What I Wish Someone Had Told Me (about starting a company) | Hacker News Reader

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me (about starting a company)

blog.bluyah.net

97 pointshariis31 comments

    > You will be forced to choose between work and family - and
    > there’s only one right answer.

This guy rocks for having the courage to say this in light of all the advice out there that says you may have to put your family/personal life on hold to start a business.

As someone with a mildly neglected (but understanding) wife and and an on-hold personal life, I couldn't disagree with your comment more -- but it's also not what the article said. The article said:

[Your] business is rarely so fragile that it can not suffer some minor neglect _now and again_.

Emphasis on now and again. You will have to put your personal and family life on hold, but you'll also need to figure out how to maintain your relationships while you do it.

Starting a company requires a tremendous amount of work, and I've regularly had to choose between what I want (a relaxing dinner out with my wife) and what I need to get done to maximize our chances of scaling to the next stable plateau (a contract, the next product feature, etc).

If you're not ready to put everything on hold and work your ass off, then starting a company is probably not the right choice for you.

It's such a false economy, anyways. If you have a family, and you aren't planning on trading them for your company, then you're never going to be sufficiently productive when they feel neglected.

Indeed, and sometimes even if you know you have to take the time to do things the right way and to have time for your life and not only for your work, other guys will try to prevent you from doing the Right Thing: co-founders, VCs, bosses, ..., make sure to be very clear about this points with this people as you have only 1 life and to work is worth it only if you can enjoy your work. To get stressed by an asshole should not be the way to do great things.

Also in general I tend to see that the clueless people are, the fastest they want to go. I think this is because people without knowledge can only stress other points like time to market, how big my deal is, and so forth.

Never implement a feature for a “potential” customer

That's a gem. It's common to hear the mantra "avoid feature creep," but this is a much clearer way of saying it.

I was at the Seattle Tech Startups meeting that the author mentions, and his dislike of public speaking wasn't apparent at all. Kudos to him.

Man, this is a killer! I wish I had known that. Wish, wish, wish. Over the years I've poured hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet only to find that the customer had other objections (price/our size/whatever) rather than just pure feature objections.

Most people choose the wrong time periods for thinking about work/life balance. The usual discussion is about achieving a balance every day or every week. That just dilutes and compromises both your work and the remainder of your life. A startup is a chance to balance out your work and life over many decades. If you can work, say, five times as effectively as other people (which is hard), and if you can get paid for that, you have the possibility to compress your working life into 9 years instead of 45 years--that will give you an extra 36 years with no work commitments at all, free to travel and choose your own interests. Balance in this form can make up for a lot of all-nighters during the startup.

The key words in your comment are "chance" and "possibility". If it really was just a simple matter of when you're putting in the time, plenty more people would do the 9 years of intense work for 36 years of freedom later on. Thing is, for lots of people a year or two of very intense work on a startup yields nothing but the learning experience of running a company.

You're assuming that the 9 years of work are somehow equal to the 36 years of enjoyment.

Nobody with a child would ever say this. You won't have 36 years of pleasure if you are "absent" for the first 9.

The trick is to not have the damn kid until after you're done with your working years. If it's too late for that then you do have problems.

You're assuming here that enjoyment in life is some mathematic, static, function of number of years worked and number of years of free time. There are a lot of issues with that assumption.

First, there are non-linearities when you mix work and play. I personally know that if I wanted to do a full day of work and have two days allocated, I'd rather split them evenly between the two. That way each day I feel accomplished while still having fun and not being stressed.

Second, the above assumes that you're working just for the heck of resources, and work is inherently negative and to be avoided. If you love your work and it's innately important to you, you're not looking to get out as soon as possible. Thus, being able to work "just 9 years" isn't a real advantage.

Finally, this last argument is a personal preference, but I believe in a lifestyle philosophy that doesn't depend on delaying gratification for decades. We already did it once for 12 years for school, and if you extend by another 10-12 years, the better half of your life will be gone before you see any payoff. Life isn't saving for tomorrow, but rather what you experience today.

"If you can work, say, five times as effectively as other people (which is hard),"

It is hard because, it is hard to find something that will make you work at very high levels of efficiency for extended periods of time.

Can I give you something to add to your list?

6. Every publicly visible action you take intersects with marketing.

There's no easily visible link on your blog that directs to your actual product. Being a "technically savvy" user, I changed blog.bluyah.net to www.bluyah.net, and got a "Welcome to Rails" page.

