truthseeker

There are many who peddle stuff which is not their primary source of wealth. Suze Orman became wealthy not by saving for 401k and 'paying herself first' as she preaches. She became wealthy by selling her books, shows and other stuff.

Many an entrepreneur, when their products failed to get the traction they expected became: - social media consultants - lean canvas experts - marketing experts for startups

I would like to hear from them how they are different from the late night infomercials who teach you to become rich from real estate and government grants.

It depends on what you do at the startup. If you are coding away just like you would at the electronic trading firm, you wouldn't learn much about running your own startup.

Are you involved in customer development, talking to investors, making connections as part of the startup? If not, there's not much upside.

I do not know if wakemate made any improvements lately but after giving it a try several times after I got it, I gave up. It sits in a box alongside old power adapters and other cables.

The main problem for me was when I toss and turn at night, it loses contact with the phone (sitting on the end table) and starts screaming 'Lost contact, lost contact'.

If I continued to use it, my wife would have thrown me out onto the patio to sleep.

There were several other occasions where wakemate never woke me up.

I would have loved to see wakemate work, I wanted to root for a startup, see them succeed. You only get so many chances with a single customer. In my books, they failed badly on their promise. continuously. starting with their delivery of the product and then later with the product itself.

I find Rand Fishkin incredible in sharing all the details of SeoMoz. It takes guts to do that. Balsamiq, Bingo Card creator and a few others on HN are transparent when it is not a great deal of money.

(I haven't seen Balsamiq post detailed revenue and their breakup lately.)

I would say do what feels comfortable to you. Most likely, it is to keep revenues etc. secret. Revealing those details might get some eyeballs in the short term but not customers.

Thank you for the awesome and detailed response. Those are pitfalls I can definitely try to avoid for my venture.

Lot of what I am learning from entrepreneurship are things I read over and over again but you don't own the advice until you experience it.

* But we relied too much on others' self-assessments.* Can you explain? Do you mean customer development brings in everyone's biases into the picture and not the truth?

What do you think is a better way to do customer development?

Right on with your logic though I am not sure if anyone is willing to give up even 12%.

6 to 8% seems to be the high numbers I have seen or heard.

I hope your post will show the people who are not experienced with the startup equity world a way of thinking what their offer is worth.

There is another missing piece from your comment that the employees need to consider, it is dilution.

It is ignorance on how startup equity works that causes most mistakes.

Well, Guys, learn from some of us who have been there and got screwed before you.

Next up on HN:

Blog post from housekeeper of Mr. Steve about how exacting he is on some occasions and how kind he is on other.

I think Steve Jobs and his contributions to the tech world are extraordinary. I wish him well and hope he lives happily for a long long time. Just as I wish for anyone I know or do not know, that they live happily.

Steve is not a friend of either you or me. I do not need to know how he was as a neighbor, his driving record, his family life or anything that does not concern his work. I am not interested in those details of Steve or Salma Hayek or Steve Ballmer.

Can we stop senselessly idolizing people in areas that are not their expertise?

This is exactly the reason why I've never been interested in working for a startup. Learning experience? Yeah, I've got that working during the dotcom boom/bust cycle.

Your reasoning is spot on but the numbers get even more unappealing once dilution in future rounds of financing kicks in.

If you have the experience, be a co-founder at a startup with pretty big upside. If you can't find that, the 150K/year salaries are a much better deal than <5% equities.

In my view there are multiple things at play.

1. They raised exorbitant amount of money which set quite high expectations from them.

2. The app didn't take off as expected (at least the vocal early adopters hate it).

3. Peter Pham (the designer co-founder) and chief scientist, DJ Patil quit or got fired, which raised eyebrows.

The backend of the operation is a hookup with a manufacturer who will supply them to us.

They are not major brand names like Nike or Steve Madden but quite nice.

I have the responsibility of driving traffic to the website and get sales.

YC or techstars see you as a point in time. Fixed and whether you are right for their model or not. However, you are not fixed. you evolve, grow, talk to customers, pivot, refine business model, etc.

They don't see all of that. Or probably see your past as an indicator of future. May be you may not have the potential for another google or youtube but you might be successful. Successful by your own measure not someone else's yardstick.

You said it...responsible for something that someone cares about. Find that out first if it is something someone cares about. If not you could be spinning your wheels for a long time.

