Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

Over the last 4 years, I've gone through a similar "speed run" of startups after quitting my job of 10 years during COVID.

First startup went nowhere and took on a contract role after 9 months. Then tried another startup with a co-founder I met at one of the startups where I worked in the interim. About 6 months building something awesome, but no commercial path. Spent 1 month with him and another co-founder on a fintech product but realized much faster that once again that there was no viable go-to-market strategy. Started another company and built a product that seemed like it had legs. We had one early user that absolutely loved the product and we thought all we needed was to find more users like her. Turns out that she was a false signal because we never found another user like her and I'm about to shut that one down after almost a year to avoid DE franchise fee next year.

If anyone is in a situation like this/thinking about doing something like this, I've gathered some of my lessons learned: https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2024/12/lessons-learned-from-worki...

If I had to sum it up: always build the minimal thing that can be "sold". Use AI to build the dirtiest MVP as fast as possible. Even better if your "MVP" is a deck and you can get people to put money down to wait. Figure out your GTM and messaging with that deck. If you are an engineer, you must resist that urge to build until you're sure you can find enough people that have this problem and want to pay you to solve it. Don't work with a non-technical co-founder if they claim if you build it, customers will come. Don't work with a non-technical co-founder that can't demonstrate an ability to sell. If the vibes feel off, get out fast. Don't form a company with a co-founder until you absolutely have to (like your personal life, don't get married until you're absolutely sure).

Lots of mistakes and lessons learned during that time having founded startups that went nowhere, been an employee in startups that went nowhere, and left startups that are actually crushing it. I have seen a big swath of the gamut at this point with some regrets in retrospect.

Given the dense amount of wisdom packed into this comment I checked out your profile. Both your current projects look extremely impressive and polished. And viable! Keep up the good work! It’s inspiring to see that in light of the obvious difficult lessons you’ve had to learn along the way.

Having learned many of the same lessons as you I can 100% backup everything you said in your “sum it up” paragraph!

The only caveat I would add is to the “make an MVP with AI”. I think MVPs generated directly out of ChatGPT/Claude are so easy now (or at least it can appear so on the face of it) that many people are just barely going beyond that - but to any experienced eye, that approach is quite transparent and can look very low-value (even if the idea is actually a good one).

Now if that person is a skilled salesperson then that might work.

But, for most people, I think it’s still very important to demonstrate good instincts, taste and strategic/commercial understanding when building such an MVP. And that means editing and shaping the output just enough to meet your vision for the product. So to agree with you - definitely, 100%, use AI as much as possible - but don’t assume that you can put zero work in on top and have that MVP be effective. Because the 10 year old down the street has the exact same tool as you - so if you are just relying verbatim on that tool’s output- it’s going to be hard to stand out.

I’d still definitely agree to spend as little time as physically possible on the MVP - with the above caveat.

Having said all that… a lot of historical wisdom on the topic of MVPs has been turned upside down since gen AI became mainstream, so on the flip side you could argue: create 1000 MVPs in an hour, publish them all, see what generates interest…*

Hmm.. I think I just argued against my own point.

* (I’m not really seriously suggesting anyone do this, but I’m also not entirely discounting this as an approach either…)

    > Both your current projects look extremely impressive and polished. And viable!

Appreciate it and thanks for the positive feedback! But those are two of the multitudes of side projects I have collected that I haven't figured out how to monetize. My "day job" is at a VC-backed startup that is going through a protracted wind-down because it also failed to find a viable GTM. So yeah, I've learned some hard lessons in multiple facets of my career!

    > Now if that person is a skilled salesperson then that might work

My rule now is that if I'm building something for fun, I just open source it. If I want to make money, I'm going to first figure out who's paying and how do I get them to pay. AI MVPs are easy now to let you flesh out an idea one level up from a slide deck (in fact, maybe this is its own startup idea? Use AI to build an MVP from a deck??).

I had a non-technical friend recently spin up a full blown startup with customers using nothing but Claude + Replit (not plugging, but just sharing to show that it's real: https://bullship.co). He came up with the idea after talking to a friend and finding that indeed, the market had only two major competitors who both charged too much for many smaller customers.

The code is throwaway in my book, but it's enough to validate the idea by actually getting people to pay for something they can use. It won't scale, but that's fine; by the point that he needs it to scale, he'll be able to hire people with more skill to fix or rebuild it.

https://turas.app video is confusing, what I got is I have to do the planning myself using your app. Why would I do that instead I can get Chatgpt do the planning for me with some keywords on what I like/want.

You also have 20 different icons, that is so confusing for the user, get rid of most of them and just keep maybe 3 or 4.

