dshipper

Dan here. Just want to back up what Quinten's saying. He went about it the right way and cleared the whole article with me before publishing it.

Always good to hear from a Quaker! I'd love to chat some time :) my email is dshipper@gmail.com

Thanks for commenting! As mentioned elsewhere on this thread I'm not really trying to say that you need a CS degree to be a good programmer. But I think concentrating on programming vs concentrating on entrepreneurship leads to different results. And so I was thinking about the consequences of that concentration and what that could look like in a few years.

I definitely wasn't saying that this is definitely what's going to happen. In fact I really don't think I'm going to be applying for jobs in 4 years. But I thought it was an interesting scenario to write about and get people's thoughts on.

I'm by no means suggesting that a CS degree is the only way to get good at this stuff. In fact, I think that most of the best programmers I know didn't graduate. The difference is concentrating on being an entrepreneur vs concentrating on being a coder.

This part is reposted from another comment because I think it's important to your point:

As far as the meaning of the article, I wasn't trying to prove a point as much as elucidate something I was thinking about yesterday: the skills you pick up through entrepreneurship.

For the past 4-5 years of my life (starting in high school and continuing through college) I've been concentrating a lot of my time learning how to be a better entrepreneur. That's to the detriment of almost everything else in my life. And it's worth it to me because I love it. Even better still, it seems like a pretty safe bet because worse comes to worse and I completely fail over the next few years I'll still be able to get a job as a coder somewhere.

But the thing about being an entrepreneur is that it encourages you to get marginally good at a wide range of skills instead of REALLY good at one area. And so something I was thinking about is the potential consequences of this decision on my life. This is what I came up with.

Thanks for your feedback. As far as the meaning of the article, I wasn't trying to prove a point as much as elucidate something I was thinking about yesterday: the skills you pick up through entrepreneurship.

For the past 4-5 years of my life (starting in high school and continuing through college) I've been concentrating a lot of my time learning how to be a better entrepreneur. That's to the detriment of almost everything else in my life. And it's worth it to me because I love it. Even better still, it seems like a pretty safe bet because worse comes to worse and I completely fail over the next few years I'll still be able to get a job as a coder somewhere.

But the thing about being an entrepreneur is that it encourages you to get marginally good at a wide range of skills instead of REALLY good at one area. And so something I was thinking about is the potential consequences of this decision on my life. This is what I came up with.

I really agree with this.

I agree completely but I think there are two things that make software slightly unique from any piece of art:

1. We have a cultural context that tells us how hard it is to produce something like a song, or a painting. There's a reverence for it. And so people tend to back off of their estimations for the amount of time required to produce it.

2. Software isn't physical. You can hold a big book in your hand say CRAP! that must have taken a long time to do. But you're just looking at the result of a program, if it's done well, it's a tiny streamlined user interface. The result of one button click could have taken thousands of programming hours and thousands of lines of code but you would never know it. Software obfuscates complexity from the user in a way that someone looking at a huge huge painting or a big book doesn't run in to as much.

So if we're talking about the efficiency of natural heuristics in estimating things, I think software is still slightly more difficult to estimate than art. But I agree with your overall point.

Really interesting point here. Although I'd like to point out that I don't think it's necessarily being technical vs non-technical that makes it hard to estimate. There are probably non-technical people out there who have managed a lot of software projects and have developed solid intuition for how long projects will take.

The real divider is experienced vs. inexperienced. But that's just a guess - I've never been managed by someone non-technical.

Hard work and willingness to put himself out there.

Agree completely - the length of time has nothing to do with the quality of your work. I have a friend who started coding a year ago and is in YC right now as the main technical founder. I'd say I've learned more about entrepreneurship and coding in the past year than I did over the past 4-5 combined.

Thanks Jason! Great point - loving what you do doesn't mean that you love every part of it, or every second of it - saying that is usually just meaningless hyperbole. But if you truly love something you put up with the stuff that you don't like as much because doing so is the cost of producing something great, being with someone great, or becoming part of something bigger than yourself.

I agree that another way to look at it is "don't hate what you do" although I feel like a post about that would be aimed at a different group of people.

