20 ms·

I got my first $50/mo customer

236 points by Malfunction92 6y ago

emagdnim2100 6y ago
Please left align this text!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- xwdv 6y ago
  Drop into the chrome dev console, go into the source and change the alignment it takes a second. Don’t need to tolerate ridiculous formatting.
- DVassallo 6y ago
  Please don’t left align this text because some stranger on HN told you so.
  - ccmcarey 6y ago
    When that stranger is giving good advice, however .. There's a reason large bodies of text are left aligned and not center aligned.
- MrGilbert 6y ago
  When switching to "Reader Mode" in your favourite browser, the text will be left aligned. :)
- purerandomness 6y ago
  Firefox Reader Mode saves the day, again
- julianlam 6y ago
  I couldn't get through the blog post. Here's why. Nearly every thought is a separate paragraph. Throw in center alignment and it's enough to drive me batty. Decent blog post content, though.
  - sixhobbits 6y ago
    Do you know why? Let me let you in on a secret. People LIKE reading text formatted like this. No, they LOVE IT. It's so easy to read. So seductive. So .... enticing Every line like honey. So much sugar. It makes you want more And it's easy to write. Easy to read. Always feels like something is coming. Just. One. More. Line.
    - misterhtmlcss 6y ago
      In my mobile device it's just irritating how much padding he has. It's basically 3 words at a time. I'd need a phablet to get through this piece even though it's enjoyable righting.
smoyer 6y ago
This article would be WAY better in paragraphs that each contained one of the sub-themes of the article as a whole. He starts by talking about tweeting and it looks and feels like the article was written as tweets too.
- DHPersonal 6y ago
  His Twitter posts are formatted in a similar way, so I think it's just his writing style. https://twitter.com/alexsideris_ https://twitter.com/alexsideris_
- drx 6y ago
  I kinda liked it, it got me to read the article. Nothing wrong with adding some personal style to your writing. OP, congrats on hitting your MRR goal!
swyx 6y ago
well said about the goals. goals make you feel like a failure if you don't meet them, and leave you wanting when you do, and worst of all, don't tell you how to reach them! Systems over goals every time. regarding your luck, you may be aware of the 4 kinds of luck (https://medium.com/@ameet/the-four-kinds-of-luck-ea729970d71d https://medium.com/@ameet/the-four-kinds-of-luck-ea729970d71...) - by putting your reps in, you exposed yourself to type 2 luck, luck that just happens randomly, but it happens because you did something. good for you!
michaelbuckbee 6y ago
This is going to sound weird but there's this great interview with Seinfeld and Obama where they talk about the "answer" to "why do you keep doing this stuff when you're so successful and have 'made it'"? Which I think is the real question OP is asking: "Why if I've hit this goal do I keep doing this? Why does it feel so unsatisfying?" I've linked to the spot in the interview but the answer is to really enjoy the work and the process. I feel this myself (as someone with a decent sized SAAS), that I still really enjoy helping people, answering support emails, getting on calls with them. It feels more satisfying than arbitrary revenue goals. https://youtu.be/UM-Q_zpuJGU?t=884 https://youtu.be/UM-Q_zpuJGU?t=884
- Reedx 6y ago
  Yeah, and the two are linked. Seinfeld's focus on the process and craft meant he got exceptionally good at it. The money was a byproduct, not the goal. The motivation was intrinsic and about improving his craft. To which there is no end. So he continues. This discussion with Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Louis CK and Ricky Gervais is worth watching for anyone interested in that aspect of comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY6BGcx37k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY6BGcx37k
  - hckr_news 6y ago
    This talk always reminds me of this, https://youtu.be/il1sgQUtYs8 https://youtu.be/il1sgQUtYs8
  - maest 6y ago
    Be wary of survivorship bias. Not everyone that focuses on the process makes lots of money. However, some of the people that make lots of money do it as a byproduct of focusing on the process. We're all familiar with the stereotype of the dev who's obsessed with polishing their code that nobody is using.
- therealdrag0 6y ago
  Weird Q: Do their heads look too big for their bodies in these shots to anyone else? Is it camera work? Super slimming suits?
ryanwaggoner 6y ago
I like this. I like the writing style, I like the humility and the openness, and I like the recognition that chasing goals is ultimately an exercise in futility. You spend almost all your time unhappy because you're not yet at your goal, and then as soon as you achieve it, you're unhappy because you're not at the next arbitrary goal. It's madness, but it's basically the way almost all of us live. I've been spending more time meditating and reading about mindfulness recently, and it's helped me become aware of just how infrequently I'm truly happy and present. I can be in the most idyllic setting and situation, and part of my brain is wondering how I can improve it, or what I can do to feel that way all the time, etc. Why is it so difficult to turn off the past- and future-oriented parts of my brain and just be? To just enjoy this?
- dhuin 6y ago
  Pretty much the human condition. Seneca was writing about it in the first century, Buddhists were talking about it from the inception of their religion.
  - ryanwaggoner 6y ago
    What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless. A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. From Ecclesiastes, one of the few parts of the Christian scriptures that still interests me.
- julianeon 6y ago
  I was thinking I like the blog format, actually: more like Tweets than like 'My Manifesto About Software, Life, the Universe, and Everything: Volume I of MDXXIII.' It just has an inherent digestibility and modesty that makes it really appealing. Also it makes me think I may try this tweet-style writing also, and modify my CSS to look more like his, because I like it a lot.
DVassallo 6y ago
I came to a simple realization: Only intrinsic motivation lasts. Achieving external rewards and arbitrary goals feels nice for a while, but it always wears off quickly. Now I don’t have goals anymore. My idea of personal growth is to keep rearranging my life so that I'm doing fewer things I'd rather not be doing. No goals. Just anti-goals.
- jlevers 6y ago
  Is it not possible to be intrinsically motivated to achieve your goals? I get what you're saying, but I feel like there's a middle ground.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    Then motivation is intrinsic, what remains outside is a measurement tool you use.
- mattbuilds 6y ago
