How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business

http://czstrong.com/how-5-years-of-reading-hacker-news-enabled-me-to-build-the-website-for-my-business/

by czstrong • 14 years ago

64 27 14 years ago

desigooner• 14 years ago

If costs are burning a hole in your pocket, I'd suggest you revisit your WP hosting solution. I think one of the shared hosting providers would suit your needs just fine if you enable caching on your site.

byoung2• 14 years ago

True...$29/month for 25,000 visits/month is pretty pricy. You could get the same performance from a $6/month shared hosting plan with a WordPress caching plugin and an Amazon CloudFront distribution.

powertower• 14 years ago

If you stopped reading HN, you could have done it in about 24 hours.

smspence• 14 years ago

I love stories like this, because it shows what can be accomplished when you focus on something and just get shit done.

He didn't mess around, he just said "I want to build a website", so he started building a website. When he came across a problem, he searched for a solution until it worked. Sounds simple, but there are so many people who won't/can't do this.

Instead of hemming and hawing, and posting on forums asking "what is the best programming language to start with", or "is WordPress the best blah blah blah", or "what is the best tool for this", and pulling his hair out while people argue over Vim vs. Emacs, Ruby vs. Python, etc. He just picked some tools and got shit done. Brilliant. Keep up the good work!!!

Reminds me of what Sam Soffes said on his blog here: http://soff.es/how-to-learn

systemtrigger• 14 years ago

Congrats on launching. CPUStorage seems a smart startup idea. Compelling web site, thoughtful writeup, good luck to you. I lived in Lincoln Park after college, by DePaul, and concur with your premise that the Chicago market is rich enough to warrant such a business. Flyers in dorms, flyers at el stations, flyers everywhere. Facebook page, viral liking. School newspapers might help distribute your story. Stay tenacious.

polshaw• 14 years ago

The site looks very good, but $122 monthly costs for getting your site to 'a few hundred' visitors (mostly friends) is crazy.

Of course, the site works and looks good (all that really matters to the end users), if you are getting a large income (and you got to that point quicker because of this outlay) then it may not be worth it to care, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Personally I'm more interested in how you got a tech consultant position at deloitte (which i'm guessing is quite well paid?) given your lack of technical skills.. or, in what area are you skilled relating to this?

Also 'cpuStorage'.. i can't not think about a processor.

tg3• 14 years ago

The tech consultant position is more of a "business technology" consultant, which really means consulting on the business side of giant enterprise software installs, like Oracle. Deep technical skills are helpful, but not really necessary.

Not to mention the technical skills needed to get a website up and running are totally different than those required to build an enterprise software solution.

gregwong410• 14 years ago

Compelling read to get beginners to actually take action. I'm in somewhat of the same situation and found it highly relatable.

Agreed on the previous comment, cpuStorage makes me think of a processor.

dinkumthinkum2• 14 years ago

I recommend reading old school text files than this method though. :)

bio4m• 14 years ago

I'd suggest the next step is looking into setting it up on your own host; say an AWS micro instance. Will cut your costs considerably, since an Micro instance runs about $15 a month + bandwidth. Theres plenty of guides available on how to set up and secure your own web host. Either way, all the best with your endeavour, hope it works out!

AlexMuir3• 14 years ago

I learnt to code when I set up almost exactly the same business ten years ago - http://www.thebigspace.co.uk

I built it in PHP and MySQL and there was no MVC for me. It was a mess. It's been completely rewritten at least three times, and is due another rewrite.

For about the first five of those years, the hosting cost £10 per year, and £2.50 for the domain name. I believe the site now uses a small part of a Linode $20/month VPS.

It's a fun business, but virtually impossible to scale. Good luck.

keithpeter3• 14 years ago

Neato

How do the students estimate the number of items?

Back when I was a student (we used to chase geese to get feathers to make pens in those days) my most difficult to manage possessions were books. Several hundred of them.

AlexMuir3• 14 years ago

They just order what they reckon and are usually 10-15% under what they thought. We charged for what we actually stored so it worked out fine.

Books and clothes are now the core of the business. When we started people all had hifis, 14" TVs, VCRs/DVD players, desktop computers, CRT monitors, boxes of CDs and DVDs - all that has gone now. And books will probably be largely gone in five years.

