481–490 of 666 posts
This barely counts, but I started a small premium handmade custom leather goods brand about 6 months ago: http://vulcancrafting.com . cash/card wallets, notebook/journal wallets, belts, etc... I didn't want to spend all my time after work sitting at a computer. I'm not in the positive yet; there's an equipment investment cost, I intentionally don't keep a huge order backlog, and I don't charge as much as I could for…
Really beautiful work
This barely counts, but I started a small premium handmade custom leather goods brand about 6 months ago: http://vulcancrafting.com . cash/card wallets, notebook/journal wallets, belts, etc... I didn't want to spend all my time after work sitting at a computer. I'm not in the positive yet; there's an equipment investment cost, I intentionally don't keep a huge order backlog, and I don't charge as much as I could for…
Great work. Followed your Instagram.
Back in August I launched https://IndieHackers.com , a site where the founders of profitable online businesses share their stories and revenue transparently. I actually got the idea after reading lots of threads like this one on HN :D Indie Hackers is my full-time job now. Is it "successful"? I think so! I've done over 90 interviews, and they've been read over one million times in the past 5 months, largely by you gu…
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Have you considered getting into colo or other services that might reduce the capital expenses per dollar of revenue? Seems like there may be an opportunity there. I once had a 2U FreeBSD box at a local dial-up ISP, and it was basically found money for them.
https://nepafiber.com/colocation
When (ages ago) talking to places about colo, it turns out places like HE would only allocate 7 amps for a full rack. Completely useless. ;)
I've really enjoyed the experience watching something I have sole responsibility over grow and be appreciated by the people who use it.
I set out to build something I could be proud of and other people would find useful - in those terms it has been successful. And with another year or so of growth it could provide the majority of my income.
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What sort of investment did it take to get started? Have you written anything about starting off, and your transition from a WISP to fiber?
I started with around $15k, but that's nothing compared to what I've dumped into the business since then. If I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I would have started this. I have not written about it, yet.
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Sales are a big struggle to me. Where did you find this partnerships?
Network. Go to the meetups. Don't rely on serendipity, we can do better than that. Use your programming skills. Pull the meetup list, get all of their twitter profiles, search everyones last 1000 tweets for topics you are interested in. Pull all of their code on github. Push it through the profiler and find the talent. Mirror github if you have to. Pull the whole darn thing, it's only a couple of hundred gigs (if you…
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1. Been thinking about doing book reviews on the blog actually. Any tips/ideas for crowdsourcing it and getting the community involved? Maybe I'll try using the forum for that. 2. Will try to do updates every few months or so in the future, don't want the interviews to get stale!
hey courtland, another big fan of indiehackers here. keep up the good work! Consider this suggestion as my form of paying it forward. ;) Don't do book reviews and the value of your site is in the data. What you should do is, for every interview, add a question in the form of "what books do you read" or "what do you recommend people should read?". Then for every book listed, add an amazon affiliate link (don't forget…
I'll refer to my recent comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13267536 It's not quite single person, I have two remote virtual assistants handling various tasks like ordering, sourcing, etc, but you only really need that above a certain scale. Most of the business currently is drop shipping from US retailers to Amazon and eBay. I got started reselling a year ago with a specific stacking deal (discover had 1…
(Just spent a few hours reading on this based on another comment in this thread so trying to learn how the "sourcing things below Amazon price" piece works...)
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small software shop too. Damn straight. I have a TINY software shop in NYC. It pays the bills and food for me and my nuclear family. I can't complain. I have friends who make 2X as me , who work in a box within a bigger box on a grid. They have NO time todo JACK and SHIT. Wealth is discretionary time. You can ALWAYS make anotha dolla, but you'll NEVA make anotha min.
Curious, how do you acquire customers? I've been thinking about doing something similar.