Lean Startup is great but you should realise the value of investing in good design. Don't go down a rabbit hole of 'big vision' design perfection straight away, sure (a $50k set of Photoshop comps before you've got product-market fit isn't a great idea) but you're not going to get very far with a fucking Unbounce template.
Hire a good designer—one who knows how to do 'early stage startup'—and flourish.
I tend to agree. The "start-up"-term has become so bloated that it hardly make any sense any more. To churn out hundreds of generic landing-pages based on templates, built with "start-up generators" wont create anything of value.
"Don't have a product - no problem!" Get your idea out there and get that seed-round running - then you can surely hire some eager developer-monkeys to do the implementation.. wrong.
IMHO a start-up is a game-changing idea; unique and ahead of it's time. Developing it should take time, and it should be risky - if not it will already have been done.
I'm a single founder. Even though I know I must delegate, I still have difficulty putting it in practice.
I'm told that I must focus on the business side of things, and outsource (some parts of) development. Being a programmer myself, I always think that "good programmers are expensive, and cheap programmers are not good", so it hinders me from hiring my peers.
How do you guys handle this situation? Esp. if you're perfectionist (I believe many programmers are).
I delegated several things already, but never the development. I like to keep my coding skills sharp so that I keep value as a developer, you might need the skills to pay the bills when your business doesn't go too well.
If you want a contrary viewpoint, Aymeric fellow HNer wrote that some time ago, you might find it interesting:
To quote the old adage, "Quality, Speed, Cost: Pick any two."
Quality is possible without cost, but the speed at which you will acquire those developers is low. You will need to hunt from the bargain bin of inexperienced and/or overseas developers. You will choose poorly and you have to be ok with that. Create a process where you can let go the developers who don't work out and retain those who do easily. Parallelize this process if possible. Your local college, local programming user groups, and online contract work websites may be good places to stat looking.
The things that irked me most about this terrible article have to do with the absence of any real product that "startup" has to offer, and when it does talk about making a product it's more a cumbersome afterthought than anything else.
Don't I need a product? Nah, let's not get ahead of ourselves here.
Hey, just outsource that onerous coding task to some monkey, it's not important.
Don't get me wrong, not every founder needs to be able to do technical stuff. But I believe some understanding of what it is that you want to build is essential. If I had a cent for every time some "ideas guy" asks me to think through his entire product for the first time and then build it for a couple hundred bucks I'd have ...more than 20 cents I think. For some reason the same cheapness showcased in the article always coincides with the most clueless people.
The problem with that statement is that it works: I seen plenty of startups with a lot of flare and filler but no product getting some generous seed rounds while the tech guys from another startup despite having an early version of the product get nothing.
Why? because their tech demo was boring to the non-tech investors, while the productless startup had a very clean well-prepared presentation that catches the eye of angels, even if they have nothing resembling an actual product.
Because doing that is easier for most people a lot of startups are born productless and focus almost solely on the presentation and pitch.
>Hey, just outsource that onerous coding task to some monkey, it's not important.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of the author's advice about outsourcing, which I think is pretty clearly a relatively smart way to do outsourcing. They are not saying to outsource all of your coding, but to pick well-encapsulated units with a clear spec, and outsource those.
That makes sense, because doing it that way means that you can completely tear out that component and rewrite it later if needed.
You have a point. Maybe it's not quite fair if you just take the paragraph about outsourcing, but it all slides into place if you look at the entire article. Of course, having clearly-defined components is a good idea, and maybe I am somewhat weary from experience with these people. But the overall impression this article leaves just conjures these images up for me.
A much better, more useful article than I guessed from the title.
The author signposts fast / cheap ways of getting (the things that take ages/money) done. Mostly this consists of paying someone to do it. I hadn't come across (or though of) a lot of the services he links. Very useful.
I found some of the resources in this article very helpful, such as Stylate, which looks like it can quickly provide value for a specific aspect of your startup. In terms of making mockups before diving into making the actual product, the author is advocating doing that for gauging customer interest in the product. You wouldn't sell mockups of a product in place of the actual product itself.
Out of curiosity I checked out ecquire's homepage and without watching the video, I had no idea what the product actually was. The supposed 'great headlines and content' are non-existent.
- Save space on your bookshelves by tearing all the pages out
- Hire actors to be your friends and family
- Wear a suit once and return it
- Wine tastings help you forget