From Idea to 10 Paying Customers in Less Than a Week | Hacker News Reader

From Idea to 10 Paying Customers in Less Than a Week

casjam.com

36 pointscasjam26 comments

"Both of his products, while seemingly very different, actually serve much of the same audience."

Exactly. That line is very important. In reality, he had an idea for a product and an existing market he had direct access to. That "less than a week" bit should really include the time it took to build the audience in the first place, which is probably a lot more than a week. A somewhat disingenuous claim.

like 99% of all the headlines that proclaim to do/learn something in a relatively short time period there is always something that is not counted.

Learn to write apps in 10 minutes! here the source code for an hello world, to learn anything else it will only take the rest of your life.

It's true that the kernal of the idea may have originated earlier, and developed over a longer period of time (which is kind of what Dan explained during the interview). But the point I was getting at with this title was that it was less than 1 week from the day Dan decided to pursue this idea and actually start this company that he had 10 paying customers.

Most founders have an idea, decide it's something they would like to pursue, then spend many weeks/months working to validate it, build MVP, attract customers. You can't deny that WP Curve started and gained initial traction exceptionally faster than most.

> Most founders have an idea, decide it's something they would like to pursue, then spend many weeks/months working to validate it, build MVP, attract customers. You can't deny that WP Curve started and gained initial traction exceptionally faster than most.

I disagree. Most founders with an audience can generally get 10 paying customers fairly quickly. And, frankly, I think 10 days isn't at all fast, especially these days.

For people who are new to creating/launching a product, 10 customers in the first week would be a huge win. So this is a very instructive conversation for people in that camp (who I'd guess are the majority).

And the impressive part of this story is its not 10 customers within 1 week of "launch" day. It's 10 customers within about a week of deciding on the "idea". Idea --> MVP launch --> Paying customers... 1 week.

Is there anything more to the MVP than the website and I would guess a ticketing/live chat system? I'll admit I didn't listen to the audio, was hoping for a transcript.

Hey mate. Actually we didn't even have a ticketing system for the first month or so. Even now we barely use it. It's mostly email. I had a live chat widget (Olark) that I'd paid a year for from my last business.

My favorite title of all time is Tim Ferriss's "How to Learn but not Master any Language in 1 Hour". All others are merely vying for disingenuous second place. I guess it is all about marketing your blog posts.

I like that. Makes it seem more legitimate but still attention-grabbing.

If there was a Cosmo-style magazine for startup founders, this headline would be one of the promos on the cover.

The rest of the magazine would be like, "patio11's dos and don'ts of summer SEO", "can lisp trim your application's waistline?", and "infosec schadenfreude! how to protect your app". viz., HN.

Totally. I used to see those types of headlines in magazines that my sisters would read. Like "10 things that will make him crazy for you" etc. (I won't even get into the all the weight loss ones).

Of course the headline is designed to attract attention. That's generally what headlines are supposed to do (get you to keep reading).

Perhaps if you listened to the interview, you'd see that the headline is perfectly in line with story presented in the interview. It also covered the backstory that led up launching this service so quickly, and how they're learning to operate and scale it as they go. Poke fun at the headline all you want, but you're missing the point.

Now there's an idea.

How can you turn a profit from unlimited 30mins job at 69$/m and even moderate capacity utilization?

Hey there. We made a few assumption about how much people will use the service, how much it costs us to get developers etc when we started. So far those assumptions are proving to be very accurate.

Most people utilize us a few times a month for small jobs. Some less, some more. The fee is per site so there's a natural limit to how many small issues a website owner runs into. We are also careful to target the kind of people that really need us and make great customers.

We don't have to worry about traditional agency expenses, offices, local staff, project management, all of the hassles in signing up new clients for project work (quoting, scoping, passwords etc). It's actually very efficient, it's not uncommon for us to get through 6-10 jobs per day per developer.

We will have to closely look at this as we grow but so far so good.

Good idea for a service. Recently I told someone that a business can be built based solely on broken wordpress installations and this validates that it is indeed a big problem out there. Naturally the only reason I thought this was due to the emails I get related to this, and I never want to waste my time getting involved with wordpress. Now I have a site to recommend.

Ya, one of the great aspects / hidden benefit of a service like this is how it makes the lives of web developers easier because they have a reliable service they can refer clients to when they don't want to handle those pesky small maintenance tasks anymore.

For sure. You could build a huge business with that. These are real problems that people are struggling to solve.

Hey thanks for the article share. I know it is a little early, but in your 24 hour live chat support, have you had any abuse from your clients or have things been more self regulating for them?

Secondly, when offering your paid product service, did you ever consider omitting the 24 hour live chat support or is that a fundamental part of your value proposition?

Hey there

So far clients have been great. We are making a deliberate effort to target a certain kind of business which helps a lot. It may get to the point where we decide before we allow someone to become a customer but we aren't there yet. We have things in place if people abuse the service.

I didn't really consider omitting the 24 hour aspect for 3 reasons. 1 is I really wanted to have something I could offer worldwide which means covering pretty close to 24 hours anyway. 2 because I want customers to not have to think. They just know we'll be there. People pay for the fact that they don't need to worry, they don't need to think about whether we will respond. The final reason is without it, it wouldn't be that much of a talking point and we wouldn't have a big point of difference. This is helping us get early traction I think.

To clarify: This post isn't published by the founder of WP Curve. It's my interview with the founder. If you have questions about their service, you should ask those at wpcurve.com.

Any blog post that purport to achieve anything substantial in less time that usual has uncounted costs. "Learn this new language in 20 mins (after learning to program other languages for years)"

omg u r teh next steven job?

What really is the point of this article? Can someone wake me up when we are ready to let go of this passive income bullshit, worshipping the 'entrepreneur' as someone who can pull money out of their ass crack by finding and statistically needling their way into some exploitative niche and start focussing on things which have real social purpose and meaning and value to their creators and users?

There are quite a few points of contention to be made with your comment:

First off, to group "24/7 on-call Wordpress support" with passive income is... well, a very, very long stretch.

on things which have real social purpose and meaning and value to their creators or users

"Someone I can turn to when my website blows up because of this new plugin I added" most assuredly provides meaning and value to WP Curve's customers. Also, I'm not sure who's exploiting who in that relationship.

But you're right, Dan should shut down WP Curve and the customers who are paying him real money to solve real problems and focus on more meaningful things.. like maybe building a social discovery app.

I suggest you actually listen to the interview. Nobody talked about this being a "passive income" business. In fact, early in the interview, Dan talked about how he doesn't believe any business can be truly automated, and that answer actually made me re-think the question I had asked.

"statistically needling their way into some exploitative niche" ...wow. Providing real support to website owners who need it (and are willing to pay for it) is exploitation?

In reality, WP Curve provides an alternative to hiring a web developer by the hour to provide support when needed. It's actually a much more efficient model for all parties (client and developer).

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