Startup Grind

I predict a great future for startups that sell pickaxes, err, tools for AI. AI is like the new gold rush. And just like back then, it's not the gold diggers that will get rich. "Most people in AI forget that the hardest part of building a new AI solution or product is not the AI or algorithms — it’s the data collection and labeling." https://medium.com/startup-grind/fueling-the-ai-gold-rush-7ae438505bc2 (from 2017)

Here's a guide from a few years ago that explains in detail how to follow the strategy. I don't bother with the really esoteric tweaks because the 95% solution is to identify keywords, write good content, and spread it around the internet. https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-step-seo-tu…

I basically learned that failing a startup is similar to dealing with end-of-life care - we all make the same mistakes so in a weird way, I think the best way to learn from this experience is to read Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal. It'll put things in perspective. Here's the post I wrote, hope it helps folks: https://medium.com/startup-grind/startup-mortality-what-end-of-life-ca…

If you just want a primer on how to think about adding search to a product, this piece by Max Grigorev is a great starting point: https://medium.com/startup-grind/what-every-software-engineer-should-k… It's ostensibly for the engineer, but actually feels more like it's written from the POV of a product manager.

This compilation breaks it down by year – but misses most of 2017. https://medium.com/startup-grind/most-recommended-medium-stories-by-ye…

Here's a copy without the paywall: http://www.4-traders.com/FACEBOOK-INC-10547141/news/Facebook-Female-En… tl;dr: diversity hires noticed that they have 35% more code review rejections than the awful meritocracy crowd, blamed it on the oppressive patriarchy Excellent opportunity to remember the story of Saron Yitbarek - a fresh developer out of a 4 month Ruby on Rails course who was hired by Microsoft for more than a year, but not as a developer, because technical interviews are sexist. The software giant hired her as a project manager for a newly created program to... teach students how to write CVs. The outcome? https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-dont-belong-in-tech-3d73d8fd6f34

Upvote manipulation doesn't work on Hacker News because both the voting ring detector is strong, and flagging is significantly more powerful and serves as counteracting force to upvotes and serves as a check to submissions which legit aren't good for the site. (both of these are in contrast with Product Hunt, which turns a blind eye to voting manipulation and asking-friends-for-upvotes-but-not-explicitly is often recommended as a promotion strategy on that site: https://medium.com/startup-grind/my-startup-launch-on-product-hunt-was… There is also a Hacker News "growth hacking" tactic of linking to /newest on Facebook/Twitter instead of linking to the submission directly to avoid the voting ring detector, which also doesn't work and is blatantly obvious: http://i.imgur.com/08pAFOw.jpg

Author here - I made this collection as part of my PhD research. I'll be adding some references to the studies to this awesome project: https://medium.com/startup-grind/help-build-the-open-guide-to-startup-… Follow @studyingVC for updates on new items, highlights from the collection, and (coming soon!) Medium articles and podcasts discussing the most relevant new research to investors and founders.

I traded a Toyota full size pickup truck in for my first Tesla, a Model S, because that's all they made at the time. I'm looking forward to closing the loop, trading that Model S (with almost 110k miles on it after driving cross country in six years) in for my Cybertruck. It's ugly, I love it, I don't care what it costs. The most popular vehicle in the US? The F150. Sell to younger people who want trucks, but want an electric truck. Same reason Harley Davidson spun their Livewire bike out to its own brand: old people riding Harley's didn't want it, and that persona is dying out. So you have to create a new brand to cater to the persona you're targeting. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/02/ford-pickup-remains-americas-top-selli… https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/27/harley-davidson-spins-off-livewire-in-… https://medium.com/startup-grind/people-dont-buy-products-they-buy-bet…

