DVassallo

It’s actually a bit cheaper this year: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1312177408879939584?s=2...

It was one of the cheapest plan on the ACA marketplace in WA. It’s a very high deductible plan though: $13.6K.

It’s a very high deductible plan ($13.6K) but otherwise had no problems with provider coverage. I’m in WA and the insurer is Molina. Found it through the ACA marketplace.

I work quarter-time at Gumroad, and I pay for my own health insurance ($950/mo for a family of 4). If Gumroad offered it, I would almost certainly still keep my own (unless it was at >50% discount). I prefer not having my health insurance tied to one source of income.

Isn’t this like Amazon employees buying stuff from Amazon with their personal card?

I only had some success with paid ads on reddit targeting r/aws, and it only lasted 3 months between March and June when competition was very low and I could get CPC rates around $0.10. From July onwards, I couldn't find availability for CPCs below $0.35 and that meant ads weren't profitable anymore. So I stopped. You can see more detail in the last graph over here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-made-210-822-selling...

As for affiliates, they bring about 7.5% of the sales. Not the most important source, but it's nice to have. I onboarded almost all my affiliates from this one tweet: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1273335185946238976 — I have about 100 affiliates, but 95% of the sales came from the top 10.

My own Twitter account is still the main source of sales: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333889974362488833

The sharp rise in April was primarily because I released my 2nd product. It's much more clear in this graph: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888959399690241

Not sure if the pandemic helped; likely did a bit.

I sell two products on Gumroad. One is an ebook about AWS, and the other is a 1.5hr video about building on audience.

Sales past 12 months: $290K

- Dec: $25K

- Jan: $26K

- Feb: $8K

- Mar: $9K

- Apr: $43K

- May: $59K

- Jun: $25K

- Jul: $14K

- Aug: $21K

- Sep: $12K

- Oct: $17K

- Nov: $29K

Profit: $256K

https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1333888186762678274?s=2...

I'm cited in the comments as an instance of this scheme [1].

If you want to see how I make it all work, check out my interview on Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/177-daniel-vassallo

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25249523

That guy is me. What would convince you that I'm not running a ponzi scheme or anything dishonest?

The methodology is in the sentence you quoted.

Something can be harmless or even beneficial at one dose, and fatal at another dose.

People have died from drinking too much water. Or breathing too much oxygen.

Here’s one example of a successful launch with almost no followers: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1260964674561953792?s=2...

They're doing the exact same thing the Netflix app does.

Yes it’s the employer that sponsors you.

The L-1 visa is portable to a green card though.

It’s explicitly a dual-intent visa, which means that it can be turned into a permanent resident visa, just like H1B. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent

I’m the person in the tweet, and now a permanent resident and soon US citizen.

Bezos absolutely knows about the standard non-compete clause in everyone’s contract. They sued many people over it.

I’m very happy with Gumroad. I can’t think of an easier way to host and sell self-published material.

Yes, I attribute practically all my sales to having an audience. I doubt I would have sold any if I didn't have any followers.

That said, I only had 10K followers when I announced my first product, and 24K for the second. But I've seen a few people get similar results as I had even with 3-5K followers.

Not a lot, but I didn't track the hours. The only promotion I did for my second product was sending 5 tweets and 2 emails, so maybe a couple of hours towards promotion. That made $85K in sales: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1270940834989355009

I promoted the first product similarly, but I also experimented a bit with paid ads and I invested some time there, so I'd say about 20 hours total. That product made $97K in sales, $13K of which from paid ads ($6K spent on ads).

Self-publishing is a very underrated way of exchanging knowledge for money with high ROI. I'm approaching $200K in 6 months from 2 self-published info products: one is a short ebook on AWS (160 hours to produce), and the other is a video presentation about building an audience (16 hours to produce).

https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1268622381964095488

S3 is also immediately consistent unless you’re updating an existing object or listing objects.

I was one of the top users by volume of both products when I worked at AWS.

No, I meant a DBMS. Almost all the things you'd expect in a DBMS are not there. Take a look at most of the comments in this thread. Everyone expecting DBMS things, and complaining that they're not there.

S3 and DDB are incredibly similar. Their fundamental operators are the same: key-value get/put and ordered list, and their consistency is roughly the same.

What differentiates DDB and S3 the most is cost and performance.

They're both highly-durable primitive data structures in the cloud, with a few extra features attached.

If you treat DynamoDB as a DBMS, you’re going to be disappointed (for the reasons you mention). But if you think of it as a highly-durable immediately-consistent btree in the cloud, it’s amazing. DynamoDB is closer to Redis than MySQL. Amazon does it a disservice by putting it in the databases category.

I came to a simple realization: Only intrinsic motivation lasts. Achieving external rewards and arbitrary goals feels nice for a while, but it always wears off quickly.

Now I don’t have goals anymore. My idea of personal growth is to keep rearranging my life so that I'm doing fewer things I'd rather not be doing.

No goals. Just anti-goals.

Please don’t left align this text because some stranger on HN told you so.

Offspring with living parents and grandparents have incredibly better odds at surviving.

I think almost everyone can get 1,000 real followers in a month, if you put some effort. If you did something interesting in real-life, and you intend to keep doing it, just share your story where people interested in that topic already hang around. Promise that you'll keep sharing more, and people will follow you.

You're never fully vested. I $650K of unvested AMZN stock when I left after 8.5 years.