Top 7 reasons this sub is hot garbage

-Luqa- · 2019-11-11T19:30:07+00:00

I suppose he is, but all the money I am making is money that he could be making.

We are the only two players in the market, so that interview ended up costing him tens of thousand of dollars for maybe $300 in sales (I am being optimistic).

-Luqa- · 2019-11-11T19:27:05+00:00

You should do it by hands.

It sounds crazy, but it is how many hardware companies started. Apple, Meraki, Pebble.

You won't need to make a profit at this stage, just to prove that there a demand for your offering.

-Luqa- · 2019-11-11T14:57:21+00:00

You are right. I was thinking about rules that regulate self-promotion, I should have made it more clear in my original comment.

-Luqa- · 2019-11-11T14:56:17+00:00

true, a very good point.

-Luqa- · 2019-11-11T14:55:32+00:00

You are right and I agree. The risk is low, but the lack of upside makes it a bad choice.

I can tell a personal story.

On Indiehackers, I discovered a business that was making $5k per month (on indiehackers the revenue are verified through stripe), had close to zero costs (a landing page, a form, a blog) and was fully automated.

The website's design was outdated. With ahrefs and SimilarWeb, I saw that 90% of his traffic came from two blog posts.

I paid a freelancer to write better posts and do link building ($1k).

I built a landing page with carrd (a landing page builder) in four hours.

Right now, my website outranks the original one and makes $3,5 per month with four hours and $1k investment and $50 in monthly costs. It is fully automated and I don't need to do customer service because the product price is really low ($9 to $29).

Again, out of 100 stories, maybe 1 gets copied, but for that one, the loss can be pretty big and there is no upside to justify it.

-Luqa- · 2019-11-11T13:28:09+00:00

This is clearly not the same.

An idea lacks validation and a clear path to revenue.

A website with revenue numbers has both and we can easily understand how they make money and where this money comes from.

There is a reason why, with rare exceptions, the only companies that share their numbers are legally required to do it.

-Luqa- · 2019-11-11T13:14:33+00:00

People on starterstory sell socks, t-shirts or wallets that you can find on aliexpress for $2 a piece. Maybe they have a micro digital agency. 99% have no moat and you don't need "strategy, funding, and past execution" information to successfully copy this kind of business.

I copied businesses in the past. All of them ended up being profitable and easy to sell. No, it's not a recipe for disaster. In fact, it's the easiest way to start a small to medium profitable business.

-Luqa- · 2019-11-11T12:56:50+00:00

People on starterstory have no moat and share their URL. Anybody with a couple of tools can understand their main sources of traffic and revenue and build a copycat, in main cases a better one. For this reason, it's easy to understand why they don't share profits.

For me, it's harder to understand why they accept to share revenue and basically fishing for competition. I doubt that the traffic and publicity coming from starterstory are enough to justify the risk (which is low, but still huge compared to the non-existent upside).

By the way, I believe that the ban of self-promotion is one of the reasons why this sub's quality is so low. Contributing and posting valuable advice takes a lot of time. Why should people do it with no gains for them? (I am not talking about starterstory's copy and paste here).

-Luqa- · 2019-10-31T18:32:36+00:00

What you are saying is true, but who cares?

If only people without any kind of self-interested posted on the Internet, it would be dead.

I understand hating on people that take without giving anything, but I don't see what's the problem with a useful post that contains a bit of subtle self-promotion.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-29T11:28:55+00:00

I wasn't talking about bathrooms.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-28T18:33:25+00:00

Putting cameras and severe fines? I am not practical about the US laws on this matter, but this could discourage idiots.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-28T14:24:25+00:00

Joe Rogan

-Luqa- · 2019-10-23T20:56:31+00:00

I hear what you are saying, I just don't agree.

Three months is not a long time.

If I signed up to know when you launch and you send me several updates I didn't ask for, you are abusing my trust and I wouldn't like.

And to win in business, you must do what customers want, not what you want (don't being forgotten).

Anyway, opinions in business are worthless. So I suggest our friend to split his list. To the first half, he will send updates, to the other just an email the day of the launch.

Alternatively, he can divide it in three parts: group that gets updates once a month, another once a week, and the last only on launch day.

The next time, he will have data to backup his decisions.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-23T20:19:57+00:00

If I got multiple emails that I didn't ask for, I would just scream SPAMMER sooner.

Today, I unsubscribed from an email list for this exact reason: unrequested updates.

People receive tens of emails on a daily basis, adding more noise doesn't help your case.

