Ask HN: What are your founder's resolutions for 2024?

37 points by virczl 2 years ago | 60 comments

Hey everyone!

As we step into 2024, I'm curious to know what resolutions other startup founders have set for themselves.

My top resolutions: - Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I'm cringe every time I do it. - Attend at least one networking event a week. - Contact much more people (prospects, partners or VCs) I've been pretty product-focused up to now to build it, but it's time to be obsessed by sales. - Exercise. This isn't really business-related, but it's more about understanding that I need to take some time for myself, because building a business is a marathon, not a sprint.

vasco 2 years ago |

> Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I'm cringe every time I do it.

Is this what people that create all Twitter and LinkedIn cringe content tell themselves? Why do it?

You really can't come up with any way to market your company that feels good? Can't you think a bit more about the problem and frame it as "what can I do that is net positive, doesn't make me feel like crap while doing it and will still get the word out"?

Why does it have to be "beat myself up continuously until I'm as bad as the other bad guys"? Is it just because it's easy to do cringe posts in 30seconds on LinkedIn? I think it is.

andy99 2 years ago | |

Posting something you think is cringe seems like bad advice. My un-asked for idea is if you want to write something, write opinions or tutorial/expositions about something you find interesting in the field of your business. Don't try and make it an ad, don't have a lame tie-in to your company's product at the end, just write something purely interesting. You can sign it with your name and title, and share on social media, and send it to prospects as a conversation starter. The point is to write something good and interesting and not "cringe" ads for you company.

klabb3 2 years ago | |

Both Twitter and LinkedIn are optimized for hot takes and fomo. It’s like a high stakes gambling of attention. I think the value of these places should be measured long term, in which case psychological biases wear off a bit. Noise is not always meaningful for a business.

My product was featured in random tech blogs, the “PC magazine” stuff that a lot of techies look down on. At one time, it was also featured in a high-profile trendy tech magazine. Initially, it drove a lot of traffic. But after only a few days, things were back to normal, and the user uptick was minimal. It turned out that even though not cool at all, the tech blogs were much better for me, because they had visitors that needed my product.

The point is: the spaces you hang out can make you think that “every important thing and person is here”, which can distort your view of the world. As a business you want to be where your customers are. You don’t have to be a “thought leader”.

_xivi 2 years ago | |

Well, cringe is subjective, especially when they've a different target audience. I can't blame them if it's working.

The fault here is on the platforms, they reward these practices, or maybe they just don't interfere and that content is really what drives people to interact with the content.

Either way, when you're playing a game, you reinforce what's working. When you watch your competitors eating your cake, unless you manage to come up with a strategy of your own, you end up going down that route sooner or later.

bottled_poe 2 years ago | | |

Is there any data that this is “what’s working?”. Seems the most engaged are the least influential.

fileeditview 2 years ago | |

I will probably insult some people with this but here it comes anyways..

I think we just have too many trash products (software and non-software) which no one really needs. This is why there are massive spam/ad campaigns everywhere to convince people that they need "new trash product xy".

One of the problems being that you cannot really build wealth today by doing your job as an employee in most cases. The result is that more and more people want a piece of the "founders pie" even though they don't have any valuable product to add.

And this not only applies to founders/start-ups.. when I look around I see 95% of all products as trash. Established big corps are guilty just the same. If you bought a washing machine 20 years ago there is a good chance it is still running. Today my washing machine has AI but dies after 3 years..

Sorry for the rant.. I hope some founder has as a resolution to make actually useful and durable products.

hashtag-til 2 years ago | |

Regular posts on LinkedIn as a goal seems backwards.

Here are examples of what not to do -> https://www.reddit.com/r/LinkedInLunatics/

zer0tonin 2 years ago | |

It's weird, because it's not even cargo cult since all the really succesful founders I know don't ever post on LinkedIn

virczl 2 years ago | |

1) My target frequents Linkedin and Twitter so it's important to have a minimum presence there.

