142 karma · joined February 10, 2010
There was a time when there were Feudal Lords and now there aren't.
Similarly, we're moving away from a time of microserfs to hackers and coders who are free.
Love the downvotes - Guess people would rather take advice on how to be mediocre and miserable and do things you don't want to do than take control of their own destiny and find a company they love being at or start one themselves.
Really good developers are priceless.
Anyone who is smart knows this. You just have to look at how much companies are willing to pay developers in signing bonuses and retention bonuses.
As a developer you should be aware of this.
Also, life is short.
Instead of choosing a company or line of work where you have to focus on things you don't want to focus on or change yourself -
pick an area you love and where people love you as you are.
Only idiot pointy haired managers would pick a clean-cut mediocre programmer over a superstar coder who doesn't shave.
And in my experience the superstars are nearly always not concerned with GTL (gym, tanning, and laundry).
Either start your own company or find a company where you can be yourself and ship code and not have to worry about 33 lessons.
In this day and age we shouldn't have to worry about things like hairstyles and asking what turns out to be a stupid question.
If you're a superstar at shipping great software then nothing else matters - at least that's my experience in two billion dollar software companies.
Perhaps that's part of why they got to such a big scale.
Starting Point: Where people start their search (to buy something or find something).
Decision Engine: Where people make a decision.
Buying Point: Where people actually buy.
What are all the reviews at Amazon for?
Amazon is both a decision engine and a buying engine. They are trying to wean off starting engines like Google and that is why they first tried A9 and now are trying devices in customers' hands.
If you step out of your attempt to defend the poster of the first article you'll realize that her article (not her, just the article) is very short-sighted.
The Internet is destroying entire industries - yet she thinks fashion internet startups should instead compete in the real world.
That makes no sense. We should all play to our strenghts. While she's trying to do backend stuff and help existing Fashion companies, some 'only 3 to 8%' earning Internet startup is going to disrupt the entire industry.
A hacker, in my opinion, is not meant to figure out how to solve the problems the existing industry power players created or want solved.
A hacker, again in my opinion, should solve the most elegant things and solve things for actual people.
Amazon started off selling books. What do you think their margin for each was?
Then they took over a large part of the market. Then they moved into selling other things like electronics.
Then they made the Kindle and controlled the device people read on and the starting point and the buying point.
Now they are getting into publishing and self-publishing.
They are taking over everything starting with taking over the online selling point for books.
That's what a fashion startup earning only 10% can do.
Use the 10% (which is mostly profit) to power an engine that slows takes over all of fashion. Move into parallel areas like shoes and accessories. Then starts making their own stuff.
I appreciate your trying to defend the poster of the original short-sighted article.
However, if you look at building a real business that has the power and control to completely take over an entire industry then starting online is much better than starting in the backend.
If you want to provide services to publishers who publish books (which is what back end would be for books) - well and good.
But there's nothing transformative about it.
The real transformation is to replace Publishers.
that's why the poster of the original article is so wrong. She thinks she's thinking big by talking about tackling the back end instead of doing online sites.
However, the real prize is to replace the entire pipeline and then, if the company so chooses, to replace labels and the entire fashion industry.
She did a fashion startup for a few years and she never figured out that nearly every luxury company gives 10% to 15% commissions?
If she really thinks it's 3 to 8% then she's blissfuly ignorant.
She doesn't get the fundamental concept of capturing the starting point. If a site becomes the destination for fashion i.e. where people go to search for the next thing they buy.
Then that site can very easily expand into selling that very thing.
At some point we say - Instead of getting 15% from this luxury watch maker, we ask for 25%. Then we say - Let's make stuff ourselves and see if we can get more than 25%.
What Google is doing and what Facebook is trying to do is very similar. Expand and take over all the profits. But first you need to be the starting point or decision point for something (search, social interactions, dating, buying clothes).
c) If you become the decision engine (something Google and Bing are trying to do with their Flight Search and other initiatives in various verticals), then you can easily take over the entire business.
If people are coming to you and you help them decide what to buy - then you can start selling them that stuff. *
If you become the decision engine for Fashion you can decide everything else.
I think perhaps it's not very clear until you consider what WalMart has done and what Amazon is doing.
And what Google is trying to do.
You start off as the starting point and then you start taking over more and more until you start producing the products you were originally only linking to.
1) Why should anyone care about solving the problems that the writer of this article wants to see solved?
2) She fixates on the 3-8% that affiliate sites make without considering a few things:
a) Sites make that regardless of where the user actually buys. So if someone comes to your site and decides to buy a jacket you make money whether they buy it from Retailer A or Retailer B.
b) It's usually 10% for fashion sites and once you are driving larger volume you can cut deals for 15%.
c) If you become the decision engine (something Google and Bing are trying to do with their Flight Search and other initiatives in various verticals), then you can easily take over the entire business.
