Funny because I often read “open to work” as “desperate”. Would love to know the success rate of quietly looking vs “open to work” and who gets hired more.
I agree, there is a lot of opportunities you can find when looking at a subset of frustrated customers. Ironically they tell you in greater detail what they dislike vs the super happy customers on why they like something.
Start telling your story about why you built it in the first place. Tell it on any community that you think people who are in a similar need will be. Get narrow, try a few small niches. Stick with it for a month and then see who is following along. That is your audience. Start to tease out features based on outcomes that those people will achieve once they are helped by your product. Let your audience tell you what they want.
Paid ads, etc, will very likely not yield good results at this early stage because you don’t know your ideal customer profile well enough and no one knows you or your product well enough to trust you. This will build over time.
Thank you for your answers; I've learned a lot. I should summarize the purpose of my product and the development process, clearly outline the pain points it addresses, and promote it on various platforms. However, I'm a bit worried because those larger platforms may not be very friendly to new users, and it feels like the content I post might not get much visibility.
Crowdfunding and donations are very high risk for fraud and money laundering activities. These approved platforms likely do some type of risk mitigation that Stripe is comfortable with when processing the transactions and take on some of the fraud and chargeback risk.
*Not affiliated with any so this is an educated guess.
A helpful thread from hn the other day on how auth tokens work and how companies like Plaid don’t actually store your credentials (like how mint did back in the day)
This is true for some banks (mostly large), but not all. Your big banks like Citi and Chase offer OAuth for this kind of thing (as they should), but smaller banks still don't and will require a username and password.
I don't know how Plaid handles that, but you don't have the nice, permission scoped, revokable tokens like you do with OAuth.
My primary bank has a checkbox for "third party access" and they pay out how you need to check it when you give a service your username and password so they can access your account. Same username and password, not a new one. It drives me insane how they don't offer OAuth.
Probably depends mostly on the payout country (where you are located) that will drive KYC requirements from the processor (stripe, etc), where people are paying you from (currency acceptance), and a little bit on what you are selling (e.g. subscriptions need a little more infrastructure).
“Non-US” could be any of 190+ other countries. Where specifically?
I believe there will continue to be a market for people building websites. Storefronts, landing pages, personal pages, blogs. I don’t see these going away.
The feedback I keep seeing on hn and elsewhere is a mix of ease/ownership/flexibility but still abstraction of coding and hosting that most people might not want to do. It’s a super broad space and lots of people want different things in a solution.
Advice: go after a narrow niche since the space is crowded, competitive, and arguably commoditized.
Here’s an example I saw launch recently and thought “that’s an interesting niche”
https://sprout.site/en/ (No affiliation)
I agree that's it's a good idea to go niche. I did some research about website builders for photographers and concluded that the best one for many photographers is a niche product aimed at their needs - https://www.format.com/website
Niching down is definitely working really well. I had an experience developing a website for a fancy gallery in London, and they were already "sold" to use Artlogic (https://artlogic.net) because every other gallery uses it. The builder itself was quite horrible and confusing tbh.
Can't wait to try this. One workflow I've started using is drafting/formatting in notion and then exporting to markdown. But having the visual editor of Github would reduce the steps.
