Re:Show HN: Design Patterns for Startups
by gruseom on Saturday July 09, 2011 @05:12PM
(#2746363)
Why not call it Startup Patterns? "Design patterns" has a bad ring to it for a lot of hackers and startup people. "Startup patterns" is shorter, captures the basic idea, and is less constraining. Besides, most startups aren't designed.
Edit 2: I would buy and read this book if it were done a certain way: if you avoid overgeneralizing or even interpreting what people do. If you could observe similar things that, say, three or more successful startups have done, and simply report them, that would be very interesting - much more interesting than trying to build any model or theory out of it. Basically, I'd like to read something like anthropological field work among successful startups; the more descriptive and less prescriptive the better. Practices that seem odd or irrelevant, and yet crop up several times, would be of particular interest. So would examples of things that successful startups do in opposite ways.
The reason I say this is that startups are not well understood, yet everybody seems to want to prematurely generalize them. These generalizations are not of much interest. More concrete observation, however, would be.
Edit 3: you should also find out what things startups do that they've always done from the beginning, versus what things got added later.
Re:Show HN: Design Patterns for Startups
by akkartik on Saturday July 09, 2011 @05:30PM
(#2746381)
+1 especially to 'more descriptive, less prescriptive'. And I wish there was a way to include what the interesting unsuccessful/less successful startups did.
Edit: I just noticed http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746291. It must be obvious!
Edit 2: I would buy and read this book if it were done a certain way: if you avoid overgeneralizing or even interpreting what people do. If you could observe similar things that, say, three or more successful startups have done, and simply report them, that would be very interesting - much more interesting than trying to build any model or theory out of it. Basically, I'd like to read something like anthropological field work among successful startups; the more descriptive and less prescriptive the better. Practices that seem odd or irrelevant, and yet crop up several times, would be of particular interest. So would examples of things that successful startups do in opposite ways.
The reason I say this is that startups are not well understood, yet everybody seems to want to prematurely generalize them. These generalizations are not of much interest. More concrete observation, however, would be.
Edit 3: you should also find out what things startups do that they've always done from the beginning, versus what things got added later.