Google Patents Gears - <AUTHOR> http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20080301221.PGNR.&OS=dn/20080301221&RS=DN/20080301221 <comment><USER2> Looks like Gears, but I can't find a word about Google in this text.

<comment><USER3> People file patents, not companies. The people then assign ownership to the company. Erik Arvidsson's blog clearly shows he works at Google and while Andrew Palay does not have a blog his $4600 donation to the Obama campaign reveals that he also works at Google.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Do no evil?

<comment><USER5> Or at least protect their ass from those that are evil.

<comment><USER4> Yes, as patent trollling is a good way to do that.

How is when Amazon tries to patent single click checkout, that is evil, but when your favorite company does the a frivolous patent, that is just protecting their ass?

Also related read: [http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2007/09/reforming- pat...](http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2007/09/reforming-patents- promoting-innovation.html) (Google's official policy on patents.)

<comment><USER6> Without going into the frivolity of each patent, let's not forget that Amazon has actually used their patent aggressively against Barnes and Noble.

<http://www.out-law.com/page-2424></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A look inside Unreal Engine 4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2014/04/08/A-look-inside-Unreal-Engine-4.aspx

<comment><AUTHOR> Part II - [http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2014/04/08/A-look- inside...](http://www.gamefromscratch.com/post/2014/04/08/A-look-inside- Unreal-Engine-4-Part-Two.aspx)</comment>


Elastic files for an IPO - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1707753/000119312518266861/d588632ds1.htm <comment><USER2> This is an extremely solid financial statement. $150M in revenue, growing ~100% per year; I'd project a valuation between $3B and $4B.

Twilio, Mulesoft, and MongoDB are probably the best comparables here -- open- source and dev-tools based SaaS IPOs. All of these were very successful at IPO and afterwards, and even compared to these, Elastic looks great.

* They're growing at almost 100% per year which is incredible. Twilio filed for IPO growing at 70% per year. Mulesoft was growing at 60%. Mongo was growing at 50%

* Losing $50M on $150M of revenue. (Net margins of -33%). This is pretty reasonable and in line with Twilio and Mulesoft. MongoDB was significantly worse at -60% net margins.

With that kind of growth I'd imagine something like a 220M ARR when they actually IPO, and valuation of 15-20x that.

<comment><USER3> I see several responses that mention MongoDB for purposes of comparison and seem to conclude Elasticsearch fares favorably.

It should be noted:

[1] Unlike MongoDB (which is a ground-up build), Elasticsearch is basically an API layer on top of Apache Lucene. This is relevant because they haven't built and don't maintain, control, or own the source of their primary IP.

[2] Unlike MongoDB (General Purpose) Elasticsearch is a single purpose database and good at/used for one thing and one thing only. It searches text fields for text.

So its potential use cases and thus marketshare is far more limited.

[3] Posts on stackoverflow with the tag:

elasticsearch × 34,253 mongodb x 103,478

<comment><USER4> Elasticsearch is much more than a search engine.

Lots of people use it for analytics (checkout their aggregation/time series queries) as well as analyzing huge logs. Some people are starting to use it for machine learning use cases too.

<comment><USER5> I have seen it used almost exclusively for logging as part of the Elastic (formerly ELK) stack.

<comment><USER6> At my previous job we used it for a fair amount of analytics for our SaaS clients.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Just to be clear, $100M is what they are looking to _raise_ , not their valuation. Their last valuation was about $700M in 2014, so presumably, they are looking for a valuation that exceeds that, most likely in the low billions.

<comment><USER8> $100M is likely a placeholder amount. They're filing to go public and can adjust that figure later, it's not that strange to do so. I don't think $100M means much there, and relative to their overall valuation if $100M is all they wanted they'd likely have other options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > We have incurred losses in all years since our incorporation. We incurred a > net loss of $52.7 million in fiscal 2018, $52.0 million in fiscal 2017 and > $18.6 million in the three months ended July 31, 2018. As a result, we had > an accumulated deficit of $233.4 million as of July 31, 2018.

Woah.

<comment><USER10> Is this a data point for how well the open source business model works?

Or are they just unnecessarily bloated?

<comment><USER11> If you aren't incurring losses, it means you are throwing away potential income by growing too slowly, and inviting competitors to take up the slack.

In case of a market or tech hiccup, you might find yourself without "sufficient cash flow", and collapse, but that would be the investors' problem. The investors are assumed to be able to absorb the loss and disappointment without undue discomfort, and so they are. Risk to your dreams takes last place.

<comment> munk-a I understand a lot of silicon valley is funded in this manner right now but please re-read this command and realize how silly it is. It's proper to say that taking a loss for long term gain is sometimes the right measured decision but saying that failing to lose money constantly is a failure is just ridiculous.

<comment><USER11> There might be a reason why you are not asked to manage a growing business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Elastic is a company I've been following from the start when they just had elasticsearch opensource project. Watching this company grow to this point has been inspirational. I really want to meet / talk to the people who made this company. They made open source work.

I'm happy to use their products, filebeat, kibana, elasticsearch, and their cloud offering has been top notch. They got a lot of things right.

Now elasticsearch even supports SQL as a query language.

This is a company that you don't hear often in the news, but they just kept their focus and shipped the goods.

As you can tell by now I'm a hardcore fan of Elastic.

<comment><USER13> i would be surprised if they were supporting sql as query language. do you mean by using spark sql?

