Five Years’ Time

212 points by gdillon 11 years ago | 47 comments

jordanbrown 11 years ago |

"One regret I do have: I spent too much time waiting for other people. Investors, cofounders, mentors. I found that once I started actually building, these things came naturally." --

I had this same experience. It wasn't until I pushed something live that those things/people just fell into place. Great article!

nothrabannosir 11 years ago |

Rejection letter from YC:

> I’m sorry to say we decided not to fund you. We liked you as individuals but we had a hard time seeing how developer API documentation was the right beachhead.

Perhaps I'm looking too much into it, it's just surprising to see, on the record, the polar opposite of what pg claimed on several occasions: people, not ideas. Or did I misunderstand it?

jamesk_au 11 years ago | |

Given the closing line was "You guys are clearly great hackers and we’d be happy to hear from you again in the future," my impression was that YC's answer was not so much 'no' as 'not yet'.

The OP says in his article: "Looking back, I never could have started a company without this [freelancing] experience."

volaski 11 years ago | |

Simple. There are tons of these "good people" who apply, and they can only accept as many per batch.

Lawtonfogle 11 years ago | |

My understanding is YC only has so many they accept. If they only accept 30, there will always be someone sitting as #31, with little objective difference between #30 and #31.

ntumlin 11 years ago |

Just a note, clicking the link at "ReadMe.io has finally launched" sends me to http://%28http//readme.io/blog/product-hunter-becomes-the-hu... which is not a valid url as opposed to http://readme.io/blog/product-hunter-becomes-the-hunted/

dmak 11 years ago |

This is a bit of a tangent, but I really wanted to comment on the product he is making.

I have been using apiary.io, and I always felt that it was lacking in many aspects (versioning, ghetto note editor, parsing issues in the preview, etc...). I just discovered readme.io and played with it briefly and it has solved every issue that I had with apiary.io. I will definitely migrate over, but having to re-do all the documentation from ground up is a bit of a pain.

specialk 11 years ago | |

I'm also an apiary.io user. I must agree there is something lacking in the hosted API docs space. What I find most lacking from apiary.io is features. They have such a limited way of expecting APIs to behave that it can be hard to represent some things inside the API docs system they have.

I wonder is it is possible to create an apiary.io to readme.io auto-migration tool. Even if it does require me copying the markdown behind the apiary.io docs manually into some tool that spits docs into readme.io. That would honestly save me many hours, probably many hours for many folk too.

I've requested access to the open source pricing plan, after I hopefully get approved it is probably something I'll look into in more detail. I'm in need of a new (probably) needless automation side-project.

Edit: wow I completely missed the free trail. If you're an open source project they'll upgrade you to the Dev Hub pricing plan. Ugh feeling so stupid for missing that the first time around and not getting started 10 minutes ago.

zzen 11 years ago | |

(disclaimer: I'm the founder of Apiary) First things first - Readme.io is a great product and congratulations to Gregory for following his dream. I did so with my own, similar passion a couple years ago.

That passion was connecting developers - API builders & users. Documentation is just a part of this (interaction, collaboration, prototyping, and testing being others), which is why it’s a bit harder to be completely free-form. That said, we're aware that there's a lot room for improvement and we're working very hard to make Apiary better. Your feedback is really appreciated, I'd like to know more. @dmak, @special and @sidi would love if you could contact to me directly at jakub@apiary.io. Thanks for speaking out and pushing us to improve.

sidi 11 years ago | |

We have had a very similar experience, and I was a paying customer the first day they launched. However, over the month of migrating documentation - we discovered a couple of areas really lacking:

1. Having to use JS too often and they only offered it in their higher plans,

2. surprisingly poor md support. I don't usually write markdown in visual blocks.

In the end, we built an aggregation of open-source tools to create something similar to the effect of readme - https://github.com/appbaseio/docbase. It uses github for markdown editing and versioning, flatdoc for rendering docs, and creates a beautiful single page routing for the doc. http://docs.appbase.io is using it.

dpeterson 11 years ago |

Do these people not see how easy they have it? I am pretty sure no one would hire me at Mozilla with just php experience then get an interview with y-combinator without a product. I'm guessing he went to Stanford or some other Ivy League.

bobbles 11 years ago | |

He went to http://www.rit.edu/ but I'm not sure where that fits on your exclusivity scale

mechanical_fish 11 years ago | | |

Quite a few RIT grads have come through my employer's engineering teams. There seems to be, or have been, a program there in "network engineering" or something, which places a big emphasis on practical systems architecture and debugging. Its grads emerge full of stories about how hard it is to assemble and debug all the physical interconnects between the network switches in the server racks that you have to assemble before you graduate.

