What's an Htmx CEO?
Readit NewsJugurtha commented on Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?" · Posted by u/bookofjoe
Jugurtha commented on Ask HN: Is it time to fork HN into AI/LLM and "Everything else/other?" · Posted by u/bookofjoe
This post is turning up at least every other day. The last few times my reply was "AI is 4/30 or 5/30 of the front page, it's not such a big deal", but today it is 9/30.
I am wondering what the ratio is for VC and angel dealflow in the valley right now.
Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.
>Hanging out on the "new" page and upvoting quality non-AI articles is an effective method of resistance.
I hang out in /ask and /asknew for my part.
PS: Hey, Paul... When are you going to close my 2021 issue[0], you already merged the pull request[1] :D
Come on, man!
>If you have start again, what would be core of building saas that makes $5k per month?
1. Why $5k?
2. Find a market and customers you can reach who have a problem they are aware of, have spent money to solve, but are still unsatisfied.
>Remember, most niche are already saturated. Community building and social posting does not yield to immediate revenue.
Questionable premise.
>What would you do?
Same as always: find customers in a worthwhile, growing, market with a problem they're aware of and still dissatisfied with existing solutions.
Jugurtha commented on Analytics tool but for landing pages. What do you think? · Posted by u/coursecrumbs
The website is either not responding or giving 500 after a cached page is briefly shown, then:
Cannot read properties of null (reading 'ce')Jugurtha commented on Ask HN: How do you get marketing and sales decision makers talk to you? · Posted by u/softsales
The ability to find and reach your ideal customer is paramount, and you're having trouble doing that. You've tried LinkedIn so far, but it's worth your while to experiment with other distribution channels.
You're trying to book meetings by reaching out ("cold") on LinkedIn in order to do what exactly? To have a conversation in which you could ask questions, and validate or invalidate hypotheses. One way to do that is to go public with your hypotheses in appropriate fora. The internet abhors someone being wrong, and your target customers will come out of the shadows and write essays proving just how little you know on the topic, and how wrong you are.
There's an old Algerian saying: "يرمي الراشي باش يجيب الصحيح", or "Throwing the brittle to pick up the solid" (meaning people who say something wrong (brittle) in order to get the correct (solid) information).
There's also "Cunningham's Law": "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."
Or this: https://xkcd.com/386/
Now, you're not doing that out of deception of course. The very reason you're trying to develop a product for your target customers is that you believe some things to be broken and believe certain things to be true. You can write about those and get to validate or invalidate these beliefs. In any way, you'll get feedback and strike up conversations.
That is but one way.
>I have offered Lunch and coffee as an incentive.
That would be a courtesy, not an incentive. An incentive would be to pay them consulting fees and get them as consultants to answer your questions.
There are other ways: trade shows, conventions, subreddits, Quora, etc. Where do these people gather?
You also could think of changing your messages and state the questions in your email. This might lower the activation energy: someone might not want to meet you for coffee/lunch with an open agenda, but if you state your questions clearly in your email they might think "What the heck, I can write a reply in 10 minutes and get done with it. Good action of the day: check".
The bottom line is to respect their time, and one way to show that respect is to have your thoughts and questions in order. This helps get responses.
They might not be interested, but if they know someone who might be, they might refer you to that person.
If you have a way to be useful for the person, don't hesitate. There are so many opportunities to be useful for people by connecting them to your network and solving problems for them. Someone sells something, you know someone interested? Offer to connect the two. Hook people up.
Do a Show HN here with your product, however rudimentary it may be. Also, make yourself reachable (put your contact information and your product in your profile) so people can reach out to you even after it's no longer possible to reply to this thread. Keep channels open.
I have replied to a few threads on this forum: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40482961
These go from "Hired, now what?" to how to validate an idea, build product, operate a company, lead a team, etc...
I hope you find something useful in there.
Jugurtha commented on Ask HN: How do you decide what to ship each week as a solo founder? · Posted by u/five9s
Issues/tickets are split between features and bug-fixes. Positive/Negative. Issue templates that force revealing the job to be done and avoid the XY problem. Get down to root causes, not just the symptom of an issue. The analogy is not to look at the last line of a traceback. If it is a feature, why should it be implemented? Who will it serve? How many complained about it? What do analytics say? What's its impact, and what graph of possibilities does it open?
