andyish

They got time, salaries, and a credit line while they developed and tried to grow the product, and I imagine they had a pretty great time with $350m over the years. It's not as though they intentionally undercut them by a dollar, their sale was $94m short.

If the story was what the headline leads you to believe and you 10x'd someone's investment and they did you over, why wouldn't you see red and scuttle your product?

I've gone back to this comment so many times, it's not a clearcut guide as what to do but it has some valuable points in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447467

Got an M1 Pro. Still happy with it, don't see a need to upgrade yet.

it reminds me of the 2014 MBP which was a solid workhorse for at least 4 years.

Last job I worked from home with monthly trips down to the London office which was okay.

To go back to the office 4+ times a week I'd be looking for something along the lines of: - 6-hour days without the pay cut - Significant pay rise - A product I'm genuinely passionate about

I just hate the commute and I do not believe anyone who had an inner city or outer to inner city commute who says they miss it. Sure it's fine some days when it's nice, everything is on time and it's not too busy, but most of the time it's grim.

I do think people romanticize what the office was like pre-covid. Only last week I was reminiscing on all the times we would complain about the lack of communication between teams, and that was when they were all sat in the same building.

I built https://team-today.com with a friend about 4 years ago and have been working on it full-time for the past 6 months.

I tried to get funding but never really got there and we've just managed to grind it out to a point where we have enough revenue to pay ourselves.

The flexible lifestyle is great, I play golf on Wednesdays and help out with childcare much more than I would have been able to with my previous jobs.

There is the looming threat that all our customers will leave us one day and I'll have to go back to a regular 9-5 job, but hey ho.

Name of your SaaS: Team Today [team-today DOT com]

What problem are you solving: Team and office planning. Knowing when your colleagues are going to be working and where from. Then using this to provide insights into office usage. Use cases from our customers are much broader than what we had in mind.

Fully bootstrapped and past MVP doing, trying to justify bringing in a salesperson but given our background is in design and dev we're not sure where to start.

Currently we're at about 300 accounts we got there with a mixture of experimenting with Google/LinkedIn/Reddit ads, cold outreach and getting the product into as many marketplaces as we can.

We both work on it part-time with additional part-time help with customer queries. We've just got to the point where we can realistically move onto it full-time.

Very similar position to you, apart from I'm in the UK and have a b2b app.

To start with, unless you already know people, raising money can be a full-time job in itself, everyone wants to offer advice and no one wants to cut a cheque.

I took a massively risk-averse approach instead of aiming for $1m ARR I started with building a self-sustaining app that pays the mortgage/rent, then all the bills, then matches your salary.

Smaller more achievable goals will stave off burnout because you won't feel like you're failing everyday you're not making $1m ARR.

Why aren't social media sites/apps considered as publishing platforms and subject to the same laws?

I wouldn't be able to put a TV ad on SkySports with a song in the background of it without paying for usage.

Yeah, I've seen that trend a lot. Execs don't want to fully commit and lose half of their office space so they reduce it down a little bit. I imagine they'll reduce it again if it's the same for the duration of the tenancy.

Exactly. I see companies downsizing to offices with more meeting and collaboration spaces

These are offices for 10 to 20 people (1200 to 2000 sq/ft) if your company isn't flush with cash an office is becoming a luxury rather than a necessity. Especially in a major city where a small office can be 100k a year.

The trend is going to continue over the coming years, especially with bigger offices that are paying millions each year.

It's no surprise, just speak to some of the pilots and they'll tell you all sorts of stories.

I wonder what's happening at Airbus right now? If they're doubling down and empowering on their engineering divisions or if they too focused on cost cutting from engineering and QA and thanking their lucky stars it's not them.

Yes, definitely less fully remote roles, but the vast majority are some rendition of hybrid. Ranging from remote first to mandating several days in the office.

I'm genuinely surprised that your typical exec isn't looking at things like this thinking: "We're spending this much a month on office space for our 500 staff at this location. Let's knock that down to 100 and push everyone to work from home". Give ourselves a big pat on the back and a nice bonus for saving a few million a year.

If after a few years, it doesn't work, you go back to the market for more office space.

In the UK government orgs sold off their office space and turned to renting. Now the people renting the office space are annoyed that the demand is dropping. Poor them.

Cold outreach and marketing.

Everyone I ask for advice tells me to just start with 10 a week and see where it goes after a few months. So that's what I'm going to do.

Dev wise, going to try and develop plugins for more marketplaces as a means of improving the visibility of the product (confluence, slack, mattermost, etc).

Because everyone has an opinion and whatever it is, there's always a counter argument to itYou can post about it and lots of people can relate, and if people relate to it they're more likely to comment.

