

Entrepreneurs Tell What They Wish They’d Known before Founding First Startup - dh
http://davidhauser.com/post/35203066523/advice-from-21-entrepreneurs

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pg
Notice how a lot of the answers form a single connected thread: how hard it is
to get users, that doing so depends on making what they want, and that to make
what they want you have to understand them (instead of working on some idea
conceived in a vacuum).

~~~
munaf
Interesting. It surprises me that many tech entrepreneurs dismiss UX methods
as fluff when they were designed to accomplish this exact goal.

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glimcat
It doesn't help that user research is constantly getting conflated with how to
do drop shadows and gradients.

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GFischer
My personal takeaways:

Mike Arsenault's suggestion of the Van Westendorp's Price Sensitivity Meter

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensitivity_Meter)

<http://orconsulting.com/blog/?p=133>

Just what I needed right now (I'm struggling to find the correct price for an
app, was going to go with the market).

Something that also resonates with me is:

"I wish that I knew how difficult it is to acquire a customer, get them to pay
for your product and believe it’s as magical as you think it is."

Edit: changed broken Wikipedia link.

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ljd
Just a head's up, that link is broken. I think you may have meant:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensit...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Westendorp%27s_Price_Sensitivity_Meter)

Also, I just want to mention that if you have the ability to change your price
rapidly then using a dynamic pricing API[0] might be better suited for
determining the best price.

[0] Disclosure: this is what we do, but don't feel compelled to use us.

~~~
krmmalik
Is your product for shopping carts only or can it be used with anything? What
if for example i was selling something using something like gumroad or
shoplocket?

~~~
ljd
Our product is just a REST API, so you could use it with anything. We have
been building out integrations with shopping carts but I think Gumroad would
be a perfect application for it.

~~~
krmmalik
Excellent. I look forward to trying it in the near future.

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ArbitraryLimits
These people seem to have been chosen because of(and their advice ordered by)
their physical attractiveness rather than their actual entrepreneurial
success.

Edit: OK, I kind of take it back. I started paying attention at #4 and stopped
at #10.

~~~
napoleond
They must have changed the order (and added a few people) in the 15 minutes
since you wrote this comment.

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ssmoot
Gotta say, that font-color is absolutely terrible. Light on light, really
difficult to read.

~~~
lnanek2
Yeah, had a tough time reading it as well.

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trustfundbaby
> Don’t hire people that are getting a salary bump up by working with you

Anyone else find that piece of advice a bit odd? Wouldn't someone like that be
more of an asset since they were (ostensibly) getting paid closer to their
worth than before, especially if they actually fit your culture?

~~~
WiseWeasel
My interpretation is that early-stage start-ups need employees motivated
primarily by something other than money (at least in the short term).

Accepting a position at a higher pay than your current one is a low-risk
proposition, and start-ups are not an ideal environment for people who prefer
to play it safe. Working to make their equity valuable in the long term should
be a higher priority for early employees than extracting short-term financial
gains.

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moens
My takeaway (Cliff's Notes):

Customer: build from distribution backwards / know your customers / build
small or incomplete first in order to test demand

Self: running a company is an emotional roller-coaster, be prepared mentally,
schedule the important stuff, your team is extremely important

Company: build necessary metrics from day one, price test / analyze, iterate
quickly, learn always

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edw519
What I liked most about this post: not so much the answers, but the fact that
the answers were all so different...further emphasizing that there rarely is
_one right answer_ , but many possibilities and that you have to find your
own.

Great read. Thank you, OP.

~~~
mmishra
I agree. It is truly a great read.

I also read the book "Connect the Dots" 2 years back. That tells the founding
stories of 20-25 founders. But all those stories are from India and are about
general businesses.

It is so inspiring to read success stories of other people and you also learn
the way they think about the problems and the way they tackle it.

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songzme
it seems that the recurring theme is "You can loose so much time worrying
about things that don’t even matter" - Gautam

"start saying NO to things that would take me away from what really needed my
attention" - Renee

"is the question I am agonizing over right now likely to be the thing I will
agonize over four years from now? The answer is usually no." - Bo

The main idea I got from this is to re-evaluate the things you are doing every
day and prioritize the tasks that are absolutely essential to the startup.

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dh
Tumblr is having a problem today, guess we have to move the blog

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bhauer
Was one of them capacity planning?

~~~
advertising
Ding! next

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why-el
This link seems to be working:

[http://davidhauser.com/post/35203066523/advice-
from-21-entre...](http://davidhauser.com/post/35203066523/advice-
from-21-entrepreneurs)

~~~
GFischer
I get this message:

"We're sorry Our servers are over capacity and certain pages may be
temporarily unavailable. We're working quickly to resolve the issue."

I got there through Google's Web Cache:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://davidhauser.com/post/35203066523/advice-
from-21-entrepreneurs)

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funkwyrm
This has happened to me often enough lately that I really wish someone would
implement peer-to-peer hosting in a form that will replace the way the current
internet works.

~~~
stephengillie
Apparently this is currently possible, or will soon be possible, on Chrome and
Firefox -- able to cache websites, and able to serve websites, through client-
to-client communications.

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robwhitley
A very interesting one: "Never take advice from anyone who hasn’t done or
isn’t doing what you want to accomplish."

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noAtlas
Thanks so much for the great post. I can definitely identify with the
emotional roller coaster aspect.

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amerf1
What users really want. That's a billion dollar answer before starting the
start up

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cerebrum
Interesting

