Without knowing what the product is though it is hard for folks to compare where they are with this narrative.
For what it's worth I am in almost the exact situation, only I have a product, but its one of those bleeding edge situations that requires a lot of up-front work. So this is a topic very close to home. I just wish I could figure out how similar it is.
I don't necessarily think building something was the right first move though. I'm a big fan of PG's "Do Things that Don't Scale", so I created https://manualviableproduct.com in my spare time to help people like this.
Also time on site is useful to know. Did they read the page? Maybe if they spent a good few minutes with the page open.
IP address - GeoIP to city with country - is also a useful thing to know. Do you really want to respond to that guy where shipping prices mean that a sale is effectively unrealistic?
Such mild-deep-stalking would be helpful to your customers and make your service appeal to a wider audience.
My intention in sharing the story was simply to say that even if you're broke, non-technical, over 30, etc., you can still make it happen. It was meant to be more motivational than informative.
I'm not looking for the recognition, only to hopefully help others in the same boat.
Really appreciate the interest and discussion.
A solid product kind of helps with the success of things and there is always the ever-present risk that a software project will take aeons longer than intended. A software product should be understandable to the target audience within seconds of seeing it. Not having at least a prototype to show (as above, without it being optimised for scaling up) is not really going to make that easy - there is a lot to explain that could be simple to just 'get' with the prototype up and running. So, from the programmer perspective you took a lot of risk!
Because we had so much hype before our product we had a miserable launch. We tried to delay it as long as we could, but feared losing interest if we waited too long.
In terms of signup/how it works, we gave people a storyline that we felt would attract interest (which it did), we also used exclusivity. We gave a intended launch date, which eventually bit us in the ass (will never do that again).
Reading the article reminded me of those companies that have testimonials on their site attributed to "Anonymous". Testimonials basically saying "This product is so good, I'm not willing to put my name to it!"...
"The results of those efforts were nothing but spectacular. Inside of three months, while still working full-time, we were able to attract nearly 20k sign-ups. Not only that, but we had been featured in everything from Thrillist to USA Today. And, we were finally having discussions with investors. This, mind you, was all before we even had a single line of code — not one."
Tough to do a TLDR version for everyone else without reading it yourself.
Does this work - leveraging previous write-ups to get better press coverage? That would be the most interesting take away for me if it's true.
What a nasty attitude and bad advice. Yes this guy ended up with a great company, but many people in the same boat won't. They'll have burnt a bridge and possibly lost a friend.
Tech culture right now prizes irresponsibility. The youth fetish is one aspect of it, but more generally, it's founded on unrealistic (irresponsible) promises and mostly bad decisions (drop out of school to work for a startup! move to the most expensive city in the U.S. with no connections!) that pay off infrequently. No one talks about how demoralizing, difficult, and wasteful it is to rebuild your savings and career after something like that fails. It's atrocious, but most investors have a vested interest in downplaying the long-term risks.
There are thousands of people like me who are smart as fuck, played the startup game unluckily, and ended up in second-tier careers compared to what they should've had with their age and ability, and would've had, had they not gambled stupidly. Most don't talk about it. They're ashamed. I'm not ashamed. Well, perhaps I'm slightly embarrassed, but (a) I'm still smart as fuck and (b) not embarrassed enough to let the next few thousand fall into the same goddamn trap, because someone has to fucking be responsible.
lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job, as opposed to an average person who has much more to gain from a startup being successful?
Maybe, but in a different way.
or are you focused on climbing the ranks to your tier 1 dream job?
I have no taste for "climbing the ranks". I want to get better at stuff. Corporate dysfunction irritates the hell out of me. It'd be so much better if work was about work and not interpersonal manipulations.
Right now I'm looking to level up on machine learning. I'm on par with your 95th-percentile professional data scientist, but there's a lot that I still don't know.
lastly, is it because you are 'smart as fuck', that why you are so jaded now because the value you brought to the startup would have taken you much further in a traditional job
I spent almost 3 years building the backend for a graph-based, distributed database in Clojure (for a startup). We ended up not getting any clients; that was above my pay grade. (Mistake #1. In a startup, take responsibility for all parts and run from founders who try to go alone.) If we had, though, the stuff I'd built would have made it really cool.
Then I ended up on legacy maintenance at Google. In other words, that 3 years bought me fucking nothing.