I did fell into that pitfall when I built keenly. Just wanted to build something new.
But then, only when I received good feedback I thought to proceed with it.
I won't deny, the new thing is definitely appealing because it's new. But you make a good point about finding myself in the same place again.
I've had some good options presented here and I'm leaning towards focusing on rosterbird and try to get a growth engine going and then, maybe, once it's sustainable, I can try new things if I still wanted to.
There's probably room in your life for both. Keenly becomes another side project.
The smart money though is on the thing that's working. Take the time to understand why it's working, and how it might grow future wise, and user wise. This is not fun like programming but makes the things you build more successful.
At the same time put some limited hours into keenly. It makes a good distraction, and we all like a change from time to time.
Always remember that building things successfully takes multiple skills. You've got the programming down, but learning the rest can be just as satisfying.
And don't be scared to ask for help. There are lots of successful people around you who can help if you just bother to ask.
Good feedback is worthless. If they’re willing to pay for it right now, that’s maybe worth something (they need to actually use it too). I recommend reading The Mom Test, it’s a great book about how to navigate this early validation stage from a non-sales perspective.
Focus on the product that’s making money with minimal effort. You will learn a lot in the process (it may make sense to bring in some contractors to help you along in certain areas). Maybe you find you really don’t want to take that any further, at least you’ll have a much stronger understanding of the product, market, etc which will help you sell it off for a higher price and fund focus on the next thing.
Valuing a profit-generating business that's making $1m in revenue as zero is reductive.
Valuation of business isn't necessarily determined by profits (perhaps for commodity businesses), It's just one of the metric. This is a business that has strong operations, product, assets, and IP, honestly quite surprised with this take.
Also, a nit fwiw, you automatically assumed the entire profit of the business is the market salary for the person running this business
I don't really disagree. It's a naive analysis, but ignoring the opportunity cost of the time the owners put into a business, which I was replying to, is even more naive, and yet an extremely common mistake small business people make.
We don't know that it is profit-generating, since the author doesn't take a salary. As for the assumption that the profit would be soaked up by the market salary for the founder, the fact that he's a former Google engineer or whatever is a pretty decent indication that this is true.
I would agree that most people would take some job flexibility/autonomy in lieu of part of their bigco salary, but my guess is that this particular Xoogler would be making well more than $236k (including stock) if he had stayed at Google.
EDIT: that doesn't mean he should have stayed at Google, just that his market salary would very likely soak up all of the profits this year. If he can keep up the growth (and ramp down his hours), then it would be clearer that the enterprise could throw of cash even after paying for all the labor.
That’s the thing though, it’s a Google engineer’s market salary, and likely the author’s as well. But the OP was drawing the conclusion that whoever’s running the business has to be paid the same amount, that’s what I wanted to address.
> I would agree that most people would take some job flexibility/autonomy in lieu of part of their bigco salary
This is one of the point the author has repeatedly stressed the importance of and I very much agree as well. The chance to chart your own journey and the excitement a business could bring is anyday more valuable than the predictable path of employment for many (including myself)
> Also, a nit fwiw, you automatically assumed the entire profit of the business is the market salary for the person running this business
Not really a big assumption given that the person is capable of operating an entire software and hardware business by themself.
It’s more complicated than that, though: The salary someone receives from a company isn’t 100% passed through untouched. To pay everything from taxes to benefits, the most they could realistically expect to take in equivalent compensation would be closer to $150K (approximate), which is actually below market rate just about anywhere for someone with these qualifications.
The point is it isn't profit generating by any reasonable definition of profit and doesn't have some obvious path to get there.
Taking into account all the things you mention, many reasonable people who spend time buying and selling businesses all day would value this business at zero.
The nit is generous - 236k is not going to cover the iq points and hard work required to do the role of this owner.
Thanks for this! I’m very surprised about the overwhelming support for Altman in this thread going as far as calling the board incompetent and inexperienced to fire someone like him, who now is suddenly the right steward for AI.
This is not at all the take, and rightly so, when the news broke out about non profit or the congressional hearing or his worldcoin and many such instances. All of a sudden he is the messiah that was wronged narrative being pushed is very confusing.
Don’t be. Almost all of it are speculations at this point and no one from inside is going to reveal the secret in a random HN comment.
And also, think about this, unless you’re a shareholder with openai, knowing the “opinion” of others isn’t going to impact your life in any form. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read it or participate in the discourse, but there’s no need to be overwhelmed by opinions let alone build a chat bot to get through it.
Yeah agree with all of the above but with one modification: We can spend a lot of time reading through 1800+ comments, and that's time when we're usually trying to just get a question answered like "what does everyone think happened?" etc.
