Posted by jamierumbelow 4/16/2025
It also aligns with other Y Combinator teachings, such as targeting growing markets.
> Scout was our most-used product. Its users weren’t our target market, but some were. We had vague ambitions to use it as an inbound marketing tool, but we never capitalised on it. This was a missed opportunity.
was applicable in a conservative industry like real estate and government as lots of open-core companies operate on this model (e.g. free open-source software and marked-up hosted solutions).
After identifying a very real, pressing problem, they made a business to solve it. They were then more focused on building that business rather than fixing the actual problem. It seems like the takeaway is: don’t worry too much about the problems where you are, instead move to the US and write software.
> If I were to start a startup again, I’d take more time and be more intentional in talking to potential customers before needing to raise money.
From the outside, this pretty much hit the nail on the head.
It's a feature, not a bug.
Capital after traction
I realize what I'm about to say will get backlash ... but I can't help but think is the time to write this postmortem indicative of how the business was run.
Meaning, who benefits from the output of this postmortem? Seems like mostly strangers (who might not even live in UK).
What other time/effort/resources was spent on things that weren't directly engaging with their customer ... because it seems extremely clear without knowing much about that market that this isn't a technical challenge per se - but a regulatory / social problem and the modest amount of capital they raised won't even scratch the service on solving this problem.
Note: not intending to be negative. It just seems like the elephant in the room is that the team was so ill-prepared and not understanding what actual problem they are solving - that my heart goes out to them.
Seems to be a piece of content marketing intended to help the two founders land a new role in the US so, in that sense, it does seem pretty strategic and well targeted.
Stripe hasn't fully fixed online payments but still made a good business of making things better.
At a high level, SaaS to help people filling out planning permission forms sounds like a viable business. Many thousands of people do this as their full time job, so their employers might be willing to pay £100 per user per month on something that makes them more productive.
I mean, they took on a heck of a problem. At least they tried, but I suspect it was an upward battle from day 0.
It isn't as sexy as doing the next Facebook or disrupting global healthcare but just copying an existing archaic & expensive product and doing it better can yield a great and stable business. There's a plethora of software products (offline & online) which cost way too much and work like crap - all you need to do is do it better for a more reasonable price (where those old companies have a big headcount and lots of mouths to feed producing a hard price floor for them).
100% agree. This looks like another case of nothing more than arrogance - another case of somebody thinking they know it all, can revolutionise an industry, even though their experience within that industry is basically zero. Some of the choices of wording in there, e.g. "potential for venture-backed disruption", say it all.
It's not far from being that typical problem where someone, without domain knowledge, has that common simplistic thought: "why don't they just..." because it's always so obvious from the outside! In this case, why don't they just buy our software? Turns out it wasn't so obvious after all.
It feels like I've seen several stories on HN from people seduced by the idea of being called an entrepreneur. (Or more accurately, wanting to call themselves an entrepreneur.) Sometimes they keep failing, and just try a different industry instead of taking stock and changing their approach to one that starts with some real learning. Their blog posts make it clear that creating a startup is/was their goal. No understanding that to be successful, your business is supposed to be a means to an end, not the end in itself - do enough research first to create a viable solution to an actual problem. Though it seems in venture capital funding, businesses tend to get funding regardless... it's another world.
- Russ Hanneman
The thing that distinguishes a startup from a small business is that the goal is growth - not being "great and stable." That said, I've worked at startups for years and I would not agree that good startups are "ego driven." They may seem that way on the outside if you take LinkedIn posts at face value or only read blog posts by people trying to hack it through publicity. They often have more understanding of the business reality of the markets they're trying to enter (or create) than anyone else, the value they add is by saying "fuck that" to a particular set of assumptions everyone else in the market might live by.
Sometimes that set of assumptions can't be discarded, but if it can and the startup is right, the backers stand to make a fuckton of money all at once.
The successful ones will either have gotten very lucky, or know lots about the market as you say. In fact the first main success hurdle is to understand the market well enough to know it's actually a market, and that it can be monetized.
All that to say, I agree with both you and OP.
Our startup is basically doing this right now. Our thesis is basically if we can make a product marginally better than our massive competitors and be able to peel away just a sliver of their customer base and get rich by virtue of having just 2 people and not 2000.
The business itself it not sexy at all but there are still loads of interesting technical problems to solve from building the app to marketing.
I would say our biggest strength right now is just having me and my co-founder and no other folks to pay. When your burn rate is your monthly digital ocean bill (which runs ~$50), you can burn practically forever.
That's why you either get in via very small business (where the owner is the buyer and user) or guerrilla (like Slack et al).
The software my school uses to communicate with parents is fucking awful. Based on digging around their website & linkedin, I suspect they have a team of offshore developers - which is fine - but my money is that they don't actually have a team, they're paying a company that gives them supposedly-fungible engineer-hours instead of an actual cohesive team that works on the product and is proud of what they've made. They just eat requirements and shit something approximating software.
But what am I going to do? Say I build a competitor, solo, for cheap. (It can be done. The software doesn't do much. The hardest thing would be ensuring the emails actually get delivered.)
Now I get to play salesman. I have to sell it to my school. Now I have to maintain it. Our school isn't rich; a local school paid $130k for an unrelated hardware+software solution, so I'm at most going to get that, and now I'm on call 24/7, now I'm training the teachers & administrators to use it, now I'm fielding support emails, etc., etc.
Fuck it. I'll keep moaning.
Tons of crazy shit in there waiting to be disrupted. The tricky part is to get the right financials to bid on the interesting stuff, a good pathway there is to combine multiple companies together and make a shared bid, reach out to me if you're interested.