Ask HN: How do busy founders deal with disorganisation in the world?

[b20000]

As a solo founder and consultant i constantly deal with banks, insurance companies, shipping companies, and lots of other partners/suppliers/infrastructure out there in the world that is disorganized and pushes work on my back. For example banks. I do a wire and they charge $25 and then block it and waste 15 minutes of my time on the phone. This happens many times in my typical week and if you think about it the cost is enormous. How do busy people deal with this? Do they hire a part time assistant? How can they do bank stuff that requires verification? How can you trust them with your stuff? When do you know it is time to hire help?

[neximo64]

To be ok to pay for it in the short term and not worry about it, to focus on the actual things that matter.

You can easily tell that your business isn't working out if you're asking this question, sorry if that's a little harsh. Its better to focus on increasing revenue than to focus on cutting cost, since you can always come back on cost & scale helps even more.

[b20000 → neximo64]

read what i wrote. i put in a wire for 5k and have 2 choices. do nothing and the wire is blocked. waste 15 min on the phone and it goes through. it has nothing to do with the cost of the wire.

i bill around $400 per hour. so 15 min is $100. let’s say this happens a few times per week so that is about $1000 per month. if we are talking about product sales it could be 10s of thousands of $.

[neximo64 → b20000]

Third choice: Try get more multiples of that revenue.

You kind of have the logic in your own post, $100 > $15.

[gregjor]

This might help. It’s for regular people, not specifically for founders, but I believe the principles are the same.

Wire Transfer 101 https://youtu.be/RXV-URLCMgA?si=JR7u6LgV9d308XWc

Congrats on crushing it so hard that you need to offload moving all that cash around.

[b20000 → gregjor]

to crush it hard, i want these time sinks to be gone

[nicbou]

I think that’s just life. People in Finland go on strike, so a man in Germany spends 3 hours on the phone rearranging his flight, loses 150€ on his hotel reservation. These things happen all the time. Bigger and bigger systems are buggy, full of ignored edge cases, indifferent to you. Pay the bullshit tax amd move on.

[aristofun]

Irony is that an average person you could hire to resolve mentioned issues would f*ck them up even more.

The only solution I come up with is to become a shitty executor yourself.

Just stop caring about anything that much. You don't have to be perfect to be successfull.

Take inspiration from those brilliant 10x developers ruining google search quality, whatever...

[julienreszka]

You could hire a virtual assistant (Just like a secretary). For your questions regarding trust, there are people who do that as a full time job they will be able to answer you and give guarantees

[AznHisoka]

Founders are used to chaos, that’s like the definition of a startup!

[gjvc]

same as anyone else. this is a lousy and boring subject for discussion.

[seb1204 → gjvc]

I agree that this is boring but I want to be properly lazy and hear the most efficient approaches on how to deal with them. Indeed one can choose to increase revenue and not worry about it but I think this is just one of the topics that OPP raised.

[b20000 → seb1204]

it is not about the cost of the wire.