Your products dont generate enough revenue / profit to dp sales, the cost of sale is too high. You want to do marketing.

0. Find all the climbing groups on Facebook and join them (also make a list in Sheets / Airtable)

1. Start adding value to the community. Do NOT talk about your product.

2. Optimize your personal Facebook page to drive people who view your page to your website or landing page

3. Be active, create a brand around you, not your product

4. Add value --> people click your profile --> they see your banner image --> they click through to your website. You might be successful linking to the homepage, product page, 'our story' page, but you may need to create "thought leadership" on climbing. The goal of this thought leadership is to indoctrinate your audience into how you think about climbing, build authority, and drive people to your email newsletter, Facebook Group and product pages.

5. Send website visitors to your own Facebook Group about climbing (also give them a reason to subscribe to your climbing newsletter)

6. Start hosting AMAs in your group with famous rock climbers that have their own audiences. Being seen with these folks will turn you into an authority.

Because I have 'an audience', I can now reach out to the leaders in my field and build relationships with them by offering them a platform --> to my audience.

Without this audience, they probably wouldn't reply to my emails / DMs.

I've used this strategy to grow my SaaS from $0 to $135k ARR in about 4-5 months.

I don't talk about my product at all .

I give value, pre-usage and post-usage,my product is just a tiny piece of the puzzle.

If you want an example of how to optimize your Facebook profile, see mine: https://facebook.com/nickfromseattle

I'm converting website visitors site wide at 20%+.

My SaaS landing page has a 44% conversion from visitor to free trial and we have almost 2,000 users.

My email list is 3.5k and my Facebook Group is 2.1k.

One day my counselor said to me “listen, here’s what I want you to do. When you’re starting to feel angry, just ask yourself ‘does this really matter?’. If it matters, go ahead get angry. If it doesn’t matter then why bother getting angry?”

I rarely get angry now because almost nothing actually matters enough to get angry, once you start to ask yourself the question.

Unfortunately, they couldn't maintain their momentum and had to get out of the business of making phones. (They still make their mobile OS, and you can buy a license for it and install it on some Sony phones).

At that time, Apple even had an ad-network for apps, and had got embroiled in the PRISM scandal (Apple, and other American corporate were selling their users data to US government agencies - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants... ).

Jolla was marketed with a focus on privacy.

To counter the bad publicity and the threat from a potential startup, they partly shut-down their ad-network ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/15/apple-to-shut-dow... ) and started marketing their new found love for privacy.

But from the get-go, it was never about user privacy - their goal was to ensure that the users data remained siloed within their eco-system, and their competitors couldn't get access to it. They also used the "privacy" angel as an excuse to further close down their devices, and make it incompatible with anything not approved by them.

(Note that it was due to their ad-network and because Apple wants access to users data that iPhones / iPad don't give you the ability to control what app can or cannot connect to the internet. This is still the case, except if you are on cellular data; if you are on Wifi though, an app cannot be blocked. While all the new labeling "transparency" feature and telling the user what data an app will gather from you is good, the feature that would really benefit every one better is the ability to block apps from connecting to the internet itself in the first place!).

Senior leadership at enterprises, in my experience, does very little collaboration. The CEO or the board make a choice to install a senior candidate in some senior position. That senior person drags behind them a retinue of trusted aides and associates, whom they busily install everywhere their reach allows. Most of their activity from that point on is trying to demonstrate that their team is the best, shitting on the remnants of whatever came before them, and forging non-aggression pacts with other people of their rank within the enterprise.

We often saw rolling waves of departures after a senior reshuffle, as departing senior execs took "their people" with them. Why stay if the next boss will consider your existence a threat to their ability to cultivate prominence and influence?

This is a deal-breaker always for these types of arrangements. I've walked away after months of negotiations when suppliers renege of this key part of any distribution agreement. You cannot be in a position to build up someone else's product or brand, and have them take it away from you at their own discretion, with zero compensation to you. You should not also be diluting your marketing efforts for said product if the supplier is handing out distribution rights like candy.

Get exclusive agreements always. You'll likely need to pay some sort of minimum guarantee, but you can negotiate a rolling start, and if the product is not present in the market, you have leverage to get terms in your favour (ie, exclusive to you, but no sales guarantee for the first 6 months, to "test out the market"). This should still be outlined in writing and signed by both parties.

1) The proper dose of melatonin for me is somewhere between 150ug and 400ug, but most melatonin sold comes in 3mg to 10mg pills. That's around 10x too much, taking that dosage of melatonin destroys my sleep schedule. It takes a lot of hunting to find the right dose. I tried once to crush up some melatonin and make my own pills with a precise dosage, but that ended up being a bit of a disaster.