Storytell's vision is to distill signal from noise → giving you a different way to navigate 1800+ comments where you're the one in control of how you spend your time doing it is our objective here.
Agree. There’s definitely use to get a general pulse of whats happening. This isnt directed towards storytell or such apps, sorry if that came off that way.
I was addressing the parent’s comment about being overwhelmed about not being able to go through the opinions. I’ve felt similar way before I realised they were just fomo. If anything, apps like storytell are actually better way to consume these things :)
I wouldn't say this one to be frugal, but then frugality varies by different parameters. What they priortize (Eg: a dedicated marketing tool vs sending marketing through app itself), what their expertise in (hosting in vps vs aws vs heroku, etc), the type of service, team size and so on. As there are 10 ways to do the same thing all with a different tradeoffs.
Being solo myself, I aim to keep my costs as low as possible as well. Until my last product, all my previous products I kept the running costs to $3 per month (just for the server on hetzner). Rest all were free services (tawk.to for CS, Zoho for email, postmark for emails, and so on). Granted they weren't making much, just couple of hundred dollars per month, but then it was pure profit and it got fun to measure the returns in profit than just revenue.
For the latest one, all in all I spend around $30 per month with close to $1250 in mrr. So it has generous spend to return ratio. The only three running cost are the helpscout (for customer support, docs, etc.), google workspace and the servers with Hetzner. HelpScout and Google workspace were my way of "splurging" the costs.
Last I checked I was using close to 16 services (ranging from marketing to revenue tracking), so weren't really skimping on tools to save costs either.
The free tools (including several the op mentioned) are awesome to get started, but many of these services' costs would jump multi-fold even if you add one other team member or go just above the limit. That's anyway all these services' business model as well.
I think the author here is prioritizing simplicity of deployments above all else, because he realizes time is money. The amount of time to build something VS paying to use an off the shelf item is an important decision to make, and I think the author made good decisions across the board
The author does come across more as a business/operations person first, developer second. Most developers would not consider tools like ahrefs or intercom or even realize that marketing is generally more difficult/important than the develpment work itself
Relatively speaking even at all these costs I would consider this to be frugal. If your a skilled developer you would easily be worth at least $100/hr
Taking off the shelf solutions with easy scalability of services for adding additional people operationally is important
time saved is time earned, time is money, and money saved is money earned
Would you be able to share what your products are? I'd love to host a small service like this, but struggle to come up with something that would be both useful and profitable at a small scale.
Sure. Broadly this is the list. Many of these are my go-to's for all my products. Only the Project management, I had to keep trying new things. Most favorite for now is Trello.
Also, I use dokku for deployment, so it's very similar to heroku and uses heroku buildpacks.
I used to do programming projects on the side for almost 10 years now. Programming has been my hobby, passion or time-pass whatever you could call it.
At the beginning, these projects was my vent from the day job to learn new tools/tricks, try out random stuff, nothing specific. And I mostly don't finish it, I just move on, because I didn't have to complete those. Some were open source, many weren't.
And then one of my project that I spent hardly few hours on got some 1000+ upvotes on ProductHunt. So many emails, new follows, it was exhilarating. It pegged me into submitting my next project to PH as well. Though it didn't get as much recognition, it was covered by few tech journals, then some more followed. Suddenly I had users who were using something that I've created and I started charging for it. When it started making money, albeit little (i think at the most it was $100/mo), it changed things.
A thought arose, "I like building sideprojects, what if I get to do this full time!". It was exciting!
After that, I could never go back to working on my projects for just "fun". It always had to have some business reason. Can it work? Is the idea worthwhile? What is the revenue potential and so on. Suddenly, I'm not just programming, but doing customer support, marketing, trying to promote the project, etc.
Eventually, I wasn't doing the thing that I enjoyed and by pursuing it for commercial motives, it had become something else entirely.
I think many of us fall into this pit either by chance or being egged from outside. In my case, what I enjoyed was just programming. I conflated it with building a business. Unless you are famous or successful, almost anything that are pursued by passion alone, had to morph into something if you want it to support your life.
I just went full-time a month ago to try and build some profitable products. And I'm trying to get that "fun" part into the full-time thingy again. Can I truly work on things I enjoy, try new stuff and still make money out of it? Only time will tell. If the results don't come, so be it.
As others here pointed out, Meta does not have a good history of launching completely new products separately and succeeding in it (except FB ofc). So it’s a wait and see.
If they’re going to ride on the coattails of the existing influencers, might make more sense to keep it a feature than a brand new app. The existing influencers would have no extra incentive to spend efforts on a whole new app if they’re addressing the same audience and won’t be gaining new set of audience.
