[dead]
I am done. I give up
801–810 of 1001 posts
Re: I am done. I give up
#802Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congratulations (I mean it. No /s). I understand that to mean that your income was enough to keep (at least) both of you fed, housed and clothed. Maybe you also had some savings/family support to use as a Kickstarter for her business and possibly to help pay the bills but maybe you didn't. If both of you had to work 40+ hours a week and there is still too much month left at the end of the money, it's really hard to a…
Yea. I was a programmer working for a stable telecom company at the time. We didn't have kids yet and lived in a low cost of living area where it was possible to live off of my income. It wasn't a huge sum of money by any stretch, but it was enough while we limited expenses. There were a lot of trials. We were close to having to file for bankruptcy 6 different times during a particularly difficult 2 year stretch. Our…
Thank you for going into detail.
I appreciate the insight.
Re: I am done. I give up
#803Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just looked at his Twitter. Seems like he's gone off the deep end and is now grifting like Alex Jones. Posts about Fauci, woke liberals, FBI + KGB working in cahoots....pathetic, really.
Pathetic to have different political opinions? Is that where some of us has landed. Anyone speaking against my own views are pathetic worthless and worthy of scorn? Then you wonder why society has divided into culture wars and why so much hate exists in the world.
It’s one thing to have viewpoints, there are a lot of traditionally conservative ideals that have value, but, like many things, become a nightmare scenario when taken to the extreme.
I think the “pathetic” comment is aimed at the fact that if you’re running with the Alex Jones camp, you’re not really on planet earth anymore.
Re: I am done. I give up
#804Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm. Lived a very frugal early retirement lifestyle in Austria because it was practically impossible to build wealth (high taxes, comparatively very low tech salaries, little entrepreneurial support/incentives). Moving to the US I was able to 5-6x my income (from what I could have realistically made) , while reducing my tax burden by 15 percentage points, and so I've been happily living a workaholics' lifesty…
> (work for almost 2 decades as an engineer just so you can afford the average one family home - what a joke!) I really don't understand this take. Why so many engineers feel entitled to have more than the average working Joe? If you are employed, our work is not risky, doesn't consume all your energy or your time, and so on. I fully understand the _economics_ behind our salaries, but I am more than happy to give 45%…
> Why so many engineers feel entitled to have more than the average working Joe ?
Above average investments (time , effort & money) have a natural feeling of entitlement for above average returns.
Cost of getting an engineering degree of value is nowhere near any "average" degree.
Recent years have driven the median cost up and the median returns down. Hence the laments about "college is not worth it"
Re: I am done. I give up
#805Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody, at least in the US system, gets very wealthy just by working hard. At the very least, you have to start out with wealth or a strong support system (which is down to luck in your input conditions), or get fantastically lucky in your first(-ish) attempt at starting something. Then, if you want to make the kind of money that, say, Bezos or Musk makes, you have to make the kinds of decisions that many of us simpl…
Nobody anywhere gets very wealthy just by working hard. Otherwise the world would be filled with millionaire janitors. > if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil. If you're using your business to create value for millions of people, you are in fact improving millions of…
If you use your business to make life easier for millions of people, that's good.
If you take enough profit to make billions of dollars for yourself, that's bad.
Because no one person (or family) can ever realize anything resembling a proportionate benefit from that money, all you're doing is raising your dollar-denominated high score, at the expense of all the other people you could be helping more if you invested that money back in your business, or paid it in taxes, or invested in other local businesses, or any of a thousand other ways to make it work for the world instead of just being a selfish Number Go Up for you.
Re: I am done. I give up
#806I am done as well. Reading the comments here and being downvoted for saying things that are true, the internet is just the worst and social media (yes, HN is social media) is just a bunch of bullies and mob censorship.
I love that wakana's post has this many comments, and it is because it strikes a nerve of truth here at HN. That you all are suckers or just want to be the next authoritarian boss with a yacht.
So long suckers.
