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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

#61

Post by earksiinni »

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 wrong ideas, but I can’t even get people to say “this is bad.” Just silence.

Seems easier when you’ve already built some clout and have a following. But also seems like I’m doing something wrong.

Do you have a specific example of how you did it? A link that you can share?

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

#62

Post by 1hakr »

Ostrogodsky wrote: post #52

The Power of Habit book suggest that if you want to be X you have to behave like X, what was your routine, not now, but in the period between starting from zero and reaching, say 4k MRR?

I love solving problems by building solutions. I Travel every now and then. Make a backlog of new ideas, keep pitching them to friends, work on my current one. One step at a time. I took things very slowly instead of rushing and getting into pressure.

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

#63

Post by djacob93 »

Hey Hari,

this might be a very newbie sort of question, but i genuinely want to know. I noticed you said, "I'm now spending just 10% of my time to maintain and fix bugs", but for your website https://visalist.io, how do you make sure the info displayed on your website regarding the different travel rules stays updated, because I guess these rules change very frequently now a days with covid

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

#65

Post by CTmystery »

1hakr wrote: post #25
orionblastar wrote: post #4

Any hints on how others can do this? I am on disability but if I can earn more with Microstartups it would be better.

There are four things need to have a potential microstartup. #1 Problem that has business potential and big enough #2 Audience who has that burning problem #3 Distribution channel to get the solution into users hands #4 Business model aka pricing fit for the Problem-Audience

Good list, thanks! For the projects in your post, how did you solve #3?

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

#67

Post by throw_me_up »

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…

Posting on Reddit or HN is fine, but unlikely to be successful if that is all you do. Cold calling/emailing/linkedin and posting on forums like HN continuously can both help. The latter only works if your solution genuinely solves someone's problem otherwise it will come off spammy. If your solution has obvious keywords and those keywords aren't too expensive, then Google ads can be relatively cheap method to get started too.

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

#68

Post by stanislavb »

catchmilk wrote: post #14

There has been a few posts recently on HN where people tell us about their success with side projects/small products that actually make them a decent living. It's inspiring to say the least. What's most attractive to me is the claim that the creators now spend little to no time on maintaining or fixing the products, and it just sits there and makes money. Is this actually a realistic representation? If I just think a…

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 under control. For example, bumping Ruby's version (or Rails) on one of the projects has an almost one-time cost, as long as I do that at the same time for all projects and document it.

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

#70

Post by blamazon »

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…

I’m not OP, but a strategy I’ve seen on Hacker News in the past might be called ‘clout hijacking’, wherein you get a momentary boost from someone who has an established audience already. A popular Twitter user, a YouTuber, a newsletter author, etc.

The frugal way is to make something they genuinely want to share to their audience, but, for some, you can also just pay them.

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