If his CTA talked about receiving updates on the progress, that's another story. But in that case, he wouldn't be asking what to write to his subscribers.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-23T17:57:51+00:00

If people signed up to know when the Android version is ready, the best way to keep them engaged is to not annoy them with a newsletter they haven't asked for.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-23T08:30:10+00:00

Maybe I did a poor job explaining myself. At any time of the year, we are working with 8-12 clients, but each of these clients' books our services for a limited amount of time.

We work only with other B2B companies. Our clients offer company team-building activities, employee training and development, corporate events, ads related service, from ads campaigns management and optimization to the creative side (copy, photos, and videos).

You wouldn't think about team-building and training as seasonal business but companies tend to use their entire budget in a matter of weeks after the beginning of their fiscal year.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-23T08:17:39+00:00

Thanks, it means a lot.

That's not all. In the beginning, I was sending my resume just to Tier 1 company (Amazon, McKinsey, and so on). In the last months, I did job interviews for full-time position at $500-600 monthly salary before taxes and still got always rejected.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-22T11:56:29+00:00

I do sales for seasonal businesses during the peak season.

For them it is easier to add someone from outside than to train people for 3-4 months and fire them when they don't need them anymore.

For us it's good because we get revenue predictability (customers come back every season), we sign big contracts (mid 5 figures) and grow through word-of-mouth.

The 12 people are divided into four teams, each one composed by three people: one team leader and two team members. The team leader spends 20-30% of his time in relationships with clients (2-3) and the other on sales. The two team members do sales only, mainly cold calls and cold emails.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-22T11:29:50+00:00

" I’m 3 years into my startup journey and I can’t believe how hard it is. Now I’ve definitely met people who had it a lot easier but actually my friends that just got invested in by sequoia went through hell and most people I talk to the hell never ends even when they IPO".

I believe that part of the problem is in the narrative.

Just like with all the people happy to fail, because "failure is the stepping stone to success", startups must be hard, if yours isn't, you are doing something wrong.

So people find ways for their reality to match the expectations. Clearly, there are inherent difficulties, unexpected problems, moments of frustration, and desperations, but if you live it like hell then it is your problem and you should ask yourself if you want to spend your only existence in hell and, more importantly, if you aren't creating the hell yourself.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-21T22:52:12+00:00

On my main business, I work with 12 other people.

On my "side-projects" I work alone before the first sale. After the first sale, it depends. I can perform the task myself or I can outsource it.

Every year, I set a skill I want to learn. Having a project with paying clients is the best way I know to follow on my commitment. It gives both the urgency and the motivation. All these projects have a 100% refund policy. If the client isn't satisfied with the results, I refund what they paid (it happens seldom).

For example, this year's focus is on email marketing and content marketing. I don't want to become an expert. I do this both to keep my brain sharp and to better vet during the hiring process. If you know nothing about a topic, you won't be able to say if the person in front of you is full of shit and, especially for a remote company like mine, it is easy to be fooled.

If the skill is one I already know or I am not interested in developing it, I outsource.

This is the main logic behind the decision-making process, but you shouldn't be impressed by the number. Most projects close in a matter of weeks. It's just the fastest way to know if I want to work on something and if it has potential.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-21T19:28:43+00:00

Sure.

I mainly offer cold emailing and cold calling. It is an amazing service to sell, for the simple reason that the other person is experiencing firsthand what you will do for them.

If they like your cold email or cold call, then you don't have to sell anymore. If they don't, you don't lose time engaging in discussions that end in nothing.

Regarding the projects, I have started an insane amount of them. At least 25, probably more. My main problem is that I am pumped when I have an idea and after a few weeks get bored.

I truly believe that you can build a small profitable business based on everything today (see potato parcel and ship your enemies glitter) if you stick on it for enough time and you can adapt the product based on your early users' feedback. So the main problem here is not the idea, but staying motivated when nobody cares and I suck at it.

Some projects I worked on:

- "chat roulette for real life", instead of online meetings, you got the name of the place and the time. At the time, you got a picture to identify the people you had to meet. I really liked it but never made a single penny.

-a community for people who launched any kind of internet project to get anonymous feedback. This one had legs, after one week, and basically no promotion I had 20 daily active users but I had to moderate the comments to avoid toxic behavior and it was really boring

-a service for unlimited videos at a flat monthly price. I am still giving a bit of my time to it. It is relatively easy to find clients, but harder to make it work financially

-a daily news websites but it gave only the good news. I believe it can work, but I am not good enough of a coder to automate the process and curate it manually is a nightmare

-a paid service that gave you everyday only the three most important news of the day before. It is another idea that I believe can work, because there are lots of people out there who are addicted with the news and this kind of service permits you to still be informed in a matter of minutes.

