riklomas

Part of the job of being freelance is expectation management - most clients want everything on a plate but you have to make them prioritize if they're on a budget... what is necessary and what is a nice to have.

I'm the writer of the article, I'll answer any questions you may have on here!

Always have a back-up plan so I'd clear out your debts first.

Yeh, of course! I'll give you a rough idea if you let me know your location in the email too :)

This was aimed at the idea validation stage. You shouldn't have built anything at this point as you're too busy talking to customers face-to-face, trying to hone the idea down.

CEO of a LLC is legal if you're in sole control of the company but yeh, owner/founder is fine too. I used to call myself Founder when the company was just me.

Fair play, my bad. I was a bit bemused that tschellenbach just dissed my startup's name in a dickish way without being critical. Apologises.

Yes I agree with this. I think if you're going to offer equity too, offer equity that vests over a longer period of time (3-4 years) might help keep them connected and give them a reason to stay with the business too. Make them work for ownership of the business.

We'll pivot into that if everything fails and my mother doesn't complain.

Haha, eastwards rather than westwards.

Yes, I'd agree with this. The agency comment was more aimed at the medium- to large-sized agencies rather than small, young ones (I kinda see them more as freelancers when it's an agency of 2-7).

Also it's a big variance of caring, some big agencies do care a lot but they're rare and hard to find. Some staff turn up late and are hungover every other morning. It's a wide range but I was trying to average it out!

A lot of brand names have vague or no references to what they do – Apple, Nike, Google, Heroku – we had a few other initial names that were like "Craft" and "Tailor" but didn't really work for us. We tried the more obvious ones and our customers didn't like them.

I'm still happy with the name two years later though and still love our branding. With the name we could use it in a few ways to make it more about learning... "learn the SuperHi way", "SuperHi school", etc.

We're also a bootstrapped company, so zero investment available for spending $$$ on a domain name. In the end, we went with what felt right for us and what our customers liked.

The name origin comes from information superhi...ghway. I was watching this Youtube video at the time and thought it was cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8cnP-RtRHU

In another comment in the thread, I was talking about the brand name testing we did with customers and also with the awesome team at Koto (http://studiokoto.co/)

If you wanna send me your CV (rik@superhi.com), I can give you a rough idea of what salary you should be expecting.

"Roundup of startup advice based on one person's journey" wasn't a catchy enough title.

I should have linked to http://autopsy.io/ - a good place to read about why startups failed from the founders.

Thank you! Yeh, we've been consistently asking customers what works for them over the two or so years we've been running. We found that a lot of people get stuck very quickly with the free online courses that are out there, and they wanted to create sites from scratch rather than learning about HTML, CSS and Javascript – it's a very slight difference, practical vs theory.

We've found that the 1:1 help informs the course material too - if we get the same request topics in the 1:1 help, it's obvious we're missing something from the course material, so we add it in.

Yep, totally agree. Didn't want to get too in-depth with that, otherwise the article would have been a lot, lot longer.

Thank you :)

Sometimes you just gotta give it a go. I'm not saying quit your job and do it full time, but if someone is going to steal your idea, then they're going to steal your idea tomorrow or in a years time.

Everything is a risk, but you don't want to get to 90 and think "damn it, I should have done that business".

The worst thing that might happen is you might run out of cash, give it up and get another job. Or someone will rip you off (be it a biz partner, investor or rival) and you give it up and get another job. It's stressful and not fun, but you're not going to die if your startup fails.

If I was to set you homework, it'd be to talk to 10 founders on your idea. See if they think it'd be useful. Talk to founders in SV and other cities (and other countries).

Do the research before building anything, otherwise you could be wasting your energy on something people don't want.

Depends! CEO is fine, business development is good too.

Looking at your profile, as a technical person you'll be a lot more in-demand than someone non-technical. Go to meetups and talk about your ideas online, people will naturally come out of the woodwork the more you talk about your high-in-the-sky plans.

Yep, totally agree. A lot of founders don't do this as they're too attached to the idea or too worried about criticism. It's a tough learning process to get over the negative feedback.

Also, don't call yourself an "entrepreneur" - it's a bit like being calling yourself "hilarious" or "handsome" - it's what other people call you, rather than a job title.

This, but make sure they have enough skills to be useful in the long term!

Look for problems. It's hard to sit and think of ideas, even if you do, most of the ideas will change on contact with potential customers.

Look at what you're strong at and what you enjoy. If you're seeing customers struggle with other businesses solutions, then there might be a way to solve that problem in a better way.

Being a good listener helps - get the feedback loop going as quickly as possible. Don't take anything personally if a customer doesn't like what you're doing. They could be right. Iterate on the initial idea. Don't spend too long building the first version of anything as it'll probably look different in a year.

Hey everyone, I wrote this guide, if anyone has any questions about it, I'm happy to answer and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the article!

A friend of mine is currently trying to sort this problem by creating OnSite (http://onsite.io/), it's not live yet but it's one to keep an eye on for the future.

I've been using Headspace to help me mediate every evening for the last month. I never really saw the point of mediation until I tried it out but it's been really useful, especially if you're working on a stressful startup!

http://www.getsomeheadspace.com/

The font, called Johnston, is from the London Underground design style and the colours are those of the lines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_(typeface)