How I built a startup while working full-time in Finance
In this technical retrospective (2012), @andyokdj shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 143 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 71 comments
Congrats on launching! I can sort of relate with trying to pull off ideas on the side in a field completely unrelated to computer science as someone who wasn't bred from a young age to program. It's definitely hard, and I commend you for putting in the hours and the effort.
As for the product: It's a neat idea. I think it'd be cool if you actually gave people on Facebook and promoters in general a small cut of some sort of revenue. It'd give users two incentives, both monetary and social (being known for discovering great undercover bands). Have users compete to be the best 'agents'.
Don't mind the haters – it's the growing trend 'round here on HN. If you're not a CS guy, you don't deserve much, basically. That's even more so for people working in business. But you've done far more than the people here can claim to have done.
Best of luck!
Edit: What made you settle for that one idea? Was it the only one you had, or did you choose it from a list of others you were entertaining? I imagine working in an industry like Finance you haven't got much time to play around with ideas left-and-right, so there's a bit more calculation in picking an idea to move forward with.
Two jokers drop out of Goldman Sachs after a very short employment stint and hire some kid to build them a Facebook-based link-sharing game that targets emerging artists who have no money on the most garish website I've seen in quite some time and all he gets credited with is Lead Engineer. Not even Mr. Lead Engineer.
If non of the above doesn't embarrass you from turning down below-market deals with non-technical, inexperienced dreamers than nothing will. You need to recognize that your skill set is a finite commodity and the more time you spend on loser projects like these, the less in-demand you become. On the other hand, everyone knows that you'll do almost anything for cheap and you'll end up as the "coder dude" while the co-founders debate the merits of shitty internet-generated logotypes and branding as they plan their trips to SXSW.
tl;dr: Facebook-based link-sharing games are loser projects you need to avoid.
Seems to me like you can win by default for people like me.
Just want to click a website and start playing music that's decent in one click, I can't be stuffed researching or downloading albums. In europe all the sites I liked in the USA have we are coming soon banners, aka massive opportunity to win by default at the moment in terms of traffic (although to be honest I have no idea how you would get me to buy something, guilt me into supporting artists by showing them pictures of their kids maybe).
Minus points:
Keeps playing the same songs, I don't really even notice because I am music retarded, but my gf will kill me if I put your website back up.
Tried to login with facebook to see if that would play me some different ones, says it wants permission to post to my wall. No way in hell am I giving you that.
I find this post strange: there is no demonstrated success aside from having the courage to quit a job to pursue a start-up (which is commendable but very different from achieving success), yet the author appears to be giving advice. This feels like a captain starting a voyage who, a few days after leaving shore, sets himself up as an experienced person. This seems more useful from a historical point of view than from a practical point of view.
Max Levchin compiled a very nice list of pointers here: http://www.quora.com/Max-Levchin/answers ↗
This reminds me of a startup mantra from the 90s: Eat like a fly, poop like an elephant.
So far there is nothing. A website with a music player and a share-on-facebook button. But the blog post sounds like Andy already turned this thing into a billion dollar company and now bows down to the mere mortals to share the wisdom he gathered. On his heroic journy to fame and riches.