Or keep it completely new to excite new wannabe influencers and they will put in the extra effort and drive activity at the beginning.
The job listing promised mountains and that it will take few hours and they’ll take time in their feedback,etc.
except i just got a generic reply that “we’re not satisfied with the solution”. For something that took ~10 hours, i was at the least expecting a vague pointers on whys. I even sent an one pager explaining style decisions, caveats, etc. It was pretty insulting.
And when asked for a follow up, got a more generic bs about how the evaluation criteria is honed from their years of experience and that is not something they share outside.
One good thing that is it made me realise interviewing still sucks and i just stopped looking for jobs.
I went and looked at your submission, and I am comfortable with how we handled it and the level of detail we gave you. Would you mind sending me an email so I can hear a bit more? It sounds like we might've implied something we didn't mean to.
These should not take 10 hours, unless you're learning Rails from scratch or something (some people do this). We've tried different ways of saying "don't spend more than 2 hours on this unless you really want to" and it doesn't always come through.
The "detail"I received is the same generic reply you've shared in the other thread.
I don't know what fly's internal processes are, but I suspect the reviewer had to have submitted some bit of internal feedback on each submissions on why they're okaying it or not. A filtered version of it or even a separate candidate specific feedback would be just enough.
I've been at the hiring side of the table for many years and every time we share a handcrafted feedback to interviewees that we have passed on, we always heard back good things. They know we respected their time (and them), even if they don't agree with the particular feedback.
This feedback is not meant for them to get "better" or something. My point is, it could even be 2 hours the candidate spends, the least they deserve is knowing that it was actually looked at.
No that's not how ours works. We have, basically, 20 checkboxes for "things that are good about this work". These range from "strong user focus" to "logic to prevent <some problem we've previously had with billing>".
The submissions that we continue with check a bunch of boxes. The submissions that we pass on don't.
The problem is, we're not hiring people to build to a spec. We want to assess your decisions and ability to go from a basic problem to a first implementation. If we shared the rubric with folks, they'd focus entirely on trying to check the boxes and I don't think we'd get an accurate assessment.
Your point about valuing peoples' time is important, though. We have not yet found the right balance for everyone.
"The problem is, we're not hiring people to build to a spec. We want to assess your decisions and ability to go from a basic problem to a first implementation"
You could have told the candidate that, then. That would have been some useful information to have for the hours the candidate put into their submission. Or like "hey, we're going to just skim over this with a subjective list of check boxes".
I have enough experience that I probably would have smelled this before I got that deep into the process and noped out, but for the hopeful mid-level/new-senior devs this sounds pretty demoralizing.
I’ve worked with, and been on hiring committees with people like mrkurt before. What always happens is they reject a bunch of candidates toward the beginning of the process, then eventually the time comes where they MUST hire someone. Because someone or something they are accountable to (investors, their boss or commitments they’ve made) asks why they can’t hire. Then there is a mad dash to interview and hire someone where standards are greatly reduced. They then end up hiring someone with similar skills and risk profile of people they have previously rejected anyways. The net result is just a bunch of time wasted for everyone.
If you ever get asked to do one of these exercises, it’s useful to try to determine where they are in this process. Ask about their hiring timeline, how long they have been interviewing for the position, and try to get a feel for how fatigued they are in general.
If it feels like they are just starting, ask how long you have to complete the exercise. If there isn’t a time limit, it’s better to wait as long as possible, so they can reject other candidates first and burn themselves out. If there is a time limit, ask to pause the interview process (insert some excuse here) before they send out the exercise.
If they are near the end and sound exhausted, that’s a good sign and the effort might not be wasted.
You know, "take-home" projects are so cargo-culted, and so poorly executed at so many places, and in such bad faith, that this I think turns out to be perfectly reasonable, valuable survival advice, even though it applies literally not at all, in any way whatsoever, to the hiring process you're commenting on.
Submissions are supposed to predict and handle issues that you guys have had in production? That doesn't seem very reasonable for a 2 hour task.
I wonder if your hiring process is skewed by the perfectionists who spend tens of hours of their submissions. Arguably that's the type of thing you guys would want to select for but it's not at all fair for those who timebox themselves to 2 hours or whatever.
That's exactly how it works. Spend more time, cover more edge cases.
This sounds like a classic "my developer reckons he can do this in 2 hours (but never actually has)". The reality is your developer is crap at estimating.
A good developer will be lucky to produce 100 lines a day. if you doubt that check your git history (excluding autogenerated crap).
So unless the project you're setting people needs, on average, 25 lines, whatever you're setting people is clearly not a 2 hour project. And that's not even taking into account whatever hurdles you've inadvertently put in the task, strange build config, obscure libraries, out-of-date libraries, non-standard formatting, etc.