  In this video by Brandon Sanderson [0] he talks a little bit about goals and I follow something similar. At one point he talks about setting goals that are actually in your control. So you wouldn't set a goal like "become a famous author" (although he says that would be nice). Instead you set something you can control like "get better with each book you write". Then you break those goals down into tasks. I think he says something like "if I was 100 and looked back and wrote 100 unpublished novels, would I be happy with that?". I think using something like that as a guide for setting goals is good because it keeps you pointed in the right direction and makes the goals things you can actually control. [0] https://youtu.be/oH9sJrAVeC0 https://youtu.be/oH9sJrAVeC0
  - thisisbrians 6y ago
    I think "be a famous author" is a goal, and "get better with each book" is a strategy. In my view: the goal is a target, and the strategy is an action in attempt of reaching it.
ericmcer 6y ago
I am always reminded of David Foster Wallace who wrote a successful novel while still in his early twenties, and before even finishing his MFA. He had to recalibrate his entire life expectation wise when he achieved his goal in his 20s and found it empty. Where do you go when you are just 'starting out' in life but have already grabbed this thing that was supposed to complete you, and it doesn't change anything.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  As much as I enjoy DFW's way with words (and I do mean that in a complimentary manner), I think his approach mostly serves as a warning as to what can happen when you get too deeply stuck in your own head with no pressure release valve to viewpoints other than your own.
dirtydroog 6y ago
Is this an ad for a company masquerading as a story about how marketing finally worked for said company?
encoderer 6y ago
There is sentiment that goals are bullshit and somewhat destructive. My take is, it comes down to setting the right goals. I've bootstrapped a moderately successful SaaS and have enjoyed many revenue milestones along the way but those were milestones not goals. The goals are lifestyle based. Things like "I want to never have another traditional job" or "I want to be debt free" are much more powerful than "I want to hit $2000 MRR". That said, look, building and selling things is amazing and I suggest everybody do it. If you only have a little time, build small things and sell them cheaply. But there is a self empowerment that comes from creating your own income that has an impact far beyond the actual dollars themselves. Congrats Alex, good goal or not, it's a notable achievement.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  > there is a self empowerment that comes from creating your own income This is something that's rarely said (or snidely dismissed as "lifestyle business") but is so very important. Realizing that you are not completely reliant on someone to employ you, that you can derive income from multiple streams and then actually seeing it happen is an incredible feeling.
  - close04 6y ago
    > you are not completely reliant on someone to employ you I don't think that's where the feeling of empowerment comes from. Instead of doing a good job to impress your boss you do a good job to impress your customers. That feeling, I believe, comes from the fact that generating your own revenue stream makes you a "one man team". You pulled all the right strings, you pushed the right buttons, you spoke to the all right people. You took your idea from back of the napkin drawing to actual functioning and successful business. You don't get to do that as an employee.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      I'll agree that what I wrote was essentially the executive summary. I think we're saying the same thing in different ways.
ozim 6y ago
He was not powerless, he was putting work for 2 years until he got lucky. People hope they will stick in week or two into something and will get lucky.
- blobbers 6y ago
  Cultivating an email list and writing a program to generate fake git commits?
krm01 6y ago
When we started our subscription design firm for Software companies, I used to share milestones publicly (mostly on Reddit back then). We grew to 5 figures a month in the first year. Like OP, I realized that the goals (and those milestones) were extremely short flashes of fun that didnt last longer than maybe a few minutes. It wasn’t after I stopped sharing business milestones and just focussed on daily improvement that things felt so much better. Not only that, it helped the business grow better as a result.
- bosie 6y ago
  how do you decide to pivot on a feature/goal if you focus only on the daily improvements? how do you connect the daily improvements to something bigger?
  - krm01 6y ago
    So the the insight was: Instead of focussing 80% of the time on the big goal and 20% on what's right in front of me, I flipped that around. So yes there are longterm goals and stuff we work towards, but instead of every day hoping you're there, you set the goal and then focus on much smaller incremental steps on a daily basis. These incremental steps, in a way, become goals, that give you continuous feedback and satisfaction (instead of 1 big high, followed up with a deep low)
pearjuice 6y ago
I just checked one of the author's projects and it's a service to automatically feign activity on GitHub to... make the activity grid on your profile look active. Is this some sort of post-ironic jab at the SaaS industry I'm not getting or people actually pay for it unironically?
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  I think the point is that it creates positive feedback and that helps people remain motivated. One of the reasons I give my team for trying to break up a large task into smaller subtasks is the enjoyment of completing something and closing out that task. It makes the overall goal seem like something achievable.
  - pearjuice 6y ago
    How is faking GitHub activity positive feedback? That's like a service which retweets random tweets to look active on Twitter.
jrrrr 6y ago
> GitGardener is at $151 MRR. TIL people are willing to pay for fake GitHub activity.
- thisisbrians 6y ago
  And Cyberleads sells emails lists (see my other comment). I don't think we should be condoning this guy's behavior..
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Why not if employers look for it?
  - kevsim 6y ago
    Because it's not particularly ethical? Doesn't seem less deceptive than lying on a CV to me.
    - sckn 6y ago
      Of course, but it looks like a so politic. In modern world we have a "fake" life. We already happy on the internet. I didn't see sad post on social media.
    - p2detar 6y ago
      But is it what the market wants, though? If customers are paying, then I think the answer is obvious.
      - sundbry 6y ago
        you can also buy stolen credit card numbers on the darknet, the customers are paying.
        p2detar 6y ago
        But I don’t need it. If I really needed it, maybe I would buy it.
Cyclone_ 6y ago
Has anyone else looked at his GitGardener project and thought it seemed pretty shady? I'm not sure I understand why github would allow it.
- scandinavian 6y ago
  It's also completely unnecessary. You can just create a repo and backdate commits to do it instantly. Like this for example: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti
