My New $156 Startup | Hacker News Reader

My New $156 Startup

theteacherpreneur.com

76 pointstacon57 comments

Perhaps I'm just jaded or not "in the know," but this seems like a shallow and short-term business model for a SaaS product.

How do you maintain the codebase? Oh, I just go grab a dev on Elance again. What happens when they introduce bugs into the codebase? Elance! OK, cool, that's definitely a long-term solution. Do you perform meaningful A/B testing? Add new features? Do anything to justify the continuous cost of SaaS to the customer?

These all seem like things that an actual team would be good at. But again, maybe I'm just too old fashioned or jaded.

Also, from "About Us":

"Jarrod is a teacher and online entrepreneur whom has built well over 100 online products and services. He blogs regularly about his experiences generating an income online"

How can one person who's generated over 100 products be adding any value? How are they maintained? Are they all just one-off, throwaway pieces of software?

> "Jarrod is a teacher and online entrepreneur whom has built well over 100 online products and services"

To the OP: something to fix

Who=He, whom=him.

It's an interesting post, but the copy is not very well edited overall. It's certainly part of what makes me question what happens with the quality of his projects beyond the initial sales.

It sounds like he does market research, marketing, and sales, and pays someone else (probably more detail & quality oriented) to develop the products.

Thanks for picking it up- the teacherpreneur new design went live last week. Appreciate the help

What's your teaching background, by the way?

I'm a PE Teacher and have built a loyal following of teachere who get everything I do - I love being able to bring products to life for them, and have spent hundreds of thousands doing it. So this approach has led to me ensuring I don't fail before I invest of bringing things to life. Once I validate it; me and my team are 100% behind it. Thanks for picking up the spelling errors, I truly appreciate it

Hi - you will find I have an enormous fan base of Loyal customers al over the planet whom love everything I do at www.thepegeek.com

Adding value is all I do

I honestly thought this was satire until I got to the website link at the end.

From the initial "design" sketch to the use race-to-the-bottom design and coding websites, I was sure this was a parody of startups racing to sell a non-existent product with just vague ideas and generic logo.

The impressive part of the article is the network the author has developed prior to beginning anything. The real startup killer in Aussie edtech is the sales cycle and this product has ostensibly hit 10% market saturation in Victoria (~120 schools) since launching a month ago. With a paid product.

For comparison, many edtech startups in Melbourne are offering a trial period until the next billing cycle (July), because it's the simplest way to get through the bureaucracy. Might not be the best approach, but it's one that seems to be the fastest way to get users.

The real cost here isn't the $10k in dev, its however many hours/dollars were spent getting the network together.

On a side note, having 'lorem ipsum' as both the public terms/conditions and privacy policy is an interesting corner to cut when selling to schools, particularly in Australia.

Just picked this up, but the early adopters pay $250 for lifetime use. So it's not necessarily $30k/yr, just $30k.

Not sure how this is a sustainable model.

The author seems to be making the mistake of conflating accounting profit and economic profit.

After 4 months of work, he has achieved accounting profit, but I speculate he's pretty far from economic profit ($5,000 for 4 months is likely far less than he'd earn as an employee). Moreover, the idea doesn't seem interesting or large enough to actually grow into an economically profitable venture.

I think that the 4 months was spent by his outsourced developer. The marketing efforts he describes in the span between when he set them to work and when he launched don't sound like they add up to 4 months of full time work. I imagine he's taken the "slow-cooker" startup approach: set it and forget it.

Hi - I spent no more then 24 hours of combined work on getting this validated and pre funded. Leveraging the power of the globe and the Internet to bring it to life :)

Hi all - I appreciate your concern over my methodology. Fact remains that I turned a $156 into a startup which has generated over 30k since launch about a month ago - while you might not understand the niche it serves our customers are schools for which there are no shortage of. All of the UI has been reskinned since the fiverr mockups and if you see the finished product it needs little resembelence. We also have two full time devs working on the software to continue to value add to the solution.

Yes I've launched over 100 products in 4 years many of which are international award winning - you can search Jarrod Robinson on the app stores to see that they are NOT throwaway products and represent hundreds of thousands of investment from me. I'm just blessed to be able to do what I love .

The $156 figure is disingenuous though. Without the $10k of development costs, you didn't have a startup—you had an idea.

