I didn't mean to nitpick your post specifically. It was more of a comment on the attitude of many entrepreneurs. I really liked the your perspective and the idea of self-directed work in general.
I'm more frustrated with the idea that we're encouraging everyone with talent to be permanent generalists flitting from one idea to another, never getting a deep understanding of one organization or specialty. The "find smart people and figure it out" approach is great if your ambition is medium-sized, but you can't build the next amazon without eventually needing longevity and specialization.
We promised Ed Nacional we would never publicly release the rate but I can say that the the majority of the $5K was spent on both the brand identity and URL.
While I was going through the process of selecting a designer, I went through a very long list of portfolios and selected Ed who was an up-and-coming designer at the time. He's much more expensive today as his portfolio and design skills have matured.
refreshing to see definitive idea selection and validation stages in your process. too much of the if-you-ship-it-they-will-come ideology on hn.
does the $5k price tag factor in the value of time you and your partner spent on this project? at the minimum you had to live somewhere and eat something...
Great point. We still have that list to this day and we keep adding to it.
We even structured our whole company around solving problems. We assign major problems to our teams, they come up with a solution, we pick the best one collaboratively, and those turn into tangible projects.
If you can clarify why this post is a "piece of trash", it would help me understand how to write better articles. I already changed my post from "zero" value to "arbitrary" value to make it more clear. I also linked to the Rolling Stone article for people that want to dive deeper into the topic. And yes, I shouldn't have generalized an entire industry and refer actually to a specific piece. It's also my opinion, which a lot of people may agree/disagree with it.
Apologies for the overreaction earlier. I did react a bit insultingly. It was an irritable reaction to a "stock statement" that I associate with idiots, which wasn't really called for in this context.
The stock statement in question is the dismissal of an enormous and critical industry as "value-less".
You link to a Rolling Stones article (by Matt Taibbi, who is a controversial journalist, who panders to the pseudo-libertarian crowds on reddit) which attacks Goldman Sachs for manipulating the US Fed (a fair point), and you use that as a justification for condemning investment banking as a whole.
Investment banking is a huge collection of professions which generally assists with one primary purposes: helping companies raise money. To dismiss that as valueless is clearly wrong. Surely, if anyone understands the value of being able to raise money, it must be startup founders. Investment banking exists to enable large corporations to raise money.
Some other purposes of investment banking include: hedging against risks (via derivates, for example, which you also dismiss), providing more advanced financial instruments (fyi, options, which you use to pay your employees, are derivatives too - and they wouldn't exist if investment bankers hadn't thought them up), market research (which has provided dubious value in the past, but that is an indictment of the global mega-banks, not of the research function, which is essential), market making (essential to provide a fluid, liquid market where people can actually exit), and many others.
When I first loaded up your site, it displayed with no CSS template, and looked like a craigslist post (I did not initially check the URL), and I checked the poster, and it was created 2 hours ago for the clear purpose of submitting this story, and it had a disproportionate number of upvotes for the weak point it was making, and it also made the above generalisation which, in my mind, categorised you directly as a reddit-style "omg banking is evil" type.
That led me (wrongly) to lump you in with the "idiots". Again, I apologise for that, it was an incorrect and rash overreaction - but some of the points above still stand. Hopefully now you understand my thinking better, though.
@swombat Gotcha. That makes sense. I originally wrote the post in 20 minutes after watching "The Inside Job" so that's probably why it seems like I'm one of the "reddit-style omg banking is evil" type."
Yes, I wrote such a broad generalization, which I will definitely not include in future posts. So, thanks for the clarification. Learn something new everyday.
Will look into the CSS. Have no idea why it didn't load for you?
So true. I think the overarching problem with that scenario is that the engineer is building the product for himself, and not for the team and end users. Rather than caring about what's best for the product, he/she thinks about his personal ego.
Totally true. The hardest part of the whole process is cutting features out. For me, I imagine that our sink is shipping and we just have to throw things overboard to stay afloat just a little longer. This allows us to throw things out that aren't exceptionally vital for the product.
The funny thing is that once you throw out the feature that you really really thought you needed, you actually don't even think about it anymore. Strange how that works.
