bootstrpppin

As with most things - it depends. Hard to give you a clear cut answer without knowing a lot more.

For us, multi-country added a lot of complexities because we expanded from the UK to Australia. So we needed to staff and integrate different teams (which is where most of the complexity was).

If you're a pure SaaS with no sales GTM, I think it would be a lot simpler if you can stay centrally operated.

The main learning I took away from growing from 20 to 250ish employees, 1 product to multi-product and 1 geo to multi-country:

As a startup, your speed of execution is a function of your simplicity. It's about your only advantage over the big players.

Adding employees, adding products, and adding new markets increase your complexity non-linearly. ie. Going to 1 product to 2 products doesn't increase complexity by 2x, it increases it by 4x.

Avoid this complexity if you can: it makes you slow, makes you hire middle management, and makes what could/should be simple decisions, multi-dimensional.

So the lesson: stay as simple as you can for as long as you can. If you can't stay simple, don't underestimate the exponential drag of complexity.

Hope that's helpful

Ahrefs is the winner for me - it's not cheap but it's very good.

If you're budget friendly I'd look at With Telescope dot com. It's PAYG and very cheap, though not as good as Ahrefs

ChatGPT but not for the good

It's made me very lazy with my thinking and writing.

We use Bright Data - so far we've found it to be pretty great, and very very cheap.

Would highly recommend

yeah potentially -

I think you can potentially detect which email clients emails open in, so you may gain some interesting insight once you've sent some cold emails.

I don't think it's possible, but a fun problem to solve...

You could probably build something to ping their number an iMessage.

If it sends as an SMS they probably don't have an iPhone, and therefore probably don't have a Mac.

I think it depends on the company you're applying for:

Disclose it to companies who have programs to support people with disabilities

Don't disclose it to companies who don't have a support program

I've used a few:

- Cognito: bad

- Clerk: ok for small scale applications but they're a small company 'moving fast and breaking things'. It's not stable enough for a enterprise grade product that needs robustness.

- Auth0: Good but can get expensive

- WorkOS: Good for B2B, especially if 'directory syncing' is important for your usecase

There are so many better Auth providers out there now - and some of them are free for the first 10k or so users (workOs has the first 1M users free!)

It's because doing two or three careers spreads your focus...you'll learn at fraction of the speed and progress slowly.

Fine at the start of your career, but specialisation wins out ultimately

Try and reframe those 8 hours of "wasted time investigating" as an opportunity to:

- learn something

- explore different parts of the codebase

- think about new/different problems to solve

...and try and enjoy the ride.

Small companies do tend to thrash around, but it's pretty unavoidable and often can be a small companies competitive advantage. Doesn't make it any easier, I appreciate.

That's a pretty cynical view....besides, big companies would take months/years to to copy an idea - even if it's a good one - and by then the market has moved.

Thank you for those kind words - I'm really glad it was helpful advice.

> It's targeted towards lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, etc. Do you think LinkedIn is a good channel to reach them? For lawyers and accounts - yes - LinkedIn should be pretty great.

For Real Estate you may want to try your luck at walking around estate agents at quiet periods in the day. Some may be kind enough to hear you out and what you'll learn from f2f will be even more impactful.

> Do you also use LinkedIn premium?

I actually use Sales Navigator - it's $80/month, but by no means is it necessary - I wouldn't use the lack of Premium/Sales Nav as a reason not to start the process.

> Have you tried cold emails?

Yes - we sent a bunch using Instantly but got such a crappy response that we stopped. Cold email is dead, IMO.

> Sorry to bombard you with so many questions. Do you have a way to reach you besides HN?

No problem - very happy to help! I don't really do twitter or anything, but happy to chat here as much as you like. Does HN have DM? (sorry, new here)

Are you going to launch it on PH?

Joking aside, I really think you need a unique angle and a solid distribution strategy: there are 1,000 PH clones but they don't stick because they're the same as PH, just with less users/traction/eyeballs.