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Scaramouche posted:I'm curious, how are you guys defining 'startup'? Is it merely a new venture, or does it have to be a radical world-changing angry birds twitter pinterest that attracts enormous IPO dollars? To parrot Steve Blank on this one: "A startup is a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model". I'd say the media tend to focus on the super-quick-rising-VC-fueled-rocket because it makes for a story people will read, but it shouldn't be exclusive to that kind of company (even though many hope to one day found one like that).
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Jan 4, 2013 12:50
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Does anybody here have any experience with the educations space, catering to schools and all that jazz? We're very vaguely considering pivoting towards making mobile software for schools (it looks like iPads are getting big in schools and the funding is as good as it's ever been), but I have absolutely no idea if there's ultimately any money in it. I know that startups in health have an incredibly hard time, with regulations and overall entrenchment of the different players, and I'm suspecting that schools might be somewhat close to that situation. Anything helps!
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Jan 11, 2013 10:24
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Any personal experience with closing down a startup after having run it full time for a year or longer? I'm curious if you had any words of wisdom.
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Mar 19, 2013 05:51
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the talent deficit posted:What do assets/liabilities look like? Any investors? Nope, no assets or liabilities or investors, just a bunch of broken dreams  Guess easy "liquidation" is one of the upsides of bootstrapping.
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Mar 25, 2013 09:25
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Cicero posted:I just signed up for a Coursera class created by Stanford dudes, Startup Engineering. Looks pretty neat, it seems to be a copy of CS184 at Stanford. Starts in June, 10 weeks long, the technical side of (software) startups. That's a really interesting one, thanks for reminding me of its existence! I already use most of the tools listed there, but there's nothing quite like double-checking that I'm not following some terrible practices or some of my tools are awfully out of date.
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Apr 14, 2013 05:41
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Overture posted:Awesome thread idea! I rarely check this Business, Finance, and Careers but now I'm going to much more. I've been "doing startups" for about 6 years now (and some form of web design and development for about 10), have one startup I consider a true success under my belt, working on a new venture now (which I went through yCombinator with), and I'm at a point in my career where I'd like to start giving back and helping others (rather than succumbing to my bad habit of working on side projects, which are easily the biggest distraction you can have while building a company). Hey fellow SF startup scene survivor! We need to talk! I'm in SF myself, full-timing startups for a year now, software industry for about 5. Would kill for advice from someone who's been through the gauntlet much longer than I have. We actually applied to YC a bunch of times and never heard back, so far at least. My co-founder interviewed with them 2-3 times, but never got accepted. Got a couple of friends who are ex-YCers, we might have a few acquaintances in common! PM sounds good?
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Apr 14, 2013 05:45
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Cool, I was just now looking for accounting software for my startup, it's between Wave and Xero.
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May 20, 2013 04:46
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Those of you with very small teams (under 5) and VC, how much do you work in a week? I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to train myself to sustain 7 days, but I've totally failed at it so far. Unless you never lift, always eat out and have someone do your laundry / chores, you pretty much need at least 1 day a week to get that stuff taken care of. You could probably eat pizza every day and never go to a grocery store, but that's just not my thing. That and I do like my 9 hours of sleep. And if that's your "break day", then you might have not actually done anything "relaxing" that week, which seems to add up over time.
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Sep 15, 2013 22:39
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shrughes posted:You'll just be dumb if you try to sustain 7 days. You have to take a break. Basically the main rules I follow when working a lot without going insane are to always sleep without an alarm, and on days when you're working, avoid all foods (or drink) with carbohydrates (carbs make you dumb for an hour or two, and this is also an easy way to avoid falling into a junk food diet), and always be awake from 5-11 AM Saturday morning for golf no matter what (or substitute a time/activity of your choice). Also, never work more than 12 hours in a day (including lunch). Don't count the hours, count the progress. Review your work the subsequent day and analyze whether its quality is really that good, to make sure you aren't doing worthless sleep-deprived work. I think I'm going to institute the Sundays to be off limit so I can cram in gym, groceries and the rest of the day with the SO and then hopefully have a energized 6 days afterwards. We'll see how that turns out. I think ultimately being able to get 9 hours of sleep every day can make it or break it, as long as morale isn't completely in the gutter. As long as your head is thinking clearly, you're probably going to be ok.
