tstegart

No, we had an app name, but my real name was visible as the developer. We didn't incorporate or have any legal protection, but it was just a travel magazine app.

I just used my name when launching our app. Since it didn't take off it worked out just fine. The plan was always to incorporate if we started making money, so we saved when the app went nowhere. If you already have people paying you money and this app will be a part of that, its probably time to think of incorporating.

I make anywhere from $100 - $300 a month, once over $450 when someone bought a Rolex. I came across the niche browsing reddit's r/watches. There are a lot of watch blogs and websites, but almost nothing devoted just to watch bands & straps. It turns out a lot of people have an old watch they'd like to fix up because the strap broke.

The research wasn't very hard. I bought some straps and installed them to get the hang of it. Its actually very easy, and now they make quick release straps, so you can change out your strap every day if you want. Mostly it's a fashion blog, so the companies do the work for me by putting out great photography.

I've been doing it about a year and a half. The first 6 months I hardly made money and almost gave up, but then I wrote a popular article and managed to rank quickly and and people purchase watches through it.

I don't really do keyword research. Most of my money comes from two or three articles, one of which is about a particular watch. So I could write more articles about other watches when I have the time. But I have a full-time job that I love, so I only do this for fun. I've done some advertising on Pinterest that seems to have been useful, and Pinterest itself brings in visitors.

I used to write a lot of content but got a new position at my full time job that's been taking up a ton of time. When things settle down I'll write more. Other people hire writers, I'm not sure about that just yet. I don't do reviews, mainly because I didn't want to handle the shipping of bands back and forth. Seems weird to keep the review bands, although plenty of companies have offered free bands I've never accepted any.

I'm an Amazon affiliate, and also Etsy & Jomashop (a popular online watch seller) and one or two others that I've never got a sale from. I usually don't get compensated from featuring independent strapmakers, unless someone buys through Etsy. But they provide the interviews and a lot of great photography, so I basically feature them for free. The blog would be boring otherwise and they're very talented artists and fun to work with. Check out Combat Straps (https://www.combat-straps.com/GALLERY.html) or Jones in Tokyo (https://www.etsy.com/shop/JonesInTokyoLeather) and you'll see what I mean.

I'm not interested in my own straps or watches, there are enough people doing that already so I'll stick with my quiet little niche. My website is just a WordPress theme.

Hope that helps. Check out the reddit link for r/juststart. It really is very informative and fun. This is my second business. The first one was an iPad travel magazine that failed miserably and never made a profit, but was also a lot of fun.

I built https://basicbands.com/ a fashion blog about watch straps. Its not very much work. Brands send me photography and I post it, or go to websites and request it and people send pictures to me to post. When I have time I write an article, but now most of the obvious articles have been written (how to replace your watch strap, etc), so I don't do that as much.

It's an affiliate income model, and it makes me enough to buy groceries and have a few nights out a month. It's much more fun than I expected it to be though. Turns out there are a lot of custom leather workers out there doing watch straps as a hobby and they produce AMAZING work, just incredible. Stingray leather, horween, lizard, I had no idea this stuff existed before I started. They are also a lot of fun to contact and hear their stories, so now I send them interview questions by email and post those. All in all I'm very happy with it. I got my inspiration from this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/juststart/

You could think about it this way: the mechanical parts of cars are all the same-ish (and Apple is planning on them being commodities). So when self-driving cars show up, the only thing to differentiate them will be the software, and Apple is planning on controlling it.

If you hop in a self-driving car, then hop out at your destination, the only parts you have connection with is the seating and the software.

I get that, but how does this suspicious trading do anything? What does it do? It just seems suspicious at this point, but I can't actually find the math to work out the purpose, even though some people in the thread are claiming its alternatively making someone money or supporting the peg, but doesn't say how.

Can someone explain what the purpose of this would be in plain English and plain math? I see a lot of claims but I don't understand how they work. For example, if the goal was to make money, can someone explain how $1000 would travel through this system and end up with a profit? If the goal was to benefit tether, how would $1000 in trades accomplish that?

Stuy town is actually what I was thinking of. Or at least mixed use, with office/commercial on the bottom and a residential tower on top. Everyone else seems to do it, it's weird to see purely office buildings still being built without residential up top.

In everywhere I've lived, the pressure to build has usually won out because the neighboring municipality will let someone build if the first one doesn't. So urbanism slowly creeps in. seems weird that it never has in 20 years out there.

The property tax seems like a likelier answer. NIMBY-ism always strikes me as a weak answer. At least in the midwest, if one city won't build it the city next door will. Seems odd (and in my view, unlikely) that every single city bands together and can resits the market forces of the most powerful companies on the face of the planet.

I'd have thought a municipality would have cracked by now and let everyone build huge residential buildings and used that population growth to fund everything else. Seems every weird no municipality isn't building houses like crazy.

The zoning is what I'm wondering about. In most of the rest of the country large corporations make the rules. It seems the taxpayers in Silicon valley are the tech companies, and they want housing. So who is voting against changing the zoning? It seemed like miles and miles of corporate offices out there when I visited. Just build a giant apartment complex on top.

