georgesequeira

Look at their investors. When interviewing, ask to speak to the investors. See what they say. When speaking with founders do they have numbers they can show or is it pure show-personship?

Idea generator and fundraising are also a couple of benefits to joining a startup before starting your own.

1. Finding ideas can be hard especially when you start from scratch. Most startups (particularly fast scaling ones) can give you ideas if you look for:

* de-prioritized ideas due to "hyper-focus"

* listening to common problems that customers [0] have that aren't necessarily solved by your company.

* product features built that many other companies would find useful (e.g. collaborative editing infra)

* internal tooling that other companies would find useful

2. Fundraising[1]

Many friends got their first checks from investors that were investors of a startup they previously worked at. And the truth is, if you choose a slow-scaling/zombie startup, you will learn a ton still but honestly, the investors of that company aren't going to be stoked to invest in you if you spin out your own thing.

A quick list of common strategies that worked for them:

* Choose founders who don't treat investors as "dumb money"

* Choose companies backed by great investors

* Join startups that are scaling fast

* Join early (< 40) so you can be part of the "success story"

* Ask to meet the investors throughout your tenure (ideally you are upfront with the founders of the company you join)

* Stay there and be a part of the solution through 2+ tough moments (ie. investors can associate you with the success of the company)

[0] Getting to know potential customers and understanding how to acquire them is also super useful.

[1] You can avoid the fundraising focus by going to YC (or equivalent) because you'll get the necessary clout to get investors knocking. If you're going to a startup anyway to get experience and find ideas, you may as well prep for fundraising.

Zapier makes changes on behalf of a single account. You can change the "share" permission to only allow view for anyone except for the account tied to Zapier which has edit permissions.

also interested, if you're up for it! (also email in profile)

Ah right. Yeah, reverse-engineering Airbyte's DSL and just "borrowing" their UI generation may be the move.

I don't know of a solution for ETL DSL -> UI but https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy goes from a DSL to internal web apps. Perhaps some inspiration could be taken from there. Good luck!

`I'm very curious to hear a concrete example of a segment/industry and how it could be "unbundled", but unfortunately, there is none in the article.`

Alloy Automation is making a better Zapier for E-commerce: https://runalloy.com/

Anvyl is making a better Zapier for supply chain: https://anvyl.com/

That being said. I think that you're right! Trying to just take workflows (or zaps) from Zapier is not going to be the best move. These companies have focused on their verticals and started building a product where automation is a feature, not a product. Anvyl for example is a pane-of-glass for supply-chains orders/parts/sourcing along with automation to supplement the experience. I believe Alloy is trying to become an E-commerce CRM. Their wedge has been enabling some tricky workflows that aren't well supported in Zapier.

Would love to hear more about your experience with these platforms. Thought they were mostly plug-n-play these days. Could I email you?

Totally, outside of people trying to make a "smarter" excel like Airtable or Rows, different business units will make some "template" that lets them run their orgs in excel. Those "templates" could certainly be better products.

Packy talks more about how this is also a platform being unbundled: https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies?s=r

At the end of the day, most business owners don't want to connect all these tools together. It just allows them to accomplish business outcomes. What makes their job hard is keeping track where all the data is and how to know if things are working.

Solutions to that problem can take shape as a CRM (and keeping it updated) or something as dumb as a dashboard of dashboards.

I think it's two things

Is the workflow automation tool big enough that subgroups of users are still a big number of users to service

Of those subgroups, does one (or more) stand to have a better product experience if someone focused on their core use-cases / workflows. (e.g. Reclaim takes a bunch of calendar automation around scheduling and makes a product that reduces the work needed to optimize your calendar).

it'd be interesting to know what kind of companies those are. Don't want to give people a false sense of hope with "Uber for x"

Also, I realized, an over-arching concern could be: Does this promote bias?

Yes.

Especially in early-stage, it's about how fast can you go and are you iterating enough. For example: Some of the advice for hiring early stage is "hire your friends/people-you-know". Instant bias.

Over time it's about taking that risk on less-clear-thinkers to help refine their thinking or more junior folks to grow them but at the start: there is very little risk in execution that you can handle.