So many people make it out to be remote v office and hybrid is the devil. I'm adamant that people want the flexibility to work how they see fit for the job at hand. Unfortunately, this doesn't typically align with all the other people in their division/team. Some will want to socialise in the office while others have commitments at home, some will want the focus they can only get in the office, while others want the focus they can only get at home. So you have a stalemate (or a planning problem).

I think Nick's right, in 10 years time it'll be a lot less controversial, there will be companies who are mainly remote, some who are main onsite and others that are both.

...and the groups of people who own office buildings who must be starting to sweat.

It takes a mature and disciplined team to use TBD and these teams are few and far between. Every developer you add to your team (or department) increases the risk that someone is going to miss a test, or an edge case and ultimately break the build and blocks everyone.

For me short lived branches that get merged into main dependant on passing tests and maybe a PR is by far the easiest, most reliable, and most common approach.

For many of the reasons listed, I do use TBD for my side projects. Push it to main, tested, built and deployed. Easy. :)

Selling to businesses can be really hard. You can get stuck with ISO standards, data and server locations and SLAs. The lead time on sales can be many months, and there's a real chance it falls through.

And on top of all that there's the strangest perception of value that can drastically change from person to person.

Companies could happily pay thousands for access to data for a single brands segmentation, then baulk at the idea of paying $7 per user for something like Slack that gets used many times a day by many people.

and step 4, i'd do the opposite. Choose a MASSIVE market. It'll be easier to get customers.

people are getting so hung up on remote vs office as though it's either or.

Out side of tech people who want to work in the office 5 days a week are in the minority along with people who want to work at home 5 days a week. The vast majority of people want the _flexability_ to decide when to go in. They'll go in for a change of scenery, to socialise with colleagues (not necessarily after work but idle chit chat in the office) or to informally speak to a few people.

Demanding and mandating people come back to the office is a real shitty move, and does nothing but cause stress and anxiety to everyone.

You've got to do both or find a co-founder that rounds off your startup team, in this case I guess it would be someone on the sales/marketing/commercial side.

If you do go down the route of learning and upskilling in marketing. You'll probably find a solid startup idea along the way.

People don't want to pay for 'good' software, so you get more and more corners cut until you end up with something that nearly unusable (or more likely, just not very good).

Return to the office... unless we're making layoffs, then work from home. Great.

There really aren't many (if any) other career paths that will pay so well that you could upskill in and reach pay parity in a few years.

You could try something like a PM/BA role, orientated more around the user and stakeholder management. It's less tech focused and more time communicating with others but probably equally stressful.

I have a friend that bought a coffee shop in a midsize affluent town. Long days, always something going wrong beit staff sickness, stock shortage or maintenance. Kept it up for about 5 years, sold it on and went back into sales.

I imagine there's a lot more going on behind the scenes that the author realises. If it's a single product startup a PM will be getting pulled in different directions by sales, marketing, tech, clients and investors. All who have their own agenda, all of whom may want different things.

It only sounds like PMs have all the power because they put the tasks in the order that you work on them in, after haggling with all the other stakeholders.

I'd guess that the PM in the story trying to get some evidence to backup a decision/convince someone of something.

This is the area my startup is in (hybrid working) and i've been exposed to work practices and decisions at several hundred companies. Unsurprisingly, the common theme is that it's a massive culture shift. You're looking at breaking something that's been the norm for a LONG time, and almost breaking it overnight.

I've spent quite a while trying to formulate a response that covers everything but it's a deeply complex subject and touches on physical space constraints, employee development, cost (both to employee and employer), speed of decisions and response, and (all) employee wellbeing.

For every positive, there's a negative and if people aren't sure what to do I think they just default to what they're familiar with and knee-jerk back to what was the norm.

I think we're only getting started with remote working, my feeling is that there will always be office only companies (in the same way there's always been remote only companies). And the most common will be 'remote first' model where you can work where-ever you want but you're expected to attend certain meetings in the calendar in person.

Posing for a corporate headshot is a whole new level of awkward (similar to the IT Crowd act casual dinner party scene)

Remember when their marketing gimmick was "Love is sharing your password"

Me and my co-founder are both technical/design and it's too easy to take refuge in feature development than do what needed on sales/marketing... a form of procrastination I guess.

Sales, sales, sales. It's all sales. And when there is feature development, it's because you've sold an improvements to a customer (but make sure they commit first).

We integrate into MS and Google which holds personal information such as names but we do make an effort to reduce the amount of personal information we hold.

The real difficulty is getting government or financial institutions to buy in, they have LONG approvals processes and require proof that certain security practices are being adhered to (ISO27001 helps but is costly).