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I made $100K from a dick joke

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Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#141

Post by rvba »

petesergeant wrote: post #109
tiffanyh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone shares your rigor to not buying from strangers. Pieter Levels is a one-person show that has started multiple businesses with just a single page & a Stripe Checkout earning millions per year and I don’t believe he’s incorporated. https://x.com/levelsio

> and I don’t believe he’s incorporated Why would you believe that? He was incorporated in Singapore last I spoke to him. Looking back 8 years ago, to last time I bought something from him, it's from an NL company with a VAT number.

A sole proprietorship probably needs to register for VAT in EU countries after exceeding some yearly sales threshhold.

Lots of small companies (hairdressers, small shops) were not really incorporated.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#142

Post by asddubs »

nosioptar wrote: post #116
Beijinger wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found ebay more reliable, interesting and smoother than Amazon. Amazon screwed me over for 40 USD now they are nagging that I should sign up for "Prime" (I ordered a bunch of stuff, maybe 800 USD. They decided the order is fraudulent, and canceled it, without ever telling me. When I moved into my new place, there was nothing. No sheets, no nothing from Amazon. That this order was "canceled" without any email seemed…

Last time I ordered from amazon, I repeatedly declined prime. My bank called me the next day about a suspicious charge for a year of prime. I had to cancel my card and get a new one. The banker told me they'd had dozens of similar problems where amazon was charging people for stuff they never ordered. When I got the package a few days later, the $150+ set of cello strings I ordered, sold and shipped by amazon, were c…

amazon is so bad about counterfeits and people listing products from different brands as the same article

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#143

Post by donatj »

A fair number of years ago now, I had a business idea and bought a domain. Within a couple hours I had a person email me offering me $250 for the domain. I countered with $2,000 saying I would have to rebrand. I'd really done literally nothing but buy the domain at that point, but I wasn't interested in selling and it was a "Go Away" price. They accepted.

Used a well known Escrow site. Took a couple days to settle. Quickest $2,000 I ever made. I found out later they were some crypto company with a similar name. They bought it from me just to squat. They still squat it.

I probably could have made way more if I had pushed the issue, oh well.

Never really built much more than a proof of concept for my business idea and never found another domain I liked enough to buy for it.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#144

Post by asddubs »

potato3732842 wrote: post #98
toast0 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, eBay has a solid niche of older items, and they tried to break into the buy new items market too, but the hassles of selling mean for the most part only scalpers sell new items on eBay. Although there's some niches where it's not unusual: new auto parts seem common, I guess it's easier for a dealer parts counter to run an eBay store than otherwise.

I find that for a lot of "cheap junk from China" gets cheaper when you eBay it directly from China and cut out the cost of the Amazon middle man. Recently I bought a chainsaw tool on eBay from China as I didn't want to buy a 6-pack for $10. I was able to buy a couple for about $0.20 more per unit. Sure, higher unit price and they'll be here slower but it's several $6ish saved.

ebay seems relatively competitive with aliexpress, sometimes even cheaper. amazon everything seems to cost much more

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#146

Post by grodriguez100 »

beAbU wrote: post #136
geuis wrote: post #127

I really hate Imgur these days. It's yet another site that treats landscape mode as some alien thing that no one uses. More importantly, whoever bought them is so focused on "showing the next thing" that the wrong swipe in the wrong area just obliterated whatever you're looking at or trying to read. It's just a giant bag of dicks in terms of poor interface programming and testing. Seriously wish the author published…

If I recall correctly Imgur was initially the de-facto image host for Reddit, if you wanted to post an image on Reddit, you had to post it on Imgur and share the link. It had a great interface for that, super easy, and you could get links that go straight to the image, no in-between bullshit. I'm not sure how they made money though. And I think there was some drama between Imgur and Reddit, with Reddit going off doin…

Also the default image host for stackoverflow.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#147

Post by greg_V »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #112
probably_wrong wrote: post #21

I don't have a great opinion of marketing in general and therefore I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". Therefore I feel vindicated when a moderately-upvoted post says the quiet part out loud, namely, "Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it bec…

>I'm often unconvinced with arguments like "marketing is about fulfilling a customer's needs" or "adding efficiency to the market". This product is actually an ideal case for marketing, because most people weren't aware that a product like this existed. The best ads notify you about something you genuinely want to buy. What you're really complaining about is astroturfing , not marketing. The more dubious sort of mark…

That's a fairly accurate assessment of marketing theory. Rory Sutherland's Alchemy talks about this in more depth.

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#148

Post by gklitz »

AndyKelley wrote: post #115

> Yeah, we made a fake post and just lied to everyone on the internet. I'm not sorry, because not only was it popular - it became the top post of the day. this is why we need better societal guardrails in place against lies... people will just do this kind of crap otherwise. I mean look at politics right now, it's a complete disaster in terms of information accuracy. lies are too powerful to be (un)regulated by the f…

You mean ban advertisement?

Re: I made $100K from a dick joke

#149

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

globular-toast wrote: post #138
varsketiz wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those in europe - check out vinted.com

Vinted seems popular amongst people who never used eBay for buying and selling commodities like clothes. Is it any good for selling higher value specialist stuff like electronics, musical instruments etc?

in my experience it's good for buying them (i.e. people not knowing items will go for multiples of what they've listed on ebay)
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