binarysolo

My fees are high but my COGS are low -- they're typically <30%, but our typical unit pricing is <$30 so the FBA fees and base fees/unit sold hit hard.

We make ~30% before labor and net 10-20% after everything so it works OK. Most bigger sellers I know live in the 10-30% net range.

Our Walmart store is pretty sad, cross product lines we sell between 1-10% of our rev on Amazon :( ... but that's also because our products (home and kitchen) have lower cost competitors on Walmart itself. We're the mid-premium product, which is a much better position on Amazon and the right marketplace fit.

I feel this is def solvable these days -- but the 7 years thing is gonna be tough to overcome at this point.

What I've done on some of these "need to escalate to a human" issues is to buy a ticket to Amazon Accelerate (in Seattle every September), book a Seller Cafe appointment to talk to a leadership team person (I think recently got moved to the captive escalations department), and get someone to talk to face to face.

I know it sounds dumb but I've solved issues that were costing my company 7fig/year sales like this.

FWIW they got a lot better on this past few years, clearly someone high up finally got the memo.

We had a similar issue in 2018 or so, 1 writer wrote a problematic listing copy on a set of SKUs -> one of the Amazon bots auto-banned the entire account (8-figs/year, great performance metrics otherwise), took us 3 days to restore and we have an insider who was able to see internally what was up + let us know how to escalate within the performance/safety orgs.

Nowadays they make sure they give you a warning first + I wanna say a week of time for people to respond before suddenly disappearing your account if you have a good Account Health Score? I think the main issue these days is people don't pay attention to the Account Health tab...

Yeah, low 8s on Amazon. They already take ~50% of our revenue for all expenses, the SASCore person is a drop in the bucket for them.

We also do B&M and website sales which have way less hassle or much lower expenses, but get nowhere near the traffic of Amazon, so that's why we deal with 'em...

My personal email is rot13’ed when you click on my username :)

This is my company (not selling anything, just wanna help out the creator of a product that brought my family some joy and showing I'm not some rando :) ): http://www.buyawesome.com

Most executive seller (8+ fig) have a kindasorta dedicated account manager... I think they're part of SASCore (Seller Account Support) that is kinda okay for internal escalations, but it is highly variable in quality based on whether you get a person that's good or downright terrible.

Supposedly anyone can get them these days by paying $1-2k/month? We've got ours since 2018 and when we balked on the price they just waived the fees -- to be fair I basically talk to him 1-2x a year only for important things and do some panel stuff for Amazon to kinda pay my dues.

> The sad part is that I sell a book, Computer Engineering for Babies

Oh no way, I bought your book (I think via kickstarter?). :)

First off -- Amazon's super bureaucratic so all of their processes require a certain language and esclation path. I'll have to ask my team's support specialist on what she thinks, but my gut is telling me your language needs to be "compatible with Samsung" or "Samsung compatible" instead of "for... Samsung TV remote".

I've been doing Amazon for 13 years and have a team + a few brands I own in the ecosystem -- just some basic tips:

1. Get brand registry (or find a maker buddy and put it under their brand) for listing control. Generic is not the way to go for listing control -- you need brand registry. Then you can edit away under your own brand.

2. You shouldn't be losing any money doing this. If you're doing 3D printer stuff you should expect your cost to be like 5-10%, Amazon takes 40-50% between all fees, ads around 10%, and the rest is labor/margin... and if your numbers aren't there you need to figure out what's wrong.

I have lots more thoughts but I realize this can become an essay haha. Feel free to ping me if you need some help, loved your books. :)

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Edit: I don't think you're at risk of getting banned, but you might need an escalation to a higher level support (a captive or escalations specialist within Amazon).

Edit 2: I had some extra downtime to look at it, my approach to resolving the issue would be: a. You should first try to clearly indicate you're a product accessory and not a Samsung-branded product; review sellercentral best practices for SKU naming but it's gonna be something along the lines of "compatible with Samsung TV remotes" b. If you get stuck here for too long, I would first remove all reference to Samsung for now from the listing and make it a more generic accessory, acknowledge the brand confusion, reinstate your store, then create a case to add Samsung back into your listing (and be sure to have this case handy if you get future problems so you can reference back and show you're doing this the right way). c. Phone support works a lot better in recent days than email/chat support. But since you're deactivated I'm not sure if you get access to this.

