makeee's comments

makeee | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Is frugality underrated in startups?

I’d argue that most people absolutely should not account for it. There’s enough to stress out about when trying to get your startup off the ground. The idea that your “spending” 2Ok a month due to opportunity cost is not helpful and probably likely to lead to burnout. On the other hand, saving a little money and knowing you’ve extended your runway an extra 3 months can be very helpful.

makeee | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

Thanks for letting me know! If you scroll down below the "Choose your template" section do you see a pricing section with purple background? I'm wondering if the scroll to logic is broken or if that section is just not being displayed. If you wouldn't mind shooting an email to [email protected] I'd love to follow-up about this.

makeee | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

The blog ranks really well without any special effort, but for Divjoy I haven't put in the work of setting up extra landing pages to rank for different topics. For example, I'd like to have a page like divjoy.com/nextjs+stripe that emphasizes that stack combination.

makeee | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

I'd say that if you're interesting in learning to code then Divjoy may work for you. I try not to over sell it to non-devs, but I do have a fair amount of customers who are hacking at Divjoy projects while learning to code and are very happy with that.

Since all the boilerplate works out of the box you can skip over a bunch of stuff (like understanding how auth works under the hood), but generally there's some custom logic you need to write and you'll want to pickup some JS/React to do that.

Any integration with Authorize.net would be totally done by you. You could export a codebase with Stripe payments so that you can at least see how payments logic ties in with UI.. but you'd need to then strip that out and replace with your own custom Authorize integration.

makeee | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

My first batch of alpha testers came from a single Twitter reply [0] that got retweeted by a prominent person in the React community. It certainly helped that I had an okay Twitter following at the time (I think around 1k), but it doesn't need to be huge. You just need the right person to retweet you.

That was enough to iterate on until I had an MVP.

Then my Show HN [1] sent like 15k visitors in a day and that led to a ton of usage. I think something like 4k projects were created that day. I wasn't yet charging at the point, but probably for the best, since high usage meant a lot of feedback.

A few months later I launched on Product Hunt and that went well [2]. Beyond that, just improving the product every day, sharing my progress on Twitter, and trying really hard to turn every new feature into an exciting launch event.

I also started a React hooks blog [3] that sends me a handful of customers every month. I could probably do a better job of promoting Divjoy on there.

Haven't delved into SEO (barely rank for anything), content marketing, paid advertising, etc, so it's still very much a learning process for me.

[0] https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1108875975494795265

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/divjoy-4

[3] https://usehooks.com

makeee | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

Divjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :)

It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance.

The conventional wisdom is that devs won't pay for software (especially code!), but I've found it to be the opposite. There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend.

[0] https://divjoy.com

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2...

makeee | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Recommended Low-Code Platforms and how ripe are they?

I’m building https://divjoy.com. My approach has been to let people make high level changes in a low-code editor (create pages, rearrange sections, tweak global styles) and then export as a React/Node codebase where they build their custom functionality. It doesn’t help with your specific use-case yet, but that’s a great example of something I’d like to enable just by dropping a “tweets list” component into your UI.

makeee | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do people make money in the cryptocurrency industry?

I few years back I made an ETH collectibles game, like Crypto Kitties, but simpler. It was just to learn how eth/solidity worked, but to my surprise people actually started buying and selling the items. It made me around $20k in a few weeks (took a small % of transactions). Eventually, I realized it was basically just a bunch of crypto wales playing hot potato and at times using bots to bid things up. No one really thought these items would have any long term value. Not much different than most alt coins I guess. It died out on its own and I was happy do be done with it since running an online casino wasn't what I wanted to do with my life.
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