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How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#111

Post by isurge »

rdouble wrote: post #96
SwellJoe wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In the post it said they were only making $50-300 a conference." That's nobody's fault but their own. That's one of my primary points about them not really learning a valuable lesson. If they were booked solid by prime conferences at those prices, and people were calling them from all over the country, I'd suggest they were undervaluing their service by at least an order of magnitude. I believe they should have begu…

The type of business makes a big difference. They couldn't have charged much more. Beyond a fairly low price, it makes more sense to just bring your own printer. It's much different from something like contract IT where nobody knows how to bring the network back up and they can't do any work while it's down.

The typical per person badge printer fee is upwards of $150 per day for the printer + laptop setup and $250-$500 per day for the labor .. you have to keep in mind travel, insurance, taxes, facilities fees etc ...

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#112

Post by agnesberthelot »

I think this is an amazing story. You guys are flexible and ready to change. You saw a new opportunity and you grabbed it and it worked out great. I think in the whole process, you gained something that are more valuable than money ... the experience and the connection. Great job ... and thanks for sharing.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#114

Post by SwellJoe »

soapdog wrote: post #106
SwellJoe wrote: post #24

I reached the end of this story and thought, "These guys have not fully learned the lesson of product failure. Nor have they learned to recognize product success." You made a product no one wanted, and in order to market it, you stumbled onto a product that lots of people wanted in a market where billions of dollars are spent each year (we spend about 10 grand a year on conferences, and we're a tiny company with a ti…

I just want to tell that I've been using virtualmin every day for some years now and it helps keep me sane while managing my virtual hosts. It is a great tool and worth every penny. Now, every time I see something like cPanel, I scream in horror. Thanks for your hard work!

Thanks for the kind words. I'm glad Virtualmin is serving you well.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#115

Post by zshanthi »

"We locked ourselves in a room and asked this question over and over: “What is something valuable we can provide to event organizers so that they can promote our product?”

Zac finally came up with an idea."

Was it luck? Was it hard work ? Was it education ? Was it intuition? Was it genius? what made Zac come of with the idea !

http://www.chrisranjana.com

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#116

Post by pbhjpbhj »

petercooper wrote: post #97
ascendant wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it every community ever is awesome until that third person joins? Then suddenly it's all about how things "used to be". Are linkbait BS titles the cancer that is killing /HN?

No. It's people not being in /new enough and voting up good stories after actually reading them. That way, the "linkbaity" stuff is more likely to get voted up. But this is a problem most vote-based link sites have, alas.

>No. It's people not being in /new enough and voting up good stories after actually reading them.

What's the solution to that, I almost daren't mention it, could it be a dig like toolbar that wraps the story (I'm assuming you mean external articles). Perhaps better would be a personal list (like Reddit) of recently viewed posts.

Alternatively one could have a sort of moderation view for trusted users so that pages like /new would give the story link with a first paragraph and up/flag/down buttons for fast rating. That way standard users time on pages like /new or /noobstories wouldn't need to be spent on spam so much.

Not that spam appears to be a huge problem here but as things grow optimisations become more important IMO.

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#117

Post by kevinelliott »

The story was fascinating. What is most interesting to me is that several people here on HN are dumbfounded by how such a simple service was in such demand. That seems to be the trend these days: do something simple, that everyone needs, and you can be a success. Complicated ideas don't seem to fair well (there is a lot of resistance to it anyway). If people need to try and figure out what you're offering, you've already lost most people.

Looking forward to the release of View!

Re: How we fed ourselves for a year & sold a startup...with only 300 lines of code

#118

Post by jbscpa »

keeptrying wrote: post #17
jbscpa wrote: post #8

Great work. I keep remembering that in my little community a business that just sold for >$100 million started out making steak fingers and selling them to restaurants. Steak fingers. $100 million. nothing is impossible.

Whats the name of this business?

http://enidnews.com/localnews/x231066283/Advance-Pierre-Food...
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