I remember a time when I'd pick up every single call received... now it's the opposite, I only have it ring on recognized phone numbers + I skim voicemails, filter out the ones that leave the 3-4s of silence or autoplay text, and call back those who actually have business purpose with me.

If there exist AI robocalls that start spoofing my friends and loved ones... ugh, I can just imagine the hassle of doing due diligence for every voicemail going forward. (This does kinda remind me of the scams where someone pretends to be a kidnapped distant family member, cries in the background of the call, and asks for ransom money....)

It's his online (HN/X) handle

I would treat it analogous to asking ChatGPT to code for you (but for food) - some times it works great, other times you gotta nudge it a bit.

The tool is currently best used by people who already know how to code/cook and don't want to spend too much cognitive bandwidth, but have the skills to mofidy as needed.

Can't comment on the macroeconomic trends, but personally as a consumer, hotels are more attractive than AirBNBs for <1-week stays due to cleaning fee and chore lists ($250 cleaning fee per stay, still have to clean up the house and pack the garbage out). Most of my travel is solo for work for 2-3 days so this nudges me towards hotels.

For 1+ week stays AirBNBs make more sense (family vacay, larger house with children), though it seems like the house owner lists the same house on VRBO and for whatever reason prices it slightly cheaper there, so I just book it at the cheaper place.

Are you a social dancer? :D Salsa dancer for over a decade and event (Congress/social) organizer for a few... I know exactly what you're talking about!

PS - the issue is that many social dancers want to dance over being social, and alcohol detracts from it. People have jobs and want to pay to contribute. We ended up settling on a cover charge that comes with food credit so people can booze up if desired, and buy water/snacks if not. Win-win.

Just... don't. Enjoy the profits when you get 'em. :)

This forum is filled with people who sold all sorts of tech stocks way too early (or too late), and people nerding out over things and tossing them and them magically gaining tons of value over time - I'm thinking about all of my super early CCGs that I tossed when cleaning house, the 20 bitcoin I mined for fun way back in 2012 or whenever and then deleted from my laptop (that I then sold on eBay for $100), the 10k of AAPL I bought for like $5 and sold for $10, etc. etc.

Same with all the early job opps and what not too - but we're the sum of our life choices till now and that's OK. :)

This "meltdown" is a highly known outcome of the practice (and kinda why people historically do it with guidance in a safe space with a lot of time-honed set of best practices from thousands of years of history).

It's kinda like people who are in reasonably healthy mental shape suddenly decide to run an ultramarathon of the mind. I'm not sure if OP may have the correct expectations.

Kinda click-baity and not a lot of substance, prob not worth the 5 min reading it. Article TLDR - work is part of life (duh) and you're just trying to integrate everything.

People need to have their expectations set on ChatGPT, just like how they have to set their expectations on Dall-E/MJ/etc. My experiences so far with both as an ML person with interests in both domains is that they get things 80-90% right, with some big flaws.

Just like how Dall-E can paint a human face pretty well but then mess up on their fingers and other extremities, ChatGPT can give you some really logical-sounding statements but totally bomb the actual facts of things.

Am curious how they'll execute - I def see a lot of potential usefulness.

Me, then my children, then my company (small 8-digit rev company), then my communities (community leader in a few niches with 100-10000 ppl). I know this is vagueposting a bit.

I've been heavily influenced by my hobbies and upbringing (almost went pro as a musician, had a heavily religious childhood) to treat life as my practice, so I just try to establish fundamental basics and work on them incrementally over time. Just focus on the journey and the nuance of each breath, each step and how fulfilled I feel... less on the big numbers and milestones and fanfare.

Maybe I'm an atypical user compared to the privacy-centric HN user, but I use Alexa a bunch, have them liberally scattered throughout my house, and bought into the ecosystem of Alexa-compatible devices (Neato, Hue, Frame TV, etc.) and services (Prime Music, Spotify)

I've def been a little annoyed at it starting to ask me for product reviews and other things these days, but most of it's been low enough friction that I don't bother shutting it down on the app or whatever.

I wish Alexa was more programmable or less clunky for a casual enthusiast though, I set up a buncha things basically the first few years and slowly had it atrophy as other priorities in life took over...

Doesn't Hue do this already with a more elegant solution?

I have a Hue setup at home and I do something like this, but hackier through an iPhone app I set up 4-5 years ago (it hasn't broken yet and I haven't touched it); I believe there are more elegant software solutions these days.

