hughstephens

It's hard to say – most Instagram influencers provide a public contact email +/- phone number for "business enquiries".

Could be that the data that is listed was previously on the profile but not currently (or matched from another service) vs acquired directly.

While interesting and worthy of debate, the title makes it feel a lot more general than reality (this is a study of Kickstarter companies, so goes with the huge sample bias of “stuff that gets put on Kickstarter”).

As a solo founder, I think people always love the idea but don’t acknowledge how lonely it is compared to having at least one other founder (not to mention complementary skills etc).

Most high growth businesses go to zero as time continues, so while there are outliers the majority (in number) case still remains a zero outcome, not more or less revenue (let alone exit $).

suggestion: surround yourself with people who constantly challenge you to do better. Everyone has times that they feel are "lost" but the time you need to remind yourself of is the moment that you realised you weren't doing what you wanted to be doing, or that something needed to change.

It wasn't until I started to spend time with people who I knew would ask hard questions and challenge me to keep going that I started to actually get shit done. Happy to chat if that'd help, but don't worry about time – my experience is that failed startups mean someone has a far broader level of experience than even they think they have.

And I'm one of those 27yo's who many people think have "made it" but still have the same sense of crippling "should I have done that differently" / "I squandered my youth" fear. It never goes away.

+1. I've participated as an angel in a few AU rounds with SAFEs and SAFE-like instruments rather than priced rounds.

Drop me an email if it's something you're curious to work on - this is an idea I've been planning to have a crack at eventually…

Dialogue Group | Melbourne Australia | REMOTE OK

Web design / UX front-end Designer and NodeJS / MEAN engineer

We build products that solve wicked problems – simple solutions to complex issues.

We're looking to grow our small team by adding a full-time front-end engineer (experience with things like Angular, React etc a massive plus, but we also need someone with a core design nous – you should be confident prototyping in HTML and CSS). Some general experience doing traditional 'graphic design' is also useful for the occasional thing that needs to be put together (like a logo for an MVP).

We're also on the lookout for an awesome Node dev – some of our products are (relatively) boring CRUD-type applications (MEAN stack mostly) but we have some more interesting bits and pieces too in the realtime space (think slack meets trello), analytics (how do you build small questionnaires to produce meaningful ongoing measurement of employee satisfaction?) and trying to fix one of the web's biggest problems: PDF forms.

We're a little team and there are still a lot of things we need to work on internally, like formalising the ways that we work and roadmap products (an ongoing struggle), and I'd love to hear your thoughts on your approach.

I'm (CEO/MD) based out of Melbourne but our team is global (India, Philippines, Dominican Republic, Australia). A bit of overlap with our timezone (+10 GMT) is necessary, but you don't have to work 9-5 local – that's crazy.

Get in touch through email, addresses below. Individuals please, I prefer to work with people directly, not businesses/recruiters etc.

hugh + design @ dialoguegroup dot com dot au – design position

hugh + node @ dialoguegroup dot com dot au – Node position

apologies, my fault.

who knows – in many ways it's even better if it's satire, because it's just believable enough.