I don't care about them being too open or not. My issue is with them pushing sensational content because it's good for their bottom line. IMHO Alex Jones should have a place to post his male enhancement promotional videos, but if a platform is curating the content and decides to recommend it to everyone because it increases time on site and engagement then they should be responsible for that choice. I have a consumer app and met with some of the early investors in the top social media companies. They all only cared about DAU/MAU, time in app and user growth. All of them recommended books like Hooked (https://medium.com/startup-grind/nir-eyal-why-you-are-addicted-to-face… to help us design something that's more addictive, or anything from BJ Fogg (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/10/05/best-e… who had founders of Instagram and Snapchat as his students. A few of them even tried to get us to hire the new hot thing, Dopamine Labs (https://www.builtinla.com/2018/01/11/dopamine-labs-boost-user-engageme… who promised to have "AI" to get users addicted with custom notifications. I used to think that behavioral psychology was bullshit (my GF studied psychology too), but being exposed to it in the industry there's no denying that some of it works. There's a reason why all headlines are clickbait now and all thumbnails on youtube and netflix are of weird facial expressions…

If this were to be offered by an actual company (a first party solution), there are some features that'd be expected that make the problem space a lot harder. Here's an "intro to search" article that's a good read, and I'll use it to highlight some of the things that'd be different in a first party solution - https://medium.com/startup-grind/what-every-software-engineer-should-k… (See the "Theory: the search problem" section) Size: This is only indexing ~500k public repos. A first party solution would be expected to index all of it, public and private. Indexing speed: This can take up to a few days to index. A first party solution would be expected to have a much lower index latency - seconds to minutes. Query language: This can (and does) have its own simple query language. A first party solution would need to have support embedded into and not break backwards compatibility with the current query language. Context-dependence: A first party solution would be expected to index private repos as well, and now the query context (logged in user) becomes another variable in an already multi-variate problem space. Latency: Gets harder with scale, and a first party solution would likely provide a SLA/SLO around latency. Access control: Same issue as context-dependence, with private repos being included. There's also unknown but likely considerations around compliance and internationalization, which are quite tricky problems. Note - I don't mean…

And this is exactly the ugly place where reality collides with the way we wish things were. I worked for a guy once who could put together a story so plausible that someone close to you would invest way more than they had any reason to or should, into the venture. He would not tell a single outright lie and the "truth" would be that if all the things that needed to happen, did happen, the business would in fact be a great investment. He would have a sold your parents so hard that they are probably getting their friends to come in on the deal too. And when all the money was gone and your parents were destitute, he would have an iron clad story about how it was not his fault, how your parents knew that things could go wrong, and that risk was all part of the equation. He would be untouchable as far as a fraud prosecution goes. Remember the 'startup story' we read here? [1] This CEO convinced his employees to cover payroll, you don't think he couldn't convince your mom? I hope you (or someone you care about) never experiences a really good con artist first hand because it completely shakes your belief in humanity to the core. These people will take everything you have if you let them, and they will do it without hesitation. This is how it goes; Your family member or friend calls you to tell you that they just got in on a really good deal. They are going to be rich and you can be too. They will tell you how this company their new friend is the owner/CEO/president of has…

Not sure who needs to know this but scribe.rip is a relatively new alternative reader for Medium. The original article is at: https://medium.com/startup-grind/what-every-software-engineer-should-k… HN's special treatment of medium.com links doesn't apply to scribe ones.

https://cdixon.org/2009/08/22/why-you-shouldnt-keep-your-startup-idea-… https://medium.com/startup-grind/keeping-your-new-startup-a-secret-is-…

> gorillafind.com Interesting. (ﾟヮﾟ) You seem to know well that search is beyond ranking and retrieval. [1] > I’d start off with not doing state of the art because it’s overkill for an “MVP”. Can a search engine "MVP" sustain without using sota methods/practices? What should be the initial scale for a search MVP for which it just works? In the modern realm. [1] : https://medium.com/startup-grind/what-every-software-engineer-should-k… just a note (you can ignore) : I am actually a believer of iterations in development and incremental optimisations. But even a minimum viable product should be able to work.

This is a better SEO guide for beginners https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-step-seo-tu…

I wrote some details on why or why not VCs do tech DD: https://medium.com/startup-grind/technology-due-diligence-or-lack-ther… > please do the due. In conclusion..it's not your money, so why do you care?

