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Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

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Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#171

Post by qeternity »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #155
fxtentacle wrote: post #150

"Commoditize your complement" I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?" But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates th…

How were you able to purchase a hosting company? Is your consulting business that big?

There are thousands upon thousands of hosting companies out there, most of which are barely breaking even, and are sold often for not much money.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#172

Post by fxtentacle »

qeternity wrote: post #171
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How were you able to purchase a hosting company? Is your consulting business that big?

There are thousands upon thousands of hosting companies out there, most of which are barely breaking even, and are sold often for not much money.

This. They were struggling to find enough customers to break even. I had the customers but lacked the hosting knowledge and technology.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#173

Post by fphhotchips »

kortilla wrote: post #49
fphhotchips wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reformed salesperson here, you're 1 for 4, and Trello really should only get half a point because they've given up massive swathes of their addressable market to others (Wrike, Asana, Monday). Word and Excel have the giant Microsoft sales team behind them. One of the largest technical enterprise sales forces in the world. Gmail is similar. Google tried the "we'll build it, and they'll come" approach. It didn't work.…

Gmail was the world leading email provider before any of the google custom domain stuff. You’re confusing google for work or whatever it’s called now with Gmail.

Personally I don't count "giving it away" as the product selling itself. GSuite - Google Docs, GMail for Business, Google Drive, etc. - has had enterprise sales teams for a long time.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#174

Post by OJFord »

themanmaran wrote: post #24

Marketing. The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales. No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/ . In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever wa…

For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#175

Post by folli »

paradite wrote: post #83
k8sToGo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering, how do you sell a company? It's not like there is an eBay or craigslist for companies, right?

Justin Kan (co-founder of Twitch) said he sold his startup on eBay: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200... And there is also https://microacquire.com/

What the hell did I just witness here? An NFT instructional video?

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#176

Post by fxtentacle »

alexellisuk wrote: post #157
fxtentacle wrote: post #150

"Commoditize your complement" I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?" But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates th…

Do you also act as an SRE for those apps hosted on your bespoke hosting platform?

I presume you mean site reliability engineer. Then yes, my clients purchase the whole package. Development, deployment, hosting, production maintenance. So if something goes wrong, really anything, I'm their first point of contact.

Before, we had many situations where they asked me to take a look because something could have been a software issue but then turned out to be an AWS issue instead. That's always nasty if I need to tell my client "sorry you're offline, try calling Amazon". Even if they understand that there's nothing I can do, emotionally they still feel disappointed in me. When I use my own infrastructure, I can avoid these situations because it's in my power to make the necessary hosting repairs, too.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#177

Post by n-e-w »

foreigner wrote: post #134
n-e-w wrote: post #109

Honestly, the two best things you can hire once you have some minimal traction are the best lawyer you can afford and the best accountant / business manager you can afford. The third bit of advice is just something you should tattoo inside your eyelids: cash is king. Now, on with the first two. "Hiring the best you can afford" doesn't mean hiring the best brand (Skadden. PwC etc). Find the person with the best techni…

Any more advice for picking a lawyer to someone who doesn't know anything about law? Also if you're bootstrapped how in the world can you afford them?

Genuinely, ask everyone you know for good recommendations. Even if they give you their uncle’s best friend in Cincinatti who does public defender work, that guy might know the woman who is the best litigator in the US who has a speciality in what you need. And then if she’s too expensive or won’t help you direct, she will happily refer you to someone who does.

And that kind of hustle is a prerequisite to solid business success anyway. So, get after it!

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#178

Post by winrid »

jcims wrote: post #154
winrid wrote: post #95

Add enterprise-y features without alienating small/middle market customers, and then charging out the ass for it. People are very happy with it, too, as long as we provide good support.

I work for an enterprise-y and this is good advice. Feature-wise a decent audit log and single sign-on are table stakes. If you don't have those we keep looking, but those shouldn't impact your SME customer focus at all and are things that can be upcharged for (particularly the latter). Core value features available via API is also super important because we absolutely aren't going to be logging into your UI. Again s…

What questions do you ask around the audit log?

We audit a lot of things but it'd be a good idea to improve that if we can.

Thanks enterprise-y person. :)

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#179

Post by kim0 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #150

"Commoditize your complement" I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?" But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates th…

Cool idea! I'm a pro SRE guy, with 20+ years of experience and working with US top500 companies. If anyone wants to partner up and replicate this, let me know! You can also reach me on matrix: @kim0:halogen.city

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#180

Post by paradite »

folli wrote: post #175
paradite wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Justin Kan (co-founder of Twitch) said he sold his startup on eBay: https://opensea.io/assets/0x495f947276749ce646f68ac8c2484200... And there is also https://microacquire.com/

What the hell did I just witness here? An NFT instructional video?

I am also a bit shocked to see the first Google search result for "Twitch Justin ebay sell" was this link to opensea. Looks like they did good SEO.

Also there was a lot of promotion on Twitter: https://twitter.com/justinkan/status/1396904507871793154

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