from Hacker News

A HireVoice postmortem - lessons learned trying to get a startup off the ground

by byosko on 8/15/12, 2:18 PM with 12 comments

  • by Argorak on 8/15/12, 2:41 PM

    Uargs. Who had the idea of having every paragraph leading up to a quote that has a big "Tweet this"-link next to it? It feels like a kid jumping up and down, desperately trying to get more attention.

  • by objclxt on 8/15/12, 2:44 PM

    > "Bootstrapping a startup when you’re 30 and have a rent to pay is incredibly hard"

    I think bootstrapping a startup when you have no capital is incredibly hard. The age you are and whether you're renting or not are merely contributory factors - imagine if you were paying a mortgage rather than rent...this could make bootstrapping even harder (could being the important word here, before someone corrects me!).

    (maybe this is a controversial viewpoint, but I feel Twitter is for 140 character insights, and a blog post is for longer ones. Having 24 quote blocks with 'Tweet This' next to it didn't make for a great reading experience)

  • by jwwest on 8/15/12, 3:02 PM

    Less than a year and 5 different products? I'm all for validated learning but it seems like they needed to stick to an idea longer than an average of two months.

  • by austinlyons on 8/15/12, 6:32 PM

    > "I had learned that, with half the time you get half the results so, for HireVoice, I was all-in, committed to success or, at least, piling up debts."

    If you look at the author's LinkedIn, you'll see he started another consulting job after four months working on HireVoice full time. Is this because he realized the initial idea wasn't going to pay the bills?

    I wonder if he would have been better off getting a full-time job first and iterating on this idea as a side project? It seems like someone who is fully employed would be more rigorous in choosing which idea to spend their precious spare time on.

  • by breckenedge on 8/15/12, 2:42 PM

    What's with all the blockquotes? Made it a bit difficult to read => Sentence "Blockquote" Sentence "Blockquote".

  • by zio99 on 8/15/12, 2:48 PM

    >Btw landing pages and mockups don’t create a lot of trust...

    Why do you say that?

  • by nollidge on 8/15/12, 4:04 PM

    What's with the random words and phrases italicized? It didn't even look like it was for emphasis.