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Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#141

Post by Lordarminius »

ikeboy wrote: post #126
pryelluw wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should blog about this.

I agree, but see #4 A lot of the people I follow in the industry have blogs and alternate income streams outside Amazon/eBay. (Paid lists, software, coaching, paid groups, etc.) Definitely something I want to do but I need to get my business onto maintenance mode first and definitely not happening anytime soon. My short term goal is consistently 100k/sales a month, and my long term (6-12 months) goal is 250-500k/mont…

what product(s) do you sell online? what e-commerce store do you use?

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#142

Post by wonderwonder »

mcjiggerlog wrote: post #118

I built my first major side project / application - https://www.artpip.com/ . It's a free app for setting fine art as your desktop background. It was a real culmination of what I've leart over the last few years and it was satisfying to actually produce and ship a finished product. I also leart A LOT about the world of art during the process which has been amazing. The feedback I've had from users has made it all wor…

Really nice concept

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#143

Post by ikeboy »

Lordarminius wrote: post #141
ikeboy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but see #4 A lot of the people I follow in the industry have blogs and alternate income streams outside Amazon/eBay. (Paid lists, software, coaching, paid groups, etc.) Definitely something I want to do but I need to get my business onto maintenance mode first and definitely not happening anytime soon. My short term goal is consistently 100k/sales a month, and my long term (6-12 months) goal is 250-500k/mont…

what product(s) do you sell online? what e-commerce store do you use?

Vast majority Amazon, some on ebay but it's much harder to handle and sales are lower anyway so haven't been devoting a lot of time to it.

Many different products, really whatever sells fast enough with a large enough margin. I've sold things for less than $5 and things for over $1000: generally the cheaper the more it sells.

What margin I want depends on how fast it sells, competition, and some other things, don't have hard and fast rules as of now.

Many categories, from toys to electronics to tools to grocery to beauty. Amazon requires approval for grocery, health, and beauty, so there's typically less competition.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#144

Post by fierycatnet »

LaSombra wrote: post #30

I landed my dream job 20 years after I decided what and where I wanted. It took me a lot of time. Battling low self-esteem, giving it up for a while, following the wrong path, surviving after being fired for the first and only time. I learned perseverance. Once I set my mind on it and worked around distractions, people and my own mind, I got what I truly wanted and I'm loving and learning every single day.

That would be interesting to read about this journey. I am pretty much starting my first steps in the same direction, don't know where I'll be but I don't have any other plans or choice.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#145

Post by jensvdh »

jboggan wrote: post #107

Started my "dream job" at Google in January and fought through a very steep learning curve towards being a fullstack engineer there. I learned our team's frontend in AngularJS (despite no frontend experience nor any idea how different JS is written inside of Google), webserver in Java, backend in C++ and data pipeline in Go (with tangential previous experience in JS & Java and none in the other two). Add on that the…

As someone applying for a front-end position and made it all the way to the on-site, doing the on-site interview soon. Can you explain to me what you mean with js being "so different" inside of Google?

Also that sounds like you learned A LOT. How does that affect your work/life balance?

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#146

Post by ndesaulniers »

ciscoriordan wrote: post #67

I accepted a job at Rothenberg Ventures in 2016. After discovering numerous breaches of fiduciary duties and wire fraud, I blew the whistle to the SEC. Lesson learned: Even engineers have to face ethical dilemmas.

That's real courage. Thanks for standing up for what is right and showing that engineers are honor bound to follow ethics.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#147

Post by LouisSayers »

rwieruch wrote: post #33
LouisSayers wrote: post #17

I created a Neo4j (Graph Database) course on Udemy - https://www.udemy.com/neo4j-foundations/?couponCode=HACKERNE... (Please enjoy the hackernews discount!) The course has an average rating of 4.62 and over 200 students. To date (since end of June), it has made $1182 for me. This was quite a learning experience - aside from putting the course content together, I found out a lot about recording audio. I tried doing th…

Thanks for sharing your story! Maybe you can give some more insights. What would you say is the ratio on "How much Udemy helps to promote your content" and "How do you have to do yourself to promote the content"? Did or Do (maybe they came up in the same time as your course) you have competitors in that topic?

No worries :)

There are courses on the same topic for sure. What I did was I took all the courses out there on Neo4j myself, learnt from all of them, and then created my course based on everything I learnt, and the pitfalls that I personally had come across that weren't detailed in other courses.

With Udemy your revenue breaks down as follows: * Your promotions * Udemy organic * Ad program * Affiliate program * Corporate subscriptions (if your course makes it into this bucket)

90% of my sales so far have come from Udemy's marketing - I have put very little effort into doing promotion myself. With some affiliates (ones Udemy has set up), I get as little as 25% of the revenue generated - and they'll be at heavily discounted amounts anyway - so maybe $2.50 on a $10 sale, others I might get up to 50% of the sale.

So basically, with me doing next to nothing (apart from the odd question - which I get hardly any of), I'm getting about $200 a month on average.

This might seem pretty good, but keep in mind this course took me a seriously long time to build out (like 6 months, with prob half of that working full-time on it), and I can get the equivalent of about $400+ per day contracting.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#149

Post by Donmario »

A big one for me was to finally put a product out that I've created http://www.curie.me/.

I never was able to finish anything. With Curie it's also an important one for me, and probably because of that I was so determinated do finish it. One of the biggest reasons was that I knew that the product could help other prevent having the same back problems as I had.

I worked on Curie with 3 other co-founders for nearly 1,5 years now after hours, but we never had the energy or time to get it done. Because I was feeling that my teammates didn't put so much effort in it I finally decided after a couple of month trying to motivate them to let them go. As you can imagine it was really hard to do that, and I felt in a kind of depression about that I knew I needed to be make Curie happen.

Now it's in open beta and soon we'll be launching a chrome extension.

Re: Ask HN: What was your greatest accomplishment in 2016?

#150

Post by nickthemagicman »

Finally followed my dreams of leaving my home state. So I quit my corporate job that I hated, left Louisiana and moved to California taking a epic road trip across country in the process, then arrived and got more or less the job of my dreams a couple months later. Been a pretty interesting ride so far out here.
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