High-value B2B product.
Magazine ads! Postcards! Care packages!
It can be hard to stand out digitally. It's easy to stand out in a world of junk mail and generic scenic-beach-view-with-just-a-small-logo magazine ads though.
Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
421–430 of 492 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers? With SaaS you can just do it remotely but if it's on site you need to send someone over I guess
A previous org did it with a tarball and install/upgrade script. Docker is also more prevalent, so handing them an image may work well too.
We did both, customer got an iso image with a single line install command. The installer would automatically download all the docker containers and lock the system down.
Since this was the customer’s initial impression (and we wanted the IT gatekeepers to be happy), we strove to get installation as close to turn-key as possible
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#423It 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…
Glad you're earning some money, but I turned ad-blocker off to see how you incorporated ads on your site - honestly taking up a quarter of the screen with autoplay videos and blinking ads is some toxic 90s geocities stuff... ad-blocker going right back on.
Maybe that's because they haven't built a profile of you to give you better targeted ads?
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trello. Word. Excel. Gmail.
Once upon a time when it was Fog Creek, no, no, no… I know for a fact on the last 3 just based on the # of cold call VMs I deleted back 10-12 years ago that I received every bloody week from Microsoft and Google trying to sell me their enterprise office subscriptions.
Product sells itself outside of enterprise though. I'm just saying that it is possible to have a product that sells itself, and reaches great success without having to have salespeople.
Maybe Word and Excel aren't the best examples, but I don't doubt they could have succeeded if they only gave it away to EDUs and had a base plan for consumers and a self-service enterprise plan. Microsoft had a foothold in desktop market so pushing Office and getting users to use it was easy. And once you try it, it does sell itself.
But I think Trello, Craigslist and Wikipedia are great product examples. You need not have a sales team to scale everything.
You can achieve that with a great product, great customer support, digital marketing and word of mouth.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freemium can work, but without VC it's really hard to sustain. For bootstrappers and small ventures, I'd rather spend the free subsidy in ads. If you do it right, it just works. I hate ads, but they work.
I learned this lesson the hard way - 11 months of freemium, decided to add a trial because "why not?" - now something like 95% of new users choose the trial of the Pro plan, instead of the free tier.
Nice! Mind if I ask whether it improved conversion to paid and what was the impact to your CAC?
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#426It 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…
Hey, just wanted to point out that your spider and freecell games are marked as unsafe/contains malware in Edge for some reason.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ?
> Who are you ?
> Do we already work with you ?
Judging from your username, you're affiliated with rsync.net. If that is correct, then no. That's a very interesting service for offsite backups, though. At the moment, I just rent colocation with lots of HDDs inside and do the RAID management myself.
> How can we work with you ?
That depends on what you need and how long you can wait. I've already committed to launching 2 AI-based products in 2022, so currently it looks like I'll be fully busy until end of the year.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#428[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks!
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Which open source project?
Depends on which AWS service, right?
But most of my customers used RDS and are now on MySql, MariaDb, or PostgreSql. Similarly, S3 -> CEPH. Nginx as front-end, Varnish as cache, Ha-Proxy for load balancing. Queues? RabbitMQ. Map-Reduce? Hadoop. Lots of data? ZFS.
There are A LOT of great open source projects to base your infrastructure on.