dshipper

32 ms·

1. 361.▲
   by dshipper 15y ago

   Agree completely - the length of time has nothing to do with the quality of your work. I have a friend who started coding a year ago and is in YC right now as the main technical founder. I'd say I've learned more about entrepreneurship and
2. 362.▲
   by dshipper 15y ago

   Thanks Jason! Great point - loving what you do doesn't mean that you love every part of it, or every second of it - saying that is usually just meaningless hyperbole. But if you truly love something you put up with the stuff that you don't
3. 363.▲
   by dshipper 15y ago

   I agree that another way to look at it is "don't hate what you do" although I feel like a post about that would be aimed at a different group of people. When I wrote this it was more directed at people who feel a little bit lost, and are wo
4. 364.▲
   by dshipper 15y ago

   Beautiful. Thanks for sharing that :)
5. 365.▲
   by dshipper 15y ago

   Yup I'm 20 and started when I was 10. It's been a good 10 years :)
6. 366.▲
   What Does It Mean To Love What You Do?(danshipper.com)

   36 points by dshipper 15y ago|23 comments
7. 367.▲
   by dshipper 15y ago

   I wish I could help you but I've only ever used them for Rails. I have used GAE for Python and had a pretty good experience. I think that's also free at the beginning.
8. 368.▲
   by dshipper 15y ago

   True. Pretty expensive tutorial at $1,000 though ;)
9. 369.▲
   by dshipper 15y ago

   Thanks for your comment! I did definitely set up Google Analytics. But I didn't have goals or Web Master Tools or funnels or anything like that set up. So I had a few metrics but nothing really in-depth. Yea I definitely could have done the
10. 370.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    In short: I drove customers poorly and infrequently. The only marketing I did was through my blog/Twitter. That spawned a fair amount of word of mouth and some other blog posts by people who had used the service. Beyond that I think it was
11. 371.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Not really. Yea it's actually just stupid looking back at it. But I hadn't done any pricing before and I wanted to experiment. So now I know at least I won't make a boneheaded mistake like that again :)
12. 372.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    I was running small instances - probably should have been micro. And there were definitely ways to decrease costs and stay on EC2. Heroku is free though so for me (at my scale) it seems like the best option for now.
13. 373.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Thanks! I really hope so - that's the beauty of doing all this stuff while in school.
14. 374.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    I really like the idea as well! From what I know the site didn't go anywhere because the minimum advertising commitment for dating websites is in the thousands. So I think he dropped the idea. But definitely it could work for someone with s
15. 375.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Definitely - although it's also worthwhile to take into account the fact that you own what you produce when you work for yourself. So while after working for someone else for 6 months I would only have cash to show for it, after working for
16. 376.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Agree if you have enough marketing power (or good press hookups) it's much easier to make something like that work. And definitely on the same page in terms of code. I like it to be mine!
17. 377.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Dude great to hear from you! I'd really love to talk some time if you're interested. Feedback Army is awesome and I think we might have some cool stuff to share. Couldn't find any contact info in your profile but my email is dshipper [at] g
18. 378.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Really glad you found it informative! I think you could definitely white-label the DomainPolish idea and sell it to people hoping to build a Review X service. The problem is that if you just try to build a site yourself that lets you review
19. 379.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Thanks Jason I'm glad you enjoyed following the story. It's definitely not a huge exit but I'm happy to have turned a profit and there's more where that came from :)
20. 380.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Thanks! That's one part of the experience that I'm definitely upset at myself for. But I'd rather get the mistakes out of the way while the stakes are low right?
21. 381.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Thanks it really was - although I regret not spending as much time on it as I could have. I basically ended up doing no marketing for DomainPolish whatsoever besides a few posts on my blog which were popular on HN. A few other people tried
22. 382.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    So I ended up licensing the codebase to someone else so he could build a different Mechanical Turk app. I kept all the IP but he got the codebase to use. Thanks for asking I'll try and make that more clear in the post!
23. 383.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Thanks for the comment! Obviously 3 instances were too much. But the point remains that if you're running a low traffic Rails app it's a lot cheaper (free) to host on Heroku than it is on EC2. And if you're running at the scale that DomainP
24. 384.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Thanks! I guess to me, more important than the selling price, was the process as a whole. It's a product that I took from an idea, built out and eventually sold. In there were a lot of lessons that I thought might be interesting to people.
25. 385.▲
    DomainPolish: From MVP To Exit In 6 Months(danshipper.com)

    107 points by dshipper 15y ago|67 comments
26. 386.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    I understand what you're saying and I think we actually agree on a few points. I'm not saying that bootstrappers can target a market and not make money for two years. In fact it's the opposite. It seems that that's the kind of idea that's s
27. 387.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Hey shingen, saying that I didn't want to build a billion dollar company and instead want to build a $50 million dollar one is more of a tongue in cheek way of saying that as a bootstrapper I can pursue opportunities with a smaller addressa
28. 388.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Exactly. And it's not just that there are nice size opportunities left, it's that it's easier to succeed as a bootstrapper with a lot of people funded because there's less competition in the spaces that bootstrappers generally play in.
29. 389.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    Great quote! Most of my experience centers around developing small web/mobile apps where building ten new apps a year is pretty commonplace. I'll add games to enterprise software as the two places where you'll have the most longevity for yo
30. 390.▲
    by dshipper 15y ago

    I really like this. It shifts the importance of the production from the physical e.g. the actual code, the actual book to the idea. Great comment.