Founding is a snowball
blog.bawolf.com70 points by bryantwolf 4 days ago
70 points by bryantwolf 4 days ago
Hey hacker news! I wrote this and I’m glad it connected with folks.
To answer a few of your comments:
Writing is all mine but I had Claude proofread it, in addition to some close friends. Honestly it pointed out some great weaknesses in the original draft.
The art is all nano-banana through a tool called flora ai. I’d love to work with a human illustrator for something like this. I can draw, but I can’t paint and there’s an aesthetic here I think it handles better than I would have.
Man, it’s amazing that I can get something out there that expresses a vision all by myself. If this were a revenue generating project like an actual children’s book or something I’d love to work with someone that could bring it to life a bit more.
The end result is quite stunning. quite beautiful. Thanks for taking the time to create it.
The metaphor is broken. The snowball grows passively over time naturally, but being a founder requires you to actively create value in your startup. Snow doesn't choose to stick to your ball based on PMF, and the entire piece romanticizes grinding without once mentioning customers, revenue, or whether you're solving a real problem people will pay for.
I think it's dangerous sentiment to say if you create a snowball (startup) and just keep pushing it forever it is guaranteed to grow to something large. Some might say "duh, of course", but I still think a lot of people don't understand this.
> The snowball grows passively over time naturally
Only if you push it down the mountain. Then it’s also susceptible to crashing and breaking down.
Normally what you do is you have to push the snowball manually. The bigger it gets, the more people you need to push it in a coordinated manner.
I think it’s excellent metaphor.
Yeah, but its a metaphor of the creation process. It's perhaps a bit on the light side when it comes to obstacles, but it's not a bad metaphor of the business creation journey.
I would perhaps point out this is not a VC business journey, that snowball looks very different.
And sure, the business starts in a easy environment (lots of snow on the ground) but the idea of starting alone resonates.
And it leaves out the sun. That pesky sun which melts the snow causing 9 out of 10 snowballs to melt. The sun, which melts the snow around you even as you struggle to push. Your direction is meaningless if you insist on pushing away from the snow.
A single metaphor cannot describe all aspects of company building.
That being said, this is definitely one that's particularly optimistic, particularly low-ego, centered around a curiosity one has with the world.
That I like quite a bit.
Great story, thanks for sharing. Besides the part where it says "Other people will see its glory and join their smaller snowballs into it.", it sounds a bit like marriage too.
Seems to stretch an one analogy in too many different directions. I guess the point of losing control is the most true.
What parts felt too stretched? Or just as a composition would you have preferred I narrow it down? I thought it was fun that it goes a little overboard. To me it felt like doing so captured just how much these journeys can change over time.
I tried to focus on 3 main bits:
Early exploration, problems between people, and then how much is ultimately in or out of your control
Reminds me of Saras Sarasvathy's 2001 effectuation paper (https://www.jstor.org/stable/259121)
If I were to add, "winter" is the best time to find snow, and there is enough snow for everyone.
In some large western cities, snow has a second meaning.
Taking that meaning and the VC money required for the inflationary marketing, is probably closer to reality.
Seeing a borderline hustle culture article illustrated with AI slop in the style of Bill Watterson, who famously opposed commercial exploitation of his work, is deeply saddening.
Beautiful
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Way too much AI-generated content in this post
I don't think this post reads as AI at all. It has none of the tell-tale signs either (em dashes, common constructions like 'not just ____ but ____, bullet points, headers, etc.)
The images are AI-generated. This makes them automatically bad in some people's view, but I think they're reasonably fitting here. With a little bit of work (e.g. attention to consistency between frames, blending into the site background) they could even be good.
I’d love some thoughts here on the consistency. I thougt I actually did pretty well! But I can see how I might be blind to mind own work here.
What ruined it for you?
The art’s aesthetic, which resembles Calvin and Hobbes, is disrespectful to its creator, Bill Watterson’s.
Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.
You did do pretty well! I don't think the final result was ruined at all. Not many people will notice things like his pants only being brown in the first image, or their eyes only having whites in the third image, or his jacket sometimes having a hood and sometimes not.
Compared to what we see on most blogs, even patio11's, this is capital-A Art.
I actually thought a lot about the eye whites! He didn’t look nervous enough without them
Pangram says fully human written https://www.pangram.com/history/02d6eff5-f782-4978-9e60-bb02...
So the art isn't AI generated either? Idk why people trust these "AI checker" sites when they have been shown time and again to be inaccurate at best, often defamatory at worst.
I too am skeptical we’ll really be able to catch everyone. By making public tools we just create evals to beat the tools etc.
Still, right now I think we can tell, so I focused on making sure they were my words, but I let an llm help edit and I think it honestly made it much more readable