Giovanni Cimmino

Rails, mobile developer and crossfitter.

[Giovanni Cimmino @cimminog]

Elda Olivieri voce di Lara Croft in Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis /Tomb Raider: Catalyst - Firma la petizione! https://t.co/UZ0gE6MJbT via @ChangeItalia

[Barbascura X @BarbascuraX]

Finalmente nella stanza dei bottoni dei POTERY FORTI

[Tsarathustra @tsarnick]

Linus Torvalds says AI will change the world but it is currently 90% marketing and 10% reality, and it will take another 5 years for it to become clear what AI is really useful for

[nixCraft 🐧 @nixcraft]

Winamp source code released
https://t.co/k3rmSK7mM1

[Javi @rameerez]

👍 So I made a Ruby gem that does the status health checks @levelsio talks about on @lexfridman

https://t.co/mND2g9UlEX

Pieter describes how he has health check pages that check the status of his sites with
✅ if the check passed
❌ if the check fails

He hooks this up to UptimeRobot which checks for it and alerts him on Telegram immediately if an ❌ shows up

I was like oh nice cool idea I also wanna have that in my apps

So I made a Ruby gem that does it for me automatically, and for you too:

https://t.co/mND2g9UlEX

[John Rush @johnrush]

I built 30 startups in 20 years.
VC-backed, Bootstrapped, Apps, SaaS, B2B, B2C.

75 mistakes I regret making:

1. Doing consumer apps.
The Failure rate here is 100x of b2b rates, nearly a lottery.

2. Raising VC money.
I felt like Marc Zuckerberg when we raised the first round. All journalists interviewing us. Felt like a dream.
Eventually, most of these startups failed by being funded too early.

3. Hiring too early.
Previously, startups took pride in large teams - a key sign of growth back then.
Founders should do most of the work until PMF.
Employees and contractors won't have enough love and passion for your project.

4. Ignoring SEO.
None of the people in my network did SEO. We all thought it was something for late and we kept postponing it forever.

5. Ignoring content marketing.
Never took blogging seriously. Big mistake.

6. Social Media Marketing.
This is my biggest regret. I started using twitter just a year ago. Got to 20k followers now. What if I started 20 years ago? Could I have 1M followers now? I think so.

7. Skipping idea validation.
I'd always assume for the audience. Anticipate what they need. It almost never turned out to be true.
My best projects were those I thought will fail and failed projects had my highest hopes at the start.

8. Hiring managers.
I haven't yet seen any useful manager in a startup.
They might be useful for corporations, but for startup I should have hired only doers.

9. Chasing Investors.
For every startup I'd spend 40% of my time fundraising.
I'd succeed in most of the cases, but at what cost?
I haven't done a single outreach to investors in 2 years, but I get VCs knocking my doors, because I have good traction and they search for such projects daily.

10. Hiring specialized of developers.
There is nothing less efficient than a team of specialized developers for a startup.
Today I have 1 fullstack dev doing 5x more progress on a project than a team of 12 back then.
Avoid "teams" at all cost.

11. Hiring people I don't wanna hug.
My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. If you don’t wanna hug the person, it means you dislike them on a chemical/animal level.

12. Betting on partners.
I partnered up with large billion dollar corporates many times with different startups.
They promise huge stuff, millions of users, but end up just wasting your time, destroy focus, shift priorities, make you spend zillions on ramping up security and compliance, and eventually bring in no users/money.

13. Shiny objects.
I fell for crypt0 hype. Got super rich, then lost it all.
Years wasted. Almost got depressed by seeing how scammy and greedy humans can be, even my own partners.

14. Holding on a bad project for too long.
I kept believing in projects after years of no traction.
I thought that one day something magic will happen and things will go up. It was just a waste of time.

15. Went to tech conferences.
Totally waste of time.
Most people there are the “good” employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation.

16. Scrum is a Scam.
If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff on their own. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans.

17. Outsourced development & marketing.
The vendors were good, but the outcome was not good.
Startups are so difficult that there is almost no chance someone from outside can do a good job for them.

18. Started with a free tier in b2b.
Free proejcts attracted totally wrong crowd who gave a feedback that was only relevant to please the rest of the "free" crowd. But "paid" users turn out to be very different and have different needs.
Few times I started with no free and had no sales, so later I added free version. But this was a mistake too. If nobody wanna pay for my product, I have to fix the product or find another audience for it.

19. Code from scratch.
My team would spend first 3 months coding basic things like auth, admin panel, cruds and etc.
It was huge waste of time.
The momeny I started using boilerplates, the speed went up 10x.

20. Spent little time with my family & friends.
I worked way too much. Didn't take holidays at all.
It was very destructive for my creativity. Once I started having some off, I became way more creative.
Quality >Quantity.

That's it.
What's your biggest regret as a startup founder?

[Giovanni Cimmino @cimminog]

@fedesimio Kanban view

[Giovanni Cimmino @cimminog]

@t3dotgg Yes, with right click i was trying to remove it

[Giovanni Cimmino @cimminog]

@iammemeloper Dark mode is better

[Giovanni Cimmino @cimminog]

@BarbascuraX @Ryanair_IT Quindi ti fanno pagare un loro disservizio 🤔

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

Quantum Physics!

[Giovanni Cimmino @cimminog]

@rbates RailsCasts is how Rails become successful 👍🏻

[Dr. Mild Yet Still Mysterious @sammy4723]

A reminder:
* COVID is airborne.
* Herd immunity did not happen.
* Omicron was not mild.
* Kids do get sick.
* Transmission does occur in schools.
* Each variant is not milder.
* No wave has been an exit wave.
Minimizers have been wrong about every
single one of those things…🦠

[Giovanni Cimmino @cimminog]

@tdinh_me What's your best product in terms of revenue?

[Giovanni Cimmino @cimminog]

@ShinoKouda Symbols: https://t.co/Cxrdw6Jj5M

[Tony Dinh @tdinh_me]

Expectation: “I can add that feature in 2 hours!”

Reality:
- Build: 3 hours
- Test: 2 hours
- Update docs: 1 hour
- Bug catching & fixing time added to your future self accumulatively: 4 hours

[VV @visualizevalue]

"Truth"

[VV @visualizevalue]

"We suffer more in imagination than reality." – Seneca