<comment><USER14> Actually, they really do support SQL as a query language : [https://www.elastic.co/en/blog/an-introduction-to- elasticsea...](https://www.elastic.co/en/blog/an-introduction-to- elasticsearch-sql-with-practical-examples-part-1)

<comment><USER13> yeah a "subset of SQL" and on the page you gave me 0 example of a JOIN. so no JOIN no SQL sorry

<comment><USER15> "We support SQL on our distributed data platform" has to be the new big lie of distributed systems salespeople.

I'm not saying that computing joins, aggegates, sorts, etc can't be done in a distributed fashion, it just takes time, a lot of network reliability/reattempts, and understanding of the approximate nature of results if there are ongoing "eventually consistent" updates rolling through the cluster(s).

<comment><USER13> well you cannot have a search engine query time + a SQL layer at least not at DB speeds

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting. My initial instinct is to compare them to MongoDB which IPO'd about a year ago. They seem to be doing quite well since, but then again, who hasn't in the tech sector?

I will say I very much enjoy Elastic's suite of products, I can't say the same for MonogoDB.

<comment><USER17> There are key differences between MongoDB and Elastic.

MongoDB (the company), has been very strategic about defending themselves from Amazon. Likely due to the AGPL licensing on MongoDB (the database), Amazon doesn't offer a hosted MongoDB - you have to buy MongoDB Atlas which runs on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, GCP and Azure. Coincidentally, Atlas subscriptions are the fastest growing part of MongoDB Inc's revenue, which is why investors are bullish on the company.

Elastic (Apache licensed) has actually had their lunch eaten by Amazon to a much larger degree. Many businesses are purchasing hosted ES instances directly from Amazon via Amazon Elasticsearch service. The problem is bad enough that Elastic Inc had to write a marketing blog post about it [0].

Say what you will about MongoDB (the database), but MongoDB Inc. is the most successful open source software-based company since Red Hat. You can see it in the outperformance of $MDB compared to similarly timed open-source IPOs such as Hortonworks ($HDP) and Cloudera ($CLDR).

[0] - [https://www.elastic.co/blog/hosted-elasticsearch-services- ro...](https://www.elastic.co/blog/hosted-elasticsearch-services-roundup- elastic-cloud-and-amazon-elasticsearch-service)

<comment><USER18> > Elastic (Apache licensed) has actually had their lunch eaten by Amazon to a > much larger degree. Many businesses are purchasing hosted ES instances > directly from Amazon via Amazon Elasticsearch service. The problem is bad > enough that Elastic Inc had to write a marketing blog post about it [0].

Also the reason Redis Labs made the controversial decision to change their licensing (and they reference Elastic in it) [1].

[1] [https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain- bsd...](https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd/)

> Cloud providers have been taking advantage of the open source community for > years by selling (for hundreds of millions of dollars) cloud services based > on open source code they didn't develop (e.g. Docker, Spark, Hadoop, Redis, > Elasticsearch and others). This discourages the community from investing in > developing open source code, because any potential benefit goes to cloud > providers rather than the code developer or their sponsor.

<comment><USER19> A big part of it is Elastic's fuckup.

It's a big deal for a lot of companies to be able to pay the cloud bill in one place. Elastic used to provide the availability to pay for the Elastic cloud subscription through AWS' Marketplace. Elastic stopped this when they changed their pricing at the beginning of 2017 and we (my last employer) were negotiating a contract with them at the time. AWS billing was a hard requirement for us because it made it a lot easier on us from the finance side. We walked and I know a lot of others who did too.

<comment><USER18> It's not Elastic's fault your accounts payable process is deficient.

<comment><USER19> I'd be surprised if even 20% of companies' accounts payable process is sufficient.

The point is that AWS removes friction and Elastic chose to add friction. They're chasing big Enterprise hard and it doesn't seem to be working out.

<comment><USER18> It's a business decision of course. Forge your own path or be beholden to your revenue model dictated by AWS.

Big Enterprise will not require billing through AWS (disclaimer: employed at a large enterprise, buying ~$900k software license currently). They'll have an accounts payable department, a procurement process, and someone to cut a check or ACH to Elastic monthly/annually.

<comment><USER19> It wasn't the way they did billing, it was just an option. One they've removed. I get it, I'm just saying it cost them some money.

<comment><USER18> I totally get that. _I don 't dispute that_. But if you must choose between "please sir, can I have some more?" and controlling your own revenue destiny, it is clear why some would choose the later.

Would you want to be beholden to AWS' whims? You might as well be a Walmart supplier at that point, constantly dragged out to Bentonville having to make your case for every penny of your costs. Amazon has proven its model (all about scale), how it operates (your margin = our opportunity), and you partner with them at your own peril.

I'm suggesting the thought process to shift from, "Ahhh, those Elastic guys and their bad decisions!" to "Hmm, well, tough decision to make [forgoing revenue through AWS] but I understand why they made it".

<comment><USER19> I had already acknowledged that though.

<comment><USER18> My apologies then; I did not pick up on that from your comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> We pay them money but I have to say.. there are aspects to the model which _freak me out_ -Like the relative paucity of good R hooks, the abortive attempt at an interface via dplyr basically died. Right now, its curl. Its http sucking and no real way past pagination.

Or, how hard it can be to intuit the json you need, as a naieve user. Back porting from kibana is silly.

Or how easily you can deploy a naieve cluster which hangs bigtime on large data. This thing is like PostGres and ZFS: you really can't fake it, you have to understand it.