djyaz1200 6y ago
If any of that is profit you've surpased WeWork! Congrats! :)
- scooble 6y ago
  There was a period (before Feb 2018) where 'more than twitter, less than facebook' was my standard answer to the question of how much profit my startup was making.
mywacaday 6y ago
Congrats Alex, any chance of a cheaper tier for Cyberleads, maybe limiting it a single country?
maram 6y ago
> From now on, I have no goals. Nothing. I don't care about anything. I don't care about followers. I don't care about revenue. I don't care about anything. I just want to enjoy my every day life. Enjoy the process. Nothing brings joy to entrepreneurs more than the “process of building” and crafting products. Your paragraph reminded me of Steve Jobs reply to Kara Swisher when she asked for his thoughts on surpassing Microsoft in market valuation. He said: “It doesn’t matter. It’s not what’s important. It’s not what makes you come in the morning. Not why any of our customers buy our products. It’s good to keep that in mind and remember what we are doing and why” 01:02 https://youtu.be/i5f8bqYYwps https://youtu.be/i5f8bqYYwps
- FailMore 6y ago
  I totally agree :)
nixpulvis 6y ago
Please ensure <a> tags (you know, links!) actually work on your webpages. I hate copying and pasting on iOS... On a brighter note, I appreciate your writing style; short, sweet, and clear.
seanwilson 6y ago
Sounds similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill "The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes."
- KerryJones 6y ago
  Thanks for this -- I continuously get reminded that many of our behaviors have actually been studied and it's worth knowing them to forward our direction in life. This is a good one
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    Yeah, it's a great feeling when you find an existing name for a concept you've partially observed yourself, where sometimes you're sure there must be a name for it already...is there a name for that? It's also great because now you can read up on it and usually find a whole branch of related stuff you never knew existed.
- graedus 6y ago
  This is a concept that matches my lived experience, and I find it's very useful to keep in mind.
donmatito 6y ago
At one point, I was helping a great speaker build her first conference, which was a smashing success. When we turned on the ticketing platform on, orders started pouring in In parallel, I was building my first side project, or more precisely I was starting to add pricing for the first time to a side project As a result I had, at the same time, a stream of several thousands of euros, and MY FIRST 19€ from something I BUILT MYSELF I was incredibly more proud of the latter. There is a sense of pride, of accomplishment, in thinking that you've built something useful enough for someone to open their wallet for you Good job on your part and keep sailing!
thisisbrians 6y ago
So, I checked out Cyberleads[1], and...this dude is just literally (and brazenly) selling a list of startup executives' emails without their permission or consent. Not sure if that's even legal, but it's definitely scummy, and I hate when I get cold (and frequently, also technically SPAM) emails like the ones this guys is enabling. Here's a direct quote from the site[1]: Every day, we scour the web and find every single startup that just raised money. We collect information about these companies, like revenue, size, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, CEO information, emails, and much more. We then further investigate, and verify manually every entry on the list. Every single data point is checked, every single email is verified. Manually. By a human. 1. https://www.getcyberleads.com/ https://www.getcyberleads.com/ Edit: added quotes.
- balls187 6y ago
  I'm curious what law do you think is being violated (I'm in the US?)
  - thisisbrians 6y ago
    I'm not an expert, but the FTC definitely regulates how emails can be sent (SPAM laws). I'm not sure if the act of creating a list and selling it without the consent of the emailees is regulated, however.
    - baddox 6y ago
      The CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t generally prohibit unsolicited marketing emails, but rather it has various restrictions on the behavior and content of those emails. It’s probably less restrictive than most tech-savvy people think. L That said, there is a restriction against sending messages to harvested emails, although I’m not sure how that’s defined or what legal precedents there are regarding that.
  - LunaSea 6y ago
    In the EU it's against E-Privacy
alexsideris 6y ago
Hey everyone, Alex here. I was caught a bit by surprise to be honest, as I did not post the article myself. The article is very sloppy and it shows, so sorry for putting you through that! I also left-aligned the text as people requested. I'm happy that people enjoyed it and can relate :)
- beervirus 6y ago
  GitGardener appears to be for letting job applicants trick employers into thinking that have legit projects on git, while Cyberleads enables spammers to shit into the inboxes of startup execs. Congrats.
  - durpkingOP 6y ago
    'shit into the inbox'? jesus do you only like emails from your mother?
    - beervirus 6y ago
      I don’t like unsolicited commercial emails, so yes, that’s correct, I only email with mom.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  I hope not many people enjoy this or can relate. Your endeavors are shameful.
tshanmu 6y ago
gitgardener is downright unethical as well?
kodachi 6y ago
(offtopic/meta) > Me and my girlfriend wanted to watch a movie on Netflix (...)I watched the film on Netflix. I'm starting to notice this pattern a lot both in person and on the internet. How long until Netflix becomes a verb? It doesn't add to the story, but somehow people feel compelled to advertise the service they use.
- viklove 6y ago
  It's already a verb, ever heard "Netflix & chill"?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Saying it's on Netflix indicates that they didn't go out and see the movie in a theater.
- Minor49er 6y ago
  >It doesn't add to the story, but somehow people feel compelled to advertise the service they use People think of virtual sites and services similarly to how they think of physical places. This link has been identified during the web's infancy: you don't download documents online. You navigate and visit a site. Those words are used for both physical and virtual activities. You "go somewhere". The site or service conveys details about the nature of the activity too. Watching movies on Netflix may paint a mental picture of adults relaxing while watching a relatively mature show. Watching movies on Disney Plus might imply that the adults were spending time with their kids or whatever. Same to real life locations again, you might tell people that you went for a drive down the beach rather than a drive through the city. These simple details can help say a lot about the nature of the drive.
sundbry 6y ago
