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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I get some insight into this? What did Balsamiq do? I'm not familiar.
hard to really say, most of the stuff will be bitrotted. But, he networked VERY hard.
I was following this same path until yesterday, when I gave up. I have the mock-ups and all the notes with me, but I won't go ahead because I know it would be too much of an effort. Web dev has become rocket science for those who started in this business in the late 90's, at least IMHO.
Curious about what more contemporary stuff you've experimented with vs. what you're comfortable with. The pop cycle is real.
For instance, one of yesterday's top posts was about htmx, which is cool enough, but it's one of those things that's very opinionated about bundling content, presentation, and behavior, and which advocates for hypertext over consumer-neutral serialization formats. All of that was de rigueur not so long ago, and then heresy in the '00s. Yet, it works, and you can drop in it and get it working in like 2 minutes.
I feel the same way as I suppose you do about a lot of popular toolchains for web work. Babel and webpack are beasts and definitely do remind me of some of the performance art-level stuff with autoconf and make.
I work on some of this stuff in my spare time. Always happy to hear anecdotes.
Writing the software is the easy part of SaaS.
>Go for B2B if you can. Freelancers aren't rich.
You might not love the b2b sales cycle either. Even if you get a whale of a client, you're gonna negotiate hard, probably fork your product for it, and get paid in 180 days if you're lucky.
> Go for B2B if you can. Freelancers aren't rich. I don't understand this... can anyone explain?
B2B vs B2C aren't two starkly different things - it's a spectrum between them. Freelancers are a notoriously difficult market to sell to as they perceive every dollar spent as coming out of their wallet. Compare that to a large enterprise company where the person making the buying decision is going to take home the same salary at the end of the week whatever the decision ends up being.
This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…
In true cynical form: Unless you are trying to either sell products to developers or are working on getting into ycombinator it seems like a terrible idea to pitch your idea here, the main benefit seems to be identifying competitors.
Then again, dropbox.
This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…
Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bubble" project I had. Figured a landing page and $200 on ads would be the best way to gauge demand before writing any code.
Seemed like a great success - 50 or so e-mail signups, time to roll up my sleeves and start building! Until I looked closer and realized that every single signup was from a clearly fraudulent address. There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses.
Using ads to dip your toe in the water might have worked ten years ago, but there's just way too much fraud nowadays. I think you're better off finding your first ten users manually and asking very nicely for their time and feedback.
That was a few years ago, but I launched my app on the Play Store recently and noticed the exact same pattern. Definitely fake, too, because accounts were created in Firebase without user profiles (i.e. the app was never launched). I assume there are bot farms scanning new releases for certain packages (e.g. Firebase) and creating fake accounts.
This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…
> Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bub…
Lots of people can write an app. At the end of the day you either have to get lucky with organic traction or be a little less lucky but be a relatively skilled marketer that has a good command of how to convert paid traffic.
This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I launched to HackerNews and some subreddits ... Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and gett…
HN readers are probably the most likely to copy and reproduce your product then spend 5x more on marketing and drive you out. In true cynical form: Unless you are trying to either sell products to developers or are working on getting into ycombinator it seems like a terrible idea to pitch your idea here, the main benefit seems to be identifying competitors. Then again, dropbox.