[HN Gopher] A Postmortem of a Startup
___________________________________________________________________
A Postmortem of a Startup
Author : jamierumbelow
Score : 111 points
Date : 2025-04-16 10:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (buildwithtract.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (buildwithtract.com)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> After raising a PS744,000 pre-seed round in April 2024, we
| explored several business models
|
| Capital after traction
| dzonga wrote:
| to those who cry about 'BS' like diversity etc ask yourself if
| people without the same backgrounds, looks would have been able
| to raise the same amount without a business model.
| drdrek wrote:
| The financial world is not equitable, its about results.
| People from privileged backgrounds are more likely to raise
| funds because their privilege makes them more likely to
| succeed. If Being raised in a trailer park raised the odds of
| a successful exit, you can be sure VC interns would be having
| business meetings over deep fried Oreos way more often.
| devmor wrote:
| This presupposes that VC firms generally know what is more
| likely to succeed, which is demonstrably wrong and the
| entire reason that the "eggs" are put into so many
| different baskets every season.
| Urahandystar wrote:
| Is that so or is it more likely to succeed because they can
| raise funds? The way modern VC works is just a packaging
| industry anyway. A VC will give money to a founder if he
| thinks that he can raise more money in the future. They'll
| get back what they put in from someone else before it
| fails.
| immibis wrote:
| Good advice for investors, maybe - not for founders. Why would
| a founder turn down money?
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| I don't know, getting paid to try things out sounds like a good
| deal
| pyb wrote:
| A good question to ask before starting a startup is : "Do I see
| myself working 10 years on this problem?". Looks like they ran
| out of steam, rather than out of runway.
| bad_username wrote:
| Why 10 years? Is it not typical with startup founders to plan a
| lucrative exit in a much shorter time frame?
| pyb wrote:
| No, where did you get this idea? Good startups do not think
| this way.
| flessner wrote:
| > "Good startups usually take 10 years." - Sam Altman
|
| It also aligns with other Y Combinator teachings, such as
| targeting growing markets.
| drdrek wrote:
| 7-10 years is the realistic time frame for a moderately
| successful exit, usually those that are "Bought" after 1-3
| years are actually failed ventures with all or most of the
| money going back to the investors to recoup their loses.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| It seems high at first but take a look at practically any
| successful startup (Slack, Dropbox, Notion, etc) and they all
| were around for 8-12 years before the founders cashed out.
| AJRF wrote:
| Thanks for writing this!
|
| > Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning
| permission is difficult.
|
| Isn't the real problem that supply is artificially constrained
| because house prices and the economy are interlinked in a way in
| a special way in the UK economy, such that the majority of home
| owners don't want it changed (because more supply == downward
| pricing pressure)
|
| I think the only entity that could meaningfully change this
| situation is government, and well it's easier to not upset your
| donors.
|
| Edit: To be fair to the author, they do mention artificial supply
| constraints but I think my point stands - it is there by design,
| too much inertia forcing it to be that way that won't be changed
| by streamlining the bureaucratic elements
| nemomarx wrote:
| is that a very special thing? it seems like that in the US too
| imo
| Destiner wrote:
| I think you're describing NIMBY, which is more of a US/SF thing
| (but also is a case in Europe to some extent).
| zihotki wrote:
| NIMBY is an universal human concept, it's present everywhere
| - Europe, Asia, South America. It may come in different
| flavours but it's everywhere. People don't welcome changes to
| the surrounding environment if it doesn't benefit them more
| or less directly.
| rob74 wrote:
| I agree with you that that's probably the real problem, but not
| that the situation is unique to Britain (although maybe it's
| worse in Britain then elsewhere)...
| kijin wrote:
| It looks like this startup tried to hack the system by
| streamlining one of the key mechanisms of artificial
| constraint: the difficulty of getting permits.
|
| Not a fundamental cure, of course, but it sounds like a
| promising hack to squeeze out a few more building permits than
| would otherwise have been issued.
| lalaithion wrote:
| One of the ways in which supply is artificially restricted is
| that getting planning permission is difficult, so you're not
| actually disagreeing with OP
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Supply is somewhat constrained _and_ demand is also
| artificially inflated (at national level it is 100% caused by
| immigration, which is kept high by the successive governments).
|
| Everyone relies on the property market going up. Beyond the
| obvious reasons, another important one is that fixed rate
| mortgages are not fixed for the life of the mortgage but only
| for, usually, 2 to 5 years after which rates jump so everyone
| is continuously worried about remortgaging.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| It's curious to think about what house prices in the UK would
| be like without immigration.