In my experience, I agree with the fact that top school people don't correlate with the best hires but my data shows that high clarity + high energy does not correlate with top schools! In fact, I have many high-clarity // low-energy folks as examples.

I think that not being crisp at communication does not mean you wont be clear. English was not my first language so I empathize! More recently, I've worked with south american developers who are not 100% fluent but are very clear in what they mean (ie. consistent and form solid ideas/thoughts/visions). And early in my career at Alexa, many researchers (lots of top-rate folks) were international and didn't have 100% fluency in english but were 100% clear about what they were building, their methods, and how we were going to test their hypotheses.

Unfortunately, the default meaning of clear is: speaks english well. But I am speaking about clarity in thinking and being able to represent that consistently in words.

Hi hn!

Early hires are so crucial in a startup. I've made dozens of interview loops to try and tease out the people who will raise the bar but honestly it just made for longer interviews with about the same mis-hire rate. When I was hiring for my last two startups, I added a simple check to our interview loops: "Were they clear and did they provide good energy". Our mis-hire rate dropped. I wrote this to talk more about how I got there and start a discussion!

I think that task/project management is also starting to go through that with Clubhouse, Linear, Height, Notion/Coda/Knowledge-bases (trying to solve it). I would not be surprised to hear that there are a couple in "Stealth" as well.

"There is still no turnkey solution for UX"

What would that even look like? Do they expect a unified UX language from the Gov t?

Working at a company where middle-management is incompetent is common. Particularly in startups where they promote from within or the leaders haven't seen good management before. That being said, if you aren't getting your best work done, it's probably best to leave.

That being said, regarding whether or not your startup is failing, its hard to know (even from the inside). But one thing that is important is whether the leaders of your company think they are failing. That is easier to notice and is a shittier experience than just if your company is failing but your leaders see a way out. If your leaders think they are going to die, the easiest way to know is when the free stuff gets taken away (swag, coffees, expensed lunches). The other is if projects keep getting killed and new ones that get promoted as the answer to all the problems ... sign that they don't know what they're doing.

Wow, this non-linear note-taking space is blowing up. Just recently I started using https://museapp.com/. That being said, they're hierarchical if not linear but same concept with "inking"! Any others that people are trying?

Hi HN!

I've been working with founders that are finding new startup ideas. I found that many were aware of B2B SaaS but were often intimidated by going out and figuring out which industries to go after and who they should talk to. I put the advice I usually give them into this handy little post :)

Hey folks! I wrote this as I've been trying to start my second company. Starting the first required trashing a bunch of "Uber for X" and it always sat weird with me. After internalizing this method of "inflection events", I was able to discover much different opportunities and it led me to create an Auto-Tech company.

RevvUp | Software Engineer - Frontend | Full Time | Remote | https://www.getrevvup.com

RevvUp is an early stage, venture funded startup building an operation management platform for auto service shops. Our mission is to make auto service operations ($125B industry) more efficient for vehicle-owners and shops alike. This starts as a platform used by service centers to manage their processes and process payments.

This mission involves thinking about how to move offline processes/interactions online as most of auto service operations is done manually or over the phone.

We are looking for a frontend software engineer to build our first product around productivity management and analysis at these auto service centers.

Tech stack is pgSQL, React, Python

Learn more at https://getrevvup.com/join-us

If you have any questions feel free to reach out at [email protected]

RevvUp | Software Engineer - Frontend | Full Time | New York, NY (Remote during Pandemic) | https://www.getrevvup.com

RevvUp is an early stage, venture funded startup building an operation management platform for auto service shops. Our mission is to make auto service operations ($125B industry) more efficient for vehicle-owners and shops alike. This starts as a platform used by service centers to manage their processes and process payments.

This mission involves thinking about how to move offline processes/interactions online as most of auto service operations is done manually or over the phone.

We are looking for a frontend software engineer to build our first product around productivity management and analysis at these auto service centers.

Tech stack is pgSQL, React, Python

Learn more at https://getrevvup.com/join-us

Apply at https://revvup.freshteam.com/jobs/dvvfcZJCh7yu/frontend-soft...

If you have any questions feel free to reach out at [email protected]