zxlk21e's comments

Yep, in progress :)

how are too many making it if none of them are making it?

title has been updated since i commented

not to anyone willing to pay then, right? only in cases where the organizer has gone awol

This person is an absolute legend.

Gordon Linoff has written a series of books on data mining and sql as well: http://www.data-miners.com/bookstore.htm

This doesn't seem like the best heuristic. Your automatic interpretation of "we are not interested in selling" is "we are interested in selling"?

I'm intrigued because at first it appears to be a paradoxical statement, but with a potentially logical answer.

In addition to that though, I think I (and others?) make sense of the world through narrative and there is value to other people's narratives, though that may be in conflict with the context of your comment.

> It dawned on me that my attempt at completely controlling my life had, in fact, caused me to lose control over it.

Could you possibly unpack this for me a little bit? It strikes me as absolutely true for me, too, or at least sounds like it could be true, but I'm pulling at a thread I can't quite grasp.

Thank you and enjoy!

No, the main challenge is to produce fantastic content, over a long period of time. That changes the sign up equation substantially.

This is a great approach, and the way I think about it, too.

I’m the guy that submitted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21423263 which might be what this post is in response to.

I have a paid newsletter, and I’ve started a community / education site dedicated to the model, as I couldn’t find one when creating my own.

Let me just say this... people are going to get rich off of paid newsletters, full stop.

But like anything else, it’s a many will play, few will win game.

There are examples of newsletters that have done well, and many examples of newsletters that have not.

In my opinion, given the choice between creating a blog and starting a paid newsletter, the choice is a pretty simple one.

Blogging is heavily saturated.

Google is downright hostile towards new, small publishers.

CPM rates are looking downright anemic.

The legal requirements behind affiliate offers are becoming complex, and sometimes confusing to understand.

On the newsletter side you have enhanced discovery, instant monetization with rates chosen by you, an implied audience that is “in theory” additive by nature, not just hit and bounce. Yes, you’ll have churn, etc. but that is how I am viewing the value prop.

I’m reading you right now and I’m interested. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Step 1. Get the idea in front of users as quickly as possible. Pre MVP.

Step 2. Get the partial MVP in front of users as quickly as possible. Mid MVP.

Step 3. Get the MVP in front of users as quickly as possible. Post MVP.

Really, I just care about getting things in front of users. I've launched and failed like 10-15 "startups" at this point. I tend to solve problems that don't exist, or that aren't correctly solved by my software.

I built out UserInsights.com exactly for this reason. And you better believe I had it in front of users at every step of the way. Probably why it's my only success to date.

Onward!

Yep, you can hit me up at [email protected] and I can get you beta to the longer ones. Also, most of the tests are much longer than 5 mins. The competitor tests normally end up being 12-20 mins on average.

Will get this fixed. Thanks for the feedback!

Thank you for your feedback!

Yep. Shoot me an email and I'll let you beta the demographics pre-screening requirements. [email protected]!

Sure - that ability is built in, but since the project is new I commented out the ability to filter by demographics until the tester base grew large enough to return results for the filters. The good news is it's actually there, so I'll be letting demographics filtering happen here really soon.

You're right - the pricing is normally a bit higher but I slapped it down to $10 for a friends and family launch. I guess I considered HN to be friends and family :)