5 ms·
Yeah it’s interesting reading the old pg essays where he says, VCs suck but they are a necessary evil. After all, racking reliable servers will cost at least 20
by waprin 4y ago
Yeah it’s interesting reading the old pg essays where he says, VCs suck but they are a necessary evil. After all, racking reliable servers will cost at least 20k, paying a PR firm so that there’s a chance anyone will hear about your site will cost at least 20k etc etc
Now basically every PaaS has a free or cheap (<$50/mo) tier, tons of helpful tools with free or cheap tiers, you can get users / customers for free on social media and probably more effectively than traditional ads / PR coverage.
It’s not strictly true because some projects use GPUs for ML , sometimes there’s some technical rot if you don’t upgrade your stack a bit, market change could make you irrelevant etc
But in general there’s a lot of products that can simmer and slowly iterate for a long time as long as founder keeps chipping away as evidenced here.
- didgetmaster 4y agoIt has gotten much cheaper to host stuff, but I really wonder if marketing costs have fallen as well. You can certainly find cheap or free avenues (like HN) to tell people about your product, but it can be lost in the sea of information. Good marketing to the best subset of potential customers is essential in getting anything off the ground. That can be expensive especially if you are an engineer with very little marketing experience.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y agoMy take is that marketing now can have very little out-of-pocket cost, but a massively increased time cost because you are now constantly engaging with people, making new posts, answering questions, exploring new avenues, etc.
- hermitcrab 4y agogetting noticed by the right people cost-effectively is hard. Anything that makes it easier for you to get attention will also potentially make it easier for everyone else. So it will always be hard.
- Alex3917 4y ago> I really wonder if marketing costs have fallen as well The overall cost of building a product and getting a product to PMF is higher, but the main cost is time. That's why it can be advantageous to just work on something for ten years rather than going out, raising a bunch of money, and shutting down two years later.
- josho 4y agoYour perspective is refreshing. I realized I was in a rut seeing the opposite perspective, that costs via things like SOC2 compliance were driving up barriers to lifestyle like businesses.
- jahewson 4y ago> you can get users / customers for free on social media Mostly you can't, especially if you're a b2b SaaS.
- post-it 4y agoIf you're b2b, you only need one client to be profitable. Or so they say.
- doctor_eval 4y agoYou only need one special client to be profitable. You might need to go through many other clients before you meet them.
- cpursley 4y agoLinkedIn has been wonderful for me.