411–420 of 492 posts
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…
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…
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'?
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…
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."
Not exactly "business" from a company perspective, but: Learning Solidity. I've been in crypto space for a long time, always wanted to learn Solidity to write contracts, but always postponed. Played with some toy code in the past years and that was it. Recently got back in the scene and saw how many new business opportunities it opens and how financially feasible they are now I hate myself for not going more serious…
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…
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."
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…
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'?
There is always a risk that the market won't like it. If you want a steady paycheque then entrepreneurship isn't for you (or isn't for you right now).
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
Can I ask why you don't just move somewhere else?
It's a tough crossroads. I am applying for work I really care about far away while my SO may still have a path to finish. No good answers, but we'll stick together through thick and thin.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I presume you mean site reliability engineer. Then yes, my clients purchase the whole package. Development, deployment, hosting, production maintenance. So if something goes wrong, really anything, I'm their first point of contact. Before, we had many situations where they asked me to take a look because something could have been a software issue but then turned out to be an AWS issue instead. That's always nasty if…
I've always found it interesting how simply "Not Megacorporation X" can be a competitive advantage. It doesn't make a lot of economic sense, but people will go through a lot of work - and it can be lucrative to you on the business-side facilitating this - to avoid having to interface with a faceless conglomerate like Amazon.
At their spending level, "Megacorporation X" would not pick up the phone for them. But I do. So in effect, my competitive advantage is not that I'm not a megacorp, but my competitive advantage is that I pick up the phone when they call.