Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 492 posts

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

#271

Post by fsloth »

urthor wrote: post #106
fsloth wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the product what you actually need, but I've personally watched more than one successfull software product launched with a more or less this resourcing. Not exactly this recipe but very much in the ballpark. The assistants aren't assistants - you hire them with minimum pressure, but try still to find the most talented junior you can find.

I'm sure you can be elastic with the mids depending on how much AWS there is to configure or some-such. 2 juniors in a startup is a bit, probably not the right thing. You'll run out of junior work surely? The "two good ones plus exactly one junior to make them feel important, and to keep the show on the road for 2 weeks in case they both quit simultaneously" formula is pretty solid.

To be specific, my experience was from non-web software.

I would consider "junior" here not as a person in non-critical role who cannot function as an individual contributor, but as a solid candidate that lacks industry experience but can be at the moment hiring be expected to quite fast grow into the role of a solid IC. I.e to use a bit too stereotypical characterization - not a "stablehand" but a "journeyman apprentice".

At the moment of hiring you don't count on it that they can deliver (but guess and hope), whereas the seniors will have shipped products under their belt.

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

#273

Post by oops »

holgersindbaek wrote: post #269

It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spen…

Really nice execution! How is it monetized though? I don't see any ads, only an "upsell" to a native app but it also appears to be free?

Edit: I see the ad sidebar now. FYI on my first visit I played for several minutes and this never opened

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

#274

Post by fxtentacle »

saimiam wrote: post #210
fxtentacle wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Buy my startup @ https://PretzelBox.cc . Jokes aside, PretzelBox is a hosting company aka backend in a box and your comments are giving me a ton of hope.

My first reaction was: "No idea what they do"

Then I read the "Host your blog right here on PretzelBox." and clicked the Blog link on top. "https://pretzelbox.notion.site/8d8ba84f16ea456984020cc15efad..."

And I thought to myself "So it's a well-marketed notion whitelabel reseller." You're probably good at marketing, but I'm not sure what Cloud back-end infrastructure IP you would have for sale...

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

#275

Post by sbarre »

mrfusion wrote: post #266
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…

Neat! Why buy a hosting company vs setting up some servers?

Not OP, but better margins I assume, for roughly the same work/responsibility?

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

#276

Post by altdataseller »

throw8932894 wrote: post #200
endymi0n wrote: post #137

To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner: "The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people…

"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.

Hotmail did a fair amount of commercials https://youtu.be/IQRZcfAwn0g

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

#277

Post by fxtentacle »

mrfusion wrote: post #266
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…

Neat! Why buy a hosting company vs setting up some servers?

For their software management stack.

My customers want API compatibility with AWS and convenient deployments like on Heroku. So I needed a software layer to convert bare metal boxes into Cloud VMs and to imitate necessary APIs. And of course base images, buildpacks, etc. to convert a git link into a runnable docker image, like what Heroku does.

So basically I purchased them for all the scripts, tools, and stuff that happens between "Customer does a git push" and "Docker images are running on the correct bare-metal servers with the correct configuration"

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

#278

Post by mbesto »

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?

Also sold a business of similar size to the parent. Basically if you're sub $1M revenue and not growing massively, then the broker websites are good solutions. Anything else, most businesses will be sold via investment bankers, an acquirer will come out an seek you, or you reach directly out to a potential acquirer.

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

#279

Post by raesene9 »

keewee7 wrote: post #224
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…

How do you do marketing when the target demographic uses adblocking?

Marketing is way more than advertising. It can be blogs (technical or general), SEO (getting your content to the top of relevant search pages), conference attendance, social media work (e.g. posting here :P ), running webinars and more...

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

#280

Post by fxtentacle »

sbarre wrote: post #275
mrfusion wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat! Why buy a hosting company vs setting up some servers?

Not OP, but better margins I assume, for roughly the same work/responsibility?

Yes and no. Quite a lot of my customers have designed their systems around separation of concerns, so they need 100 small services running. By having my own layer in the middle, I can group those 100 service VMs onto 10 beefy physical servers, as opposed to actually needing 100 bare-metal servers to run their 100 services. But in the end, yes, I have roughly the same responsibility and much better margins.
Post reply on HN