71–80 of 180 posts
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
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
- automatically scrapping websites - paying someone to do the work manually - who knows, there might be a database that someone else maintains, free or paid, and the website just displays the information
Or a mix of all that.
I have two questions:
(1) What learning pathway would you recommend a total beginner in programming to follow in order to develop their own microstartups or side projects?
(2) How do you come up with an idea for a given microstartup? Is it an organic process, or is it more about thinking actively of potential business plans? Do you have any advice regarding idea generation?
Thanks for the share. I'm curious if you have a favorite best-of-breed vendor stack you use? Do you try to optimize much on the tech or just do whatever works? I'm curious about several things specifically: who do you host with? SSL certs? CDN favorites? automation tool favorites? which hosts do you use to scale out?
i use cloudflare and host it on GCP, i dont use automation tools. I have my backend on GoLang and its pretty good, never had to scale my servers sofar except in the very beginning.
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.
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…
You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.
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…
If this person spends 10 % of their time just on maintenance and bug fixes, I'd assume they spend just as much on marketing, customer service, etc, meaning they "work" for 20 % of their time -- which is almost a full time job at that point.
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…
When 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 at least 50% got excited. I pick this idea to build. You can find problems in your day to day life. Travelling is another way of discovering new problems. Every problem is not worth building a solution for. Only the burning ones with business potential.
And how do you find these 'few people' to pitch to? You would have to find the right people with skin in the game, who are actually impacted by this right? How do you do that? For me, this has always been the part I could never crack.