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.
This was aimed at the idea validation stage. You shouldn't have built anything at this point as you're too busy talking to customers face-to-face, trying to hone the idea down.
CEO of a LLC is legal if you're in sole control of the company but yeh, owner/founder is fine too. I used to call myself Founder when the company was just me.
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.
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!
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.
In another comment in the thread, I was talking about the brand name testing we did with customers and also with the awesome team at Koto (http://studiokoto.co/)
Seriously though, we did a lot of testing with names with real customers and also with a brand agency called Koto (the team behind Airbnb's new work - https://www.studiokoto.co/). We didn't want to call ourselves "online code school dot com" or some SEO-bullshitty name and we found that our customers preferred a name that's not like that too, so it goes back to talking to your customers and seeing what they like and dislike. We found customers remembered our name more and could find us with the dot-com domain.
The HN audience isn't one that we promote to because our customers are designers and creative industry professionals, so I'm not really bothered about promoting what we do on here. I'm more bothered about our customers liking what we do. I'm just trying to be active in the HN community.
So Thierry's unthoughtful, uncritical comment deserved me saying that IDGAF response.
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.