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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?

#341

Post by vyper91 »

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…

Damn, that's an excellent earner! Well done lol. I've never played Solitaire to completion and I just checked it out and spent 8 minutes of my life playing Solitaire and completing for the first time, lol. Really smooth experience :)

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

#342

Post by willhinsa »

jes wrote: post #328
exogenousdata wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

That's literally a plot point in Glengarry Glen Ross. Al Pacino made a sale the night before, but the buyer gets cold feet and wants to back out!

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

#343

Post by ctomczyk »

martin_a wrote: post #220
qwerty456127 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, make sure that your page loads fast To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?

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…

> - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics)

I'd add that third-party dependencies are sometimes useful. Especially when they aren't served from the same location which gives and opportunities for the browser to open more HTTP connections: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-does-your-browser-limit-n...

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

#344

Post by taffronaut »

I took a couple of sales training courses. One was an intro course for non-sales staff, and the other was for B2B selling with a longer sales cycle. Both very much helped with the social interaction side of selling, and the second one was very useful for structuring marketing approach and material.

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

#345

Post by TimLeland »

TimLeland wrote: post #340
atentaten wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many monthly visitors do you have?

SimilarWeb says 342K monthly visitors. Always curious how accurate these tools are.

The competitor solitaired.com is doing over 6 millions views a month and has similar ads. My guess is they could be making over 150,000 a month from ads.

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

#346

Post by xtracto »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #204
throw8932894 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though. Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something…

Gmail had plenty of marketing when it started: Both the '1 GB account' and the "Search don't Sort" snippet where heavily pushed through several marketing channels at the time (paid articles, Google search homepage, among others). Not all marketing is "ad banners". For example, all those Businesswire articles are pure marketing and advertising.

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

#347

Post by athenot »

mrborgen wrote: post #226

Charge for our product. I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while. Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have g…

On a side-note, thank you very much for creating and releasing Imba! It's a joy to write apps with it and I can put things out so much faster.

https://imba.io

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

#348

Post by themanmaran »

Softcadbury wrote: post #161
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…

Guys, you learned nothing ! You are the top comment on HN, you should share the link to your project :)

Noo! And it's too late to edit the comment.

https://rysolv.com/

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

#349

Post by eezing »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #204
throw8932894 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though. Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something…

The killer feature was archive.

Growth was viral. Only cool people had Gmail.

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

#350

Post by smilebot »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #208
pawelwentpawel wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second that. SEO is a slow growing channel and it takes some time to get effects. Starting earlier can help out. Also, make sure that your page loads fast - especially the content that you are trying to index. Low hanging fruit like optimising image size or cleaning up your imports can have a big effect. When just starting out with little backlinks, good page speed loads can be the differentiator that will put you…

> Also, make sure that your page loads fast To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?

That’s a bit too extreme since you still probably want all the UI libraries readily available to make your life easy. You could use server side rendering instead. And as others have said, package “marketing” landing pages without any heavy plugins/modules. Look into chunking, lazy loading etc.
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