Just Launch the Damn Thing
mobilefolk.com
mobilefolk.com
While it's true that you need to begin the iteration process with real customers sooner rather than later, you still have to actually build something for them to use. This is still going to be very hard work.
Yes, don't build features nobody has asked for yet, but do completely deliver on at least one core feature that actually makes people want more. Also, if you're a small team, and you crank out sub-par and not very well understood foundations, you're running the very real risk of having it all fall apart from underneath you when the first thing goes wrong. Again, don't go full k8s if you don't need to, but it's still very important to have a solid grasp on every aspect of your system.
You can't just skip the hard parts and get to the money printer. Or maybe you can, in which case, consider me jealous!
There's a fine line between an MVP and chumming the waters.
Stealth Mode is meant to give you some buffer against competitors who agree with the kernel of your idea and want to copy it. If the idea is obvious, someone else might beat you to market while you're faffing about. If there is no danger of a competitor having the same idea, then customers might not 'get it' either, at which point waiting has cost you a fortune.
Like you said, being first to market comes with the burden of having to educate the market about what the offering even is, whereas having competition means the market exists already and you won't have to do (as much of) this work.
In the end, there are plenty of examples of best-in-market beating first-to-market, and vice versa. And here we are trying to predict the weather :p
Feedback is important. It's not the only thing that's important, but it's important. Sitting on a bunch of dark code means you won't get any feedback, and when you do get it, it won't be usable (too late to reverse course).
It’s funny because I read many books and HN posts until I launched 7 years ago, and I was prepared for all situations (including downs) and all went well.
But no-one had told me that one. Fortunately, my startup is my longest streak in a single employment (2.5 max for the other ones, I’m missing recognition in the real world), but now I feel it’s time to enquire how one jumps out of this.
- Intermediaries like Corum Group only accept to help you sell if you are worth 6-30m€ (I’m around there, but, being sole owner, it’s hard to prove a valuation),
- When selling a startup, there are always provision clauses that a lot of liabilities will remain with you. Which defeats the role of an LLC (or equivalent in Europe).
So it’s hard to sell or jump ships.
This is just food for thoughts for the wannabe-entrepreneurs here — but by all means, that was my best professional experience and I had immensely more recognition naked in front of a market than in companies where the boss wouldn’t even coach me into improving myself, apart from “be the best of the team and we may promote you – 9 month later — maybe.”
So: THANK YOU HN!
Make old ideas better, make new ideas mature.
While obviously not moral, the current environment seems to reward “get big fast, then take a breath to clean up the mess before other catch up”, by then the damage to many has already been done, but your company is huge and ate the rest.
- At the beginning, you innovate, and there are 100 car manufacturers in your city (Lyon, France) and every employee can build a car from A to Z.
- Then you mature. You need to build the petrol station in every corner of the city, and put pollution everywhere especially on cathedrals (and passwords spill all over the place). Employees have a scope and become replaceable, but at least it’s a skill that _can_ be taught at school so you build schools to output a nation’s worth of engineers, not PhDs.
- Then it concentrates. You still make more and more cars every year, but legal requirements rise and less than a dozen manufacturers per continent make it, it is extremely capital-intensive and return on investment is around the interest rate. Employees have a mundane job, there is even a job description, which would be an insult to most of the previous generation.
- Then global warming comes and you need to remove petrol stations and cheat on tests to prove that you comply to regulatory emissions.
Startups are at phase 2. Regulatory burden is so immense that the only way to comply to SOCs/PII/Health/GDPR requirements is to build inside of AWS. The job is becoming 1. either work for Atlasssian or Amazon 2. or be independent and built a toy inside their containers, with pre-approved APIs that insurances cover you for.
Your comment is a sign that we’re entering phase 3: It’s hard to launch a startup and comply by the correct security and redundancy requirements, the talent has to be great, funding is absolutely necessary to have enough lawyers and designers, it’s capital intensive but still has excellent potential growth.
But soon, launching a startup will be as hard as launching a clothing brand: You’ll need support from stars to get famous, advertising power of the soap industry, and you’ll only make 4% above market rate.
https://abc11.com/bear-chases-skier-romania-skiing-brown-cha...
While you don’t want to do something really dumb that’s hard to get out of from day 1, I can’t agree more. Last year I was asked to help with an open source medical devices project for Covid, and when the guy writing the infrastructure said he had a microservices design in place I took that as a queue to exit the project. They hadn’t even validated that people needed what they thought they should build, and here was a guy about to do a ton of work for scale that likely never came.
Individual anecdotes are often charming and sometimes inspiring. But with so many decision points, a series of "succeed like me" single-example posts, all with different messages, start to blur.
Launching something that clearly nobody will use because it can't do anything is clearly a waste of time still, but if you have something that people will use despite its flaws, maybe it's time to launch.
The fact is we have coworkers who want to appear high brow but not put in the work. So they will espouse a deep belief but then use it to do something else entirely. Or nothing at all.
Stalling, YAGNI, are extremely powerful tools. Maybe not explosives level of power, but perhaps cutting torch. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble with a torch if you do things in the wrong order or skip steps. (Not a welder, but I recently watch Alex Steele, Youtube blacksmith, and his then-partner make the same mistake twice in three weeks - heating a 3 piece assembly with a torch to get pieces 1 and 2 apart/together, could not remove piece 3 afterward due to the heat - expensive teachable moment the first time, but they needed a refresher)
The Fine Art of Stalling is figuring out which Irreversible Decisions you can safely put off until later, when there is more information, and which things you require now regardless of reversibility. You don't stall on Reversible Decisions you need soon. You make them cheap.
Got a bike shed to paint? Budget for five coats of paint in as many colors, pick one at random, and then move the fuck on. Your real job is determining which concrete contractor is certified to lay the base for your nuclear reactor, when you need it laid, the lead time each candidate needs to start the work, and any buffer you want to build in. If that means you don't need to know for another year, then let's keep an eye on those contractors' finances, turnover, and lawsuits, and look at the next thorn in our side, like the shipping company we're using that keeps screwing up.
> Until sometime last year I'd been coding socii in the open because I bought into the MVP (minimal viable product) hoopla the tech community spouts. As a result, no one used it because it lacked features people expected or wanted. Turns out, if something is too minimal it ends up not being viable and well, no one will use your product.
It's an ad.