Remote OK Open Startup

I very much admire your 5% revenue donation, although I wonder if Stripe Climate is the most effective way to deliver positive impact.

If you haven't already, I would encourage you to check out www.givingwhatwecan.org/donate to see research on optimising charitable giving for doing the most good.

Pretty sure a lot of people here have the same feeling. It's one I had before, and I still have after my success. There is always something else, something better you wish you had.

In my hometown, there is an entrepreneur; one everyone knows who started a 3D studio with now more than > 300 employees; a massive success. He lives in my neighborhood, so we happen to discuss from time to time on walks. He, at one point, stopped me when I told him how much I admired his work and how envious I was of his abilities to scale smoothly; he told me: "Phil, there is nothing I would love more than running a small profitable web business like yours with just two of my buddies."

When success hits for the first time, it's a disturbing feeling realizing your desires and insecurities are pretty much still all there. You are still an envious bag of meat.

Anyway, congrats Peter on the success and fantastic journey! Yes, I'm still a bit jealous, like most here :) But I work on this. I got to go; I got my Yin Yoga class in 20 minutes. It will surely help me realize how lucky I am to live a life of beauty and experiments. It will help me recognize this burning jealousy, accept it, as it is simply part of this beautiful game of life.

[1] https://missiveapp.com/blog/how-we-built-1m-arr-email-client

There is some irony in @patio11, who I think has/had some of the best writing/talking on the subject of SaaS. He has helped a LOT of other people in their SaaS (and even salaried careers), but was never successful in his own SaaS business.

As a fellow bootstrapped entrepreneur (& programmer), I sympathize with what you're going through. Maybe it's the survivorship bias but I think you could try some things differently. I'm not sure you're open to receiving advice but I hope you find it at least well intentioned.

My biggest piece of advice is that only the sales channel really matters. People talk about product-market fit but that's kind of ambiguous. What you need to do is really understand some sales channel. Your real goal isn't to create the best product in the world, it's to own some sales channel for a particular category. Take movie theater food for example. It's shitty & expensive but keeps selling because it's the only thing available. It may even be helpful to ignore the actual product part and learn about understanding and identifying opportunities in sales channels first. Then you build the product to dominate that category.

Sales channels can be content marketing, google, facebook, amazon, trade shows, in person meetings, and more. For example, if you wanted to do content marketing. Instead of building a product and hoping that content marketing would work, you should learn about how content marketing actually works. Things like link building, content optimization, technical SEO, and keyword research. Then you could find categories you're interested and start seeing where the competitiveness is relatively low compared to the volume. You may also learn that content marketing usually takes 5-figure investments + months to work even in niche categories.

If you really understand a sales channel, the opportunities become obvious. Most people don't really understand why Gitlab succeeded or how it's different from Github. If you're running a dev ops team with a requirement for an on-prem OSS solution, then it starts to make a lot more sense. Another example is the dozens of companies working to port Wordpress apps to Shopify. They're not making the apps any better, they're just making them work on shopify by owning their category in the Shopify App Marketplace. Here's one idea I posted on Shopify hoping someone would build it: https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-apps/how-to-add-a-ta...

All in all, I wish you the best. It seems like your heart is in the right place but you need improvement on strategy. You want to build something that people use but thought experiments aren't the way to figure it out. Coming up with more ideas probably isn't going to work out if you don't understand why the other ones didn't work out. An idea without understanding the context of how it will be sold is only a prayer. Talking to customers is great & reaching out manually is a sales strategy as old as time, but it's hard to build a company out of this without 4+ figure deals.

For me, it was figuring SEO and micro influencers. My first business was CBD products got to ~$500K/month in 2.5 years before selling it. I'm now investing in (and helping build for a few months) a cardboard cat homes business. It's completely unrelated except for the sales channels. It sells exactly the same ways and it hit $10K in its 2nd month of sales. After this 3rd month, it should be profitable and I can step away to help other founders start more ecommerce businesses.

His Twitter account was powerful and perfect for reaching wannabe nomads and remote workers.

Did you see value in the 30x500 course? Would you say it’s worth the price tag (I think it was 4K last I checked)?

I’m in a similar spot where I’m mostly disillusioned from salaried work. I enjoy writing quality and long term code and companies tell me it’s what they want when they hire me, but when the rubber meets the road, what they want is quick and dirty quality be damned.

But I can’t think of anything that I could sell for myself (either a course or a SaaS). I’ve had ideas before but always ran out of steam before they were useable. I usually spend a lot of energy on the project setup (deploy from git push, tooling config, etc)

And honestly, it doesn’t feel like I have the stamina to work so hard for year for maybe a payoff in the future.

Any thoughts on the above? How would you tackle it?

Golden advice for many people launching things on HN who get this wrong.

Then he does the Nomadlist and RemoteOK thing. Because I followed him before he was a smashing success ($$$), it made me question the whole survivorship bias thing.

Then again it shows he was always a prolific content creator and always interacted with his audience.

Some of my best stuff was built by embracing "done beats best practice."

I've learned that lesson when working on a $100M ARR product that was basically thrown together PHP spaghetti code that was launched as a prototype and never was refactored again. Most terrible code I've ever seen, yet made a LOT of money.

So it completely makes sense in his context. How was he ever going to focus on the other code qualities?

If on the other hand you're experienced it's probably about finding that trade off between perfectly orchestrated software and having something that delivers your vision in an acceptable amount of time.

What I don't have is support for people that aren't customers, because I don't have the resources to manage that.

If you're a paid customer on Nomad List or Remote OK you can report bugs which I'll fix, or request features, and if I like them I'll build them. That's most of my work every day. See Nomad List's bug reports channel for an example of it.

I'm also very lenient with giving refunds, if people cancel their membership on Nomad List they automatically get a refund if it's within 7 days. Without even asking for it. Anyone who posts a job on Remote OK and isn't happy I can re-post it for you or get you a refund etc.

I started Remote OK in 2015 when remote work was still HEAVILY frowned upon. Perfect time to start something. After COVID, remote work is now almost the default.

So go to a trend that's nascent and jump in, then strap on and ride it for years until it hits mainstream.

Most of my traffic is word-of-mouth (look this guy made his own startup with just a PHP script and no team, eg this HN thread is marketing too) and from Google for "remote jobs".

Recently, I hired a part-time contractor for customer support on Remote OK. And @daniellockyer has been a very-part-time contractor to keep the VPS secure and fast over the years. But that's it.

Second, people make things like this all the time (anyone remember the million dollar web page where ads sold by the pixel?) - that doesn’t necessarily mean anything for you or me. It certainly doesn’t mean we should all be endeavoring to create the next PR sensation.

Finally, be careful what you wish for.

Pieter is responsible for everything - product, design, sales, marketing, documentation, customer support, etc.

At a job, you do your job and someone else does the other jobs. Less responsibility, less income.

I do recommend starting something like this on the side, and learning all of the skills listed above. In 5 years or less you can have a side project that makes more than your job with only an hour or two a day.

Literally go for it