Under Appreciated Benefits of Selling to Startups

2024-04-05

Unusual’s Startup Field Guide says: We’ve found startups to be less optimal design partners…While they have extreme urgency and can certainly move quickly, they lack the stability and consistency that a [larger] company has. In addition, they often have small budgets and a high propensity to “DIY.” They are often consumed with their own challenges and feedback so you can easily get lost in the shuffle. We’re trying to make startups our design partners and early customers in spite of advice like this.…

What Your MVP Says About Your Market

2024-03-12

Tuomas Artman, Linear’s CTO, recently claimed that increasing SaaS competition is raising the bar for what’s required of MVPs. Mocks, demo videos, and even ugly prototypes aren’t enough anymore. Others have made the same claim.1 They’re wrong. There are lots of markets where minimal MVPs are good enough, and if you aren’t in one of those markets, you may be better off pivoting instead of building a fancy MVP for picky customers who are flush with alternatives.…

Look for billion dollar mistakes

2024-02-28

Successful startups grow so quickly that incumbents can’t catch up. Google couldn’t catch Facebook. Facebook couldn’t catch Instagram. Instagram couldn’t catch Snapchat. From each of these incumbent’s perspectives, the competitive startup’s success is actually a $1B+ strategic mistake. This incumbent perspective leads to a novel approach for finding startup ideas. Instead of generating ideas by trying to be creative or visionary, we can just focus on flaws in human reasoning and knowledge and ask which of those flaws are likely to lead to $1B+ strategic errors.…

Dont Get Into the UX Business

2024-02-20

We built an LLM-powered product that improves software help UX. Although there are a few exceptions, generally speaking, no one will pay for it. Below I discuss the headwinds I encountered while trying to sell this product, headwinds that will affect anyone in the business of helping other software companies improve the UX of their product. These headwinds aren’t worth fighting. Unless you’re offering a UX improvement that very obviously leads to more revenue, don’t get in to the UX business.…

Internal tools often make bad startup ideas

2024-02-14

Just saw YC updated their request for startups page, and they’re asking for startups inspired by internal tools: We would like to see more startups created that are inspired by…homegrown tools, because it’s likely that if it’s very useful at one company, it’s very useful at others. Although a tool may be valuable for many companies, software engineers — who are often influencers in a purchase decision — are strongly incentivized to build instead of buy.…

Conflicting employee vs. business incentives slow B2B SaaS growth rates

2024-02-09

B2B founders are often told to build solutions that cut costs or drive revenue for businesses or to solve severe pain for a particular employee within a business, but this advice is overly simplistic. When you’re building a B2B SaaS, you’re selling to employees and companies that can have conflicting incentives. When those conflicting incentives intersect with your value prop, you’ll face serious headwinds to growth, even if your solution drives revenue, cuts costs, or solves pain for an employee.…

For Data Notebooks, Functions Arent Enough (and what to do about it)

2023-01-12

The Dark Knight has this great scene where Batman punches The Joker to intimate him into giving up information and he just starts laughing and says: You have nothing! Nothing to threaten me with. Nothing to do with all your strength. Batman, shocked and powerless, just stands there like an idiot. While working in a data notebook a few months back, I felt the same way. The typical power that I had as a programmer felt worthless against the data work I was doing.…

The code that ChatGPT can't write

2022-12-07

HN Discussion ChatGPT is game-changing, and, more generally, language models may be the most important dev tool of our generation. (It takes some humility to admit this, as we’re working on a dev tool for data scientists.) But neither ChatGPT nor some larger descendent model will ever be able to write the most difficult pieces of our software given natural language descriptions of desired functionality. Here’s my argument for this claim, drawing on observations from Fred Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet” and Eric Evans’ Domain Driven Design.…

Postgres SQL Lessons From Advent of Code Challenges

2022-02-17

Note: This post was originally published on heap’s blog and was co-written with Amanda Murphy We did something odd for Advent of Code this year: We solved a few challenges in javascript and then in PostgreSQL. We learned a few interesting things about SQL that we’d like to share here. Disclaimer: We did not complete all 25 days in SQL (judging by the links from this HN thread, it looks like pretty much no one did), but we still think the things we learned about SQL are useful and worth sharing, especially for non-experts.…

Optimizing Postgres Queries at Scale

2021-12-28

Note: This post was originally published on heap’s blog Heap is a product analytics tool that automatically captures web and mobile behavior like page views, clicks, and taps. We’re operating at a scale of billions of events per day, which we store across a distributed Postgres cluster. Heap’s thousands of customers can build queries in the Heap UI to answer almost any question about how users are using their product.…