Prioritize:
- Bugs: monitor exceptions with tools such as Sentry to help prioritize bugs because you get just how many times an exception was raised. The exception traces get buried in logs; you will not notice them if you're relying on logs.
- Features: analytics tools such as PostHog to track usage and non-usage (non-consumption) and find out why customers are not using certain features.
- On-going customer support: How's your customer support? How often do you interact with users? Do you have a Slack/Discord/IRC channel people can get on right away and start ranting about some issue with some screenshots and talk with a human? This both exposes issues you were oblivious to and assigns a weight to issues you were aware of but hadn't ranked: One user who complains about an issue is one thing. Many people complaining about the same issue that prevents them from working is another thing. Use frequency and severity/impact
- On-going customer success: having to hold users' hands to accomplish something could indicate poor UX, which should nudge you to make it more intuitive. The less users need you, the less complex sales become, the more "low touch" the product becomes, the higher the odds people at an organization will adopt your product ("shadow IT", "bottom up"), the higher your chance to really sell into that organization.
- Marketing: when talking with users and when you read what they write and listen to what they say, do they use different words, names, and expressions than what you use? When you watch them use the product without helping them and scream in your head that they can't seem to click on the proper icon even though they just hovered over it and it even had a tool-tip and a label, do you adjust for that in your language?
- Resist the temptation to implement features just because other products have them or just because a few users asked for them. Wanting to please everyone only pleases shrinks. The Sirens always sing for you to jump into a sea of code and you better have wax and rope nearby.
- User feedback does unearth problems, not draw the roadmap. Listening to users' "solutions" (features) is like a physician asking you which prescription to write. I'm not saying to ignore it, but it pays to be very, very careful.
- Features that are interesting are often found looking at the whole journey of a user trying to solve a problem. What is the user trying to do? Why is he using the product to do that? Which steps come before using the product and which steps come after?
Problem solving for features:
The XY problem can be sneaky. For instance, we had built an MLOps platform a few years ago. I was doing "customer discovery" and people worried about data privacy/security and infrastructure capabilities, especially GPUs. In other words, these represented friction and increased the "sale complexity". Some users asked us to offer compute and storage, others rejected the product because it's not open-source and they don't trust it (digging deeper, they were afraid we'd die). I could've taken that and decide to "increase security/privacy", and chase the infra route to reduce that friction, which was what most companies were doing. Instead, I decided to completely bypass it and use the user's infrastructure by integrating with it: the compute jobs would now happen on the user's own clusters and on the user's own data sources without transiting by our platform. Also, we were able to die without losing users' work. That's an example of circumventing a sales obstacle/objection with technical means. Even more so, the rationale was that by going that route (using their own compute and storage), we wouldn't need to find a budget with their CFO, because their compute and storage was already budgeted for. In other words: staying true to orchestration and integrating with the user's infra.
It could be a variety of things and we lack information, so I'll give a, hopefully useful, generic answer.
>We did get some validation and we are generating low 3 digit revenue. But, that’s not enough.
- Does your product save money, make money, or make life "easier"?
- Did your users find you or did you find them?
- How many people have you talked with and what have you learned?
- How did your users find you?
- How did you find your users?
- What do they have in common?
- Are they in the same industry?
- Are they in the same function?
- Have you talked with them?
- What is it that they're trying to accomplish with your product? (I'm not asking you what your product does, I'm asking what they are trying to do)
- How do they describe your product? Are there words that come up again. Do they describe it differently than you do?
- What is your conversion graph (or "funnel" with the different drop-offs) like?
- What's your product's sale complexity? (high touch? low touch? do they self-serve? Do they need a demo? Do they struggle?)
- Is the user the person who pays for the product or is it someone else?
- What's your features usage like? (are they using all the features and if not, why not and what are they using to solve the problem you built the features to solve?)
- What did the people who said "NO" tell you? What are the reasons they will not use your product?
You're experienced and you seem to already have identified what you don't like. Software is practically everywhere, and it doesn't engineer itself. The aspects you talk about relate to noise that has become intolerable and there are many sectors, especially when the stakes are real, that eschew this "nonsense".
Have you considered working at places that don't "identify" as "tech companies/software companies" but where software is very present? Industry/Manufacturing, construction, automotive, aerospace, energy, logistics/supply chain, etc... In other words, places where software is a leverage to something. This may help "root" what you do in the "real world".
All these need software and they need actual, tangible, results.