Or limit the number of beta users there can be.

Or work some freelance jobs for a few months and save up the cash and during that time pitch to investors. As you progressively have more cash you can hire an engineer to part-time hack on cool demos or to give you the opportunity to increase the number of beta users.

We decided to build an MVP based on our best estimates and test the market that way. The goal was to launch something in 6 months and test if the demand was there; and if it wasn’t, we’d only wasted 6 months. We chose to optimize for getting to market quickly rather than worrying about how much it would cost.

Contrast it to what the Lean Startup principles say:

The Lean Startup methodology has as a premise that every startup is a grand experiment that attempts to answer a question. The question is not "Can this product be built?" Instead, the questions are "Should this product be built?" and "Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?"

So instead of doing what a lean startup would do, they did the opposite. Let's see what they could have done instead...

"How many customers will actually use it?"

- Lean startup: create a signup page with a mock up or landing page and a few buttons that work and every potential behind a "coming soon" screen - Their approach: actually build the whole product and then launch it and see who's interested

"What is it all going to cost?" - Lean startup: As little as possible to discover the insights we need to iterate and evolve the product - Their approach: well we already paid the salary for our engineers and we've given them six months, so what's half the salary+benefits of X number of engineers?

"What should we charge for it? Is it going to cover the infrastructure costs?" - Lean startup: experiment on costing and pricing as you go along - Their approach: give away the product for a 30-day trial at a high cost to ourselves! Unbelievably expensive customer acquisition costs.

Reference: http://theleanstartup.com/principles

And now I guess I've truly learned why product managers exist. Someone let this crazy experiment run for six months. You're saying in six months you couldn't spend one month finding the simplest/cheapest ways to test these various hypothesis?

$100k customer acquisition spend is insane.

The whole post is just a lesson in contradicting what an MVP minimal viable product is.

Even when we were building v1, the team knew it wasn’t the ideal architecture. Before v1 even launched, there were plenty of conversations in our Slack about whether we should port Octopus to Linux and run it on Kubernetes, or see if we could run it on Windows within Kubernetes or use Nomad by Hashicorp?

Lol, engineers always want something fun to work on and sometimes it turns out to be a great idea. But they porting software for an MVP? Why not evolve the new product so that it generates more revenue or reduce the costs in some other way instead of talking about porting and rewriting?

If you're at an established company that has money to burn, go ahead, read the whole blog series. If you're trying to create a new startup, whether it's a product or service, avoid this article or read it as a warning. When you've spent as much as a decent engineer costs in one month...something's gone off the rails.

>The best way to learn is to do your own experiments. Once understood, that understanding lasts a lifetime. Facts can change, but the governing rules, if deciphered, won’t.

I recommend to all software developers that they join the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery). This gives you access to computer science papers which are the foundations and the governing rules. There's also access to Safari Learning which gives you access to the latest books and video courses:

https://www.acm.org/membership/membership-benefits

It costs a few hundred bucks a year and I've learned more in reading random CS papers and having access to great books and video courses than paying for many courses.

Slowly changing. The US companies are going to pick up all the talent here.

This is true and more true if you're freelancing for US dollars. That sweet sweet conversion rate from USD to CAD works very well. But again this is why Europe is a better choice, Euros to USD or Euros to CAD whenever you want to travel is also a nice conversion rate.

Salary ranges are still the same since a decade ago even though cost of living has gone up.

My first job as a full-time dev was $65k rent was $1500 or thereabouts, I'm sure there are first-time devs making $65k now. Even though rent is now $2000 at least for the same place I was living at.

After tax income is $49,190 (https://simpletax.ca/calculator) and rent went from $18,000 to $24,000. As a percentage of after-tax income that's going from 36.6% to 48.8%. The rent would have made me poorer if I hadn't changed jobs!

What's wrong with writing "initializers" which are serializers/deserializers? If you're looking for automatic file format to C++ class object, why settle for JSON (whether it's this library or JSONCpp) why not use Thrift or Protocol Buffers?

- Thrift: https://thrift.apache.org/ - Protocol Buffers: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

Since JSON only has basic data types, it's easy to just parse and retrieve objects, similar to using XML tree parsing libraries back in the day.

Hey now, stop with the name-calling :P I work on and use proprietary end to end solutions for ecommerce (but not Shopify).

Woocommerce wins for me because it lowers development costs and costs are lower overall. My perspective is definitely someone who has developed ecommerce sites, not solely as a non-technical user, and for me it's very advantageous to lower costs by using and modifying GPL'd plugins and themes.

I guess Shopify has 4000 employees and enough cash and enough direction to come out of box with a good UX and good defaults and that's good enough for nontechnical users.

* Until then, Shopify earns their keep (and margin)*

That's fair. For business stuff I've swiped the credit card and paid for support as well. If the Shopify experience is easier than WooCommerce, etc. then I get it.

I guess I wasn't clear enough in making my point: Wordpress + Woocommerce can be setup very quickly and with minimal fuss and they can be as heavily customized as you want and rival whatever plugin-heavy Shopify sites are out there.

They're also growing and hiring more which always looks good in the books.

Unfortunately, while their revenue is growing their earnings are in the negatives: 1B revenue in 2018 up from 673M in 2017, however they're -64M in earnings and -40M in earnings previous to that.

Not to mention the hype stories like this: "Shopify's market share could triple within five years rivaling Amazon", https://finance.yahoo.com/news/shopify-apos-market-share-cou...

Number of plugins isn't the greatest metric but it's a good leading indicator. It's kinda hard to estimate how many merchants and customers and volume of transactions have been processed when they aren't being tracked by a central entity ;)

Why not YC North Korea then?

I cannot believe in 2019, with the mass surveillance systems being built, you cannot see that there is are ethical questions to be asked.