I'm building my company (https://weardulo.com/) while working as a web developer full-time. Mornings, evenings and weekends is when I dedicate time to it.
Ask HN: How did you start your business?
101–110 of 145 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm not sure young people can take financial risks, unless they're already rich. It's a lot easier to take a financial risk when you have no dependents and no mortgage. I quit my job to start a business in my late 20s, when I was single and had no kids. I will say that another reply's statement is very true: "If I think back to the person I was in my mid-20s, I would not have had the dedication, confidence, people…
During my 20s, I was in graduate school and I had no money. Now I'm in my 30s making good developer money, and while I have a mortgage I also have enough saved to pay it for a long time. I also have no dependents, which is obviously the big difference maker.
> I also have no dependents, which is obviously the big difference maker.
Yep. Just try to build significant savings with a wife and 3 kids. I'll probably never have more than a couple of months' pay sitting in savings. I realize if I lived alone I could easily live on 1/3 of my current salary. Ah well, life choices and all that...
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea, the margins went from out-of-this-world to terrible as the price of new laptops came down. We used paypal and a few other (way worse) credit card processors. We also accepted checks and money orders by mail. Edit: Another interesting tidbit. We were such a large paypal customer at the time that we were invited into their IPO. Bear Stearns (I think) called us 5 times trying to get us to buy in...but it was right…
It's a real shame tbf, the drop in laptop prices means a lot more stuff is just thrown out and turned to e-waste instead of repaired / refurbished and resold, with fixing electronics having reached such a low point that it's become a somewhat rebellious volunteer job now.
I don't think it's a shame at all, I bought my first laptop in 2004 for iirc 2200 EUR, in my 2nd year of university. (OK, I wanted a nice laptop and not the cheapest piece of junk(.
It served me well for quite a few years, but I wasn't the starving student type, but actually working part-time as a programmer. I also wouldn't say this laptop was essential to finishing my studies, but (computer science) it was very, very handy.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#104I just got started - I started a content website about starting e-commerce businesses https://www.starterstory.com
Right now, it's earning about $1-200 a month. Still have a full-time job.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#105I left my job. Or, more accurately, the startup I was doing contract work for went under, and I decided not to look for another contract afterwards. I worked on a few projects before starting my business, Indie Hackers, which I grew to just under $6k/mo in revenue (in 8 months) before joining Stripe. I've done interviews with close to 300 founders. Recently, I added a sortable, filterable directory that can help answ…
I've seen other attempts to build a community around this demographic before. One I really liked, I even found someone on there and we built a nice project together, though I forget the name. Do you recall what you focused on when you started? What do you think led to your success and traction? I find this stuff fascinating when there seems to be an idea that people want to happen but no has been able to get it right…
I put my whole history up here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/indie-hackers. I've got to run, but hopefully will remember to come back and edit this comment to respond to some of your questions!
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#106I started https://www.browserless.io/ when I found out that there wasn't a good hosted solution for headless-browser work. There's a ton of other higher-level services that do things like screenshots and pdfs, but what if I needed something that those services didn't cover (and had to scale out to 100's of concurrent sessions).
I didn't really set out to do this service, but it came after _not_ finding it anywhere else. I'm about ~4 months in and make $1k/month on it so far, which tells me that others need this service as well. Happy to answer other questions about the business if folks are curious.
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#107I started https://www.browserless.io/ when I found out that there wasn't a good hosted solution for headless-browser work. There's a ton of other higher-level services that do things like screenshots and pdfs, but what if I needed something that those services didn't cover (and had to scale out to 100's of concurrent sessions). I didn't really set out to do this service, but it came after _not_ finding it anywhere el…
What was version 1.0 of the product?
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#108I started working on a prototype smartwatch back in 2008 while I was doing undergrad at UWaterloo. iPhone didn't have a Bluetooth API then so I actually hacked together a small 30 pin dongle with an nrf radio. Quickly moved to Blackberry which had a semi working BT API. I graduated in 2009 and decided to work on it full time. Funding in early days came from oversized novelty cheques from pitch competition wins, some…
I still regret that Pebble went out of business. Any plans to make similar smartwatch again?
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you want those big money enterprise clients, add Maven and Nuget support.
I agree. If this tool does what it says, and supported .Net/Nuget, my company would throw a lot of money at it. More than the $50/month advertised.
+1 for .NET. This'll be a killer thing for us!
Re: Ask HN: How did you start your business?
#110I decided to quit my full-time job in Feb and go 100% start-up.
Two of the largest risks I considered before taking the plunge was career risk, and financial risk.
For financial risk, I’m from Waterloo Canada, which is a relatively low-cost area. I’m doing some part-time contracting to pay off the bills just to break even. I am okay to lose out on the opportunity cost of earning more money at a full-time job. I treat that as an investment in the future cash flows of the company I’m trying to build.
For career risk, I think working on a start-up can actually make you more employable and increases your future earning potential. At a start-up, you work like hell and are constantly learning. If you believe your salary should be an accurate reflection of the market value of your skills, and you work to improve those skills, then your market value should increase accordingly.
Reading Nassim Taleb’s book “Antifragile”, gave me a lot of confidence. One of the central ideas from the book is to put yourself into environments where there is an asymmetrical bias for positive payoffs. I.e. you can’t get randomly unlucky and die from entrepreneurship, but you can get randomly lucky and do very good.
For those of you curious, my company is https://www.hodlbot.io After I realized I was spending too much time rebalancing my portfolio, I made a trading bot.
For the MVP, it uses trade-only API keys to diversify your portfolio into the top 20 cryptos by market cap on Binance. It rebalances monthly.