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6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

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Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#131

Post by rootusrootus »

rhizome wrote: post #56
rootusrootus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all just "Us" and "We". I tend to assume that a lot of times this is because "We" is a lie, it's "Me" and they want to avoid revealing that it's someone's side project. I could be completely wrong. I am a lot.

Not to jump on you specifically, but seriously, why does this matter? I'm not saying "don't think about this thing I don't think people should talk about," I'm saying, "in what way is pronoun selection important?"

It might matter to your customer. Especially if you are trying to succeed in the B2B market. My side project is a piece of software I am confident has real value, and therefore the price won't be chump change. My biggest early hurdle will be convincing companies that they can trust I will be there to support them. I won't lie, but I'm not going to advertise how small the operation is.

Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#132

Post by ComputerGuru »

hef19898 wrote: post #28
DoreenMichele wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all just "Us" and "We". That's something I often get instructed to use when doing freelance writing. It is considered "professional" and "corporate speak." The other thing is that women and minorities sometimes intentionally hide or downplay their personal details. One guy with a very "foreign" sounding name legally change…

Damn, I might be guilty as charged! Not long ago, I officially launched greenleaves.io, a logistics startup. The main issue I have with the about us thing is, that for now it is just me. So I use a lot of we and such (the co founder will join as soon as there is enough money to sustain a second person, we both have family, so...). Would you to have quick look at https://greenleaves.io/about/ ? Because the last two we…

Those stock photos. cringe

Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#134

Post by perl4ever »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #128
perl4ever wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what GIS school is. Was this an undergraduate program? Having lunch with professors is something that I am not really aware of people doing non-romantically, and certainly never did myself in college. When I went back to try to complete my degree in my late 20s, I thought I needed to find an internship if possible, and I went to the office of whatever they called it, and asked for suggestions on where to…

My choice to use personal anecdotes to try to elucidate the problem was not intended to turn this into a personal discussion about my life. There are tons of aggregate statistics out there about how men generally make more money, disproportionately take up top positions in corporations, etc. Iirc, only 17% of people in the C suite are female. Less than 5 percent of S&P 500 have a female CEO. https://www.cnbc.com/2019…

Italicizing platonic is rude and I have no right to insinuate anything about your personal life nor do I expect you to share anything further. I regret the tone.

Since you shared a meaningful experience with me/the world, I responded in kind, because to me, my experience is also essential truth.

However, I'm not sure that I was trying to be "sincerely helpful" to you. That's not how I would automatically think of it when I respond to some random non-gendered username on the internet.

...I also don't think asking if you were in an undergraduate program is such a personal question.

Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#135

Post by kayson »

jnfr wrote: post #94
kayson wrote: post #52

I'm always hesitant to use any of these services because (AFAIK) they need to store your banking credentials in order to access your account. The one exception I've found to this is Chase, which actually has an API. But even with providers like Plaid, its not clear whether the API is being used - I don't think it is, because the request does not go to Chase. Is there a better way? Or a service that would let me enter…

Totally understandable that you'd like to avoid using services like Plaid. We have a lot of users who share the same sentiment, and also many international users who cannot use Plaid, so it's a priority to ensure the experience is without Plaid is still an enjoyable/practical one. We offer two other ways to bulk insert transactions: 1. we offer a CSV import tool, and 2. we are currently beta-testing our developer API…

I'll give the CSV import a shot, thanks!

Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#136

Post by DoreenMichele »

perl4ever wrote: post #134
DoreenMichele wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My choice to use personal anecdotes to try to elucidate the problem was not intended to turn this into a personal discussion about my life. There are tons of aggregate statistics out there about how men generally make more money, disproportionately take up top positions in corporations, etc. Iirc, only 17% of people in the C suite are female. Less than 5 percent of S&P 500 have a female CEO. https://www.cnbc.com/2019…

Italicizing platonic is rude and I have no right to insinuate anything about your personal life nor do I expect you to share anything further. I regret the tone. Since you shared a meaningful experience with me/the world, I responded in kind, because to me, my experience is also essential truth. However, I'm not sure that I was trying to be "sincerely helpful" to you. That's not how I would automatically think of it…

I'm absolutely not accusing you of anything whatsoever.

