9 ms·
From idea to paying customer
- orangepurple 4y agoCool! But: One paying customer leaves and you're back at ZERO/month I'd celebrate cautiously. The whole initiative is one cease and desist letter away from collapse. We're here for a good time not a long time. Have fun and good luck!
- kirso 4y agoI always love this kind of posts. Because they outline a great approach that actually works and is solid. Yet, we always have HN comments why the idea would never work :)
- nl 4y ago> - The API would then redirect them to a blank white page with the words “Syncing in progress” > - I would frantically run a script in the background that actually trigger the sync locally ( I had to do a manual sync locally because I was using nextjs and hosting on vercel which didn’t support background jobs) > - I would then make small talk to distract them on how long it would take > - Once it was finished I sent them the link of the page that was finished along with DNS instructions to set up subdomain forwarding Love this so much. The irony is that SO much enterprise software is basically this, and there having the person on the line is sold as a benefit!
- mellosouls 4y agoEarlier discussions of the project fwiw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31168882 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908
- throw03172019 4y agoCSS reset clobbered the horizontal margin. Text is edge to edge on mobile. Very hard to read.
- quickthrower2 4y agoSmells like tailwind to me. Chuck an p-5 on that body!
- throw03172019 4y agoUpdate: it is fixed now. Thank you!
- jmathai 4y agoOT: visiting the website rendered my browser navigation control (Safari, iOS) completely hidden. I lost the ability to go back or close just its tab. Is that intentional? Edit: reproducible and happens when I scroll the content. Maybe related to the sticky header. Killing Safari and reopening got my browser controls back.
- igorkraw 4y agoI'd be curious about stories on how to approach potential customers without existing relationships. Do you just cold email them?
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoNo you got to have friends and acquaintances who have that problem.
- onion2k 4y agoYes. And post online. And submit links to aggregator services. And message people on social media. And go to face-to-face events and sell to people. And post in places even if they say you shouldn't promote things. Really, you need to be willing to do all the things you hate other people doing...
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago> Really, you need to be willing to do all the things you hate other people doing... This is why I am a firm believer that marketeers are a different breed of people altogether. Marketeers, recruiters, managers, sales, etc. I mean software developers are weird, but THESE people, yikes. (this message is tongue in cheek)
- stanac 4y ago> you need to be willing to do all the things you hate other people doing... This is worth remembering. Always hated receiving cold emails. edit: grammar
- igorkraw 4y agoThanks. I guess there's different ways to go about it though, I can respect a cold email which asks for my consent before starting the sales pitch in a 2nd email for example
- 12907835202 4y agoThe landing page doesn't seem to mention the cost at all? The burger menu also doesn't appear to work on mobile (Android Pixel 6) so maybe it's hidden in there.
- soulchild37 4y agoIsn’t this a violation of Slack and Discord TOS? I think this guy did well, but as this tool grew more popular, Slack and Discord might pursue legal actions
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shafyy 4y agoI had the same thought. If I remember correctly, one of Slack's paid features is that you can retain older chat archives. This kind of circumvents that. Now, I think it's a cool product and I hope that there will be no legal repercussions.
- dinobones 4y agoI think that's exactly why OP's idea will take off. Everyone is too scared to build a competitor. Airbnb started by spamming Craigslist with fake ads. Stripe started by accepting payments to a single bank account. Doing something shoddy/somewhat shady and not being afraid of the repercussions gets you ahead in startups. So what if OP breaks someone's "TOS", by the time they notice or OP's product gets big enough too care, he will likely have sufficient enough capital to fight them off. If he never gets that big, more power to him for something that makes him some beer money.
- onion2k 4y agoStripe started by accepting payments to a single bank account. Where can I read more about that? It sounds fascinating..
- smcn 4y agohttps://read.first1000.co/p/-stripe https://read.first1000.co/p/-stripe This might be of some interest
- languageserver 4y ago
- ttoinou 4y agoPieter Levels made this already for NomadList https://nomadlist.com https://nomadlist.com syncing its Discord and Slack
- newbie578 4y agoHow to even decide on what idea to focus on? Just keep a list of ideas stored in the Notes app and decide on a whim or? Would love to hear other's processes.