2) Melatonin is regulated as a supplement in the US. Basically that means there is no regulation and even the active ingredient can vary wildly in a pill. When I visited a sleep specialist they mentioned to always buy the same brand, because "Each supplier has a different incorrect dosage, your best bet for dialing in on the correct dosage and timing is hoping that they're at least consistent among themselves".

But I do agree with you, regulating it as a prescription medication would do more harm than good for most people. I wish there were some middle ground that would both solve the above issues but still keep it easily available for people who rely on it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_disorder

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

* Line management: are you willing to be the man and promulgate the party line? You can be mostly apolitical in this role.

* Middle management: are you willing to be the pawn of a specific member or two of senior management and do their bidding (which probably isn’t fully aligned with the party line)?

* Senior management: do you know how to intelligently break the rules in order to stand out from the crowd of middle managers? This could be by developing a broad following within the lower levels of the company through self-promotion, through cultivating specific relationships with the CEO and/or board, or by (in rare cases) delivering on highly visible and truly remarkable results for the company.

Amazing breakthroughs have high risk, and make it highly likely you'll have a crisis when it doesn't happen.

And what I mean is that, even if you don't know what the answer is going to be at the end of your research, you must think about, or have an idea about, the format of what that amazing answer is going to be. Write the outline of your thesis and "ghost out" what the major charts will be. Write the intro sentences of each chapter -- what are they? (and I don't just mean the boring review of the field part, but your findings part)

You should know what major finding, plot, or table your research is going to output. What are the columns and rows of that table, or axes of that plot? How many data points are required? How many of them can already be guessed? Where is the surprise going to be? What is the conclusion going to be?

For most graduate research, the finding is not an amazing field-changing big bang. Few grad students are that fortunate. Or at least most of the bulk of the work will be of that sort. You should be able to predict what the answer is going to look like from past work, and the error bars.

Draw out the answer you're aiming for, now. If you can't even articuate what the answer will look like, you may be in for a bad time, so work on fixing that. It will also push you and your advisor to be specific about what the output of your thesis will be.

Your future self will thank you.

1. Prototype and benchmark each of your stack pieces before you pick a stack. It is far easier to fix architecture mistakes when you don’t have 10000 users expecting overnight customer service. If you are using new technology, find good open source products to see how they’ve structured their projects. Your architecture, designed for speed and experience, will be your key differentiator. Inherent speed at core task, design to user needs, and name choice are the 3 musketeers of a solid growth.

2. Prepare for abusers to attack your system from every direction, especially if you enable users to publish content under your domain. You will see bots looking for Wordpress installations, users trying to fill content with SEO links, users trying every hacking vector known to market. Collect known vectors and test for them and never refuse a legitimate bug bounty request.

3. There is an eternal debate about the trade off between building a quality product at start or opening early to get user feedback before you get too deep into features. There is merit to both choices as a solo founder. The moment you open the gates to users, your ability to make changes comes with very high friction. With time, trying new features becomes a tremendous luxury hidden under bug requests, roadmap, customer service replies, etc. Build your biggest riskiest assumptions first.

4. Testing is hard as a solo founder. Selenium is your friend. If you don’t spend time with them, your users will take that time in multiples after a mistake.

The best way to learn is to come up with a product you really want and build it in your own time. You can test launch in a weekend.

When I started launching consumer sites solo as an engineer, I went from a tight specialization to being unafraid to try any tech if it gives me an advantage in solving a problem. Once you’ve simulated enough problems and dealt with the consequences of your choices personally, you can play that 10 level chess game with the architecture of each new feature much faster.

The strategy worked -- the book was #1 in its category that day, which certainly led to increased sales over time. Probably didn't hurt that it's a superb book.

(Ryan North is also the author of the popular webcomic "Dinosaur Comic".)

In my instagram marketing last decade thats what we did.

While others were imagining that people "buy likes", or actually were dealing with bots, we were doing this for our clients.

Basically you get meme accounts to do a promotion of a profile that is currently private, and all the followers to a private profile get queued up, you can queue them up in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. when you unprivate the account, only like 100 of them get approved to follow you at once, so it adds up like a currency you can spend whenever you want. to mass approve you have to toggle private and unprivate over and over again, or approve the requests yourself or via API. either way you can only pull a list of 100 or so at a time, but you can keep them in the "requested" pool forever until convenient.

So you can grow an account with like a few hundred followers to a hundred thousand+ real followers very quickly.

