robbiea

great read.

Thanks frereubu. Sorry, I posted it because the author kadavy wrote the book "design for hackers" and it was big on HN a while ago. I was going to add the "design for hackers author" to the title, but I didn't want to editorialize it.

I thought this community would like it and can relate to it, but I understand if it goes against guidelines.

is this good enough to post or unflag, or is linking directly to Amazon not a good idea. Thank you!

Start with your personal blog first. That will go wherever you go, even if the company doesn't work out.

That's how I did it and it worked out perfect.

My experience hasn't been that bad. I don't hit all of the tech buzzwords in my titles, but still the emails are the worst.

... and just like that everyone all of a sudden hates product hunt on hacker news. I don't understand most of these comments.

Product Hunt is still very new and we're already talking about how the algorithm is no good and bad tweeting practices.

Of course other users are going to ask their friends to upvote their submissions. Of course the founders are going to make sure that quality products are shown near the top. Of course the founders are going to make sure that engagement is higher even if that means notifying users via twitter.

Why can't we just say congratulations!? Why do we have to hate so quickly? Everyone acts like they have been doing this for 10 years and they should have all this stuff fixed by now.

Agreed with parent comment. I'm a big fan of quitting, but make sure you address the issues in your life first. I was also a workaholic and was able to get out of it.

Even when I hated my job I could still sleep at night.

A lot of great advice in this thread. My input is to get involved in organizations that are the most likely to help you find clients.

If you're a digital marketer, get involved in digital marketing meetups. If your clients are most likely lawyers, go to lawyer meetups. When I say get involved, I mean really get involved. Get a position on the board. Immerse yourself in the community where your clients are.

probably a plugin / chrome extension issue.

Agreed. Principal works great if you want to brand yourself as someone who is looking for longer term projects and you can do multiple things.

You don't. You can give your input with the known challenges, but you don't tell him to stop doing the idea. People learn by failing and your best friend's idea may never work, but what he learns from that and what spawns from that might work.

I remember specifically when a company pitched their idea that it would never work, and 3 years later the business is doing really well.

The only way you can really tell your best friend to stop, is if you have direct experience in what he is trying to build and have succeeded.

Your friend will learn the hard way and that's the best learning that there is.

Agreed. Ship it for the sake of shipping it and using it as a portfolio piece. I remember one app in particular that I spent a LOT of time on including meetings with others, etc and I never launched it. It still makes me mad and haunts me.

So if you're close to launching the first app, launch it for the sake of launching it and seeing a project all the way through.

To be honest, this is great news for you. All this means is that you are on to something. Think about it. You have another company who has a million dollar investment, and the people behind the money must be OK with the path they are taking in your niche industry.

Yes, it's not right to steal stuff, but I would take this as a compliment. Forget about them, and focus on you. If you're lucky enough, they will copy your features again.

As some others have said. Focus on technology consulting if that's the life you want. You probably won't be a software dev, but you will lead software development teams who are often remote or offshore.

Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Capgemini, KPMG. Look at those firms, because travel is usually 100% required.

try Angel List https://angel.co/jobs

I have worked for Accenture & Deloitte as a consultant and for many years and have implemented software used for internal teams.

It surprisngly works very similar to any other industry company. The software to be used internally comes from the top of the food chain and then pushed on to projects below it.

The goal is standardization across projects, so I think it would be extremely tough to use an "un-tested" or un-authorized tool at a project level without it coming from the top of the chain first.

Especially McKinsey where the process & methodologies are very defined. It would start from the top and then maybe use a "pilot" project for a small engagement.

They are often forward looking for their clients, but not forward looking internally if that makes sense.

Usually there is a "Tools & Methodology" team that is an internal team and that is who you should be selling to. This is the team that defines the tools that are used for projects.

I hope that helps.

Form a company with a generic consulting name, and brand yourself as yourself. That's what I do now and it works fine for me. When you bill give them your company billing information.

If your freelancing does get bigger than you can just step back to your company name.

Sell You, Bill your company.

Take a look at these articles from Mark Suster about enterprise sales:

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2013/03/19/one-of-the-big...

http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/on-selling/ (look at the PUCKKA links, those are great)

Love the writing style of this post. He may be in an introvert but he's a damn good writer!

I was scared in the last email I sent to over 30 people. Like /u/taternuts said, you have to be a little scared. But yes, you will get over it, but if it's a big push to prod - you will still be scared.

