Paul Buchheit said something similar at startup school years ago and I watch the video every once in a while to remind myself not to be similarly prescriptive when I meet new people.
His key takeaway slide was a simple equation:
Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization = Advice
The full video has more info on how to get past the advice you hear and actually process feedback:
Me too, but you need to get funded by them to participate :)
One important improvement is that it looks like they go the full product release cycle and incorporate the feedback into something testable with real users, so they go from idea generation to actually testing products or features by the end of the week.
It's a great primer on workflow in general, not just remote teams. I must've referred to it a dozen times at my previous gig and kept trying to model our process after theirs when I decided to just join the real thing instead.
Slow rolling a launch reminds me of how the Facebook mafia tends to roll out their companies in measured and targeted ways, rather than trying to go viral all at once.
Interesting idea for a service. Not sure if it would've solved my problems when I freelanced though, since the biggest time sink wasn't finding leads, it was all the communication before even starting a project to determine what they really needed in the first place, breaking it down by scope, priority, timing, etc.
I solved this problem by charging for everything I do, be it a discussion, requirement gatherings, analysis, estimates, quotes etc. There is a lot of value in the early communication. I wouldn't go back to doing this for free now since it really set a different tone, and people actually care of the time you spend on their projects in that case, much more.
Could you say some more about this? I'm curious how early in the process you start charging, how you present that to clients or potential clients, and how you handle objections.
Thanks for the writeup! I've done a couple of Startup Weekends and never thought about doing a subscription service, especially not for something I only ever eat on road trips.
Since you plan to keep the subscriptions going, I'm curious about how you plan to follow up with this project:
* do you plan on returning profits to the team?
* if so, is it evenly divided, or are individual sales tracked to the person that closed them? The latter could be the beginning of an affiliate system.
* also, would each team member get the full profit of each sale, or would you take a cut of their sales? The margins might be thin but could be interesting for the work-at-home types.
* have you learned more about sales or products during this time? i.e. did this fire you up to do sales for other existing products, or did it give you ideas for different subscription-based businesses? I can see product ideas for this - e.g. a "healthy pack" kind of offering, where you choose from jerky, nuts, dried fruit, and other Paleo-friendly road trip food, which you upsell to existing customers and hopefully make the offering more enticing to new ones - but don't see how the sales lessons scale if you tap out your friend network within a single weekend, unless you do the Amway kind of thing and just keep finding new sales people that sell to their friends.
* what's your long term plan? Do you plan on putting in more work into this?
I can think of several scenarios for the last point: to do no work and just let it ride as free money while you work on other projects; to do occasional weekend sprints of work with a team; to do little bits of work by yourself every day, like 30 minutes each morning.
I'd personally be interested in trying to learn other aspects of business that could make it grow, especially content marketing. I.e. would a blog about jerky be worth it in terms of sales? What kind of writing could you come up with that felt authentic? What kind of a time sink is it? Would it build a returning audience or be linkbait for Google? Would random people from adwords convert at all? Could you convert office managers that stock the office kitchen, or do they all use other services like Amazon? Etc.
Good post. It's a developer-specific flavor of Imposter Syndrome that I've struggled with too. Must learn all the frameworks! Now! And my designer side wants to master ever style I see on Dribbble until Photoshop stands up and starts clapping.
A book that helped me overcome it is called Mindset, written by the psychology researcher Carol Dweck. I can't recommend it highly enough. Apparently the problem gets worse as you gain skills, not better, if you don't consciously take steps to counter it.
I was just chatting with a friend this weekend that I also recommended the book to because he identified Imposter Syndrone as his major obstacle in life, even though he's highly accomplished and his blog is constantly on HN. Talking to him made me realize that it not only affects more people than I realize but that it probably also affects generalists more than specialists, since being T-shaped means by definition that you can only pick a few areas to go deep.
Sometimes, I feel as if I have no idea what I am doing. I mean, I only know Photoshop, Illustrator, HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. I can only design websites, program them and launch them. I am such a fraud. I can't even use .NET or Ruby! How can I call myself a web developer? And I keep using google to find answers or keywords I forget! If I wasn't such a fraud, I could write code on paper, and it would be perfect!
My cofounder quit the day we got our email to interview and wouldn't budge no matter how much I tried to reason, cajole, or beg him to change his mind. At the time I played a weekly poker game hosted by a bunch of YC founders and I still remember walking in with two bottles of champagne in my hand that I bought before I got the breakup text and announcing "guys, I've good news and bad news and reason to drink either way".
I don't blame him at all. We had built up a ton of great chemistry working together for 6+ months but it was on a startup that flamed out with a firesale acquisition and he wanted more stability, especially with his wife grueling away at a residency to pay for their mortgage.
I still think it was a mistake though and not just on his part. He was my Woz and I would've gone to greater lengths to get him to stay if I truly had the Jobs zeal.
I bet you'll never forget the memory and ironic imagery of walking in with celebratory champagne for a startup that lost one of its founders to a room full of founders.
Also, would love an opportunity for a seat at one of those poker games.
Yeah, I miss that game. It ran for a couple of years before everyone moved on but a couple of us are thinking of putting it back together. Ping me at my HN username at gmail and I'll let you know.