And I wasn't actually talking about corporate housing, just giant residential buildings. But even then, company towns still exist, why haven't Google and Apple built them?

I always see news articles about companies building campuses and headquarters out there. Can anyone tell me why Google/Facebook/apple can't just build a residential tower for 10,000 people next to their building? It seems they get approval for everything else they build out there.

The only time I went out there it was very suburban, with plenty of room for more buildings. Seems odd that the businesses with all the money paying all the taxes can't get a city council to approve giant apartment complexes right next to their headquarters.

Anyone have the answer? Must be the only place in America where corporations don't get their way, unless they don't actually want housing for their workers.

I think that's the point though, to give power when you need power, and fuel efficiency when you don't. So everyone does do it, because its a good thing. I think you're making a mistake about what crime they're accused of.

The tradeoff between efficiency and power is ok, but what they did is have software that detected when an emission test was being run and created a fake engine profile that only made fuel efficient tradeoffs, and when the emission test stopped the engine went back to the regular tradeoffs.

That was their crime. They hid what settings they were really picking and specifically wrote software to defeat an emissions test.

What kind of university has the space to start classes at 11AM? Just the logistics of trying to fit that many more classes into your limited building space seems impossible. You'd either need a lot more buildings, or you'd need to be forcing other things to the early time slot.

No need to wait that long, just call them and say you'll fax over the proof. Lawyers don't want to be a party to a lawsuit later over a few thousand dollars if they might clearly lose it.

They will keep some of his money as fees and give some out to clients, so then if they can't get it back from clients, depending on the rules, they might have to come up with it all themselves. No regular attorney wants that, nor do they want the hassle.

Just call them all up and say this money isn't from one of the defendants, it's an accidental transfer from an unrelated third party and they will be getting it back.

He should be calling up the plaintiff's lawyers, not BOA. Lawyers don't want to collect only to have to give it back. Find out who they are and call them. Any other attorneys involved as well. Once they have proof the money should not be given out, any ethical attorney would be very wary of handing out money.

It's also likely the money will be sitting in the trust account of an attorney before it actually gets dispersed, so he has more time that way. Contacting the bank for help in the legal system is totally the wrong way to solve this. They've given the money away and can't actually get it back even if they tried. They're a useless avenue at the moment.

I have hired a freelancer for a small project from that thread, and it went pretty awesome.

Thanks. I'm a little surprised by the answers in this thread. I guess I run into what I'm kinda looking for so much I thought that it wouldn't be a big deal to find a turnkey solution. Everyday I use mobile apps that show me where things nearby are and how far away and allow me to search product listings. I dunno, I guess I thought it would be a thing I could set up in 30 minutes like Shopify because it seems so ubiquitous. The fact that I couldn't find a solution after Googling should have been a hint, but I figured it was just hiding and HN would know. Thanks again.

Well, it seems that a shopper would search for different characteristics of a product and be given search results, much like I want a user to be able to do. They could then calculate shipping, which is analogous to calculating distances between two points. A user could enter product data, much like I want users to do, and site registration could keep data from different users separate.

I'm actually thinking of using an e-commerce site and just not putting product data in, rather each "farm" would be a product and have tags associated with it and when you narrow down the tags you get the farms as a result. Seems like the cheapest option at the moment given the other answers in this thread.

Do you know of any providers that would charge a monthly fee instead of setting it up from scratch? Maybe I've misjudged, but this (searching data added in by users) is something common that a web service out there would already offer.

I said free or low cost. I'm not looking to low-ball anyone here or ask for free work on one of my ideas from the HN community. I'm looking for something out there that I can shoehorn my idea into at a low cost. It seems like what I'm looking for is done a lot on the web, and I was looking for ideas on who does it at a low cost. I can get a cheap e-commerce site done for practically free or for $7-$30 a month that charges cards, ships packages, calculates taxes and has stats and searches. It seems like someone, somewhere would be offering something less technical for the same price or less. So do you know of anyone?

We should add for those still wondering that the point of the post was really about the graphic that accompanies the article. You can find it by clicking on the cartoon to the left of the article (for the people whose browsers don't open the graphic automatically).

I hired someone from one. They were awesome.

Yeah, Xcode is pretty much all you need. I would second the WWDC videos, they explain a lot.

Ha, I feel like I'm in a Reddit thread. Ask the man anything!

No. We launched a travel magazine. Travel is a pretty hot start-up spot right now and there is a lot of money to be had. Giving people good content and travel companies a great way to reach customers is a great idea.

I just started using Textastic to code the next issue of our iPad magazine and I LOVE it. Freaking awesome app, can't say enough good things about it. On an iPad 1, never crashed, always smooth, its just a blast to use.

Hmm.. it doesn't seem to check if the website you're reviewing is actually there. The window just sits there, and if I go to the site it is down.

Man, I would pay money for this. Its exactly what I need. Who made this?

I asked this a while ago on HN and got turned on to Zoho CRM. I like it a lot and its easy to use, and free, for small users.