Was in a similar situation re: biological age, just some anec-data for you:

1) You and your spouse most likely can still have children assuming you two are in reasonable health with no serious fertility issues; age is less of an issue with today's medical tech. My spouse and I had our first child at a simlar age to you two.

2) Sounds like you have burnout/depression/something-else. Consider getting help from a professional (therapist)?

3) For me, parenthood is cool, tiring, and rewarding, but definitely not an endpoint of personal fulfillment. With all the socio-cultural changes of our times, our sense of self, identity, and value should enrich our families, and not be predicated upon society's value towards being a giving/sacrificing parent unit.

Absolutely love the aesthetic/experience, the map w/ the music and the little crowdsourced flavor from Craigslist et al really add to this. Thank you for this.

This post is (intentional?) rage bait for nerds - as everyone else says this is the wrong comparison.

Short answer: depending on your definition of rural, yes, there are def pockets of tech folks in rural areas.

These rural areas with tech folks tend to be outer suburbs of cities and/or niche touristy/outdoor places -- basically work-remote tech folks who live at an area to enjoy the other aspects the land can offer.

I run a remote-first business around Lake Tahoe in Nevada and there's def large pockets of CA tech expatriates here settling down here, but this area isn't exactly rural, it's a big tourist town. As you go east you end up in the desert and it gets pretty rural, and there's def a tech segment out there though it's highly correlated with a communal/art scene courtesy of Burning Man (art hippies that happen to tech).

This thread would be way more useful if one of the HN mods were willing to share (a maybe obfuscated) traffic snapshot of the site.

As it stands we're gonna get: who on HN bothers to comment on a poll. :)

"American incompetence" can be pursued via court of law, so that puts a certain floor to how bad things can get...

Source: me, a US brand owner who has worry about product liability...

I want to upvote this just to keep it out of gray (since I do think it adds to the conversation), but this being grayed out is just hilarious on a meta level.

Assuming it's not outright foul play, it's prob more likely that the matching services intentionally boost your profile gets better reach/impressions as that's a +EV play, and reduce your profile reach when you're subscribed long-term.

To carry this thought exercise more, someone structuring this system could also treat hot/responsive/engaged profiles as an asset of retention and intentionally matchmake the results to optimize for a system to be engaged (vs to matchmake two people who find love and unsubscribe after).

Spoiler alert: as a small business owner, you're EVERYONE'S b_tch. Your customers, your employees, your critics... Being mindful of what everyone cares and distilling the actual value delivered is both skill and constant practice.

I'm trying to be constructive with my thoughts, so my initial thoughts are: I've had a pretty different experience than you, and don't think your recommendations are good for a lot of people. IMHO you're taking too much risk doing what you think is a market need, when you should be offloading risk and making what the market is actively wanting/needing. This sentiment is repeated by quite a few commenters in different words.

Serial SMBer here, looking back at the dozen entities that worked in the past 20 years -- every one of my projects with 7+ figure outcomes had clear successes to validate the idea 3 months in, and I would often times MVP it off a contract with one client/vendor. (A few examples: niche used office furniture circa 2006, iOS app circa 2010, ML-based investing circa 2011, Amazon store in 2013 - so... all over the place.)

Just adding a bit of anec-data since we have quite a few people sharing what worked (and what didn't), the top 3 learnings for me have been:

1) Know people with deep pockets who want a problem solved - this means networking and establishing a niche for yourself as the go-to execution guy for problem X. I went to school near Sand Hill so that made it convenient. This simplifies your customer #1 problem as well as your revenue problem.

2) Know people who are good at solving problems, esp ones you dislike or can't solve. This is how you scale from a 1-person weekend project to a 1M+/yr rev project. You want this because a) problems that need multiple people to solve are a natural barrier to entry for anybody else, which means your solution is more defensible and b) partnerships are fun and when built right promote accountability where the sum of work is greater than its parts.

3) Entrepreneurship is hard work and should only be done as a last resort, if you know what you're getting yourself into, because you ABSOLUTELY WANT IT for whatever reason, whether because seeing something inefficient drives you nuts, that sorta thing. It's absolutely not for glory-chasers which I find kinda frustating, as a lot of (US) society glorifies it as such and sets peoples' expectations totally wrong and I see tons of miserable entrepreneurs burning out all the time in the startup orbit.

Thanks for your's and whakim's thorough conversation about this -- some of the nuance is really hard to articulate without the historical geopolitical context and you summed it up really well!