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Nice looking page? Did you design it? If so, where did you get the graphics?

My design work looks like a kindergartener drew it with a fat crayon on Big Chief paper! ;-)


Yes I designed it myself and I did all the drawings myself on an iPad Pro with the pen. I wanted to create a unique and relatable website which didn't look like every other default Starter template and I also was too cheap to pay for professional images so whenever my brain was fried in the evening and I couldn't do any coding work anymore I grabbed my iPad and drew a couple graphics for the current page I was working on whilst winding down in front of the telly watching some British drama series which my wife picked and I didn't need to focus on anyway LOL


Completely understand fried brain and TV with the wife.

Thanks for the response


Here's my upvote!


EXACTLY the same feeling here. No ideas and unsure of follow through.


I'd love to just make $1000 / month profit. I don't "need" the money per se, but definitely "want" it. Maybe for no other reason than to just to do it.

I just can't seem to come up with an idea. It has been said/written multiple times "scratch your own itch". It seems that I don't have an itch. If it takes me X-amount of steps or time to do some task, I don't ever look at how to reduce it, I just go with the flow.

In the grand scheme of life I am very satisfied. I don't NEED anything and for that I am grateful. However, I am a worrier and I do worry about the future and retirement (I'm in my mid 50s), specifically healthcare.

Anyway, better quite here and stop blathering on


One of my products makes well over that amount, and it’s an identical clone of one of about 500 identical products in the same (large) niche.

If all you want is $1000/mo, you don’t necessarily have to solve a new problem, you can solve a problem that already has solutions (ideally doing it slightly better, but this isn’t required).

If your product is identical to the competitors, then you can carve out a small percentage of the market just be being the first solution the user tries, e.g via paid ads putting you at the top of the search.

Best of luck!


I have the same problem. When I see the kinds of simple products printing HNers money I think “people pay for THAT?”

Any ideas I do have I convince myself nobody needs, wants, or will pay for.


Ok here is the playbook:

- Go here https://aws.amazon.com/products/?aws-products-all.sort-by=it...

- Look at the list of products

- Copy one of them

- Do it a bit better (e.g. cheaper, faster, hosted in EU, targeted at some specific segment of users etc.)

- Launch asap (no longer than 3 months of coding)

- Reach out to potential users everywhere you can, until you get a few dollars of recurring revenue in

- Write blogs, and long form content, integrate with other libraries and systems

- Automate everything, pay for services that aren't core to your business (e.g. payments, backups, etc.)

- Do everything you can to help all your early users, keep improving the product every week

- Wait a few months/years, till it compounds up to 10-20k MRR


Are you suggesting to copy one of AWS services? This seems like fool's errand.


Thanks. I'll definitely take a look.


actually a pretty good playbook, would probably work


So in future, build a landing page, start shipping it around and see if you can get some early potential customers interested.

Or, choose a small thing you can build in a few weekends, get it built and try shipping it.

If you get no traction, you learned something. If you do, you can now invest more.

This is the whole idea behind lean startups: don’t assume tou have a winner or a stinker, go find out and adapt based on feedback.


> start shipping it around

Can you elaborate on this?


Share it on social media, talk to potential customers about it, give people something to sign up to, in order to learn more.


It is all about execution. There are people making 10k/month++ right now with apps to take notes or newsletter


What blows my mind is that people tolerate paying monthly for what is a static service.

A service routine monitor doesn't need to be updated every month to function, so why would anyone pay every month to use it?


"Tolerate" is an odd way to describe a totally voluntary transaction in a market with plenty of alternatives. The service is either worth the price or not for each person, regardless of the COGS.


If only plumbers knew the value of having a toilet inside your house.


Offer a cheaper solution and find out!

Servers cost money each month, as do the services they use.


You've got a backend as well, and support?


So did Dean Koontz. I don't remember if they agreed upon one year or five years for him to make a living at it before he would give up and get a regular job if he didn't succeed. What ever the time period they agreed upon it worked out for him.


I left STEM (non-CS/software) and became a firefighter-paramedic in 2006. I spent 14 years and left in 2020 when Covid was the rage. From 2010-2015 I got a masters in CS as a back up plan in case I got hurt or sick and couldn't do FF/PM. After I graduated in 2015 I worked a couple of remote part time jobs and then went full time developer in 2020 when I left the fire department.