But engagement is more important for the utility value of the account, and so you can also post an image with all the hashtags and location tags while the account is private, and let your new followers begin engaging with it. And then unprivate the account and even more new followers begin engaging with it, and then it becomes the TOP image in the hashtag.

In prior versions of instagram it would also be in the activity section in a large web of followers of followers.

For myself I have used one of the popular quickly and cheaply grown accounts to slide into the DMs of local women. In general on dating apps, women are funneling people to their instagram profile to ignore them. If you have a popular account its a night and day difference. I don't even attempt to match with them on the dating app, I just message them on IG straight away from the popular account (30K+ followers). Real dates and intimacy off of that, even in San Francisco. Skips the queue.

Once you get a fish on, you'll need a professional sales person to carry the deal forward. Meeting, review, reply, next meeting, follow-up, etc.

Cold prospecting from directories and trade-orgs is another channel. Call,call,call. Then call some more.

And keep pumping the newsletter, opt-in only, keep content fresh.

There's not really a "how it works" for this. If I had to tell you how it works I'd say: it works by you making friends inside a corporation and convincing them to buy your product. Did that help? :). Probably not, so here's a little more: you preferably start with a member of your founding team who is articulate, outgoing, amiable and enjoys meeting and talking with people. That person needs to know the product and competitive environment cold, and it helps if they are passionate believers in the value prop. They need to have an identified list of target companies. They need to start calling and emailing and working contacts to get meetings. Eventually, if you actually have a value prop, one of those meetings will result in a relationship with someone who is willing to champion the product internally.

You then work outward from that contact, meeting with their colleagues, eventually identifying decision makers who control actual budget that can be used to pay you for something. If you do all this skillfully then you may get them to commit to a purchase. They will then have to shepherd you through a potentially long series of internal policy and legal hurdles. You may need to get on a qualified vendor list, or meet certain business stability criteria. You will likely need approvals of the deal from different departments, and their legal team will review and try to negotiate any agreements you request them to sign. You can see why developing internal champions is absolutely critical. In every single successful deal we did, by the time we got to the second or third round of meetings our internal champions were doing most of the selling.

The last thing I'll say is that it can be powerfully tempting to think you can purchase success at this by hiring the right magic person who can work their little black book and make sales happen. I tend to doubt it, and it definitely never worked for us. A founding sales person can make this happen. That's the person I'm talking about above. But just bringing in a hired gun is unlikely to result in success imo. I think you need to believe in your own thing enough, and be good enough at talking about it, that you can land your first few deals. Then when you do bring aboard professional sales people you'll have some actual idea of why people buy from you and how to systematize the approach. Good luck with it!

- Always go for prestige over purpose. Have a choice between a shiny project with very little actual impact to the company and a behind the scenes project that will actually make lives better for employees and customers? Go for the shiny project. It will look better on your resume and to executive teams, and will get you promoted faster.

- Learn the art of looking busy and practice it often. If you look busy all the time, people will assume you're productive and also not give you a bunch of extra work for no extra compensation.

- Play politics. A lot. Especially throwing other people under the bus. The key is to align your politics with the right power players in your org. You'll get promoted faster, get more bonuses, and be able to get away with more things in general.

- Get the scoop on what's actually going on at executive levels by making friends with the office managers/personal assistants. You'll get an early notification of problems coming up, people to avoid, opportunities to take advantage of, etc.

- Loyalty is for chumps. Play the game for yourself. If you get a better offer somewhere else, take it. If your boss is an asshole or putting a glass ceiling over you, leave. If you need time off, take it. If your team isn't being effective, throw them under the bus and move on.

Before voting or commenting please remember this HN guideline:

>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith

...and for what it's worth, I absolutely wouldn't want to work with the person I'm describing below.

1. Lie strategically.

When looking for a job/project, lie about what you know, what you've done, who you know, what you can do for the company, etc.

Many times you are never actually called on to prove these things.

If you are sure you'll be called on to prove them, still lie, but study them as much as possible beforehand.

2. Do what matters for the people the matters.

Figure out what metrics count. Ignore or give away everything else.

Who controls your next promotion? Who could potentially refer you to your next job?

These are the people you need to please before anyone else. If you have time to please people who won't advance your career, don't. Look for ways to improve your relations with those who matter -- or ask them to introduce you to others like them.

3. Extract value from everything you do.

Look at every opportunity you would normally pass on and figure out how you can use it to your advance. Maybe you can refer someone, maybe you can take it on and subcontract it out.

Never pass up any opportunity without first asking how you can extract value from it.

4. Everything is negotiable.

Your severance package? Negotiable. Your working space? Negotiable.

Figure out what matters to the people who you interact with and use those levers to push for your desires.

