Hacker News Reader

Comment by waprin | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it’s interesting reading the old pg essays where he says, VCs suck but they are a necessary evil. After all, racking reliable servers will cost at least 20k, paying a PR firm so that there’s a chance anyone will hear about your site will cost at least 20k etc etc

Now basically every PaaS has a free or cheap (<$50/mo) tier, tons of helpful tools with free or cheap tiers, you can get users / customers for free on social media and probably more effectively than traditional ads / PR coverage.

It’s not strictly true because some projects use GPUs for ML , sometimes there’s some technical rot if you don’t upgrade your stack a bit, market change could make you irrelevant etc

But in general there’s a lot of products that can simmer and slowly iterate for a long time as long as founder keeps chipping away as evidenced here.

View on HN

Your perspective is refreshing. I realized I was in a rut seeing the opposite perspective, that costs via things like SOC2 compliance were driving up barriers to lifestyle like businesses.

It has gotten much cheaper to host stuff, but I really wonder if marketing costs have fallen as well. You can certainly find cheap or free avenues (like HN) to tell people about your product, but it can be lost in the sea of information. Good marketing to the best subset of potential customers is essential in getting anything off the ground. That can be expensive especially if you are an engineer with very little marketing experience.

My take is that marketing now can have very little out-of-pocket cost, but a massively increased time cost because you are now constantly engaging with people, making new posts, answering questions, exploring new avenues, etc.

getting noticed by the right people cost-effectively is hard. Anything that makes it easier for you to get attention will also potentially make it easier for everyone else. So it will always be hard.

> I really wonder if marketing costs have fallen as well

The overall cost of building a product and getting a product to PMF is higher, but the main cost is time. That's why it can be advantageous to just work on something for ten years rather than going out, raising a bunch of money, and shutting down two years later.

> you can get users / customers for free on social media

Mostly you can't, especially if you're a b2b SaaS.

If you're b2b, you only need one client to be profitable. Or so they say.

You only need one special client to be profitable. You might need to go through many other clients before you meet them.

LinkedIn has been wonderful for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com