
Do “Shitty” Work - honzzz
http://ryanhoover.me/post/66092903567/do-shitty-work
======
charlieirish
This really echoes with me - I see too many startups focusing on the wrong
things or more importantly forgetting that they need to do everything...

1) You still have to do the things that you're bad at

You're a developer/designer/architect/[insert profession] so that's what you
do. You build great apps or you design beautiful pixels. That's probably what
people have paid you to do and that's also what you're good at. It's also
highly likely that you enjoy it. The problem is that you focus too hard on
what you can do and not on things you can't do. This means that you launch
products that are half-baked. Most people launch without focus on customers or
marketing but sometimes it's a lack of focus on design or user interaction.
The point here is that you need to start looking at things that you don't
enjoy because that's probably the area that needs the most attention. Now,
this doesn't mean you have to learn how to be something you're not. You can
outsource it, hire someone, partner with someone... but you do need to do it
if you want to be successful.

2) Do the unscalable things

This is of course copied from pg's essay [1] but it is so relevant to
startups. Early in the life of a startup, you need to make sure you have
excellent customer service and a thirst for growth. 'Moving the needle' is
what counts - you need to do it quickly. When you're bootstrapping this can
often mean cold calling or 'shoe leather'. Many first-timers brush this aside
as 'old marketing' and 'it'll never work'. It does work. However, it's hard
work. Focus on the things that move the needle early on, however troublesome
and manual, because you then you will learn what's important enough to build.
You can then automate much of what you already know and move on to the next
challenge.

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

~~~
weixiyen
Doing the unscalable things only works if the LTV per user is very high. You
can't just apply that every single startup.

~~~
jmngomes
It doesn't apply with to every startup, but it does to most.

Getting early adopters is usually a very "manual" process, even more so in B2B
startups.

My business' sales will be entirely online once (if) it gets into cruise
speed. Then, the CAC will lower and the LTV will rise.

But until then, I have to spend a lot of) time cold calling, getting intros
and doing the first B2B sales myself.

If I don't do this, I won't have any customers from where to compute a CAC or
a LTV.

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birken
Don't go overboard though. The whole world doesn't play out with a hindsight
bias, and just asking yourself in the morning "why is this important" wont
necessarily actually improve your choices. I have seen some incredible
successes coming from very unexpected places, places where had somebody asked
themselves "is this likely a giant waste of time" the answer would have been
yes.

At the end of the day, if your startup is going to succeed then you are going
to have to do something amazing. If you are spending all your time stifling
your own instincts to follow somebody else's playbook, you probably are in
trouble anyways.

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RyanZAG
Just wanted to add another view on this: wasting a few days creating a perfect
design for something that you never even create is not necessarily wasted
time. During that time you're thinking through all the different interactions
your product could have and getting experience on putting together a good
design for when you do need one. It's pretty good training and you learn the
same whether you wasted the time or not. It's obviously better to not waste
the time, but don't knock yourself short for having done it after the fact
since you probably learned a lot of important stuff that will help in the
future.

~~~
rrhoover
Great point, Ryan. There's definitely value in this process and thinking
through the problem and potential solution. The question is: is it the most
valuable use of your time?

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branksy
This is a great post, and it's a good illustration of the difference between
fun hacking/project buildling, and actually creating a business around
software.

The ugly fact is, when you're creating a startup, only about 5% of your time
is spent on the fun coding stuff, the main implementation of your whole idea.

The other 95% is spent on "plumbing" \-- refactoring, credit-card integration,
e-mail newsletters, browser bugs, server administration, and so on. And that's
even before you get to things like hiring, fund-raising, and such.

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beat
Something I learned over the years... if your code quality is too high, it
means you're sacrificing productivity.

~~~
philbo
I couldn't disagree with this sentiment more.

Of course, it depends on your definition of quality, but for the sake of
argument I'm assuming that we're including things like test coverage, code
complexity, code cleanliness/readability, structural soundness (cohesion over
coupling, the single reponsibility principle etc) and so on.

The point with all of these things is that as much as they might seem to be a
waste of time when people can be hacking on something else, they (imho) save
orders of magnitude more time than that in terms of maintenance of a codebase:
being able to quickly fix issues as they occur; how quickly new developers can
grok the codebase; how easy it is to add new features that were not part of
the original design.

Unfortunately I have no hard data to back that opinion up, but it is what I
intuitively believe to be true based on experiences.

~~~
beat
It is dependent on the definition of quality. I'm not saying just throw crap
code over the wall as quickly as possible! I've seen the consequences of that
often enough. But I've also seen a lot of premature optimization masked as
"quality", and at a certain inflection point, it becomes so time-consuming
that it threatens the project.

For example, do you really need 100% unit test coverage of all corner cases?

~~~
RogerL
If it is the front end to a banking app, or otherwise involved with account
security, then yes. If it is an "Angry Elves" game with no login, then
probably not.

As always, these memes are useful to guide/test our thinking, but not very
useful if used without reflection.

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rrhoover
What's the most important thing on your to do list today?

~~~
robodale
further validate ideas found while talking to business owners in my niche,
also setup a time to talk to a competitor in my niche that offered to share
pains and problems common in my niche that he's found over the years. Lastly,
respond to emails from several business owners in my niche who were willing to
talk about their pains and problems...and where I can provide a software
solution to them. Notice there is no wireframing, code writing, blog posts,
etc etc in my todo list. Until I have 5-10 prepaid customers...I'm not
touching my code editor.

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ebarock
In the end when I read "Combatting Fake Progress" it sound so real. It seems
that so many companies are trapped in real bondages and they just seems to be
running without any kind of plans.

~~~
pyrocat
I'm a fan of the word Boondoggle for that type of situation.

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simplimedia
What's the goal of a startup? The unscalable stuff works if the goal is to be
a real business that provides real revenue.

