

The Other Stuff That's Not Product That You Need To Build Early - sachinag
http://blog.meatinthesky.com/the-other-stuff-thats-not-product-that-you-ne

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ryanwaggoner
_Make sure you've built a functional admin panel before you launch._

Sorry, but this is bad advice. For 99% of startups, their biggest risk is not
going to be spending too much time mucking around in the production database
because they don't have an admin panel, but that no one is going to show up or
care when they launch their product. Building cool stuff like admin panels,
metrics dashboards, and loggers is just more procrastination to keep from
doing the most difficult thing: launching.

If you're going to build those things at some point, make it _after_ you've
seen that users care enough about this product that you're not going to scrap
it and move on to the next one. Otherwise you're just wasting effort.

EDIT: To be fair, I think this is otherwise a great post. It is important to
build those things _early_ but I think building them pre-launch and pre-
validation is a big mistake.

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idlewords
I think it's symptomatic that the author does not mention building the part
where people _PAY YOU MONEY_.

Payment integration is a big pain and is something you should get into the
product early, because grafting it on later will hurt. The same goes for ad
management, if that is your business model.

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sachinag
Given that my startup I not only had people paying me money and then turning
it around and giving it out to others, I definitely know that pain. I just
totally thought of it as core to the product; people generally have asked me
about gateways and whatnot when they have their "ohmygodIhavethisidea"
conversations with me.

This was more about the stuff they didn't ask about that they should have, but
your point is exceptionally well taken - people who are picking a revenue
model should _support that revenue model before launch_.

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boundlessdreamz
Are you acting as middleman ? In the sense, people are paying you money for
products/services you don't own ? (An example would be online travel
companies)

If that is the case, which gateway did you choose. From the gateways I spoke
to this type of operation is difficult to get approved unless the final vendor
itself has a merchant account. Was that the case in your startup?

~~~
sachinag
Yes, Dawdle.com acts as a middleman between buyers and sellers. We got a
merchant account through Paymentech and used Payflow Pro as our gateway to
take money in and used PayPal's Mass Pay API to send money out (after an
aborted attempt to use ACH for disbursement). Dawdle is the merchant of record
and so holds the proceeds in escrow for some period of time to mitigate risk.

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wheels
I'll just offer some counterpoint, as we didn't do this. We created accounts
manually with a script for a long time. By the time we needed a panel (leads
were starting to get out of hand), I knocked out a fugly one in Rails in one
20 hour coding marathon. Then I banged up an email parser in Perl to add all
of our current accounts / correspondences. That was just a couple months back.

The biggest problem that I could see with building a panel up front is that
you might be building it for the wrong product. In my eyes, testing your
product to see if you get any traction would probably win.

~~~
gyardley
Ditto. When we needed to do a little admin, we just modified the database. (A
little risky, I suppose, but we were doing regular backups.) We only wrote
administrative tools when things got too complicated for the least-
technically-sophisticated member of the team - me - to easily tweak things.

As it turned out, some of the most common customer support issues we had
weren't anticipated by us in advance, so building out an admin panel would've
still only met part of our needs.

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almost
+1 for Django admin! The amount of effort it alone saves would make Django
worth while (for me) even if the rest was no better than PHP (luckily that's
not the case though).

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tdoggette
There's an overwhelming amount of cool-looking options for analytics. Is there
a standout option for logging and visualizing everything that one would need,
or is it better to have two or three different analytics suites?

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rbritton
The pitfall I've run into when building CMS interfaces for the sales types is
that they always want to do something you didn't enable it to do. The image
always displays on the right, so naturally they want it on the left, and you
end up having to go muck with the code anyway.

Sure, there are plenty of vetted CMS systems out there (e.g., Drupal,
Wordpress, etc.), but they're massive overkill when you only need an events
list or something.

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bdr
#777 on white is just plain abusive

