DVassallo

Lots do well (low 6 figures in sales per year) in the health and fitness category on Twitter, even with audiences smaller than mine.

You can use Twitter in many ways. But I treat it as a virtual town square. Some important info, some gossip & news, and plenty of conversations. People get to know me a little bit, and I get to know some people.

My average is about 2 tweets per day (to my timeline), and it has been consistent since the beginning. I wrote 5 blog posts in the first 3 months, but then settled on Twitter.

Authenticity has a price. It can affect job opportunities, lost business, awkwardness, and other things. However, I control what goes out and stays hidden. I don’t feel an obligation to share everything, and if it’s something I feel can harm me, I keep it offline.

So far, I didn’t experience any consequential downsides, but I’m sure I’ve closed some employment opportunities with some of my comments. (But I was aware of that risk when I made them.)

Start with something of broad interest first, rather than a niche. It's easier to find customers this way. If you have expertise in the niche, you likely know the fundamentals well. Teach those fundamentals.

Don't worry too much about production quality. The value is in the message. Many people fall in the trap of obsession on the production and get demotivated by the lack of progress. Just think of this as a recorded live talk. Prepare some slides, think about what you're going to say, and record.

The most difficult part is marketing. It helps to have an audience. People prefer learning from someone they feel they already know a little bit.

I don't think it's a problem as many people think. Followers don't tend to follow you to buy products from you. They follow mostly because they like to watch a story as it happens, get some inspiration for themselves, and occasionally learn something actionable. Talking on various topics doesn't necessarily detract from being interesting in that regard (within some limit).

When it comes to monetization, only a small fraction will buy directly. Your audience helps you most by spreading the word. Since they feel they know you a little bit, they start recommending you and your work to their friends and followers. It's this network effect that makes it really powerful.

It started with the blog post in my pinned tweet. That made it to the frontpage of HN and got me my first ~2000 followers in a week. Then I kept sharing details about my business and self-employment journey. Occasionally a tweet goes a bit viral, and it gets me a few hundred followers. But most of the steady state growth happens from other people recommending me to their followers. In the course I just released I go in a lot more detail about what I did, and what I've seen work and not work.

1. 20% require hospitalization. Hospital capacity is limited.

2. It's questionable whether we can become immune to it. We might keep getting re-infected.

3. It causes permanent lung damage in some patients. Makes re-infection even more lethal.

4. There's a chance that animals can catch it and become a reservoir for it. Imagine if every dog, cat, and pigeon in the world is infected with it, but doesn't die from it.

Yes, it's low probability. But it's not zero. And it's not negligible either.

Rather than bailout the corporations, bailout the workers who lost their jobs.

Looks neat!

End-to-end encryption in the browser is not perfect security, as other comments are saying, but it’s significantly better than having user data in clear on a MySQL database somewhere.

PS. I’m the founder of Userbase.com — an open source service to help you build end-to-end encrypted web apps like this.

We had a couple of frustrating typos in the first version. Very sorry about that. We fixed them now, and the latest book version is in sync with the GitHub repo.

It’s a summary of a book.

Book co-author here. (Not article author.) The recommendation is based on the multi-tenant behavior of NLBs (no need to warm up the LB to handle traffic spikes). If you need any ALB features, use ALB. Otherwise, NLBs give you one less thing to worry about (and slightly cheaper and faster too.)

No CI/CD — You have to set it up yourself. Once you use Netlify/Zeit, you will never use S3 for static hosting again.

Book co-author here. (Not article author.)

The recommendation against using S3 for static hosting is that there are much better alternatives outside of AWS. The dev experience you get with Netlify and Zeit will almost certainly never be possible with AWS.

The entire chapter on DynanoDB is free in the sample. The answer to your question is there: https://gumroad.com/l/aws-good-parts

Netlify or Zeit. Save yourself the pain. AWS will almost certainly never come close to the dev experience of those 2 vendors. (Book co-author)

Wanted it to be open, no strings attached. The business comes from providing high-quality hosting and (eventually) pro services (support for accepting payments, etc).

Adding origin whitelisting is on the roadmap. We're working on 2FA to prevent phishing.

And thank you!

We’re marketing this as something that can significantly reduce personal data misuse compared to having user data sitting in clear in a MySQL database. The value-add is mainly to the developers. (Although the devs can choose to promote some of that to their users too.)

Main differences:

- An end-to-end encrypted database.

- Super simple SDK.

- 100% open source, MIT licensed. Both the backend and SDK.

Thank you! — Addressed that in the FAQ: https://userbase.com/docs/faq/#faq-7

We’re not metering storage yet, so nothing will happen right now. Soon we’ll have another pricing plan with metered storage, and people who happen to be exceeding the limit will be given the choice to upgrade to unlimited metered storage (ala AWS).

Correct. Pro plan with unlimited metered storage, and support for collecting payments coming soon. (Targeting end of April).

End-to-end encryption is one of the main features of the product. Since the key is user-controlled, there will always be something that the user must keep and never lose. For this first version, we chose to make that thing the user’s own password.

Other end-to-end encrypted apps (such as password managers) have the same requirement. Sometimes the password is resettable, but you have to keep another key. But there’s always something that would lock you out if you lose it.

It is. Main differences:

- User data is end-to-end encrypted.

- Super simple SDK.

- Predictable pricing. (You won't need a cost calculator.)

- 100% open source, MIT licensed.

Thank you. Working on it. The next version is expected to have a feature to allow you to export all the data to your own self-hosted backend (without any downtime).

You keep flagging it after it gets 5-10 votes and makes it to the front pages, and then it gets buried.

I thought it was allowed to re-post something a few times if it doesn't get attention. No intention to spam.

(And half of the links you posted are not to same content.)

Because they're not natural foods.

And natural here does not mean not artificial. Natural food is the food we've been designed to eat.

Will do. Thanks.

Thank you! I'm very glad to hear that, because that was the intention.