My First month as a startup CEO | Hacker News Reader

My First month as a startup CEO

ryanckulp.com

4 pointsryanckulp11 comments

Flagged.

I've had college projects longer than your tenure as a startup CEO.

Also, on ArtSpot:

The front page signup lightbox is broken--it isn't sized properly and the signup button is moved wrong. You need to remove the "btn-block" class, or at least disable display:block on the element. Also, the lightbox shows up over the header--it should probably just occupy the main pane.

The footer on the front page could probably stand to be a proper navbar.

The background color of the typeform is slightly darker than the rest of the page background on the "Own a venue?" page. In fact, why use typeform at all? Just embed a Google Form and save me the trouble of having to sign up for anything. That'll also save some annoying and ugly display scrolling display behavior. Ditto for the "Collectors" page.

Hey there--

Thanks for your feedback. I've had college projects last much longer too. I have another co that's doing ~$500k /year, but that's not the focus of this blog post.

Moving on... the design needs a lot of love, right now it's sub- bootstrap quality.

How is the lightbox broken? It loads center-top for me, and buttons in the right spot. Not saying it's pretty, but not broken either.

RE footer, for sure. Spent no time on that (yet), but could definitely be improved.

Agree re TypeForm too. I like the feature of sending Typeform straight to Mailchimp, bypassing double opt-in, etc and didn't want to set up API connection for G Apps to Spreadsheet to Mailchimp. So kinda being lazy there, but yes this needs a refresh. Perhaps I can open up the page template so the scrolling bar disappears on its own, for the time being.

BTW, Typeform(s) on site are for info gathering. Signing up as an artist (via 'Get Started') is instant auth, other 2 spots on site are for manual outreach or Mailchimp signup.

Thanks again!

BTW, what do you mean by 'flagged?'

He reported your submission as a spam or the like.

Ah, good times. And he provided helpful feedback too. HN makes no sense.

The trick with the lightbox is that it could probably just occur in the main content pane--as it is now, especially on larger monitors, it looks like it is sized incorrectly.

Gotcha, sure I can make that change.

Just next time don't flag an appropriate post.

It's a good list but my favorite quote from last week, on twitter no less, is instructive:

>>> "Fail fast" refers to your product, not your startup." - Justin Kan

18 months ago when I quit my job to join a new company as Co-Founder I had no intention whatsoever of failing and I still don't. It's not even an option. We did fail too slowly on the first rev of our first product and that was painful and expensive but we recovered.

Please stay healthy and learn to turn it off and sleep too. I strongly recommend quitting coffee altogether. It helps immensely to keep you on a good schedule.

[1] https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/571008487456509953

Thanks for reading.

And really funny you say that RE failure... check out this tweet (of mine) from a few days ago before I wrote the post:

https://twitter.com/ryanckulp/status/572089334612041728

For the record I ran growth @ a YC S12 startup. The co is still alive and kicking, but I needed to move on.

Great team if anyone is looking for a kickass role in user acquisition...

As I mentioned the last time you tried this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045985), the fact that you were ex-YC is irrelevant and not discussed in the article, and the addition of that to the title is pure linkbait.

It's not link-bait, it's proof of relevancy to this community. YC startup peeps like learning about other YC startup peeps.

Obviously the community is much larger than the YC network, but I don't see the issue with relating to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com