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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

#171

Post by throwawayvibes »

melenaboija wrote: post #125
bArray wrote: post #120

Related: "Tell HN: My Microstartups make $500/day while I'm sleeping" (this): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29790964 "AMA: I make $100K+ ARR from my microstartups" (3 months ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28561132 "Show HN: I passed up an opportunity to make $200K from my microstartup" (2020): https://twitter.com/1HaKr/status/1301142901510995969 "Show HN: My Indie Hacker goal - Earn $100 a day to k…

Also seeing the title and the upvotes tells this is one of the topics that matters to the HN community, simply how to make money. Not saying it is bad, just an observation.

Have you never written a HN upvote bot to push your submissions up? It's how it goes.

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

#172

Post by cloverich »

TOGoS wrote: post #166
cloverich wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Q: I am having trouble understanding why people think / do X A: You should talk to people who think / do X and ask them why they think / do X. Until you do so, you lack sufficient empathy to address their issues / change their behavior.

Its good feedback that it is worded in a way that has ambiguous meanings, one of which (you are a sociopath) is an unwelcome character judgement. But IMHO the charitable interpretation is perfectly practical and important feedback: Don't build products for users you can't talk to and learn from.

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

#173

Post by kingcharles »

frontman1988 wrote: post #134
kingcharles wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year. The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and Fi…

You made 13 mils and yet didn't have money to pay bail and are now broke? Your comment history doesn't seem to add up.

The site made $13m. I stated in my comment above that I was only making about $150,000. Which I frittered away on bullshit toys. I had no savings at all.

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

#174

Post by kingcharles »

xuki wrote: post #98
kingcharles wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year. The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and Fi…

> The other site was a private TV torrent tracker that closed in 2013 due to legal pressures. Barely touched the code in 7 years. It made a total of over $13m. I was under the impression that most private trackers run without a profit, at least the reputable ones. Are you telling me PTP/BTN/HDB sysops are loaded?

I would guess so. It might be harder to take payments now than it was then, though, which would add friction and lower your revenues. I bet hosting is cheaper now, though.

Back then we took credit cards with PayPal and PayPal were on our side. We had our own personal account manager because we were moving so much money. PayPal had a login for the site and they would go in every few weeks and make sure we weren't doing anything too shady. What would happen is that every couple of months our competitors would claim we were actually selling child porn, and PayPal would be forced to immediately close our account while they investigated. I guess this is a good technique to close down any small business reliant on a merchant account.

We never intended to make money at first. We just wanted to cover the hosting bills and asked for donations. It's just that by offering upload credit as an incentive to donate, we created a market. And the donations far outweighed the costs over the long run. The total was probably more than $13m because I only queried the SQL data and I'm not sure we logged the donations at first.

Also, we were a very niche TV tracker, so we wouldn't have anywhere near the user base some of those other sites have.

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

#175

Post by kingcharles »

agopaul wrote: post #130
kingcharles wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year. The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and Fi…

That is impressive. How much time do you think you spent on non-coding activities? I imagine that running a torrent tracker probably took a good chunk of your time.

Really? Practically zero. We would just promote users to be staff and let them get on with it. When we had enough complaints against a staff member (they would all become Hitler eventually), then we would fire them and upgrade another member.

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

#176

Post by kingcharles »

darthrupert wrote: post #146
kingcharles wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made a fortune off two web sites that sat there and basically did their thing. I essentially did about an hour's work a week for 5 years and took home about $150,000 a year. The first was a mortgage web site. I bought a domain for $6000 that matched a top mortgage search term. The front page of the site scraped the latest mortgage rates, and the rest of the site was well-written mortgage advice written by me and Fi…

> 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.

The income was taxable.

Yes, our site was ethically wrong, but I'll add that the studio holding the copyright to most of the items on our site used our site to download their own material and it was brought up in board meetings. The studio staff would occasionally send me PMs on the tracker when we got something that was pre-release and ask us to take it down until it had aired on TV.

After we closed down the studio borrowed the name of our site and set up their own legal streaming service, finally.

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

#177

Post by YounesDz »

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 the OP.

You can use gummysearch.com and launch a product that has already a customer base looking for using it.

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

#178

Post by daniel1969 »

1hakr wrote: post #59
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?

Yes there were a few. But I try to always keep the cost of failure small. This is how I try to be frugal. * I see a potential problem, see if I can solve it. See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. If atleast 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build * I set a goal on day 1 on what the microstartup should achieve once its launched. * I try to take no more than 4 weeks to build it. *…

To which specific groups you post on LinkedIn, Facebook and Reddit?
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