redguava

I would like to see people be a bit more supportive when someone announces their first app and asks for feedback.

I understand you have provided feedback, but perhaps put yourself in the shoes of the developer and consider the way you put the message across.

It would be great if every piece of software was perfect and awesome on first release, but really iterative development is what gets us there. I hope the developer and also other potential users aren't discouraged by your "DO NOT USE".

I didn't know you could fit so much "passiveness" into one sentence.

I think it's really important not to forget that this is for getting funding, not necessarily for having a successful startup/business. There is a really big difference there and often this type of advice ends up getting repeated but without the appropriate context.

"Instead of trying to do everything well (traction, team, product, social proof, pitch, etc.), do one thing exceptionally. As a startup you have to be exceptional in at least one regard."

That might be great advice to get funded, but it would be terrible advice to try and create a profitable business. To get a profitable business you really need to a do a lot of things well, not necessarily exceptionally.

"Growth hacker" aside, would you put up a recruitment post like this?

I don't think it's so much about bootstrapping vs. funded as just being frugal.

Not all bootstrapped companies are low on money, some had plenty of their own to put in, or others have achieved profitability.

This is a way of running a company for sure, but I think it would be better put as "Frugal is a state of mind".

The "Visits vs Uniques" graph is one of the worst I have seen. When your Y-Axis has such variable jumps it just makes the graph completely irrelevant. I would say it was intentionally skewed to mislead, but sometimes the jumps work in your favor and sometimes not, so I just can't understand the reasoning.

Equally spaced increments go by 500k, 1mm, 500k, 1mm, 600k.

Charts are meant to give a visual representation of data, if you skew the chart then you may as well be skewing the numbers.

I would guess that if anyone can find cheap flights it would be them.

I think the leaderboard should be based on your win/loss record. Leave snacks as a way to get bigger and give you a better chance to win the game... they don't need points as well.

The game is a classic, no need to change much, adding multiplayer is enough.

Raising more money means giving away more equity. If you think your company is going to get a higher valuation later, it makes sense to raise a smaller amount now and then raise again later when you get more $$$ per % of equity.

I hate reading things like "more than half of startups will fail in the first 5 years, so get ready to fail and change your plans".

It's not random... you don't have 50% chance of success. The half that failed did something wrong, there is a reason they weren't successful... it's not a probability thing.

I agree this won't show what your customers prefer, because you aren't giving your customers a choice. This might show you which of these your customers will buy from if they have no choice though.

If you want to see which they prefer, why don't you just have all three options on the page and see which one gets the most sales? Surely you can just see how much revenue is coming in from the different outlets?

It seems to me like this isn't a great use case for a/b testing. If you have all three options and one of them never gets used, stop showing that option.

"If the same person sits down and starts creating his own software, he will probably earn much more one year later by himself already."

I think people really underestimate what a small portion of a successful business the ability to code well is. I am not saying it isn't helpful, but I would put my money on someone that is an average coder with great business, marketing, customer service skills over a great coder that lacks those any day.

This isn't to downplay a developers role in business, I am a developer myself, it's just that a great developer can't turn that into money without working for someone else, or having the other business skills that are required.

It's not luck that they are already well known for their UX work. That is part of their hard work to get them to that point.

You say these results aren't as reproducible without significant connections... but getting significant connections is reproducible. I guess you could consider that step 1 in their process.

I would also say that you can build an audience and get connections with some hustle and/or money. A well designed pre-launch page and some paid advertising will get you an audience for launch day.

I recall that had a fairly impressive marketing video on their page previously. This could have cost $50k alone.

I think the main unexpected cost that you can incur is advertising/marketing. You can build the software cheaply, but it's very hard to get the word out without spending money (and it can add up very fast). Considering their fast growth, I would also assume significant spend in this area.

As long as you are getting a positive ROI from this spend, then it's worth throwing as much as you can at it, but obviously you need to have it to throw... that may be one the keys to their success.

The irony of having three separate points that all say the same thing... and that thing is keep it brief, don't use filler.

As much as I like to see people talking about profit rather than revenue, revenue is really important as long as you are profitable. It is only when you are losing large amounts of money every month that revenue is less impressive.

Facebook had over 1 billion dollars revenue in the quarter and they were profitable. Why is it so bad that they decided to spend most of that revenue to grow the business further rather than keep it as profit.

If revenue is decreasing, thats another story, but profit being down for one quarter is a result of how much they are reinvesting their money.

It hasn't held them back. I wonder if it's a case of their services been so unique, cheap, competitive, etc. or if we overrate design and it's not really that important. I tend to think it's the former, but it's an interesting example.

I think it is sad that this is probably the correct answer.

I would love to refute it and say "no, you need to monetize it, don't just get users and hope". However, recent history has shown that gaining traction and losing money every month is enough to earn yourself a heavy payout later.

builtwith.com is showing fandalism to be running on IIS. It was quite a rant you had about rails before even checking.

You can write a resource hog application in any language just like you can write an efficient app in any language. Don't blame the tools. This isn't to say different languages are all the same with performance levels, I just think it's negligible compared to the different performance levels of developers.

Are you good?

If yes, then you're very hireable.

If no, then practice, learn and get better.

The rest doesn't matter as much.

Great to see you respond here. The time that lost me was when you were telling the story about your wife's issues. I understand your intent with that story, but it was quite long winded and it looked like a few times your guest went to speak and was effectively cut off.

I didn't watch the whole video, I was put off by the signal to noise ratio in the first few minutes.

I am not familiar with his work, but I also don't think I should need to know his reputation in order to watch the video.

To me it seemed disrespectful to the person he was interviewing, and honestly a bit egotistical to be talking so much.

Hopefully this feedback reaches him and it's something that can be considered.

I stopped watching very early on. It really bugs me in interviews when the host does too much talking.

I hope it balanced out as the video goes on, but if you have a guest on that has valuable information... let them speak.

Setting up a landing page and doing a few basic things to draw attention to it should take you a day or less. You can either spend that time right away and have 500 people that care when you launch, or you can spend that time when you finish your MVP and launch and have no one that cares.

It's time you have to spend anyway, do it early, let it sit there and attract interest.

One thing you can't do when you finish your MVP is go back 3 months and have a landing page that attracted interest.

Thanks. I wondered how people were showing ads to me after I had visited their website.

So you let people rate it with 5 stars, but then show it as 3.7 magic points. Magic points can be your proprietary ranking system.

You don't need to let them rate with stars and also show it as stars.

I don't see why 2 minute response times can't be sustainable, you just might need help with it down the track. I launched my SaaS product in June 2011, so am a bit further along than you and am still managing to maintain it.

I really hope people take your advice on board, I think those techniques made the difference for me.

I hope people don't get too hung up on the numbers thing to miss out on the great advice you give. With all the factors that contribute to a startups success, I think this post really nails some critical ones:

- Create a list of people interested before you launch

- Be proactive with support, consider it a sales tool

- Have a great first use experience, that's when people are deciding to use your system.

Great post and well done on your success so far.

I don't understand why you want to look for indicators that someone will be a good coder... rather than actually see if they are a good coder (ie. actually look at their code). I understand looking at peoples code takes time... but really that's why companies are paying recruiters, to save them time.

I would guess if there was some magic set of indicators that shows if someone is a good coder or not... we would have worked that out by now. It turns out there isn't... look at code.

If you aren't able to read code and evaluate someone by their code, you shouldn't be hiring software developers. How did we end up in a position where people that understand code, hire people that don't understand code (recruiters) to hire people that can code.... what am I missing here.

I am too distracted by the N in your logo looking like a Z on it's side.

Is that intentional?