Congrats, GitGardener helps idiots like you commit hiring fraud. Go fuck yourself. Some of us actually spend our time digging into and actually contributing to open source projects we use.
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  Public existence of such tool proves that quick glance at commit graffiti tells you nothing. And that's a good thing, because otherwise solving of big problems that require several days to produce a single commit would be discounted. >hiring fraud Committing to junk repositories is fraud too?
jansan 6y ago
Anecdote: After I released my fist software in 2002 I received an order by fax. Unfortunately my HP Office Jet had an error and refused to print the fax, so I called HP customer service. They told me to shut the device off and on again. I told them that this is not an option, because there is an order worth real money inside the device's memory. So the great guy at the other end of the line told me to take out the cardridge and give it a good wash and rub. I placed it back in and the Office Jet started printing the order. It was a 1000$ order by Lehman Brothers! I am still telling my friends that this was the final straw that broke Lehman Brother`s neck several years later :)
zozbot234 6y ago
Are we sure that this gitgardener stuff is even allowed by the GitHub ToS? I mean no offense to the OP of course, but clearly some people are clogging the site already by creating entirely fake users, with zilch useful contributions to FLOSS or the dev community. I don't think GH would look kindly on this sort of activity.
lostinroutine 6y ago
Not sure if that's outdated but the home page says: I have a goal I'm working towards. Mine is to achieve financial independence in 2020. ... I've reached $800 MRR so far. My goal is to reach $2k MRR.
rchiba 6y ago
Boo to all of the people on this thread who are hating on what you've built. Why can't you build a business selling emails, or automatically posting to GitHub? If you hate getting spam emails, hit "spam" and get that domain blacklisted, it creates a natural balance where the quality of cold outreach grows. And I doubt real hiring decisions are being made from git commit history badges. Kudos for going out there and adding value to the people that are paying for your products.
- viklove 6y ago
  Because "automatically posting to GitHub" is the exact kind of bullshit that a society driven by capitalism comes up with. Employees lying to employers lying to investors lying to customers, all so they can make themselves slightly richer. No value is being created, no progress is being made -- it's all just a house of cards. Then there are people like you praising it, and just because the goal of capitalism -- to amass as much wealth as you can -- is being met. Even though it's a complete fucking waste of human potential. Makes life seem pointless.
  - ploxolo 6y ago
    [...] that a society driven by c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶i̶s̶m̶ humans comes up with. [...] FTFY
  - rchiba 6y ago
    Yes, with that kind of attitude life does seem pointless. My opinion is that not everything we do in life needs to aimed towards the lofty self-actualization of mankind... or even the lofty self-actualization of one's self, which is the point being made later in the blog post. Sometimes you wanna build something and see what happens. Hell yea I'll praise that. Most human progress is made incrementally and in all directions, with many of the paths failing. The original versions of many extraordinary things seemed like meaningless branches of a capitalistic society. There was a time when people played chess over telegraph, and considered telegraphy as a technology nothing more than a strange novelty.* * For more, I highly recommend checking out the book "The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers"
jldugger 6y ago
> I tried many things. Reddit. Facebook Groups. Quora. LinkedIn. Direct Sales. Twitter. ... On the 21st of April, completely unexpectedly, a tweet of mine blew up big time. "Fortunate favors the prepared." The highly random nature of internet karma should probably be more well publicized by now. If ten years ago, I gave myself all the blog posts I'd write over the next ten years, I would not have predicted correctly which ones would be most popular. Not that I write for the pageviews, or even write all that often. If you think of it as a multiarmed bandit problem, you kinda have to publish without a goal in mind in order to have enough arms to pull to find and iterate on the few good ones. This is why IMO, it helps to have a few input goals as well as outcomes. AFAICT, content marketing is basically posting good stuff and hoping some of the traffic rubs off on your sales funnel. Like that Sparkfun rotary cell phone from way back when, though obviously it helps when you sell the parts to your ironic nobody-would-buy-this product online. > I smashed my infamous $500 MRR goal. It was a huge mental barrier for me. The sad thing is that once again I was tricked. I was chasing this goal for more than two years, and now it means nothing to me. It's dead. Cold. Meaningless. Like it was never there in the first place. Elsewhere on his site Alex describes his goals as 'humble' but that may be part of the psychological problem here; even he believes they're not the same as even modest success. $500 MRR feels meaningless because it _is_. Why does 500 MRR matter? If you borrow the OKR framework, perhaps he would reframe the Objective (goal) as 'build a business capable of sustaining my preferred lifestyle', and then the MRR target would have meaning as a key result? The Objective/Key-Result framework provide two major benefits: First, it gives you the means to tie your metrics to something meaningful, and the ability to fact check your assumptions. Make more money isn't necessarily meaningful, but 'quit my day job' or 'send my kid to art school' can be. Perhaps the $500 MRR goal feels meaningless because the lifestyle goal _is_ the real Objective, but the $500 MRR Key Result is insufficient to meet it. The second thing it does is provide a process for breaking Big Problems into smaller ones. You'll probably need multiple strategies to reach any important Objective, and the KRs help you break them into smaller steps. Which themselves can be treated as Objectives with their own KRs. Using https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundamental-equation-of-saas https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundame... as a guide for how to break down the 'big number' can help, but there is no predictive formula for maximizing it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
durpkingOP 6y ago
ya'll honestly be overreacting.
- durpkingOP 6y ago
  "i want people to put in work to find my email address" - all the derps in this thread
dilandau 6y ago
And here he is again shilling his shit. Or maybe a better analogy is the mother bird, puking half chewed "startup tips" into the mouths of hungry "hackers". Keep whittling away at that work week, hackers.
joshcramer 6y ago
Some products should not be built. Here are a couple examples of such products.

