How I got to $9.99 MRR after 7 years
cloak.ist
cloak.ist
I've taken that out of the title now.
I'll trust you on that and reiterate my apologies. I have never thought that Show HNs get more votes by default (look at the Show HNs in my history, you'll see they got absolutely nowhere), and was not trying to game the system.
> More significantly though, this doesn't feel very on topic for HN
I thought that this was mostly determined by whether or not the HN community upvotes a link. I personally do think there's a role for (perhaps infrequent) satire about certain quite cringe-inducing types of articles you get here. I saw a similar piece the other day - can't recall the link though.
Upvotes are great, because the entire point of HN is to be interesting to the community. But moderators and software are needed too. If the site were determined only by upvotes, ironically it would soon cease to be interesting to the community.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
By the way, this isn't primarily because moderators are smarter or more competent than community members. It's because we're in a position to give HN our full attention and think about the global optimum. Users are giving much less attention to the site (at least I hope they are) and reacting quickly to the specific things they run across. I wrote about that here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22863209.
> And if you'd like to read a true, but much more boring story about getting MRR, go here.
Not everybody might like that type of humor, but I found it amusing ;-)
Louis, I don't know you, I've not come across Cloakist before, but you've done something solid here, and MRR is truly a long slope of soul crushing growth and you're playing the game fine. Keep it up. Five months in on Cronitor we were at $410 MRR.
[1] https://cloak.ist/blog/how-we-got-to-400-mrr-in-5-months/
> And if you'd like to read a true, but much more boring story about getting MRR, go here.
But still very laudable!
I know he's been sarcastic but it's actually how we started at serpapi.com. Even less. First month was $9.97, second month was $19.94. (Double the revenue!) And now, we are a real business, profitable, with a 8-9 strong team.
I recognize that's the best way for you to get to MRR of course.
Sent you an email (julien at serpapi.com). I am sure we can figure something.
Even if they don't hit front page, the comment itself adds to the longer term plan of these accounts. I don't doubt for a second that someone has, or is currently manipulating a lot of the traffic and comments for certain posts.
This is easily established via networks of rotating residentials; or better yet, real humans in Ukraine [1]: something that cannot be defeated unless you start nodal map chaining.
High likelihood that these troll farm/serious commenters algos are not equipped to deal with such complexities such as human satire yet, which is a reasonable conclusion as to why there are so many "serious" posts
[1] https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/inside-a-ukrainian-t...
People try every day to plant stuff on HN's front page, and every day our anti-abuse systems catch such efforts and apply different types of counter-action depending on the case. I'm not saying no one gets away with it (obviously we can't know that) but I can say for sure that anyone getting away with it would have to be way smarter than that group.
In case anyone's interested, it happens that I've been working for the last few weeks on a new type of anti-abuse system, which is designed to more tightly enforce this site guideline: "Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff occasionally, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.".
That's not evidence of what you claimed upthread; it was an inept bunch of content marketers who were easily caught by HN's anti-abuse systems. The thread you're linking to contains over 20 comments that I posted explaining various aspects of this. And if you read Troy's original report you'll notice that the examples he shows of them succeeding come from other places than HN:
It's not that it never happens for real, of course. Both things happen: real manipulation and imaginary accusations of manipulation. Both are bad, and we need some sort of evidence or data or $objective-thing to look at in order to have a hope of distinguishing the one from the other. We put a ton of effort into protecting HN from manipulation and have many years of experience with this. I can't say we're not being pwned but we certainly catch many attempts to game the system here.
There's plenty of past explanation here if anyone wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Answer to "does this count as breaking that rule?": no, Troy emailed us long in advance and he had lots of specific data that we could look at.
Answer to "does this count as evidence that HN is overrun by bots?": no, our systems had caught most of that activity long before. I posted over 20 comments in the thread you link to, covering a lot of these points; see e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24785165. And if you read Troy's original report you'll notice that the examples he shows of them succeeding come from other places than HN:
https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1315441811658219520
https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316038695535833089
If there are botnets or rings escaping our attention and succeeding on HN, they would need to be several levels more sophisticated than that one.
One thing to realize is that HN's anti-abuse systems don't always reveal publicly that accounts or sites have been caught. It can often be more effective to preserve information asymmetry and fight the abuse in subtler ways.
Re Rohrschach: the fact that it's considered dodgy is part of why I use the analogy. Most internet speculations about bots, astroturfers, shills, spies, brigaders, foreign agents and all the rest of it, are way dodgier than that.
There are plenty of people out there that make a comfortable living with one-person online startups. The weird idea that only the "super-privileged" can do this is just flat-out wrong. In fact, the internet has allowed many people outside of typical Coastal/SV/yuppie bubbles to make much more than their immediate circumstances allow.
Instead of ragging on Slack, or AirBnB, or YC/pg for being proud of them -- yeah, yeah, with a lot of hyperbole and rosy hindsight -- just close your browser, open that terminal, and build something. Isn't that the whole point?
It's not that YOU HAVE TO BE super-privileged to be able to quit your job and take a whack at the start-up lyfe, it's just that you are much more likely than the average person to be super-privileged.
That's how stereotypes work.
To start a business you need to invest a lot of time (and money), which most people simply don’t have. I have a regular job and no children, and there are so many things I’d love to do but simply don’t have the time for. This is true for most people.
Outside of anecdotes is there any data to really back up this claim?
The cross-section of people willing to spend "hundreds/thousands of hours building" just don't make it remotely close to that point perceiving their efforts as worthless.
It's not nearly as big as the list of people who are afraid to try.
The almost innate human quality of seeking the relative (and modest) safety of what the middle class call "financial freedom", an escape from the hamster wheel of wagecuckery, is now accelerators filled with bullshit artists and financiers at odds with status-game playing success-shamers and the typical rent seekers found around any popular delusion.
People with honest sensible small business advice get treated like heretics or, worse yet, how the bullshit artists should be treated.
I've tried to share a few lessons learned, having moved from employed to self employed to business owner and most of it has not been received well, or even treated with hostility.
As Jack Napier once said, "you get what you f*ing deserve".
There are good lessons to be learned from both the successes and failures of other startups. It's worth taking some time to evaluate what others did right and wrong.
Most startup founders aren't dumb. They know that other companies succeeded or failed due to a mix of their own decisions and uncontrollable luck. Occasionally you see founders get obsessive about cargo culting in the footsteps of some company they idolize, but it's not really helpful. Most actual founders (not the wantrepreneurs) I know are reasonable about all of this.
What you're seeing in all of these articles and websites dedicated to success or failure stories is journalism. The authors want traffic, first and foremost, so they editorialize and glorify in ways that appeal to mass audiences. Writing strictly for actual startup founders is an extremely competitive niche because there are so few founders and they're all super busy. Instead, journalists target the broader startup community as a whole. That's how you get these articles designed to spark conversation and link sharing more so than conveying the most useful information.
The above TLDR is really all you need to know but if you're interested in more I wrote a longer article about how this all happened here: https://medium.com/@qrohlf/i-sell-triangles-on-the-internet-...
Then Youtube said fuck you. Your 1-video account doesn’t have 1000 subscribers, no more monetization for you!
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/youtube-will-put-ads-on-non-...
All the best for Cloakist and any other ventures you come up with!
Jokes aside - funny article :p I liked it
EDIT: Clearly a joke, I took it literally at first.
Insert link to Poe’s Law.