights would not likely be gained if I had been focused entirely on development. Mix it up.

> customer support chores

This may sound trite: That's not a bad problem to have..

Reading Hacker News

though i use it for taking breaks...

My other projects.

Deliberation....you can discuss and plan things all you want but at some point you have to just dive in

I'm at a stage where I'm hacking most of the time (yay!), but I've learned that I can get really stubborn about solving problems, and don't know when to just take the loss, and do something in a way that is less robust but at least works.

In fact, I'd say I waste several hours a week being stubborn about problems, and I'm not a particularly stubborn person.

I would pay good money for a solution that always gave me insight into when I've been spending too much time on a task...but I'd be surprised if that could be pulled off.

I believe what you're referring to is yak shaving:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html

The only thing stopping me is that I'm not entirely confident with PHP yet. I'm working on small sample projects until I'm certain I can go out and build everything optimally.

Prototyping fast, then start the second edition. Don't wait until you are confident enough to start. I find that whatever I do whatever language I use, I always do the best in the second version.

I'm mocking up every page in HTML right now. My cofounder and I are scouring over all the details, trying to make absolutely gorgeous pages. (I know every person who makes an HTML thinks this, but I truly think that the few pages we've finalized are superb.)

Next semester, I'm in an advanced PHP course - enough to really firm up the things I'm working on. I'll probably have a prototype made winter break, so I'll be able to fix up the beta and stabilize it as part of that class, and have a working model in time to apply for YCombinator this summer.

I'm working with other PHP projects so I can get confident enough in PHP to make my site. The code for it is really simple: one of the things that makes me certain about my idea is that it's an incredibly basic one that hasn't been used in the way I'll be using it. I'm not too worried about it getting complex, so I'll know exactly when I'm ready to dash it out. But HTML first.

Unless you're certain about the UI elements, doing a hard design may be a bad move. I personally get better mileage from building the core architecture/functionality first, and working on the rest, ideally with public feedback on both after a certain stage. I've made significant changes in usability in the past as a result of this. If you end up hard-coding stuff before it gets scrutinized in the forge of actual use, you'll have a harder time making changes down the road.

YMMV. It helps if you use a framework or something else that can get you started. Just remember that customizing a framework isn't your core competency.

I'm very good with frameworks - I've got several years' experience with Drupal - but this project I want coded by hand, because I want to be absolutely certain of what's going on on every page of the project.

The UI elements are pretty much set. This is an idea that's been a long time coming, and we've got ourselves almost entirely planned out.

Just work on the product!

It's way too easy to spend time on things that aren't core to your business.

Don't worry about where to open a bank account, where to incorporate, etc. This can all be fixed later on, and won't prevent you from making something people want.

payment systems.

That doesn't stop me, but boy is it a pain in the ass (I'm currently building our payment system).

Finding good documentation on PyXPCOM.

odd, I didn't expct to be moderated up there. Is someone else working on something involving PyXPCOM? Wanna chat?

A friend of mine is working in a research project about integrating and contextualising web and desktop applications. He's building their system using Firefox, PyXPCOM and SproutCore. I have an email address on my profile page.

Fulltime PhD :(

How is that working out for you? (Both the startup and the Ph.D.?) I'm considering both.

Who is forcing you? Also, doesn't doing a PhD come with lots of opportunities to do interesting stuff? What are you working on? Maybe we could exchange places, I always wanted to do a PhD...

can't get my head around ruby on rails..

If you are struggling with RoR, I would recommend doing a 1-5 day online tutorial on Ruby (the length depends on how quickly you can pick it up). I skipped pure Ruby and went straight to RoR. In retrospect this was a mistake as a grounding in Ruby would have saved me a lot of pain.

can you recommend any courses?

School.

school

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