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How Hacker News and FreshDesk led me to quit my job and launch my own startup
- ogezi 11y agoThis is very good to hear. Good luck.
- lenin1234 11y agoThank you so much. We are in the prototyping phase and will be launching the product very soon
- wingerlang 11y agoWhat is the difference between "startup" and, say, "company"?
- WellDressed 11y agoIt's my understanding that you're working on your "startup" until you've found a repeatable way to generate profits. Once that occurs you then begin working on your "company".
- kriro 11y agoI think there isn't an exact definition but generally a startup has theoretical hyper growth potential. So opening your own bakery would not qualify, envisioning a franchise chain of bakeries (or a social network etc.) would. [I don't particularly like this definition but that is the common understanding AFAIK]
- rorykoehler 11y agoStartups focus on high growth. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
- mundanevoice 11y agoThere are quite some broken links on your website (for instance careers link). You might want to fix them.
- lenin1234 11y agoYes. We are fixing those links right now. We will be changing that very shortly. Thank you so much for your feedback
- petewailes 11y agoYou might want to get some caching on that WP site. And decent hosting so it's not so horribly slow to use, under virtually no load. You might also want to explain what it is your software actually does. "Marketing Automation" is fairly broad in scope.
- travjones 11y agoI thought the exact same thing while loading up the page. However, I think you should change a few words in your post in an attempt to improve the tone. It reads kinda mean, but maybe that's just me, or maybe that's what's acceptable on HN these days? I'm not trying to be "PC police" or anything, but when we write comments about people's stuff we need to have a little empathy. I think this would make HN a better, friendlier place. Btw, I'm not trying to start a fight or argument. I just saw this as an opportunity to call something out that I've noticed on HN far too frequently.
- lenin1234 11y agoWe just moved on to the best hosting package available in Godaddy. But the site is still slow :( They want us to move to a VPS and we need to migrate our site to a better server soon
- juanrossi 11y agoI would recommend trying Webfaction (for a simpler option), DigitalOcean or AWS instead of GoDaddy
- navd 11y agoI really don't understand what the whole product is about - I don't think you communicated that very well - but never the less congrats and good luck!
- lenin1234 11y agoWe are still in the process of updating our site. Your point is duly noted. Our product actually automates repetitive marketing tasks like emails, social media posts like tweets / facebook etc... depending on leads's behavior. We are building something similar to marketo and pardot but more simple to use and very cost effective.
- lenin1234 11y agoCan someone suggest a better hosting platform for us? It don't think Godaddy is helping us scale. We are on the ultra premium hosting option and the site cannot even handle 100 users at the same time.
- abluecloud 11y agoHosting like godaddy tends to not differ in performance between their lowest and highest packages, they just differ in cheap resources such as space, bandwidth, "number of allowed email accounts" etc. Processor, memory consumption and maximum concurrent users don't change. Do you know anyone that is familiar with setting up VM's or managing servers? If so, hit them up and get them to set you up a linode vm (or whatever other provider you want) with nginx. If you don't, perhaps looking at getting a contractor to set you up.
- josephmx 11y agoDigitalOcean (and probably others) have a pre-prepared web server VM you can spin up
- codelitt 11y agoDigital Ocean hits the sweet spot for me with both pricing, availability, speed, and ease of getting up and running for a project like this. You can have a new server up and running in 30 seconds and locked down within 10. Bryan Kennedy has a great write up to help you get it set up and locked down: http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essential-security-for-linux-servers http://plusbryan.com/my-first-5-minutes-on-a-server-or-essen... We put our own twist on it which improves on his base (mostly security related): https://github.com/codelittinc/incubator-resources/blob/master/best_practices/servers.md https://github.com/codelittinc/incubator-resources/blob/mast...
- brianwawok 11y agoThis kind of worries me as a tech company, you have no devops guy?
- 11y ago
- lenomad 11y agoFirst of all, congratulations. Can you tell us more about why you chose Chennai? Does it have a good startup ecosystem?
- lenin1234 11y agoyeah... chennai has a better startup ecosystem compared to other metros. More than that, this is where I grew up. I was able to convince few of my college friends to join me and help me get this venture started.
- nindalf 11y agoGreat post! A minor correction - the name of the language is Go, not golang. Also, Chennai le enda area?
- chocks 11y agoNice post, congratulations and all the very best for your venture. I'm from Chennai too and at some point plan on starting a company there, it was nice to read through the planning, experience etc. Thanks for sharing!
- lenin1234 11y agoThank you so much.
- brobinson 11y agoWhen I click the "Beta Sign Up" button, it opens TWO modal overlays. I noticed this because it broke tab order when I was filling out the form. Happens in both Chrome and FF 41 on OSX. I was able to close one of the overlays and successfully submit the other one.
- lenin1234 11y agoThanks for noting it. We are fixing it right away :)
- gearoidoc 11y agoA little advice: state what you do in the first sentence. Lost my interest after one paragraph.
- lenin1234 11y agoSure. Thanks for the advice. I was trying to post my experience in launching a startup and not detailing into what the startup does. We are working on simplified marketing automation platform that does email and social media automation depending on customer's online behavior. Very similar to marketo and pardot but simplified and priced for small business
- lenin1234 11y agoI have a prototype of the product that you can check out at http://demo.maaxmarket.com/app http://demo.maaxmarket.com/app
- tmaly 11y agoI like the story, but I think you should explain upfront what the service is. Most people have a 8 second attention span, so you want to get the point of what your service does across in a fast way.
- lenin1234 11y agoSure thing. Point noted. We are working on marketing automation platform similar to marketo and pardot, but simplified for small businesses and at an affordable price point.
- elvis635 11y agoHow's your experience with legalzoom? I'm in the process of incorporate my side project, and as a not US person I'm looking on the best way to do it. From opening the company, the bank account (without having to take a plane and go to the US just for that), and also all the work that needs to be done during the year (taxes, accounting, and I guess many more)
- lenin1234 11y agoThe process has been fairly simple. You need to have atleast one person having SSN in order to incorporate the company. I can help you with more details on type of corporation, bank account and few other details. Please email me lenin@maaxmarket.com
- gyllenhaal 11y agoFirst of all My Hearty Felicitation and the logo seems to be much perfect. Wish you all for your future endeavors.
- lenin1234 11y agoThanks a trillion!
- superchink 11y agoIs there a mirror for this? Or has the URL changed? I am getting a 404…
- lenin1234 11y agoPlease allow 5 mins. we are hosting the server right now in Microsoft Azure. We will keep you posted when the site is up. Our site crashed due to huge volume of traffic
- lenin1234 11y agoThe site is now up and running. We have now migrated to Azure.
- lenin1234 11y agoThe site is now up and running. We have now migrated to Azure.