My name is George Saines, I've been reading HN several times a day since 2007. In fact, it was partially because of you folks that my two friends and I formed a startup in 2008. Three rounds of funding, innumerable mistakes, and 5 years later, we started our second venture http://www.codecombat.com and got accepted to to the YC W14 batch on stage at Startup School 2013.
I stopped working on CodeCombat in early 2015 and worked at a startup called Lovely, then Salesforce, then Facebook, over to Google, back to Facebook, and Salesforce. Beautiful symmetry.
Personally, I enjoy downhill skiing, talking about cars and computers, working with my hands, blogging, and music videos. Although I wasn't a computer science major, I've built two products from the ground up with the help of my two cofounders. If you'd like to drop me a line you can do so at my personal email gsaines at gmail.com
My personal blog is here: https://www.georgesaines.com
For anyone interested in really digging deep into this trend, I recommend picking up the book “After the Spike” by Dylan Spears and Michael Geruso.
It opened my eyes to the mathematical inevitability of short-term population contraction. Seriously, there is no way to avoid short term population contraction at this point. None. Zilch. Zero. We made our proverbial bed in the 1980s.
They convinced me that population contraction is almost certainly bad for people alive today, but also probably for our species as a whole.
Finally, they present a dozen or so hypotheses about what might be at the root of declining birth rates and what we might be able to do to stop reverse current trends.
The thing that made the book a true 5/5 for me is that they end with questions, not false certainty. Basically, demographers aren’t completely sure what’s driving the trends nor do they have fully baked conclusions about how it can be solved or if that’s even possible.
Thanks for engaging with this. I'm not trying to troll or be sarcastic. Could well be the case that painted door testing just doesn't work on B2C. What I learned on Skritter and CodeCombat is that if you have a couple of years to devote full time to building, it's almost always possible to power through bad channel / market fit with good product and build a small company.
The problem is that it's not a very good idea to invest in that way if you both like money and can hold down a corporate job (not saying everyone meets these two criteria BTW).
The 4 steps to epiphany is outdated, and The Mom Test is great if you have existing deep industry expertise and credibility. If you lack either, though, it's really not obvious how anyone tests product ideas without 12+ months of investment.
Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.
I stopped working on CodeCombat in early 2015 and worked at a startup called Lovely, then Salesforce, then Facebook, over to Google, back to Facebook, and Salesforce. Beautiful symmetry.
Personally, I enjoy downhill skiing, talking about cars and computers, working with my hands, blogging, and music videos. Although I wasn't a computer science major, I've built two products from the ground up with the help of my two cofounders. If you'd like to drop me a line you can do so at my personal email gsaines at gmail.com
My personal blog is here: https://www.georgesaines.com