Could you tell us what the average length of a submisson is?
One task I got given a year or two back had an old version of Vue, linting rules that conflicted with the defaults of the 'usual' IDE you'd use, wanted you to create 3 new backend API endpoints and a new frontend page with non-trivial functionality. Plus they wanted units tests.
That's a 2 day job. They also claimed it would take an hour or two.
Sorry, this smells bad - It sounds a lot like the old "We've just solved this really tricky bug that nobody knew how to deal with - it took us a month, but we're experts now - now you do the same in 2 hours"
Even a very experienced engineer might not have encountered this specific bug/situation that you’re testing for in your take home assignment. How do you make sure that you don’t filter out good engineers by testing them on a situation they haven’t encountered in their career?
Presumably the answer is "we don't, because we're ok with filtering out a few very experienced developers if that reduces the risk of a bad hire".
It's pretty rare IME to encounter interviews which are closely related to the actual work you'll be doing, mostly it seems like the main purpose is to filter out the heaps of bad/mediocre developers.
> The submissions that we continue with check a bunch of boxes. The submissions that we pass on don't.
What detail is shared about what "checkboxes" the candidate met and didn't meet? From the parent post and your reply, it doesn't sound like much at all?
Woah, I've been a hiring manager long enough that it's been a while since I've done a take-home code exam myself but I don't even think I would grade a LLM that way (because I moved to AI now). Unless your code exam is super trivial or the boxes themselves are table stakes ("code runs without errors", "code includes more than one function"), coding is creative enough that it's hard to come up with 20 checkboxes that cover whether a sample is any "good" let alone "shows better decision making".
I've had a few bad experiences when sharing feedback with candidates myself and I would understand doing the checkbox approach for feedback and/or just never sending detailed feedback, but actually grading submissions pass/fail based on a subset of criteria you jealously guard from candidates essentially selects for lucky people. If I wanted to do that, I'd just shuffle the submissions by number of bytes and discard everything that's a multiple of 5 or something.
> Your point about valuing peoples' time is important, though. We have not yet found the right balance for everyone.
Did you try paying candidates for the home assessment? People's time costs money. Paying people not only helps attract candidates but also helps the company reduce the list of candidates to take the assessment.
I'm inclined to say the interview process is imbalanced with more power in the hands of the employer. If you're looking for the right balance, try turning over some power from the employer to the candidate.
The candidate's cost was 2-hours worth of time. Was the employer's cost 2-hours worth of time?
Presumably you can't tell if the applicant spent 2h or 6h, and in practice the 6h solution is probably going to look much better. So sure, in theory you may be right, but in practice I bet you select for people who spent (much) more than 2 hours.
And for every company that means it there are five others want to find people that will sink massive amounts of time into these so they can do the same once they start.
I would describe my personal experience in Zurich (and having lived in Berlin before) a bit differently.
Everyone loves whining about finding a place to rent in both places, but in Berlin it's about finding anything at all whereas in Zurich it's usually about finding something cheap and ideally in a desirable Kreis 3 or Kreis 4 neighborhood. Yes it's competitive, but you will find something with realistic expectations + budget.
NB: I don't earn a big tech salary either. If you land a Google/Meta/IBM/Disney/adjacent job, the (rental) housing market should not give you any headaches.
Indeed. Which is worst, cities like Zurich and London where housing is very expensive but is available especially with a skilled job, or Berlin where housing is not too expensive, but almost non available to newcomers even on skilled jobs?
> Berlin where housing is not too expensive, but almost non available to newcomers even on skilled jobs?
It's not available to long term residents either. In Berlin one has to compile and update monthly the application portfolio. Good luck having a landlord who'll issue debt free certificate more often than once a year. Think will get away without debt free certificate? Someone else will have it, sorry.
Finding an expensive apartment vs. not finding an apartment at all, really?
Say you are single, have some experience and get low-balled into a CHF 100k contract. Not counting 13th salary this translates to CHF 7.7k per month gross / CHF 6k net (before health insurance). I.e. at up to 1/3 of your monthly net you can spend up to 2k per month on an apartment. There are plenty of those to choose from inside Zurich city, even if some might be small for the price or have other drawbacks. You can find cheaper/bigger/nicer easily by expanding your search radius to the (extremely well-connected) suburbs.
Only if you're a relentless hunter. Otherwise it looks more like >2.5k CHF monthly. 400-500 CHF monthly on health insurance, 500 CHF monthly for random tickets, fees, fines, and other "disciplinary measures". Suddenly you find yourself being poor in Switzerland. Being poor among rich hurts multiplied.
