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Based on the comments, this might be a slightly different POV on the topic, but not understanding the value of personal/professional networking and soft skills. Very early on in my career, I was less interested in the networking aspect, and more focused on (for lack of a better way of describing it) pure meritocracy - if I become more skilled, more opportunities will naturally become available. I eventually discovered how narrow of a view this is and sometimes wonder how life would've gone if I'd had a different mindset earlier in life.

I participated in reddit secret santa twice, 10 years ago. Both times, I sent something out and got nothing. It was a nice idea, and I'm not really salty about it cuz I gave some nice things to strangers and the point of the season is more about giving than getting.

But it never really delivered on its fundamental premise, even when it was small. These were problems that existed a decade ago.

I've also thought about this a lot wrt microsaas projects. Specifically, looking to acquire projects that are small but match my tech expertise such that I can consolidate certain aspects of them easily. Ultimately maintenance will probably be the biggest problem with acquiring numerous small projects, so making that as easy as possible is important.

It would probably not be "viable" in the sense of it becoming a unicorn, but it probably is a viable small business or side project. I get the feeling that once you become a medium sized business, you kind of necessarily outgrow the "micro" part of the monicker.

Does it? It feels to me like it stands to gain a good bit. There are a lot more people remote working either part or full time, and many remote workers like to use coworking spaces. Their potential customer base is probably higher than it was pre-pandemic.

This is interesting but I also wonder where the effect tapers off. I'm working on a startup in a particular space, and almost all competitors have high ratings on marketplaces but behind the scenes we know their churn is HUGE because people strongly dislike the products. Are some products just polarizing such that the highs and lows will be more willing to submit ratings while the displeased but unmotivated mids won't bother with a rating but will still churn?

Most regular non-trivial maintenance is also on your plate as a homeowner. Need a new roof? That's on you, and isn't reflected in the standard monthly payment. If you rent, its on the property owner.

> Right now, almost all the clients that we acquire are through Upwork. We are a bit nervous about the risk of getting kicked from the platform in the future for any reason. Not that we are doing anything that violates their terms, but just in case. We don't want to be over-reliant on one channel. What are our alternatives? I know few other sites like Fiverr, Freelancer, etc., but supposedly they are not that great in comparison.

Use upwork as an absolute last resort. Find clients through word of mouth, referrals, social proof, networking, SEO, and maybe light ads and sponsorships. Only fall back to upwork if you can't fill your schedule otherwise.

Probably more importantly, change the type of client you're working for. People who use upwork and similar platforms are either uninformed, or intentionally looking for the cheapest work possible. You won't, as you put it, "grow your business" on that. Its possible for you to find some good clients there, but its much more rare and requires effort. So why not put that effort into finding clients who will pay you more?

Take the wins you've made on upwork, those clients who you did really good work for and really made happy, and ask them to refer you to other people, and engage those people off of upwork.

> We are most certainly leaving money on the table because we cannot handle all the job requests we get. We want to grow our team, but hiring developers in the U.S is not an option, given the high wage demands. What country is most suitable for hiring some good developers at reasonable rates/wages and being compliant with U.S labor and tax laws at the same time?

There's nothing wrong with hiring offshore people, but don't hire offshore people because you can't afford onshore people. You can't afford onshore people because you're way undercharging. Maybe that's your business model, but given you're asking about how to hire offshore people, I don't think it is. Raise your rates so that you can hire onshore people.

> What are some of the hot areas that we should build our expertise in besides mobile and web app development to expand our business?

You shouldn't chase hot areas, you should pick something that has longevity and dive into it. Okay maybe that means you can pick something hot and fresh today. But if you're always picking something hot and fresh every few months, you're not getting REALLY GOOD at one thing. Trying to go all in on something like blockchain or whatever means you need to now figure out how to build up your blockchain sales pipeline. Where would you even go for that kind of work? If you don't know the answer to something like that, then devoting time to getting good there is actually a negative EV for your business.

Once you position yourself as a specialist, raise your rates.

> How do we actively look for bigger companies that may be interested in offloading some of their work to a small team like ours? What are some efficient cold emailing strategies? Should we hire salespeople for that?

Do good work for smaller companies, and ask them for word of mouth referrals. You'll get intros to bigger companies, eventually.

> Is there a particular type of team structure or hierarchy that works well for services as opposed to in a product company? What roles should we prioritize in hiring?

This depends a bit too much on where your problems lie and what you're doing w/ your business IMO. At least, when your company is young. There's no one correct answer here. Fill in your skills gap and then hire to address your needs. But based on the rest of your post, I'd guess you need help with bizdev/sales.

> Finally, Any tips on how to build web presence?

IMO web presences for dev shops who truly want to succeed early on should be localized. Pick a city or geographic region (hopefully where you are already located) and a specialty and SEO the hell out of it. You won't stand out in a global marketplace, but you can stand out for local businesses looking for local help. And there are usually a lot of them.

