truthseeker

There are many who peddle stuff which is not their primary source of wealth. Suze Orman became wealthy not by saving for 401k and 'paying herself first' as she preaches. She became wealthy by selling her books, shows and other stuff.

Many an entrepreneur, when their products failed to get the traction they expected became: - social media consultants - lean canvas experts - marketing experts for startups

I would like to hear from them how they are different from the late night infomercials who teach you to become rich from real estate and government grants.

It depends on what you do at the startup. If you are coding away just like you would at the electronic trading firm, you wouldn't learn much about running your own startup.

Are you involved in customer development, talking to investors, making connections as part of the startup? If not, there's not much upside.

I do not know if wakemate made any improvements lately but after giving it a try several times after I got it, I gave up. It sits in a box alongside old power adapters and other cables.

The main problem for me was when I toss and turn at night, it loses contact with the phone (sitting on the end table) and starts screaming 'Lost contact, lost contact'.

If I continued to use it, my wife would have thrown me out onto the patio to sleep.

There were several other occasions where wakemate never woke me up.

I would have loved to see wakemate work, I wanted to root for a startup, see them succeed. You only get so many chances with a single customer. In my books, they failed badly on their promise. continuously. starting with their delivery of the product and then later with the product itself.

I find Rand Fishkin incredible in sharing all the details of SeoMoz. It takes guts to do that. Balsamiq, Bingo Card creator and a few others on HN are transparent when it is not a great deal of money.

(I haven't seen Balsamiq post detailed revenue and their breakup lately.)

I would say do what feels comfortable to you. Most likely, it is to keep revenues etc. secret. Revealing those details might get some eyeballs in the short term but not customers.

Thank you for the awesome and detailed response. Those are pitfalls I can definitely try to avoid for my venture.

Lot of what I am learning from entrepreneurship are things I read over and over again but you don't own the advice until you experience it.

* But we relied too much on others' self-assessments.* Can you explain? Do you mean customer development brings in everyone's biases into the picture and not the truth?

What do you think is a better way to do customer development?

Right on with your logic though I am not sure if anyone is willing to give up even 12%.

6 to 8% seems to be the high numbers I have seen or heard.

I hope your post will show the people who are not experienced with the startup equity world a way of thinking what their offer is worth.

There is another missing piece from your comment that the employees need to consider, it is dilution.

It is ignorance on how startup equity works that causes most mistakes.

Well, Guys, learn from some of us who have been there and got screwed before you.

Next up on HN:

Blog post from housekeeper of Mr. Steve about how exacting he is on some occasions and how kind he is on other.

I think Steve Jobs and his contributions to the tech world are extraordinary. I wish him well and hope he lives happily for a long long time. Just as I wish for anyone I know or do not know, that they live happily.

Steve is not a friend of either you or me. I do not need to know how he was as a neighbor, his driving record, his family life or anything that does not concern his work. I am not interested in those details of Steve or Salma Hayek or Steve Ballmer.

Can we stop senselessly idolizing people in areas that are not their expertise?

This is exactly the reason why I've never been interested in working for a startup. Learning experience? Yeah, I've got that working during the dotcom boom/bust cycle.

Your reasoning is spot on but the numbers get even more unappealing once dilution in future rounds of financing kicks in.

If you have the experience, be a co-founder at a startup with pretty big upside. If you can't find that, the 150K/year salaries are a much better deal than <5% equities.

In my view there are multiple things at play.

1. They raised exorbitant amount of money which set quite high expectations from them.

2. The app didn't take off as expected (at least the vocal early adopters hate it).

3. Peter Pham (the designer co-founder) and chief scientist, DJ Patil quit or got fired, which raised eyebrows.

The backend of the operation is a hookup with a manufacturer who will supply them to us.

They are not major brand names like Nike or Steve Madden but quite nice.

I have the responsibility of driving traffic to the website and get sales.

YC or techstars see you as a point in time. Fixed and whether you are right for their model or not. However, you are not fixed. you evolve, grow, talk to customers, pivot, refine business model, etc.

They don't see all of that. Or probably see your past as an indicator of future. May be you may not have the potential for another google or youtube but you might be successful. Successful by your own measure not someone else's yardstick.

You said it...responsible for something that someone cares about. Find that out first if it is something someone cares about. If not you could be spinning your wheels for a long time.

How did you find a business mentoring program in your city? Are there any resources that you are aware of? I am in the US and would love to be part of such a program.