2) I don't think that everything on Linkedin is cringe, there is a lot of very interesting people out there. I find my own posts cringe like for example, I find celebrating my birthday narcissistic, but I love celebrating other people's birthdays and I don't think their posts are cring. It's just a weird cognitive bias I'm trying to fight.

3) Of course there are other ways of marketing my product, and most of it doesn't come from these networks. But building an audience is always useful.

4) I was only sharing good resolutions, i.e. actions to stop procrastinating on specific points. However, my goals and plan of attack for my company are very different from that.

LightBug1 2 years ago | |

Yes, this seems like a goal NOT to commit to, on the regular.

I mean ... I'm really not looking forward to reading all the 'I'm delighted' posts on linkedin when I get back to the office ...

jmduke 2 years ago |

Last year my goal was "I can take off for a week or two and the technical infrastructure is fine"; this year it's "I can take off for a week or two and the business infrastructure is fine" (meaning, there aren't enterprise prospects who are completely blocked by my absence, nor is the content/blog/changelog pipeline always waiting on me). Largely, this means finding someone who can handle some of the higher-touch parts of sales & onboarding and be a little more proactive in terms of writing.

t-writescode 2 years ago |

I was one of many, many people laid off in 2023. I have about 6 months of unemployment, and my state supports entrepreneurship in its unemployment system; so,

I am giving myself 6-ish months to release a product enough that it can start taking income and see how it goes. That’s my mission for 2024 :)

harrymit907 2 years ago | |

Great. Do you mind sharing what location it is?

t-writescode 2 years ago | | |

Washington State

cl42 2 years ago |

To have more fun and to enjoy the process of working on things, not focusing on the end result.

fhd2 2 years ago | |

Refreshing take! I feel like the last years the tech industry has been increasingly obsessed with outcomes and moving KPIs at all costs.

I've seen pretty great (not always financially successful) things come out of people genuinely enjoying their work.

cl42 2 years ago | | |

Thanks! I agree with you, though this is much easier said than done. Ask me how it's going in 12 months. :-)

yamalight 2 years ago |

To finally figure out how to effectively design and test MVPs / prototypes without overdoing it. I think this has been a bane of my startup life for pretty much whole ~14 years I've been doing it.

pilgrim0 2 years ago | |

As someone who’s on research, I do hundreds of prototypes each year. My time optimizations include having a backing hypothesis for each prototype, and prototyping one hypothesis at a time, even if two hypothesis touch on the same domain problem, I spin a fresh new prototype for each. Usually I’m able to validate the hypothesis even before finishing the prototype, as merely getting the hands on the process reveals the answer. Also, each hypothesis lend itself to some specific kind of prototype. Some things will be amenable to code prototypes, others to statecharts, others to visual designs, etc. so getting intimate with your toolset is essential for productivity, as most time is spent with these tools. Even simple things like mastering keyboard shortcuts represent significant productivity gains. But building is not the hardest part, by far. The hardest part, for which there’s hardly any optimization is this: how to filter and select an hypothesis to begin with? Overall, I would recommend getting good at prototyping in general (as a mindset thing) and not simply trying to quickly make a particular prototype.

yamalight 2 years ago | | |

Having a research background - for me, doing this in research was always easier. Because you generally have very straightforward ways to validate your hypotheses.

Validating things with customers - in my experience - can be extremely tricky as they might not even know what they want

dan_lannan 2 years ago | |

+1. I'm in the same boat. Making a conscious effort to build quick and dirty prototypes when needed and only build them after I get a potential customer to jump into Figma with me and spend an hour of their time designing something with me. If they're willing to do that the hypothesis is they actually really do want it.