Really, it's you're $10,156 startup—still something to be proud of though. I see many people spending way more without any signs of traction.

But he collected the money to pay for dev cost from the initial 156$ investment. It's not disingenuous at all.

But he only put $156 in. Everything from there was self funded.

Congratulation with the launch and thanks for sharing the details. I think it was very impressive and show that you are very skilled at starting things.

I don't know how you manage to keep 100's of products alive at once, but as an end-consumer I would worry about the long-term viability when the owner of the product I'm investing in and planning to rely on is run by a guy who say he is more interested in starting companies than running them - which is exactly what your about-page sounds like.

nit-pick: front page of sports tracker spells built with two i's ;)

To me it's strange that I see so many comments on HN about how technical skill isn't the most important thing: business sense, life experience, communications skills, etc. count for more.

But when someone with no technical skill creates a product by outsourcing the technical side, suddenly the comments are all negative.

My critique of the model is more that outsourcing will get expensive quickly. The founder of this product 120+ schools to support with 30k. Many of these schools are expecting lifetime support: they paid a one time $250 fee. It's not clear what the legal relationship is between the service provider and the schools either, which may be a problem.

So my critique has nothing to do with technical skill, it's more that getting 'profitable' quickly without any consideration of the potential long term debt can be a bad business decision.

In my view, these were shaky business decisions (to outsource development, cutting legal corners w schools, one time fees), rather than technical ones, if that makes sense. There are times when outsourcing is the right call, in the context of this particular business I'm not convinced.

Ps. The adequate technical skill to execute is kinda assumed if you're founding a tech startup. If it's just building a product without the expectation of scaling it you can maybe get with outsourcing. This might be why there's more of a discussion on HN about the business side - this is the area that most of the audience here need to develop.

I remember reading that YC was founded in the first place with a hypothesis that teaching tech founders the nontech skills (eg. business/communication skills) is far, far more effective than vice versa. Seems it was right.

Hi - you've assumed this is not being done by s full legal entity that my company is - the software also has a global base with customers all over the planet - 120 schools is really not the case. You've also assumed I don't have full time staff now to manage the project

I sense jealousy in some of the other comments here.

Jarrod is smart in building assets and fueling his ADHD at the same time.

He's not a slave to anything or anyone and he didn't buy/build himself a job, but REAL assets that puts money in his pocket each week.

Building a SaaS isn't building an asset. It's building a service. Key difference. One appreciates, the other requires continuous attention. Services which don't get attention after they make their first bit of money are a detriment to the overall market. As far as I can tell, that's exactly what's going to happen when all of the actual implementation work is outsourced.

A big part of how many people work is to be proud of what they have achieved. Personally, I wouldn't even build this kind of 'product' because I wouldn't get any sense of achievement or any sense that I'd built something worthwhile. Further, I can't imagine having an interest conversation or relating that well to someone that does this for a living. It seems little better than firing off as many slight variations of a 99c mobile app as possible.

I honestly think this is great. He got a website built that clearly folks need enough to pay for, without any real risk. The wonderful thing about business is you can't argue with revenue, either you have it or you don't. If you do, no one really gets to tell you your doing it wrong (outside of security and ethical issues).

Thanks for the support - I ove that people find my product useful and that I get emails daily about how helpful it's been to them - I wouldn't have it any other way

As someone who is currently going through setting up a company, a list of words I didn't read in that article include: incorporation, insurance, attorney, EIN.

I can assure you these costs alone are well above $156. I don't know of a single state that looks kindly on un-registered businesses. I'm about to spend my Friday night (and Saturday and Sunday) doing legal research so I don't have to pay my attorney to use the Googles.

At some point anything beyond an idea will need to be backed by a legal entity, and that process is no joke.

A sole proprietorship exists as soon as you say it does in many jurisdictions. That's the most common kind of business entity in the US. In my case I had to file for a DBA, which was a three field form plus a trifling amount of money to my local newspaper's classified section.

You can run a software business for many years before you need to formalize things, depending on what you're doing. I think I put off incorporation and insurance for about 7 years.

Hi - appreciate you worrying about my legal situation. We used the $156 to get started and now have more then enough money and resources to follow any legal proceedings. You're also unaware that my company connectedpe already turns over a very nice revenue. This new startup is a new product to our lineup

You don't have to form a corporation to start a business, and you don't need an attorney, EIN or insurance.

