Wow... Just... Wow...
Dudes, really. Save your money for ramen noodles and start hanging out at other Hacker News meetups[1].
Or, better yet, move to Silicon Valley, start attending meetups[2] and startup events[3]. Make a point of handing out business cards and asking people out for coffee. I can guarantee that within a year you'll become friends with any number of entrepreneurs who will give you similar or better advice for the price of a beer.
Hell, if you move out here, come to a Hackers and Founders event, I'll buy you a beer.
By the way, we're probably going to be turning Hackers and Founders into a non profit, because I feel like it's wrong to try make a quick buck off of hackers who are eating ramen noodles and trying to get a startup off the ground. YMMV
</rant>
ref:
[1] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmQExXr67OcTdDBZZl9...
I'm speaking from my personal of running Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley. We have 2000 members, and we get together for beer/networking every 2 weeks. It started with me and a few other hackers getting together in a bar every couple of weeks to talk about startups and give each other advice.
The startup culture and community that I'm around is that of freely sharing business knowledge and helping each other succeed. That's what I'm referring to.
I have made a conscious choice to network, be helpful and ask for advice when it's available an appropriate. Because of that, I've gotten advice over coffe/beer from Joel Spolsky, pg, any number of YC founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, Ben Horowitz, the former CEO of Alta Vista, etc...
Business knowledge, connections and advice _are_ cheap if you put in the time and make the effort. Paying $1000 for 8 hours of business advice seem like a poor business decision to me.
But, then I have a profoundly different belief about how startups can, do and should help each other out.
More info: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/466-sketching-with-a-sharpie
I literally knew almost, if not every item on the list from reading their books/blogs. I'm sure the experience was more beneficial then just reading the books, but was it worth $1000?
I'm generally a very big fan of the 37signals gang and their products and philosophy, but lately it really seems more and more that they are getting a bit greedy. Starting from publishing blog content as books to the $10 paint app, it's uncomfortably reminiscent of the tony robbins shtik.
For example, how are these wrong or irritating?
"Ask a person to draw the screen from memory and only the most important things will be remembered"
"Users always come with feedback in the form of solutions, not problems. Try to understand root issues."
"Try it and look at the data for decisions. Don't be attached to your decision"
Is it irritating because you find these obvious? I could see that. But the same way I know I should exercise more, eat better and sleep more, while still not doing it, it's always good to hear/read good advice again and again.
What we remember is different to what we want if we need it. "important" isn't specific enough. Who is it important to? In what context?
Should we also ask a hacker to write down the keyboard short cuts from emacs they remember and get rid of the rest of them?
I'm not going to get into an argument, but hopefully you can see why I made the comment.
Either you love 'nuggets' of "wisdom" like this, or you hate them.
It might have also been the [tweet] spam buttons that got on my nerves (Makes you tweet out the 'nugget' with a bitly link back to the page).
"Never go with your first instincts."
Google "Always go with your first instincts" = About 50,800 results.
Google "Never go with your first instincts" = About 7 results.
It's just 37signals being contrarian, pretty much their MO.
For me the most valuable thing was really writing out the story of the site & simple mocks before you start building.
Trying to do more of that now.
It's a bunch of platitudes. Nothing straightforwardly false, but in such high doses? Smug and vacuous.
The one-liners are useless. The experience that led to them (which was, no doubt, shared at the "masterclass") is priceless.