Depends. Sure, it hurts your ego being "poor" in a super rich country, but that has the advantages of being safe everywhere, not being stabbed for wearing a nice watch, having access to the best medical care in the world, a reliable insurance and justice system for when things go wrong, clean air and drinking/bathing water, a high trust society where you're not afraid of being scammed everywhere or leaving your door open at night, not afraid that anyone will shoot you in your school, etc.
Some people would rather be dirt poor in Zurich, than filthy rich in Zimbabwe.
Prices in Germany and Austria are not that much lower for handymen and locksmiths, unless you already have "a guy".
Ultimately it's supply and demand. It's the consequence of everyone wanting to be a latte sipping WFH laptop worker, instead of a contractor/handyman.
Also, worth considering that locksmiths charge crazy money because they basically work shit hours and have to deal with shitty customers. You're basically on call 24/7, on the road a lot, and most of your customers who call you are party people who realize they lost their keys when they get home from the bar/club at 2AM on a Saturday night/Sunday morning and call you desperately trying to get into their house, and once you do open their door they start to bitch, moan and can even get aggressive refusing to pay, because you're charging too much money for "5 minutes of work". Sure, maybe you make a solid thousand Euros that night, but you basically fucked your weekend. Not great work/life balance IMHO, which is why not so many do it.
In life you often have to choose the least worst option for you out of two bad ones if you want to survive. It's rare to have your cake and eat it too, especially when it comes to housing in desirable metro areas and you not being wealthy. Beggars can't be choosers.
Granted, nobody put a gun to your head and said you must live in Zurich, London, Dublin, Berlin, or any other city with a housing shortage, it's your own voluntary decision to do that, but doing so you must be mindful of the compromises and sacrifices such a choice requires.
I heard this in Germany a lot in various circumstances while seeing on my monthly payslips deductions totalling well over 40%.
> nobody put a gun to your head and said you must live in Zurich, London, Dublin, Berlin
I didn't force myself to that bloody miserable country either, but got qualified job and was granted relocation there. At which point I'm not a beggar anymore and can start posing even a smallest demand?
>I heard this in Germany a lot in various circumstances while seeing on my monthly payslips deductions totalling over 40%.
That's the situation with social welfare states. They're not the USA. Everyone contributes as much as they can while receiving benefits per their needs. It's a social contract where people, for better or for worse, give up their individual opportunities for wealth generation, for the sake of collective wealth and welfare safety nets. Germany is not the place to move to, if you want to make wealth and pay as little taxes as possible.
>I didn't force myself to that bloody miserable country either, but got qualified job and was granted relocation there.
You could have gotten a qualified job in any other country, nobody dragged you into forced labor to Germany kicking and screaming I assume. Once you saw the situation you could have packed up and moved.
> At which point I'm not a beggar anymore and can start posing even a smallest demand?
You are free to make as many demands as you want, most likely nobody in Germany will care. If you want change, the best way is to vote with your feet and move to a country that's already built on your beliefs (tax heavens). Trying to change a country, as na individual, is like trying to move the planet.
The third bomb, a classic, bringing up comparisons with the USA. Listen, I'm EU citizen relocating within EEA and I don't care about your US fetish or complex. I turned around and moved away indeed. Now Germany will be more preoccupied in vetting boat immigrants. I wish they'll find enough qualified people ready to give up their individual opportunities for wealth generation, while repeatedly being moved back at the end of the queue to the benefits they need! Sounds like a lovely deal.
I was trying to explain things to you respectfully, and using the US was an easy way to exemplify an extreme, and you go straight to the throat with bullshit accusations. Lovely. Cheers mate!
Swiss companies are glad to hire EU folks just below the average Swiss salary. The relocation package is "we expect you to show up in the office on the first day".
I'm doing a speedrun of sorts trying to build a product every 2 weeks. This is mostly to satisfy the builder in me and to exercise the product shipping muscles.
For a long time, with full time jobs and consulting gigs I was never able to do what I loved the most, just programming. It was always superseded with other "business" stuff that it is has been ages when I could just put my heads down and work on something. So, this is an excuse to not focus on the nitty-gritty of business related things and just build and ship products.
Also, I had a growing list of ideas and a fomo along with it. So, i wanted to give a shot in attempting a fair number of them in short time.
But then, only when I received good feedback I thought to proceed with it.
I won't deny, the new thing is definitely appealing because it's new. But you make a good point about finding myself in the same place again.
I've had some good options presented here and I'm leaning towards focusing on rosterbird and try to get a growth engine going and then, maybe, once it's sustainable, I can try new things if I still wanted to.