Concours• 14 years ago

As for the form, you should take a look at http://www.jotform.com , (not affiliate with them, just a happy customer) , they are less expensive and have a 50 % yearly discount during this period, that could be a place to start to bring your spending down

IsaacL• 14 years ago

I do think Wordpress, big hairy pile of PHP that it is, is actually a much better way to learn to code than CodeAcademy or equivalent. In fact, it's because working with WP involves so much hacking and kludges that it's such a good way to learn.

CodeAcademy seems to follow the Dijkstra school of CS teaching... start people off with the fundamental principles. Sounds like the logical way to learn, but maybe it's not the most effective.

There seems to be a gulf between "I know how for loops and functions work" and "I know how to use HTML, CSS, PHP and an FTP account to get a website working". People also complain that CodeAcademy spoonfeeds you too much - those of us who had to claw our coding knowledge out of shitty w3schools and tizag tutorials might actually have been more fortunate.

That's why I like Wordpress, or similar platforms. I've known a few people who accidentally taught themselves to code this way: they install Wordpress, then install a theme, then decide they want to tweak the theme and end up accidentally learning HTML and CSS. Then they start installing plugins, decide they want to tweak the plugins and accidentally learn Javascript and PHP.

nicholas73• 14 years ago

I don't think the two ways are mutually exclusive... in fact I'd say both are needed. I started out trying to throw up a quick website in Wordpress and Drupal, and found out I couldn't set it up the way I liked. So I taught myself to code with resources including CodeAcademy. Now I can build a site pretty much from scratch, hosted on my own server or GAE.

Without my struggles with CMS or frameworks, I wouldn't have known what to code. But without the likes of Udacity and CA, I wouldn't have known how to code it. But, I can now write a functioning webapp after half a year, while working full time. I doubt that would have happened with just books/tutorials or even a university course.

For what it is, these are great learning tools. I can't fault them for not being designed to make you into a full stack developer, yet.

Though I still couldn't have done it without StackOverflow :)

ahulak• 14 years ago

I could not agree with you more.

I think it is absolutely crucial that you have a real world project to work on - something that makes you actually write some code and solve some problems in a production environment. That being said, supplemental education that focuses on fundamentals can drastically speed up the learning process.

It's almost like practicing a sport. There are drills you need to run in order to improve specific skills, but without taking those skills and applying them in a real game situation you never actually connect all the dots that lead to self improvement. On the flip side, its not enough to just play games - sometimes it helps to go the batting cages and practice on a specific skill set. I treat my learning the same way.

true_religion• 14 years ago

The first money I made in programming was hacking at hairy piece of PHP called the Coppermine gallery back in '06.

Later, reading software design books made sense. I knew why you shouldn't do X or Y, because if you neglected using those techniques you'd end up being Coppermine---powerful, well loved by some, but barely maintainable and extendible only through immense effort and careful reading.

I like to think that I worked my way up the open source software ladder, learning techniques from each piece of software till I was able to make my own from scratch.

dinkumthinkum2• 14 years ago

I don't personally think this is a great way to learn programming at all. Sure you might eventual play around with a little Javascript and some PHP but it's at such a surface and it's a long slog. Figuring out how to signup for an FTP account is actually much simpler than learn fundamental programming concepts and languages. I mean I guess it depends on what your goals are but it's just a such strange way to me, I'd have a hard time calling this programming, to just be honest about it.

jessaustin• 14 years ago

There are definitely cheaper ways to get SSL. The simplest might be a CloudFlare Pro account, since you won't have to migrate to a different host. (It wasn't clear how much of the $99 WPE charge was hosting and how much was an SSL surcharge. It's my impression that these surcharges vary quite a bit.)

xordon• 14 years ago

I read the website several times and one question that I just never found an answer to is, "Where is this service available?"

I am not from the US so one of the first things I need to know is, can I actually use this?

habosa• 14 years ago

First of all, the site looks great.

Second of all, your home page says "Instragram" instead of "Instagram". Sorry to be _that guy_ but I figured you'd like to know.

Ecio78• 14 years ago

also it is Patrick McKenzie not McKennie (aka patio11) :)

lazyjones• 14 years ago

This (HN post) is a good marketing attempt, but perhaps the best way to grow your business is to add some sort of referral bonus (refer a friend and get $10 discount). Word-of-mouth is powerful, more powerful than posting on HN. ;-)

How 5 years of reading HN enabled me to build the website for my business

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