|
| With a sustained negative fertility rate over the past few
| decades, there could've feasibly been stable prices with no
| new houses built at all.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The UK population would have started to decrease naturally
| I believe around 2024 without immigration. It so happens
| that the past few years have also seen record high
| immigration and population growth...
|
| Obviously the property market would be looking very
| differently if population was decreasing. The whole economy
| would.
| immibis wrote:
| Are you trying to paint a conspiracy here? It seems like
| people just move around if they can, and one pressure
| that drives people away is a lack of housing even worse
| than other places' lack of housing. If there's less of a
| lack of housing (relative to how bad it is everywhere
| else), of course a place becomes more attractive to move
| to.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| > It so happens that the UK population would have started
| to decrease naturally I believe around 2024 without
| immigration
|
| I think it would've been much earlier than that.
| Cumulative net migration since 2000 is around 8.5 million
| people. So the UK's current population would be radically
| lower today without immigration.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-
| fig... (annoyingly the per year figures need to be summed
| up manually on both this and ONS reports)
| LurkerAtTheGate wrote:
| > Obviously the property market would be looking very
| differently if population was decreasing. The whole
| economy would.
|
| Isn't this exactly what's happening in Japan? Govt
| practically giving away mostly rural homes, as owners
| died without heirs.
| AJRF wrote:
| NIMBYism is not unique, but the importance of house prices to
| the UK economy is more severe than other countries.
|
| - The UK has a very strong household wealth affect (consumption
| is tied to house price growth / decline). The US and UK
| borrowers borrow at a rate against household wealth not seen in
| other nations (look at the chart on page 6 -
| https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1117.pdf)
|
| - It has had dramatic, sustained house price growth (400% real
| price growth since 1980) vs US (200%), France (200%), Germany
| (150%), Spain (Collapsed in 2008), Italy (Stagnant since 2008)
|
| Some Links:
|
| - https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/working-
| pa...
|
| -
| https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Issues/2016/12/31/Uni...
| immibis wrote:
| It's been said about the New Zealand economy that it mainly
| consists of five people trading houses with each other for
| ever bigger numbers.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| I've posted this before, but I think the reason house prices
| are expensive in the UK is that they are an asset. If the rich
| can buy that asset and make a return, they will buy it. So
| price equilibrium is where rents are at an absolute maximum
| that can be born by tenants. As the price is determined the
| potential yield, the price then rises as high as possible.
|
| Building more houses won't change this situation until the
| number of houses is greater than the number of tenants. At the
| point where the number of tenants equals the housing supply,
| the returns can still be made and prices will be bid up.
|
| The problem is that is a competition between the rich buying as
| an asset vs the rest of us buying as a home. The only solutions
| are to reduce or eliminate the possible returns for the rich.
|
| And as posted if the prices are then allowed to fall, the whole
| economy is in danger, because it is based on the creation of
| illusory wealth via asset inflation. Remortgaging a house that
| has risen in price feeds money into the economy, despite no
| wealth actually being created. And the entire economy is based
| on this, because the rest of the economy has been destroyed by
| neoliberalism.
| matt-p wrote:
| Yes, it's seriously unhealthy to have most of peoples
| individual wealth tied up in the fact that there's
| constrained property supply. If we just built a bunch more
| housing (or removed net immigration) such that house prices
| dropped say 25% (which would still be too little, actually),
| people would be in negative equity, the banks would collapse,
| government voted out, riots in the street. Yet it's whats
| needed. If a late 20's professional in London is earning
| PS40,000 after tax they're doing fairly well, yet a one bed
| flat in zone 2 would still be 10X their annual income.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| >Building more houses won't change this situation until the
| number of houses is greater than the number of tenants.
|
| That's wrong though. Building more houses eases this
| situation as it approaches the number of tenants. It gets
| better! Better is good!
|
| And the (perceived) appreciation of houses is also part of
| the asset price, not just the rental income.
| matt-p wrote:
| arguably asset price is built on scarcity vs demand
| everything else is all second order really.
| pyb wrote:
| It's true that the general public have a revealed preference
| for the housing crisis to continue forever.
|
| However in principle, as with many social issues, a motivated
| actor such as a startup could still have a chance of fixing it.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Nice writeup, wish more startups who didn't succeed did this
| though understand not easy thing to write so kudos.