I wrote out this long reply answering all of your questions and felt weird about it and wondered why and didn't post it. Then I decided to try to use this as an example of exactly what I'm talking about.

Thank you for talking with me. I'm running a fever today, so I no doubt could have said something better than I did.

Edit:

In fact, I'm mixing up two discussions, because I talked about the private-public divide to someone else. So I apologize for the disconnect there.

Other discussion where I talked about that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22508564

Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#137

Post by jnfr »

twentyloops wrote: post #120

I recently switched to Lunch Money from Mint (6+ years user). I was sold after spending a weekend setting it up and getting used to it. The app is a delight compared to Mint. The interface is simple, fast and snappy. You never get an annoying "Refreshing your accounts" notice every time you login. I've come across far fewer connection issues compared to Mint (~everyday). There is a host of nifty features I never knew…

Thanks for the awesome review and for your continued support!

Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#138

Post by throwaway1726 »

perl4ever wrote: post #87
DoreenMichele wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised at how awful women can be to each other. LOL. No, I wouldn't be surprised. I'm well acquainted with the phenomenon. The only people I see activity holding back women is other women. This framing may be on the mark, but my observation has been that the primary way men are a problem is that men mostly don't want to engage a woman too much if they aren't looking for a sexual relationship and this is a…

"...I don't think most men are intentionally, actively and on purpose trying to keep women out, but it's a big, big problem that they don't want to talk too much to a woman for fear that it might lead to an affair or a really terrible misunderstanding or gossip" It's bewildering how everybody knows there are these tremendous informal barriers, that have withstood all past attempts at equal rights, and yet everybody a…

> One thing that jumps out at me is you seem to be saying what holds women back is that men don't trust them

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

As a man, I’m rather skeptical about trusting women in business. I will never have a one-on-one meeting with a woman (especially somebody under my management), and I will especially never interact with with woman I work with outside of the office. I will generally try to keep discussions with women in the office strictly about business and professional. I am incredibly cautious about mentoring a woman.

The risk of being accused of something untoward is just not worth taking. There’s little risk of my male colleagues taking some extreme level of offence at banter or any of the other normal interactions of friendship. None of my male colleagues are going to file a complaint against me just to spite me, or to further their career objectives. However this is a non-trivial risk with women. I know women who openly talk about having done this, and I know men who it has happened to. I don’t like it, but that’s simply the reality of the current political climate.

Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#139

Post by AmericanChopper »

rootusrootus wrote: post #10
blakesterz wrote: post #2

This was super interesting! The design really helped as well. I liked this one: "Lesson learned: People care about the narrative behind your product, so don't be afraid to tell your story!" As someone who finds new things on HN all the time, I always check the "about" page, especially if it's something that isn't free. I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all…

> I'm surprised at how often the "About Us" isn't actually "About Anyone", there's no names, it's all just "Us" and "We". I tend to assume that a lot of times this is because "We" is a lie, it's "Me" and they want to avoid revealing that it's someone's side project. I could be completely wrong. I am a lot.

> "We" is a lie, it's "Me" and they want to avoid revealing that it's someone's side project.

Or if it’s a small group of co-founders and they don’t want to paint a target on their back, and have their employers suing for the IP they created on weekends and evenings.

Re: 6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far

#140

Post by z3t4 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #83
z3t4 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get somewhat a big audience you will get weird messages anyway, it doesn't matter if you are a man or women. For an app that probably have hundred of apps just like it I think it helps go get personal, you want to build trust and bound.

This is absolutely true and it's been enormously helpful to me to actively seek out such information and have a more balanced perspective. An important difference seems to be that women very frequently get a lot of weird and problematic attention before they are big and it often outweighs the positives. If you get enough positive attention and money out of it, putting up with some icky stuff can be worth it. But wome…

You have to grow thick skin. People will try to bring you down mentally. Doesn't even matter if you are famous, the world is full of people that will try to put themselves above you so that they can feel better about themselves. Its just that the more ppl you talk to the more of those you will interact with. Get moderators that will moderate public forums ( control your communication channels). Dont share stuff about your private life. Everything you say can and will be used against you.
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