I see good potential in Elastic _training_

</comment><comment><USER21> Elastic's signature product is ElasticSearch. They also make Kibana and Logstash

[https://www.elastic.co](https://www.elastic.co)

</comment><comment><USER22> For anyone that for any reason is looking for an alternative to ElasticSearch/Solr: Try Vespa.ai

The feature of live node removing/adding alone made my life so much easier. The performance and Machine Learning ranking is the icing on the cake!

<comment><USER23> You mean there's no refresh delay?

<comment><USER22> Oh yes! "Vespa is designed to be real time so once you your document has been accepted it is live in search. You can control visibility-delay which by default is 0: [http://docs.vespa.ai/documentation/reference/services- conten...](http://docs.vespa.ai/documentation/reference/services- content.html#visibility-delay) "

<comment><USER23> Yes very interesting thanks for sharing. Have you used in production? Have you used the change steam functionality?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it just me, or does 33 pages of risk factors seem pretty high?

<comment><USER7> I used to put together deal documents similar to this when I worked in finance. It was literally my job to think about potential risks and then list them out.

"Hey boss, this investment has _possible_ earthquake risk, but that seems very remote; do I have to put that in?"

"Yeah, put it in. No one reads the document anyway unless it goes to court and in that case, you can get dinged for leaving _out_ stupid risk factors, but not for having them in."

<comment><USER25> Exactly. Serious investors aren't going to look at this list, but rather do their own research. This is basically to protect against lawsuits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I like to see open source backers going public, they give a boost to open source community who want to share but do not want to just spend energy where they cannot get something out of it (money/fame/recognition or just a satisfaction of doing good). I am sure the people are proud of their work. Good luck with the IPO!

</comment><comment><USER27> Anyone figure out which product/services are driving the majority of this revenue?

</comment><comment><USER28> Interesting that JOBS act took so much care about executive compensation :

"

Implications of Being an Emerging Growth Company

We are an "emerging growth company" as defined in the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act of 2012, or the JOBS Act. An emerging growth company may take advantage of specified reduced reporting requirements that are otherwise applicable generally to public companies. These reduced reporting requirements include:

the requirement to present only two years of audited financial statements and only two years of related management's discussion and analysis in this prospectus;

an exemption from compliance with the auditor attestation requirement on the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting;

reduced disclosure about our executive compensation arrangements; and

an exemption from the requirements to obtain a non-binding advisory vote on executive compensation or shareholder approval of any golden parachute arrangements."

<comment><USER29> I guess it's clear whose JOB the act is all about ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> And it all started with Shay Banon attempting to build a cooking app for his wife who was a chef.

> JAXenter: You started Compass, your first Lucene-based technology, in 2004. > Do you remember how and why you became interested in Lucene in the first > place?

> Shay Banon: Reminiscing on Compass birth always puts a smile on my face. > Compass, and my involvement with Lucene, started by chance. At the time, I > was a newlywed that just moved to London to support my wife with her dream > of becoming a chef. I was unemployed, and desperately in need of a job, so I > decided to play around with "new age" technologies in order to get my skills > more uptodate. Playing around with new technologies only works when you > are actually trying to build something, so I decided to build an app that my > wife could use to capture all the cooking knowledge she was gathering during > her chef lessons.

> I picked many different technologies for this cooking app, but at the core > of it, in my mind, was a single search box where the cooking knowledge > experience would start a single box where typing a concept, a thought, or an > ingredient would start the path towards exploring what was possible.

> This quickly led me to Lucene, which was the defacto search library > available for Java at the time. I got immersed in it, and Compass was born > out of the effort of trying to simplify using Lucene in your typical Java > applications (conceptually, it simply started as a "Hibernate" (Java ORM > library) for Lucene).

> I got completely hooked with the project, and was working on it more than > the cooking app itself, up to a point where it was taking most of my time. I > decided to open source it a few months afterwards, and it immediately took > off. Compass basically allowed users to easily map their domain model (the > code that maps app/business concepts in a typical program) to Lucene, easily > index them, and then easily search them.

> That freedom caused people to start to use Compass, and Lucene, in > situations that were wonderfully unexpected. Imagine already having the > model of a Trade in your financial app, one could easily index that Trade > using Compass into Lucene, and then search for it. The freedom of searching > across any aspect of a Trade allowed users to convey this freedom to their > users, which proved to be an extremely powerful concept.

> Effectively, this allowed me to be in the front seat of talking and working > with actual users that were discovering, as was I, the amazing power that > search can have when it comes to delivering business value to their users. > Oh, and btw, my wife is still waiting for that cooking app. Now, 10 years > later, it is the basis of Elasticsearch.

[https://jaxenter.com/elasticsearch-founder- interview-112677....](https://jaxenter.com/elasticsearch-founder- interview-112677.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> Does this mean more Big Data IPOs coming? A few good private ones have been close.

</comment><comment><USER32> Tl;Dr; should I buy?

</comment><comment><USER33> They have a 75% profit margin. $120mm profit from $160mm in revenue.

<comment><USER17> You are misreading the financials. 120m is cost of revenue, not profit. They had a 52mm net loss in the last year ending April 30th.

<comment><USER33> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Slightly off topic: this quote from the SEC filing document:

 _" Immediately prior to the completion of this offering, we intend to change our corporate form from a Dutch private company with limited liability (besloten vennootschap met beperkte aansprakelijkheid) into a Dutch public limited company (naamloze vennootschap) and change our corporate name from Elastic B.V. to Elastic N.V."_

As far as I know, Elasticsearch has no headquarters or offices in The Netherlands. I assume the company is only registered in The Netherlands for tax avoidance.