|
| One factor to success is timing, as someone who lives in UK
| around London and is seeing (slowly) greenbelt getting developed
| on perhaps the market might be moving towards you in the next 5
| years.
| ktallett wrote:
| I would agree but I doubt it will become more of a thing, too
| many seem to not be willing to accept failure or show
| vunerability. This will always be rare in the start up market
| as long as bravado and fake it till you make it is still a
| thing, which it is.
| morsecodist wrote:
| This is interesting and they make some good observations but I
| can't help but think the deck was stacked against them because
| they are trying to come up with a technical/business solution to
| what is fundamentally a political problem.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| Yeah "founded to build software to fix Britain's housing
| crisis."
|
| There was literally zero hope for success.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Planning permission is partly a political issue, partly down to
| expertise. You need experience, you need to know the rules, you
| need to know the tricks, you need to know how to draft the
| application. You need to know the game. Indeed this is not
| something that is waiting for a technical solution.
|
| It's great that they tried, though. But it strikes me that they
| seem to be 20 something students (not meant disparagingly) with
| no experience in this so perhaps lacked the insights and
| understanding of the pain points. It does seem that VCs were
| happy to fund based on an AI play, though ;)
| dzonga wrote:
| well written. I think your fatal mistake even though you folks
| are smart was not understanding the complete value chain of your
| business.
|
| What I mean by understanding the economics of the value chain is
| you've to understand how your customers make money, how their
| customers make money & how their suppliers make money. From there
| - you can workout your value proposition - are you saving your
| customers money (means there's a cap on how much value you can
| extract) or are you allowing your customers to make more money
| (how much value you can extract is kinda uncapped - depending on
| mechanics)
|
| The other mistake - which you correctly kinda alluded to is not
| understanding the incentives / dynamics of the industry. UK land
| is tricky since most wealth / power is packed into UK land. hence
| your part about emotion etc.
|
| final mistake was equating success to raising money. Profit, if
| not revenue growth is the only measure of success. Raising money
| is not.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I don't think the last paragraph is correct, many unicorns
| don't generate profit, yet are hugely successful by any other
| metric. In many cases, generating profit is actually
| undesirable for tax reasons.
| frankdejonge wrote:
| I believe that why they said "if not revenue growth". Those
| successful, yet unprofitable companies do have revenue
| growth, or market share growth.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Generating profit is highly desirable for any business.
|
| For tax purpose you need to differentiate between "profit"
| and "taxable profit". You can try to lower your taxable
| profit to minimise tax, e.g. by re-investing your profits,
| but ultimately it is better to turn a profit and to have to
| pay some tax on it that to have an unprofitable business.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Not necessarily, this is a classic misunderstanding. As a
| famous example, Uber did not make a profit for 14 years,
| all the way up to 2023. For taxable profit it's even more
| severe, they've built up a considerable backlog of losses,
| so they'll pay very little in taxes for the foreseeable
| future, even though they're now profitable.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Uber, like Amazon before, had the strategy to forego
| profit in the short term to focus on growth. Ultimately
| the goal is to be profitable because that's the point of
| a business.
|
| I think the misunderstanding is to confuse this for
| "profit isn't desirable".
|
| Sure you may try to minimise your taxable profit for tax
| purposes but that means you are turning a profit, and
| that may be impossible if you intend to pay dividends.
| immibis wrote:
| Success is when you get paid. If the product is unprofitable,
| you lose out on a bunch more money, and your investors lose out
| on most of their money, but _you_ did your job and got paid for
| that, and as long as it was a reasonable rate, what 's the
| failure on your part?
| flessner wrote:
| Very thoughtful writing and great to see someone cut it early
| instead of continuing without a clear path.
|
| > If I were to start a startup again, I'd take more time and be
| more intentional in talking to potential customers before needing
| to raise money.
|
| From the outside, this pretty much hit the nail on the head.
| philipallstar wrote:
| > Housing in Britain is expensive because getting planning
| permission is difficult.
|
| It's true that planning departments are very expensive, don't do
| much positively, and still seem to allow awful-looking things to
| be built, and I'd probably happily do away with them, but the
| fundamental driver is the incredible onboarding of people from
| overseas for years that crushes the combination of the existing
| population and the new people into a number of dwellings that
| isn't that dissimilar to the previous year.
|
| You can't take on a net number of people each year that would
| require a new city the size of Nottingham to be built to
| accommodate, and say "well, it's all the planning process'
| fault."
| froddd wrote:
| Reducing the problem to 'people coming from overseas' is an
| equally reductionist argument.