You want these people on your team.

azinman2 11 years ago | | |

Random side story: when I toured there when I was 18, my tour guide was severely depressed and told me not to go there. Before showing up we got pulled into a gas station and quickly left when we realized it was being robbed.

I never attended so I can't say if this is indicative or not of the school in general, but it's funny how much these first impressions completely changed my decision to apply!

patio11 11 years ago | |

Some people complain about privilege while others are out there putting in the hours. One gets to pick which group they belong to. He picked wisely.

dpeterson 11 years ago | | |

Ha, talk to me when you are 34, have a CS undergrad, a Master in Software Engineering, spent every second of your life programming since 19 and have been working on your startup for over 7 years, then get rejected flat out from y-combinator.

dlevine 11 years ago |

Congrats (so far)! The truth is that the route to a successful startup is often circuitous, and takes a lot of unexpected detours. I bet that a lot of the experiences you had along the way have made you stronger, shrewder, and better able to deal with the twists and turns. It's almost like, by not doing a startup right away, you were actually able to train individual muscles rather than just attempting to lift the boulder onto your shoulders. Once you got to the point where you were actually ready, it started to happen on its own.

smcl 11 years ago |

I'm impressed that an idea you had five years ago has sat there without anyone else thinking of it and delivering something in the meantime. Anything useful I get started on usually has someone launching a very slick VC-backed launch ~six months later and I just cannot compete (I don't have the time to dedicate to anything, nor the money to afford to not work for long enough)

thebenedict 11 years ago |

I appreciate the update on Phileas and Fogg! I remember seeing the launch on here a couple of years ago.

I'm curious about "idea factories are a dime a dozen, and nobody would want to work for one". I've turned down similar arrangements in the past because they felt vaguely sketchy, but didn't realize "idea factories" are common. What are the problems with them?

gkoberger 11 years ago | |

I can only speculate, but here's a few of the issues I have with them:

  * No incentive to see anything through, since there's always a "next idea"
  * Lack of vision. Most of the good startups have someone with a general vision, which is impossible this way.
  * Harder to recruit people since there's no core idea to get behind
  * Since the only way these are funded is by a rich person (after all, no VC would ever invest in one), it's susceptible to the whims of said rich person.
  * What happens if something becomes successful? How does equity/spinning out/etc work? And, if it spins out... all the revenue for the "factor" dries up.

There's a lot more, I'm sure.

thebenedict 11 years ago | | |

Looked at charitably these could be mitigated with good contracts and governance. E.g:

  * Well defined procedures for choosing what to work on and for how long
  * Agreement on what metrics to to base go/no-go decisions for continuing with an idea past the initial stages
  * Contracts to specify how spinoff equity is assigned. One interesting proposal I've heard involves a calculation based on developer hours worked over the initial development period.

Might be interesting outside of major tech markets where where VC funding is unlikely anyway, which could be an added benefit to the traveling idea factory/accelerator.

I appreciate that this is hard (if possible) to do in practice, and that lack of vision might be a fundamental problem. It also feels like it could be an excuse to treat developers poorly -- which was one of my concerns when I had the opportunity and seems to have happened in this case.

calpaterson 11 years ago | | |

I work for an "ideas factory" and can confirm we have all of those problems.

icefox 11 years ago |

> The problem is one of content generation, as opposed to lack of tooling.

I also have been pondering docs for many years and I agree with this statement. The core value I was going to build my solution around was by incorporating / generating examples from real code. Rather than being docs that were published it would almost be close to a code search engine. While the developers are lazy and rarely document you could bootstrap the documentation by finding example usage in the wild and presenting it and from there allow the users annotate it (and the developers if they ever get around to it).

There are many problems with todays docs, another one that is missing has to be analytics. If I own an API I want to know what users are constantly looking at and discussing so that I can make that part better, less confusing, etc. And conversely if there are no example usage and no one has ever looked at an API that would be useful to know too as it could be code that could be ripped out and no longer maintained. What api are users searching for, but never find? There is more, but these are just a few off the top of my head.

By generating content rather than relying on the developers to sign up and publish the site would explode in size and utility. Think Yahoo directory v.s. Google ala 1998.

The idea that someone would generate static html files and put them somewhere is almost barbaric compared to the richness that could be provided.

Unfortunately I don't really have a financial story to go with this idea. One was to be free for open source projects and charge for commercial. But honestly more likely would be that I would build it for a few years and then someone like Facebook would just call me up and buy it out to shut it down and solve their API documentation problems. Not saying that is bad, but I would have to make it until that would happen and I would prefer to have found another solution than a aquirehire end game.

pnathan 11 years ago |

> My biggest two takeaways contradict themselves: I wish I had started sooner, but I’m so glad I waited. I had the idea from the beginning so it’s painful it took half a decade, however I never could have made it happen five years ago.

