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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?

#471

Post by kubami »

DarylZero wrote: post #332
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…

> Life in general is sales Life in a society... where people are divorced from all material realities and only interface with the social... but that's not life in general. There are, for example, wars.

But then resolution of the conflict is sales.

Wars don't end when people put down the guns, it's when people can reconcile their differences.

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

#472

Post by nickfromseattle »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #318
nickfromseattle wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too. But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking). Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs. For most SaaS, there aren't a few…

> the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited IMHO actually good UX metrics mean as low time on-site and pages visited as possible. An ideal user experience (I would, as a user, be glad to pay for) is when you visit the page, immediately find what you want, do you job as quickly as possible and go away. A good valuable website caring about users rather than ad-spamming them would optimize for this, no…

"Good UX" is dynamic, and depends on the search query, and the UX metrics of the websites you're competing with.

Recipe related searches will have different UX metric gradient than "creating a PTO policy"

I also kindly disagree with your assessment.

All things being equal, if you're Google, and you want to keep users coming back to Google Search, and you could show one of two pages for any search query, I think the only reliably metric to evaluate whether one page adds more value to the user than another page is through UX metrics.

Generally, if you can't find what you're looking for - you'll bounce and look somewhere else.

But if you Google something, then get drawn into the website because the writer knew the 'intent' behind the search, the writer/website should ALSO know what you need to know next, or likely questions to have, and serve you that content after they finish answering whatever is you originally Googl'd for.

For example, if someone searches "content writer job description", I can guess that

1. This is an employer that is actively in the hiring cycle

2. The next things they might need to know are average comp for content writers, the best place to find content writers, the best way to evaluate / test / interview them, etc.

So, if I'm competing with a page of content that is just strictly about "content writer job description", and I go above and beyond to educate you on what you'll need to know next - I should end up with better UX metrics that reflect an increase in value I provided over the page.

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

#473

Post by nickfromseattle »

yowlingcat wrote: post #296
nickfromseattle wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too. But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking). Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs. For most SaaS, there aren't a few…

Love this. Have you written any more detailed content about this journey taking any one of these such websites from 0 to 100k? I'd love to read the play by play.

I looked at your profile to send you a DM, but no contact information. :(

Here is the playbook we used to grow a website from 0 to 1,500,000 organics/month: https://workello.com/0-to-1-500-000

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

#474

Post by DarylZero »

kubami wrote: post #471
DarylZero wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Life in general is sales Life in a society... where people are divorced from all material realities and only interface with the social... but that's not life in general. There are, for example, wars.

But then resolution of the conflict is sales. Wars don't end when people put down the guns, it's when people can reconcile their differences.

War probably wasn't the best example because, although I wasn't thinking of it, there's still that social element.

My point is that war involves people directly interacting with physical reality in ways that aren't mediated socially. Modern high tech people live in a world where popular illusions and perception are much more important than gravity and inertia, but reality still exists somewhere, and sometimes it matters.

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

#475

Post by dennis_jeeves »

simmo9000 wrote: post #214

Establish what "trust" is. The play-by rule-book. My approach has mostly been to get out of the way of what I don't know and hold on whilst having blind trust. Like riding a horse, hold on and give direction of the course with balance of freedom to run. Give more freedom and get more trust and enjoy the exhilaration, however hold the reins too tight and you will be fighting all the way. Walk the tightrope so to speak…

No post body was provided.

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

#476

Post by baby »

holgersindbaek wrote: post #448
baby wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Damn man. Sounds nice . What website was it?

Not sure if you remember, back then you could add “like buttons” from facebook on your webpages, and if someone would like it it would display “X liked ‘music saved my life’” (if that was the title of the page) on their timeline. Which would make a lot of people “like” the page by clicking on the like button located on the timeline this time. I had seen these english websites doing this with a lot of funny or inspirational sentences like that, so I created the first French website like that. I was in the top alexa 500 for some time, then facebook decided that this feature was dumb because it was, and all these websites died. It was nice money while I was still a student though :)

during my first year of uni I had to do a presentation about what I wanted to do in life and how I was planning to find a job and make money after graduating. In front of two professionals that were here to help guide students (and probably making less than me). It was graded. I told them that it didn’t matter because I was already making bank lol, they didn’t believe me and gave me a shit grade. Good times.

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

#477

Post by missedthecue »

jacobmischka wrote: post #147
konschubert wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's heartening to hear how remote work is helping to even out global wealth inequality.

I wouldn't call "hire people from countries with low wages so you can pay them literally 1/10 of the US equivalent haha" heartening.

So it's better if there are no international buyers for their labor and they can only sell it to local employers for say $10k?

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

#478

Post by hardwaresofton »

flurly wrote: post #181

I used to immediately launch on Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. the moment I finished my side projects. The problem I found with this approach is 1. Often times the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero. 2. These platforms often times also are filled with people waiting to abuse your platform. For flurly, all of m…

> For flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my product hunt launch.

I think it might be time to stop using Product Hunt for me. I find that I reliably get email spam after posting projects there. Along with the spam, there's usually little to no useful feedback.

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

#479

Post by hardwaresofton »

simmo9000 wrote: post #214

Establish what "trust" is. The play-by rule-book. My approach has mostly been to get out of the way of what I don't know and hold on whilst having blind trust. Like riding a horse, hold on and give direction of the course with balance of freedom to run. Give more freedom and get more trust and enjoy the exhilaration, however hold the reins too tight and you will be fighting all the way. Walk the tightrope so to speak…

> Find the balance of trust between ALL steak-holders and get it ALL in writing. +2cents.

Dunno if this was a joke on purpose but "stake-holders" is what you want there!

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

#480

Post by sanedigital »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #462
sanedigital wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then where is the threshold for 'sales'?

As in, what is "sales"? It's the presentation of that offer. That might be an offer for a product, for companionship, for an intimate coupling. All of those are a form of sales.
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