Show HN: I made $10000 by posting on Hacker News about my microstartup I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it. A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with the pandemic, I had very little motivation let alone travel anywhere. It took me 3 months to do research and plan out the architecture to the last detail. I looked at some of the B2C bootstrappers offering a lifetime deal and getting success. That's possible because they don't have a huge recurring cost with each customer, but in B2B SaaS, you have a recurring cost with each customer. But I thought let me add and see how it goes. So added a lifetime deal with for $199. At that time I posted it on Hacker News [2] and it made it to the front page and all the lifetime deals were over in 12 hours. Then I added $299 which got over during the week. So far I made over $10000 and got more than 35 customers. Even though it might not be profitable in the long run, I got the cashflow and customers in less time and it removed the pressure to chase customers. Now I can focus on the product. One of the biggest challenges of a SaaS startup is to acquire the first 50 customers. I have seen many startups achieve this over 6 to 12 months, some even a few years. But with this initial business model, I have cashflow for a year which is the best thing that can happen to a B2B SaaS. Lifetime deals can be a powerful way to get initial customers especially when you are getting started. [1] https://simpleops.io/ [2] https://ift.tt/3jnKex1 August 24, 2020 at 07:20PM
Show HN: Infstream – We’re trying to fix video monetization for creators TL;DR: https://ift.tt/2VFChrA Hi HN – we’re Ben & Callum from Infstream. We’ve always been heavy users of YouTube, for entertainment, education and sharing. Towards the end of last year, we saw more and more horror stories of YouTubers losing their livelihood to the ad algorithm. We decided to build a content-first video platform, which aims to reduce issues by removing advertisers from the equation. Instead, we charge for the content you watch – bold, I know. Instead of paying in advertising and data, users on Infstream build their own streaming package, a channel at a time. Anyone can start a channel (US & UK now, Europe soon) and earn directly from their subscribers. Subscribers pay $1 per month per channel, of which the channel receives $0.75. This all begins from the first subscriber, there are no minimums to start monetization. Channels have total control, and can publish on a daily, weekly or monthl...
Comments
Post a Comment