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Maybe I am wrong, but the article doesn't come off as satirical.
The title is just intended as a good-natured dig at his own experience ( I made literally TENS of dollars ) drawing on the gullible-get-rich-quick trope, nothing more.
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This plus the mention of ProductHunt makes me think they fell into the trap of marketing to their fellow creators rather than their audience. That's a common mistake plenty of people make when building anything. Game developers market their games on game development forums, website owners market their sites on web development/webmaster forums, authors market on writing forums, etc. They then forget that the typical p…
I see this advice a lot, but I never really understood what the alternative is. If your product has a specific niche, maybe there are some forums or subreddits dedicated to it, sure. But if it's a game? Some are designed for a niche audience, but most really aren't. Another thing is that most of the forums/subreddits these days have strict rules against self-promotion. And I'm not saying that you're wrong - I'm just…
How obvious the distinction is depends on your product.
Imagine I'm a robot maker making a robot vacuum cleaner. The kind of publicity that can get me into "Hackaday" probably comes to me a lot more naturally than the kind of publicity that gets me into "Good Housekeeping"
But I should be aiming for the latter, assuming my target market is "homeowners" rather than "robot enthusiasts"
Of course, for other products the distinction might be less obvious; if I'm making an IDE my users and my peers are probably fairly similar groups.
To be fair, I would re-phrase the author's thought as "I wrote an SaaS product because I believed it would get me rich and I went and scoured the internet for a well that echos my thoughts" The author speaks about exactly one example, that,I guess I can say inspired him to get going with his idea. No, The internet did not convince him. He convinced himself using the internet to find evidence for a conclusion he alrea…
The Internet is the place where one can always find well that echos one's thoughts. I wonder if that is the reason our society has become so polar. It's not even limited to specific country, this can be observed throughout the world.
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…
Hrm, you identified your target market within the first tens of words: freelancers working on UpWork. But you launched on HackerNews. Why didn’t you seek out communities that freelance, especially on UpWork? That’s where you plug your product, after becoming a valuable member of the community. And becoming a valuable member of that community IS something you can do: you can give free advice on winning UpWork jobs, ho…
„Just ship it“ does not mean spending 9 months(!) building something that should have been a no-code MVP built in 2 weeks max.
Some products are inherently difficult to monetize. I wouldn't give up yet, but another approach is to make the product free and use it as lead-gen for something else (an affiliate product, your own product in a separate niche, or even ads) if you corner the market for the free product it can bring a lot of valuable traffic.
> Reilly uses EarlyBrd to find folks who need help with Ubiquiti Wi-Fi gear and tell them about Hostifi. This should be on your home page. It made me want to buy your product.
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Its not particularly useful to just parrot the information without also including their justification; not all of us take YC mantras as the gospel. Did they give you a reasoning for this guidance?
I have not attended the Startup School, but I imagine there's a lot of value in personally recruiting your first 20 or 50 customers. You get to talk directly to them; you get a chance (not easy, though!) to find out the real reason they stopped using it, etc.
Going after your customers looks great (honestly, I have zero successful experiences either way), but it is really hard for people that have a day job.
Qoute: "In the Fall of 2017 I'd done a ton of freelancing on the (garbage) website Upwork. Upwork is a bit of a grind. User's can search for a skill they'd like to freelance in ( Cisco Networking, Python programming, Painting Dogs, whatever) and apply for job's via proposals. The crappy thing about Upwork is that once a job is posted, the heat is on to apply. The longer you let the job sit, the more likely that other…