If my assumption is true, despite that I like their products, this makes me a little sad.

EDIT: my bad. I missed the tab Europe and Asia. They do seem to have an office in Amsterdam.

<comment><USER7> > _As far as I know, Elasticsearch has no headquarters or offices in The > Netherlands._

According to their contact page, their European headquarters are in Amsterdam ([https://www.elastic.co/contact](https://www.elastic.co/contact)), so they do seem to have some kind of presence there. And if you look at their careers page, it seems that most of their engineering team is distributed/remote.

<comment><USER34> I edited my post. Missed those tabs. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Don't write code first - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reemer.com/why-only-fools-write-code-first <comment><USER2> I understand that Hacker News is mostly targeted towards the startup crowd, but asking _hackers_ to have a business model before they write anything is completely backwards to me.

Hackers don't write code because they want to make lots of money. Hackers write code because they are hackers. Building a viable business on top of that code may be a nice side effect of this.

<comment><USER3> The word hacker has been twisted into oblivion.

Just assume that any mention to 'hacker' in Hacker News has nothing to do with hacking, but with entrepreneurship.

<comment><USER4> It has and it hasn't.

There's always been a yin-yang between hacker and hustler here.

And I am glad this hasn't been destroyed as there is merit in the frame.

We hack and hustle customers and software.

We validate the market on both ends: business and product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't wait to see the "Write code first" article later this afternoon. </sarcasm>

There are no concrete rules in life, I get it. If you are trying to make money, all he is saying is find out if people are actually willing to pay for this. However, like other's have pointed out, sometimes we write code not driven by monetary rewards but just the joy of coding. There are no concrete rules, sometimes it's a great idea to write code when the idea comes into your head, sometimes it's not. The hard part is figuring out when to do which.

<comment><USER6> _> I can't wait to see the "Write code first" article later this afternoon. </sarcasm>_

== Don't go looking for customers before you have working code. ==

Years of experience show sales and investment rounds go better if you can show an actual, working software. The solution doesn't have to be complete, nor perfect fit for this particular customer, but nonetheless, if you pitch, you better be able to back your words with something concrete.

Don't even attempt to set pricing or commiting to delivery deadlines unless you have at least sizeable chunk of code working. At the very least have third-party libraries ready and pick a platform (hardware, OS and UI toolkit) that provides most of what you need.

Beware that quite often what seems an easy endeavour upfront, show to be quite complex, perhaps even unachievable, as you start coding. Thanks to the halting problem, it's not possible to find that out without actually implementing the important parts of your software.

Last but not least, before you start selling, have had written and delivered at least a few similar pieces software. Having experience in problem domain is crucial for producing commercial-grade software.

# # #

Phew, easier than it seemed -- which goes to show how little value is in such generalizations. At least in general ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are some assumptions in the story. The first is that you/your team is able to communicate your idea verbally (maybe with some mockups) clearly enough that people understand it fully. This isn't always the case, and it's certainly not always the case with engineers. We're in this process right now and I tried to explain exactly what the product is verbally to potential users, I just couldn't.

The second assumption that seems to come into this argument is that ideas for products are stand-alone and don't evolve through experience in a domain and feedback of pain points on existing products (prior to where we form the idea).

You either put up a landing page and say give me your email, or you build a minimum viable product as with feedback as you build.

So we built the minimum viable _prototype_. It's not the MV product, anyone using it gives up within 3-4 minutes. But combined with me talking directly to the user, I can now hear that lightbulb turn on as they get what I'm talking about.

Simply, it's a continuous spectrum between the two boundaries and you need to pick the right point for your product. As a contextless headline, this is bad advice.

<comment><USER8> I think you missed the point a little bit.

The point isn't to get them to confirm what you want to build is the right thing, it's to learn more about their problems to find out what you should build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I really don't understand all of the negative feedback to this post (maybe I didn't see the old title, as it has evidently changed).

It seems like this is straightforward honest advice when you're trying to solve somebody else's problem(s). Some other folks have mentioned other products as examples of build first, but those all seem to have been people solving their own problem/desires.

If you're trying to create a business that attempts to solve other people's problems, this approach would be excellent. The example that the author used (Movie theater) illustrates the point of view perfectly. I suspect none of us have ever had the problem of watching a movie and being distracted by the fact that we didn't purchase enough snacks. That is not a problem a 'user' has ever thought of, but I would guess theater owners think about it a lot.

<comment><USER10> The original title was "Why only fools write code first"

I'm glad HN moderates titles, it's super unproductive to react to a title but people do it anyways, rather than reacting to the content.

It's easier to just read the title though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I simply made the original title of the submission match the title of the blog article. I didn't realize it would be an issue.

<comment><USER10> You did the right thing honestly. The rules seem to indicate matching the source title is the defacto right thing to do.

All the same, I think in cases where responses start reacting to the title and not the content, it makes sense to moderate it, but then again, I am biased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord This whole "everything has to be a business" mentality can get pretty toxic. It's perhaps the root cause for all sorts of things like proprietary software (not inherently evil, but by definition cannot be trusted), software patents, DRM and whatnot.

A hacker who has an idea will do it regardless of whether it'll make them money or not.