gtf21 2 years ago |

I've continually been dragged back into the operational weeds of the business over the last few years (by which I mean things like running a team day-to-day, working through risk analyses on a project, etc.). This is (a) not something I enjoy; and (b) not the thing I'm best at (although I am quite good at it for short periods). I'd really like to be spending my time on things I get satisfaction from beyond "you're making your company work so that should be satisfying in itself", so this year one of my goals (sooner rather than later) is to actually make myself as operationally redundant as possible so I can have higher leverage and enjoy it at the same time.

jongjong 2 years ago |

My resolution is to seize every opportunity I have to acquire as much money as possible by whatever means necessary and at whatever cost within the confines of the law when stretched to its absolute maximum capacity.

fredwu 2 years ago |

After having worked at many startups for two decades, most recently as CTO, I had finally started building my own SaaS (https://persumi.com, a blogging/audio platform and https://rizz.farm, a lead generation platform) in 2023. So for 2024 I'd love to start monetising them and turning them into real businesses. Fingers crossed.

namanyayg 2 years ago | |

What does Rizz.farm do exactly? What role does AI play?

saq 2 years ago |

I'm on that LinkedIn train also. As founder I would really need to build an audience there, but can relate to comments about feeling physically bad about it. I really would like to be original myself but feels like it is total waste of time with all the algorithm hacks and "top 10 thing to do to get audience" bs. If any of you solves this I want to jump on that train too.

mindcrime 2 years ago |

I wouldn't exactly call it a "resolution" but one theme for me this year involves picking - and committing to - a specific stack for front-end development, and really mastering it. I've spent most of my career mostly focused on backend-end / data / AI stuff and have a hole in my repertoire as far as building front-ends. I mean, yeah, I've done some basic stuff with HTML, Bootstrap, vanilla JS, jQuery, etc., but I've never really made it a point to really master a modern front-end stack.

So with that in mind, I've pretty much settled on learning Svelte, Tailwind, and DaisyUI, as well as really working hard to bone up on javascript / CSS fundamentals. The goal is to get to a point where I can build front-ends for tools that I use for myself, and for products at least up to a demo / MVP level.

I'll probably never be a web-design guru, but that's not really the goal. I just need to be able to build things end-to-end without needing to pull in somebody else.

andyish 2 years ago |

Cold outreach and marketing.

Everyone I ask for advice tells me to just start with 10 a week and see where it goes after a few months. So that's what I'm going to do.

Dev wise, going to try and develop plugins for more marketplaces as a means of improving the visibility of the product (confluence, slack, mattermost, etc).

fhd2 2 years ago |

I prefer to formulate goals as something I want to achieve, not something I want to do. For me, this year, the number one goal is to become competent at marketing.

When I started last year, I told myself I need to get competent at sales, or I will always need some CEO by my side and never have a business that's truly my own. Now I'm pretty decent at sales, but I can't fully leverage that since I don't have enough prospects to truly scale things. So figuring marketing out seems like my biggest lever.

How, I don't know yet. Pretty sure I won't post anything on LinkedIn I consider to be cringy :) What I already did is hire a fractional CMO to coach me - getting help from people already good at this seems like a reasonable tactic.

virczl 2 years ago | |

Did you find the fractional CMO's advice useful? I'm always worried that it's too high-level or not adapted to early-stage start-ups.

fhd2 2 years ago | | |

We had only two calls - I'd say it was pretty eye opening so far, for someone pretty far away from marketing like me at least. She focuses on startups though. I think it'll be a few more sessions before I can really tell if it was useful.

But I'd definitely exercise caution: Most marketing people I met have been the "let's do fancy rebranding, post on social media and go to events" types. Took me a while to find someone more suited to what I'm looking for. More strategic, less... arbitrary.

erru 2 years ago |

We've finally managed to close our first customer with our tiny bootstrapped AI sales bots project - so, the only resolution I have for 2024 is to scale that stuff to more customers (never gotten to that stage before, so this is going to be first for me).

dan_lannan 2 years ago |

- Splitting my time 50/50 between building and business.

- Holding myself and my co-founders accountable with metrics. If we say we're going to reach out to potential customers there will be a number/time_period involved.