If people are coming to you and you help them decide what to buy - then you can start selling them that stuff.
3) The costs and barrier to entry is much lower if you are trying to fix the discoverability problem.
4) The real problem, and the most important thing, is the role of fashion. What fashion really does. That can be tackled completely in the online world through a website.
5) Fashion is a market that is going to make a lot of startups a lot of money.
Things that signal status (such as special electronic brands and designer bags and Grey Goose vodka) are never going to go out of style.
Instead of listening to this writer's advice, any company going into fashion should look at how backward thinking most people in the industry are, how little they understand technology, and how they are unwilling to admit the core purpose of fashion.
The easiest entry is discoverability and influence and that's also the most powerful element of the fashion ecosystem.
If you become the discovery engine and the decision engine then it's game over for everyone else.
All those VCs funding fashion startups are not idiots.
It still isn't the kind of thing I personally am hoping to get at Hacker News.
It seems to me that more and more people are interested in shortcuts to success and praying to the Tech Religions than actually doing something themselves or sharing stuff that is really worthwhile.
This seems more like something SEO marketers or people with nothing to do would be interested in.
Q1 Does knowing the amount of traffic a Google Doodle gets in any way help someone become a better hacker?
Q2 Does this topic in any way lead to getting better at anything?
Or has Hacker News turned into some tech version of LOLCatz?
Most people, instead of being the star of their own lives, want to follow a cult or religion or leader.
That's why people get such strong illogical feelings about a brand.
My suggestion to you would be to consider whether you can put in more effort into your next startup.
We each have our own beliefs on what works and then there's reality. So there's probably a chance that there is something that works very well but both of us would have to look at things from a different perspective.
For me I tend to believe that you can't really succeed unless you're 100% in it. That having a family pretty much rules out having a successful start-up. That's obviously not true as there are exceptions. Perhaps lots of them.
I think in the end it comes down to not giving up. However, again, that's just a belief and who knows what the reality is.
Thanks for offering to connect me to your friend. Not interested at the moment as I'm quite overwhelmed and already places like Hacker News are putting too much of the possibility of failure into my head.
My attitude is that failure isn't really possible and it's working amazingly well so perhaps I should only read posts that are very positive like the Yoghurt business one.
I'd rather learn from the experience of someone who became an absolute master. Because the lessons of absolute mastery apply across fields.
Who cares about the top 10%? The top 10% isn't worth wasting your time on. Especially if it means you spend 6 months each on 20 different areas and become top 10% in 20 areas.
Much better to find 1 or 2 areas you absolutely love and become top 1%.
Top 1% - Going to the Olympics. Top 10% - Impress your friends.
1) Firstly, that you were in business to add value to customers and that was the primary motivation. It seems your primary motivation was to learn/experience it. Which is fine - it's just not what I assumed it was.
As Zig Ziglar would put it - To get everything you desire in life you just have to give enough other people what they want from life.
* Who knows what approach works better. For me, the Zig Ziglar approach has worked much better but that's a sample size of 1 person.
2) Secondly, my mistake in assuming your post was meant to help other people. If you could have added a note that it was meant mostly as a catharsis and written for yourself.
Then I wouldn't have assumed that there might be a lot of value for me.
Right now the value is in seeing a few things but the amount of effort is just not enough to actually know whether any of your mistakes other than not putting in enough work matter.
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See, the key thing is your line on work being from 0 to 10 hours per week with some weeks being over 10 weeks.
How can you know your ideas and business were right or wrong with that amount of time?
For entirely selfish reasons (to help myself) I wanted to learn from your experience. However, if your experience is based on working an average of 10 hours a week, then it doesn't really say anything about what the market opportunity really is/was.
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On a related note there seems to be a fascination on hacker news lately on apps done in 5 days and 'passive income' and how to succeed without working hard.
Are there any people there who are succeeding after working really hard? Who are spending 5 months on their app and not 5 days?
My argument would be that without at least 2 of these 3 the OP will keep running into problems and keep blaming extrinsic meaningless things.
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Credit to the person (aaron?) for writing this. However, the lack of measured numbers is terrifying. And the disconnect with the customer perspective is just hard to fathom.
1) How much time did you spend on this? Over what period of time?
2) How much traffic did you get? How many people bought coupons? How many people went to other sites from your sites?
3) What amount of money did you spend? On what areas? What amount of money did you make? From what sources? *
You say that you didn't listen to your customers. My point would be that you didn't realize that you were making something FOR THEM and not for you.
You should consider thinking from your customers' perspective.