236 points by Malfunction92 6y ago

emagdnim2100 6y ago

Please left align this text!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xwdv 6y ago
Drop into the chrome dev console, go into the source and change the alignment it takes a second. Don’t need to tolerate ridiculous formatting.
DVassallo 6y ago
Please don’t left align this text because some stranger on HN told you so.
- ccmcarey 6y ago
  When that stranger is giving good advice, however .. There's a reason large bodies of text are left aligned and not center aligned.
MrGilbert 6y ago
When switching to "Reader Mode" in your favourite browser, the text will be left aligned. :)
purerandomness 6y ago
Firefox Reader Mode saves the day, again
julianlam 6y ago
I couldn't get through the blog post. Here's why. Nearly every thought is a separate paragraph. Throw in center alignment and it's enough to drive me batty. Decent blog post content, though.
- sixhobbits 6y ago
  Do you know why? Let me let you in on a secret. People LIKE reading text formatted like this. No, they LOVE IT. It's so easy to read. So seductive. So .... enticing Every line like honey. So much sugar. It makes you want more And it's easy to write. Easy to read. Always feels like something is coming. Just. One. More. Line.
  - misterhtmlcss 6y ago
    In my mobile device it's just irritating how much padding he has. It's basically 3 words at a time. I'd need a phablet to get through this piece even though it's enjoyable righting.

smoyer 6y ago

This article would be WAY better in paragraphs that each contained one of the sub-themes of the article as a whole. He starts by talking about tweeting and it looks and feels like the article was written as tweets too.

DHPersonal 6y ago
His Twitter posts are formatted in a similar way, so I think it's just his writing style. https://twitter.com/alexsideris_ https://twitter.com/alexsideris_
drx 6y ago
I kinda liked it, it got me to read the article. Nothing wrong with adding some personal style to your writing. OP, congrats on hitting your MRR goal!

swyx 6y ago

well said about the goals. goals make you feel like a failure if you don't meet them, and leave you wanting when you do, and worst of all, don't tell you how to reach them! Systems over goals every time. regarding your luck, you may be aware of the 4 kinds of luck (https://medium.com/@ameet/the-four-kinds-of-luck-ea729970d71d https://medium.com/@ameet/the-four-kinds-of-luck-ea729970d71...) - by putting your reps in, you exposed yourself to type 2 luck, luck that just happens randomly, but it happens because you did something. good for you!

michaelbuckbee 6y ago

This is going to sound weird but there's this great interview with Seinfeld and Obama where they talk about the "answer" to "why do you keep doing this stuff when you're so successful and have 'made it'"? Which I think is the real question OP is asking: "Why if I've hit this goal do I keep doing this? Why does it feel so unsatisfying?" I've linked to the spot in the interview but the answer is to really enjoy the work and the process. I feel this myself (as someone with a decent sized SAAS), that I still really enjoy helping people, answering support emails, getting on calls with them. It feels more satisfying than arbitrary revenue goals. https://youtu.be/UM-Q_zpuJGU?t=884 https://youtu.be/UM-Q_zpuJGU?t=884

Reedx 6y ago
Yeah, and the two are linked. Seinfeld's focus on the process and craft meant he got exceptionally good at it. The money was a byproduct, not the goal. The motivation was intrinsic and about improving his craft. To which there is no end. So he continues. This discussion with Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Louis CK and Ricky Gervais is worth watching for anyone interested in that aspect of comedy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY6BGcx37k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKY6BGcx37k
- hckr_news 6y ago
  This talk always reminds me of this, https://youtu.be/il1sgQUtYs8 https://youtu.be/il1sgQUtYs8
- maest 6y ago
  Be wary of survivorship bias. Not everyone that focuses on the process makes lots of money. However, some of the people that make lots of money do it as a byproduct of focusing on the process. We're all familiar with the stereotype of the dev who's obsessed with polishing their code that nobody is using.
therealdrag0 6y ago
Weird Q: Do their heads look too big for their bodies in these shots to anyone else? Is it camera work? Super slimming suits?

ryanwaggoner 6y ago

I like this. I like the writing style, I like the humility and the openness, and I like the recognition that chasing goals is ultimately an exercise in futility. You spend almost all your time unhappy because you're not yet at your goal, and then as soon as you achieve it, you're unhappy because you're not at the next arbitrary goal. It's madness, but it's basically the way almost all of us live. I've been spending more time meditating and reading about mindfulness recently, and it's helped me become aware of just how infrequently I'm truly happy and present. I can be in the most idyllic setting and situation, and part of my brain is wondering how I can improve it, or what I can do to feel that way all the time, etc. Why is it so difficult to turn off the past- and future-oriented parts of my brain and just be? To just enjoy this?

dhuin 6y ago
Pretty much the human condition. Seneca was writing about it in the first century, Buddhists were talking about it from the inception of their religion.
- ryanwaggoner 6y ago
  What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless. A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil. From Ecclesiastes, one of the few parts of the Christian scriptures that still interests me.
julianeon 6y ago
I was thinking I like the blog format, actually: more like Tweets than like 'My Manifesto About Software, Life, the Universe, and Everything: Volume I of MDXXIII.' It just has an inherent digestibility and modesty that makes it really appealing. Also it makes me think I may try this tweet-style writing also, and modify my CSS to look more like his, because I like it a lot.