|
| There are properties going unused, for very many reasons.
| Second homes, holiday homes, etc. This also drives the price of
| properties up. This is one of the inputs to the problem.
| Planning permission laws is another input. The size and change
| of size of the people needing housing is another input.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Is it not the dominant factor, at least in the short term?
| It's much faster for 150k people to enter/leave the UK than
| for a corresponding number of homes to built/demolished.
| chippiewill wrote:
| It does, but occupancy rates in the UK are already incredibly
| high compared to countries like France.
|
| There are simply too many people and not enough houses.
| matt-p wrote:
| reductionist in this case is not a bad thing. We need a major
| change to fix this situation and doing some little tweaks
| like increasing taxes on second homes or holiday homes does
| not actually fix this (we already tax those specific cases,
| with things like second home stamp duty or in some areas
| second home council tax).
|
| You have
|
| A - Demand (immigration of 1 Million per year)
|
| Or
|
| B - Supply (building only 120,000 houses per year)
|
| We MUST fix one or both of these sides of the equation.
| Holiday homes aren't going to add up to a row of beans quite
| frankly (and will have very negative effects on the tourism
| industry, not so bad in London - but might be quite an impact
| in cornwall for example).
| margorczynski wrote:
| I think the problem with startups (from a business perspective)
| is that they're ego-driven and instead of looking at the business
| reality in an objective fashion they mostly try to
| "revolutionize" and "make a difference".
|
| It isn't as sexy as doing the next Facebook or disrupting global
| healthcare but just copying an existing archaic & expensive
| product and doing it better can yield a great and stable
| business. There's a plethora of software products (offline &
| online) which cost way too much and work like crap - all you need
| to do is do it better for a more reasonable price (where those
| old companies have a big headcount and lots of mouths to feed
| producing a hard price floor for them).
| belinder wrote:
| Now where to get a list of such companies and products to
| decide what to build...
| madmask wrote:
| A decent 3d CAD and multiphysics FEM (cheap comsol) would be
| a good start
| ph4evers wrote:
| Yes but the industry is so rooted and vendor locked that it
| is extremely hard. People pay for Autodesk, Ansys, comsol
| etc. because it is proven and engineers are trained to use
| it. I would not be eager to use something new if I'm a
| constructor or car manufacturer.
| nradov wrote:
| Sure, a new startup will never get any market share in
| large, stable businesses like those. They would have to
| sell to other startups. New auto parts manufacturers pop
| up all the time.
| qazxcvbnmlp wrote:
| Yep, decent 3d CAD is expensive. Competition in this space
| would be fantastic
| razakel wrote:
| People constantly moan about their jobs, stupid processes,
| broken software and tools... listen to them and build
| something better.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem is that usually the moaners are not the loaners
| - they're not the ones making the purchase decisions.
|
| That's why you either get in via very small business (where
| the owner is the buyer and user) or guerrilla (like Slack
| et al).
| Zambyte wrote:
| The people moaning are the ones building things that can
| be built better, not the ones that you should try to sell
| to.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I'm a moaner, but I'm not building anything.
|
| The software my school uses to communicate with parents
| is fucking _awful_. Based on digging around their website
| & linkedin, I suspect they have a team of offshore
| developers - which is _fine_ - but my money is that they
| don 't actually have a team, they're paying a company
| that gives them supposedly-fungible engineer-hours
| instead of an actual cohesive team that works on the
| product and is proud of what they've made. They just eat
| requirements and shit something approximating software.
|
| But what am I going to do? Say I build a competitor,
| solo, for cheap. (It can be done. The software doesn't do
| much. The hardest thing would be ensuring the emails
| actually get delivered.)
|
| Now I get to play salesman. I have to sell it to my
| school. Now I have to maintain it. Our school isn't rich;
| a local school paid $130k for an unrelated
| hardware+software solution, so I'm _at most_ going to get
| that, and now I 'm on call 24/7, now I'm training the
| teachers & administrators to use it, now I'm fielding
| support emails, etc., etc.
|
| Fuck it. I'll keep moaning.
| dazh wrote:
| Is this true? I've tried for months to get people to talk
| to me about their problems and the most common answer I get
| is "everything's... fine?".
| bagpuss wrote:
| there's neoseed.io that sends out emails weekly with "ideas
| you can replicate"
| mickael-kerjean wrote:
| A dirty secret I recently learned about: look for public
| contracts in your area, to find some of those, google
| "contract register filetype:pdf".
