bramkrom

Sorry, totally missed this. In case it's still relevant: Stages were all before 500k revenue. So maybe the very successful ones did have their mvp built by someone else, but I just didn't encounter them. As far as proper hand-off concerns - yes, I've seen companies usually deal professionally with their hand-off. That's what their reputation depends on. But the idea of the MVP is not necessarily the product - it's more the first attempt at seeing if you can solve something. Next steps are usually hard to follow up. Seeing as you just do the minimal, you leave out so many things that later on it's just hard to improve on it. I'd want my co-founder to be part of all the initial learning, and so would rather stay put in my job and find a passionate co-founder first before having someone build the mvp. good luck!

What worked for me (oversimplified): 1. Find an interest you're excited about and/or spend a lot of money in (climbing). It'll be easier creating something of value for yourself. 2. Write down what could be improved there. Problems you run into. Solutions you use that suck, or chose not to use because they suck. Build your problem understanding. (developing climbing technique and staying hyped) 3. Find others who're interested in this space. (fellow climbers) 4. Build your problem understanding. Ask them what is challenging, frustrating or annoying for them as climbers. Ask them what they've tried or are trying and what they like/dislike. 5. Come up with a solution. Make something super small. A landing page that explains your idea. A brochure. Something ideally that you can make within a week. A day's even better. 6. Show your solution to people you'd consider customers. Ask them for feedback about how they think this could solve their problem. (for me I came up with an online program, designed a landing page with google sheets and showed it as if it was an actual website. Climbers gave me feedback that they wanted to know more about the practical way of learning - exercises, etc) 7. Repeat step 5&6 until you have confidence this is worth building. Then you've got your idea you're asking for. Congrats. You've ended up at the hardest point: figuring out how to execute on your idea and get all the parts right and figuring out how to sell and market it.

Interesting overlap between crisis management & startups:

You need to react quickly. (…) You need to engage with communities deeply - community acceptance is important. You need to be coordinated. You need to be coherent. You need to look at the other sectoral impacts. (…) The lessons I’ve learned are: be fast, have no regrets. You must be the first mover. (…) One of the great things in emergency response is (…) if you need to be right before you move, you will never win. Perfection is the enemy of the good (…). Speed trumps perfection. And the problem (…) is that everyone is afraid of making a mistake, everyone is afraid of the consequence of error. But the greatest error is not to move. The greatest error is to be paralysed by the fear of failure. That’s the single biggest lesson I’ve learned in Ebola responses in the past.

Good to read they're doing what they can. In the meantime, there's business like ours (in travel, 70-ish people, not profitable) that are fighting to survive this crisis. Would've liked to see an extension of the deadline for the apple sign-up requirement. I know we're late, but this means we need to spend valuable time redesigning our sign-up whereas what we currently need to do is redesign our entire business model to stay alive. Curious how others in the market feel about this

Bit of background - last January I read Marcus Aurelius' Meditations for the first time. There haven't been many books that I'd say changed by life, but this one certainly did. It resonated so strongly with struggles I was having (and still have), that it inspired me to dig as deep as I could into the topic. So that's what I did. I think I spent the last 8 months reading everything I could from Marcus, Epictetus and Seneca, and dissected their works into quotes that I then mapped to certain struggles I have. That resulted in a series of essays, of which this one is the first. I doubted whether I should publish this, as I primarily wrote this for myself. But then a couple of people read it, and convinced me to share it with others. So, that's what I'm doing here. The reason I wanted to share it here is because Stoicism has as its fundamental principles very similar ones to the ones I think many of us here at HN adhere to, which are 1) When in doubt, apply rationality, and 2) Life is about contributing to your community's well-being. Hope it helps you then same way it helps me. B