- Doing with intention with a direct goal and deadline instead of just generally building.

Last year I spent 90% of my time coding. The last 2 months of the year I talked to more businesses than I have in the last 3 years and started to see progress in idea development. My team just bought ZoomInfo and we're setting up HubSpot. My #1 goal is to spend time on the business and not just code 60 hours a week.

lijok 2 years ago |

> Commit to regular posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, even if I think I'm cringe every time I do it.

If marketing is making you cringe, you're marketing to the wrong audience

virczl 2 years ago | |

It's not really marketing posts, it can be anything. Like saying we are attending this or this conference.

lijok 2 years ago | | |

That's marketing

sum1ren 2 years ago |

Focus on one side project and one side project only - I think the concept of trying to create 12 products in 12 months is probably counterproductive (for me)

jansan 2 years ago |

Release my product, even if it is only in beta.

virczl 2 years ago | |

Good luck, launching fast is really the key!

hutzlibu 2 years ago | | |

"launching fast is really the key!"

That is todays Mantra it seems. But there is no second chance to correct a first impression, if your rushed prototype was too rushed and no one gets the value beneath the flaws. It really depends on your product and market.

Oras 2 years ago |

My resolution is to learn & reflect before executing.

For the past 3 years, I was the kind of "it has to be done in a weekend", now I am trying to focus on getting it right, explore possibilities, reflect, and then execute.

I also set longer deadlines for myself now (3-6 months instead of a week or two).

t1tech 2 years ago |

Release a new version of my product. If that goes well, focus on marketing.

autotune 2 years ago |

Escape the complete corruption and chaos that is Charleston, SC. I was recently arrested for waving hello to a police officer with presentable clothing on. That is how corrupt this place is. You could argue Detroit is worse, but at at least lead levels are detectable. This place you don't realize how corrupt it is until you follow your parents out to the suburbs here on your last paycheck to be recycled into the service industry forever, while you freeze and die on the streets without support.

withinboredom 2 years ago | |

I left there in 2018 for the EU. Never looked back. That place is messed up.

virczl 2 years ago | |

wow

edweis 2 years ago |

On my side: - Invest in a stable lifestyle - Decide between bootstrap or fundraising in 2024 - 10x profit in sales

joduplessis 2 years ago |

Actually, can anyone give some insight to if the LinkedIn (cringe) posts actually work (converting sales, etc)?

lfglopes 2 years ago |

Find a mentor/coach.

I don't really want to play the LinkedIn game (at least for now).

jddj 2 years ago |

Can absolutely relate to the linkedin cringe.

I need to continue to increase my presence there, and I feel an almost physical resistance.

Feel dirty whenever I put my marketing hat on and wade into that pool of narcissists.

I'm seeing as many people as I can in person to try to keep myself sane, and in the meantime reminding myself that most of the stuff on there is (thankfully) paid/ghostwritten/chatgpt and not organic.

cgeier 2 years ago | |

Is there any evidence that churning out cringy linkedin posts leads to increased revenue or any other tangible benefits for a startup?

jddj 2 years ago | | |

Only anecdata from my side, and even that is very industry specific.

I'd guess that for another company which is B2B but with an audience more technical than ours (easily achieved) it wouldn't be/seem as important.

kristiandupont 2 years ago | |

>I need to continue to increase my presence there

I am curious why you are concluding this if you dislike it so much? I am not judging here, I definitely recognize the feeling..

jddj 2 years ago | | |

The honest answer?

There are some people who have climbed to relative positions of power not by producing value but by playing the business social metagame.

It's not about having the best quality product, there are two ways to reach those people. They need to either see you as a means to an end for them (caveat: they only deal in shallow self-promotional narratives, not nuance or detail), or they need to see you as one of them.

If the competition weren't happily(?) playing the game it wouldn't be necessary, but given that they do and that I have an obligation to shareholders I have to play along.