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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

#81

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 OP, but validating ideas is (relatively) easy. First, you figure out who will use your product. Then, you get a few of those people to use or discuss your product. You only need a few people, and they can be close acquaintances. After showing the product to a few people you imagine to use your product, you come to a determination of whether or not they liked your product. This part is a little subtle. You don't ask them "did you like my product?" Instead, you try to figure out if your product seems like something they were excited about, would continue to use, and, most importantly, tell others about.

Think about it like this. If you show the product to a handful of people that you imagine to be ideal users, and NONE of those people are excited enough about your business to share it with others, then what chance of success do you really have?

To give you a concrete example. I made an app that was a pretty revolutionary take on reading short stories. I had a few friends try it out, all of whom were passionate readers. They said they liked it, but I could see that none of them opened it again after their initial test. To me, that was all the signal I needed to pivot to something else.

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

#82
post #80
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> See if it's already being solved, if not I pitch the idea to few people. 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.

If you don't have first-hand contact with your potential users, and you don't know where they are, then you likely lack the empathy to build a great product for them.

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

#84
post #77

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 mean, even a full time (40 hour work week) job is 24 % of your time. 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.

Alternatively, the OP means he spends 10% of his work time on this, not 10% of the 8760 hours in a year on it.

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

#85

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

3 possibilities I can think of: - 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.

Or the information isn't up-to-date ... This is the kind of thing you always should check on an embassy or other government page.

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

#86
post #79

Got blocked by an adblocker blocker. Sometimes I wish sites could advertise their requirement to see ads so you can avoid opening links if you don't want to.

If companies made their ads informative/interesting in some way instead of pure propaganda mind poo with dumb jingles, puns and foolish attempts to sound humorous perhaps I wouldn’t black hole them all so much with Adblock and pihole

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

#87

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 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 First Wife. The site just had a form you filled out to speak to a mortgage advisor. When it launched in like 2007 I got about $400 for each time the form was completed. (It was less after the Great Recession)

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.

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

#89

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…

You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done. Let go of perfection and only do the necessary, then you can realize maintainance with very little time investment. This obviously does not work if you feel like all your code's libraries must always be on the newest version because simply keeping several projects' code running with the latest thing is quite a bit of work. I have a profit…

> You need to distinguish between what _can_ be done and what _needs_ to be done.

This is a very insightful comment. For my last project, I spent a long time doing the opposite of this. A good lesson to learn.

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

#90
post #79

Got blocked by an adblocker blocker. Sometimes I wish sites could advertise their requirement to see ads so you can avoid opening links if you don't want to.

uBlock Origin's element picker (not zapper - that's temporary) is your friend here. Works to get rid of basic overlays.
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