This is very inspirational, and very true: the ideas I had years ago I could never have brought to life, and I probably would have failed, badly, at the business side. Today, I can bring things to life, and I'm understanding more and more of how businesses run.

kylec 11 years ago |

I don't dislike goals, but I dislike rigidly holding yourself to goals when your circumstances and desires change. I'm really glad that it worked out well for the author, but not everyone is so lucky. I'm not where I thought I'd be five years ago, for both better and worse, but I think I'd be less happy if I measured my success today by my goals from back then.

tjradcliffe 11 years ago | |

"Five year plans" for my generation have a bad sound to them. They were the basis for planning in the Soviet Union and were kind of a joke in the '70's and '80's to mean "stuff that never gets done."

That said, goals aren't plans, and five years is a reasonable time-horizon for a major goal. He did a lot of things right in his use of time, including giving it a go too early, and then again getting sucked in to a startup that didn't really work out. There is nothing like seeing things fail to teach you the elements of success.

Part of that use of time should definitely be asking yourself "Am I pursuing the right goal?" as you learn more, but a fair number of people get it right.

lbotos 11 years ago | |

That's a great point. In this case, he's in a completely different place and the goal was still applicable. That's great. I would tell you to set goals all the same. If you _don't_ hit them, figure out why. If it's because you are different, that's cool. You adapted.

Don't use goals to measure "Success" per se but rather, yourself. It's a great lens to see trends in what is important to you in thought and practice and where they diverge.

gkoberger 11 years ago | |

Agreed! I didn't set a goal that I held myself to. Rather, it's just a lucky coincidence it worked out so perfectly.

sidi 11 years ago |

Really interesting backstory, and congrats to @Greg and team for joining YC. Curious to know more how this worked out, since readme was gaining dev adoption pretty rapidly when they launched last fall.

gkoberger 11 years ago | |

It's going amazingly well so far. Demo day is this week!

Shoot me an email at greg@readme.io if you want to talk more

javindo 11 years ago |

This is a tremendously reassuring article for someone still in University wanting to build a company. There's always the question in the back of my mind "should I start now or get a few years experience?" and articles like this reassure that it's not too late if you need a couple of years to build skills.

vinceguidry 11 years ago |

> They kept pushing and changing the rules. Cutting salaries, forcing us to work on their pet projects, insisting I hire less-talented programmers for cheaper, cutting timelines, reducing investment, increasing their equity, and more.

I'm curious as to the exact take-away here. The author seemed a bit naive. The investors approached him with a bad idea that has numerous potentials for conflicts of interest, and he gave in, believing verbal promises would eliminate those conflicts.

I would guess that if you want to get into the idea business, you should probably fund yourself using your own ideas and your own implementations. It's a pretty abstract business model, one that can very easily devolve into "we will do anything for anybody who will give us money". So you need a pretty strong vision and leadership skills to keep that from happening.

christop 11 years ago |

The pedant in me wants to point out that the title should be "Five Years' Time".

bshimmin 11 years ago | |

This is one of those ones that everyone seems to get wrong - even otherwise very grammatical people. Even Hollywood gets it wrong: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313737/ (You'd think Hugh Grant, with an English degree from Oxford, would have known, noticed, or cared, but seemingly not...)

kra34 11 years ago |

Where do you want to be 5 years from now?

dsugarman 11 years ago | |

sitting atop the massive ReadMe kingdom I would assume

manigandham 11 years ago |

Nice article, just came across readme.io a few days ago when coming across another product (GridGain) for the first time. Thought the makers of readme.io had something really nice, interesting to read the history now.

Goals and plans, especially 5 years in the future, can be hard to keep up with but the feeling of achievement at the end if truly amazing. I think even the practice of just sitting down and setting goals and making realistic plans goes a long way to helping you get there.

ac360 11 years ago |

Gregory,

I just signed up for readme.io last night and it is an incredible product. The attention to detail is astounding. I've just become a big fan of yours. Never wait again. Your execution is too good.

Good luck,

Austen

ha8o8le 11 years ago |

I was hoping the title was referencing the song :)

* No incentive to see anything through, since there's always a "next idea" * Lack of vision. Most of the good startups have someone with a general vision, which is impossible this way. * Harder to recruit people since there's no core idea to get behind * Since the only way these are funded is by a rich person (after all, no VC would ever invest in one), it's susceptible to the whims of said rich person. * What happens if something becomes successful? How does equity/spinning out/etc work? And, if it spins out... all the revenue for the "factor" dries up.

* Well defined procedures for choosing what to work on and for how long * Agreement on what metrics to to base go/no-go decisions for continuing with an idea past the initial stages * Contracts to specify how spinoff equity is assigned. One interesting proposal I've heard involves a calculation based on developer hours worked over the initial development period.