from Hacker News

Five Years’ Time

by gdillon on 3/18/15, 9:58 PM with 47 comments

• by jordanbrown on 3/19/15, 2:28 AM

  "One regret I do have: I spent too much time waiting for other people. Investors, cofounders, mentors. I found that once I started actually building, these things came naturally." --

  I had this same experience. It wasn't until I pushed something live that those things/people just fell into place. Great article!

• by nothrabannosir on 3/19/15, 2:44 AM

  Rejection letter from YC:

  > I’m sorry to say we decided not to fund you. We liked you as individuals but we had a hard time seeing how developer API documentation was the right beachhead.

  Perhaps I'm looking too much into it, it's just surprising to see, on the record, the polar opposite of what pg claimed on several occasions: people, not ideas. Or did I misunderstand it?

• by ntumlin on 3/19/15, 3:31 AM

  Just a note, clicking the link at "ReadMe.io has finally launched" sends me to http://%28http//readme.io/blog/product-hunter-becomes-the-hu... which is not a valid url as opposed to http://readme.io/blog/product-hunter-becomes-the-hunted/

• by dmak on 3/19/15, 2:46 AM

  This is a bit of a tangent, but I really wanted to comment on the product he is making.

  I have been using apiary.io, and I always felt that it was lacking in many aspects (versioning, ghetto note editor, parsing issues in the preview, etc...). I just discovered readme.io and played with it briefly and it has solved every issue that I had with apiary.io. I will definitely migrate over, but having to re-do all the documentation from ground up is a bit of a pain.

• by dpeterson on 3/19/15, 4:01 AM

  Do these people not see how easy they have it? I am pretty sure no one would hire me at Mozilla with just php experience then get an interview with y-combinator without a product. I'm guessing he went to Stanford or some other Ivy League.

• by dlevine on 3/19/15, 3:15 PM

  Congrats (so far)! The truth is that the route to a successful startup is often circuitous, and takes a lot of unexpected detours. I bet that a lot of the experiences you had along the way have made you stronger, shrewder, and better able to deal with the twists and turns. It's almost like, by not doing a startup right away, you were actually able to train individual muscles rather than just attempting to lift the boulder onto your shoulders. Once you got to the point where you were actually ready, it started to happen on its own.

• by smcl on 3/19/15, 1:58 PM

  I'm impressed that an idea you had five years ago has sat there without anyone else thinking of it and delivering something in the meantime. Anything useful I get started on usually has someone launching a very slick VC-backed launch ~six months later and I just cannot compete (I don't have the time to dedicate to anything, nor the money to afford to not work for long enough)

• by thebenedict on 3/19/15, 9:00 AM

  I appreciate the update on Phileas and Fogg! I remember seeing the launch on here a couple of years ago.

  I'm curious about "idea factories are a dime a dozen, and nobody would want to work for one". I've turned down similar arrangements in the past because they felt vaguely sketchy, but didn't realize "idea factories" are common. What are the problems with them?

• by icefox on 3/19/15, 3:04 AM

  > The problem is one of content generation, as opposed to lack of tooling.

  I also have been pondering docs for many years and I agree with this statement. The core value I was going to build my solution around was by incorporating / generating examples from real code. Rather than being docs that were published it would almost be close to a code search engine. While the developers are lazy and rarely document you could bootstrap the documentation by finding example usage in the wild and presenting it and from there allow the users annotate it (and the developers if they ever get around to it).

  There are many problems with todays docs, another one that is missing has to be analytics. If I own an API I want to know what users are constantly looking at and discussing so that I can make that part better, less confusing, etc. And conversely if there are no example usage and no one has ever looked at an API that would be useful to know too as it could be code that could be ripped out and no longer maintained. What api are users searching for, but never find? There is more, but these are just a few off the top of my head.

  By generating content rather than relying on the developers to sign up and publish the site would explode in size and utility. Think Yahoo directory v.s. Google ala 1998.

  The idea that someone would generate static html files and put them somewhere is almost barbaric compared to the richness that could be provided.

  Unfortunately I don't really have a financial story to go with this idea. One was to be free for open source projects and charge for commercial. But honestly more likely would be that I would build it for a few years and then someone like Facebook would just call me up and buy it out to shut it down and solve their API documentation problems. Not saying that is bad, but I would have to make it until that would happen and I would prefer to have found another solution than a aquirehire end game.

• by pnathan on 3/19/15, 6:22 PM

  > My biggest two takeaways contradict themselves: I wish I had started sooner, but I’m so glad I waited. I had the idea from the beginning so it’s painful it took half a decade, however I never could have made it happen five years ago.

  This is very inspirational, and very true: the ideas I had years ago I could never have brought to life, and I probably would have failed, badly, at the business side. Today, I can bring things to life, and I'm understanding more and more of how businesses run.

• by kylec on 3/19/15, 1:52 AM

  I don't dislike goals, but I dislike rigidly holding yourself to goals when your circumstances and desires change. I'm really glad that it worked out well for the author, but not everyone is so lucky. I'm not where I thought I'd be five years ago, for both better and worse, but I think I'd be less happy if I measured my success today by my goals from back then.

• by sidi on 3/19/15, 6:10 AM

  Really interesting backstory, and congrats to @Greg and team for joining YC. Curious to know more how this worked out, since readme was gaining dev adoption pretty rapidly when they launched last fall.

• by javindo on 3/19/15, 9:50 AM

  This is a tremendously reassuring article for someone still in University wanting to build a company. There's always the question in the back of my mind "should I start now or get a few years experience?" and articles like this reassure that it's not too late if you need a couple of years to build skills.

• by vinceguidry on 3/19/15, 3:39 PM

  > They kept pushing and changing the rules. Cutting salaries, forcing us to work on their pet projects, insisting I hire less-talented programmers for cheaper, cutting timelines, reducing investment, increasing their equity, and more.

  I'm curious as to the exact take-away here. The author seemed a bit naive. The investors approached him with a bad idea that has numerous potentials for conflicts of interest, and he gave in, believing verbal promises would eliminate those conflicts.

  I would guess that if you want to get into the idea business, you should probably fund yourself using your own ideas and your own implementations. It's a pretty abstract business model, one that can very easily devolve into "we will do anything for anybody who will give us money". So you need a pretty strong vision and leadership skills to keep that from happening.

• by christop on 3/19/15, 3:32 AM

  The pedant in me wants to point out that the title should be "Five Years' Time".

• by kra34 on 3/19/15, 1:43 AM

  Where do you want to be 5 years from now?

• by manigandham on 3/19/15, 5:54 AM

  Nice article, just came across readme.io a few days ago when coming across another product (GridGain) for the first time. Thought the makers of readme.io had something really nice, interesting to read the history now.

  Goals and plans, especially 5 years in the future, can be hard to keep up with but the feeling of achievement at the end if truly amazing. I think even the practice of just sitting down and setting goals and making realistic plans goes a long way to helping you get there.

• by ac360 on 3/20/15, 5:04 PM

  Gregory,

  I just signed up for readme.io last night and it is an incredible product. The attention to detail is astounding. I've just become a big fan of yours. Never wait again. Your execution is too good.

  Good luck,

  Austen

• by ha8o8le on 3/19/15, 7:33 PM

  I was hoping the title was referencing the song :)