randfish

Shortly after this book came out, my wife and I read it together and a few months later, formed a studio to make a game together. She's the writer. I'm the creative director. Launch is still a year away, but it's been a wonderful, new part of our relationship.

Unusual that an interview captures such a nuanced take, but I appreciate both Ward's pragmatism and his sadness around the death of human-created art. Grateful for the submission.

Just wanted to say this is wonderful work, timely for a couple of my companies, and I love seeing stuff like it posted to HN.

Deeply curious to know if this is an outlier opinion, a mainstream but pessimistic one, or the general consensus. My LinkedIn feed and personal network certainly suggests that it's an outlier, but I wonder if the people around me are overly optimistic or out of synch with what the HN community is experiencing more broadly.

Archive link is here: https://archive.ph/Plj4J

Thought it was great. Thanks for writing and submitting!

Just wanted to say thanks for the submission. I never would have found this story otherwise, and it's both a powerful read and especially relevant to a close friend—she was one of the airlifted/trafficked babies and has never been able to find her birth parents.

While many of the images were low resolution or just strange icon graphics, and the text felt like AI-slop, the core concept is great. Hope you keep making progress on this.

"Make sure your hook is glowingly radioactively good. Don't overbalance. Leave in some jank. Scope down and finish quickly. And avoid tropes. Stand out."

Sounds like outstanding advice. I hope we can follow in your footsteps! (and thanks for the kind and comprehensive answer)

Incredible work, Brian! I'm in awe of what you've done in such a short amount of time. I started an indie game company (still working on our first title) and had a few related questions if that's OK?

1) If you didn't need a salary or marketing help, would you still have signed a publishing deal? My sense is most of the publisher value lies in getting paid before the game launches, and with marketing around launch, but curious if those are wrong assumptions?

2) Early Access vs. Straight Launch - any insights about why you chose to do a full launch vs. an early access beforehand? Was it something you and the publisher discussed in detail?

3) Outside of Steam's ecosystem, how much marketing, promotion, social media, YouTube, Discord, etc. stuff did you (or the publisher) do? Do you think that pre-launch work had a sizable impact on the launch and post-launch success? Or would you say it's mostly the Steam algo making the game more visible to the right buyers as the positive reviews rolled in?

Truly kind of you to share so openly here. Already sent some of your other replies to our game team

I love this concept for a thread.

Here are a few people my startups have worked with that I can vouch for:

Asia Orangio of DemandMaven - customer research and SaaS product positioning, feature prioritization, and product strategy

Talia Wolf - conversion rate optimization

Seer Interactive - PPC and SEO

I'll try to add more as I dig through my list.

+1 for Threads - I'm shocked at how good the engagement is there, and how kind the community is (generally) too

VERY much like this part: "integrates directly into your GitHub workflow, transforming Figma designs into deployable code and understanding your entire codebase." Getting on the waitlist.

I think that's a very standard VC line I've encountered in the startup world, but the stats just don't bear it out.

Pick any software business - productivity tools, marketing, data providers, security, UX, medical/healthcare - and the reality is always that 1-5 big companies dominate, while 100s or 1000s of smaller companies, many that fit with the ideas of the "calm company" philosophy, are profitable and even growing (albeit more slowly).

The "winner take all" mentality isn't even true in the sectors where it's supposed to be a hard and fast rule. Social media platforms have a half dozen dominant players, and another 40-50 businesses that are successful by the calm definition. Search engines - Google dominates, but another half dozen and a few hundred vertical search engines (in travel, B2B data, real estate, ecommerce of every kind, etc.) have 10s to 100s of millions in revenue.

Until I see an economy-wide analysis of this "winner takes all" rule, with massive numbers of sectors where no small/calm companies are surviving, will I believe this is true. Seems to me like the "riches in the niches" saying is actually the rule, but it doesn't fit with the unicorn-or-bust returns model of large venture funds.

Couldn't agree more. It's cool to be profitable, to grow slowly and with intention, to create a good experience for founders, employees, and customers, to build something that lasts.

The grow-fast-or-die-trying approach that Silicon Valley (and YCombinator) promoted in tech world the last quarter century leads to millions of miserable folks (employees, customers, and founders) and a few very rich ones. After trying that approach for a long time, it just doesn't bring me motivation or joy.

Yup. Ditto here. I'm a "Zebra" style founder (as in Zebras not Unicorns) and love what TinySeed's doing. My wife and I are LPs in TinySeed, too.

Really sad that Indie.vc's LPs weren't willing to even wait the usual judging period that venture funds get (often 5-7yrs, sometimes more) before determining that they "didn't want to exposure to those types of assets."

Love this Nialna - thanks for sharing, and for making a demo for us non-devs to explore, too :-)

Disco Elysium really nails late stage capitalism.

+1 for April. She recommends against a lot of what's in this First-round article, and I think that's wise. This feels like an out-of-date business school primer, which is unusual for FirstRound as their stuff's historically pretty good.

Hi HN. Second-time founder (previously co-founded Moz), launching our product for the first time today. It's a tool to help founders, market researchers, PRs, & marketers discover the publications and people followed+engaged-with by any describable audience.

Search for "woodworking" and we'll uncover several thousand profiles that talk about woodworking online, then show you the podcasts, websites, social accounts, and YouTube channels those profiles interact-with most.

Feedback welcome; hope the data proves useful to some of y'all for your own projects.

One of the best, most beautifully written articles I've read during this dark timeline. So glad someone submitted it here. Highly recommend listening to the audio version.

Super fair criticism of the post and process/structure. My only pushback might be that you can raise $25k or $50k with this structure (doesn't have to be $1.3mm) and you can use these docs with 2 or 3 investors if 30+ isn't the right match. I agree that anytime you announce you've raised a bunch of money, it's bragging. But I don't know a way to a) make that transparent and b) inspire other folks to consider alternative fundraising options without a post like this.

Nice! LMK if I can ever be helpful to you/Canny

(Rand from SparkToro here) Honored that you'd think of us, but no plans to hire in the near term. We're gonna be super-conservative and try to get a product to market before we consider hiring.

+1 Also rooting for you Danielle - and always will be. Can't wait to see what you do next, and if I can ever be helpful, don't hesitate to ask.

Thank you Niniane. Your courage is so appreciated.

Moz has 140 employees and is at a revenue run-rate of ~$33mm, putting us around $235K/employee. I know companies with higher revenue/employee than us (many of those are smaller) and some with lower revenue/employee (many of those have lots of funding and are going negative to grow faster). So long as you're applying additional metrics into the equation (funding, growth rate, cost/person by location/type, etc) I think this is a reasonable baseline.

That said, there's lots of very important metrics to understand if you're trying to do a comparison - rate of growth, margins, churn, etc. - all of these figure prominently into the health of a SaaS business.

Thanks dude! Totally fair question & assumption BTW :-)

We've actually never crawled out of Amazon (mostly because it was expensive to do so), so the crawl blocking stuff is unrelated, at least for us. As Sarah noted, it's really been costs, service, and support issues.

Yeah - we were a blog first, then a consultancy, then moved into software in 2007. Glad you like some of our old posts!