Readit NewsAussieWog93 commented on Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead? · Posted by u/ilyaovchinnikov
One of the hardest pills to swallow when you are doing a startup is that there are customers you don't want. A customer that takes a week of grinding to close and makes you $27 IS NOT A CUSTOMER YOU WANT. You should pretend that sale never happened. It is just as much validation of your idea as a car salesman who manages to sell a brand new car to someone for 10% of what it is worth.
My honest advice is to get a job and stop digging yourself into a financial hole by living off credit. Work on your project one day a week. Try to take what you have and pivot it to a problem more people have and you can solve. Your goal should be to make something that you can spend 1/3 of the selling price on ads to acquire a customer. If you can't sell it with ads and you need a human involved to close people, you need to be selling your product for however much it would cost to cover a full time sales person (not you).
>Work on your project one day a week.
I have successfully bootstrapped several online business and absolutely, 100% this.
It'll either fail, stay a side project forever ($1k/mo isn't bad if you only need to put in 30 mins work per week on maintenance!), or reach the point where quitting your job becomes brain-dead obvious (for me, it was when the one day a week side hustle was pulling in 33% of the income as the 50 hour a week day job).
If you already have a decent job, there's no real need to risk everything and eat shit for years so you can have a crack at the big time.
Your idea is either good or bad, and part of business savvy is evaluating the idea without dumping millions of dollars/thousands of hours into a pit.
AussieWog93 commented on 'Lukewarm' and 'lukecool' (2021) grammarphobia.com/blog/20... · Posted by u/tintinnabula
bookie (maybe this is UK) is usually short for book maker, not bookkeeper.
Same in Australia!
AussieWog93 commented on USB in a Nutshell (2010) beyondlogic.org/usbnutshe... · Posted by u/throwaway71271
I would love at least some vague estimate that is more descriptive than "a reasonable amount of time" :)
Perhaps as a range (95% confidence interval perhaps) - estimate of total hours on task?
I've written a device and driver side USB stack, not even bare metal and it took several weeks of attempts and hundreds of pages of reading (mostly USB complete by Jan Axelson, this site is also good but just not as in-depth) to get right and there are still parts of it I don't fully understand.
Call it 15 hours to get a "ping" signal across, and another 15 to get data travelling at full speed with proper SOF handling.
Nowhere near as simple as something like I2C that you can get a complete understanding of in an afternoon.
The simple truth is that due to decades of lack of investment, chronic individualism, poor vocational schooling and inflated university degree costs, US workers cannot compete. They are less competent, less disciplined, less skilled. Some of this is due to no fault of their own, while some of this is also due to the culture. This manifests in every facet of American industrial capacity -- from "toothpick and tissue paper" home construction to most basic manufacturing like injection moulding, where moulds are used far past their serviceing periods to churn out margins.
As opposed to Japan? US workers are pretty famous for being hyper-productive and highly skilled...
Having had a career mostly in non-profits and NGOs (on the tech side of them), holy crap does this ring uncomfortably true. There are a few exceptions (de-mining NGOs actually do remove land mines rather than placing new ones, etc.) but the temptation for a whole lot of them to just become permanent fixtures of the problem can be overwhelming. It's how you get situations like where San Francisco spends what amounts to $28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness", and it get absolutely devoured by a giant NGO-industrial complex.
>$28K per homeless person in the city per year to "address homelessness"
Do you have a source for that number, or similar numbers for other cities? I believe you, just wondering if there's a breakdown or something. It's absolutely bonkers to imagine.
Colleagues in workplace started buying and were receiving commission by referencing next client. Trained salesman visited home and used all dirty sales tricks and pitches. Until now I remember "don't say this vacuum is expensive, this is Mercedes of vacuum cleaners, everyone desires even a substitute of Mercedes", or "a salesman enters someone's home with an attitude that they own him the commission money". You grew up in Communism with an absolute shortage of everything and are unable to evaluate good value in market economy. Fuck this manipulative psychopats.
>Colleagues in workplace started buying and were receiving commission by referencing next client.
You can blame the West as much as you want, but it sounds like Poles were stabbing Poles in the back too.
> I hear about various "work from home" jobs actually being scams, but what's going on there?
There's a lot of variants, but a couple of the most common ones are:
1) "Welcome to ScamCo! Here's a check for $X to help you pay for these work supplies, send us back the extra after you're done." (The check bounces; the repayment of the remainder doesn't.)
2) "Welcome to ScamCo! You'll be my personal assistant, please buy me some gift cards / cryptocurrency / whatever." (The payment to cover the cost of the cards bounces; the gift cards / cryptocurrency / whatever are unrecoverable.)
3) "Welcome to ScamCo! You'll help me move money between my bank accounts." (The bank accounts are stolen; the mark is working as a money mule.)
4) "Welcome to ScamCo! You'll help us reship packages." (The packages are stolen goods.)
Looks like 50% of those scams could be eliminated simply by the general public not accepting cheques.
I don't think I've seen one here for at least a decade and a half, same for signatures with credit cards.
AussieWog93 commented on Insecure vehicles should be banned, not security tools like the Flipper Zero saveflipper.ca/... · Posted by u/pabs3
> As a Catholic, I think I can tell you that it might be more nuanced. I believe that ethical norms are not some arbitrary rules, but are a bit like the part of a manual for some device that says under what conditions the device works properly and under what conditions it may break, only for humans. As in "if you commit adultery, you will end up unhappy; you have been warned".
Forewords: I was raised in a Catholic family, in a Catholic environment and I was a practicing Catholic up to almost 18yo. Then, I changed my mind through reading and experiencing the world as a young adult, and now I 'm probably biased the other way round (just like smoke quitters). No offenses intended, don't feel attacked.
I really struggle to understand how nowadays we are still somehow blind to the fact that religions were always basically a way to pass ethical behaviors to the population, playing the "almighty divine being" card.
Just like you would tell a child that Santa Claus is bringing their gifts and he and his assistants are watching you all the time, and know if you are good or naughty, and bring presents accordingly. Our society has - or should have - grown up by now, and we should be able to teach a shared ethical background without the need to use the God device. There is no need for a God that will give you his love Heaven or Hell to treat someone that is just like you, the same way you would like to be treated.
You could make a similar argument about capitalism. We _should_ have grown past it by now, but we haven't, and every time we try to invent a replacement system we end up making things worse.
You can see the ethical decay unfolding in real-time as societies turn replaced the old, rigorously tested system of religion with shiny new secular ethics.
I am aware that HN is not Ozbargain, but holy moly you can't deny that this is something that "good hackers would find interesting".