The threat of a lawsuit, or an actual lawsuit, can be used in negotiation, even if the lawsuit would be unfounded.

5. Take as much data with you as you can.

When employed, you have access to an incredible amount of valuable data, resources, and tools. Take full advance of these while employed, but also remember that you will move on from your position at some point.

Back up whatever you can without being noticed. Who knows what can come in handy in the future.

---

Caveats:

Most of this is unethical. Some of it is illegal.

Understand your risk tolerance. Understand your environment.

Doing any of these can, and likely will, burn bridges. Many industries are tightly knit. People talk. Be smart.

- Actual domain expertise (a summer internship or talking to a few people doesn't count)

- A solid grasp on business fundamentals and managing teams effectively

- A strong network of people who serve as potential employees, partners, customers, mentors, etc. due to being outgoing and generally spending time on developing relationships

- An uncanny ability to recognize niche business problems that are underserved by existing options

- A willingness to laugh at concepts like "work-life balance", "happy marriage", and "spend more time with your kids"

- The ability to build a strong team from nothing and keep it strong by firing people who suck and rewarding people who are good

- Recognition of what you are and are not good at, and then finding good people to do the latter for you

- The ability to sell things effectively (no, if you build it they probably won't just come)

I'm sure others on HN have their own lists.

Problems can be put into three buckets: 1) Can be solved by things 100% under your control. 2) Can be solved only by influencing others to participate, 3) Things that are part of the environment and can really only be mitigated.

Area 1, control, is the realm of the first line manager. The FLM has the people, the budget, the FLM's team has the know-how, so execute well and the problem is solved.

Area 2, influence, is the realm of the middle manager, and also sales and marketing. You need to borrow resources from somebody else, argue for corporate re-allocation of resources, convince a sales prospect to become a customer, etc.

Area 3, environment, is the realm of the executive. You have no control and no influence, unless you can find some levers and then delegate. But some things will not have obvious levers. Example: It rains. No body will stop the rain. But everyone can fix the holes in their roof. Likewise, companies have competitors and an economic environment in which they operate. Predict and make plans.

When I was at Intel, one of the great things that senior Mids got to participate in was "red teaming" as competitors. Given all that Intel knew about a competitor, a team would be give a data dump and a short number of weeks to come up with a strategic plan for that competitor to Eat Intel's Lunch. Then they presented to Intel executive staff. From what I heard, it was an excellent experience all around and very valuable to the company. (Before you ask, no.... I was not ever in any danger of participating....)

Hiring:

- Writing job specs.

- Dealing with recruiters

- Reading CVs/résumés

- Interviews

- Onboarding

- Outreach

- Who do you need to hire next quarter to avoid capacity problems?

People:

- How do you level up your developers? What new responsibilities can you delegate to them so that they can grow without swamping them? Are you available enough to them so you can help them take these new tasks on?

- Evaluating training courses / conferences etc.

- Are there any personal or interpersonal problems that need sorting?

- What can you do to help your team gel better and feel like they are part of a team?

- Where are your team members' careers heading and how can you help them get there?

- Your team has grown too large to manage effectively by yourself. How do you split things up?

Process:

- What is everybody working on? What will everybody work on next?

- What are people blocked on? How do you unblock them? What is likely to block them next?

- Can you do things in a better way? How?

- You've got a lot of bugs in the backlog. Is there a root cause? Are there any patterns?

- You aren't performing as well as you thought you were. Where is the time being spent? What's the cause? Are the estimates wrong or the performance?

- Some people want to shift their hours or work remotely. Can you accommodate this? Do you have to adjust process and if so, how?

Line management:

- Approving invoices

- Approving holidays

- One on ones

- Salary review

- Getting people back to work after sickness / parental leave / sabbaticals

- Disciplinaries / performance problems

- Firing / redundancies

- Exit interviews

Planning:

- How well is your team performing? How do you measure this and how do you improve?

- Do you have enough capacity?

- If not, which features do you bump?

- Are there any bottlenecks in the pipeline?

- What are you telling the shareholders you're delivering next quarter?

Product:

- Does marketing know what you are building next? What information do they need from you to sell it?

- Do CS know how to support your customers with the new features?

- Feedback from the rest of the business about the product and how the tech team works.

- Are the specs precise, correct, complete, and achievable?

- Features have been requested. Are they technically feasible? What's the general size of it and what quarter can we deliver it by?

- A big customer has a major problem with your product. It's not your fault, but it has a disproportionate affect on the customer. How do you prioritise solving this problem?

External:

- A shareholder owns a business with a related product that they want integrated ASAP. How do you deal with that pressure without disrupting your plan?

