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All startups work with constraints. For some startups design & UX are less important than for others.

Products CAN succeed with crap UX (though it can severely penalize the outcome).

Products CAN NOT succeed without _product_.

So if an entrepreneur has to pick between a rails developer and a front end dev, in some cases he has to pick the backend guy.

Rock, Entrepreneur, Hard Place

I signed up, and I hope this one becomes real, but if it doesn't I am crossing my fingers that someone will do the legwork to make it actually happen.

when you're going from "black and white wireframe" to "something userfacing" for example, you probably don't have to care; but with an established userbase that is USED to the product, you should care more.

if your product is transactional and there aren't good alternatives (people come to site X to send money to another person and this is the only one with an API) you might not need to care, vs "people spend time as a diversion on my site and explore photos and status updates of friends", it might be important to care more.

100% agreement that evolving design to the desired spot is more educated -- I think that statement is indisputable, as it is essentially saying "if you can incrementally split test results with lots of different versions, you can learn more".

With a large "total redesign" you just get one fat multivariate test that can have conflicting results and you can't isolate the winning changes.

I was just stating that the time penalty for evolution might be too large for extremely small teams. its not just a design, its design, implentation, and testing the differences -- which takes a lot more time than just implementing the design itself. without testing results, incremental design is only good for "easing the user in" and you lose all the benefits of the "more educated approach" you're referring to (which, in my mind is the valuable part... users are forgiving, you can shock UI from time to time, but information gained can be priceless)

Right now, with a small, strapped team, my primary problem is finding enough hours to do all the tasks necessary.

As a result, while the idea of slowly evolving the design to let customers ease into it sounds good, I'm willing to shock my users into a radically different design in order to save development hours.

My userbase, in particular is the sort that (I believe) won't dramatically change engagement based on most designs (untested, and now that I write that, ludicrous sounding, should test). Additionally, for early stage startups (at least Rocket Lease stage startups), the total user count is very low and the alienation risk carries a small absolute penalty relative to the time sacrifice of incremental evolution.

tldr: article acknowledges that there is a time penalty for an incremental design evolution. this is in contrast to the typical time BENEFIT to iterative programming approaches. i suspect that many early stage startups can't afford the time cost, so interface iteration is an important tool, but not to be used by everyone.

He is absolutely phenomenal, a pleasure to work with, a great communicator, has really helped clarify the UI, and helped bring focus to each of the internal pages.

Ryan writes fantastic javascript and awesome, clean, HTML markup, and convinced me to take the plunge and start using Compass.

He's a cofounder level UI/UX developer, and if you're looking you should be looking here.

Ryan, feel free to post before/afters of the Rocket Lease work you've done if you want to highlight some of the work you created for me.

A+++ would buy again.

"[There's something very sinister about a company that takes society's greatest engineer and science minds away from important tasks for humanity and diverts them to the task of optimizing ads]

A lot of people will say what you say about HFT, but have no qualms about Google and Facebook and Twitter. Why is that?

I know that the startup community at large doesn't largely respect short term trading, particularly HFT. I understand it, though I honestly think its misguided and the outrage is disproportionately large, but thats another story.

The reason why this article TITLE excited me was because I think its totally true, or least close to true. I think awesome HTFs and algo traders have a very similar skillset to top notch startup hackers.

Small prop shops ARE startups. You:

    1. wear a lot of hats
    2. release early, release often
    3. write really fast code, really fast
    4. validate theories against the market (or consumers)
    5. if you're right, keep going, if not, pivot
    6. success is dependent on understanding lots of different sub-specialties
    7. lots of overlapping skills: big data, distributed computing, machine learning

love the idea.

Being in a place other than home removes all sorts of distractions from your regular life and you can focus on (a) work and (b) spending time getting to know your teammates, if that sort of thing is important to you.

Question: do you have rough guesstimate on what this sort of thing will cost per person, after all is said and done?

I'm guessing: 1000 airfare + 200/night/4 people for lodging + 50/person/day for food + 50/person/day for entertainment/booze ==

$12k for a 4 person team to go to spain from Chicago for 10 days? Is that about fair?