DVassallo 6y ago

I came to a simple realization: Only intrinsic motivation lasts. Achieving external rewards and arbitrary goals feels nice for a while, but it always wears off quickly. Now I don’t have goals anymore. My idea of personal growth is to keep rearranging my life so that I'm doing fewer things I'd rather not be doing. No goals. Just anti-goals.

jlevers 6y ago
Is it not possible to be intrinsically motivated to achieve your goals? I get what you're saying, but I feel like there's a middle ground.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Then motivation is intrinsic, what remains outside is a measurement tool you use.
mattbuilds 6y ago
In this video by Brandon Sanderson [0] he talks a little bit about goals and I follow something similar. At one point he talks about setting goals that are actually in your control. So you wouldn't set a goal like "become a famous author" (although he says that would be nice). Instead you set something you can control like "get better with each book you write". Then you break those goals down into tasks. I think he says something like "if I was 100 and looked back and wrote 100 unpublished novels, would I be happy with that?". I think using something like that as a guide for setting goals is good because it keeps you pointed in the right direction and makes the goals things you can actually control. [0] https://youtu.be/oH9sJrAVeC0 https://youtu.be/oH9sJrAVeC0
- thisisbrians 6y ago
  I think "be a famous author" is a goal, and "get better with each book" is a strategy. In my view: the goal is a target, and the strategy is an action in attempt of reaching it.

ericmcer 6y ago

I am always reminded of David Foster Wallace who wrote a successful novel while still in his early twenties, and before even finishing his MFA. He had to recalibrate his entire life expectation wise when he achieved his goal in his 20s and found it empty. Where do you go when you are just 'starting out' in life but have already grabbed this thing that was supposed to complete you, and it doesn't change anything.

Baeocystin 6y ago
As much as I enjoy DFW's way with words (and I do mean that in a complimentary manner), I think his approach mostly serves as a warning as to what can happen when you get too deeply stuck in your own head with no pressure release valve to viewpoints other than your own.

dirtydroog 6y ago

Is this an ad for a company masquerading as a story about how marketing finally worked for said company?

encoderer 6y ago

There is sentiment that goals are bullshit and somewhat destructive. My take is, it comes down to setting the right goals. I've bootstrapped a moderately successful SaaS and have enjoyed many revenue milestones along the way but those were milestones not goals. The goals are lifestyle based. Things like "I want to never have another traditional job" or "I want to be debt free" are much more powerful than "I want to hit $2000 MRR". That said, look, building and selling things is amazing and I suggest everybody do it. If you only have a little time, build small things and sell them cheaply. But there is a self empowerment that comes from creating your own income that has an impact far beyond the actual dollars themselves. Congrats Alex, good goal or not, it's a notable achievement.

HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
> there is a self empowerment that comes from creating your own income This is something that's rarely said (or snidely dismissed as "lifestyle business") but is so very important. Realizing that you are not completely reliant on someone to employ you, that you can derive income from multiple streams and then actually seeing it happen is an incredible feeling.
- close04 6y ago
  > you are not completely reliant on someone to employ you I don't think that's where the feeling of empowerment comes from. Instead of doing a good job to impress your boss you do a good job to impress your customers. That feeling, I believe, comes from the fact that generating your own revenue stream makes you a "one man team". You pulled all the right strings, you pushed the right buttons, you spoke to the all right people. You took your idea from back of the napkin drawing to actual functioning and successful business. You don't get to do that as an employee.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    I'll agree that what I wrote was essentially the executive summary. I think we're saying the same thing in different ways.

ozim 6y ago

He was not powerless, he was putting work for 2 years until he got lucky. People hope they will stick in week or two into something and will get lucky.

blobbers 6y ago
Cultivating an email list and writing a program to generate fake git commits?

krm01 6y ago

When we started our subscription design firm for Software companies, I used to share milestones publicly (mostly on Reddit back then). We grew to 5 figures a month in the first year. Like OP, I realized that the goals (and those milestones) were extremely short flashes of fun that didnt last longer than maybe a few minutes. It wasn’t after I stopped sharing business milestones and just focussed on daily improvement that things felt so much better. Not only that, it helped the business grow better as a result.

bosie 6y ago
how do you decide to pivot on a feature/goal if you focus only on the daily improvements? how do you connect the daily improvements to something bigger?
- krm01 6y ago
  So the the insight was: Instead of focussing 80% of the time on the big goal and 20% on what's right in front of me, I flipped that around. So yes there are longterm goals and stuff we work towards, but instead of every day hoping you're there, you set the goal and then focus on much smaller incremental steps on a daily basis. These incremental steps, in a way, become goals, that give you continuous feedback and satisfaction (instead of 1 big high, followed up with a deep low)

pearjuice 6y ago

I just checked one of the author's projects and it's a service to automatically feign activity on GitHub to... make the activity grid on your profile look active. Is this some sort of post-ironic jab at the SaaS industry I'm not getting or people actually pay for it unironically?

HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
I think the point is that it creates positive feedback and that helps people remain motivated. One of the reasons I give my team for trying to break up a large task into smaller subtasks is the enjoyment of completing something and closing out that task. It makes the overall goal seem like something achievable.
- pearjuice 6y ago
  How is faking GitHub activity positive feedback? That's like a service which retweets random tweets to look active on Twitter.

jrrrr 6y ago

> GitGardener is at $151 MRR. TIL people are willing to pay for fake GitHub activity.

thisisbrians 6y ago
And Cyberleads sells emails lists (see my other comment). I don't think we should be condoning this guy's behavior..
lostcolony 6y ago
Why not if employers look for it?
- kevsim 6y ago
  Because it's not particularly ethical? Doesn't seem less deceptive than lying on a CV to me.
  - sckn 6y ago
    Of course, but it looks like a so politic. In modern world we have a "fake" life. We already happy on the internet. I didn't see sad post on social media.
  - p2detar 6y ago
    But is it what the market wants, though? If customers are paying, then I think the answer is obvious.
    - sundbry 6y ago
      you can also buy stolen credit card numbers on the darknet, the customers are paying.
      - p2detar 6y ago
        But I don’t need it. If I really needed it, maybe I would buy it.

