stephenhacking

So, it's "bragging rights". But, temporary bragging rights considering the fact that they have at least ~100 teams per year and unless your startup goes somewhere after YC, you're just wasting your time.

Why are so many people fretting about not getting into YC and why do crappy stories like this get upvoted? If getting into Y-Combinator was your idea of validation, your startup is doomed anyways.

Not very well.

Nope.

For starters, you'll need to start doing the following:

1. Register a Pvt. Ltd. to do business <-- hard to do unless you're Indian or someone who's Indian on board 2. Register with the RBI and get stamped from them every time you remit money from outside India <-- painful 3. Not be able to use a majority of payment gateways that collect payments in foreign currency if you want to directly tie it to your Indian co. 4. Process ESI if you're paying under $400/mo 5. Process PF if you're paying over $400/mo and have more than 10 employees

It's paperwork, paperwork and more paperwork!

As for being late to the party, cost of labor has gone up at least 4 times in the past 10 years and it's going to probably go up another 3 times in the next five years. Smart people are no longer that easy to find and very few folks actually are interested in working for startups. Cost of infrastructure, electricity, broadband, everything is higher in Bangalore and more at par with Austin or Boston tbh.

I run a startup in Bangalore and Chennai, so I can explain the costs involved:

In Bangalore

Your cost for 2000 square feet office space would be at least $2000/mo in a fairly decent building; add to this 10 months rental advance which is $20k

Your cost for each developer would be between $1k - $2k - this of course depends on the kind of work they'd need to do as well as how much experience you're looking for in people. Do remember that almost everyone in India expects a 10 - 20% raise every year. Senior level PHP folks will cost you $1,500-ish considering the fact that freshers out of school get paid $600-ish a month.

You'd also need to invest substantially in management staff in India because it's very hard to get anything done unless you have a manager for every 4-5 people, unless you get really good self-motivated guys who'll cost you a bomb. Managers will end up costing you $2k+

And, I forgot to mention - laws and the government are a bitch here.

I think you're just a few years late in jumping to the Bangalore bandwagon :)

Yes sir. My bad.

Medium has a prettier editor? I could get featured on the first page of medium if my content doesn't suck?

And, I was talking about Medium vs my personal blog. Not really talking about Medium vs HN.

You're right. I was more active on Inbound.org vs Hacker News simply because I used to primarily write marketing content. The post I wrote yesterday which was actually a rant about the growth hacking buzzword hit the first page of HN momentarily. That obviously caused a server crash which made me want to switch ship to Medium / Quora.

Medium's editor was just a lot nicer.

Great argument. But, not quite the same. I run my personal blog on a $5/mo digital ocean box - I'm too cheap to shell out $100/mo for a managed SingleHop box.

I don't know how to use terminal too much, I just learnt how to reset mysql AFTER my server crashed yesterday.

Yet another yay for medium.

Possible true, but that's a tad too technical for me. I just want to focus on the writing.

I used to think the same way. But, propagation of your content is a lot more important than just feeling good that it's hosted on your own blog.

A mysql reset seems to have fixed it.

Server down. I'm not a hacker, so I need to sit down and figure this out :)

I agree. The dictionary needs an update, but attaching the suffix to everything is just a tad annoying. My cousin told me that somebody asked her to "hack the computer" when she wanted her to just turn the darn thing on!

Freshbooks.

I initially checked out iDoneThis and liked the idea, but $5/user/mo was a little too much for my bootstrapped startup.

Hence, I just created a mashup of Google Calendar + Docs and Gmail to create a solution does the same thing as iDoneThis for zero dollars.

I'm not certain if the analogy that news is bad for you is true. I've heard this multiple times from multiple people and practiced going on a news diet (temporarily) even though I'm used to being on top of what's happening.

What I ended up realizing was that the news wasn't really affecting me, because, what I was reading was not the crap about celebs, gossip and other nonsense, but actual stuff around me that was having an impact on the world.

I don't know if I could go on without reading about the Arab Spring, or the Nuclear tests in North Korea, even though they don't directly impact me or my daily life.

I'm not sure if I agree with this.

1. There's nothing wrong in failing 2. Investors run a business - with a business, you have things that fail and things that succeed; they know that there is a probability of your startup failing and have gone through that multiple times

If your investors don't want to talk to you anymore just because your startup failed - you have shitty investors.

If they truly believe that you are solely responsible for the failure - they suck. It is their responsibility to help you succeed, and when you dont, be there for you and try to take responsibility for a small part of that failure.

I know it sucks to fail. When impending doom closes on you, you always feel like writing a 200 word rant essay on pastebin, but it is OK to fail and you will succeed. It's all a question of learning from this experience and moving on..