- autonomousErwin 4y agoI too have an idea list - I suppose the idea you choose is the idea that you're thinking about the most
- newbie578 4y agoHow do you keep track of them? Do you have some grading system implemented?
- bazmattaz 4y agoHey this is my job! You don’t necessarily want to focus on an idea but instead get obsessed with a problem to solve. You want to spend some time validating the problem and interviewing customers with this problem. Only then do you start ideating on ways to solve the problem for users. I have a big list of ideas too but I’m not entirely sure they all solve a valid problem. I’m nervous about spending a lot of time on something that’s cool but not sellable
- d3nj4l 4y ago> I had to do a manual sync locally because I was using Nextjs and hosting on Vercel which didn’t support long running jobs. > Finally if they were ready to pay I would send them a Stripe checkout page for payment and I would then update a field in the database manually of whether the user was a paid user. > I could have spent 4-5 weeks coding and polishing up the onboarding process and getting payments ready Just use Rails...
- RileyJames 4y agoYup. And if you want to go even faster, don’t start from scratch, use JumpStart. https://jumpstartrails.com/ https://jumpstartrails.com/
- t_mann 4y ago> Before I wrote a single line of code I had spent a week talking to potential customers and even before that I had spent a week doing customer research and identifying potential ideas that I wanted to work on. This sounds like a great approach to any startup / for-profit project that easily goes overlooked. However, I guess most people will still get stuck at this point: > I had built a relationship with other open source projects so I knew where my early customers was going to be. Background: I have an idea that I think might be interesting for large corporations with lots of retail customers, specifically mobile service providers, ISPs,... However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time. It'd probably be more of a consulting-style gig than a startup initially, since it'd need to be heavily tailored for each of those giant idiosyncratic businesses. Any thoughts or suggestions much appreciated. Anyway, thanks for sharing, OP!
- iglio 4y ago> However, I don't know anyone at T-Mobile or similar, so I've been carrying the idea around for a long time. You could always try and get a job at one of these business for a year, with the primary goal of building connections.
- t_mann 4y agoBold move, hadn't thought of that, thanks for sharing.
- swores 4y agoIf you're good at selling yourself (or more realistically/usefully, if you think you might be willing to practise until you become good enough) relatively quickly[0], it might be worth going to an industry event or two, and pitching yourself / your proposal to as many people at as many companies as possible. Maybe you'll get a useful contact or two from the exercise, at the very least you'll learn something about to improve your self promotion, maybe learn more about the industry and the needs of people in it, maybe even come away with a lead that becomes your first client. Of course, this relies on being able to afford tickets to, and likely travel/accommodation around, whatever event(s) will attract the sort of people you're interested in. And putting yourself out there, time after time, hour after hour, each time projecting the confidence that "hey even though we've just met and I don't know what your working hours consist of I'm confident enough in what I want to discuss that it's not a waste of either of our time", is easier suggested than done for many people. [0] The upside to iglio's suggestion of working at a company to network is that you can build relationships slowly and organically rather than having to impress very quickly to get even an hour meeting, then kick ass in that hour to get a next one, etc. Plus, you gain a reputation for actually contributing to the industry rather than potentially appearing as an outsider going "With no experience I still know better than you" (shouldn't be too hard to avoid giving off that vibe though).
- anonymous344 4y agoNice writeup, but I don't understand why would any company would want their chats or other stuff to be moved outside of their envinronment to third party who has absolutely no credentials of security. Even the bigger operators has made stupid mistakes and got hacked
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoAnother comment mentions open source projects, open communities like that. There's some OS projects that use Gitter, which has search engine indexable chat history which ended up being quite useful. I'm in a big Go Slack community and it's not indexed, which is a shame because there's a lot of really good info there.
- znpy 4y agoWhich is ironic because slack supposedly stands for “searchable log (of) all communications (and) knowledge” https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13098164/slack-is-an-acronym https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/28/13098164/slack-is-an-acro...
- christophilus 4y agoThat is ironic, because Slack is where data goes to die— undiscoverable and pristine. Their search is never useful to me.
- hunter2_ 4y agoI've found it to be good -- way better than Teams which doesn't even offer any ability to see the messages adjacent to the one containing the search term if it's more than a few months old: useless if one message has a question, the next has an answer, and you only have the knowledge to search for the message with the question.