How did you find a business mentoring program in your city? Are there any resources that you are aware of? I am in the US and would love to be part of such a program.

May be you should have provided context? like 'I've dealt with similar things and if you are interested download the book I wrote?'

I am not the one who down modded you but your posting came off as self promotion. HTH

Are confusing Americans and American politics? I haven't been to many countries but I find Americans the kindest and helpful people around.

May be there are some advantages to a 2 party system but it left the whole country divided and there seems to be no middle ground anywhere in sight.

The biggest problem I face is finding the initial set of users whom you can interact with to identify the product/market fit.

Lets say your customers are small businesses. - Do you cold call them about an online product/webapp? - Adwords is too expensive when you are not sure if there is demand for the product.

Finding the first 100 customers who love your product is the hardest thing (or so it seems to me).

I would love to hear stories on how you guys went about finding the initial set of customers.

May be a partnership with web hosting companies will drive traffic? Affiliate marketing in those area probably will help.

I agree with you.

I totally believe Eric Ries knows what he is talking about, I love his presentation style and he seems like a really genuine guy.

I follow him on twitter and find the sales pitch for the past several months way too much to deal with.

Also the constant self-promotion of the ignite/simulcast/whatever conference they are hosting really annoying.

May be I am missing some marketing secret Eric Ries et. al have figured out but it doesn't seem to work on me.

I've looked through and tried to follow some tips on psdtuts. Most of them are over my head too (unfortunately).

I started looking for courses in community colleges around my area but haven't found any that are geared towards web designers.

Yeah, themeforest is the route I usually take but to customize anything, I am still lost.

plus they are used to epic winning

With all these articles, I got large doses of Groupon S-1 wisdom from HN.

I recently had lunch with an ex-colleague who invariably dropped the idea of building a coupon site together. Everyone is doing so well, we could do even a smaller scale operation and do well.

I was surprised that my friend who is quite a bit into affiliate marketing, internet businesses is not even aware of anything wrong with Groupon. He thought they were a slam dunk investment.

Moral: There are lot more people who are not aware of the pitfalls and probably be hungry for the shares once Groupon goes public.

See that crew of criminal alien hispanic landscapers? Are you being serious or are you having a bad day? I would be scared to be around someone like you who makes such sweeping generalizations.

I didn't see any advice there. I agree with your point about not taking advice from successful people about everything. It irks me whenever Einstein is quoted on God. Einstein himself probably never intended the quote to be abused the way it is tossed around these days.

fyi, there is no contact info in your profile.

Absolutely correct. As a developer, I am willing to work with idea guys as long as they can show their previous work. Success or failure, it doesn't matter as long as they hustled enough to get something done. Just like I am willing to show my technical skills with a portfolio, projects etc.

Most users don't mind paying for services with their time. eg: watching tv programs with ads in them vs HBO subscription. The cases where you see people paying for services is when the service will provide them with value/convenience/time savings and the users care for the value/convenience and time savings

I could check if my servers are up every hour without subscribing to pingdom. Do I want to do it though? no. It's too painful and time consuming. For most people, it really doesn't matter if their desktop is up or down, their livelihood doesn't depend on it.

Try Sparrow. I've been running their trial version as well. It is really good and 10$ for full version.

I quit my job few months back. How much money you have in the bank has no bearing on how you feel about not having constant income. (fyi, I saved up lot more than your number). On a day without much progress, I stress myself that had I been at my job and goofed off, I would still make the money.

Here are a few tips: 1. Have a project that you are ready to launch. 2. validated from users/customers that they are interested in it. 3. Figured out how to market your project/product.

I had 1) but not 2 and 3. It is a long process to learn what customers care about and what channels you need leverage to market it.

I read everything about startups over the years , worked at one and still wish someone told me specific things like 1. How to validate a project idea before you spend too much time on it. 2. How to effectively market it.

Goodluck.

I am surprised that so many people are willing to open a bank account with someone you've never heard of. I couldn't even find if they are FDIC insured.

I know several friends who wouldn't use mint.com. For them, it is a single point of failure. You can explain all the technical details you want but there is no way to get past their fears.

When shit hits the fan, you can expect the US govt. to bail out Bank Of America. SimpleBank? I am not so sure.