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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?

#401

Post by ironmagma »

giorgioz wrote: post #232
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter, race still seems to be a criteria in their hiring process and that's.. racist.

It was good you asked. It was threatning you immediately added the legal punishments. YES if (s)he was discrimating against minorities it would have been indeed racism or some other form of xenophobia. The point is: 1) YOU DON'T KNOW THAT YET (s)he was discriminating minorities. And given you already made a sentence the person it's likely to not tell you now. For example at my current company we almost hire exclusive…

Hacker News rules:

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

#403

Post by sanedigital »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #317
aaronsimpson wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Life in general is sales. Job interview? Sales. First date? Sales. Sales is more than "Here's my product/service. Give me money". It's the art of getting someone to do what you want. I can only speak to American culture, but I feel like most people feel icky about that because the first thought that comes to their mind is the car dealership guy that's trying to sell you garbage like gap insurance that you don…

I agree with everything except the 'first date'. I'm trying to find a person I'm compatible with, and who I can trust completely with who I am. Rough edges and all. I would much rather torpedo date 1 or 2 with a person I'm not compatible with than string things along for a couple of months and break up when she suddenly discovers those rough edges. This has not been a recipe for quantity, I'm hoping it's one for qual…

That's still sales. People focus on "bad" sales, but "good" sales is about being honest about the capabilities of your offering and finding people who honestly need it. It's a bad practice long-term (both in business sales and dating sales) to be over-focused on short-term closing and not focused enough on long-term satisfaction.

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

#404

Post by baby »

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…

Same here. A long time ago I was running a website for fun, a friend told me I was crazy not to have ads, added ads and started making 4000€/month

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

#405

Post by marcosdumay »

sanedigital wrote: post #326
marcosdumay wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Try to close too early and any sensible customer will run away and never talk to you again.

"Always" be closing includes too early as well as too late, after the client has run away and you will gain nothing except to alienate him further.

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

#406

Post by achillean »

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…

> I never had the "hands off" hosting experience that cloud providers advertise in the first place.

We've had exactly the same experience. From a business perspective it does mean that you can shift the blame if something goes down but it still impacts your product all the same. And you're left without the ability to directly fix the underlying issue. Most of our infrastructure runs on our own hardware out of a single datacenter and we've been able to get significantly better performance/ value. I love your approach of commoditizing your complement and acquiring a hosting provider.

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

#407

Post by willis936 »

donatj wrote: post #356
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 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…

I moved to an area where the only engineering work is defense contracts. I have been and am morally opposed to the MIC both for its primary product being death and for its massive societal waste. We have high rent and bills to pay and I am working for a defense contractor.

My joke since moving has been "I like my morals and will stick to them as long as it's convenient."

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

#408

Post by savorypiano »

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…

Any chance you can give me pointers on how to improve SEO for my sudoku site? It's been up for 8 years now and I've left it for dead since user growth wasn't happening. Thanks!

http://www.sudokuisland.com/

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

#409

Post by mohanmcgeek »

giorgioz wrote: post #232
mohanmcgeek wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter, race still seems to be a criteria in their hiring process and that's.. racist.

It was good you asked. It was threatning you immediately added the legal punishments. YES if (s)he was discrimating against minorities it would have been indeed racism or some other form of xenophobia. The point is: 1) YOU DON'T KNOW THAT YET (s)he was discriminating minorities. And given you already made a sentence the person it's likely to not tell you now. For example at my current company we almost hire exclusive…

> We in fact discriminate positively in hiring non-white because generally they provide more value for money because OTHERS discriminate them and lower their range of offers.

Are you saying that you're paying non white people less because of their race? That should be illegal in a lot of countries.

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

#410

Post by isoprophlex »

lootsauce wrote: post #353
thom wrote: post #168

I’ll give the exact opposite of what you ask, just because we could easily have chosen not to do it. Our business was initially built on analysing data from a commercial provider and selling those insights to customers. The provider required that both we and each of our customers paid a high license fee. It became pretty clear that the provider was moving towards lots of tools and value added features on top of their…

I’m interested what is your site?

check their profile!

about: CTO @ StatsBomb. Sports analytics - computer vision, data science, stream processing, data viz. Always hiring: https://statsbomb.com/careers/

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