Abandoning Macintosh for Windows. Released software for Mac in 1989, but sales stayed flat. Finally released for Windows in 1994, and sales took off. Time and money spent on marketing + engineering had a 10x better ROI under Windows. Gave up on Mac in 1999.
Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
371–380 of 492 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#372Marketing. 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…
I'm a solo developer with little marketing knowledge with a few hundred dollars to burn each month, where and how do I spend advertising money?
It strikes me as imprudent to split it between Google, FB, and Twitter ads when I don't know what I'm doing.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#373It 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…
I run a blog that gets about 200k unique users a month. My wife lost her job at the beginning of Covid-19, and I slapped a single ad on my most popular post to supplement our income. I hate ads, but income is income. It’s bringing in over $300 a month. Fast forward to now, my wife has a new job. I still hate ads, but I have become accustomed to that extra $300 each month and have had trouble talking myself into takin…
1: set up a Patreon or Ko-fi with monthly memberships enabled
2: replace the ad with an ad for your thing
You don't even have to offer any perks. In my experience and in those I've heard, most people don't care about "rewards." They come to support. Just make a few tiers since people tend to pledge along them.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#374Earlier 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…
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 ).
This looks excellent! Nice work!
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#375Like other people mentioned, starting to market is the main one, but I think the bigger one was charging more for the product.
I was charging close to nothing for our original product, and I can't tell you how many people would argue with us or try to haggle. As soon as we increased our pricing, we started landing bigger companies who just paid without any question and required little to no support.
The memes are true about this sort of thing.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#376Moved up market and started selling to enterprise. Go where the money is.
I'm in the process of doing this now with my first enterprise meeting coming up this week. Could you share more insight on the shift from D2C to B2B? What challenges did you face while making this transition and how did you combat them?
The hardest thing is product. If you are starting with a product that is focused on non-enterprise users, you aren't going to have product on day one, and often what enterprises need is quite different from what startups or indies or consumers need. So, step one is doing a lot of discovery and talking with the market to figure out what to build.
Beyond that, scaling up a GTM engine (sales, marketing, customer success, etc) is a multi-year effort but it's a bit more formulaic than product, so there are a lot of resources and people out there you can hire to help you with that. Not a strength of mine so I lean on our COO and the rest of the team for that part so I can focus on product.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of O/T but why the free tier for your service? I would think everyone with a legitimate need for an audit trail is a paying customer, in fact would prefer to pay so there is a contract around the audit trail, and “free tier” would just be a drain on your support resources.
We offer a free trial to encourage developers to easily try out and integrate the product. Our free tier can cover low TPS usecases. We offer a free tier because we believe audit logs are too hard to build & consume and would love to see even smaller companies adding audit logs to their products.
I generally agree with the dimmish view of offering free stuff espoused on HN. However one upside is that grunts at largco can tinker on the side without contracts and all that drag. Diehard freeloaders will just keep signing up if you timebox it but it might filter out the casuals.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#378Marketing. 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'?
> 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'?
In gaming industry you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. Anthem, Marvel Avengers, Fallout 76, that game with 2042 at the end, Amiga CD32, Ouya. A lot of games as a service(and for most of them you pay upfront and afterwards). Everything is so much hyped to be the best thing since sliced bread.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s… not a hosting company though?
I’m probably using the term very loosely but PretzelBox can be used to host a website, store and share images and files (like Dropbox or Imgur or wetransfer) and integrates with AWS to give you an entire backend you can extend to run a whole business. In my mind, I feel this could/should qualify as a hosting service
I'm going to amplify what others here have already mentioned.
I read your landing page, I have no clue what it is you're selling or what it costs. I'm busy, you were lucky few minutes of my time, in the few minutes I couldn't figure out why I should give you more time or money.
I would highly suggest you work on the landing page:
* What am I buying?
* What problem are you solving?
* What does it cost?
* How is your solution better than others?
Ah, a .cc domain, they're too underfunded to pay for a .com. I probably shouldn't use them for anything too important.
I do not want to "join your beta list". I want a service, now or never.
"PretzelBox" is my backend? Backend to what? You tell me not to worry about domains, email, storage... Does that mean PB provides those? Are you better than WordPress? Are you better than gsuite?
Then there are some random (and I'm guessing fake (rude, I'm sure, but why should I believe them?)) testimonials.
Then some arbitrary text: "See what people have twisted their PretzelBoxes into" with no links, description, or examples... So I'm assuming PB has been twisted into nothing?
Finally, after much scrolling and bullshit, a list of features. So I get some email, some storage, you say unlimited, but I doubt. Still no pricing info. I get some blogs, "No need to learn WordPress!" but... I have to learn PB? How hard is PB. WordPress at least has a ton of support and resources.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#380It 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…
I opened your site in multiple separate browsers and the starting card arrangement was the same in all of them. Do you start new users off with the same setup of cards to ensure a good playing experience and hook them?