Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern Europe at the age of 23

Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by psvx on Thursday June 29, 2017 @07:20AM (#14662278)

I'am an ex ChaosGroup employee and I can tell you that if there's one thing I learned while working there, it's that all these constraints are in your mind. You can find talent here. You can create a product here and sell it worldwide and be successful. You can be competetive or better than your western competition. In some ways, doing this is even easier than in the west. My view is that in order to be greatly successful, you need 3 things, no matter in what part of the world you happen to be:

1. Great idea.

2. Great timing.

3. Lots of work.

(besides the companies you listed, I could also mention coherent-labs.com, which are also global leaders in their market).

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by charlesdm on Thursday June 29, 2017 @07:39AM (#14662370)

I don't live in EE (and maybe I'm naive about this), but shouldn't it actually be easier to find great talent if you put in an effort?

I mean, there are great people in pretty much in every country, and if the alternative is, say, (boring) outsourcing development work, shouldn't you be able to convince people with above average (local) pay and offering them a great place to work, etc?

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by taway_1212 on Thursday June 29, 2017 @07:51AM (#14662450)

> convince people with above average (local) pay and offering them a great place to work

With hardly any VC money around, you don't really have a way to pay for those.

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by charlesdm on Thursday June 29, 2017 @07:58AM (#14662489)

Nonsense. You’ll make plenty of money by actually building something people will pay for. You know, a product can actually make money without raising VC?

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by taway_1212 on Thursday June 29, 2017 @08:00AM (#14662508)

I agree, but then you have to bootstrap with your savings, which means you definitely won't be paying above average wages and renting nice offices etc (which is what I was replying to).

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by Luc on Thursday June 29, 2017 @08:37AM (#14662724)

A great many successful entrepreneurs have money (and often a tradition of entrepreneurship) in the family to get them started. No VC needed.

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by auganov on Thursday June 29, 2017 @10:39AM (#14663643)

Don't need to raise local. And you probably shouldn't anyways if you're in Europe.

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by vminkov on Thursday June 29, 2017 @07:52AM (#14662458)

That may be valid only if you're able to raise good money but the tech investing culture is quite underdeveloped here. The startup scene needs several bigger exits to make the investors greedy and curious about it and also construction/private property yields huge profits right now, so the tech startups are not the spotlight catcher.

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by charlesdm on Thursday June 29, 2017 @07:59AM (#14662495)

Without making this sound ridiculous -- sometimes it just doesn't make sense to do tech. If I can make crazy returns investing and/or building property, you should probably be doing property and not tech. EE is probably a good place to be in terms of property investing at the moment.

But there's probably a place for both.

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Re:Starting and self-funding a software business in Eastern ... by yitchelle on Thursday June 29, 2017 @09:08AM (#14662949)

4. world class execution.

Without this, all you have is just time to tinker about on an idea.

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