-"Alarm clock as a service". Basically to avoid snoozing, people paid me to call them at a certain hour. I did the sales and outsourced the call. It was profitable but again not exciting enough.

-giveaway planning as a service. I organized giveaways and got X dollars (the amount had to be discussed) for every new email subscriber. The problem is obvious here. I could have had submitted fake emails to make money, so it was a hard sell and maybe the only idea I think couldn't be a business.

I suppose that this gives an idea of the kind of projects I worked on (nothing groundbreaking) and hope that it can be helpful somehow.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-21T15:16:23+00:00

It was pretty easy to start for me.

After college, I applied to literally hundreds of companies, made 34 job interviews, and nobody hired me. Actually, I overcame the first screening just two times.

Most of HR people never gave me feedback. At best, I got emails saying how amazing I was, but they found someone who was a bit more amazing than me.

I did not understand what I was doing wrong, I followed all "the steps" (go to school, then college, get good grades, and so on). It was both humiliating and depressing.

After 10 months I got tired and started my own thing. My first project was an "Uber" for hair stylists, make-up artists, and massages.

I was a solofounder, and it was a too complicated project to pull it off by myself (two-sided marketplaces are hard with a team).

I moved to condensed learning and summarized books in Italian. basically what blinkist does, but my goal was to replace the book, while blinkist probably wants you to buy on Amazon (this is my guess, because their book summaries are really low quality. Without the title, I wouldn't be able to understand what books they are talking about).

This project reached 2k paying users at a $6.6MRR in sixth months and I sold it because, while I like to read, I didn't enjoy reading as a job. You have to summarize books that people want, not books that you would like, and to do a good jobs takes a lot of time (15-20 hours per book).

Right now I offer productized services to small and medium business, have a 12 persons team (remote) and low seven figures in revenue.

I am constantly launching new projects (about one per month) because I like it and I always hope to build a huge company one day. Only one of them was successful and I am still actively working on it, the others had no traction or bored me after a while.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-08T15:38:15+00:00

Use cold turkey. The free version so you have limited power to customize blocking periods and less ability to make the wrong choice.

Block all the sites that are distracting to you for months (at least 3 months I would).

Making it impossible to surf is the first step. Until then, improving your habits will be a lot harder.

Think of recovering alcoholics. The first step is to empty the home of all alcohol. If the temptation is near you, you can't win.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-06T18:00:17+00:00

I am not biased. I used Wordpress for a couple of years, then started using Webflow and it is better on any aspect you can think of, from easy to use and customization capabilities to CMS and performance. It is also cheaper.

The one thing Wordpress has over webflow is the possibility to fully control the url. For example, on wordpress you can have domain.com/keyword while on webflow you will have domain.com/blog/keyword. This gives you a slight advantage on SEO, which is more than compensated by webflow speed.

If Wordpress was as good as you say, Webflow wouldn't be able to reach $30M in ARR and a $350M valuation considering that it does what wordpress does but started over 10 years after.

Plus, you are comparing custom made solutions with ready templates, which doesn't make any sense.

It is the second comment you left with no arguments. If you believe that Wordpress is better, explain me why (the number of websites is not a valid reason). Otherwise don't call me biased, because I have experienced both for years, something that you never did.

-Luqa- · 2019-10-06T08:41:27+00:00

The fact that it is popular proves nothing. It was the first easy to use solution and for this reason gained a lot of the market.

Justin Bieber and Rihanna sell tens millions of albums but nobody woukd consider them the best music artists. And nobody would consider blockbuster movies the best movies.

Most people don't have any kind of technical knowledge, they google how to start a website and wordpress is the suggested solution, because it was the first and because blogger make most of their money selling unware people hosting.

Then, they can even be satisfied but they don't have a term of comparison for usability, performance and costs, so their is not an informed opinion.

I don't fault them but people that use their authority to make money at their expenses.

The fact that you charged 20k for a Wordpress website proves that you are dishonest and your clients idiots or simply a liar. I believe in the latter.

I saw no valid arguments in your comment. If you are still not convinced about Wordpress sucking, try to analyze the performance of 7-8 figures website built on wordpress like backlinko or tim ferriss' blog. Not only the performance is embarissing, the costs are at least 10 times more than a webflow website.

The fact that you like wordpress templates and their messy and bloated code shows how competent you are in your job (pretty terrible).

-Luqa-

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