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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?

#181

Post by flurly »

I used to immediately launch on Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. the moment I finished my side projects. The problem I found with this approach is

1. Often times the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero.

2. These platforms often times also are filled with people waiting to abuse your platform. For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch.

Thus for GraphJSON, I went with a different approach. I shared my progress on my twitter account and mostly had my builder friends use the product. Over the past 6 months, the product has continually improved due to the constant feedback of this community. Word naturally spreads and so does the growth.

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

#182

Post by jitendrac »

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…

Great. If you don't mind, can you share your trade-offs and pain-points of managing own hosting? and How do you manage to get your service/apis compatible with forever(kinda) changing AWS/Heroku apis.

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

#183

Post by leathersoft »

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…

Damn, it’s the first time I bump into this article. Thanks for the share!

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

#184

Post by axiosgunnar »

urthor wrote: post #60
throwaway1777 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First one doesn’t work anymore with remote being so common they demand the same wages as everywhere else.

It works. These days the secret is you have to hire the good South Americans. Exploit the fact corporate America hasn't caught on to routing contracts through Upwork et al. Then don't get greedy, keep the TCE delta below 20%, so they stay more than 9 months. You can take your pick of the finest FOSS contributors Guinea and Paraguay have to offer. -------------------------------------------------------- Startup engine…

> Ukraine

Warning, they might need increased PTOs starting tomorrow.

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

#185

Post by can16358p »

Zealotux wrote: post #160
can16358p wrote: post #121

Not exactly "business" from a company perspective, but: Learning Solidity. I've been in crypto space for a long time, always wanted to learn Solidity to write contracts, but always postponed. Played with some toy code in the past years and that was it. Recently got back in the scene and saw how many new business opportunities it opens and how financially feasible they are now I hate myself for not going more serious…

How do you get opportunities in that scene? Do you get paid in cash or cryptocurrencies? Aren't you afraid of an eventual impending crash of the markets? I also thought of learning about so-called smart-contracts but I'm skeptical of investing time in something that looks like it could crash any day, or maybe I'm just missing a big opportunity.

Being active in communities/Discord, some networking.

It can of course crash, but take it as an opportunity to learn things and build up relationships in bear market, and when things go green again you'll have it pay.

About the payments, it's usually in the form of crypto (or getting some tokens from the project).

It did crash and I've lost a lot in the past, but I've always cashed out MUCH more than I've lost so it's a win if you get timings right.

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

#186

Post by jcims »

winrid wrote: post #178
jcims wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Basically? who, what, when, were, why and how.

AWS CloudTrail is far from perfect but it has been battle tested as much as any SaaS audit log out there.

Who: userIdentity.arn

What: requestParameters.*, responseElements.*

When: eventTime

Where: sourceIPAddress, sourceVpce, userAgent

Why: userIdentity.issuer/rolesession

How: eventName, eventSource

Baller move is to include internal ops actions in your log.

Main thing is to think of it as a product rather than an a feature. People don't want 10 different audit logs...everything should flow through it. With CloudTrail this extensibility comes through the requestParameters/responseElements sections. Most of the schema is fixed but in these sections its service-specific.

In terms of integration, push audit via webhook or various cloud event/message brokers is ideal, but at bare minimum the customer needs to be able to ingest that data wholesale to integrate with their security stack.

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

#187

Post by smus »

urthor wrote: post #127
laurent92 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the code of the app is made by remote people in remote countries, how do you sell software to the US government? What do you answer to “What is the nationality of your developers?”?

I imagine the answer to that is, I've simply never heard of the US government buying from a software vendor with less than 500 employees. Surely it never happens?

You aren't looking too hard then, 2/3 start ups I worked for less than 50 ppl sell to the gov

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

#188

Post by wizwit999 »

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…

Yeah, I've seen this approach work a lot. I've found https://www.enterpriseready.io is a good resource to learn more about the features that enterprises care about.

I'm also working on a solution to make part of this easier, specifically audit logs (https://apptrail.com).

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

#189

Post by hvidgaard »

berkes wrote: post #148
hvidgaard wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until your startup is a full on company with multiple hires, consultancy work is revenue and can be a source of other business ideas that you might hire people for and make into another reliable revenue stream. I know a handful of people who started with creating websites, then took some consultancy work and now have an entire different software company. They used those two things as a bootstrap to get going with opp…

We've recently come across this conundrum too. But we chose to forego the "consultancy" jobs. Reason is that we optimize for learning (we're at that stage). And while consultancy may look like a good opportunity for learning, that it allows you to get paid for investigating the real problem domain of your customers it is not optimised for that. Far from it. My decades of consultancy and freelancing experience has tol…

The main driver of consultancy is revenue. If you can survive without that, don't do it if it isn't core to your business, just like you wouldn't do in an established company anyway.

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

#190

Post by sideproject »

k8sToGo wrote: post #76
awb wrote: post #25

Ran a web agency from ‘08-‘13, grew it to 20 FTEs fully remote then sold it. A few accelerants: 1) Hired talented engineers in low cost of living areas in the US. 2) Started replacing myself by hiring multiple managers, which helped when I sold the business as it was no longer just about me. 3) Converted long-term clients to pre-paid retainer billing with helped create predictable workloads and revenue streams.

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

Another one - https://www.sideprojectors.com
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