Live data from Hacker News

How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

indiehackers.com

51–60 of 68 posts

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#51
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you successfully followed this plan? It seems to have a couple of holes in it. I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less. I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because…

I have. Built a multi-million dollar company this way.

Can you explain more? I'm interested in the full story.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#52
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming it's because you have a full-time job that takes the majority of your time: 1. Cut your expenses 2. Go to your boss, negotiate working part time 3. Use this time to start your side project 4. Make sure you don't use you company's equipment, make sure you don't work on your project during the time you're supposed to do your regular work.

Have you successfully followed this plan? It seems to have a couple of holes in it. I tried #2 at 3 separate jobs over 10 years, to no avail. Best I got was "does it have to be on the books?" i.e. I could call in sick or take random afternoons off and my manager would look the other way. If you are in demand, companies want you to work more, not less. I was, however, able to negotiate 80% time at my last job, because…

I also have done this. When companies reach out via recruiters, it never hurts to ask for what you want. Worst case, it's an easy screen; best case, you get what you want..

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#53
post #42

Seth Godin is a marketer and talented self-promoter. His job (which he does well) is to write pithy stuff that captures your attention. This is an agency problem with a lot of business advice. The people who really know how to launch a business on $1K are almost never the ones writing about how to do it.

This is exactly true. His super skill is self promoting and capturing attention. He has definitely done well at that. And sure it's possible that he could start a business on $1000 but quite honestly I am not sure that is even a good yardstick anyway. A good business could take much more to start and in business you wouldn't never arbitrarily limit yourself in that way anyway. Not sour grapes either. I started a busi…

What is it?

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#55
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I realised that my brain just doesn't work that way. It seems that for any meaningful, productive work I need at least hour and half. On smaller budget I can only do chores, i.e. pay an invoice or answer a trivial email. As if there was some weird rule stating "if you can't complete a thing in 15 mins, it will take you at least an hour" For harder work, I need 3 hours and quiet. 4 hours seem to be the m…

I think it's a matter of practice. I experimented with trying to do a long kata (the old Core Wars game) one pomodoro a day [0]. I didn't finish it, but I managed 66 pomodoros. I kept a detailed TODO list and I was really surprised that I could maintain a fairly decent pace. The link has Asciinema videos of every Pomodoro I did. It's painfully slow watching me type, but if you use the ">" key, you can speed up the vi…

You spent 30 hours on a coding problem? How big was this thing?

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#56

I really enjoyed this article. Any news aggregator where I can find similar articles? (HN for marketing?)

We publish a few marketing articles a week at Indie Hackers, and that rate will only increase as we attract more authors. I'd suggest either checking in with our site a few times a week or subscribing to our newsletter.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#57
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have. Built a multi-million dollar company this way.

Can you explain more? I'm interested in the full story.

I will definitely write something about it one day, I just think it's a little bit prematurely.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#58
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who has written two hugo-nominated sci-fi novels, but otherwise lives a typical 9-to-5 work life. I finally asked how he gets his writing done and learned that he wakes up at 5am each day. According to him, "the first thing you do every day is the most important thing".

But then you need to be extremely driven. There are very few things in life I would be willing to sacrifice sleeping a little bit longer for.

I started going to bed earlier so I could wake up earlier. Seems zero sum, but waking up early to focus on my top priority when it is quiet and I am fresh has been a huge gain.

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a matter of practice. I experimented with trying to do a long kata (the old Core Wars game) one pomodoro a day [0]. I didn't finish it, but I managed 66 pomodoros. I kept a detailed TODO list and I was really surprised that I could maintain a fairly decent pace. The link has Asciinema videos of every Pomodoro I did. It's painfully slow watching me type, but if you use the ">" key, you can speed up the vi…

You spent 30 hours on a coding problem? How big was this thing?

Hmmm... It's a couple of thousand lines of code I think. I forget. If you go to the link, the code is there (I run everything through Github). Each pomodoro is in it's own branch and I kept them around so that I could study the diffs later (haven't gotten around to it yet).

My original goal was to practice constant refactoring on a non-toy sized problem. Normal katas necessarily require you to work on toy problems. Because of this many interesting real world problems never come up. Frequently you can see people using techniques that aren't sustainable, for instance.

In the end, while I did get some value from that, by far the most interesting thing I discovered was that you can write code 1 pomodoro a day! If you take this as being about 1 weeks worth of work, I think my productivity is a bit lower than normal. However, it's not off by that much.

Even more interestingly, because I work in a timezone 9 hours separated from my colleagues I've always wanted to be able to hand over work. In other words, 2 people working on the same story. 1 person works during the night and the other person works during the day. They hand over the code in the morning and the evening. Using the TODO list techniques I was using in the kata (and making sure to end the day on a failing test), I've actually been able to accomplish this with like minded colleagues. It's actually quite incredible. Probably I should write a blog post about it ;-)

Re: How Seth Godin would launch a business on a $1,000 budget

#60
Always wondered why marketing gurus couldn't create any big companies. They write about people psychology, how to sell, how to create hypes and go viral plus they have the network of investors, CEO and brands.

And yet, they're not the people behind behemoths like Stripe, AirBnB, Uber - you name it - nor smaller cool companies out there.

Post reply on HN