I definitely consider them different, though perhaps I didn't highlight that difference sufficiently.

I made a modification and titled the section as such, with a credit to you in the post.

flask is great. but if you want the admin, then you have to build it yourself. i've used django formsets ONCE, ever, but when i needed them I'm glad that django had them instead of me having to build them on flask.

then i've used flask for awesome projects that i knew in advance i didn't need that stuff.

different needs, different tools.

This seems like a misinterpretation of what YCs investment/mentorship philosophy.

I understand that "why django sucks" is a better, more provocative title that will get read more than "why django isn't perfect in every way and i prefer using flask for this", so i don't fault the author for choosing that subtext.

However, the general "tradition" (yes, its a tradition now) of justifying a tech/infrastructure decision with "Ah! language/framework/db made popular by others is a horribly broken mistake! you are doing it wrong!" is 1. getting old, 2. counterproductive for engineers.

They are tools. There are different tasks with different requirements. They have different pros and cons and different learning curves. Some tools are better suited for some tasks. Some tools are even better suited for most tasks. Sometimes it even makes reasonable sense to use a product that isn't the best of the best of the best if you are really certain you don't care about the dimension in which your tool is not the most amazing.

Hammers are bad for cooking eggs. Spatulas are bad for nailing nails. I made eggs this morning. Keep an eye out for my upcoming blog post: "Why hammers suck!!"

Who cares why he chose his path?

Everyone's different. He's happy so that's the right path for him.

I think this is a play at incentivizing residential buyers/sellers to let you refer them to the local Realtor the first referral and taking the referral to let the user buy things with "points"? If so, I love it.

for giggles: existing home sales 5mm/yr * 200k/house. Assuming a full commision of 3% on one side and if you get 25% as a referral:

A typical transaction could be worth:

$200k * 3% * 25% == $1500 (less redemption value in points, so basically a redeemable user point has to be less than .03.25 purchase price)

If you owned one side of every single existing home sale, that is worth: 5mm * 1500 == $7.5B/yr

How do you intend to reach users? I guess with a value of $1500 per conversion, you can afford to spend liberally on adwords to catch users as they are searching, but I suspect the words in that space are competitive and expensive. Even if you get the a 25% referral on the full commission, someone else is able to pay up to 100% of the referral on the commission in user acquisition costs, so you'll never be able to outspend the actual broker in paid search.

Basically you'll have to be creative with how you pay for traffic.

Which isn't to say its not doable... This sort of reminds me of deal aggregators like Yipit -- they get a commission of the transaction from someone like Groupon, so that means groupon can always outspend them, so you ahve to find some other way to get your leads.

What is your plan?

one extension requested -- MOST contractors for $BIG_COMPANY are not in a position where they have had sufficient ownership of a project to be able to attribute specific company bottom line gains to their work.

For example, if you're in the practice of doing conversion optimization work, split testing landing pages, or doing SEO work, you might be able to measure conversion or added traffic and make claims about how that impacts the bottom line, which puts you in a MUCH stronger negotiating position.

Do you have specific advice for contractors who might be part of a team or contributing in less measurable ways (writing internal code, building a new feature)?

Your feedback amounts to "hey it happens. that's how business goes, it may suck, but learn to play the game. and if you're any good, just walk away".

Discourse is the first place to start a meaningful conversation about how to change bad/unpleasant practices. There are good clients and bad clients (I'm a client, and I'm a good one).

Patio11's comment is great because it outlines a way to engage the client in a discussion that has a better probability of leading to a mutually agreeable strategy than "just walk away".

Generally a developer walks away from an existing engagement like the one the OP talked about and partially hopes that the client will find someone worse and realize they've been punished for their behavior, but in practice, $BIG_COMPANY thinks they care about costs, are stupid about how they try to cut costs, don't know how to evaluate quality, and never realize they've been punished, so the developer just has to find new work and $BIG_COMPANY isn't worse off in any impactful way.