They really don't care about some of the things that you think are successes i.e. using hosted services and learning Ruby and the site being BEAUTIFUL because you think a site being beautiful is important to you personally.
Unless Indianapolis is 99% users of HackerNews.
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You say that you were shocked that small business owners don't track things - yet you write this post without giving any figures. Which makes a great post meaningless because we don't know what 'You had no skin in the game' means.
Did you spend 40 hours a week after doing your day job? Did you do that for 3 full years? Did you put in $100K of your own savings?
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Finally, you went into a space where you had very few competitive advantages - not the first mover, not the best product, not the most money, not the most resources, no brand recognition.
If you had tried a niche within coupons or a new area you might well have seen much better results.
Also, you don't mention anywhere how much total time and effort you spent on this which makes it difficult to know whether your lessons are worthwhile or not.
If you spent 10 hours a week for 6 months - then obviously all your 'learning' is probably useless.
If you spent 40 hours a week for 2 years - then it's very valuable stuff.
which one is it?
The last few wars were attempts to strengthen the US - quite frankly Oil really is more valuable for the US than winning the title of prom king.
Regardless of your or my personal opinion on what the war is doing there can be little doubt that Iraqi and Afghanistani Oil is going to play a huge part in the US keeping its position in the world.
The thing that actually unsettled things is that the Wall Street people got out of control and made too many inroads into the Government and started stealing from the Average American.
His theory still holds true. Unless you can conclusively argue that 'Peace' isn't the MAIN reason for the downfall of non-warring civilizations and countries - don't see where your argument leads.
In a way you're supporting him.
Finally, he's pointing out something that might be The Truth. If it's the truth then it says a lot of positive things about his capacity for logical thinking and his ability to be HONEST with himself and others.
The standard quote about all the peace in Switzerland leading to nothing other than the Cuckoo Clock and all the strife in Italy leading to the Renaissance comes to mind.
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As human beings we want to give 'meaning' to our lives and underplay the role genetics and survival of the fittest play.
We also want to pretend that we don't have a baser nature and that we can 100% 'civilize' ourselves.
So we often make the wrong assumption that the perfect natural state is perfect harmony where everyone taps into some global 'peace wave frequency'.
Is it possible? Who knows.
It's just interesting that it's never happened. Ever. There has never been a point of time when the entire world was at peace. There are always wars because human nature never changes - no amount of 'civilizing' can change that, nor can everyone pretending that we are flawless perfect peace-loving creatures.
It's your flawed assumption that everyone else is wrong and you're right.
Groupon may or may not be a viable business.
However, your assumption is guiding you and you haven't provided enough data or facts. Your opinion doesn't really matter or your annoyance that everyone is picking on poor Groupon.
There are a lot of red flags and you are avoiding mentioning them and not mentioning very much supporting data for your assumption.
We aren't here to listen to wild conjecture.
Time Required and Difficulty (or Ease) of developing on one platform vs another ...
... without factoring in the amount of money you can make (or if you don't want to make money, the amount of people you can reach).
It's also very, very strange to not talk about the huge number of devices that run on Android and the complexity of supporting some/a few/most of them.
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What's the point of - It took exactly just as much effort and time and pain to make a great app on Android as on iPhone
without elaborating on
- how much profit there was - how many people it reached - various other factors like how much of the Android time was spent on supporting various devices - what the level of quality on each platform was.
Finally, don't mean to be a dick about this but -
Who cares if someone makes an app in 4-5 days worth of work and releases it.
Where are the people who have made amazingly good Android Apps?
What's their story?
Do we really want to focus on how easy it is to make an app that takes just 5 days and is nothing out of the ordinary?
Why can't people just say - Here's a situation and a company that I think is the Do'est No'est Evil'est company of all time is being a sore loser.
Google bid on the patents and it lost. It's a bit ridiculous to now claim some sort of divine right to be above patent law.
Also, FYI, google has a patent on their doodles. It's the height of hypocrisy to claim that patents for telecom technology aren't fair and at the same time patent a set of doodles.
We will soon be in a leisure economy and 'jobs' will be something completely different. It'll be about helping people waste time/kill time rather than producing something of value.
As we advance, we are moving to a scenario where there just isn't that much work to do. Leisure time is increasing more and more. More and more 'work' is becoming automated or being done by robots or algorithms. People just aren't needed in lots of places.
If wealth was distributed equitably or even a little inequitably, then it would mean that most people could just take time off and spend their money on entertainment. You could argue this is already a big trend with movies, video games, devices that aren't necessary, etc. taking up more and more time.
Since wealth is very inequitably distributed - it leads to lots of people being left in a leisure economy with very little money. These people 'need' jobs even though the economy itself doesn't have 'jobs'.
