This is How Many Startup Businesses Fail in the First Year (+Survival Tips) | Hacker News Reader

This is How Many Startup Businesses Fail in the First Year (+Survival Tips)

54collective.vc

28 pointsmakerdiety32 comments

on year 7 of my startup and profitable. I'd like to add a few things.

1. look for a boring problem that needs solving. related to the product market fit. a lot of founders are trying to build a sexy solution to a problem that no one has.

2. Sales is half the equation!. you can have the best engineering team in the world but it means nothing if you dont have good sales. and good sales people don't just get sales. they are the first point of contact for your prospective customers. Empower them to get feedback and ideas for how to evolve your product. half of our features at my startup are things we never would have thought of until our sales guys kept telling us how many restaurants were requesting the feature.

What does your company do?

cloud based restaurant POS

Isn't that super saturated and commoditized? How do you compete against the likes of toast?

I listed the two main ones in my original post. everything else is a competitive advantage we prefer to keep secret.

I can tell you, from the other side of the house (the eater), that there is still a giant yawning gap in restaurant software. Toast must have great sales people, or some compelling meal ticket manager or something, because the experience given to the diner is absolutely trash.

> half of our features at my startup are things we never would have thought of until our sales guys kept telling us how many restaurants were requesting the feature

As a developer in a smaller company I like to chat with both support and sales due to this.

Could be at lunch or by the water cooler, but just gently probe what they're struggling with or what our customers are telling them.

Often there are low hanging fruits that have significant customer impact for fairly minimal development effort.

cultofmetatron is hiding an grace/ability ratio of an olympic ice skater. My friend worked for a POS company where potential customers had features in mind and engineers were expected to place the next block on the barely standing Jenga tower. They were bootstrapped, had excellent moonlighters and years of headstart in Indian market. They were dead by the time most shops got Android POSs.

one of the best decisions I made as CTO was to focus purely on IOS devices. That massive moving target of android devices is a nightmare to develop for if you're going for bug free turkey operation. Second was moving to hire someone with "olympic ice skater" level experience with ios development. We tell our customers what devices to get and in B2b, its a very small part of their overall budget.

The second best decision was to build our server infrastructure on top of elixir/phoenix. I don't think I could have gotten this far if we used node (and I had 10 years of nodejs experience)

Interesting. Do you do anything “special” on the server thats hard / impossible to do with node js?

well for one, in elixir, you can get away with having a monolith architecture. elixir has the concept of a "genserver" which is a dedicated thread. the beam has a message passing system baked in. So lets say I want to create a service to which I want to send jobs, I can create a genserver which is just a file taht inherits genserver behavior and mount it at the top level's application.ex in the supervision tree. phoenix will take care of keeping it up and monitoring it in place of crashes. You can also have your api nodes connect to each other and maintain persistent data across them. this means a thread in one machine can send data to a thread on a completely different machine.

If I were to do this in nodejs, I would need to setup a supervisor. I'd need a message passing broker like rediis or rabbitmq and I'd need an orchestrator to manage the various services. in elixir, we get all this baked in. I can add a microservice as easily as you can add a controller in rails.

Also, the websocket system in elixir is so good makes nodejs look like a toy.

1. look for a boring problem that needs solving.

Even that is not boring enough I reckon. It is totally fine to find a problem that already has a solution and just execute better on delivering the solution than your competitors. Many (most?) businesses start out this way yet I've heard plenty of times that somebody will not start a business until they find a problem that needs a solution.

Add to that, lots of tech is "over-priced" these days. There are a lot of PMF validated out there and you can compete on price. I don't understand the reluctance to do that.

Hard to make that work when all your competitors have VC funding. More generally, this will normally make your unit economics look worse, which can limit your valuation.

Obviously, in the real (non-VC) world, price wars are a great strategy if you can provide the service more cheaply.

competing on price is generally a bad idea. its an inevitable race to the bottom. Plus now you're running on less profit which limits yoru ability to grow. you're much better off adding features that your competitors don't have or optimizing for a subset of the userbase that would prefer a simplified workflow.

you can always build a solution to a problem only one billionaire has though as long as you can convince them to part with their money.

Hey would love to learn things on two on the traits you look in a sales person. I have been selling myself as a founder last 8 years, now want to hire someone.

Okay, I got it. If I want to make a successful startup, I simply just need to get an insane amount of funding and develop a great product based on detailed market research that fits the market and solves an actual problem. I also should find a way to actually sell a product in order to avoid negative cash flow problems.

This reminds me a bit of the main reason why restaurant businesses fail according to some TV shows I've watched: They have a lousy cook.

Indeed, the article is kind of only saying obvious things. I was disappointed because I expected some very specific, insightful ideas.

This article must be pretty great to make it to the front page while messing about with how scrolling works

:-)

Yeah it feels like a way to troll HN at this point. Add a scroll script and get angry upvotes.

I usually don't comment on stuff like this, but _wow_. This is one of the worst scrolling I've seen on a website in modern days

Reminds me when I get rabbit-holed on something I think is really cool, spend the day implementing it, step back and think "wow, I've really done something cool here".

And then wake up the next morning and realise it's shit and needs to be thrown away.

Coupled with a red square that follows the mouse pointer is the one-two knockout of annoying mouse UX.

Haha yes! Why on earth is there a red dot following me around?

I also came to comment the same thing. I cannot believe someone made a design choice to have it implemented that way with a straight face...

I had never heard of dead day but this from the description on their webpage:

>> ABOUT THE GAME Dive into a fantasy NFT game where survival meets strategy and humor. Battle zombies, beasts, build bases, and earn real rewards in a magical world that challenges your wits and rewards your adventures. Every quest is a step towards mastery and monetization in this enchanting realm.

Why can’t games just be games? Do I really need to monetise every aspect of my life? Should hacker news give me a fraction of a penny for every view of every bullshit comment I make on the website? Should I get a dollar every time I conquer the world in civ4? I’m not against the makers of this game. I’m wondering why every part of every life seems to be on the direction of commoditisation. Who wants this life and why?

> I’m wondering why every part of every life seems to be on the direction of commoditisation. Who wants this life and why?

Those who can extract some value from being in the middle of that commodisation, like game devs making a "gambling site" looking like a game.

Reason #0: Your website has a weird override to basic scrolling and what looks like a tracking marker, so users immediately GTFO of there.

Don't override basic UI controls.

Thankfully there's reader mode.

"In the first year" is a good and well-needed qualifier for such analysis.

Oftentimes we fall into the trap of defining a business success as "forever", anything short of that is deemed a failure. I think such views make the industry look far bleaker than it actually is.

Even by their standards, I'm not sure that 'running a business that did well for 10 years' should count as a fail in the same way that 'couldn't even figure out a business plan' should.

Do code quality and architecture astronauts matter? If I were a VC, I would set up an automated code quality monitor and bring human consultants. I saw Indian startups copy paste code in Lambda web editor without any VCS, critical code which can be touched by one person who may have left, buggy half baked ORMS/frameworks, URL params that allow anybody to access anything etc. They enable territorial people, reward yes men, leave you vulnerable to hacking etc.

I would imagine those are actually counterproductive. Typically when code quality becomes too important developers are too opinionated about the wrong things.

The big exception, though, is having a super solid foundation because you will need the ability to pivot in the shortest time without risk of regression and without burning cash. I suspect these factors are what kill most technical founders.

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