Ask HN: Share a learning & a happy moment from your startup in 2013
With the year ending & many a startup founders around the world working on their dreams through the midnight - it would be great to celebrate it with your best moments and share a learning to help others
PS: One liners preferred Happy, unexpected moment: Added a stupidly expensive "Enterprise" pricing tier as a polite way of declining business from users who were taking up too many resources to bother trying to service. And people started buying it. shit I need to do this ASAP! Learning: if you ask your users to help you improve your product they will give you bad ideas. If you ask them to tell you stories about what keeps them up at night they will give you gold. Happy moment: growing way faster than we did the year before. Rentify now transacts with more landlords than nearly every brick and mortar letting agent in the UK. The old story is true: ask a farmer at the turn of the century (next last anyway) what they wanted, they'd say "a horse that pulls harder and eats less hay". They never said "a tractor". Best moment: Tutorialize getting its first paying customer Learning: If you're going to use a technology like MongoDB make sure you're using it the way it was intended to be used. Testing a new hypothesis after 18 months that resulted in 5 new paying customers AND an exciting new direction for our startup. The heart warming satisfaction of convincing my company to use unit tests, and seeing them come online for the first time. Localization matters for mobile apps. addendum: this might be even more true for niche apps. My $5 iOS app sells way more in non-US/non-English stores. Hitting ramen profitability and being able to click the "donate" button on many of the gems and plugins that helped us get there. Learning: Single Focus. Speed. We digressed a bit and we lost the game both ends a bit. Wish we had focused on one thing. Happy Moment: We were 17 people and we went out for a trip from the company, stayed in a good resort, had a time-off. It made me happy to think back from where it started. edit: going by what I said on the post - one liners. removed rest. Quality experience translates into repeat customers and steady growth. Not features; not highly-paid sales teams; not flashy design. Just support the customers you have with good empathetic skilled staff, beef up the quality of your pipes and codecs, make the on-boarding experience clean and clear, and the customers get on board. Remove the PS.