Free 60-minute 'How to Build a Startup' video series | Hacker News Reader

Free 60-minute 'How to Build a Startup' video series

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97 pointsryancarson27 comments

What startups did Ryan Carson do? All I've seen of his is that little file uploader clone he sold off in like 6 months.

It seems to me like he gave up on trying to build successful webapps and is now just trying to sell "How To Mine Gold" books and conferences to the actual miners.

The first startup I built was DropSend which did $250,000 of profit a year, which was sold after about 18 months. That's the "little file uploader" you're referring to.

The second startup I've built is our events business. We've grown that to $2m+ in revenue per year.

The third startup I've done is Think Vitamin Membership which is now at $1m in revenue after just 12 months.

Boom. roasted

Most people wouldn't consider conferences or online video lectures to be "startups". Just like most people wouldn't consider a blog a startup. They're also not product based and certainly not webapps.

That raises a really interesting point: what constitutes a "startup"? Does it have to be product based?

Started a new thread for this question http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2642425

I was going to put effort in to responding, but on second thought, it's just not worth the five minutes that would require. Best of luck to you Staunch.

Would just like to say that we are subscibed to the membership, and your videos and content are top notch, and one of the best 50$ I spend a month. Keep doing trainings, dont do webapps. :)

Thanks Shabda - really appreciate that :)

And some other specific texts -- written by some of our own:

Startup Law 101 Series: http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup.html

Assorted writings on startups: http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

I feel these are some of the most important videos I've seen this past year. Thanks Ryan and the team.

I liked the idea. It would be great if there was an option to download them too. I am on slow connection and buffering is kinda of an issue.

Members can download all the videos. I guess we felt we needed to keep something back for the folks that were funding the service ;)

Ryan - A couple things: - I'm curious why it was so obvious after 2 days that you needed to drop the freemium model? (under pricing video) - I have no experience with your current offering but think doing a people who liked this video may also like would have pointed me to some premium videos worth checking out. I did find some but only after some searching. - I've only seen up to the pricing video but it seems like this particular set of videos would have been better served as a podcast so I'm curious why go the video route? I just mean the visuals aren't necessary to understand the material so it seems the savings in bandwidth, production cost etc... would be motive enough to go the podcast route...

Thanks in advance for any response and thanks for taking the time to put the videos out there.

We offer about 20% of our videos for free anyway, so there wasn't a need for a 'free' trial (we already offered it).

You're right about the video format on the video series. Audio would've been sufficient. However, all our other content requires screencasts and graphics to explain.

on the banking video: go to feefighters.com - save yourself a ton of money by making payment processors compete for your business. Almost all of them integrate with authorize.net which does what ryan was talking about with recurring subscriptions and storing cc's on their servers (so you don't have to be PCI compliant).

on the accounting video: ryan is wrong about quickbooks only working on one machine. It is designed to live on a fileshare and have multiple clients connecting to it on your network. They also have an online version, however almost ALL US accountants will know what to do with a quickbooks file.

I second the feefighters.com recommendation. They've showed us a way to save a lot of money, I wish we had known about them before.

Good advice, but please keep in mind that even if you're merely shoving the cc data over to authorize.net for storage, you still do need to be PCI compliant if any of it ever touches your servers at all. Everyone is reactive about PCI compliance and cross that bridge when they come to it, but it is something to keep in mind.

In this series I cover: choosing a founder, picking your product or service, pricing, culture, company structure, funding, banking, accounting and cashflow. It’s over an hour of free video, so enjoy! :)

The culture one is really interesting. Other ones which helped me a lot:

http://www.mikekarnj.com/blog/2011/02/21/creating-a-product-...

Is "Business Accounting for Dummies" (as recommended in the accounting video) really the best book? It looks like it's meant for the UK, as well as being both out of print and not very highly rated on Amazon.. Maybe you meant "Accounting For Dummies"?

We're a UK company

Interesting thoughts there. The audio is what matters though, rather than the video, would be nice if you added them to the Think Vitamin podcast (if you're not planning on doing so already).

Ryan - Really enjoyed these, looking forward to more. Inspirational.

Thanks for watching! :)

I can't see any of the videos, it just says "The video you are trying to watch is currently unavailable"

I believe it's because we're getting slammed right now. Please try again in a few minutes. I'm sorry for the hassle!

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