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Sep 17, 2013 20:41
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Drive By posted:Why are you trying to work 80 hour weeks? Is the product of your work that well defined that you just need to build whatever it is you're building, to the exclusion of any sort of intellectual work? That's a good question. The product is somewhat defined, in fact we made a few institutional sales already, but we have no idea if this will scale. In fact right now it looks like it won't, too much hand holding to make a very measly sale. If we don't come up with a better monetization route (or a different engine of growth) we're done in half a year at best. We're continuously trying different experiments, and the thing we stress hardest is the speed of iteration of such experiments. The more we try, the better our chances of striking gold and not having to go back to real jobs in a few months. Our runway is extremely short, around 6 months at the current rate, and we've just started paying ourselves "salaries" to survive (after 1.5 years of sucking it up). Our incubator's demo day is in 3 months, so we need to fake that perfect last minute hockey stick to make it to a reasonable seed round (our industry is pretty tough as far as vc goes, so every little bit counts). The better our traction at that point in time, the better the chances of missing the timing on that seed. At this point 80 hours is out of question, I don't even know how to do that. I agree that's kind of immature and an indication that you're not really doing work for at least 20 of those hours, but trying to live the "lifestyle". I'm a bit too old for the whole "don't shower for 3 days and sleep at work". Ideally we're aiming for 60h of well-rested work, which is pretty achievable with 6 day work weeks, but if you work intensely enough you could be done in 40. And yes, I 100% agree that working less helps you considerably with not being stuck in the trees and missing the big picture, but there's something to be said about the power of continuous rapid experimentation. Ideally we'd have both, but it's been very tough so far.
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Sep 18, 2013 20:46
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No Wave posted:Are VC firms so stupid that they can't tell the difference between real growth and "that perfect last minute hockey stick"? I mean this as a sincere question. It's a gamble. If they wait too long, the train could be gone, the terms might have become much better for the founders, and VC returns are severely diminished. They have to make 100x off of black swans for their business model to make any sense. They will have wasted their time chasing a lovely return that makes no visible difference for their fund, meaning that their fund will shrink, they lose prestige and eventually their jobs. Not that their fund management cut isn't very generous, but that's a different story. If they invest too soon, they might throw away money for no reason by committing to a dumb project. For seed rounds VCs are investing in the potential, the "hint of a hockey stick" is where it's at. For A rounds that won't cut it anymore and you gotta show a lot more real growth/revenue/traction or whatever metric is relevant for your business model. DreadCthulhu fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Sep 19, 2013 |
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Sep 19, 2013 00:43
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Drive By posted:I'm sorry, but I can't agree with this. I don't care for Lean and think quality of iteration trumps speed of iteration. Experiments should be driven by hypothesis drastic enough to change your whole business, and that takes strong intuitions, time to think and a lot of industry-specific knowledge. No one strikes gold at random, you learn to dig in the right places. You are not a lottery ticket. If you don't know enough about your industry to make educated guesses about the future just shut the whole thing down right now. I completely agree with all of what you said there. I guess we're in the lucky position to have a lot of strong intuitions, since we're pretty immersed into the industry and surrounded by a very vibrant community within it, so we're only limited by our own speed of execution. Random experiments make no sense, no arguing there. Drive By posted:I wouldn't though, you're doing something right if you have sales. If something's connecting with people, you need to amplify the effect, broaden your reach and make sure it's scalable when it needs to scale. I think our problem is that we eventually discovered that schools have no money unless you're in bed with the right folks at district level (see Pearson, News Corp, Apple) and so our model needs to be seriously reconsidered. A couple of grand here and there requiring dozens and dozens of hours and in-person meetings is insane, and the people with cash are not reachable with a bottom-up approach. Time to charge them parents What's interesting is that NOBODY has yet figured out a way to make this work, and there are hundreds of companies all trying to chip away at the puzzle from different directions. It's one of those situations where it's stupid and doesn't work, until it suddly does, and then in retrospect it was obvious it would have worked. Anyway, edtech woes. Next time I'm doing a porn site, I promise.Drive By posted:6 months is a shitload of time, are you kidding me? Also, no one half clever goes to or cares about demo days. Optimize for the long term, not for a stupid deadline. At the most you can use Demo Day as a PR tool if you have a shiny number or a new release. I'm pretty sure if you were in YC you'd not skip your demo day because you're too cool for school. Obviously you shouldn't stray from building a real business as you're approaching demo day, but you'd be foolish not to leverage the attention you're getting IF your company is ready to enter fundraising mode by then. There are numerous cases of people sucking at demo day and still raising a major round 6 months later. Still no point in throwing away a perfectly good opportunity. In any case, feel free to PM me with your schedule if you want to hang out I'm in SOMA with the rest of the cargo cult.
DreadCthulhu fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Sep 22, 2013 |
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Sep 22, 2013 07:35
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We're not actually in YC, I was posing that question hypothetically, so no worries.
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Sep 23, 2013 19:57
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| # ¿ May 5, 2024 00:07 |
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I'm trying to figure out how to make a nice, short and sweet front-page product video along the lines of what Dropbox used a few years ago. Their video was pretty DIY, but still good enough not to give off the ultra-amateur vibe. I have no experience in that area and would be ok with spending a little bit on contracting this out. Does anybody have a good experience with studios making such videos? Ideally super dirt-cheap and not too fancy, just good enough. Perhaps tools out there that can help an artistic imbecile like me slap something together in no time?
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Sep 25, 2013 01:19
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