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riklomas's comments

riklomas | 9 years ago | on: How to go freelance

Part of the job of being freelance is expectation management - most clients want everything on a plate but you have to make them prioritize if they're on a budget... what is necessary and what is a nice to have.

riklomas | 9 years ago | on: How to start a startup without ruining your life

Yes I agree with this. I think if you're going to offer equity too, offer equity that vests over a longer period of time (3-4 years) might help keep them connected and give them a reason to stay with the business too. Make them work for ownership of the business.

riklomas | 9 years ago | on: How to start a startup without ruining your life

Yes, I'd agree with this. The agency comment was more aimed at the medium- to large-sized agencies rather than small, young ones (I kinda see them more as freelancers when it's an agency of 2-7).

Also it's a big variance of caring, some big agencies do care a lot but they're rare and hard to find. Some staff turn up late and are hungover every other morning. It's a wide range but I was trying to average it out!

riklomas | 9 years ago | on: How to start a startup without ruining your life

A lot of brand names have vague or no references to what they do – Apple, Nike, Google, Heroku – we had a few other initial names that were like "Craft" and "Tailor" but didn't really work for us. We tried the more obvious ones and our customers didn't like them.

I'm still happy with the name two years later though and still love our branding. With the name we could use it in a few ways to make it more about learning... "learn the SuperHi way", "SuperHi school", etc.

We're also a bootstrapped company, so zero investment available for spending $$$ on a domain name. In the end, we went with what felt right for us and what our customers liked.

riklomas | 9 years ago | on: How to start a startup without ruining your life

Thank you! Yeh, we've been consistently asking customers what works for them over the two or so years we've been running. We found that a lot of people get stuck very quickly with the free online courses that are out there, and they wanted to create sites from scratch rather than learning about HTML, CSS and Javascript – it's a very slight difference, practical vs theory.

We've found that the 1:1 help informs the course material too - if we get the same request topics in the 1:1 help, it's obvious we're missing something from the course material, so we add it in.

riklomas | 9 years ago | on: How to start a startup without ruining your life

Sometimes you just gotta give it a go. I'm not saying quit your job and do it full time, but if someone is going to steal your idea, then they're going to steal your idea tomorrow or in a years time.

Everything is a risk, but you don't want to get to 90 and think "damn it, I should have done that business".

The worst thing that might happen is you might run out of cash, give it up and get another job. Or someone will rip you off (be it a biz partner, investor or rival) and you give it up and get another job. It's stressful and not fun, but you're not going to die if your startup fails.

riklomas | 9 years ago | on: How to start a startup without ruining your life

If I was to set you homework, it'd be to talk to 10 founders on your idea. See if they think it'd be useful. Talk to founders in SV and other cities (and other countries).

Do the research before building anything, otherwise you could be wasting your energy on something people don't want.

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