> Yes, but as a programmer I'd rather have a mediocre programmer who is a good communicator and who knows how to integrate with the team

I wholeheartedly agree with this, but fwiw, the FAANG companies OP applies for generally speaking don't. I think the applicable advice is for OP to go work for a smaller company.

This is entirely dependent on the business and the pricing of the product. Monthly SaaS was basically crafted in order to bypass the procurement process, to make it easier for business customers to buy software on the corporate card. Part of pricing a b2b product is to understand the procurement process as well. A lot of b2b products have price breaks built around common procurement limits (i.e., 249/mo and 499/mo because common customer single transaction procurement limits are 250 or 500)

> To be very blunt because I'm anonymous, how do I monetize this stickiness to extract maximum value from future customers?

Addons/extras/upsells. Find some features that might make the most sense as something that exists outside of your current pricing structure, maybe due to specific fixed costs of some sort that don't make sense to roll into the plan pricing, and offer them a la carte at like $20/mo or something. This would allow you to bump your ARPU a bit.

Another option is services. Not knowing your product, its hard to make any concrete suggestion here, but data migrations and initial account setups are common ones.

I generally speaking agree with this in spirit, and I've been the one in the seat making the Heroku <-> AWS decision. But for the last 3 companies I've made that choice, the decision to move from Heroku to AWS doesn't start to make sense until the ~25 team member size and several years into the life of the company. It doesn't happen all that quickly, at least in my experience.

[Edit: so what I'm saying is the characterization of heroku is only good for very tiny teams/projects/etc has not been true for me.]

YMMV of course - depends largely on what you're building.

> And which is better? It all depends on context!

I long considered myself a generalist because I typically work with early stage startups to get them going and growing, and that requires being competent at many things, wearing many hats. I now position myself as a specialist at growing early stage startups, because that wide of a skillset is exactly what you need to be successful in that context.

In many cases, its about how you frame it.

Is any of this shocking or contrary to what's already been said in public? You could summarize the whole article like this:

Tesla intends on building a great L2 system, releasing it publicly, and then moving on to L3 afterwards.

> OPM went to JC for S2 because the very expensive S1 from Madhouse had already satisfied the goal of bringing tons of new fans to the franchise.

IIRC it was also scheduling. Madhouse was booked up for a while.

IMO the "problem" is that RH doesn't tell you that (or at least their marketing makes it confusing at minimum). The way they describe it as an "instant bank transfer", not "we give you margin until your transfer clears". The former gives you the impression that its your money that you're trading with, while the reality is it's a margin account.

That's why a lot of people were angry. They were forced to sell GME because they were technically using margin and it got called, but they thought it was their own money from their own bank account. The optics are that RH forced them to sell GME when they didn't want to.

Sure, but that isn't the topic I was responding to. The previous poster suggested that its not a topic that anyone talks about, when it is; and suggested that businesses hiring fewer people is the only possible outcome/side-effect, when it isn't.

Everyone talks about it. This is pretending that businesses would do nothing in response to the changes. They'd do a lot of stuff, like raise prices, invest in efficiency improvements, invest in their employees, reduce employee hours, offset the increase in lower level wages by reducing upper level wages, etc.. What the response would be just depends on the business and their circumstances.

Edit: also, I can't find the study, but I know there was one done about statewide minimum wage changes in states with large differences in cost of living. It's a smaller scale version of what you'd see on a nationwide hike given the differences in cost of living (i.e,, NYC vs Buffalo). Generally speaking, businesses adjusted.

E2: here's a study that isn't the one I was looking for, but is topical: https://www.epi.org/publication/webfeatures_viewpoints_raisi...

> Am I missing something?

A few things. I'm not an expert, but:

> They don't even need to buy up 100%. They only need to buy up 20%. Then they're back in the situation of being under 100% shorted, and problem no longer applies.

They're still in a very tough position. Buying 20% will raise the cost of the stock further, since they're buying it at market price which would drive up the price. And raising the price makes maintaining the rest of their shorts more expensive. That's ultimately the goal - make and maintain a higher share price, which would force shorts to buy instead of continue to pay to maintain their position, which in and of itself would make the stock price grow.

This is also why /r/wsb is interested in other large but not greater than 100% short interest stocks. They might not get squeezed as much as GME but the pressure would still result in a similar situation with lesser gains.

This becomes much less possible as the short interest shrinks or the lower impact you have on the share price.

> Do you really think that the guys at VW and others can't figure it out? It just takes a while.

Probably, yes, but Tesla does have quite a head start. This is also something both professional and armchair analysts have been saying for the last decade. "The big automakers will just throw their weight around to catch up." They still haven't caught up. They probably will someday, but having the head start and the lead during an inflection point period is quite valuable.

> now they are in the driving seat in terms of numbers on the markets that are truly developed (in Norway Audi, VW and others are eating Tesla's lunch).

