francescopnpn

A $250mm sale is lottery type sh+t. u can't plan it. 1:1mm odds. you're naive. $10mm is realistic while still highly unlikely. like 1:100 odds. just build a SaaS that makes $3mm a year (e.g 5k customers paying $49 a month or 300 that pay $1k a month).

I told people to buy btc and decentraland here on HN 2 years ago and now you'd be up x100.

now I'd tell you, trading NFTs should be your full time job

Buy a weekly option on a company it's going to announce a merger or predict any other many-sigma event with week/month-precision always using weekly options

Extremely unhappy too with Stripe's support. Patrick Collison never answered my emails (not that I expected to). They disabled and re-enabled our Stripe account multiple times thinking it was a forbidden business. With another company we received 2 chargebacks out of 20 transactions and balance ($6K+) has been blocked for 90 days. Not to mention that the chargebacks arrived much later, and the reason it has not been paid out early (weeks earlier) prior to the chargebacks (weekly schedule) was because of an unknown bug or something. Basically the payout date moved to the next day every single day the payout was supposed to happen. or so it seems, who knows! no emails, no nothing. Stripe's support that bad.

I emailed Stripe and the chat support 10+ times and all I received is 10(!!) days later was a copy paste "sorry can't do anything about that" - referring to the fact that by then the chargeback rate was 10% because of 2....so statistically insignificant... chargebacks. which again, happened much later, after the supposed payout date.

Oh. And to add to it, we requested 10+ days ago for a migration of our data to Braintree / Paypal and they never got back to us. again. it's just a shitshow.

Very sketchy and nonsensical business practices, if you ask me.

if someone from stripe is wiling to actually fix this shitshow (aka perform the migration and payout our money or at least explain why prior to any chargeback the money hasn't been paid out), you can email me at: arturaregnante90 at gmail

different people have different tolerances. clearly your sweet spot was "half a dose" dude.

As the solo founder of a profitable $1MM ARR company I'd say you can do it on your own and there's nothing they can add anyway. Just pick a domain you're deeply obsessed with in the first place.

Remember, in software in 2020 the only important thing is distribution. Work backwards from distribution. The biggest SaaS products aren't that great, they just have a great way to get sales/leads. The best consumer products, aren't that great (or weren't that great) - they just found an hack. 99.9% of startups thinks they need to make a great product and then raise VC and throw millions on FB and G ads -being highly unprofitable- (since PPC is a game for established deep-pocket companies with ridiculous CACs)

Literally just hacks: Airbnb, spamming Craiglist. Dropbox, referral incentive-based storage + a viral funny video for hackers. Stripe, they happened to be in an early YC batch. Facebook started with the most exclusive place in the world: Harvard. Hotmail: adding "sent with hotmail" at the end of the email. etc.

If you find a way to for ex. post on Facebook Groups at scale, then you should work a product backward from there since not all channels are suited for all products. If you have many friends in the intel community, probably you should make a product for the US Defense. Get the gist?

in 2020 any decent dev can create any product and/or copy your idea. what's impossible is getting tons of customers at a reasonable acquisition cost as to be profitable and have to spare to re-invest in growth.

Hardware/scientific breakthroughs are obviously different. Making the product is h hard part and distribution is easy: if you inventhe the transistor, the customers will be there.

so yeah a sales cofounder will add nothing as he wont happen to know which temporary weird thing on the internet allows in a very specific way to get a ton of customers at a very cheap price (ideally free). If he did, he would hire anyone in the world as a contractor to build a prototype and distribute it through the hack he found- 99% of the work is already done when you found the well. If you'll attempt to methodically find a well (usually one just stumbles upon it), know that before you'll find find 1 you'll have to go thru 100+ dry wells.

The alternative I guess is you could make software for a super niche kind of business. like Insurance. Software for insurance agents. Maybe an even more narrow niche. That's because you can reach these people via phone or email. which is free.

Memento mori. Unus sed leo.

Same. Sometimes I use Airbnb and it's a mixed bag. Same thing happened with me once a year ago: I left a bad review for the host, the host a bad review to me, both have been removed.

so much for trust. Why not completely remove reviews and manually inspect each property with some regularity? Might as well do that since they're completely fake.

Sure, there'll be less properties but the quality will go up so much which translates into higher retention and $.

I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream. One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions). The bottom of any market is shit.

I agree. But amazon has AWS too which is high-end.

I always think that the best business to build or own is the one with the highest margins which usually means catering to wealthy customers. Apple, Tesla, Gulfstream.

One exception is if your business accepts payments which can't be reversed such as wires (investment products, some hardware subscriptions)

what about just drinking water and eating berries? I kid you not, you will feel so much better.

This is peak YC

I guess people eventually could win twice in a short span if they're unlucky and they'd be out of money

How much does the insurance cost? Was it hard to find someone wiling to insure that?

Finally, you pay 0.2% but Ally pays 1% yet you say your rates are as good.