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Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

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Re: Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

#161

Post by IndexPointer »

earksiinni wrote: post #61

You wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no? I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wr…

Put ads before you have a product. Send people to a fake landing page when they click, just to see if there's interest at all.

Re: Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

#163

Post by c_o_n_v_e_x »

Glench wrote: post #148
c_o_n_v_e_x wrote: post #57

Do you have a process for ideating new microstartups? Or are your microstartups based on problems you experience in your day to day life?

You might find this post from IndieHackers creator Courtland Allen helpful: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

This is great! Thanks!

Re: Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

#164

Post by teaearlgraycold »

chii wrote: post #24
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also very curious about this. I went to his websites with the goal of finding out how I could give him money. It was incredibly difficult for Visa List - and all I got to was a buymeacoffee page that couldn't possibly be the only source of income. If OP is making money off of these from users then they could make way more by having an obvious CTA in the nav to give him money.

the visalist page has a popup asking users to either re-enable ads, or subscribe (which i presume might be paid? didn't look further).

Ah, I do have ad block that might have blocked ads and the pop up. Didn't see any indication of a subscription system.

Re: Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

#165

Post by kirso »

halpert wrote: post #81
earksiinni wrote: post #61

You wrote elsewhere that you validate within the first four weeks. How exactly do you do that? What if you have no Twitter following or very little social media presence? How can you get people to listen to you and say yes/no? I’ve tried micro startups in the past. I build a landing page, get Google AdWords, maybe put out a post on Reddit or HN, and then…nothing. No signups, no comments. Maybe I’ve just picked the wr…

Not OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don't a…

If it would have been easy, we would probably have millions of micro-startup founders out there.

I have been doing customer discovery professionally for over 10 years as a sales person and PM and there is no 1 method or silver bullet to predict whether the product will be successful.

Talking to acquaintances is terrible, because they are biased (see MOM test). They will tell you all kind of stories, but ultimately what matters is:

Are they going to pay?

Excitement has nothing to do with revenue which in the end is the blood of a business.

To extend this - there is a patter now on Twitter where indie devs are selling to their twitter friends, but is it a viable business beyond that? I don't know.

What I do know is that the only way to validate a product is to get paid and the market will tell you the truth.

Re: Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

#166

Post by TOGoS »

cloverich wrote: post #153
TOGoS wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone scrolling by and getting sucker punched by halpert here, I'd like you to know that not being surrounded by people whose problems can be solved with software startups doesn't mean you 'lack empathy'.

I think boffinism's comment below hits it, but to also add -- its important to try and find a charitable interpretation of comments when possible. Here I think empathy was meant literally as understanding other people's needs and points of view. If you don't know people with some problem directly, and also don't know how to find them -- how sure are you that the problem you are solving is real and in need of a practi…

Even in the most charitable sense, it's still a worse-than-useless comment.

Q: I am having trouble with X; do you have any tips?

A: You are bad at X (but rephrased to make it sound like a character judgement).

Re: Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

#167

Post by accountofme »

MrDresden wrote: post #152
Jugurtha wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they passing around TPS reports without paperclips ?

From what I hear they used to just staple them together, what with the lack of paperclips. But now the stapler seems to have gone missing. Its quite the pickle.

those red swinglines were on the chopping block for quite some time.

Re: Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

#168

Post by darthrupert »

twox2 wrote: post #160
darthrupert wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> private TV torrent tracker Cool, I used to run a service where I break into peoples' homes, take everything I can carry and sell them on. With this business, I was able to make $35 million in 2014. Non-taxable income, obviously.

Great analogy! Oh wait, it's not and your comment offers nothing of substance to the conversation.

If you want a deeper point, here it is: are all "microstartups" sleazy, almost illegal scams that generally make the world a worse place? Based on this thread, it seems so.

Datamining, ad networks, peddling, piracy.

Re: Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping

#169

Post by sekl »

cpursley wrote: post #117
stanislavb wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's kind of possible when you use a solid framework and a homogeneous tech stack. For example, I run a few relatively big projects (millions of page-views per month), and I've achieved some solid automation through Ansible - both provisioning and deployments. The primary tech is Ruby on Rails + Postgres, and it's relatively easy to maintain current. As long as I keep all the projects up to date, things are u…

Postgres is nearly always the right choice. But I've had major breaking changes in the Ruby ecosystem really bite me in the past.

I’m a solo dev running a few large, profitable websites, and the one running Rails has simply not been feasible to update recently with all the breakage it brings. Especially Webpacker is a major pain and I regret going down that path. Active storage has been another (lesser) pain point.
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