Work gap is fine as long as it is right after school. You have an easy story to account for the gap, and it's a good time to take a break.

Agree with all the comments so far. Take the interview, build great relationships with the people that you are interviewing with.

The good news is that you've only been on the job for a month, so if you do take the new job you won't look like a job hopper considering you won't even list this as a job.

As everyone said. Look out after yourself first and foremost. Don't burn any bridges with current employer either if you do decide to move on.

| the only other thing I would try is reaching out to one or more of their investors / board members

I think that's what he is doing right now :)

Could you clarify what your interview process is to get a wholesome picture of a candidate in a 30 minute interview? That would help me understand what your viewpoint is.

Why would you want to be less confrontational in an interview? The point is to see if the candidate is good or not, not "let's see how I can ask this question in the nicest way possible so I can get a nice and safe response that the candidate will just read off his / her resume".

The fact is this question weeds out people who truly havent' done anything difficult or unable to communicate their achievements properly. If you have an impressive set of skill / strength, then it should be easy enough for you to pick one.

In my mind the question forces the candidate to show the interviewer his / her:

1) Communication skills (i.e, is this person going to tell me all their problems, or just the one major problem that he/she needs help with)

2) What they view as an accomplishment or challenge

3) How they handle challenges

4) Their ambition (i.e, did they take a leadership position in their accomplishment or did they sit back and let everyone lead the project)

A chrome extension for twitter that:

1) Tells me via a % of what type of things they post (text only vs links, vs images, etc)

2) Tweets to followers % (If someone has 10k tweets and only 100 followers, that usually means they aren't worth following IMO)

3) allows me to filter by media type on the twitter website. So, let's just say I only want to view tweets that don't have media links.

I would pay about 5 dollars for that.

amazing.

ahh, I just read this after I wrote my post. What you said above would bother the hell out of me too! Try Austin. It's a much different place. Wait for the football season to start and go to a UT football game.

I've travelled quite a bit because of my previous IT Consulting job and I basically "lived" in one place for 6 months at a time.

I've also spent time in Seattle and Denver so I'll explain those just so you can compare you vs. me.

1) Chicago - Born and raised here. It's what you expect from a Big midwestern city. We're nice, but will cut you off on the road without thinking twice. Summer is when we're the nicest and most outgoing, Winter is essentially a black hole where you keep in touch with your existing friends and stay in. But overall, I've met a lot of nice and supporting people in chicago.

2) New York / New Jersey - Lived here for a year. It's a different vibe all together. Of course there are a lot of nice people, but expectations for you to be on your own and figure it out on yourself is much bigger here.

3) Seattle - I forget which suburban city it was (maybe kirkland) where there are pedestrian crossing flags to cross 4 lane streets. If that doesn't tell you what kind of city seattle suburbs are, then I'm not sure what else I can tell you. Extremely nice people, can't merge on the highway for the live of them and the only place where everyone drives the speed limit normally. In the end, really nice people but Im not an outdoor person and the cloudiness was actually affecting me.

4) Denver - nice outdoor people. That's all I can really say. I enjoyed denver and the people were always nice to me.

5) SF - A hectic place where the cab drivers know more about technology startups than you do. A wide variety of people where people pay too much to live in a city. Overall, nice people though but esp in the tech community an expectation that you must be part of a growing tech company to be successful.

6) Austin - Man, I do love this place. I can't stand houston or Dallas. I would rather live in Alaska then live in houston or dallas (mainly because of city layout). But Austin is a very nice city with people who are willing to help you. They still have a little of a texas attitude that everything is bigger in texas but an extremely friendly city. If you can't find friendly people in austin you are doing something wrong. These texans are extremely nice and plus you have a lot of converts from other cities that came here for the tech.

7) Los Angeles - I haven't been there for too long, but if you are looking for friendly I'm going to say this isn't your place. The roads aren't friendly and it ruins the experience for me.

8) Manchester, UK - I spent 6 months here and people call it a "rough place", but I enjoyed every second of it. If you're american it makes everything that much easier. You stick out and people love talking to anyone with an american accent.

It's not the same URL. Yours was the mobile version (it has a m.) and his was the normal URL.

I think this one got more traction just because of the timing of the post too being in the morning and getting enough traction to make it to front page.

You can also post something on reddit/r/<yourcity> if it's a large city. They can probably help you with other local resources for you to look into.