

Ask HN: Any interest in learning how startups actually work? - paulsingh

I've been throwing around this idea of interviewing startups to learn how the actual systems and processes work behind the scenes. (ie, what do you use to handle billing and how does it tie into everything else? how about customer support?)<p>I put up the second interview today (http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/back-office-exposed-zippykid) and was hoping I could get some feedback from other HN readers.<p>Is this interesting? Any areas you want me to dive particularly deep on?
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patio11
I am _incredibly_ interested in well-documented business or technical
processes, particularly at startups that run at a smaller scale than the
Google / Facebook / etc tier who usually publish that sort of thing.

What's interesting? Oh, where to start, where to start. Dashboards. Metrics.
Customer service processes. Architectural decisions. Rationales and
priorities, most particularly "We intentionally avoid doing X, because..."

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paulsingh
Exactly what I needed to know - thank you, thank you, thank you. :)

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mattrepl
Very interesting. I'm interested in hearing about working with open source
projects, selling data, and customer support; I'm especially interested in how
startups handle bugs in newer open source projects. Do you spend time
identifying the cause and submitting a patch, switch technologies, or work on
something else and punt the decision?

This is a specific system design question, but I'd also like to hear about
choosing between job queues (e.g., Beanstalk) and batch systems (e.g., Hadoop)
for soft real-time data processing.

Interesting startups to interview:

\- FlightCaster and BackType (lots of data, users get product for free,
discuss process of finding and selling to customers interested in associated
data; both also deal with real-time data)

\- Shopify (supporting users that use your product to sell their product)

\- banksimple (regulated industry)

\- DuckDuckGo (building a system to compete with a wealthy behemoth)

\- WakeMate and Square (designing and manufacturing hardware)

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stakent
Clickable: [http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/back-office-exposed-
zippy...](http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/back-office-exposed-zippykid/)

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CatalystFactory
I'd be interested to see how processes work at a bootstrapped vs. funded start
up. A comparison table would be awesome!

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jorkos
Yes this is useful. In terms of the "infrastructure" I would drill deeper
around surprises for people, what pieces they see as critical, etc.; just
knowing the infrastructure is much less valuable than its relative importance
and key lessons around its use... Good luck

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AmberShah
I would second this and look out for things that break from "traditional"
startup advice, or things that they didn't expect.

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petervandijck
Awesome, but way too short. To be really interesting, make it 5 times longer
and more detailed.

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paulsingh
Good feedback. What sort details would be interesting?

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kunjaan
As an engineer I want to request you to devote more questions to the
infrastructure and the architecture in place. I would want to know the big
architecture picture, alternatives that they researched, why they chose
certain technologies , the human resource devoted to delivering the technical
product, the ratio of technical-nontechnical in a team etc. Thank you for the
initiative.

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zippykid
Hey Guys, I'm Vid Luther, the founder of Zippy Kid, any engineers etc that
have any specific questions/comments I'll try to answer them here.

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icey
I'm definitely interested in this idea. I was really impressed with your
Mixergy interview, so I have high hopes for something like this.

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stakent
Maybe you can share some approaches which didn't work? And, of course, their
working replacements.

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bradhe
Sort of like a startup postmortem without necessarily the mortem part? I like
it! Would be good specifically for those of use just venturing in to Startup
Land :)

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bdickason
Probing for as much 'open-ness' as possible is the #1 thing I'd like to see.
Things like 'share your financial model spreadsheet' and other documents like
this would be essential. I'm doing something similar with salon owners at the
moment as I'm launching a small salon software kit in the next few weeks.

Will definitely check back every once in a while!

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guiseppecalzone
I like it.

The only thing I'd say is, get interesting startups -- and the rest will take
care of itself.

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paulsingh
Are there any in specific that you'd be really interested in? I'm the master
of cold-calling (if I don't have some warmer way of getting my foot in the
door)! :)

