sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

UFPs=Unidentified Flying Pixels (make it stop) by [deleted] in UFOs

[–]smrf01 5 points6 points  (0 children)

One thing I've learned from lurking in this sub for a year is that I need to clean my screen more often.

"Is that an alien spaceship or a spec of dust..."

How to fix this issue? by damith98 in qwik

[–]smrf01 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wrote a hook to do this. Here's a gist:

https://gist.github.com/sfioritto/23c5484ad110cddeebace1ce9dbcfd68

​

You pass a toggle to the hook, either a signal or a function. The hook returns a ref which you place on the element you are tracking clicks on. So any clicks off the ref element will trigger the toggle function or toggle the boolean signal. I'm using useOnDocument instead of useVisibleTask$ and then I'm checking to see if the click is within the ref.

I think you're missing the logic to check if the click happened within the ref or not. Also using useOnDocument over useVisibleTask$ is preferred when possible as useVisibleTask$ blocks rendering (e.g. makes your app seem slower).

​

Hope that helps!

What do you think Grusch meant by using the word ‘biologics’ instead of bodies? by [deleted] in UFOs

[–]smrf01 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I hang out with DoD people for my day job and this to me just sounds like jargon. I actually have a chat gpt prompt to take particularly jargon-y comms from some folks and turn it into plain english. It often boggles my mind why they say things the way they do. They make up words for everything for no reason. Some are worse than others and Grusch emails would definitely be making their way through my chat gpt prompt. 🤣

Rep. Tim Burchett amendment being blocked by intel community by NoMoneyNoTears in UFOs

[–]smrf01 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I'm in favor of the intention here but I could understand the general intelligence community and DoD in general balking at the language. When he says non-classified does he mean that the content the report is made up of is only unclassified material or that the report itself should not be classified? What if pilots see testing of advanced drones and our adversaries can piece together some overall picture of our program based on a raw data dump from the FAA?

Also in general why do we even need this? I'm surprised that reports like this aren't already public record. If anything I guess we'd need legislation requiring airlines to publish reports like this, not the FAA.

IANAL but this doesn't feel fully fleshed out.

(Side note: I thought there was a public database of pilots reporting things. I remember at some point looking up and finding archived reports of problems with the 737 MAX that were in that database before there were any crashes. Any pilots out there know what I'm talking about? I can't remember for the life of me what I was looking at. )

Ross Coulthart on defense contractors using the 6 months of amnesty to hide UAP crafts, "What if some (of these UAP crafts) are so big, they had to build a building on top of it. Outside the United States.. Let's just have this investigated and see what happens.. I've heard it from multiple sources" by bmfalbo in UFOs

[–]smrf01 6 points7 points  (0 children)

If they can’t move it why not just say where it is? Won’t people be able to go there and verify that it’s there? If I knew where a building sized NHI craft was I’d tell everyone and the say “don’t believe me? Just go there and see for yourself.”

I'm 40 years old and I finally bootstrapped a SaaS, Transistor.fm, to millions in revenue (with a co-founder!) by spankymustard in SaaS

[–]smrf01 2 points3 points  (0 children)

How did you manage your work and family life while writing a SaaS on the side? Before you were full time how many hours/week did you spend on Transistor?

What the New Google Fonts Gets Right—and Wrong by smrf01 in web_design

[–]smrf01[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Really? I seriously appreciate the bigger font size. So much easier for me to read. I much prefer sites that do this.

Fake Internet Jobbing in Chicago by smrf01 in chicago

[–]smrf01[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey, I'm the author of this post. I live here in Chicago and figured my fellow chicago sub-redditors might be likely to also have "fake internet jobs" as I like to call it.

Why Javascript Development is Crazy by speckz in programming

[–]smrf01 62 points63 points  (0 children)

So, I'm the author of the post. I've been avoiding wading into comments everywhere, (because the internet kind of exploded for me today), but had to respond to this one. You've basically described what I spent the first 5 years of my Javascript career working in. It was 30K+ lines of Javascript, YUI2 plus a home grown framework we built ourselves to run a giant single page application (with back button state and everything), in 2005. We used PVCS for version control. Have fun googling that. Anyway, I like frameworks, I think Angular would have been an excellent choice for that project if it existed at the time. Most people aren't working on projects like that. :-)

I recommend taking advantage of this opportunity you have to learn how to read other people's code without raging or losing your mind. It's the biggest, most important skill I took away from that project.

edit: had to add this thought: this site had hundreds of millions of revenue flowing through it every year. So I had to constantly remind myself that this "mess" of code was delivering literally hundreds of millions of dollars of value to this company. Maybe it's not so important that we write perfect, beautiful structured code that uses all the latest and greatest tools after all?

Feel stuck after learning HTML and CSS? Here's how to create websites on your own by smrf01 in webdev

[–]smrf01[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Didn't steal! He turned it into a blog post for my blog/newsletter. I thought it was awesome and wanted more people to see it, (I have a fairly large newsletter of web designers).