When I wrote this it was more directed at people who feel a little bit lost, and are wondering why they haven't found that one "thing" that they're passionate about. It's about telling them that they don't have to search so hard for it because it's probably right in front of them right now.

I think people that hate what they do are in a slightly different (though similar boat). Sometimes hating what you do can actually crystallize exactly what it is you love (because you can't do it as much anymore) and so I feel like the problem that those people face is more making the leap to spend time doing what you love even if it means taking more risk.

Thanks for sharing - I really agree with your point.

Beautiful. Thanks for sharing that :)

Yup I'm 20 and started when I was 10. It's been a good 10 years :)

I wish I could help you but I've only ever used them for Rails. I have used GAE for Python and had a pretty good experience. I think that's also free at the beginning.

True. Pretty expensive tutorial at $1,000 though ;)

Thanks for your comment! I did definitely set up Google Analytics. But I didn't have goals or Web Master Tools or funnels or anything like that set up. So I had a few metrics but nothing really in-depth.

Yea I definitely could have done the EC2 experiment much more cheaply. But Heroku is free if you're small scale like DomainPolish :) Thanks again for commenting!

In short: I drove customers poorly and infrequently.

The only marketing I did was through my blog/Twitter. That spawned a fair amount of word of mouth and some other blog posts by people who had used the service. Beyond that I think it was just people talking to eachother because the product really does provide value if you're building a website.

I also have a hunch that the custom thank you videos played a part too but I can't prove it.

Not really. Yea it's actually just stupid looking back at it. But I hadn't done any pricing before and I wanted to experiment. So now I know at least I won't make a boneheaded mistake like that again :)

I was running small instances - probably should have been micro. And there were definitely ways to decrease costs and stay on EC2. Heroku is free though so for me (at my scale) it seems like the best option for now.

Thanks! I really hope so - that's the beauty of doing all this stuff while in school.

I really like the idea as well! From what I know the site didn't go anywhere because the minimum advertising commitment for dating websites is in the thousands. So I think he dropped the idea.

But definitely it could work for someone with some marketing skills and/or cash to burn. It's something that can be built in a weekend as well. Feel free to reach out to me and I can try to help point you in the right direction if you're interested in pursuing it.

Definitely - although it's also worthwhile to take into account the fact that you own what you produce when you work for yourself. So while after working for someone else for 6 months I would only have cash to show for it, after working for myself (very part time) for 6 months I had the option to turn what I produced into immediate cash, or do anything else with it that I wanted.

But I definitely agree that it's something to consider.

Agree if you have enough marketing power (or good press hookups) it's much easier to make something like that work.

And definitely on the same page in terms of code. I like it to be mine!

Dude great to hear from you! I'd really love to talk some time if you're interested. Feedback Army is awesome and I think we might have some cool stuff to share. Couldn't find any contact info in your profile but my email is dshipper [at] gmail.

Really glad you found it informative!

I think you could definitely white-label the DomainPolish idea and sell it to people hoping to build a Review X service. The problem is that if you just try to build a site yourself that lets you review anything it's very difficult to target your customers.

People search for "get feedback on my website" not "site to review anything". Picking a specific vertical makes marketing much easier. But it's a cool idea! I can put you in touch with the current owner of the DomainPolish source - he'd probably license it to you :)

Thanks Jason I'm glad you enjoyed following the story. It's definitely not a huge exit but I'm happy to have turned a profit and there's more where that came from :)

Thanks! That's one part of the experience that I'm definitely upset at myself for. But I'd rather get the mistakes out of the way while the stakes are low right?

Thanks it really was - although I regret not spending as much time on it as I could have.

I basically ended up doing no marketing for DomainPolish whatsoever besides a few posts on my blog which were popular on HN. A few other people tried out the service and wrote popular blog posts as well. I think doing the thank you videos in the beginning was key because it gave people a huge incentive to tell their friends about the site.

I wish I had more to say on marketing but that's something that I'm working on a lot now for my new startup. Hopefully in 6 months I'll have some more lessons to share :)

So I ended up licensing the codebase to someone else so he could build a different Mechanical Turk app. I kept all the IP but he got the codebase to use. Thanks for asking I'll try and make that more clear in the post!