<comment><USER11> > A hacker who has an idea will do it regardless of whether it'll make them > money or not.

That's exactly the motivation that drives me to create side-projects. But it's still a bummer when nobody uses them.

The point is not about money, but creating value. Hackers don't always want to create things just for flexing their technical muscles. In the end, we all want to provide value in one form or another. If no one is using your software, then it's wasted effort.

You could modify the approach outlined in the post and just verify peoples' pain-point and see if they'd be willing to just use your software instead of asking them to commit to paying for it.

<comment><USER12> Some people on this thread liken hackers to children/babies. Doing things out of fun and compulsion without thinking too much about the net result. That is hardly true (as you say)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The last time I talked with 5 potential customers they all agreed that my idea would really fit their needs but they can't see how this ever would work. Explaining to them couldn't change their mind.. I like your approach, but sometimes a little demo is necessary.

edit: I'm dissapointed this isn't about entity framework ;)

</comment><comment><USER14> People don't always know what they want. People have trouble seeing which of their needs can be feasibly addressed. People are bad at imagining how new ideas integrate with their established way of doing things. If, 10 years ago, you'd asked every current smartphone user whether they needed a multi-hundred dollar phone that does mostly the same things as their laptop, the vast majority would say no.

Hackers don't always know what people want. Hackers, having hammers, will only see the bits of problems that look most like a nail. Hackers, having hammers, will forget that other people don't like to deal with hammers. Hackers, having hammers, say things like: "For a Linux user, you can already build [Dropbox] yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224))

The real lesson is to integrate users in every part of development. Targeting a specific user group? Talk with them, try out products they use, and try to grok their needs, values, and relationship with technology. Trying an innovative interface? Throw together a minimal, flexible mockup (just enough to facilitate a conversation), and find out how people react.

Whether you should _start_ with users depends highly on the product, but get users involved throughout the design process when user input is needed.

<comment><USER15> I think you should always start with users by having a deep understanding of their problems. That may come from domain expertise or from talking to them. But if you don't start there, you're going to make a lot of incorrect assumptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of successful things have been built before there was customers. Some people just enjoy building cool things and when they start don't really care about customers; Minecraft springs to mind.

Also, the quick rise of this is a bit suspicious.

<comment><USER17> >Minecraft springs to mind.

Minecraft is an example of a game at the right place, at the right time. Indie when indie was the hot new thing, 3d voxel, when gaming was tiring of FPS's, and cheaper than most console games.

It is not a model others, or even Mojang has been capable of replicating.

<comment><USER18> _Minecraft is an example of a game at the right place, at the right time._

A great number of products and business ideas spring from noticing that something seemingly necessary doesn't exist, which, said another way, is recognizing that there is a right time out there waiting for the right thing to come along.

I see the battle here as a conservative/liberal one. Not politically, necessarily, but of personal effort. Do you research and line up customers and let people wait for the product to arrive, and in this way creating a right place for a product to occur in (hopefully) the right time? This i see as conservative with ones own efforts while beign liberal with other peoples' time and attention. Alternatively, being liberal with one's own efforts in creating a product that can be presented in a turnkey fashion, effectively treating the customer's time and attention conservatively. There's no right answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I understand the spirit of the post, but it's not so black and white. You should think about what you really need to do, and then do it. That might be writing a little code first, and then focusing on the customers.

The reason is that a lot of the time you need to technically validate an idea. You have a great idea for a product but you have no idea if it's even possible. You _have_ to write code to understand what your product is even going to be ("these are the 3 most important features, can we actually do them?") Maybe these are features that depend on an external service and you need to make sure they provide the right info.

I feel much more willing to sell an idea when I have a vague idea that it's possible.

But yes, only write as little code as possible at first, and expect to throw it all away. It's just part of the research process.

<comment><USER15> Author of the post here.

> The reason is that a lot of the time you need to technically validate an > idea. You have a great idea for a product but you have no idea if it's even > possible.

I agree that things are rarely black and white, but because hackers tend to default to their comfort zone - code - and because (in my experience) technical risk is usually a non-issue, the biggest risks are finding a large enough market, a set of customers willing to pay, and a way to profitable reach them. Since they're usually the biggest risks, it makes sense to tackle them first.

<comment><USER19> Definitely agree that most technically-focused people fall into the trap of writing too much code too early.

There's the other end too, though: you get so wrapped up into an idea and sell it too hard and end up not delivering because you were detached from the technical reality.

I think you just need to be smart about switching contexts, especially early on in the game. Using a little bit of code here and there to stay well- grounded, while focusing on customers to validate the idea. Early on you definitely should be spending most of your time engaging future customers.

<comment><USER15> > Early on you definitely should be spending most of your time engaging future > customers.

100% agree. Though my approach is less about selling and more about learning: are we solving a valuable problem? Are people willing to pay for it? Do we have some ideas about how to scalably reach those folks? Etc

<comment><USER19> That's true. I guess because I'm a "hacker" I just don't know how to ask those questions without involving the technical merits of the product.

I have a specific question, as I'm in this phase right now. I need to validate my product and demographic. It's a finance app targeted towards developers. I'm still working through the core feature-set (on paper, and a little code). It needs to differentiate itself in the details; the market is somewhat saturated. I also don't see how I can make a landing page without screenshots.

