cabinguy

I did the same. I remember spending a week trying to have an out of body experience per instructions from one of his shows. Rest well, Art.

I agree 100%. I purchased bidets as Christmas presents for many family members this past year after a visit to South Korea (where they were the norm in the hotels I visited). I've even found myself telling my neighbors about the advantages of bidets over cocktails (which is kind of weird). I wouldn't want to live without one, and I spread the word.

Yea, the margins went from out-of-this-world to terrible as the price of new laptops came down. We used paypal and a few other (way worse) credit card processors. We also accepted checks and money orders by mail.

Edit: Another interesting tidbit. We were such a large paypal customer at the time that we were invited into their IPO. Bear Stearns (I think) called us 5 times trying to get us to buy in...but it was right after the .com crash and we chickened out. We would have doubled our money that day ;(

Thanks. I'd probably be up for it.

I started buying broken laptops on eBay, fixing them, and reselling them with my best friend. We started with $600 each on credit cards. That turned into a large refurbished computer sales business. So large that I started shopping for a vacation home (lake home).

Well, the process of buying a vacation home was frustrating. This was back in 2002 and most real estate brokerages did not have websites, and if they did, they were static and outdated. This led to a conversation with my business partner...and we ended up buying a really good domain related to my vacation home search and launched a website for realtors. We called it our side project.

When the used laptop market turned into the used VCR market, we shifted all of our eggs to our side project basket.

Today we own a real estate brokerage with 20 offices and are pretty much considered the leaders in the lake home sales market in the Midwest. We're on track to hit a $Billion in annual sales in the next couple of years (did about $300M last year). Neither of us were Realtors (I'm still not). It's been an interesting ride so far.

That’s right. We like to say “professionals ask questions, amateurs make statements.”

The “sales process” is just a series of questions. The close is the natural ending to a great presentation.

The FBI made the call to publish the manifesto, hoping for this exact outcome.

"seen how little work agents do..."

This is going to sound condescending, but you honestly do not know much about the business you're in.

Depends who you ask. I did a 12 day fast once, nothing but water. I intended to do a 10 day fast, but I felt so wonderful, so healthy, so clear, that I decided to add 2 extra days.

For those interested, most of the benefits (for me) happened after the 5th day. Thats when the hunger and caffeine withdrawal ended.

I don't know all of the science behind it, but I can honestly say that I never felt better/healthier in my life.

There isn't much evidence to show that supplements do either.

I agree. Capitalism is by far the best system, but its glory days (in the U.S.) have passed us by. I drove through the downtown area of my hometown this past weekend and tried to convince my wife that it was once a vibrant business district. When I was a kid in the 80's, every storefront was filled with local businesses bearing family names. Today there is only a collection of small-town dive bars, a tattoo shop and a gas station.

Of course there is a Target, Walmart, Home improvement center & large furniture store out on the highway that squeezed the life out of the family businesses a long time ago. It's really sad.

He didn't create or own the show. He was an employee.

The VC model works best for the VCs. Sure, a few entrepreneurs win too, but the model expects way more failures than homeruns. And that's if you get to the place where you're deemed worthy of their capital.

I'm part of that successful bootstrapped crowd (way more than $20k/mo profit). I'm not a billionaire but my lifestyle is pretty amazing. Bootstrapping is a legitimate way to grow a real business.

Well, that's one point of view, but I disagree. Subsidizing the wealth of ultra-rich people...and then trying to recoup it by increasing their taxes seems much more inefficient.

Right. But the part you are leaving out is that the children of Walmart's founder are among the richest people in the history of the world. We are subsidizing their wealth.

I've been bootstrapping my current business for 13 years...and started in business several years before that.

I didn't necessarily want to bootstrap, but no one (outside of my business partner, wife & kids) ever believed in me or supported my efforts in any way...and for good reason, I was a classic underachiever until I was 25 or so.

I personally believe that success has to be your life's mission if you are going to be successful. If you know that success, no matter what (as long as it's legal, moral and ethical), is your mission - you should be able to stay motivated through almost anything. It's worked for me.

Note: Success can mean different things to different people. For me it is making a lot of money while doing what I love to do. That and great kids.

3rd time's a charm.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12531079

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12533650

Thank you!

Actually, we don't service the real estate industry, we're in the real estate industry. It's a long story[1] but we stumbled into the business. The main idea behind Dane Arthur is that we need to stand out from everyone else. We built a niche real estate company/brokerage to $200M/year in sales on the back of a website and want to expand our offerings, but not our geography.

And you're 100% correct about time on site. The only measure we're really interested in is converting unique users into happy clients.

[1] http://davegooden.com/2013/08/our-story-10-years-of-bootstra...

Thanks for the great feedback. Current average visit is about 9 minutes...so it seems pretty sticky compared to our more polished/shiny real estate sites (7 min avg).

We will most likely add an advanced search down the road, but as someone who has made their living with real estate websites for a dozen years, I love this one the most (as is).

Thank you.

Great catch. We just made a change 20 minutes ago that must have broken this. Thank you very much!

Agreed. We plan on fixing that. Thanks for taking the time to review!

You know how it goes...when you work on something intensely, you can lose some perspective. I'm very open to suggestions. Thanks.

Wow. Thank you very much. I appreciate it and will keep playing around with the typography.

Thanks. We went with a "scroll and click" UI. Keyboard not necessary.

Hi Everyone, we just launched Dane Arthur, a minimalist (brutalist?) real estate website that covers all areas of Minnesota & Wisconsin (19 MLS boards). The idea was to run in the opposite direction of everyone else. Mobile version will be up next week (currently looks terrible on mobile, fine on desktop/tablet). Feedback is welcome - thanks!

Go to a small bank. I'm a bootstrapper and I have lunch every couple of months with the owner/ceo of the bank we do business with. They have about 25 branches within their family (under 2 brands).

Small banks still do business the old fashioned way. Credit isn't an issue if your cash flow supports it.

The best (banking) move we ever made was switching from a huge bank to a small bank.

Yes.

If you are a VC backed startup, growth solves all of your problems (at this particular point in history). If you are a non-VC backed startup, sales/profit solve all of your problems.

Either way, growth is a wonderful thing and I think you should grow as fast as you can.