[HN Gopher] Founders share the challenges of running a tech busi...
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Founders share the challenges of running a tech business
Author : ChanningAllen
Score : 94 points
Date : 2020-02-14 17:01 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.indiehackers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.indiehackers.com)
| taylorjacobson wrote:
| wow, love the honesty of some of these, killer compilation
|
| really liked this --> "From the start, I was aware that I was
| taking on a huge project that other companies have devoted entire
| teams to, but I chose to look at it as more of a mental challenge
| than a technical one. I knew I had the skillset to pull it off, I
| just had to keep myself motivated and on track."
| c-smile wrote:
| Heh, that's mine and about my Sciter project.
|
| Sciter is pretty full implementation of HTML5 and CSS, has
| scripting engine on board, etc. So, indeed, I am personally
| competing with teams behind WebKit, Trident, Gecko, V8 (JS
| Engine), Chakra (MS JS Engine) and bunch of others.
|
| And recently with ReactJS (Sciter got Reactor - native
| implementation of ReactJs), Angular and others.
|
| And that is really a fun project to work on - many different
| paradigms on the same code base.
| chirau wrote:
| The site is not working/rendering properly in both Chrome and
| Firefox.
| nif2ee wrote:
| Never trust anything that comes from indiehackers, this is a
| community of professional indie astroturfers and manipulators of
| everything from renaming the same product and launching it every
| couple months on ProductHunt and buying upvotes, to baiting HNers
| with "How I made $X by doing Y". It's a pump and dump scheme on
| sub-million dollar levels.
| Wordball wrote:
| hmmm, odd that you're getting downvoted...
| gumby wrote:
| Not sure why a coffee company is a "tech startup".
|
| (Though TBF Amazon didn't feel like a tech company in the
| 1990s)
| Wordball wrote:
| It has a live chat and five different tracking solutions
| implemented. What about this doesn't look like a tech
| business?
| gumby wrote:
| That's just table stakes for a generic retail store Just
| because I drive a car wouldn't make me a car business.
|
| I think of tech businesses primarily as those that develop
| novel technology and secondarily as those who use
| technology in a novel and unexpected way. In both cases
| technology is the differentiation.
|
| The only novelty of this business is its message and while
| that might make a perfectly respectable business (I am not
| part of the target market so I can not judge) there's no
| "tech" in their business plan. Think of it more like Ralph
| Lauren and Calvin Klein: the clothes are made in the same
| factories by the same workers; the only differentiation is
| market positioning. Nobody would criticize them as not
| being "business" or even "clothes business" but their
| differentiator is marketing.
| sosodev wrote:
| I'm not sure you can lump all of IH together into one big
| undesirable thing. All platforms have bad apples but there's
| plenty of good information if you look closely.
| aldoushuxley001 wrote:
| How can it be a pump and dump if they're not public companies
| and generally rely on subscriptions?
|
| Indiehackers is a great community that produces a lot of useful
| content for other bootstrappers. Sorry that you think it's all
| a fraud, but I suspect you're throwing out the baby with the
| bath water.
| taylorhou wrote:
| enjoy how there's perspective given from the responders with
| their current MRR as well. as a founder of a bootstrapped tech-
| enabled service startup with $135k+ MRR is cash flow. Accounts
| Receivable is a PITA and it still hasn't been solved (even with
| the likes of bill.com, harvest, stripe, paypal, qbo, etc...) -
| i'd almost pay for a company to outsource our AR to completely to
| represent us on initial AR, 30-90 day AR, collections, demand
| letters, and ultimately lawsuits if needed. bleh.
| blizkreeg wrote:
| at that size, would it be better to just hire an in-house
| accounting/book-keeping person?
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| I was going to recommend the same thing, but I also know
| there are plenty of AR companies out there. YC even funded
| one called YayPay. I know my accountant will chase down
| invoices for me if I asked him (for a fee of course),
| thankfully QuickBooks Online handles this reporting, and has
| a one click solution to resend Invoices. I don't do $135k/mo,
| and only send a handful or two of invoices each month, so I
| cannot comment on how well it scales.
| haidersf wrote:
| love the honesty
| userium wrote:
| I'd add the struggle / time it took to really deeply comprehend
| what 'build, measure, learn' means in practice. And realizing
| that there is a more scientific approach to building good
| products. For example by using Hypothesis-Driven Development [1].
| We wasted lots of time (and money) at the beginning with our own
| stupid assumptions.
|
| [1] Hypothesis-driven development (HDD)
| https://teamsuccess.io/hdd
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Is IndieHackers completely fucked for anyone else right now in
| Chrome 80.0.3987.106 on MacOS? The js and CSS static assets are
| getting blocked for some reason, even after disabling all my
| extensions and refreshing the page in incognito and without
| cached assets.
|
| edit: Works fine in Safari, but the same thing is happening in
| Firefox.
| HelloFellowDevs wrote:
| I had the same issue with the link on both safari & firefox, I
| used the readerview on firefox as a workaround.
| hhs wrote:
| With respect to each company, what do the numbers in the
| parentheses mean? Is that profit, revenue or something else per
| month?
| randlet wrote:
| This is almost always (and frustratingly!) Monthly Recurring
| Revenue.
| lwb wrote:
| Frustrating how?
| pb7 wrote:
| Revenue is close to useless if you're selling dollars for
| quarters. Hard to gauge the efficacy of businesses without
| the full picture.
| riku_iki wrote:
| IndieHackers are usually self-bootstrappers, they
| wouldn't sustain long by selling dollars for quarters.
| [deleted]
| hhs wrote:
| Good to know, thank you!
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(page generated 2020-02-14 23:00 UTC)