

Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product? - iseff

In my own experience, and from reading Hacker News, I've noticed that there is still a lot of friction when starting a startup. Things like incorporating (choosing which type, what state, actually filing, etc), payroll, taxes, and so on. These are all tasks that just seem to take founders away from working on their real goal.<p>I was wondering what tasks take you away from working on your goals -- what things do you wish you could just quickly take care of and get back to work?
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pg
The two biggest time-sucks for YC alumni seem to be talking to investors and
dealing with visa problems.

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aristus
An interesting thing about YC is that it saves time spent securing funding at
the early seed stage: a week on the application and a week preparing for the
interview, with a definite yes or no by a certain date.

Can you see later stage investors (100k, 500k, etc) doing the same thing?

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pg
They certainly could be a lot more efficient about it than they are now.

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ivankirigin
Do you think you would be closer to typical investors if you had "rolling
admissions" like they do?

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pg
Yes, in a sense. We just couldn't deal with as many startups if we had rolling
admissions. So that would mean funding fewer, which would let us take longer
deciding.

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nostrademons
It's actually quite possible to just ignore those tasks, work on your goal,
and then retroactively take care of them once your goal's on it way.

There's a big task that has to be done beforehand, though, and is a huge pain:
figuring out what people want (and will pay for). It's much harder than it
seems.

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iseff
Heh, I totally agree.

Unfortunately, these tasks do have to be done at some point, and they aren't
the goal of your startup, so they do take you off-course. Minimizing the time
they take would be a good thing, I think.

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litewulf
Not starving in the street: AKA full time job.

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sherl0ck
vote one on this.

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tom_rath
The only tasks which I find stop me from working on my product are various
administration and customer support chores. The one-time items like
incorporation are trivial in terms of time-cost.

Being forced to step away from development has actually saved me more trouble
that it's taken away. Being forced to take a breather to tally up expenses or
polish up some documentation takes my mind away from the development task at
hand and helps give me a better perspective on things when I return. On far
more occasions than I'd care to admit, I'll find myself thinking about the
'absolutely essential' work I was intently doing to improve my product and
realize it was either completely unnecessary or else could be done in a better
manner.

Those insights would not likely be gained if I had been focused entirely on
development. Mix it up.

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tomsaffell
> customer support chores

 _This may sound trite_ : That's not a bad problem to have..

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paul9290
Reading Hacker News

though i use it for taking breaks...

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picnichouse
My other projects.

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kwamenum86
Deliberation....you can discuss and plan things all you want but at some point
you have to just dive in

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babyshake
I'm at a stage where I'm hacking most of the time (yay!), but I've learned
that I can get really stubborn about solving problems, and don't know when to
just take the loss, and do something in a way that is less robust but at least
works.

In fact, I'd say I waste several hours a week being stubborn about problems,
and I'm not a particularly stubborn person.

I would pay good money for a solution that always gave me insight into when
I've been spending too much time on a task...but I'd be surprised if that
could be pulled off.

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tlrobinson
I believe what you're referring to is yak shaving:

<http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html>

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unalone
The only thing stopping me is that I'm not entirely confident with PHP yet.
I'm working on small sample projects until I'm certain I can go out and build
everything optimally.

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liuliu
Prototyping fast, then start the second edition. Don't wait until you are
confident enough to start. I find that whatever I do whatever language I use,
I always do the best in the second version.

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unalone
I'm mocking up every page in HTML right now. My cofounder and I are scouring
over all the details, trying to make absolutely gorgeous pages. (I know every
person who makes an HTML thinks this, but I truly think that the few pages
we've finalized are superb.)

Next semester, I'm in an advanced PHP course - enough to really firm up the
things I'm working on. I'll probably have a prototype made winter break, so
I'll be able to fix up the beta and stabilize it as part of that class, and
have a working model in time to apply for YCombinator this summer.

I'm working with other PHP projects so I can get confident enough in PHP to
make my site. The code for it is really simple: one of the things that makes
me certain about my idea is that it's an incredibly basic one that hasn't been
used in the way I'll be using it. I'm not too worried about it getting
complex, so I'll know exactly when I'm ready to dash it out. But HTML first.

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curiousgeorge
Unless you're certain about the UI elements, doing a hard design may be a bad
move. I personally get better mileage from building the core
architecture/functionality first, and working on the rest, ideally with public
feedback on both after a certain stage. I've made significant changes in
usability in the past as a result of this. If you end up hard-coding stuff
before it gets scrutinized in the forge of actual use, you'll have a harder
time making changes down the road.

YMMV. It helps if you use a framework or something else that can get you
started. Just remember that customizing a framework isn't your core
competency.

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unalone
I'm very good with frameworks - I've got several years' experience with Drupal
- but this project I want coded by hand, because I want to be absolutely
certain of what's going on on every page of the project.

The UI elements are pretty much set. This is an idea that's been a long time
coming, and we've got ourselves almost entirely planned out.

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aschobel
Just work on the product!

It's way too easy to spend time on things that aren't core to your business.

Don't worry about where to open a bank account, where to incorporate, etc.
This can all be fixed later on, and won't prevent you from making something
people want.

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curiousgeorge
payment systems.

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swombat
That doesn't stop me, but boy is it a pain in the ass (I'm currently building
our payment system).

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nailer
Finding good documentation on PyXPCOM.

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nailer
odd, I didn't expct to be moderated up there. Is someone else working on
something involving PyXPCOM? Wanna chat?

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tuukkah
A friend of mine is working in a research project about integrating and
contextualising web and desktop applications. He's building their system using
Firefox, PyXPCOM and SproutCore. I have an email address on my profile page.

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FiReaNG3L
Fulltime PhD :(

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Tichy
Who is forcing you? Also, doesn't doing a PhD come with lots of opportunities
to do interesting stuff? What are you working on? Maybe we could exchange
places, I always wanted to do a PhD...

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pclark
can't get my head around ruby on rails..

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mellow
If you are struggling with RoR, I would recommend doing a 1-5 day online
tutorial on Ruby (the length depends on how quickly you can pick it up). I
skipped pure Ruby and went straight to RoR. In retrospect this was a mistake
as a grounding in Ruby would have saved me a lot of pain.

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pclark
can you recommend any courses?

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rksprst
School.

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SapphireSun
school

