Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week • Hacker News Board

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#41

Post by czue » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 11:14 AM UTC

mr-wendel wrote: post #40

I've developed, maintained, and extended web platforms that all could benefit from what Pegasus seems to do. These platforms have driven up into the million-per-month range of sales for consumer (and team!) based products. The vast majority of the platforms are trash, yet power jaw-dropping amounts of sales and usage. I think it perfectly reasonable that Pegasus has all the underpinnings these kind of platforms would…

I would love to make Pegasus a hosted platform, and it's certainly been at the end of the giant tunnel of work ahead of me in terms of the long-term potential I see.

The most concise answer as to why I haven't done it is that I'm just one person, and I'm not smart enough to have figured out how to do it yet in the ~2 years I've been working on Pegasus.

To me the huge difference between a code starter kit like Pegasus, versus, e.g. Shopify, Webflow, or any other hosted no/low-code product is that at the end of the day you end up with a codebase that is maintained by developers in a totally standard framework and language that they can do anything with. No code / low code tools are inherently difficult because they have to put in place this firewall/abstraction layer that hinders your ability to customize. The same thing that makes them great for simple things makes them bad for difficult things.

So anyway, I think a hosted version of Pegasus should still give the power of anything you want to do with a Python/Django application, and I'm sure that's possible to do in a hosted way, but I find the prospect of building such a thing in a scalable, secure way quite intimidating.

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#42

Post by zweicoder » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

czue wrote: post #2

Hey HN. Author here. I wrote this up because I very hesitant to run a black friday sale for my product and was blown away by how much it impacted the business. Hopefully sharing the story (and lessons learned) might encourage others who are worried about the "ickiness" of sales to try them out. Also happy to answer any questions anyone has.

Thanks for the inspiring post!

I have a slightly unrelated question on your product itself. I'm curious how the model of SaaS Pegasus, where the source code is the core product, works?

Is it possible for someone to just duplicate the same source code for multiple sites, for example, or share the code to their friends?

Re: Lessons from Running a Sale That Earned 3 Month's Profit in a Week

#43

Post by mr-wendel » Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 4:24 PM UTC

czue wrote: post #41

mr-wendel wrote: post #40

I've developed, maintained, and extended web platforms that all could benefit from what Pegasus seems to do. These platforms have driven up into the million-per-month range of sales for consumer (and team!) based products. The vast majority of the platforms are trash, yet power jaw-dropping amounts of sales and usage. I think it perfectly reasonable that Pegasus has all the underpinnings these kind of platforms would…

I would love to make Pegasus a hosted platform, and it's certainly been at the end of the giant tunnel of work ahead of me in terms of the long-term potential I see. The most concise answer as to why I haven't done it is that I'm just one person, and I'm not smart enough to have figured out how to do it yet in the ~2 years I've been working on Pegasus. To me the huge difference between a code starter kit like Pegasus…

My hat off to you, all the same. I hope you find a way to pull it off. What you've already produced is impressive.

Cheers for the great response to this and other comments!