Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcavezza | Hacker News Reader

I was really looking forward to learning how the product was built, how the payment processor was set up so quickly, the tools used, and how he was able to build the product so fast.

Most of the post was actually about dealing with the uncertainties of launching a product before you're comfortable with it and being pleasantly surprised by the results.

There's very little information on the process of how Amir launched it in three hours except using paypal and buying a $35 theme from themeforest - I'd like to hear more about this in a feature post.

View on HN

Sure. If enough folks want to dig into this much detail, I'd be happy to put together an in-depth write-up.

Yes.

Ditto. Please, if you're exposing this much about the process and not trying to keep it a secret or anything, give us the play by play.

:) No secrets here. I've been keeping a journal of the whole experiment, and can compile it into a couple of posts this weekend.

Excited to read that!

definitely would like to read, getting traction is the hardest part of any startup

Great way to generate interest. :) Good job, looking forward to reading your posts.

You'd be surprised how often nuts&bolts issues stop people from starting. I was mildly mystified by "Set up website, collect money, deliver software" prior to starting, too. Turns out it is trivial, but that was not obvious prior to doing it. (Relatedly: taxes, bookkeeping, accounting, and government regulation were all walks in the park. Marketing is hard. Who knew?)

Yeah, the nuts and bolts of selling the product is the easy part. There are loads of services out there to sell digital goods including the one that the submitter used and my own service (shameless plug: link in my profile anyone is interested).

PayPal is still the cheapest and easiest way to collect the money, even considering fraud. (PayPal almost always sides with the buyer and with digital goods you have little recourse.)

It's the marketing that makes all the difference. We have customers that have made $50-60k in less than a week due to awesome marketing. And we have customers that pull in well over $100k/yr due to good marketing and good affiliates. We also have many that will never sell anywhere near that much in the product's lifetime, also due to marketing.

I am more surprised by how much people are trying to reinvent the wheel every day. I think there are enough tools and APIs out there to build small useful products in less than a week.

Agreed, 100% There are tons of APIs now available for email delivery, billing, etc.

Great job with this!

This has always been my impression. But when I've actually looked for resources on how to get those nuts & bolts set up, for someone who knows nothing about them, it's been non-obvious.

You wouldn't by any chance know of some resources related to getting over the initial hump of getting paid for software/services, would you?

Actually, I've been trying to write a little bit about this here: http://www.resultsjunkies.com/blog/category/back-office-expo...

HTH!

Thanks! That is indeed useful...

Please do a step-by-step write up, it would mean a lot to me to help me get started.

Yes, please

My guess is that the nuts and bolts problems aren't actually that big. Most people Just Don't Start™.

That's exactly right. I really don't think I did anything new or special here. My biggest challenge was to stop thinking about it and do it.

The problem, for me at least, was that I didn't know what was the simplest way. I spent a long time learning some design skills, learning html/css, etc. Then I realized (not long ago) that I could effectively buy a 20$ site template, and it would take a hundredth of the time and look 100 times better. Then, even more recently, I learned that you can set up a WordPress site, with a great design, and pretty much any goodie you need (contact forms, email lists, etc.).

Now, none of these things are particularly hard. But for me, coming from a non-Web background, each of these steps took some learning. And you never know when you should be learning more.

So in that sense, every article I read that says exactly how to set up an MVP, including all the nuts & bolts of the various plugins / etc, is incredibly valuable.

Right on it. I spent literally weeks building barely average-looking purely W3C-compliant webpages in pure HTML+CSS... And it's a huge pain right now to change the site because there is no way to iterate rapidly.

That's because I've learnt HTML at the time when even HTML 3.2 was hot :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com