Cyclone_ 6y ago

Has anyone else looked at his GitGardener project and thought it seemed pretty shady? I'm not sure I understand why github would allow it.

scandinavian 6y ago
It's also completely unnecessary. You can just create a repo and backdate commits to do it instantly. Like this for example: https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti https://github.com/gelstudios/gitfiti

djyaz1200 6y ago

If any of that is profit you've surpased WeWork! Congrats! :)

scooble 6y ago
There was a period (before Feb 2018) where 'more than twitter, less than facebook' was my standard answer to the question of how much profit my startup was making.

mywacaday 6y ago

Congrats Alex, any chance of a cheaper tier for Cyberleads, maybe limiting it a single country?

maram 6y ago

> From now on, I have no goals. Nothing. I don't care about anything. I don't care about followers. I don't care about revenue. I don't care about anything. I just want to enjoy my every day life. Enjoy the process. Nothing brings joy to entrepreneurs more than the “process of building” and crafting products. Your paragraph reminded me of Steve Jobs reply to Kara Swisher when she asked for his thoughts on surpassing Microsoft in market valuation. He said: “It doesn’t matter. It’s not what’s important. It’s not what makes you come in the morning. Not why any of our customers buy our products. It’s good to keep that in mind and remember what we are doing and why” 01:02 https://youtu.be/i5f8bqYYwps https://youtu.be/i5f8bqYYwps

FailMore 6y ago
I totally agree :)

nixpulvis 6y ago

Please ensure <a> tags (you know, links!) actually work on your webpages. I hate copying and pasting on iOS... On a brighter note, I appreciate your writing style; short, sweet, and clear.

seanwilson 6y ago

Sounds similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill "The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes."

KerryJones 6y ago
Thanks for this -- I continuously get reminded that many of our behaviors have actually been studied and it's worth knowing them to forward our direction in life. This is a good one
- seanwilson 6y ago
  Yeah, it's a great feeling when you find an existing name for a concept you've partially observed yourself, where sometimes you're sure there must be a name for it already...is there a name for that? It's also great because now you can read up on it and usually find a whole branch of related stuff you never knew existed.
graedus 6y ago
This is a concept that matches my lived experience, and I find it's very useful to keep in mind.

donmatito 6y ago

At one point, I was helping a great speaker build her first conference, which was a smashing success. When we turned on the ticketing platform on, orders started pouring in In parallel, I was building my first side project, or more precisely I was starting to add pricing for the first time to a side project As a result I had, at the same time, a stream of several thousands of euros, and MY FIRST 19€ from something I BUILT MYSELF I was incredibly more proud of the latter. There is a sense of pride, of accomplishment, in thinking that you've built something useful enough for someone to open their wallet for you Good job on your part and keep sailing!

thisisbrians 6y ago

So, I checked out Cyberleads[1], and...this dude is just literally (and brazenly) selling a list of startup executives' emails without their permission or consent. Not sure if that's even legal, but it's definitely scummy, and I hate when I get cold (and frequently, also technically SPAM) emails like the ones this guys is enabling. Here's a direct quote from the site[1]: Every day, we scour the web and find every single startup that just raised money. We collect information about these companies, like revenue, size, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles, CEO information, emails, and much more. We then further investigate, and verify manually every entry on the list. Every single data point is checked, every single email is verified. Manually. By a human. 1. https://www.getcyberleads.com/ https://www.getcyberleads.com/ Edit: added quotes.

balls187 6y ago
I'm curious what law do you think is being violated (I'm in the US?)
- thisisbrians 6y ago
  I'm not an expert, but the FTC definitely regulates how emails can be sent (SPAM laws). I'm not sure if the act of creating a list and selling it without the consent of the emailees is regulated, however.
  - baddox 6y ago
    The CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t generally prohibit unsolicited marketing emails, but rather it has various restrictions on the behavior and content of those emails. It’s probably less restrictive than most tech-savvy people think. L That said, there is a restriction against sending messages to harvested emails, although I’m not sure how that’s defined or what legal precedents there are regarding that.
- LunaSea 6y ago
  In the EU it's against E-Privacy

alexsideris 6y ago

Hey everyone, Alex here. I was caught a bit by surprise to be honest, as I did not post the article myself. The article is very sloppy and it shows, so sorry for putting you through that! I also left-aligned the text as people requested. I'm happy that people enjoyed it and can relate :)

beervirus 6y ago
GitGardener appears to be for letting job applicants trick employers into thinking that have legit projects on git, while Cyberleads enables spammers to shit into the inboxes of startup execs. Congrats.
- durpkingOP 6y ago
  'shit into the inbox'? jesus do you only like emails from your mother?
  - beervirus 6y ago
    I don’t like unsolicited commercial emails, so yes, that’s correct, I only email with mom.
caymanjim 6y ago
I hope not many people enjoy this or can relate. Your endeavors are shameful.

tshanmu 6y ago

gitgardener is downright unethical as well?

kodachi 6y ago

(offtopic/meta) > Me and my girlfriend wanted to watch a movie on Netflix (...)I watched the film on Netflix. I'm starting to notice this pattern a lot both in person and on the internet. How long until Netflix becomes a verb? It doesn't add to the story, but somehow people feel compelled to advertise the service they use.

viklove 6y ago
It's already a verb, ever heard "Netflix & chill"?
saagarjha 6y ago
Saying it's on Netflix indicates that they didn't go out and see the movie in a theater.
Minor49er 6y ago
>It doesn't add to the story, but somehow people feel compelled to advertise the service they use People think of virtual sites and services similarly to how they think of physical places. This link has been identified during the web's infancy: you don't download documents online. You navigate and visit a site. Those words are used for both physical and virtual activities. You "go somewhere". The site or service conveys details about the nature of the activity too. Watching movies on Netflix may paint a mental picture of adults relaxing while watching a relatively mature show. Watching movies on Disney Plus might imply that the adults were spending time with their kids or whatever. Same to real life locations again, you might tell people that you went for a drive down the beach rather than a drive through the city. These simple details can help say a lot about the nature of the drive.

sundbry 6y ago

Congrats, GitGardener helps idiots like you commit hiring fraud. Go fuck yourself. Some of us actually spend our time digging into and actually contributing to open source projects we use.

