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

381–390 of 492 posts

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

#381

Post by pavlov »

saimiam wrote: post #363
pavlov wrote: post #260

Earlier 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

Usually this would be called a PaaS (Platform as a Service). It's another layer on top of a public cloud, AWS in this case.

Someone looking to save money on server costs by using a hosting company would effectively be going the other way in the stack: taking the cloud out of the equation and operating servers directly. The original poster in this thread acquired a hosting company to be able to provide this kind of service in their vertical.

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

#382

Post by mrborgen »

athenot wrote: post #347
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

Awesome to hear that you're using Imba! It's my co-founder Sindre who has created it, not me. But please share whatever you're building with us (e.g. via Twitter or Discord), as we love seeing people use it to build stuff :)

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

#383

Post by saimiam »

mmh0000 wrote: post #379
saimiam wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Very invaluable feedback. I’ll find a way to make the landing page better. Thank you.

Edit: s/valuable/invaluable!

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

#384

Post by peytoncasper »

shoto_io wrote: post #130
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…

I agree 100%. I think from an investment perspective putting most of your time into marketing yields the highest return. My biggest struggle so far is: How do I find those people to "sit and talk" to? Any advice on that?

I'll be honest, I don't have a ton of experience when it comes to finding investors, and other early stage enablers. However, when it comes to your market, I think the question is better asked, who is your audience?

Who do you expect to use this product day in and day out? And then make it even smaller and go look for those people on LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, etc.

Then just hit them up. You don't have to be selling necessarily, you can simply be asking about the problems they might have or looking for feedback on something.

Obviously this depends a lot on B2C or B2B, but there exists a community of people somewhere with the problem you're trying to solve or a company which is kind of a community :D.

If you can't find an audience, then I think that also answers your question.

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

#385

Post by saimiam »

pavlov wrote: post #381
saimiam wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Usually this would be called a PaaS (Platform as a Service). It's another layer on top of a public cloud, AWS in this case. Someone looking to save money on server costs by using a hosting company would effectively be going the other way in the stack: taking the cloud out of the equation and operating servers directly. The original poster in this thread acquired a hosting company to be able to provide this kind of se…

PaaS is probably the right term and you’re right that the original comment was about buying bare metal servers to offer value added services.

When I made my comment, it was half in jest so I didn’t think through every word choice of mine.

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

#386

Post by rsync »

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…

Who are you ?

How can we work with you ?

Do we already work with you ?

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

#387

Post by mittermayr »

dinkleberg wrote: post #265
mittermayr wrote: post #239

I added a simple self-made affiliate system. It had two implementations. One allowed to purchase 10 or 20 "accounts" in bulk, resell for any price you want. And the other one meant that if two other people signed up for a free account, your account was moved up to the second level (basic, premium, pro). Once one of your referred accounts upgraded, then your account was moved up to the highest tier. I implemented that…

That’s interesting. Did you find both implementations were effective or was one more useful than the other?

Depends a bit on the clientele you're serving I guess. At first, the referral part (encourage others to upgrade your account) worked very well, I saw people either onboarding their other accounts, friends' accounts, or just heading straight to Twitter to let everyone know they're recommending the service (so their account would upgrade for free). So that brought users.

The "buy in bulk" was silent for a while, until a few freelance social-media managers discovered that they could buy account slots for their clients in bulk here, and then charge their clients for that plus a fee on top (which I didn't regulate). So that surely brought the biggest chunks of purchases albeit irregularly so.

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

#388

Post by jokethrowaway »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #80
urthor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you need more than two engineers + 2 assistants, you should have hired smarter engineers. Oh, I half thought you were serious until this point. I still don't get the joke though.

There is no joke, that's correct.

You won't need more than 2 engineers at the beginning for 99% of the startups. Almost nobody is making anything technologically significant - and if they do they raise millions and act like a disorganised mid company.

In order to do your typical backend + frontend work you won't need much more, unless your developers can't code.

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

#389

Post by donatj »

revicon wrote: post #358
donatj wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Which ad network/provider did you use for your ad? Did you shop around for the best paying one?

I just use adsense. Haven't shopped around at all. If you have recommendations I'm all ears.

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

#390

Post by jedberg »

tech-historian wrote: post #380
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…

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?

On the bottom in the "New Game" menu is has "Random Shuffle" and "Daily Challenge (current)", so I assume it defaults to the daily challenge, which I assume is the same for everyone.
Post reply on HN