You appear to be shadow-banned... which means that almost no one can see what your posts because of HN's algo and moderators (only people with show-dead enabled are able to see your posts).
It's not as bad in US and reason is purely economics of fraud. Very large fraction of US population is paid $30 an hour compared to Indian population. Biggest problem isn't even market in India which has lot of demand.
> As I mentioned, my first lead/opportunity came from an introduction. That was made possible when I took a couple friends (who are salespeople) out for drinks to tell them what I was working on. Afterwards they both said they would try to think of people to refer me to.
> My next two customers came from a less obvious channel. A friend told me about a service called Growth Geeks and suggested I create a profile for my service. I was hesitant at first because it seemed like a distraction, but I signed up nonetheless.
So basically he sent an email to the founder of that website like this https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5706d181b09f95e331b21... saying that the author (a bit confusing to figure out as both are called Mike/Michael) can grow your sales with no marketing.
Then this happened:
> He responded that day and asked if I had time to speak on the phone.
> On the call I learned that he had a customer who needed 2,000 leads a month and they needed 2,000 leads a month for themselves. I used the same sales process as my first call and closed two deals in 30 minutes worth $3,000 / mo (25% of the $4,000 in revenue went to Growth Geeks). Suddenly I went from $1,000/mo to $4,000 / mo.
My question is now, how he manages to make 4k leads?!
> Later that week I decided it was time to double down on this side project. I spent a couple nights writing email templates and planning outbound email campaigns. By May of 2015 I had sent over 30,000 sales and marketing emails so I knew how to get high response rates (see play #1).
So now he says he sent over 30000 emails (I assume he has a mailing list of 30000 and sent an email, but that doesn't match what he says, he seems to have sent multiple emails). So let's say he has 30000 email list and a click-through rate of 13.3% (which I think is very very high, maximum I got was around 3-4% and was only once) then he would make 4000 leads.
First thing I think is strange, is how he got 30000 emails? That's kind of the most important part of the guide, without this he couldn't make any lead.
Then he says this:
> I sent emails to about 500 people over the course of a month which resulted in ~20 free trial sign-ups. Two of those free trials converted within the month and by the end of June, I had $5,000 in booked MRR.
Note that this is another customer acquisition source. So he has an additional 500 emails.
I mean how can a person reproduce this guide without these mailing lists?
So even if he says how he did it, you can't really do the same unless you have:
- Friends that can sign up for your product or refer other people
- Big email lists
- Create leads from ???
I feel like all these missing points leads directly to his startup https://getsimpledata.com/ - So I guess is more about marketing.
Anyway, I think the post was interesting, but not too much I can do about it because I probably know about:
- Focus on a problem that already exists
- Work on your pain point
- Outsource to a cheap country
- Positioning in the market
He didn't say he ate a ton. He said he eats pizza and doesn't get fat. Well... I agree with him, I ate whatever I wanted for a few months but just half of what I usually eat... lost 7-8kg in 3 months. I was still eating pizza
Many "irrational" decisions are related to interactions with anti-bot/anti-fraud logic.
I worked on IE in the days when there were many crazy conspiracy theories about silverlight and IE collaborating to ruin the open web. This sounds similar.
I agree on writing environment (client/server) agnostic code, but not in this way.
Js code should definitively run on the client and here is why:
- Instant feedback, no matter how bad is your connection: here if I click on something and there is no internet, I won't see a loading icon. You probably have to hack it.
- I'm not sure how it will scale and if it scales will be way more expensive than just using rest api (sockets are more expensive)
probably more problems.
I'm the creator of this game http://bitplanets.com which has a lot of shared code that runs both on the client and the server side. Some validation is done on the client (so you don't even hit the server if it fails + get instant feedback that your action is successfull or failed) and the same validation is done on the server side as well (so you can't hack it).
Examples:
- When you send a ship it will show a temporary ship immediately even if the server didn't receive yet the ship. If the client validates most likely it will be a valid ship (unless you hack it, but server side will deny your ship). Then when the server comes back saying that the ship is valid then the ship is not temporary anymore.
If you had a java backend everything would be so much more complicated. This is what I mean by having agnostic code, this validation function doesn't really care if is run on your client or on your server.
What if mark monitor would put all parked domains to bob.com.mys3.com service? Me, as mys3 provider I'm at fault? I doubt.
What if mark monitor would point to an IP address they don't own? Still not their fault?