SAAS founder. I love to teach what I know even if I am no expert. It is simple. Teaching makes you better. I love to ask the "why" and not just the "what" or "how". I also am a geek and builder by nature.
I am always looking for smart, hungry and talented people to join me in creating great products and company.
My long term interests are in SaaS, edtech, hrtech, Dev Tools etc for the most part. I may have ADHD but too lazy to get diagnosed.
Always happy to chat with strangers. Hit me up if you want to talk about anything.
meet.hn/city/39.9527237,-75.1635262/Philadelphia
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Submissions
New Jersey Passes Garden State Balcony Solar Act
pluginsolarus.com
3 points·by codegeek··1 comments
Tell HN: Godaddy DNS resolution down for 2+ hours
9 points·by codegeek··0 comments
[untitled]
1 points·by codegeek··0 comments
Shadcn UI library hits 100k Stars on GitHub
github.com
1 points·by codegeek··0 comments
.NET 10 Released
dotnet.microsoft.com
12 points·by codegeek··2 comments
Ask HN: Is GraphQL Worth It?
3 points·by codegeek··1 comments
ClickStack:Future of Observability on ClickHouse
clickhouse.com
1 points·by codegeek··0 comments
[untitled]
4 points·by codegeek··0 comments
[untitled]
2 points·by codegeek··0 comments
Ask HN: Anyone building a non AI product/startup?
5 points·by codegeek··4 comments
Digitalocean Droplet Autoscale Pools
digitalocean.com
1 points·by codegeek··0 comments
Good Docker Files
gooddockerfiles.com
12 points·by codegeek··1 comments
Per Bucket Access Keys Now Available for DigitalOcean Spaces
digitalocean.com
2 points·by codegeek··0 comments
Ask HN: YC Cofounder Matching Platform
2 points·by codegeek··2 comments
Ask HN: Finding Technical Writers for Open Source Software
1 points·by codegeek··4 comments
IRS Plans to Make Free Tax Filing Permanent
cnn.com
44 points·by codegeek··15 comments
AWS S3 will soon not charge for un-authorized requests
Because it was never about you. They have to fake empathy and provide "explanations" because they think its the "Safer" way. You already know that of course.
Because that's the truth and just because you fake empathy, the person getting fired knows what their worth to the company was. Sure there are people who don't prefer to hear the truth but most employees would. In fact, I would go as far as to say that firing someone by accepting the truth is more empathetic than lying to their faces and crying crocodile tears.
I am a founder/CEO myself (a very small company so I don't have experience of mass layoffs for full disclosure). However, I don't get this explanation. If you feel genuine responsibility for the people, then figure out a way to NOT fire them. Or be honest and admit that the company needs to make more money/cut costs. Trust me, no one wants to hear "we love you so much but we have to fire you and I feel so bad". It just doesn't land. Be honest, be open and be willing to provide a good severance.
"Not having empathy" may have made sense 20-30 years ago when mass layoffs weren't as common as nowadays. Nowadays, everyone knows how it works and how much they really care about the employees. Nothing is worse than someone faking empathy especially CEOs (and I am a small time founder/ceo myself even though of an extremely small company).
The only possible positive thing out of this cringy article is that the severance is decent (for a US company). 4 months of pay and healthcare coverage through Year end. Everything else could have just been a couple of sentences.
Companies need to stop doing this melodrama every time they decide to fire people. Everyone knows the goal is to make money and keep a company profitable for their shareholders. Why these melodramatic posts ? People would prefer honesty. Just say "We need to increase our profits or reduce costs or both and hence we have to lay people off. Here is what we are providing as a severance". That's it.
It is bad because you are deciding something for ME, the user. That's bad UX because I want to decide my own experience and scroll jacking is the worst thing you can do for UX. Stop doing this.
I run a bootstrapped B2B SAAS (12+ years now) and I have seen it all, made all the mistakes possible and had enough wins over the years to keep going.
The first thing to understand is that there is no one size fits all. You have to start somewhere keep iterating. Ok you probably already knew that but wanted to preface anyway to set expectations.
