Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?

1

Flippa

#Online Marketplace #Buy Websites #Sell Websites 68 social mentions

2

Newscatcher News API

We’re ~17k MRR right now. Being doing it for almost 2 years. What made us take off is I and my cofounder running through our savings. I did it for ~15 months. One thing I had to start doing earlier is not trying to get everyone buy our product (we sell news articles published online as a source of data for insight mining) [0] I’ve lost so much time on people who’d never be able to use what we have unless we completely change our product. And yeah, marketing is super important. And, it’s going to take some time. [0] https://newscatcherapi.com.

#API Tools #APIs #News 16 social mentions

3

MicroAcquire

#Startups #Online Marketplace #Buy Websites 135 social mentions

4

Online Solitaire

It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spent time improving the site, optimizing speed and improving SEO. A couple of years later, the site is now earning $10k+ a month .

#Games #Online Games #Card Games 10 social mentions

5

Enchant

In the space we[1] operate, there's no shortage of competitors. Over the years, I've seen that those who can unlock marketing see a lot more success, even with a shittier product. As a developer-turned-founder, a lot of marketing feels sleazy. Was it always this way? So much link-bait, fluffy posts that are really big ads, shallow content just for SEO, upvoting-rings on platforms, etc. There's so few who seem to put in an honest effort. And Google also doesn't help here, they seem to be going downhill and letting a lot of poor content rank high. One thing that's helped us over the years is taking care of our customers. Using their feedback to guide the roadmap, reprioritizing when the pain points are growing for them, transparency about outages, following up once things they asked for were released, etc. In our case: we take care of our customers and they bring us more... And it compounds. A referral is basically a pre-sold trial. :) [1] https://enchant.com.

#Help Desk #Customer Support #Customer Service 4 social mentions

6

Imba

On a side-note, thank you very much for creating and releasing Imba! It's a joy to write apps with it and I can put things out so much faster. https://imba.io.

#Personal Finance #Financial Planner #Android 36 social mentions

7

rysolv

Noo! And it's too late to edit the comment. https://rysolv.com/.

#Developer Tools #Tech #Work Marketplace 12 social mentions

8

Next.js

Not exactly correct or incorrect. Some projects built as a single page app (SPA), using a fancy framework like React or Angular with little configuration, end up loading all DOM content client side via javascript which has a number of drawbacks on performance and SEO. It doesn't have to be that way though. If you want to use React, there are tools to help you easily make something like a static site generator (SSG) which will transform your React code down into pre-rendered HTML pages. Two popular ones are Gatsby (https://gatsby.dev/) and Next.js (https://nextjs.org/) which also supports Server Side Rendering (SSR). So out of the box plain HTML / CSS might be more optimized than a fresh create-react-app repo, but if you prefer to use the toolset provided by React to build your site (or Vue or Angular, etc), there are plenty of options to make that equally performant.

#Developer Tools #Web Frameworks #JavaScript Framework 923 social mentions

9

Divjoy

Charge more! My product[1] was originally free, then $49, then after a year I started to bump up the price more aggressively. It's now $299 and I probably should have started with that. Devs either aren't willing to pay for boilerplate code (and happy with open-source options) or they are willing to pay. If they are willing to pay then $299 isn't much if it saves them a week or more of dev time. 1. https://divjoy.com.

#React #React Tools #Developer Tools 29 social mentions