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darrenwestall

127 karma · joined February 4, 2018

CEO of www.paiger.co, previously CTO at www.broadbean.com

Email me: Darren _at_ Paiger _ dot _ co

submissionscomments
darrenwestall··on Ask HN: Giving away my (barely) profitable SaaS app, any takers?
I’ll happily take this over - happy to include a small equity for yourself too.

Email is in my profile.

darrenwestall··on Show HN: UK Company Dashboard and Search (Lockdown Project)
That, with an API would have me as a paying customer. We have a project on our backlog to build this ourselves - I’d rather pay for a SaaS and concentrate on other things.

Happy to discuss our use case, email is in my profile.

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: What startup would you make if you had access to GPT-3?
How do you get access out of interest? I’ve been on the waitlist for a long time now
darrenwestall··on Show HN: Screenity – Open source screen recorder and annotation tool
I’ve made a note to sponsor this project on Monday, we’ll be using this commercially and would very much like to thank you - it’s incredible, beautiful and unbelievably generous.

If you’re ever looking for work (and with your skill set I highly doubt you will be) please reach out to me.

darrenwestall··on Show HN: I made an alternative to Google Alerts that listens to social media
I’m really keen to see how LinkedIn alerts work, I’d love to plug into this by API for our clients. Email in my profile if you’d like to chat?
darrenwestall··on Show HN: Podcast API
Happy customer here. I’ve seen a few people suggest a free service but from our testing this is far more comprehensive and with better search quality.

We use the service in conjunction with iframely to load podcast episodes that can be listened to with ease.

Great product, customer service and documention.

Thanks from team Paiger <3

darrenwestall··on Show HN: Barebackups – My first indie SaaS. A super-simple MySQL backup service
Do you offer storage inside the EU? As a UK business this is a must
darrenwestall··on “Open Sourcing” Paiger’s Marketing
Certainly not my intention at all! I'm learning marketing as I go and this is a blueprint of the things I want to achieve.

I wanted to share how we get on, what works and what doesn't with everyone. We've been growing the business through LinkedIn / Call outreach so far, and it's probably why despite being a successful business, in my opinion we're underachieving on the potential.

I recently had a choice to either outsource marketing or hire, and I chose to hire but junior. Part of the reason I started the business was to challenge myself and I'm really enjoying exploring marketing.

On another note, I'm very happy that you said it's well-designed! I made it in Canva :).

darrenwestall··on Show HN: I Made Date Countdown Timers Webpage. OpenSource. No Ads. No Login
What website did you get your imagery from? I’ve seen it before but I’ve lost the link!

Cool site too, bookmarked :)

darrenwestall··on Show HN: Be 10x more efficient prospecting leads
Sounds great but my niche isn’t supported (Staffing) and I would love to see 2-3 results before you ask for my card details. I can’t sign up without checking the quality is somewhere near what I expect.
darrenwestall··on Show HN: Calendar API for Developers
I’ll sign up tomorrow - we offer a social media scheduler in our platform and this looks great to highlight holidays and times to post.

Will feedback to you any issues!

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: How did you acquire your first 100 users?
We hit the phones and met a lot of people.

After 100 paid customers, we’ve found true product market fit and are now gearing up for a true SaaS offering - we’ll continue to hit the phones though!

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: API to generate interesting mp4 from jpg, PNG, SVG and video source
If you build this, please get in touch. I’d be a customer.
darrenwestall··on Show HN: Monitor websites for change and get scraped data in a webhook
This is ideal for a new feature I’d like to add to our service. My concern is that you won’t stick around - does the on premise version continue work if you were to close?
darrenwestall··on Best advice for female co-founders
Talk.

Most industries have so many men that talk at shows, exhibitions etc and the organisers are dying to have more women on stage.

Building a personal brand is key to start up success as for a while, you’ll be a better marketing asset than your company’s name - use the fact you can get talking slots at events to your advantage.

darrenwestall··on Show HN: A rap song about tech interviews
I’d love to sponsor this video - feel free to get in touch if you’re up for bouncing around some ideas.

Love the song.

darrenwestall··on Show HN: Blidder 2.0 – Instagram and Twitter Scheduler
Looks good! How did you get access to the Instagram API? We partner with Buffer for this right now as it was in a closed BETA
darrenwestall··on Show HN: I build a website for picking Chinese names
Your website doesn’t portray the problem you’re solving. You sell it better here.

Pikaname - stopping embarrassing tattoos.

Have you ever had a friend who got a “cool” Chinese tattoo only to find out later it meant “toilet”? Don’t be that guy. For just $5, a native speaker will choose the best Chinese name for you, based on you and provide a full explanation of its origins.

—-

I’d then market to tattoo shops as an add-on service and give them a cut ($1 per transaction).

Build them a portal they can log into with a customer, branded to them, and provide the report with the shops branding too - you’ll have an army of sales people every day if you invest a little further in your tech and market it smartly.

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: How to download comments of my favorite submission on HN
File -> Save Page As

Or is that too simplistic?

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
No offence taken! I don't disagree - but it helped feed my family well for a long time.

I'm on a start up journey now and much happier.

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
Absolutely, if you truly want to automate your day job, you need the best people propping you up.

Luckily I did, and if I didn’t I removed the rot fast - that can spread and really make your life difficult.

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
In the longer term that is usually a good thing. If they’re the only person who fixes things, that also implies the correct knowledge sharing isn’t happening.

We strive to remove any single point of failure from a hardware point of view, and for me, people are no different

The only exception to this is sales, it’s usually your top biller who you can’t promote - because you want them out there selling. Luckily sales people usually respond to money rather than titles so it’s important to reward those efforts. It’s why some sales people earn more than their managers and 6 figures+ is the norm for good sales people.

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
Yes, but let me elaborate.

I quickly learned the way to get promoted is to be replaceable.

If you’re relied upon too much or if you’re the guy who always fixes things - it’s actually too risky for a business to promote you.

Throughout my career I always made sure I was giving people below me the opportunity to step up, which allowed me to step up too.

I quickly appointed team leaders as soon as a team I managed had more than 4 people for example.

I had to manage the team leaders but they had a lot of freedom.

Some days I had so little to do you wouldn’t believe it, but the department was running the best it had in years and everyone was happy.

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: How did you automate your day job?
I became a manager and delegated everything.
darrenwestall··on Show HN: Drag and drop page building for any site
I’d also like to discuss this use case with you
darrenwestall··on Show HN: Google Site Search Alternative
Can you share more details about searching LinkedIn via your solution?
darrenwestall··on Show HN: Get SMS reminders for dry days in India
What’s a dry day?

I assume it means no alcohol, but worth making it clear on the site.

darrenwestall··on Ask HN: SEO Opportunities?
Are you open to side work rather than a full time gig? I’m looking for some help in this area.
darrenwestall··on Ask HN: Blogs about Being CTO/Head of/Lead Dev?
I don’t have any blogs but happy to chat on anything specific you may need - feel free to connect on LinkedIn.
darrenwestall··on Show HN: 50M stock photos for $12.95 a month
This looks fantastic and great value. Is their an API? We’re heavy users of the other sites you mentioned in that way.

While I have you, what’s the ETA on the Canva button?

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