Re: I am done. I give up
#807Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. It's the "developers trying to sell products to other developers" conundrum. You know the development workflow. You came up with a great tool to increase productivity for developers. You set a low price of $50. And yet no one is going to buy it because "lol I could do this in a weekend". Developers are cheap bastards (I'm still fighting over whether I should shell our $99 for Panic's Nova editor or not - even t…
I actually totally disagree with this. Developer tools are probably one of the easier segments to tackle because technical people 1) like trying new things and 2) often have company credit cards that don’t have to justify expenses.
Uh......
Dev tools is one of the hardest segments to tackle.
Developers are notoriously cheap and every one of your developer-customers (falsely) assumes they could build a better version of your product over the weekend.
Developers will always compare your fully-featured, supported product to a shitbag OSS "free" alternative they found on GitHub (abandoned by some dude who tried to build a clone to a real product over the weekend and then discovered that is actually not possible...)
Developers will take great pains to overstate the case for building internal tools as it gives them more control and embededness in an organization.
Selling to developers is not for the faint of heart -- and ironically, takes MORE* sales skill than, say, selling marketing automation tools to marketers. No sales/marketer will say to you on a sales call:
"You know, I could build that if I wanted to...."
First-time entrepreneurs who happen to be developers often attack devtools because that is all they know.
*This is a weird self-esteem insecurity tic.
Re: I am done. I give up
#808Been in your shoes, man. But according to smartest marketers (like Garry Halbert), we programmers are doing it backwards. Because when all you have is a hammer (or programming skills), then everything looks like a nail.
According to Gary Halbert, you first have to find a starving market. And there are three things people are starving for -- health, wealth and relationships. It's what they crave. It's what keeps them up at night. Notice, I did not say that they are starving for software of any kind. Unless this software helps them make money. For example, there's some software that generates $750/month per month per user. It's called Overflow. Why? because it generates more revenue for each of those clients. CBSplit is another one. It helps generate wealth to it's clients. Health supplements market is exploding. Golf buyers are so passionate, they'll spend thousands just to get an edge.
So in short -- we programmers suck as marketers. And until we unsuck ourselves, we will feel like giving up. Now I'm going to give you the legends you can learn from - Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Michael Masterson, Dan Kennedy. They wrote books they've learned from even bigger masters.
The sad fact is - your software or your product doesn't matter. Only your marketing does.
Re: I am done. I give up
#809This might sound a bit assholish, but I'm writing this to hopefully help others spot a crucial mistake: Did you have anyone on your team with actual skill in sales or marketing? Because from your post it seems you tried the same channels that everyone else does (writing blog, engaging on Twitter, setting up ProductHunt launch) without any specific strategy for how to succeed. And this stuff is hard! There's a reason…
Maybe a dumb question, but where do you find people who are skilled in sales/marketing like this? I'm learning this lesson the hard way right now.
Someone skilled at selling your product for a commission, would be stellar at selling their most valuable product - themselves.
Sales and marketing is about reach and incentives. Outright lying works against you. Choosing to only tell the truth keeps you right where you are, on the slippery slope of sunk cost.
Folks in the sales and marketing domain come across real crafty; its a side-effect. Cz you deal with people (i.e. emotions, psychology and incentives). People who get played, know somethings up. Once you figure out how the sales game works, then its about trial and error to find a suitable market, using well known techniques and experimenting with new tools, growing that network. It is an art, learned slowly, with expensive mistakes.
There's also that steep cost attached to even play around with serious tools, effective strategies are not scalable, consume labor and time, require frequent pivots without much evidence, effects are only visible at a high macro level without much granularity. A lot of it works against an engineering mindset. And for a malicious actor, sales is a good breeding ground.
I recall the exact moment where the doors to this rabbit hole opened up for me - a comment from a friend of mine, "Its amazing how Gordon Ramsey has people lining up at his restaurant on opening day"
Re: I am done. I give up
#810Listen to Nassim Taleb on success. If you want maximize your chance at success, you need to do something non-scalable. The number of successful barbers is astounding, the number of successful tech startup founders is vanishing, and half of the founders have given away much of their equity before even making money.
Focus on your mental health. Life is hard. Treat the people you care about well because they're really what you have in life.