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Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

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Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#261

Post by jmacd »

ackbar03 wrote: post #196
wolframhempel wrote: post #169

Creating an on-premise version of our product for enterprises (as opposed to a pure SaaS version) Turns out there is still a lot of money in selling technology to large enterprises that they can host and run themselves on an annual licensing model. We were initially afraid of the long and high-touch enterprise sales cycles, complex procurement processes and enterprise integration requirements (complex permissions, LD…

How do you deal with maintenence and stuff? Do you need on-site engineers? With SaaS you can just do it remotely but if it's on site you need to send someone over I guess

Replicated.com is a popular one

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#262

Post by polk »

Crazyontap wrote: post #113
themanmaran wrote: post #24

Marketing. The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales. No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/ . In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever wa…

I kinda expected this as the top comment. It's just so simple stupid yet it's a wonder that a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't. I think it just comes down to fear of rejection in the end. Making a product, adding features, working on things and even showing your "cool" demo to friends isn't same as asking strangers for money.. because people can say a million nice things about what you ha…

I think it's because most tech/product people incorrectly assume that other people also search for the best products to solve their problems

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#263

Post by nickfromseattle »

martin_a wrote: post #220
qwerty456127 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, make sure that your page loads fast To me this sounds like "code in pure HTML, no React/Angular or anything like that". Am I correct?

There's more to it, but I've focussed on WordPress pages in the past. Some things I'd start with: - Minimize images (tinypng/tinyjpg) - Deactivate/Remove what you don't need (Plugins (!!!), RPC, Emojis, stuff like that which is ON by default in WP -> will strip down the code) - Strip down & combine scripts - Reduce third-party dependencies, try making them first-party (fonts, analytics) - Minify scripts and CSS - Use…

These are overly technical things that technical founders will be drawn too.

But it's not what matters (at least, until you have hundreds of pages ranking).

Google Search is very similar to LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram in the sense that the better your UX metrics are (time on-site, pages visited, return visitors, etc) the more visibility Google will give you in the SERPs.

For most SaaS, there aren't a few valuable keywords, there are hundreds of valuable pages representing thousands of keywords to drive a qualified audience.

This means after you learn how to create highly valuable content, the next step is to scale your publishing velocity to increase your footprint in the SERPs.

I've brought 4 websites from 0 to 100,000+ organics/month by focusing on creating more reader value than any other page of content Google could show for the keywords I want to rank for, and publishing hundreds of pages of content.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#264

Post by hvidgaard »

berkes wrote: post #213
hvidgaard wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main driver of consultancy is revenue. If you can survive without that, don't do it if it isn't core to your business, just like you wouldn't do in an established company anyway.

Yup. I've worked at a startup which, bootstrapped, was struggling with income flow. So off-and-on we, the programmers, would be outsourced to gigs that would generate some income. I've always found this the worst of all options and decided to never get into this with my own startup. It takes away the most valuable resources. It's a negative investment. It advertises the "panic-mode" you are in, to all stakeholders an…

From your example the consultancy work wasn't the problem, it was mismanagement of the of the startup.

The only alternative to consultancy should be to close. If you can let go of 1-2 unproductive employees, that should happen before taking on consultancy work. It should happen in any circumstance anyway, but taking on work to pay for other peoples wage and not getting value for that is a recipe for failure. If on the other hand it was high performance developers that really made progress on the core focus on the business it's probably okay.

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#265

Post by dinkleberg »

mittermayr wrote: post #239

I added a simple self-made affiliate system. It had two implementations. One allowed to purchase 10 or 20 "accounts" in bulk, resell for any price you want. And the other one meant that if two other people signed up for a free account, your account was moved up to the second level (basic, premium, pro). Once one of your referred accounts upgraded, then your account was moved up to the highest tier. I implemented that…

That’s interesting. Did you find both implementations were effective or was one more useful than the other?

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#266

Post by mrfusion »

fxtentacle wrote: post #150

"Commoditize your complement" I had hosting issues in many of my companies and consulting projects, running from "WTF is this AWS bill $10k???" to "WTF did our 10gbit/s download just kick Heroku offline?" But people can only appreciate the things I build for them if they are hosted well. So I took the obvious next step and purchased a small struggling hosting company. We then introduced nicer tooling that imitates th…

Neat! Why buy a hosting company vs setting up some servers?

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#268

Post by [deleted] »

rozenmd wrote: post #146
trhway wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building MVP and finding and tuning your market fit early - those Lean Startup ideas were popular here 10 years ago. The money flood of the recent years seems to allow that 'Build it and they will come' as well as just bulldozing your way into market.

Nah there's more nuance to it than that - it's more that customers expect a better featured solution before buying now. It's still an MVP, but the goalposts have shifted as more folks put up "drop your email here if you're interested in uber for dogs!" type pages.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#269

Post by holgersindbaek »

It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them.

One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .

Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

#270

Post by rmbyrro »

superasn wrote: post #259
mrborgen wrote: post #226

Charge for our product. I'm the founder of Scrimba.com, an interactive code-learning platform. We went almost two years from when we launched our very first free course until we launched our very first paid course. In the meanwhile, we planned the "perfect" business model and also pivoted to a Teams-based product for a while. Had I just dared to put up a pricing wall in front of our second course instead, we'd have g…

Sometimes the free product helps you get traction during the initial hard phase of your business when nobody knows your name. A lot of businesses do this as a growing strategy so don't fully discount the backlinks, leads, social media it gave you.

Freemium can work, but without VC it's really hard to sustain.

For bootstrappers and small ventures, I'd rather spend the free subsidy in ads. If you do it right, it just works.

I hate ads, but they work.

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