Wow, the two founders started awesome guides that I consulted in the past, from https://www.holloway.com/about?section=story: - Josh Levy: The Open Guide to Amazon Web Services (AWS) (https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws/) and The Art of the Command Line (https://github.com/jlevy/the-art-of-command-line) - Andy Sparks: Everything You Should Know About CRISPR—And Where to Learn More (https://medium.com/startup-grind/a-primer-on-crispr-and-how-to-learn-m…

Hm, neither the article, nor anyone yet in the comments, has mentioned crowdfunding, a.k.a. Kickstarter et al... This article is old, but shows CF passing angel four+ years ago: https://medium.com/startup-grind/trends-show-crowdfunding-to-surpass-v…

What's up HackerNews! I'm surprised to see my creation Startup Stash pop up here, after launching it early 2015. I think I tried to post this here before? (back then) Those of you who don't know, Startup Stash is the most upvoted product of all time on Product Hunt with 11K+ upvotes (https://www.producthunt.com/search?q=%2A), if you want to know more check out this blogpost I wrote after launching it: https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-i-launched-the-2-most-upvoted-pro… Right now I'm working on something new: a course to teach anyone how to build a Minimum Viable Product without code: https://nocodemvp.com.

Yeah, the Trump campaign spent tens of millions of dollars more than Clinton on online advertising, using the profiles they have of most of the country to target people they believed they could influence in states they believed would be close. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-not-just-fak… https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-the-trump-campaign-built-an-ident…

Hey, care to share more details? https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-i-found-a-developer-partner-for-m…

Oh wow, didn't expect to see this on the front page. If you enjoyed this I have a bit more content on user acquisition that is a similar actionable, step-by-step style. SEO: https://medium.com/startup-grind/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-step-seo-tu… Instagram: https://austenallred.com/the-growth-hackers-guide-to-instagram-3f084d7… Pinterest: https://austenallred.com/how-to-growth-hack-pinterest-699d295909b1#.pi…

Ethereum is interesting. Ether as currency is a disaster waiting to happen. https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-was-wrong-about-ethereum-804c9a906d… People are speculating on it because they have confused companies using the technology as using the currency itself.

I had experience with this kind of employers in my very young days, when time and time again 'probably something wrong with the bank' or dozen of other bs excuses. If you are inexperienced, very short on money (e.g. a student), and have no one to discuss these issues with, rationality might go out of the window. You can convince yourself that everything will be fine very soon, you will get your money next week, etc. So it's not very surprising. Quote from the original Medium post: We had 8 young Chinese employees on H-1B visas with us as developers, limited in experience but eager to please and learn. They end up being the ones to suffer the most. https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a-silicon-valley-sta…

This blog post[0] is ostensibly an account from one of their actual employees––considering the fraudulent actions happened on the same dates and both founders sent a fake wire as the account noted; among other shared similarities. Quite vindicating if it is so. [0] https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a-silicon-valley-sta…

It may have had only a tiny effect but considering the election could have swung either way with 100,000 votes in the right states so who knows. https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-the-trump-campaign-built-an-ident… https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trumps-new-attack-strategy-keep-cl… https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-27/inside-the-trump-bu… a.) identifying Clinton voters and sending negative Clinton ads based on race/gender/policy reversals(by Clinton) to make them consider voting for anyone else, or not voting b.) identifying voters who were on the fence and sending them ads for Trump + identifying geographic clusters in swing states and sending Trump there for campaign rallies

The stack you currently know will be good enough for a MVP. You might not even need to code to verify your idea if it's in a very early stage. But if you don't know any programming at all, I would skip programming for now and look at other options [1]. [1] https://medium.com/startup-grind/the-non-technical-guide-to-launching-…

"If you build it, they will come" only works in the movies. There are several devs turned marketers here on HN that have taken the time to document what's currently working for them. The most recent I'm aware of is Austen Allred: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13877509 Some of his stuff he made freely available (apparently a bit dated per discussion): https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-to-get-press-for-your-startup-the… | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10438634 As seen on: PR 101 for engineers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13169309