
My startup bombed and I lost everything (here’s what I learned) - chejazi
https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/57cknb/my_startup_bombed_and_i_lost_everything_heres/
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avmich
> Avoid friends/family as cofounders.

Looks tricky to do. If your cofounder is a strictly business partner - how can
you make sure you have the same vision/values? And vice versa, if you're
pulling the same company together - should you do whatever to avoid becoming
friends?

I understand the idea, but literal alternatives don't seem much better?

~~~
fuzzfactor
Well, 12 months later he started "another SaaS with a couple friends, and with
less than $1k invested between us, 3 months in we were live with sales and it
was acquired 6 months after that."

Apparently not following his own advice here worked out better for him this
time.

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wsgeorge
What I find about most of these pieces of advice is, they really just come
down to common sense. Not that it takes anything away from the value in there,
but I've long given up chasing advice.

~~~
erroneousfunk
Yeah, what I find crazy about this story is that it seems like the poster
decided to start a startup based solely on watching "The Social Network" and
reading a couple Inc. Magazine articles.

I mean, "let's take $50k spend most of our time/money on picking a baller
domain name and making logos"? What? Startup culture is toxic.

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aregsar
You want to always be in default startup mode so here is my contrary advice to
number 2 which also sets you up for applying number 7

Spend a week setting up your future startup efforts for success at the
beginning and then focus completely on reaching your customers and iterating
on your solution to their problems.

step 1: first protect yourself legally by setting up a LLC you can use
[http://www.legalzoom.com/](http://www.legalzoom.com/)

or might even try to get access to stripe atlas
[https://stripe.com/atlas/faq](https://stripe.com/atlas/faq)

also get your terms of service setup. here is a resource for that.
[http://snapterms.com/](http://snapterms.com/)

2-spend a few hours getting a generic domain name that is easy to spell. here
is the registrar I use [https://dnsimple.com/](https://dnsimple.com/) also get
SSL certs. you can use dnsimple but a free lets encryt cert is even better.
[https://letsencrypt.org/](https://letsencrypt.org/)

3-spend a day or two setting up continuos integration this involves a code
repo such as github, gitlab or bitbucket. and continuous build and testing
service such as cicleci, travisci or codeship (although all the repos are
integrating build and testing features)

4-setup a hosting service such as AWS, digital ocean or heroku. Personaly I
would start out with heroku as hosting service but to keep costs low with a
bit more effort AWS proper or digital ocean can work as well. setup a staging
server so that when you push code to your repo it is automatically deployed to
your staging server and from there you should set it up to promote the code to
production with a single command. I use heroku pipelines in conjunction with
some simple automation scripts for this.

Also at minimum setup hourly backup and restores for any databases that you
may use.

5-by the end of the week you should be able to push a hello world to your real
production server out there on the open internet.

Now at this point you have a real platform out there in the real world to
start iterating on. Start talking to your customers and build really small
features and push them to your repo on a daily basis to get feedback from your
users.

Since you have a generic domain name you can pivot in any direction keeping
the focus on just the one project that you are iterating on.

One last thing. Start a blog related to your business and talk about what your
mission is, your product features and your technology

~~~
aregsarkissian
One important detail I left out is that you need to also instrument you app to
give usage analytics on how users behave on your site from the very beginning.
This could be in the form of a service like google analytics but also custom
code tracks metrics specific to the features that you are deploying.

