I’m officially going on my second year at Print.io. What a tremendously crazy, intense ride. I imagine starting a business and seeing it through its seed stage is much like having a child; from what I hear the saying is “you can’t be prepared.”
It’s crazy. (I’ve already covered that.) What makes it worse though is the layers of bullshit that surround the startup industry. Reading about startups online is not unlike wading through a sewer, hoping to find some valuable items with the dream of eventually finding a golden latch out.
I would like to spend some time touching on some of the things I’ve learned, more oriented towards engineering-types. It’s gold for me…
Let’s do this one as a test that helps you better understand who you are (a la facebook).
Please select one of each of the following, sum your points as you go.
I would rather…
If i had to pick, I’d rather be…
The person I’d like to make happy/impress is
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this, but if you have any points you should question if you really want to be involved in a seed stage company. Its going to take everything you have to get it out of infancy, and if your desires lay elsewhere its less likely that it will happen. (Note: if your business involves working with programmers obviously theres some overlap w/ the questions … you get the point.)
Long and the short of it– be in your startup to make it a success, not to make “you” a success.
It doesn’t matter what programming language you use, somebody thinks it sucks. The important thing to note is that the term “sucks” is subjective.
At print.io we use a ton of csharp and fsharp. It just happened that way due to developers we had and dead lines we had to meet. In the early days I loathed the fact that I wasn’t able to build the whole thing from the ground up using my latest fancy at the time (probably would’ve ended up as node/mongo at that time) but it is what it is.
Switching to node/mongo/golang/clojure (anything cooler) would not have gotten us to funding or profitability more than csharp. In fact, if I had decided to spend the time initially in code base and programmer transfer if anything we couldve risked deadlines for our first client, who ended up sticking with us and subsidizing much of our initial build-out.
While I’m on the subject, I’m able to make requests from one side of the US to our csharp/Azure based service on another side of the US and consitently get (db based) results back in under 100ms. Is getting faster than 100ms a concern to me? Nope! (Normally they come in around 40ms, btw.) Further, its incredibly stable. We just don’t have surprises/emergencies. Stability is worth more than anything.
Btw, fsharp really is the most beautiful language.
Ok so this one is kind of an issue surrounding .NET. Programmers really do hate MSFT. I’m inclined to make this a function of “cool-oriented” development (see first point above) but at the end of the day the toolset/ease available for mac or linux based programmers justifies the desire.
Do think about your developer experience. Its not easy to attract top-rate .NET/MSFT devs. We’ll have to deal with that in the future.
In the early days (and still frequently) my weeks are/were filled with 12+ hour days. Its not sustainable. I’m lucky that my cofounder supports me with taking breaks daily for exercise– it keeps me balanced.
Make it count.
Come work with us at print.io. Reach out to me on twitter or email me at [my first name]@print.io.