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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 49 posts.
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YC Annual Letter 2017
Dear YC Community: In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress. Our mission is to enable the most...
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Everything I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS
Everything you want to know about Medellin and Colombia
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Things learned while running your own self-funded startup
Here's a brain dump of the things we've learned while running our business and shipping our first product ( Basis ). My experience at Valv...
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Y Combinator When No One Cared
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...
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Yes, but what does your startup do?
I recently signed up for a hackathon. Part of the deal these days is that sponsors get to send promotional messages to the attendees. Fair enough. The only problem is, most of these messages are rubbish! Here's the verbatim message I received - there were no links other than to Twitter. See if you can work out what…
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Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed (2011)
I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Lea…
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Twice as happy customers means half the marketing spend
Halving your cancel rate doubles the number of customers your business has. Even if you run a subscription business forever, you will not have infinite customers. Instead you reach a steady-state number.
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Startups should not use React
That is, if you ever hope to be acquired by a larger company
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Why I don't believe in Uber's Success
I wanted to write this blog post for well over half a year. I don’t believe Uber will be a successful business . I’ve been making my points in individual conversations over and over again - with this post I’m creating a writeup of my arguments that I can share in future.
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Successful Solo Founders
Note* Since publishing this, a research study came out by MIT with more information and data on this. See 2 founders are not always better…
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Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
Founders predictably underestimate the importance of hiring marketers. Here’s why many startups don’t get round to marketing their product…
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The life and death of a startup
At DjangoCon Europe 2017 , and again at DjangoCon US 2017 , I gave a talk entitled “Autopsy of a slow train wreck: The life and death of a Django startup”. After I gave those presentations, a number of people requested that I publish the content in blog form so they could share it with colleagues.
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The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
Data analysis reveals 50% drop in San Francisco startup funding, with Series C & D rounds falling 66-75%. Key insights on shifting venture capital trends in 2016-17.
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Climbing the wrong hill (2009)
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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The Merge
A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced...
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Candy Japan 2017 Year in Review
This was another tough year for Candy Japan, with many factors combining to a sharp decline in subscriber numbers. Contains revenue numbers, site statistics and learnings from 2017.
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A Story Of Starting A Business In Japan
Making It In Japan is a first hand account of the process of starting a business in Japan. Elizabeth interviews five other entrepreneurs and gets their advice on how to go about setting up your business.
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How a Large Customer Can Kill a Startup
I often hear a founder get very excited about the prospect of a large customer. The implied expectation is that this out-sized customer is going to shower the startup with cash & confer on them the imprimatur of legitimacy. However, when I hear a founder start talking about “the big one” I cringe. I start …
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Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
Trello was so focused on building its free customer base first and monetizing later that by the time it looked to its paid subscribers, it was too late.
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Avoiding Startup Tarpits
Startup growth can be painfully slow. So slow that many entrepreneurs just give up and quit when their launch doesn’t go as expected. When…
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Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit
I show how I built a mini startup called Hoodmaps in public from the first line of code to a functioning web app that I got to the frontpage of Reddit with ove…