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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?

#321

Post by usefulcat »

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?

One approach is to find someone (or a few people) who are well connected in the space you're in and offer them a percentage of the sale if you close a deal with a buyer they've introduced you to. AIUI, 5-10% seems fairly typical, at least for a smaller company. Obviously you'd want to have a signed, written agreement in place with any such intermediaries.

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

#322

Post by christophilus »

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…

I'm going to save this so I can just link to it whenever the "but running your own servers is irresponsible!" thing comes up (as it seems to do weekly here on HN).

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

#323

Post by ctomczyk »

zuhayeer wrote: post #110

Invest in SEO early. And I mean invest all the way, including all the different structured metadata into all of your pages to get your website to appear the best on search results [1]. The long tail and residual effects of it get pretty insane. [1] - https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

You may want to try https://www.sitelint.com/ for SEO testing, but not only. We have just launched a platform recently and the main idea behind is that all audits are performed on the client-side, as opposed to crawling. I'm happy to get the feedback and improve anything that can be improved there.

Additionally https://www.sitelint.com/sitelint-vs-lighthouse-comparison/

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

#324

Post by jasfi »

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…

So, don't sell yourself short?

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

#325

Post by adevx »

nickfromseattle wrote: post #263
martin_a wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to it, but I've focussed on WordPress pages in the past. Some things I'd start with: - Minimize images (tinypng/tinyjpg) - Deactivate/Remove what you don't need (Plugins (!!!), RPC, Emojis, stuff like that which is ON by default in WP -> will strip down the code) - Strip down & combine scripts - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics) - Minify scripts and CSS - Use…

These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too. But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking). Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs. For most SaaS, there aren't a few…

This exactly. Focus on value for the person that hits your website and organic search will follow. I've had a slow SPA site for years but the (user generated) content, long on-site time and high rate of return visits all made it one of the top pages in my niche. Not because I was fine tuning image size, speed or meta tags.

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

#326

Post by sanedigital »

marcosdumay wrote: post #285
eej71 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be that guy. Actually it's Always Be Closing. Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s

It's a usual joke, based on the fact that "always be closing" is horrible advice.

It's not. It's a reminder that all of your sales and marketing efforts are wasted if you're not actually pushing towards a sale. Calls to action, follow ups, using funnels—all of these are things that increase an individual's likelihood to close. That's "ABC".

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

#327

Post by sanedigital »

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.

Like another poster said, Hotmail offered free email accounts. Google offered 1GB of storage. Both of those things are "marketing".

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

#328

Post by jes »

exogenousdata wrote: post #303
swalsh wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your product. If you're radio shack, sure, always be closing. If you're selling me an essential component of my business, and I expect to have a long term relationship with you... concentrate on the relationship and trust. I worked for a small startup that won a HUGE contract because the big guy stopped supporting them to their satisfaction. We twisted over backwards to support their needs and they liked t…

Agreed with the sentiment that there are different kinds of clients/opportunities and sales cycles. However the idea specifically in ABC is the 'close'. 'Closing' is the act of securing payment from an entity. I've seen a lot of 'sales guys' who talk about how hard they're selling. But ultimately getting the money into your bank account is the real goal. Everything else is derivative.

Loosely quoting Eli Goldratt, "Until the money is in your bank account and there is no possibility of having to refund it to the customer, you have not made the sale."

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

#329

Post by Two_hands »

fxtentacle wrote: post #197
jitendrac wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never had the "hands off" hosting experience that cloud providers advertise in the first place. Before (with AWS and Heroku) if things went down, I was the person that had to investigate and escalate to the appropriate vendor's support. Now, I'm the person responsible for investigating and fixing things. For many small issues, it's easier to fix them than to get someone at AWS with the necessary clearance on the ph…

Which open source project?

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

#330

Post by ethbr0 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #285
eej71 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be that guy. Actually it's Always Be Closing. Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s

It's a usual joke, based on the fact that "always be closing" is horrible advice.

It's "closing" because, from memory, they're selling junk real estate. In the US, the end of a real estate transaction is called closing, beyond which it's (mostly) irrevocable.

Hence Baldwin is effectively saying "get to the end of the transaction."

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