NullPrefix 6y ago
Public existence of such tool proves that quick glance at commit graffiti tells you nothing. And that's a good thing, because otherwise solving of big problems that require several days to produce a single commit would be discounted. >hiring fraud Committing to junk repositories is fraud too?

jansan 6y ago

Anecdote: After I released my fist software in 2002 I received an order by fax. Unfortunately my HP Office Jet had an error and refused to print the fax, so I called HP customer service. They told me to shut the device off and on again. I told them that this is not an option, because there is an order worth real money inside the device's memory. So the great guy at the other end of the line told me to take out the cardridge and give it a good wash and rub. I placed it back in and the Office Jet started printing the order. It was a 1000$ order by Lehman Brothers! I am still telling my friends that this was the final straw that broke Lehman Brother`s neck several years later :)

zozbot234 6y ago

Are we sure that this gitgardener stuff is even allowed by the GitHub ToS? I mean no offense to the OP of course, but clearly some people are clogging the site already by creating entirely fake users, with zilch useful contributions to FLOSS or the dev community. I don't think GH would look kindly on this sort of activity.

lostinroutine 6y ago

Not sure if that's outdated but the home page says: I have a goal I'm working towards. Mine is to achieve financial independence in 2020. ... I've reached $800 MRR so far. My goal is to reach $2k MRR.

rchiba 6y ago

Boo to all of the people on this thread who are hating on what you've built. Why can't you build a business selling emails, or automatically posting to GitHub? If you hate getting spam emails, hit "spam" and get that domain blacklisted, it creates a natural balance where the quality of cold outreach grows. And I doubt real hiring decisions are being made from git commit history badges. Kudos for going out there and adding value to the people that are paying for your products.

viklove 6y ago
Because "automatically posting to GitHub" is the exact kind of bullshit that a society driven by capitalism comes up with. Employees lying to employers lying to investors lying to customers, all so they can make themselves slightly richer. No value is being created, no progress is being made -- it's all just a house of cards. Then there are people like you praising it, and just because the goal of capitalism -- to amass as much wealth as you can -- is being met. Even though it's a complete fucking waste of human potential. Makes life seem pointless.
- ploxolo 6y ago
  [...] that a society driven by c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶i̶s̶m̶ humans comes up with. [...] FTFY
- rchiba 6y ago
  Yes, with that kind of attitude life does seem pointless. My opinion is that not everything we do in life needs to aimed towards the lofty self-actualization of mankind... or even the lofty self-actualization of one's self, which is the point being made later in the blog post. Sometimes you wanna build something and see what happens. Hell yea I'll praise that. Most human progress is made incrementally and in all directions, with many of the paths failing. The original versions of many extraordinary things seemed like meaningless branches of a capitalistic society. There was a time when people played chess over telegraph, and considered telegraphy as a technology nothing more than a strange novelty.* * For more, I highly recommend checking out the book "The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers"

jldugger 6y ago

> I tried many things. Reddit. Facebook Groups. Quora. LinkedIn. Direct Sales. Twitter. ... On the 21st of April, completely unexpectedly, a tweet of mine blew up big time. "Fortunate favors the prepared." The highly random nature of internet karma should probably be more well publicized by now. If ten years ago, I gave myself all the blog posts I'd write over the next ten years, I would not have predicted correctly which ones would be most popular. Not that I write for the pageviews, or even write all that often. If you think of it as a multiarmed bandit problem, you kinda have to publish without a goal in mind in order to have enough arms to pull to find and iterate on the few good ones. This is why IMO, it helps to have a few input goals as well as outcomes. AFAICT, content marketing is basically posting good stuff and hoping some of the traffic rubs off on your sales funnel. Like that Sparkfun rotary cell phone from way back when, though obviously it helps when you sell the parts to your ironic nobody-would-buy-this product online. > I smashed my infamous $500 MRR goal. It was a huge mental barrier for me. The sad thing is that once again I was tricked. I was chasing this goal for more than two years, and now it means nothing to me. It's dead. Cold. Meaningless. Like it was never there in the first place. Elsewhere on his site Alex describes his goals as 'humble' but that may be part of the psychological problem here; even he believes they're not the same as even modest success. $500 MRR feels meaningless because it _is_. Why does 500 MRR matter? If you borrow the OKR framework, perhaps he would reframe the Objective (goal) as 'build a business capable of sustaining my preferred lifestyle', and then the MRR target would have meaning as a key result? The Objective/Key-Result framework provide two major benefits: First, it gives you the means to tie your metrics to something meaningful, and the ability to fact check your assumptions. Make more money isn't necessarily meaningful, but 'quit my day job' or 'send my kid to art school' can be. Perhaps the $500 MRR goal feels meaningless because the lifestyle goal _is_ the real Objective, but the $500 MRR Key Result is insufficient to meet it. The second thing it does is provide a process for breaking Big Problems into smaller ones. You'll probably need multiple strategies to reach any important Objective, and the KRs help you break them into smaller steps. Which themselves can be treated as Objectives with their own KRs. Using https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundamental-equation-of-saas https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas#the-fundame... as a guide for how to break down the 'big number' can help, but there is no predictive formula for maximizing it.

deleted 6y ago

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durpkingOP 6y ago

ya'll honestly be overreacting.

durpkingOP 6y ago
"i want people to put in work to find my email address" - all the derps in this thread

dilandau 6y ago

And here he is again shilling his shit. Or maybe a better analogy is the mother bird, puking half chewed "startup tips" into the mouths of hungry "hackers". Keep whittling away at that work week, hackers.

joshcramer 6y ago

Some products should not be built. Here are a couple examples of such products.