|
| Tons of crazy shit in there waiting to be disrupted. The
| tricky part is to get the right financials to bid on the
| interesting stuff, a good pathway there is to combine
| multiple companies together and make a shared bid, reach out
| to me if you're interested.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| > There's a plethora of software products (offline & online)
| which cost way too much and work like crap - all you need to do
| is do it better for a more reasonable price (where those old
| companies have a big headcount and lots of mouths to feed
| producing a hard price floor for them).
|
| Our startup is basically doing this right now. Our thesis is
| basically if we can make a product marginally better than our
| massive competitors and be able to peel away just a sliver of
| their customer base and get rich by virtue of having just 2
| people and not 2000.
|
| The business itself it not sexy at all but there are still
| loads of interesting technical problems to solve from building
| the app to marketing.
|
| I would say our biggest strength right now is just having me
| and my co-founder and no other folks to pay. When your burn
| rate is your monthly digital ocean bill (which runs ~$50), you
| can burn practically forever.
| c_hastings wrote:
| As long as you remember to pay yourselves too!
| abanana wrote:
| _> the problem with startups is that they 're ego-driven_
|
| 100% agree. This looks like another case of nothing more than
| arrogance - another case of somebody thinking they know it all,
| can revolutionise an industry, even though their experience
| within that industry is basically zero. Some of the choices of
| wording in there, e.g. "potential for venture-backed
| disruption", say it all.
|
| It's not far from being that typical problem where someone,
| without domain knowledge, has that common simplistic thought:
| "why don't they just..." because it's always so obvious from
| the outside! In this case, why don't they just buy our
| software? Turns out it wasn't so obvious after all.
|
| It feels like I've seen several stories on HN from people
| seduced by the idea of being called an entrepreneur. (Or more
| accurately, wanting to call _themselves_ an entrepreneur.)
| Sometimes they keep failing, and just try a different industry
| instead of taking stock and changing their approach to one that
| starts with some real learning. Their blog posts make it clear
| that creating a startup is /was their goal. No understanding
| that to be successful, your business is supposed to be a means
| to an end, not the end in itself - do enough research first to
| create a viable solution to an actual problem. Though it seems
| in venture capital funding, businesses tend to get funding
| regardless... it's another world.
| duped wrote:
| > I don't want to make a little money every day, I want to make
| a fuckton of money all at once
|
| - Russ Hanneman
|
| The thing that distinguishes a startup from a small business is
| that the goal is growth - not being "great and stable." That
| said, I've worked at startups for years and I would not agree
| that _good_ startups are "ego driven." They may seem that way
| on the outside if you take LinkedIn posts at face value or only
| read blog posts by people trying to hack it through publicity.
| They often have more understanding of the business reality of
| the markets they're trying to enter (or create) than anyone
| else, the value they add is by saying "fuck that" to a
| particular set of assumptions everyone else in the market might
| live by.
|
| Sometimes that set of assumptions can't be discarded, but if it
| can and the startup is right, the backers stand to make a
| fuckton of money all at once.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| Most startups fail, and most startups are run by founders
| driven by ego and vision rather than by disciplined market
| research or curiosity or understanding of the market.
|
| The successful ones will either have gotten very lucky, or
| know lots about the market as you say. In fact the first main
| success hurdle is to understand the market well enough to
| know it's actually a market, and that it can be monetized.
|
| All that to say, I agree with both you and OP.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| "address Britain's housing crisis"
|
| It's a feature, not a bug.
| matt-p wrote:
| up to a certain point, yes, asset holders do benefit from
| workers spending 50% of post tax income on housing. It is now
| restricting GDP growth, however - so long term it's not in many
| peoples interest.
| djoldman wrote:
| I looked for a source for this statement in the article:
|
| > Granting permission takes the median hectare of land from
| PS20,000 to PS2.4 million - a 139x uplift.
|
| I couldn't find one. However, I did run into some interesting
| viewpoints by a certain Paul Cheshire, Professor Emeritus of
| Economic Geography at the London School of Economics... "one of
| the world's pre-eminent housing economists"
|
| He has this to say about "Green Belts":
|
| > Britain imposed its first Green Belt in 1955 and now, if re-
| zoned for building, farmland at the built edge of London has an
| 800-fold mark-up. There was no secular trend in housing land
| prices in Britain until the mid-1950s, but after Green Belts were
| imposed real prices increased some 15-fold. More than houses
| because you can substitute land out of house production. There is
| a similar pattern in Canada, New Zealand or the West and East
| coasts of the United States where policies restrict land supply.
