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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,552 posts.
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How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
A rant-focused guide to founding a GmbH in Germany: 16 steps including Transparenzregister and Rundfunkbeitrag, with tips to avoid common bureaucracy.
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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.
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Schlep Blindness
January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness . Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. No one likes schleps, but hackers…
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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea (2020)
When good ideas make bad business
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A startup doesn't need to be a unicorn
The Missing Middle Path: What VCs Don’t Tell You
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I stopped advertising and nothing happened
What happens when you turn off all of your Internet advertising? Apparently, nothing. This post explores how I came to the decision to turn off all ads, and what I found as a result.
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Startup = Growth
September 2012 A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups…
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I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)
Update: This post received a large amount of attention on Hacker News — see the discussion thread.
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I made a million dollar product from my dorm room (2025)
The story of the nice!nano; a wireless Pro Micro-compatible microcontroller board I made in my freshman year of college.
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The Tech Bust of 2015
Maybe instead of a tech bubble, we’re in a tech bust. No one seems to fervently believe tech valuations are cheap, so it’d be somewhat surprising if we were in a bubble. In many parts of the...
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Success and Failure at Pebble
We launched Pebble on Kickstarter 10 years ago today! It was an amazing ride and I learned a lot from the experience. Story time…
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What I Learned Burning $14k on YouTube Ads for Candy Japan
Explains how expensive it is to advertise on YouTube, what is involved in launching a campaign and finally tweaking it towards profitability.
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Rules to run a software startup with minimum hassle
Over the last 5 years of bootstrapping, I’ve tried a lot of things, and discovered there are many ways to create hassle for yourself that wastes time and energy and distracts you from building value in your business. This is my second post on lessons learned from bootstrapping; you can subscribe to updates to this…
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Startup lessons
There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path.
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After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code
And by "all," I mean everything: core product, failed pivots, miscellaneous
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I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts
A while back I wrote : I've had many, many failures in my life. (Hm, maybe I should write a blog post about that.) This is that post. I'm ...
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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
YC is no longer an exclusive club where membership signals legitimacy—it’s becoming a broad index of tech startups.
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Debt is coming to the tech industry
Ten years from now, what seismic change will we reflect back on and think, “well that was pretty obvious, in retrospect”? Debt is going to finally come to the tech industry. We can hat…