A HireVoice postmortem - lessons learned trying to get a startup off the ground | Hacker News Reader

A HireVoice postmortem - lessons learned trying to get a startup off the ground

etiennegarbugli.com

11 pointsbyosko12 comments

Uargs. Who had the idea of having every paragraph leading up to a quote that has a big "Tweet this"-link next to it? It feels like a kid jumping up and down, desperately trying to get more attention.

I wouldn't object to it quite so much if it wasn't for the "Tweet This" links next to every one.

Even then, I find the style debatable. I think its overused, with some quotes only separated by a small sentence. But "tweet this" is definitely the thing that kills it all.

> "Bootstrapping a startup when you’re 30 and have a rent to pay is incredibly hard"

I think bootstrapping a startup when you have no capital is incredibly hard. The age you are and whether you're renting or not are merely contributory factors - imagine if you were paying a mortgage rather than rent...this could make bootstrapping even harder (could being the important word here, before someone corrects me!).

(maybe this is a controversial viewpoint, but I feel Twitter is for 140 character insights, and a blog post is for longer ones. Having 24 quote blocks with 'Tweet This' next to it didn't make for a great reading experience)

100% agreed on the age thing. Comments like this just reinforce the stereotype (myth?) of 20 year olds chasing multimillion dollar lean startup VC IPO dreams. Many people over 25 start up organizations/companies.

You can look at it as "oh it's so hard, i've got a mortgage!". Or you can look at it as "Wow, I've got some really good experience in industry X, skills to sell, and established roots in industry X and my local/regional area to help me get moving faster!".

There's a few entrepreneurs/startups in our area that I really respect, and most of them started over 30. One was closer to 40 before he started, and wasn't really rocking it until 40 or just a bit after I think.

Living at home with your parents, no rent/food to pay would still be hard if you didn't have enough money for a computer and net connection (assuming you're trying to work online). Having capital relative to your startup needs is key - age is immaterial.

Less than a year and 5 different products? I'm all for validated learning but it seems like they needed to stick to an idea longer than an average of two months.

> "I had learned that, with half the time you get half the results so, for HireVoice, I was all-in, committed to success or, at least, piling up debts."

If you look at the author's LinkedIn, you'll see he started another consulting job after four months working on HireVoice full time. Is this because he realized the initial idea wasn't going to pay the bills?

I wonder if he would have been better off getting a full-time job first and iterating on this idea as a side project? It seems like someone who is fully employed would be more rigorous in choosing which idea to spend their precious spare time on.

What's with all the blockquotes? Made it a bit difficult to read => Sentence "Blockquote" Sentence "Blockquote".

Agreed, make it a bulleted list instead.

  1. People

  2. Like

  3. Lists

>Btw landing pages and mockups don’t create a lot of trust...

Why do you say that?

Demos build more trust. Working products even more. Revenue builds more trust yet. Customers with recognizable names in your target market helps even more. A long track record of revenue showing the health of the company helps more, too-- nobody wants to be a customer of a company that's likely to disappear. It's like the opposite of the saying "nobody got fired for choosing IBM."

What's with the random words and phrases italicized? It didn't even look like it was for emphasis.

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