My friend Torey from Rocket Referrals is a great example of this; he embedded himself with a target customer to learn and feel their pain points before even deciding what product to build. https://www.dsmpartnership.com/growing-business-here/business-resources/small-business-resources/bootstrapping-starting-a-small-business-with-minimal-capital

Depends what you want to build. Eg if you’re making a native iPhone app you should learn Swift. If you’re doing machine learning, Python. Games, Unity is a good place to start and it uses C#.

JavaScript is a pretty good choice all around since it can work across (almost) every device in the browser, and on the server with Node.js. And you can also use Electron or React Native to use it for building “native” apps for desktop or mobile.

Congrats on a fantastic week! That is super impressive & you should be proud regardless.

Anecdotally, there doesn't seem to be much correlation between our best weeks and number of votes we get either (we went undefeated one week that I thought was kind of mediocre and got several downvotes the week I thought was our personal best); I think it really just depends who you get matched up against and who your voters happen to be that week.

Any given week may be an outlier; what matters more is the trend line. Keep building up momentum and it'll all work out over time.

This was a popular startup idea 5-10 years ago (I can think of 3 examples that were trying to build startups around this just in our small city). None of them took off.

For someone trying it again, having opinions about why they all failed (and how you will be different so you don’t repeat their mistakes) is a prerequisite.

Some hypotheses:
* Strong network effects working against
* Old habits are hard to break
* The tech wasn’t ready yet
* The target audience were smartphone late adopters
* Maybe the purpose of business cards isn’t really exchanging contact info
* Business cards are “good enough”
* The people likely to be early adopters of this new tech are “weird” so it doesn’t catch on

Depending on the reasons you think those previous attempts failed, the product and company you build will be quite different. (Eg if you think it’s the “weird early users” thing maybe you go after influencers and celebrities first like Twitter/Clubhouse did. If it was that business cards were “good enough” maybe you push on the cleanliness/COVID angle and build on the “no handshakes” sentiment now.)

Only just getting started; stay tuned.

I’d appreciate if Stripe and Airbnb bowed out of the leaderboard[1] to make room for us too but I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon.

Guess we’ll just have to work harder, be better, and outcompete them so we can get to the top.

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies/

Not sure. Definitely don’t want to outsource this... hiring the early team is probably the highest leverage thing we as the founders will do.

We don’t seem to have a problem getting enough high quality candidates to apply right now; that might become a bottleneck in the future but we’re only hiring a couple of people at a time right now.

Bigger issue is surfacing and nurturing the best leads, interviewing, spending time getting to know them, intro’ing to the team, checking references, and negotiating. Onboarding is soon going to be a big bottleneck as well.

Hiring. It takes a ton of time to recruit, sort through applications, do initial outreach, schedule, interview, and close.

And the whole reason we need to hire is that we don’t have enough bandwidth to do the things we need to do as it is. So adding what is essentially another job to our plates makes it hard to keep our heads above water.

I’m a fan of this leaderboard