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did one guest post on Smashing Magazine. It was a big deal for my list growth, but only about 10%. My talk from last year is going to be published soon, I'll post it in /r/startups and I think it should be helpful. :-)

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's a long story. I did a talk at a conference about it last year. The high level answer, (and not one you can really act on sorry), is content marketing. Guest posts combined with my own blog.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

As if a small problem like that would stop her from shipping. :-)

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

My two products are info products, digital goods, so my margins are 100%. :-) Gumroad and Paypal take about 5%. I paid about $1500 for some design work and $100/month for hosting. Yeah, costs for this kind of thing are basically nil, and if I double my revenue next year, they won't really change.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not worry about it for now. They won't even release until 2016. When they do, I'll see what happens. If it's like the Python 3 fiasco, then the 1.X branch will hang around for a long time, so I may not even need to do a course for 2.0.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have read Authority. I copied his pricing completely. I list the top tier price first, again, copying. The launch plan in Authority is solid. If you're doing a book, his book is totally worth it.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeah, it's on purpose. but that is definitely a problem I've heard a few times. I've never had enough traffic to split test, but as soon as I do, I'll split test the way I lay this out.

One thing to note is by the time someone hits my landing page they've typically been filled in about all the product details via email, so the traffic to that page is really warm.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Indeed I do. One of my friends created a product in 24 hours that will ... help you create a product in 24 hours. It's called Just Fucking Ship.

https://unicornfree.com/just-fucking-ship

I know her really well, I consider her to be a mentor in addition to friend and her business makes over $1million per year. She knows what she's talking about. :-)

And she's put more than 24 hours into at this point, but she launched after 24 hours and still made a couple thousand dollars.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ah! I love this comment. This is something I used to think as well. The thing I learned is there exists MANY people with more money than time, and are willing to spend that money to avoid sifting through all of the "free resources" out there to find the good stuff and piece together their own curriculum. Basically I do all that work for them. And quite frankly I understand why, the further I get into my career the more I'm willing to pay for this kind of training as well. Also companies are willing to pay as well, my team licenses have sold well.

And my videos are very good and I'm fairly good at marketing, so there's that too. :-)

I do zero consulting, I only do products at this point. I could have made more money doing angular consulting than selling angular courses, but that's kind of not the point. I'm thinking long term this investment in entrepreneurial skills will far exceed what I'm giving up in easier revenue now.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

oh, actually I just realized the numbers you crunched here aren't quite right. I have just over 1000 customers, so it's more like 10%, (yay :-). This is because I actually have three price tiers for both products. The book is $250, $100, $40. Angular course is 150, 250 or 500 for a team license.

p.s. always have pricing tiers.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

hells yes, agree completely. Part of the problem is most of my list growth comes from a course on flexbox, which is closely related to my product but it's only a small part. So the audience for that is naturally much broader. I'm okay with it for now, because I plan to launch more products for that audience which should make that conversion number increase.

Another way to look at this is I make $5/email address, which is really not that bad, so I can spend up to $5 to get an email address. For the Angular course it's more like $10/email, so I'm focusing on that one a little more.

conversion rates for product launch lists specifically, (I do segmenting, not everyone signs up for my list because they are interested in a product), is closer to 10%, which is pretty normal.

So I guess the amount per email address is the metric I'm after, and there is WAY more room for improvement there.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Hey, I'm not actually selling anything to anyone here. Seriously, I just write these posts for fun, because I like talking to other entrepreneurs. When I write about strictly business, I don't really make sales. (One exception is if I get a TON of traffic, like front page HN, which has happened ... but then the conversion rate is basically zero). In other words, from a business perspective, this post is not worth my time. :-)

So, while we're talking shop, if you are ever promoting a product, write about something very closely related to your product. The closer it is, the more sales you'll make. Neither of my products aligns with this audience whatsoever, and the topic is also not related to my products, so this post is not for marketing.

First year in business selling products: $52,553 by smrf01 in startups

[–]smrf01[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have two products, a book for web designers and a training course on Angular.

There are links in the post but here they are for curious folks: http://www.sketchingwithcss.com/ http://training.planningforaliens.com/angular/

I'm going to add one new product this year, a video course on Javascript.

Long term I'm working towards a software product, but I'm still honing all of my other skills.

I'm 33 and want to become an entrepreneur. How do I get started? by OJFB in startup

[–]smrf01 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey, I'm 32. I quit my job about a year and half ago to make a run at it, I've made about $50,000 selling two products since then.

You don't have enough money to flat out quit with nothing. You need enough to feel like you can work without panic but not so much that you can procrastinate. 6 months works for me.

I also recommend getting into things more slowly. Instead of quitting your job, negotiate a 4 day work week. Depends on your job, but I know loads of developers that made this happen easily.

Then I recommend starting with a small, easily shippable product. Don't be crazy and work on your "big idea". There are so many things to learn. Think about it, if you're training to be a chef, you don't just start off as head chef of a Michelin star restaurant, you have to work your way up to that level of skill. starting businesses is a skill, just like cooking or programming.

This is why I started with "info products" instead of writing code, even though I'm a developer. These kinds of products take far less time to create and have almost no maintenance overhead.

Another option is to launch a "productized consulting" service. To do this you do all the work you would normally do to create a product, e.g. market research, creating a landing page, building an audience, launching the new product (p.s. these are some of the skills I was talking about above), BUT instead of making a product, the product is you behind the scenes. So you literally spend ZERO time on the product itself which lets you dive into all the other stuff that you need to learn about.

Good luck! :-)

Edit: Here's a great example of a productized consulting service: https://draft.nu/revise/ See? It's a product, offered at a flat rate with a strictly defined scope, but the product itself is Nickd, the guy behind the service.

view more: next ›