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Thank you for your advice.

I understand that I should take them and think further about them, that the questions are not necessarily for the here and now. I'll anyway give you my initial thoughts.

* I really disagree on the contract thing. That attitude can't work in my country, and always needs a big personal finance and security net.

* To not expand seems to be the consensus, and I'm convinced

* The people I can reach (via forums and reddit) are mainly gamers. It is also where the idea of the site is coming from: to get the best possible performance, which for an office or minecraft pc is not really important. My impression so far is that the people who build their custom PCs are gamers, with some workstation for programmers (that often want to game on them as well) in the mix.

* You assume correctly. Though currently it is the markdown code used on reddit that is mainly used (to a big part by myself when going to the user asking there for builds). In the share widget there are also buttons for facebook, twitter and g+ that are supposed to enable sharing configurations, from my stats facebook and twitter are used a tiny little bit.

A big problem with going into forums and having the site used there: Every forum has their own standards of what is a good PC (and some are ridiculous faithful to their ways), and the big german forums have a cooperation with geizhals, a price search engine.

I think that the last point is the core point, to improve the answer "how do people find the site".

> * Don't worry too much about crazy contracts / terms of service. If you run a business you will end up signing all kinds of ridiculous contracts. If you are worried about the consequences, get a normal job instead.

Anyone here's been doing that, and is still running a business after 10 years?

No, that is terrible advice. People will try to throw ridiculous things in contracts, but as a business owner, it is your responsibility to read them, and negotiate adjustments. It is also your responsibility to know what is/is not acceptable for your business, and know when to walk away from a negotiation.

Sure, but sometimes it's worth the risk to sign these contracts to land a big customer, even if they are unfavorable and may ruin your business. Especially if the alternative is no viable business at all (which would be the case for me).

>* Don't worry too much about crazy contracts / terms of service. If you run a business you will end up signing all kinds of ridiculous contracts. If you are worried about the consequences, get a normal job instead.

How is this a top comment?? Awful advice

I don't think it's awful. While the strategy may not suit everyone it's still a strategy. My business would have been dead long time ago if I didn't sign all these insane contracts. It landed me some big customers (top tier SV) which would never have happened otherwise.

Sure, I'm taking extreme risks but that's part of the strategy. Bet big, win big.

It's not awful advice but it's definitely risky. Probably okay when you are a small one-person shop with nothing to lose and no significant assets but maybe not acceptable for anything larger, unless everyone is on board with the extreme risk-taking.

That said, agreeing to onerous terms and having the company actually enforce them later are two different things. This is a good explanation from an earlier HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6366912 (yes, it's the pud 'Fucking Sue Me' thread which is evergreen).