Millions of businesses operate in the US as non-incorporated entities (eg sole proprietorships or partnerships).

In addition, an LLC is incredibly easy with regard to paperwork and effort compared to a corporation, and gives the owner(s) limited liability as well as tax advantages (vs sole proprietorships or partnerships).

My LLC was one sheet of paper and $100 to the state, plus $25/year renewal. Some states charge considerably more (CA, for example) but I think most states are similarly easy.

Many cities expect even sole proprietors to obtain business licenses from them.

Only if you work or have property in those cities.

Yes, of course. I should've been clearer.

For a one person business, you don't need any of that stuff. A sole-proprietorship is a legal business.

Depending on where you are based, but in a lot of cases yes. Insurance is all about reducing financial risk, if you are willing to take that on yourself (and your customers are ok with it) then you don't need insurance.

I had to buy business insurance for my sole proprietorship once. It was mandated by a customer contract.

Congrats on the successful launch.

As a developer, my initial gut reaction is "damn biz guys devaluing what I do".

But creating a product or business requires far more than simply having technical skills (or essentially none in your case, as all the technical components were outsourced) and proving a market exists and figuring out how to satisfy that market are an incredibly important part of building something that is more than just a bit of tech.

Please consider making your blog and landing pages static sites. They'll handle load like this much better (the site is currently 500ing), and will be cheaper to operate as well. I did a little write up here, but you can also just google "build static website": https://eager.io/blog/build-static-websites

This is awesome!

If there is no con anywhere, everyone is happy:

- The customer

- The outsourced developer

- And, of course, the website promoter, AKA Jarod

Thank you for this project, it's very inspiring for anyone waiting with an idea to actually make it come true.

thanks for the positive comment - we certainly have happy customers and that is the thing I live for more than the money

I don't know how I feel about this race to the bottom that is design work through sites like fiverr.

I can only hope oDesk and the like don't ever replace the need for a full time programmer or I'll be out of a job.

Having inherited a bunch of products that were developed by outsourcing companies, at several different employers, I can safely say that outsourcing companies aren't going to replace the need for COMPETENT full-time employees.

I even spoke with several clients who switched from outsourcing in 3rd world countries back to hiring local developers. Wages are going up 10%-20%/year in the 3rd world countries while they stagnate in the USA, so there was no long-term economic benefit to outsourcing.

On each of those projects, the outsourcing company did the minimum effort to get paid, and left an unmaintainable mess.

Then the employer has two rough choices. Keep the outsourcing company on at inflated rates to support it, or hire full-time employees to do the support. Or find someone to rewrite it, they don't deliver, and now a couple years and a lot of money is down the drain.

The outsourcing company does not have the same incentive as a competent employee. An outsourcing company just wants to get paid, and technical debt doesn't matter. An incompetent employee will obfuscate things to protect his job security (or because he doesn't know better). A competent employee wants to eventually move to another project, so the incentive is more to do a good job so it can be handed off to someone else.

My philosophy is that any company I do side work for that hints of "adding horsepower through odesk" or similar, I fire as a client. With that philosophy, they don't value your work and need to see how things are on the other side.

You're right that 90% of the clients on oDesk are absolutely horrible, but so are most of the developers.

There are some, however, who are genuinely just trying to find affordable talent in places where it's available. I know plenty of great developers in Russia and India making $40/hour as programmers for US companies.

I tried looking around on oDesk for contract work, but every time I clicked on a job and looked at the client's history they were paying less than $10 an hour on average. I couldn't find anything paying near $40 an hour.

Are you still looking for contract work? If so, email morgante@cafe.com.

Yes I am. Just sent you an email. The email address is learc83@gmail.

One of 'What our clients are saying' has lorem ipsum :/

http://theteacherpreneur.com/mentoring/ (scroll to down)

Your terms and conditions is still a Lorem Ipsum

Yeah is's quite funny really.

What a coincide, a guy that knows how to make money online, teaching how to make money online (for money).

There is a type on the website : buiilt

Couldn't read the article, but based on the hostgator 500 page, I'm going to guess you're doing it wrong.

What a joke of a response

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