The biggest two lessons that may or may not have been learned by this founder is they raised from the wrong type of investors and didn’t set expectations when the business started to look like a cash cow instead of a growth engine.
With the right investors could’ve funded a small team and turned a handy profit for those with equity.
Very valuable, thanks for posting. The author understandably leaves out the dollar figures (even approximations) for what that exist looked like, but the tone suggests it's above decent. The concrete advice for startups requiring cold pitching and network effects was particularly good.
Very interesting... I see a lot of parallel with my higher-ed startup - regulatory moat, fragmented market almost like consulting, and super long sales cycle...
Maybe I should be more mindful of integration cost than I do know.
I think an interesting observation here is the amount of integration time necessary in the B2B space, when each of your customers are using their own internal tools that you have to interface with.
This can be problem for many SaaS since it limits a one size fits all approach, but it could also be used as a moat if you are the only one with a specific integration.
The reason we have this rule is that the /newest page is a bit of a lottery, meaning good submissions often get overlooked, and we want to mitigate that randomness a bit.
Of course, this could cross into spamming, especially when an account is promoting the same thing/company/site, or handful thereof. But that's not the case here. azhenley is one of the best submitters on HN!
With the right investors could’ve funded a small team and turned a handy profit for those with equity.
reply