

Ask HN: Share a learning & a happy moment from your startup in 2013 - jyothi

With the year ending &amp; many a startup founders around the world working on their dreams through the midnight - it would be great to celebrate it with your best moments and share a learning to help others<p>PS: One liners preferred
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jasonkester
Happy, unexpected moment: Added a stupidly expensive "Enterprise" pricing tier
as a polite way of declining business from users who were taking up too many
resources to bother trying to service.

And people started buying it.

~~~
lshemesh
shit I need to do this ASAP!

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georgespencer
Learning: if you ask your users to help you improve your product they will
give you bad ideas. If you ask them to tell you stories about what keeps them
up at night they will give you gold.

Happy moment: growing way faster than we did the year before. Rentify now
transacts with more landlords than nearly every brick and mortar letting agent
in the UK.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The old story is true: ask a farmer at the turn of the century (next last
anyway) what they wanted, they'd say "a horse that pulls harder and eats less
hay". They never said "a tractor".

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lshemesh
Best moment: Tutorialize getting its first paying customer

Learning: If you're going to use a technology like MongoDB make sure you're
using it the way it was intended to be used.

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collin128
Testing a new hypothesis after 18 months that resulted in 5 new paying
customers AND an exciting new direction for our startup.

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moootPoint
The heart warming satisfaction of convincing my company to use unit tests, and
seeing them come online for the first time.

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kranner
Localization matters for mobile apps.

addendum: this might be even more true for niche apps. My $5 iOS app sells way
more in non-US/non-English stores.

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pardner
Hitting ramen profitability and being able to click the "donate" button on
many of the gems and plugins that helped us get there.

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jyothi
Learning: _Single Focus. Speed._ We digressed a bit and we lost the game both
ends a bit. Wish we had focused on one thing.

Happy Moment: We were 17 people and we went out for a trip from the company,
stayed in a good resort, had a time-off. It made me happy to think back from
where it started.

edit: going by what I said on the post - one liners. removed rest.

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JoeAltmaier
Quality experience translates into repeat customers and steady growth. Not
features; not highly-paid sales teams; not flashy design. Just support the
customers you have with good empathetic skilled staff, beef up the quality of
your pipes and codecs, make the on-boarding experience clean and clear, and
the customers get on board.

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Kiro
Remove the PS.