- risyachka 4y agoThere are hardly any security issues here. The app basically exports info that is intended to be public using read-only access.
- codingdave 4y agoFrom idea to talking to people to spending a few weeks laying out the right solution to finding one pilot customer willing to pay and than into a month of coding to produce what that one paying customer wanted. This is actually the right approach. This is a good story of how to test out a product idea. Just a terrible headline to describe it.
- hnbad 4y agoThey say they actually only spent 2 weeks coding and that the overall process from idea to 1k took a month in total, so it seems to be still accurate.
- is_true 4y agoI went like this: idea -> 6 months sending emails -> 1st sale -> 2 weeks building what I just sold This was after doing build -> sell for far too long.
- OJFord 4y agoSome prefer building to selling though, so I wouldn't say it's wrong (for everyone). I have various 'projects' between shower-thought to prototype/usable-for-me that it wouldn't make sense to sell first, because I'm thinking about or building them to scratch an itch and use myself; popularity with others and people paying for it would be great, but it's only the right place to start if the point is 'right, I want a successful business'.
- is_true 4y agoI understand the "build" mentality, I also prefer that. Selling isn't only about money, you get feedback also.
- Ma8ee 4y agoBut you wouldn’t have been able to build it in two weeks if you hadn’t built a lot of similar stuff previously?
- TruthWillHurt 4y agoAmazing that you skipped login/signup and self-service bootstrapping! Such a great decision. even OAuth/SSO solutions can complicate things, and why spend time on automation before you have the load to justify it? Well done.
- YeBanKo 4y agoI find it very impressive. Some things that stood out to me is fully manual onboarding and even manually updating the database. It makes tons of sense, but as an engineer we tend to want to automate all the things, and, I guess, loose momentum.
- adv0r 4y agowait, "Backed by ycombinator", while in the blog post I tried cmd+f "YC" and "ycombinator" without luck How is something backed by YC if it took a month to build?
- eloisius 4y agoThis is interesting to see, and reminds me that I really have no idea how to sell myself. I spent 7 years on this exact thing--a project to archive a community Slack server to a crawlable website, even with full-text search that (IMO) worked better than Slack search. I made the code available for other communities to use, and never once considered that this was a sellable product. I shut it down this year after a flurry of folks started asking to be opted out of the archive. In case you want to run your own: https://github.com/zacstewart/tech404logs https://github.com/zacstewart/tech404logs
- solumunus 4y agoYou really don't! You've finally learned that you have an established project which is sellable and your immediate reaction is to link your public repo for others. Why not make it private, develop the project and sell it? You're nearly there...
- XCSme 4y agoWhy is there no Pricing section?
- Double_a_92 4y agoThat kinda sounds horrifying... I wouldn't want my casual chat within some semi-private community to be google searchable.
- simonhamp 4y ago> 4-5 weeks coding and polishing up the onboarding process and getting payments ready I don't know when Linen was first created, but these days you can get most of this done much more rapidly. Check out Laravel Spark[1], for example, where all of that billing stuff is neatly abstracted away so you can focus on your product [1]: https://spark.laravel.com/ https://spark.laravel.com/
- cercatrova 4y agoBut then you'd have to write PHP... (I know, users don't care about tech stacks, but if I'm going to be developing the product over time, I definitely do care what I'm coding in)
- artificial 4y agoRight tool for the right job. What language do you prefer?
- pc86 4y agoI'm not a language elitist (I did start with PHP way back when) but in my experience PHP is only the right tool if you only know PHP. Which is fine, but it's not exactly purpose-built for much of anything.
- artificial 4y agoWhat is a framework that’s as productive that meets or exceeds the features found in Laravel? Vapor? Rails? Django? I’d say Laravel exceeds those. I write go for the day job fwiw, and just spun up a new Laravel project last Sunday. What I was able to get spun up in 15-30 mins (oauth, dashboard, tailwindcss, vue frontend, db migrations, s3 integration, sendgrid email, dockerized).
- cercatrova 4y agoI usually use NodeJS and TypeScript, but I've been learning Rust as well recently.
- conqrr 4y agoWould this still work for some lo side projects? With only a few hours a day, the research is possible, but shipping fast is definitely not.