What do you like/dislike about both careers?


The STEM (non-CS) was boring AF! I use to joke that I did more math balancing my checkbook than my job which required an engineering degree.

There are a lot of things that I miss and don't miss at the fire dept. I miss dinners at the FD. We would sit down to a nice, home-cooked meal, laugh, argue and rag on one another. I don't miss getting a call at 2 a.m. for constipation (true story). I worked 24 hours on / 48 hours off, thus if I took one shift off it was a total of 5 days I had off...miss that. Definitely don't miss the politics between management and the field - typical politics of every other job I've had regardless if blue collar or white collar.


It is my understanding this is how Apple does their development. Everything is home grown and not a hodge podge of dependencies from outside the company.

I do like Mac products but just can't get passed their walled garden. However, to have the quality they do I guess it kind of makes sense to have the garden.

I personally like the idea of few-to-none outside dependencies, solid testing and solid, up-to-date documentation. I need to work on being more disciplined and motivated to do it.


I think that Facebook is similar, but more of their stuff comes from acquisitions, so the conglomerate is quite a bit more heterogenous, than a company like Apple.

I think that most corporations don't like to cede control. I have been told that one of the big reasons for Boeing's troubles, is that they have pushed a lot of important functionality to external contractors.


"found them all a bit pants" Can you explain this phrase to me? I've never heard it before and I can't get the meaning from the context.

Thanks


I can’t seem to find the history of it, but it essentially means somethings a bit rubbish, bad, or crap.

Pants are typically underwear in Britain, we wear trousers (Jeans, chinos, suit trousers) over our pants (boxers, y-fronts, briefs) so probably not something you’d want to show off that much.


Thanks for the reference to pants. In US pants covers jeans, chinos, slacks. Shorts are well, shorts. Underwear is our boxers, briefs, tighty-whiteys, etc.


A lot of Brits will use pants the same as you do to be fair, myself included.

Shorts are mostly just shorts, but we do have jorts and chorts depending on how hipster your shorts wearing cohorts are.


I believe it's this one?

- "adjective. British slang. Not good; total crap; nonsense; rubbish; bad "The first half of the movie was pants but I stayed until the end and it was actually a great film.""

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pants

HN is the pants, man! (am I doing it right? am I cool?)


Better would be - HN is the dogs bollocks, other sites are just bollocks


No, it's the cat's pyjamas.


refers to underpants, with some perhaps dubious stains. common uk english.


Thanks for that. I figured is was UK but didn't want to assume.


> Here we tend to ventilate only once the fire is under control rather than during the rescue and initial attack stages. Cutting a hole in a roof to ventilate a fire is never done. Breaking a window is very rare.

Respectfully disagree. At the central FL fire dept I worked for (2006 - 2020) ventilation during initial attack was practiced and expected. The command to ventilate is given by the hose team once water is on the fire.

For my dept, breaking a window was probably the most used because a couple of reasons: 1) most houses are single story and 2) usually not enough people for roof ops, initially at least. First due is a 3 man engine, 2 man rescue (ambulance) and a district chief, with at least the same complement for second due.

2-in / 2-out rule kept crews off the roof but the 2-out could, and would, break a window.

Once additional crews arrive on scene, roof ops would be started if needed.

But, each dept and type of fires for the area are different. At our dept, single family homes, room and contents fire were the bread and butter, so roof ops weren't usually needed, but, breaking a window in a coordinated effort and in a strategic position was almost always done.


The person you're replying to didn't say where "here" is. I took them to mean they were in Europe, which could explain why your experience was different.


You are correct and I meant to acknowledge that in my comment. I took them to mean "here" as U.S.


He is in Australia as per his website.


Yep, spot on. Sorry I thought it was clear from the context that I was contrasting the US practice.

To be clear, not trying to say one is superior to the other. I don’t have any experience with, or specific training in, the US method.


I like helping employees do their job more efficiently with custom software. One of my favorite places was working part time for an environmental lab that rolled their own LIMS software and just about everything else. People were so grateful for helping them solve their problems.

If the software isn't tied directly to a companies bottom line things are much more chill, in my limited experience anyway.

EDIT: on -> own


> If the software isn't tied directly to a companies bottom line things are much more chill

Yep. But conversely, the pay also tends to be lower, and there is a chance operations can get offshored (eg. Cummins or JPMC's internal systems)


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