Now, how do I validate it without writing any code? I have already written some code because I need to make sure I could get certain info from banks. I need to make a landing page to get people to sign-up. Can I really do that without screenshots (even if it's mock-ups, I need to think about the UI a little)? I need to "sell" it on a few features; writing code has helped a ton to sift through my ideas. How do you flesh out a landing page when you just have an idea?

Obviously, I'm still learning about this.

<comment><USER15> > I also don't see how I can make a landing page without screenshots.

Use thumbnails with copy about benefits. That's what we did.

> How do you flesh out a landing page when you just have an idea?

We talked to customers about their problems - we reached out to people through our networks and cold emailed them. We understood their problems first, then were able to create a landing page with fake thumbnails of the interface. We wrote copy detailing benefits (save time / save money / make money) of the product. The goal of the landing page was to get more people who we could talk to to validate our idea.

It didn't matter that the product didn't look anything like the thumbnails.

The only code we wrote was to hook up the landing page to Mailchimp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great article. This is something that, logically, makes a ton of sense... yet very few entrepreneurs do.

I published a Slideshare last week with some tactical tips on performing the interviews: [http://www.slideshare.net/ZacharyCohn/18-customer- interview-...](http://www.slideshare.net/ZacharyCohn/18-customer-interview- tips)

[Full disclosure- my company teaches big companies about this stuff. We publish a lot of free content as A) Content marketing, but B) as a way to help our startup friends.]

</comment><comment><USER20> What's ironic here is all the push-back from people about why you seemingly don't need to think about anything but code. There's a bunch of hacker and code-specific reasons not to write code first he doesn't even mention.

\- To provide a usable product for your customer you need to _ask them what they want_. I can't tell you how often I see tools that are practically unusable for the target audience because the devs were just writing with devs in mind and couldn't be bothered to take a couple days to do interviews. (I'm looking at you, every-open-source-tool-that-gets-shown-off-on-HN)

\- Writing code first also means you probably didn't have a plan for the entire design flushed out, which means hacks on top of hacks, which is equivalent to a giant Jenga stack with half the pieces missing.

\- How will this code be used in 10 years (if at all)? In 20? Is it going to be made obsolete, or will your users and their needs change? (think multimedia, transportation, competing market forces, legislation, etc)

</comment><comment><USER21>
        "Talk is cheap. Show me the code" Torvalds, Linus (2000-08-25)

Surprised this quote didn't get mentioned already.

FWIW... on a first glance, i parsed the submitted title as

        "don't write, code first".

lol.

On a more serious note, I wonder if the folks at Xerox Parc would have created the mouse/various interface hacks had they thought about the biz. On the contrary it was the "business concerns" that decided to not continue it further.

That said, code itself has its own consumers/customers who will use what you create. And that's selling in its own right. _eg:_ jQuery's decision to incorporate chaining, selectors, more functional aspects.

When i write frameworks or libraries, I always try to start with the api/wrapper first, and then work on the internals. can't remember the threads, but am sure there have been a bunch of HN threads on just this subject.

~B

</comment><comment><USER12> What is being described is called 'consulting'. No consumer would pay for code that doesn't exist.

<comment><USER15> I'm the author. This is demonstrably not true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've always been mystified by the oddly specialized approaches that come across as a "one size fit all" claim.

Just like pure Agile, Waterfall, etc methods aren't complete solutions, we seem to have the tendency to try and redefine "good software development" every other month.

The most important thing is to do what works the best with your team; and even this varies from project to project. Sometimes coding out a half baked idea into a POC is better than spending hours on a whiteboard, just to get stuck at some unforeseeable roadblock as soon as the code hits the editor.

Sometimes, you need to hash out a problem on paper before devoting coding time. Proclaiming absolutes as gospel is a little dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER23> Are there any examples of a big tech company that started with sales and not the product?

<comment><USER24> Microsoft :P can't get any bigger than that. They sold DOS to IBM even before they had anything like that

<comment><USER25> If I remembering reading correct, MS also sold their version of BASIC to Altair before actually having physical access to an Altair.

<comment><USER24> If i remember correctly, they wrote BASIC for it, (language design) and then pitched it to altair, who then gave them an actual altair to implement it on, no? Btw, wasn't programming without actual access to a PC, pretty common back then too? (even decades later, when u had decent computers). From what i hear from my dad, programmers wrote it out on paper, and sent it to the data entry people who would type it in, run it, and report any bugs etc. Heck, imagine debugging without access to a PC!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Given the state of today's technology, I'm kind of surprised that this viewpoint would be expressed in such absolute terms. Here are a few companies I can think of in which "build first" seemed to permeate the enterprise at the very start:

\- Google

\- Facebook

\- Twitter

\- Chatroulette

\- Minecraft

<comment><USER27> and how many build first and solve a problem no one has?

<comment><USER16> Lots, but at the end of the day it shouldn't mean that nobody should build first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I understand that for the author of the article the goal is to make a product that people use and that entails a financial return. I just want to say that building a software from scratch, even if doesn't end up used by millions of people, is worth doing for the process itself. Not just for the fun of it, but especially because you learn a lot during the process. I don't consider learning a waste of time nor a fool somebody that is motivated more by learning than by fame and money.

</comment><comment><USER29> True header. Don't write code first. First write the docs to understand the problem domain from the other side, the user, and come up with a better API. Then write the tests to support this API you came up with, and help structuring the code into small testable units. And lastly write the code. The business model needs not to be written, it must be simple enough to stay in your head and explain it to anybody in two sentences anyway.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is interesting. I have applied to YC and have not written code first. I have talked to customers and found out they need. We will see if these quotes hold true because in interviews I read YC likes when something is already coded a bit.