"you have options enough anyway" might be true, but encouraging the "f it, walk away" tactic out the gates doesn't help anyone in the long run.

With that I agree. Yes, you should test yourself.

However, most people are not split testing their "follow me" button -- and since most people aren't going to/dont care to, it's absolutely sensible to follow best practices or copy Dustin.

I went to the link expecting to find a how to guide or a link to a how to guide. The page copy seems to indicate that it exists, and says "[the guide] is here..." but I can't seem to find it.

At the time, I didn't really know how to solve code problems, how to effectively use docs, or how to use a debugger -- which they taught me. A lot of times they let me build the wrong thing then show me how I could do it better (doing research, learning how cookies work, and reinventing the wheel with web authentication, for example).

'Twas an odd, makeshift apprenticeship program, but it was perfect for me. At the time I didn't realize how lucky I was (I don't think they did either), but I am very grateful to have stumbled upon the opportunity.

This also explains the "its so hard to hire" sentiment.

@benjaminwootton: reasonable argument that typical early stage employee equity is dwarfed by what engineers can get by founding their own company and that engineers might rationally require larger salaries at startups to compensate for failure risk (sucks to job hunt, even if its not hard to get a job).

on the other side, the founders who are trying to give away 120k and 1% to get a great hire have the responsibility of maximizing their own total EV as well, so if they were to give away 10%, it would have to be clear that the hire would be expected to grow the total founder EV by more than 10%, and in fact, more than that to compensate for the risk of the failure of the engineering hire to do so.

So if the founders are sitting on a validated, funded, post-revenue startup, its not necessarily enough for the engineering hire to help accelerate product. they have to make the total pie bigger, and by enough to compensate for the variance in outcomes for how much bigger they can make that pie.

So if you want 10%, and you're trying to join a startup with 100k/yr in revenue, you can't just help them get to 1mm/yr in revenue 1 year faster. you have to demonstrate that if you forked the universe into two paths, one where the founders gave you 10% and salary, and one where they walked away from you, the present value of the cash flows (or some metric) of they company in the "hired you" scenario is:

    1. > 10% better with 100% certainty
    2. more than > 10% + x% better with something less than 100% certainty to compensate the founders for the variance...

So generally these decisions are probably made with non-economic reasons, like "We like each other" or "I get off on working on bleeding edge technologies" or "The engineer is willing to give up substantial economic EV in return for te ability to feel like part of a team or affect decision making".

TLDR: engineers work for companies when the needs of the engineer and the company converge. the bid and ask between "what an engineer needs/delivers" and "what the startup offers/needs" separate as early stage startups move past "MVP" into being somewhat validated.

    1. Build product
    2. Build Product
    3. Build Product

This interview is about writing prose, but it really spoke to me about the creative process and I read it from the perspective of a startup founder.

It's great how sometimes he gets snippy at silly questions and I love how he describes the separate pleasures of creating and consuming (writing and reading) and how they each have their own merits, and that they're not necessarily meant to be shared.

I don't understand why people post these things though. Are they really looking for validation?

Startups are an acute instance of "too much to do, too little time". Good task prioritization might be the SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT skill that a startup founder needs to develop.

Not all failures are time wasters though -- some of the items in that list seem reasonable enough (techcrunch amazon affiliate links).

DHH said something like "If you're not working on your single best idea, you're doing it wrong". He was talking about startups, but I think that could be applied to your to do list as well.

To be clear, I'm not trying to say this is a good way to run a startup or that anyone should do it.

In particular, I am really bad at doing more than one thing. It is one of my personal weaknesses. Some people, like my previous cofounder Andrew, are great at it. But as a result, I HAVE to be focused to get anything done. This isn't true of everyone, its just something that I finally realized about myself and its changed the way I work. My typical day literally starts with me adding to my to do list, ordering it, then knocking them out in order.

I think the idea of a startup founder with nothing to show for himself but a string of dead websites (me) advising other people on optimal strategic decisions for their startups is a bit silly. I think all those ideas I cut out are great ideas, my brain just isn't big enough to hold more than one.