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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 147 posts.
Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
[updated April, 2022] So you wanna start a side business while holding down a full-time job. Kool. Dang smart move – that’s the same route I took – ten years ago now. Self-funded, no VC to appease, no angel investor to update. Just you, and your sandbox of ambition. Hmm, but where to start? Which ... Read more
Published my first proper product after working as a developer for 10 years
The AI agent for accounting and bookkeeping firms. Dytto works inside the tools your firm already uses and handles the routine work. You sign off on everything.
Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker
TLDR: 30 member tech team formed over seven years built India's largest stock broker. Unconventional setup. The long pending tech blog is finally here. Some backstory and context.
I got my first $50/mo customer
Sharing everything I learn along the way and blog about my progress daily.
Startup financial models – Templates compared for SaaS
Need a financial model for your startup? Fear not. I have extensively compared the top 12 templates, free and paid, so you don't have to do it.
Signs that a business idea will probably fail
After 14 years running my own businesses, I’ve failed a lot. I haven’t kept count thankfully, but I’d say I’ve started at least 50 businesses / ideas and out of those, 3 have worked. And when I say worked I don’t mean staying in business, I mean resulting in either a decent income for me […]
Pricing Your Product
A lot of startups treat pricing as a math problem or, worse, an afterthought. Pricing is as much an art as it is a science, one that relies as much on marketing and psychology as it does on classical economics.
How to sell a B2B product
Lately, a bunch of early stage founders have emailed me to ask for go-to-market (GTM) advice. They have a real product, it solves a real problem for their handful of customers…
Vercel, formerly Zeit, raises $21M Series A
Today, we have some very special news regarding the evolution of our company.
YC S20 Remote Batch
We have decided to run the S20 batch remotely, because amid the COVID-19 crises, the safety of founders and YC staff is our top priority. Interviews for the batch will be remote, and office hours, evening talks, and meetups throughout the batch will all take place over video conferencing, as well as on our online…
Emotional debt in startups
Three to four years into my startup journey our then CTO Sunil introduced me to a term called “technical debt”. He explained that we would have to account some time to make changes to the product that won’t be seen by customers but that would support us in the long run. I was furious. How […]
Tips for Founders Sales: Lessons from Starting Two B2B Startups
Thus far I’ve founded two bootstrapped B2B startups, and led sales on both. One is off to the races, profitable, and growing. We even hired a general manager so that I can free myself up to work on other projects. The other is slightly more nascent, and just barely at ramen profitability.
Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. It’s been updated with new information about the U.S. Paycheck Protection program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan progra…
Remote Work: Hiring, recruiting, and essential tools
This is the first part of a two part masterclass on remote work, now live here: 01:46 Meet Shogun, the e-commerce page builder 02:58 They started fully remote as a side project that became...
How YC will be funding the S20 batch
Hint: it will involve a lot of video calls
Our Experience with Stripe Atlas
What its like to start a company with Stripe Atlas
Fast-Growing Remote Startups
Note: Enter your email to get notified when we launch our job board for hot remote companies! “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.” -Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook One of the greatest myths about remote work is that there aren’t phenomenal companies that are hiring remotely. […]
How to sell to 20M software devs with amazing onboarding
20M software developers in the world— if you can convince this set of people in the world to use your software, you've got a very very valuable startup. Today I wanted to sit down with the folks...
True product-market fit is a minimum viable company
Hi, I’m Ann. I was one of the first investors in Lyft, Refinery29, and Xamarin. I have been on the Midas List for the past 3 years and was…
YC W20 Online-Only Demo Day
Edit: YC W20 Demo Day is now on March 16. See here [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w20-online-demo-day-now-on-march-16/] for more info. On March 23, YC will host our 30th Demo Day online. With the growing concern over COVID-19, we believe this is the right thing to do for the safety of all attendees, including our…
6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far
It's been 6 months since the official launch of Lunch Money and I've been sharing milestones, both big and small. But that's hardly the full picture.
Sequoia Capital memo to their portfolio founders on Coronavirus
Here is a note that we sent to Sequoia founders and CEOs today to provide guidance on how to ensure the health of their business while…