</comment><comment><USER31> This, and about 2000 other articles, are just a regurgitation of the Lean Startup book.

It's almost comical these days when you read a blog article or pick up a magazine and it's just recycled ideas from that book.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think this applies to startups that target businesses, and this is generally good advice for that segment. It doesn't really apply to consumer products like Facebook, Google, Minecraft etc.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is this really a one-size-fits-all advice because I always seem to be presented with it as being such. Clearly there must be edge cases where this advice doesn't apply (?).

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I don't think it's a one size fits all. However, if you can present a solution to a person's problem, and that solution does instantly resonate and it becomes obvious that such an app/website can exist to solve it, people will want it badly. -- and that becomes obvious.

I basically think it ties back to becoming an expert on the problem. Instead of the solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Suspicious that this made it to the top with almost no comments.

<comment><USER15> Ha. Author of the article here. I submitted this 588 days ago when I first wrote it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3721015](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3721015)

Just bummed I'm not getting karma for submitting it this time!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Sometimes you need a demo to gain customer attraction.

</comment><comment><USER37> Always writing code will also make you a better developer.

<comment><USER38> Becoming a better developer requires a certain level of self-criticism and willingness to improve and learn. Just writing (lots of) code alone will not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Writing lots of code will make you a better developer if you lack the experience, but you will plateau if that's all you do.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggestion for crowdsourced design companies? - <AUTHOR>

A few weeks back someone posted a link to a company where you specify the number of different designs you want, pay a fee (~$1000) and you are given a bunch of designs to choose from.<p>Can anyone remember/share the company (or companies)? Has anyone had good/bad experiences with a company like this? <comment><USER2> <http://99designs.com/> is one of the big ones.

<http://www.crowdspring.com/> is another.

There are more listed if you use a google search like this: related:99designs.com/ 99 designs</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think a Global Transparent Banking system would be feasible? - <AUTHOR>

I'm talking about the "idealized" global banking system in which everyone can see every account's history.
It would definitely be trouble for companies hiding their (lack of) revenues, money launderers, tax evaders etc. but I wonder if it would cause any trouble for "legit" companies. (First thing comes to my mind is employees of the same company could see each others' salaries, so that may be a problem)
Would you be comfortable using a transparent banking system? Would you oppose it, why? <comment><USER2> I absolutely would oppose such a system, and if my choices were somehow limited to this or keeping bags of cash under the mattress I'd go for the cash every time. My objection is fairly simple - I value my privacy. I don't want my financial status visible to everybody, and I don't see any particular upside for me in a system that allows that.</comment>


Why the World is Full of Shoddy Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.itslikeasabbatical.com/chapters/2012/7/26/a-digression-why-the-world-is-full-of-shoddy-software.html

<comment><USER2> This makes it sound like the world would be better off if there was less shoddy software. I don't agree. I like a world where lots of people try lots of different things. Many of those people aren't ever going to produce things that rise above "shoddy." But every now and then somebody in the "shoddy" camp is going to do something brilliant. More power to 'em.</comment>


YouTube bans Neo-Nazi group following backlash over hate speech - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/28/youtube-bans-neo-nazi-group-following-backlash-over-hate-speech/?sr_source=Twitter <comment><USER2> Why does Google News list articles from The Final Call? Do they list the newspapers of any other SPLC-listed hate group? I've never seen Stormfront or whatever show up on Google News. They even listed as news the text of Farrakhan's crazy anti-Semitic rant that CNN highlighted.

</comment><comment><USER3> why is the banning always after they have earned Google money??</comment>


Staff at the New Republic Follows Editor Out the Door - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/business/media/new-republic-staff-members-resign-over-management-changes.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was relevant given the subtext of a clash of values between a CEO with Silicon Valley pedigree and existing staff at a media company.</comment>


Gif's inventor says ignore dictionaries and say 'Jif' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22620473

<comment><USER2> Steve Wilhite told the New York Times that he was "annoyed" there was still a debate over how to say the acronym.

What a legend.</comment>


Ask President Barack Obama anything on Reddit (seriously) - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/29/ask-president-barack-obama-anything-on-reddit-seriously/ <comment><USER2> Link to actual AMA: [http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obam...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/z1c9z/i_am_barack_obama_president_of_the_united_states/)

Reddit's ops team is going to have a fun day today. (Link's down as I post this.)

</comment><comment><USER3> There's already a thread above this one on the main page, and it actually links to the AMA: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4450803>

</comment><comment><USER4> As stated in the reddit thread... He's currently out and about in Virginia - So this is a staffer pretending to be him.

Sad.

<comment><USER5> As stated in the top of the thread:

"UPDATE: Hey everybody - this is barack. Just finished a great rally in Charlottesville"

So he's doing it while on the road.

This pic shows he's obviously in some kind of temp office/building: <http://i.imgur.com/oz0a7.jpg>

<comment><USER6> I just realized that they covered that Macbook's Apple symbol with a Reddit alien.

Chances of this being a staffers computer...rising. But then again, AllThingsD has an email from Alexis (admin) that says that this has apparently been floated for years and they were notified before hand. [http://allthingsd.com/20120829/how-reddit-got-obama-there- ar...](http://allthingsd.com/20120829/how-reddit-got-obama-there-are-quite-a- few-redditors-at-1600-pennsylvania-ave/)

<comment><USER7> Is it possible that someone from Reddit was on site and set up the "office" and everything, provided the Macbook with the Reddit alien, to make sure the POTUS would have a smooth Reddit experience? I doubt this was a spontaneous thing.

