101–110 of 145 posts
Love to see brain genius programmers charging money for a Fourier transform of some audio.
76k mrr with some contractors, this guy is printing money and I'm very jealous.
Or maybe it's a good thing because it means a stupid simple idea can make you a millionaire
Just watching the marketing materials and presentation once again highlights just how important marketing is. Well done on that front.
Having been in a few failing businesses I can tell you that marketing and sales are _the_ core reason tech (maybe also non-tech) businesses fail. Fundamentally you can do without code, but you can't do without sales. I have a lot of respect for sales people and people who can market themselves. One of my favorite videos about this is by a bodybuilder/powerlifter Stan Efferding [1] - he is some sort of marketing savan…
Question related to video encoding: We are spending quite a bit of money on Amazon ElasticTranscoder for video encoding. Wondering if anyone had experience or advices to selfhost that kind of service? Any project I should consider for a proof of concept?
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Probably possible, but what would be the advantage? I know for instance using something like Google Speech to Text API is a lot more accurate than Web Speech API.
The advantage is reduced server costs + more efficient use of computing resources in general. I personally am always happy to offload processing to the client side wherever possible.
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Maybe your takeaway is right but there's also a huge piece that wasn't captured in your one-liner "We lost about 2 years of our time and $30k of my savings (which was most of it). " "Getting those first 10/100+ customers was really hard. We relied primarily on direct outreach via cold email and social media messaging to obtain those first customers. Taking the time to reach out directly to customers for a $7/month pl…
that's because all of that goes without saying (since I assume that the typical hn reader already knows about 1. pivots being costly 2. the early adopter grind). those points aren't key features of their succuss either because every startup experiences those pains.
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Semi-rhetorical answer: 1. It still provides more value than the monthly subscription. 2. People have shown a greater willingness to pay for ongoing features and support in a SAAS model than in other formats. 3. It better aligns with the costs of support and maintenance that the provider needs to provide. 4. It's less risky for the consumer to get started. 5. There's no piracy or people decompiling your app and putti…
All fair points, a mix of which some focus on customer benefit and others on benefit to the business. Perhaps the motivation behind my question was wondering whether there’s an opportunity to eat SaaS margins with products that compete by changing the distribution, and whether there’s any market data to support that hypothesis. 1, 4, and 6 align with the customer. 4 could be alleviated even with a local application a…
The alternative is the company going out of business and not providing the product or the company’s founders getting acqui-hired followed by a final “Our Amazing Journey” blog post before the product is cancelled.
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that's because all of that goes without saying (since I assume that the typical hn reader already knows about 1. pivots being costly 2. the early adopter grind). those points aren't key features of their succuss either because every startup experiences those pains.
Or you could look at it another way. Perhaps there are many, many that would be successful if only you can get past the first obstacles. The success may be less due to it being a good idea and more to do with overcoming the obstacles. I often wonder how things would be viable businesses if you were good at grinding.
you should go ask a miller.
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that's because all of that goes without saying (since I assume that the typical hn reader already knows about 1. pivots being costly 2. the early adopter grind). those points aren't key features of their succuss either because every startup experiences those pains.
Or you could look at it another way. Perhaps there are many, many that would be successful if only you can get past the first obstacles. The success may be less due to it being a good idea and more to do with overcoming the obstacles. I often wonder how things would be viable businesses if you were good at grinding.
Outside of the few "lottery winners", most are grinders that didn't commit business suicide.
Major props for those who grind until they can share their tales.