I mean, lets compare apples to apples. In 2020, Tesla sold ~500k EVs worldwide. Audi sold ~50k EVs. The remainder of the VW group sold about ~175k EVs. Tesla is still significantly ahead despite your characterization.

IMO major consequences from this repeal has been very slow to roll out due to states threatening to implement their own local NN laws, which would create a really painful, fragmented legal web for companies to have to traverse. Some ISPs are doing some stuff, but nothing too out of control.

Depends on your definition of "successful" and "side business", but yes, a few. The most successful one I had that was a true side business was a nice aggregation and stats website that was probably doing around $2-3k/mo until I had to shut it down for reasons outside of my control.

> If you have, how did you do it?

I do side projects for 2 major reasons: to build something I'd like to use myself, and to learn/practice tech skills that I can't at my day job. Its just about consistently making a little time every week to move things forward.

From my understanding, the way they moderated was to show content to 5 literally random Parler users and let them decide as a group what to do with the content.

This kind of by its own nature drags a platform in a specific direction based on where it started. It had a starting culture of being the alternative platform for conservative voices, and so over time that moderation technique would just push it further in that direction.

Its hard to give more specific advice without knowing more about the product, but to me it does sound like the most straightforward path would be to keep your existing free plan as-is today, and then offer a paid plan structure on top of it, turning yourself into a freemium offering.

You don't need to reduce your free offering to make space for a paid plan - not right now, at least. Maybe you will eventually, but if you think you still have space to grow your free plan and it the unit economics are manageable for you, that's a half million or so and growing hot leads for your paid plan.

> The think i am worried is that our growth happened like this, A dev team from a company started using it and then they like it and in few months it will be 5-15 teams from same company will start using it because they liked it and it was free now

If an entire engineering organization with multiple teams is using your product, the vast majority will pay for it if you find the right features, pricing and positioning. A small dev team at an unfunded, pre-revenue startup might want to pinch pennies some, but if orgs that have a significant sized engineering team are starting to use your tool, paying a reasonable amount monthly is a rounding error compared to the cost of their salaries.

> Then there is another segment these are large enterprises and they ask us a lot about security, sso and integrations we have quoted them price from 1 USD per user per month to 10 USD and reaction is mixed some thinks even 1USD is high price for this kind of tool.

There is always difficulty in getting people to go from free to paid. It doesn't matter how much the pricetag is, there's resistance to pulling out the wallet across the board. You shouldn't be trying to minimize the price of your product. In fact, I'd personally look at a $1 price tag and wonder if the software is robust enough to use at my organization. It would make me NOT want to buy it. Price it reasonably. Some people will never pay for your product. Your goal isn't to convert all of your users to paid accounts, your goal is to convert enough people at an appropriate pricing structure for you to have a sustainable, successful business.

Compared to Witcher 3, they DID do this with 2077. 2077's main storyline is roughly 20 hours long, while the Witcher's is about 50 hours. CDPR is kind of known for their longer story driven stuff, and its my understanding they took that feedback in this game and made the primary quest shorter while expanding the optional quest branching.

IIRC Plenty of Fish was doing like ~1m/y in ad revenue before the guy started hiring people in 2008. Probably a less viable option now given the ad landscape, but that one always stuck with me as a solo founder success story with a nontraditional path.

I think it entirely depends on the path you're taking. For example, I'd disagree with the quoted section you made for a different reason. I'd almost always suggest early stage startups to use something like Heroku (if it works for them), which gives them the ability to pay a small premium in order to never have to spend too much time dealing w/ devops stuff. Pre product-market-fit, that's wasted time/effort unless specific devops needs are essential to getting there.

No prob - I know a bit more info than I'm mentioning in public, just didn't want to overly distract here. Feel free to drop me an email if you want or something

This is interesting, as IIRC another YC alum had a (non-YC) startup that failed that did almost exactly this (which shut down a while ago) - a marketplace of interviewers that recorded stories from older family members. Dunno if you've connected with him or not but seems like it could be worthwhile to chat

> It seems pretty unlikely that a very specific bundle of proposed legislation is the only way to address climate change. Are all other countries doomed to failure because they don't have the Green New Deal?

GND is not the only way to address it, but it definitely seems like the most politically palatable option right now inside the US. In terms of options that will have an actual impact and are also legislatively achievable, GND seems to be it. It also doesn't really "address" it so much as slow it.

Other countries HAVE already passed legislation and have taken substantive action, so they would not need to pass a GND. Though the ones that haven't passed anything would need to figure out what they can do that is palatable, yes. The US hasn't, and lately has been rolling back rules and regulations such that we're moving in the opposite direction.

Yes you can coast normally if you disable regenerative breaking. If its on, your car slows down a lot faster than it would if you were just coasting, so it triggers the break lights when you remove your foot from the gas