If it was a staffer, he must be very good at impersonation, the style of the answers was VERY close to Obama's unscripted Q&A sessions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> All questions have to be about Rampart.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've never seen so many positive up-votes before. What do you think of this as a move? Do you think it makes him accesible or will it be seen as pandering?

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Americans on reddit were already going to vote for him, and that it will have virtually no impact on anyone who doesn't use reddit.

<comment><USER11> I'm pretty sure the vast majority of Americans ... were already going to vote for him. Is the other guy remotely viable? Really?

Edit: a guy from Europe's viewpoint.

<comment><USER12> Is Obama viable after a failed 4 years?

Your comment is maybe from a European with your own viewpoint.

<comment><USER13> Outsiders often have a valuable viewpoint on other groups, because they are not emotionally invested.

Bush was always ridiculed and seen as stupid in German media. The US should be proud that Obama is seen as intelligent and that his word carries weight. (And Romney had a bad start with his remarks in the UK about the Olympics.)

I also remember the doomsday mood 2008 about the economy. It bordered somewhat on the brink of a depression. I think the administration handled that very well! And as practically every other industrialized country has universal health care the struggle in the US about that is baffling. On the other side the Republicans were obstructing so much important stuff! I remember the shenanigans about the debt ceiling. I wish they would be punished with an election loss for their irresponsibility to the world and the American nation.

<comment><USER12> >> Outsiders often have a valuable viewpoint on other groups, because they are not emotionally invested.\

I wasn't discounting outsider's opinions, I've traveled the world several times, America is great because we are all outsiders. I was addressing the nature of his comment which sounded to me like he was intending to represent all Europeans, rather than a European expressing his view.

Bush should have acted sooner to restrict the door Clinton opened which allowed many people to get loans who had not the finances nor shown the responsibility to own a home.

If common sense regulation should be required of big banks and "wall street"; then we should require it of ourselves as individuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can't even load the page, so... "was bubble sort the wrong way to go?" ...I hate myself a little.

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope Reddit follows up with a blog post on how they handled the load and how it affected the amount of new sign-ups

<comment><USER16> They didn't. I spent an hour and a half just refreshing the page and only ever saw "Reddit is under heavy load..."</comment></comment>


The tax haven in the heart of Britain - <AUTHOR> http://www.newstatesman.com/economy/2011/02/london-corporation-city

<comment><USER2> I find this badly written, so that its point is buried under a good deal of mystification. I don't care about the backgrounds of the protestors or red cords, or much about William the Conqueror. I'd like to know a) what are the powers of the City of London, b) in what way does the writer consider them harmful, and c) how does he propose to restrict them? All this could be related in much less space.

<comment><USER3> a) City of London is the underwriter for the International Monetary Fund. City of London manages the finances of the Vatican Bank. City of London is where the Virginia Company was registered, which eventually became the United States of America.

b) Read up on the Schiff, Warburg, Oppenheimer, and Rothschild families.

c) there is no proposal on how to restrict them. patches welcome.</comment></comment>


Single Entrepreneur looking for love? We launch StartupDating - <AUTHOR> http://startupcafe.co.uk/2011/04/01/looking-for-love-startupcafe-launches-startupdating/

<comment><USER2> "Would I rather date someone for a personal connection, or a business connection? One will take time away from my startup, and the other will bring valuable resources to it. The answer is quite obvious really."

</comment><comment><USER3> Now there's one obvious AFD gag that should probably actually be made real!

<comment><USER4> We're actually working on this at Sparkmuse. We call it Matchmuse, an e-harmony for cofounders. I'm actually glad this one was a joke, but it doesn't matter because ours will rock! Matchmuse generates introductions to other cofounders in our 1000+ member community based on multiple dimensions of compatibility (sounds familiar doesn't it?). Our goal is to help entrepreneurs, especially those outside of the valley, form their own core groups.

edit: If anyone here who would be interested in using it, we'd love to hear from you~

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best thing about this site was this link in the comments: <http://www.techcofounder.com/></comment>


Bubbles May Have Speeded Life's Origins on Earth (1993) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/06/science/bubbles-may-have-speeded-life-s-origins-on-earth.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I didn't pay attention to the article's published date until mid way towards the article. Here's an recent article on related subject ([http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/researchers-may- have-...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/researchers-may-have-solved- origin-life-conundrum))</comment>


What they're "protecting" us from - <AUTHOR> http://dashes.com/anil/2011/08/what-theyre-protecting-us-from.html

<comment><USER2> It is reassuring how well a liberal can succeed in an unregulated industry. Where there are no unions and unpaid overtime is the norm.

It's also to be admired how he can build a successful company while insisting on green practices by shipping all the dirty manufacturing to a country with no environmental protections and where the workers are brutally exploited.

Not to mention his social responsibility and sense of community in basing his software and services on FOSS advancements. Of course without sharing any profits with those who made that community what it is, and tightly controlling his own platform.

Your right Mr. Dash. Jobs is a paragon of liberal business acumen and virtue. Your next article should be on Ariana Huffington.

</comment><comment><USER3> You got your politics in my tech news!

</comment><comment><USER4> What's going on with Joe Biden's watch? Seems a little... illuminated.</comment>