|
| https://www.newgeography.com/content/006358-lse-economist-pa...
| matt-p wrote:
| I have not researched this but someone I know at one of the big
| house-builders pegged the cost of building a 3 bed at around
| PS35-40,000, so in the south east land with PP is 10X more
| valuable than what's sat on it.
|
| "Farm" land, even in the SE is about 12K an acre, and you get
| 6-8 houses to the acre so you should be able build a three bed
| and sell it for PS50K on the outskirts of London, Cambridge,
| Oxford or Brighton (just by example) still making a profit if
| we liberalised planning in those areas. That shows you how
| extreme this situation of fake constraint is.
|
| It could therefore never be allowed to happen. The big house-
| builders wouldn't build and sell at that price, the locals
| wouldn't allow it as they've bought their houses for 500K, 10X
| as much and would literally all go personally bankrupt...
| gnfargbl wrote:
| > I couldn't find one.
|
| A parliamentary publication from 2018 estimated the uplift
| factor to be 93x outside London and 287x inside [1]. Found via
| ChatGPT.
|
| I would think that the north-south variation has flattened a
| little bit by now, but I can't immediately find any similar
| document from the last couple of years.
|
| [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads
| /..., page 12.
|
| [2] https://www.progressive-policy.net/publications/gathering-
| th...
| tiffanyh wrote:
| A lot of time & effort went into that write-up.
|
| I realize what I'm about to say will get backlash ... but I can't
| help but think is the time to write this postmortem indicative of
| how the business was run.
|
| Meaning, who benefits from the output of this postmortem? Seems
| like mostly strangers (who might not even live in UK).
|
| What other time/effort/resources was spent on things that weren't
| directly engaging with their customer ... because it seems
| extremely clear without knowing much about that market that this
| isn't a technical challenge per se - but a regulatory / social
| problem and the modest amount of capital they raised won't even
| scratch the service on solving this problem.
|
| Note: not intending to be negative. It just seems like the
| elephant in the room is that the team was so ill-prepared and not
| understanding what actual problem they are solving - that my
| heart goes out to them.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| > this isn't a technical challenge per se - but a regulatory /
| social problem and the modest amount of capital they raised
| won't even scratch the service on solving this problem.
|
| Stripe hasn't fully fixed online payments but still made a good
| business of making things better.
|
| At a high level, SaaS to help people filling out planning
| permission forms sounds like a viable business. Many thousands
| of people do this as their full time job, so their employers
| might be willing to pay PS100 per user per month on something
| that makes them more productive.
| shalmanese wrote:
| > Meaning, who benefits from the output of this postmortem?
| Seems like mostly strangers (who might not even live in UK).
|
| Seems to be a piece of content marketing intended to help the
| two founders land a new role in the US so, in that sense, it
| does seem pretty strategic and well targeted.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| > In May 2023, Tract was founded to build software to fix
| Britain's housing crisis.
|
| I mean, they took on a heck of a problem. At least they tried,
| but I suspect it was an upward battle from day 0.
| ejsdev wrote:
| I wrote something similar to this last year - it was an
| incredibly cathartic writing experience. It's extremely weird to
| realise that you're hung up on a business venture from years
| before, but made a lot of sense.
|
| FWIW I am never doing a 3-way marketplace again, hellish.
|
| If anyone is interested - https://edjs.dev/blog/my-first-startup/
| shalmanese wrote:
| When I coach startup founders, I walk them through a very simple
| 4 step process when we meet:
|
| 1. What have you learnt since we last met and how has that
| altered your priors?
|
| 2. What do you now believe is the most important problem you
| should be solving?
|
| 3. What's currently blocking you from solving that problem?
|
| 4. How do we overcome those blocks?
|
| Crucial to this process is that Q1 is not what have you _done_ ,
| it's what have you _learnt_. I do not give a shit about anything
| you 've done if it's not in the service of learning.
|
| I also run a retro every 3 months with founders where we ask the
| following questions:
|
| 1. What would you want to tell yourself 3/6/12 months ago
| (essentially, all the lessons learnt in italics) to save the
| maximum amount of pain?
|
| 2. When did you learn each specific thing?
|
| 3. When was the earliest you could have learnt that thing?
|
| 4. What changes can we make going forward to minimize that delta?
|
| Extremely simple things but extraordinarily powerful when applied
| consistently over a long enough span of time.
| mrweiner wrote:
| Thank you -- the way you frame this is helpful.
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