Ask HN: How profitable is your productised service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How profitable is your productised service?

1 pointcronjobma5 comments

We gave up. The business was selling geographical data services. Most clients wanted sample data and far over 50% of the time spend was creating those, so we'd invest a lot of time and still risk the client bailing. Any strategy to sell regular updates (e.g. every three month re-extract the road network of a country) didn't work out. All clients prefered "let's see how we use the first extract first" and never came back. With one exception all clients wanted different data and not enough scripts/systems/logic was reusable. On top the largest clients took longest to pay their bills.

What is your experience? Have you productised your own service (referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953847)?

I notice you ask many AskHN questions, sometimes multiple per day, but don't share insights or seem to read the answers. Referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15017173

Hopefully I am not misinterpreting your second line, but asking good questions that elicit insightful responses is a positive contribution, even if the author doesn't share their own insights or read the responses.

Good open question are indeed excellent discussion material, no doubt. /r/askreddit (100x the answers) shows that every day. Even when some popular questions come up regularly.

I'm just puzzled why even with trivial questions like "what 5 websites do you visit everyday?" or "what skill do you wish to have?" or the more interesting "What is your biggest business expense besides salaries?" a submitter wouldn't share their own answer. And then (sometimes) within the same hour ask the next question.

Follow-up after checking other submissions:

On the AskHN page right now 28 of 30 submissions are questions. 11 times the submitter wrote an introduction usually describing their own viewpoint. Only three times the submitter commented, of those only one was an answer.

That means I shouldn't be surprised, it's normal.

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