After digging around your blog, I realised that I'm actually supposed to go to bluyah.COM. Please don't make it so hard for someone who stumbles onto your blog to learn about your product.

And while I was trying to figure out where to get information about your product, the subtitle of your blog, "Report Blogging for the Rest of Us", really confused me. What does that even mean?

Hope that helps, and thanks for the article.

As someone said, no knowledge is often better than some knowledge. If you weren't so savvy, you'd simply check the "About Us" page and then follow the link to their site.

This is the best link I've ever seen on Hacker News.

It's honest, it's filled with good advice, it has warnings that people should be at least aware of (e.g., "mentors" who provide an hour of advice and expect an equity stake in return), and it's very, very well written and is a pleasure to read. I knew the author had some serious writing experience when I read the post, and sure enough, he has background as the founder of an online literary publication.

Thanks hariis, and thanks Paul.

I really like the first one : No one will ever be as excited about your [product, service, business] as you are. That should really be the first thing to say to a new entrepreneur : "noone cares so you better be prepared to fight".

Maybe after I start a business I'll understand, but this seems kind of backwards.

"In reality, it’s been more like being a shepherd trying to herd a flock of ambivalent geese through an obstacle course."

Maybe that should be a cue to make your product or service more valuable and exciting, with fewer obstacles. If your customers don't love you yet, you need to do more for them.

yep, find passionate users, if not, redesign your product/service and try again.

Even if you find some passionate users, they will be a tiny minority against the sea of ambivalent geese. Getting the passionate ones on your side is a good move, but if you have to choose between the passionate ones and getting more of the flock through the pay gate, the latter is frequently a good choice. It depends, of course; you can't ignore your passionate ones either or they will passionately turn against you, but some balance is called for. And in fact the article warns you, though not in these exact terms, against letting that one passionate customer turn you into their personal consulting service while the rest of your customers get left in the lurch. It's not necessarily wrong, but it is dangerous.

unless it makes them happier/sexier/kick ass etc.

then they just won't believe you.

"No one will ever be as excited about your [product, service, business] as you are."

This is so true. It is sometimes very hard for you to transfer the excitement of your idea or product onto others. That's why it's important to find co-founders that 'share' your vision, or you might risk loosing interest in own project yourself.

I like #1 as well. But the hard part about that is the uncertainty.

Am I a visionary or just delirious? :)

All good advice. This alone doesn't warrant praise though, since good advice often finds it's way to the homepage.

No, what makes this worth reading are three things, a very rare combination: the advice is succinct, honest, and non-obvious.

If you have a new product though, it can be tough if there isn't a market yet. Its tough coming up with something truly new, but that's when I've been most excited. After that, listening is very important. Everything we have done with our new iterations has been customer driven.

I still envy Apple, even though this is mostly good advice. They are very feature forward, but their nitch asks for it, so maybe that can be seen as the "customer asking for it".

Ever since the beginning, Apple has had to ram their features down the throats of society.

Today, they have developed sophisticated ways to do this like their slick marketing videos where soft-spoken people walk you through the scary world of new features.

"But at the end of the day, understand that you will always pay more (in many ways) than what you had hoped or planned to pay."

This could have been a point in itself.

you can be an entrepreneur and have a social life if you find an understanding girlfriend and not some paris hilton wannabe. I tend to find asian women more understanding about work life.

that depends on what kind of 'asian' they are.

I had a Taiwanese friend joking about this last week: He said a americanized asian girl will complain why you are not spending enough time and money with her. A fob-i chinese girl, even is she in maternity giving child birth will tell you: Oh... Don't woorry about the baby, just go to work and make sure you make the money/get promotion.... etc.

Sorry, don't downvote this, I know it is a crass overgeneralization but this is just a view of my chinese/taiwanese friend.

It seems that cultural upbringing has a huge role on how women see what the role of the man should be. And in some cultures, women demand less attention, which might make them a better fit for busy type of person.

I downvoted it. It is a crass overgeneralization, clearly based on stereotypes that have been reinforced by the narrow opinions of a couple of your friends.

I lived in Asia for more than six years. Speak Mandarin. Married locally. The idea that Asian women tend to "demand less attention," or what you refer to a "Fresh Off the Boat" Chinese girl giving birth will urge her mate to "don't wory about the baby" and "make sure you get the money" is absolute, utter B.S.

It has to do with where one is at in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

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