Overall, You have to start with the WHO. Who is this product really for ? If your answer is generic or covers various horizontal segments, you are going to struggle a lot more. NO one builds a product that covers various horizontal segments on Day 1 and succeeds generally. You have to go really really niche and specific. The problem is that this scares new founders who think that if they don't think or aim big (translates to trying to sell to too many segments), they will fail or not make enough money to make it a real business. This is totally false thinking. Take it from a guy who has done it for 12+ years and still fails.
Once you have defined the "Who" (note that this may change with time but you have to start somewhere based on your best assumption as of now), you should have it written down very specifically. For example, don't say "I have a CRM". Instead say "I have a CRM that helps B2B SAAS founders in this specific way".
Also, 100 customers is too ambitious and unrealistic in early days. Start with getting first 5-10. Get them in first. Condition your mind that it is ok to have a really small set of customers who hopefully love your product. With that, you now have to go hunting also known as "outbound" in salesy terms. Sorry no magic wand here if you were expecting a different answer. You of course can do the usual like submitting to directories,writing blog posts etc and you must do all those as well on the side as everything adds up.But the most important thing is manually reaching out to prospective customers.
So now the question is: how do I find those prospective customers ? This will again depend on the "WHO". But more importantly, where do they typically hang out ? I don't mean necessarily in person (that of course helps a lot) but also online.
One tip is to look for customers in your niche already who may be using a competitor product. Websites like builtwith etc can give you a decent list of those customers (not 1005 accurate but they are reasonably accurate).
Bottomline is that you have to do manual outreach every day (minimum to 50 people if you can). Don't sell them the product. Start asking them for a conversation.
All the best. Happy to help if you have more questions.
what is your objective ? Are you trying to learn how startups work and hence wanting to work at one ? Or are you trying to work at a startup and hopefully build wealth with equity (very unlikely).
Then, The question is : how much equity vs salary ? Lot of startups have roles like "founding engineer" etc but the equity won't be more than 1%-3% (or even less). Granted, some of these are funded and offer almost market salary.
Or are you looking for significant equity (say > 5-10% or more) ? In that case, you will almost be like a co-founder and that changes the game and requirements.
They are not just some random 3 have decades of real db experience behind them. They also just got funded which gives them the ability to expand and stay longer in the game.
"Why Us" => "I ran Postgres at Instacart, where we scaled the company 5x in April of 2020. The biggest problem we had was making Postgres serve 100,000s of grocery delivery orders per minute"
Agreed. S&P 500 needs to be seriously gatekeeped. We need safer boring companies in there thatbhave been peoven over a long period of time. Nothing against these companies but they are not proven and ready for S&P 500.
To be fair, it is done exactly to protect against accounts like yours. HN quality needs to be gate-keeped and new accounts absolutely need to be throttled. You may have meant well and be genuine but the bar is high now especially due to AI bots.
Sure but thats a very cynical way of seeing things. A company cannot exist without making a profit but there are plenty of companies that try and take care of their people. At least the ones that don't have investor or board pressure (smaller private companies).
Because of these shitty corporate companies that don't give a shit about their employees, the well is now poisoned for companies that do care especially smaller ones. Employees don't want to give their best anymore because they are burnt elsewhere and they become unemployable at smaller companies. It is a sad state of affairs.
I wish all platforms did this specially reddit, twitter etc. I don't use AI to write comments on any platform and always wondering if I am replying to an AI comment.
In my experience, any meetup > 10 people becomes useless because you cannot really make meaningful connections and large meetups usually have a fixed agenda where everyone is out there selling their own stuff.
I now will not attend a meetup unless it is extremely small group (<10 people). Those are hard to sustain though.
Exactly. I hired someone who was a good developer but he was charging hourly and extremely slow for what we needed. I am a software engineer (and a founder) myself so I get what it takes to write good code but I am no longer waiting for a dev to turn something around in 20 hours when I can use LLM to write it in 1 or less.
Going forward, I am no longer hiring hourly rate devs. Either fixed rate project or full time as needed. No hourly.
I am always looking for smart, hungry and talented people to join me in creating great products and company.
My long term interests are in SaaS, edtech, hrtech, Dev Tools etc for the most part. I may have ADHD but too lazy to get diagnosed.
Always happy to chat with strangers. Hit me up if you want to talk about anything.
meet.hn/city/39.9527237,-75.1635262/Philadelphia
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