Thanks for the feedback!

It's not an itinerary generator; it's a replacement for people who use spreadsheets to plan meticulously. Definitely not for everyone!

This.

Build only after customers have thrown money at you.

As it’s at that point you have enough clarity and specificity to build.

>Build only after customers have thrown money at you.

This advice is better if you have 10k twitter followers. For example I'm building something cool, a no-code visual regression tool. I don't have any real network. Besides cold outreach (and hn, ph), what else is there? Would love to know what you recommend.

Unfortunately, if you genuinely want to build something cool, the correct path is build it as open source project while having a job.

If you want to make money (at least break even the opportunity cost of a programmer), you need to work backwards: build things that you will be comfortable to pitch to your connections. Selling home-made chilli sauce to friends&relatives is unironically a better business model than building an app for most people.

Thanks, that makes sense. I did reach out to my limited network and the reception has been good.

Yup.

Stuff I build for fun, I generally just open source. If there is an audience, you can always build a commercial model later.

    > For example I'm building something cool, a no-code visual regression tool.

Make sure you do your research on what's already out there, how much they charge, who their target market is (startups? Mid market? Enterprise?), what's their marketing strategy, etc.

Basically understand how your solution fits into that market and how you'll differentiate and make money.

These come up every few weeks on HN. Something something Playwright, something GPT something.

I fully agree that you should try to sell the thing first, because a good chunk of the people who might want such a tool could already have the savvy required to bolt together the relevant open source and off the shelf building blocks.

Even before getting any sort of demo/landing page up?

Yes. The more excited someone else is about an idea, the stronger the signal. The more you have to show them the idea, the weaker the signal (with exceptions at the edges)

That's fair but I need a job so this demo is a perfect way to showcase all of my skills and to add something recent to my portfolio. Maybe if I have like a year of runway and no money stress I can try the pre-sell thing.

Do it for your portfolio; keep it open source. Use a license that's conducive to OSS and possibly a paid version in the future or dual license later.

Just be realistic with your expectations and don't quit your job until you know that there are customers willing to pay.

I haven't worked in over a year and I'm in dire straights. I'll do the OSS version later.

hey

some time ago i skimmed around notion of Wardley maps and bookmarked it but did not pay (enough) attention. The other day there was another post on the topic, now with some basic resources, and i got hooked.. and read half of that book [0]. But right now have nothing on my mind to play with. May be that is a way? Map-and-try-predict the battlefield (needs lots of reconnaissance and "feeling" of the "landscape" and what-else-is-there). Mail me if you want a sparing partner - i want to learn this technique. But Anyway, have fun.

[0] https://feststelltaste.github.io/wardley-maps-book/#_the_fir...

(IMO, read chapter 2+ then 3~4 first, then restart from beginning)

Hey I'll definitely reach out. The first 5 times I read your comment I had no idea what you were talking about then did some reading. Very cool.

Who do you expect to buy it? How many face-to-face conversation with them about why they’d use this tool?

Customer don’t exist in hn, ph, twitter, they exist in their own offices, on Zoom, and your local coffee shops.

I expect managers of small/mid size product teams to buy it instead of pinging me and my friends at the end of the day/start of the day/throughout the day. This makes it so my managers don't have to ping me all day, helps devs monitor UI breakages, and helps stakeholders get easy made reports on changes they requested. It's quite useful.

I've had 10ish face to face conversations with people, people who've sold significant companies / engineering managers at FAANG's.

My competitors all require code, mine doesn't.

I threw up a sign up page on https://shutr.app if you're interested. Maybe it goes somewhere, maybe it goes nowhere. But I believe in it, and it's useful for me.

Quick reminder that FAANG is not small/mid.

My guess is, you’re selling to the individual devs at the smaller places. Talk to them and their managers. If they want to buy, they’ll buy with what you have already.

Right, true. Thanks.

Ph? Product Hunt?

Yes

> like your personal life, don't get married until you're absolutely sure

I misread “personal wife” (in Kripky’s voice from big bang theory) and after I was done chuckling, I started thinking of something funny to comment about the other types of wives there are… then reread your comment and… yeah.

Haha, well, I'm going through a "divorce" now with a co-founder and unfortunately, it costs money, time, and effort to try to get my assets (code) back. He was never able to generate a dime of revenue after I brought the code, but now he wants the code (which I want to open source).

So yeah, in many ways, it is just like a marriage when you formally create a company with a co-founder. Don't do it unless you need to and if you do, make sure that you can get your assets back if you are bringing existing assets to the table.

Thank you for sharing this.

Good luck if you're thinking about going for it! Learn from my mistakes.

Good lessons!

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