Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 399 posts

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#251

Post by dmritard96 »

shostack wrote: post #216
dmritard96 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi @shostack. We ( https://flair.co ) are a team of engineers and looking for feedback on the marketing side. We have some nice preorders and shipped our first few units a few days ago. We will have brick and morter presence in the next few months but our online strategy has largely been focused on reddit. Looking to do more FB ads etc but curious about tactics for identifying copy/images/audience most effectively. A…

I love companies that get their start on Reddit. While I'm not familiar with yours specifically, generally speaking you are having a dialogue with your target audience. This is critical for validating product-market fit and learning about who your target audience is and what they care about. I mean, people will literally tell you if you ask them. Beyond that, if you are able to harness the goodwill of the hive mind,…

This is great and I really appreciate your thoughtful feedback.

Another question - looking to pick your marketing brain. We built a bit of a swiss army knife into our products. I'll try to break it down as simply as possible:

- a user can use one Puck as a remote sensor for their Nest

- a user can use one Puck + Multiple Vents for an Ecobee (like Nest but with remote sensors)

- a user can use Multiple Pucks and Multiple Vents with a Nest

- a user can use a Puck with a Window AC or Minisplit (standard AC outside of North America where they don't have central heating/cooling)

Without having you get too deep into our specific products my main question is more around how to market in a scenario like this. I am toying with the idea of effectively building different landing pages for different people (one person controlling a minisplit likely doesn't care about smart vents for instance and might even be confused). Was thinking specific adds that target different use cases that then direct to those landing pages. A bit of a PITA in terms of lots of different flows/content etc but need to make sure we effectively communicate without confusing.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#252

Post by udkl »

55555 wrote: post #110

I run http://choosejarvis.com with a friend. It's not profitable yet but is getting there. We've just iterated on the product and feel that we're finally making a good enough value proposition to ramp up marketing. I previously ran http://amzshark.com with a friend, which was very profitable within a year (~360k ARR) and ramen profitable within 3 months.

Good job on amzshark ..... I would be interested to understand how you scrape data from Amazon ... I assume crawling would be a significant portion of your operating cost.... and how you do it without violating their ToS....

choosejarvis, why did you think there was a market need for such a product ? How is it different from buffer.io ?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#255

Post by udkl »

joshontheweb wrote: post #15

I'm running https://zencastr.com as a solo founder. It isn't profitable because I haven't moved to paid plans yet. I haven't had any time to focus on marketing yet really but I get a steady stream of signups each day. So far around 10,000 hours have been recorded using the service.

If you provide a side by side comparison on the landing page of audio samples, that would make me instantly choose zencastr vs other products ...

Further, 'Free' should be immediately visible above the fold on the landing page.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#256

Post by shostack »

dmritard96 wrote: post #251
shostack wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love companies that get their start on Reddit. While I'm not familiar with yours specifically, generally speaking you are having a dialogue with your target audience. This is critical for validating product-market fit and learning about who your target audience is and what they care about. I mean, people will literally tell you if you ask them. Beyond that, if you are able to harness the goodwill of the hive mind,…

This is great and I really appreciate your thoughtful feedback. Another question - looking to pick your marketing brain. We built a bit of a swiss army knife into our products. I'll try to break it down as simply as possible: - a user can use one Puck as a remote sensor for their Nest - a user can use one Puck + Multiple Vents for an Ecobee (like Nest but with remote sensors) - a user can use Multiple Pucks and Multi…

Glad you found the info valuable.

Multiple landing pages may be the way to go, and can have value from an SEO standpoint as long as they are not too repetitive.

Beyond that though, consider entry into those pages. Odds are you want to give a different message to different people, so think about how you might incorporate some sort of self-selection mechanism when people arrive at your site. Maybe asking them in a little configurator widget what setup they have or what they are trying to do. You can use those signals to direct them to the appropriate page, but also to segment them into various audience buckets for purposes of advertising, remarketing, etc. It is amazing how valuable a couple clicks can be in terms of clarifying what audience someone falls under. For example, if you get a lot of searches on your brand term in AdWords, giving different site links to different sections lets you better understand the intent of your audience. Better intent signals give you better data for targeting and messaging which in turn should lead to better conversion rates from the more relevant experience.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#257

Post by chdir »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #51

I started Apex a few months ago, first product is a little uptime monitor built on AWS Lambda: http://apex.sh/ping/ . Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that. Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're…

I know you are a very talented developer so I'm curious :

Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ?

P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort.

P.P.S. Here's a list of services that do performance / uptime monitoring in various forms. Some might be incorrect / irrelevant, but just to convey an idea of the crowded space :

[1] pingdom , site24x7, statuscake, statuspage.io, status.io , runscope, opsgenie , newrelic , datadog, Librato, Scout , Skylight , Server Density , Stackify, OpsDash , Boundary, Netuitive, Keymetrics, Appsignal, Appdynamics, copperegg , stackdriver, xmatters, uptimerobot, AWS route53 health check , nagios, t1mr.com, Visualping, diff.io, Obvious.io, Stashboard, Cachet, updown.io, Pingometer , stillalive, alertbot, vigil, AWS Cloudwatch, Cloudability, StatusGator, CloudCheckr,

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#258

Post by middlechild »

shostack wrote: post #100
Frondo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this times a ten thousand. It took me years to unlearn all of the "marketing is all bullshit" attitudes I grew up with. Whole different set of skills to learn, and not like, say, imperative->FP. Much harder.

As a senior marketer who has to combat this myth frequently, thank you. Modern day marketing is a complex orchestration of many parts that are often highly technical. Further, the discipline as a whole has some incredibly hard unsolved problems when it comes to measurement and analytics (attribution and viewability I'm looking at you). If anyone has a product with initial traction but is unsure of where to go next, f…

I'm a solo founder and I've been working on an e-learning platform for the past few months: https://www.tutora.org. It's a work in progress, and the most interesting part of the platform is still being developed; but it can definitely be used as is, while I continue to make progress.

I'm currently going through the pain of trying to figure out all the marketing stuff... it's hard. Really hard. I don't have traction right now, but I want to start building a small user base so I can begin collecting some feedback. I've put together a survey (http://survey.tutora.org), I'm handing out flyers and talking to people, I've also set up a small Google AdWords campaign. Am I on the right track? What do you guys think is the best strategy to acquire the first 100-1,000 users?

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#259

Post by udkl »

vital101 wrote: post #106

I started https://kernl.us last May and brought it out of beta in January. I've been growing at the rate of around 5 new paying customers a month. After the closed beta I started out with about $140 / month in profits, which has grown to $330 / month over time. The growth rate has been pretty steady, but nothing so large that I could go full time on it.

Clever.

Do you market it on the WP plugin market ? What is a common user profile of your average user ?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#260

Post by udkl »

sblawrie wrote: post #220

A friend and I have been running WeScreenplay ( https://www.wescreenplay.com ), a very niche service for screenwriters, for about 2.5 years now. I recently separated the backend platform that manages and coordinates everything and spun it off into Coverfly ( https://www.coverfly.io ), which we sell to film festivals to manage their screenplay contests. Between the 2 products (which use the same codebase), we've tripl…

Which marketing channel worked the best for you ?

How can you create a 5 page, detailed report for just $65 ?

How are you different from a brick-mortar service with a website ?

Post reply on HN