- One of your suppliers has a data breach that has leaked your data. How do you deal with that? Have you defined processes for reporting security issues?

- A supplier is failing to perform adequately. Can it be fixed? How do you move away? How soon? Where does the work fit into the schedule?

- A supplier has changed their pricing structure. Do you have to move? How soon? Where does the work fit into the schedule?

- New legislation has been passed and you have to make changes to your product. What are the requirements?

- A complaint has been made about the accessibility of your product. Does it have merit? What's the impact of fixing it, and how urgent is it?

- A big prospective customer is on the verge of signing, but they must have one feature that you weren't planning on building until next year. How do you rearrange things to get the customer with minimum impact?

- A service you use is changing their API. What's the risk of staying on the deprecated version until it can be planned in?

- Stop using Google CDNs

- Stop using Google fonts

- Don't put Google Analytics in the header (or don't use it) otherwise will block/delay the browser load the website.

Most of the websites just timeout because of those 3 things and make the website imposible to navigate.

If you host your website in a normal VPS, without using Google services you will have a quite nice chance that the website loads pretty fast there in China.

edit: formatting

Radio Yerevan was asked: "Is it true that there is freedom of speech in the Soviet Union the same as there is the USA?"

Radio Yerevan answered: "In principle, yes. In the USA, you can stand in front of the Washington Monument in Washington, DC, and yell, ´Down with Reagan!´, and you will not be punished. In the Soviet Union, you can stand in the Red Square in Moscow and yell, ´Down with Reagan!´, and you will not be punished.

And

Q: What is the difference between the Constitutions of the USA and USSR? Both guarantee freedom of speech.

A: Yes, and the US Constitution also guarantees freedom after speech.

Then I realized your retinas are more like a specialized tongue covered with lightbuds, and my sense of vision changed dramatically. I suddenly had a sense of blindness, that I could see only as far as the tips of the rods and cones in my eye, and everything beyond that was just lining up the photons so they made sense when they arrived.

I was coming downstairs from Admiral "Bull" Halsey's office. I would have to pass right by Admiral Nimitz. Was he waiting for me? Would be renege on the all-important Special Film Coverage directive I had written for him, and he had signed? Had MacArthur nixed the order to integrate all combat photography? Had the Air Force? The Marines?

I hesitated, then saluted, and walked by him.

"Oh, Capra! Can you spare a moment?"

I went limp. "Of course, Admiral."

Behind his desk, his back to me he faced a window that looked out over our sunken warships. "Sit down, please," he said, huskily. "I apologize for calling you in here. It"s just this --this --goddam sonofabitch of a war!". His hands clasped and unclasped behind him as he rocked slowly back and forth on his heels. Then, out of the depths of an overwhelming hurt, he cried out: "They cheered me... Three thousand of them... Eighteen-year-olds... Legs gone, faces gone... They cheered me... I sent them there .... They cheered me....".

Then he turned, sat heavily on his chair, and with tears streaming down his face, he beat the table with both fists: "GODDAM SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! GODDAM SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! What am I going to write to their parents? What can anybody write to their parents?..." He grabbed his wet face in both his hands. He was sobbing now. A father weeping for all the sons in the world. "Eighteen-year-olds... kids... boys... three thousand of them... They cheered me... I sent them there... they cheered me... GODDAM SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! goddam sonofa--" His handkerchief was out now. Not once had he looked at me, directly.

I sat as if transfixed. Tears had started down my cheeks. The white-thatched adminral blew his nose, composed himself, then looking at me with a shy little smile, he said pleasantly: "Thank you, Capra, Thank you."

He had wanted to share his great pain with another human being -- someone that was not Navy. I rose to my feet, try to mumble something. I couldn't. So I smiled back and walked out. I had witnessed something rare. Something awesome -- the inside of a tormented human soul.

“In order to do business in China, non-Chinese companies must Partner with a Chinese company.”

These days, what you’ve asserted here, is only true in a very limited set of circumstances.

For example, one of my companies is an engineering/supply chain consulting firm and the other is a fully licensed CM factory. With our factory, I have the China government paying me VAT tax rebates on export. I don’t have a Chinese partner, for either of these companies.

That said, it is very difficult to get setup here, without a Chinese partner. It is a difficult convoluted process. And, the locals have no incentive to see a foreigner succeed.

But if Americans want to own a private factory here, and more fully control their own IP and what they allow Chinese nationals to see. From my view as an American that owns a factory in China. They can do it!

Get on a plane, come over here, stay a couple years getting it done, and voila, you own your own factory in China, without a Chinese partner.