The net is that we have technology doing this ->
A small percentage are taking up most of the money and lots of people need jobs for money even though the economy doesn't really have jobs left for them. They will be forced to adapt to become entertainers/time waste-helpers rather than productive workers.
instead of this ->
People need to work less and wealth is reasonably distributed and people can do what they want without worrying about money.
From, a 'being a good person' perspective - there are lots of problems here. Isn't there someone at this company that can throw away legal concerns and just go talk to her and ask her what in her mind would fix the problem. It seems the company still can't get out of 'its own needs and wants' and understand that there's a human being affected by this who had her home trashed.
Perhaps the thing the lady wants most is just someone who CARES!
Not about the company's reputation or legal concerns but CARES about her as a person.
Even then, you could argue it's better to build multiple streams of income and not depend on one product.
An offer of Buy 1 product and get the other free - that's fine. But giving away inbox cleaner doesn't make sense unless you get a really high conversion rate for Tweeting Machine.
You have also asked a completely different question in your blog post. To sell more tweeing machine subscriptions - perhaps a longer trial (1 or 2 months instead of 10 days) or a lite version would make sense.
Why do people care so much about having lots of women work in the software industry?
Seriously, there seems to be this desire to get women into programming. If women really were into programming they would get into it despite the 'sexist creeps'. It might surprise all the people here but a lot of industries (like real estate and sales) have a LOT more sexist creeps than programmers.
There are lots of areas where people are sexist and racist and jerks - it doesn't stop the people who want to get into those areas from getting into them.
Perhaps women just don't want to get into computer science. And no amount of bending over backwards and trying to appeal to female programmers will get us to a situation of 50% female developers.
The first question people going on and on about 'ratios in the software industry' need to answer is -
Are there really that many women interested in becoming a software developer? Is their interest a lukewarm type of interest where the minute they see one sexist programmer jerk they run off?
We are talking about the same women who fought tooth and nail for things like the right to vote and who do lots of really tough things like raise a family (often alone). Are we to believe that a few sexist programmers scare off these same women?
Final Question: Is the presence of some percentage of sexist jerk programmers the real reason there are far fewer women in programming? Is that really what differentiates programming from fields with more social interaction (like sales) or fields with more of a human aspect (like health care and medicine)?
You have the wrong approach. You can't predict success and you can't predict what markets will work and you can't prredict what the perfect product for a market is. You have to release products and track ALL possible metrics and tweak consistently.
Basically, even the really big companies have hits and misses. And more misses than hits.
So, firstly, you should be releasing 5 or 10 high quality web apps and seeing which stick and focusing on the ones that do.
That's the first step - finding a market demand.
Second is hitting the value for money/quality/perfect market fit.
That's the second step - after you have found market demand, making the most of it.
An inbox cleaner for $20 is just too expensive. Too much friction - especially for a new product from an unknown developer. You have to minimize regret for users - or rather, potential regret.
Instead of thinking in terms of what you want to make think in terms of what people want to get in terms of value for money. 5 people is too small of a data point. So you have to lower the price anyways - to get enough customers to find out whether there is market demand or not and what things people want and what they are willing to pay for.
So play around with the price a bit. Plus release 4-5 other products and see if you find a market with huge demand - one where even lower value for money sells well.
Big Failures = some people who let failure become bigger than them and destroy them + some people who learn from it and succeed big down the line.
When you write:
tl;dr; Your desire to quit is also greatest right before you go totally bankrupt and wreck your life.
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You're exaggerating the consequences.
There's the type of failure where you take on bank loans and have to go bankrupt and there's the type of failure where you run out of your own money and have to start from scratch - perhaps with a new venture, or perhaps take up a job and then come back to entrepreneurship after a while.
The former is what you're assuming. The latter is reality - provided you don't go overboard in where you get money.
Just out of curisoity - what would the Color guys qualify as. It looks like they might fail. Would that be 'wrecking their lives'?
Here's the interesting part:
1) If you always give up right when you feel things are bleakest -> You'll never go bankrupt or to be more precise never experience total failure.
2) At the same time - you'll never experience the best possible success you could have. Because if everything is easy and guaranteed that probably means you never did the maximum you could and never pushed yourself.
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Again, the first point he says - Stay outside of your comfort zone.
Is it a bit of a cliche? Yes.
However, lots of people who you would probably quantify as 'not evil like Bob Parsons' succeeded precisely for this reason. They pushed out of their comfort zone.
I think entreprenuership pretty much means getting out of your comfort zone, getting other people out of their comfort zone and changing things - for the better, or, if you are not inclined that way, for money.
Whenever you get someone's good attitudes you also get a little (or a lot if you aren't careful) of the not-so-good attitudes.
Great to know you are willing to take the risk to learn something new.