JustTim

That was fun

I liked the post.

Yahoo! Pipes a strong argument for building your own tool/buying a paid product, in that if one relies too heavily on a service and it went away, then that [business] process went away as well. The demise of Pipes! caused us a bit of anxiety and made us hustle to find other solutions in a compressed time frame.

The rather quick demise of Yahoo! Groups was also disruptive. Heck, even Hacker News could have worked as a Yahoo! Group. Fortunately, it is not. When Groups went away, so did a lot of discussion groups and even when those groups moved, they lost many members. Groups.io is a nice alternative, but there too much of their platform is free.

There is always a danger when you build critical things on someone else's land, particularly if they allow you on their property for free. Even if they charge you but are not profitable, there is a risk of waking up to read that the service is closing.

We use Zapier in our small business, but work to build out tools for those Zaps! that become mission critical.

August 2014 I was taking suitcases out of a vehicle and a few days later found myself in so much pain that I threw up while trying to get out of bed. Went the physical therapy and steroid route. Not very much results. To the point that three months later I bent down to pick up a piece of paper and could not get up. After 45 minutes of laying on the floor swearing in pain my daughter called 911 and I took the first ambulance ride of my life. I walk 5 miles a day, but for two months could not walk from my bedroom to the kitchen.

I have collapsed disk at L2/L3 and to a slightly lesser extent L4. Four doctors said surgery was the only answer. I went to that many trying to find a different answer as I had heard so many stories of failed back operations. Plus a few years ago a 25 year old kid that worked for me went in for “minor” back surgery. He left St Francis Hospital in a hearse. They cut a blood vessel, did not realize it and he internally bleed to death.

Instead of surgery I went with steroid injections in my back and a chiropractor. Both helped somewhat. The chiropractor suggested I try Yoga. Weird thing for a socially conservative midwestern kid (who is now 60), but at that point I’d try anything.

Yoga saved me. I started with restorative and now do mixed level. I can now keep up with many of the guys 20 plus years younger than me. A friend had a bad back since a car accident a decade ago. I convinced him to try Yoga and he has had similar positive results.

Is my back perfect now? No, but probably close to what it was before I realized it was damaged

You should talk to your doc about Yoga.

"I think the consensus in the grown-up business world is 'fire immediately for cause.'" Concurring that this is the correct answer.

I make this statement from the perspective of having employees since 1979 in multiple concurrent businesses. If they have no respect at the beginning they will have less respect next week.

You must choose between your business and the new guy. In a year, you will have one or neither.

Comcast is on my list today for a different reason. We have Comcast Business Class service at one of our FL locations.

Tuesday we could not access VNC nor our remote database services from that location. All port 80 traffic was fine. I had one of the staff call, wait on hold for an hours.

Just as I suspected Comcast had implemented port blocking on a high priced business account. It took the guy a second to release it. It put our company down for two to three hours.

Also the speed of Comcast service drops to 15-20% of advertised from 2:30 to 5 PM when kids arrive home from school.

Once the contract is up we are moving the service to someone who understands "business class"

Live simple, create the life you want, then live the life you created.

I spent a couple of years eating Kraft macaroni and cheese (my generation's ramen noodles) five days a week, driving a $200 car (country boy - no public transportation) and worked 12 hours a day, six days a week to get my business off the ground. For much of those two years I worked nights to buy the little we had. I had two kids at the time I quit my paycheck. I gave them more than I gave myself.

In 1981 I received the last paycheck that was signed by anyone other than myself. A year later I was living fairly comfortably. I put my kids through college with no student loans. Today I live on the ocean, have any car I want, never worry about money, travel where and when I want.

You can work to get a large paycheck, I'm sure. But in exchange for that paycheck someone else owns your life.

I am by no means smarter than most, I have no real education, no one gave me financial support in the beginning, I was just doggedly persistent in pursuing my vision.

Hangout with people who are smarter, more successful and more diligent than you. You want to be the dumb kid in the company of great rather than the top of a group of underachievers. Meetups or trade organizations are a great start. But also seek out the people in your industry that you admire the most, tell them your interest and offer to buy them lunch to hear their story.

Personally I feel that this generation's pivoting is often just giving up too soon. Decide what you want to do and then move mountains with a teaspoon if that is what it takes to make it happen. Others will disagree and they are just as right.

But if you truly want to do something, quit reading Hacker News and get on with doing the job at hand. If for no other reason than HN exposes you to a wealth of choices, which makes it harder to focus on one. Once you succeed come back and read the cool new stuff that is out there.

Best of luck.

Is productx.com a parked name or will you be infringing on someone's copyright/trademark? If it is the former and you think you have a home run, buy the domain. If it is the latter you need a new name.

One question: Do you think HN is the best forum to seek the answer as this is mostly a tech oriented site?

Not that I have a better suggestion where to post the question.

I too focus on physical businesses. I read HN for ideas to make those businesses more effective through applying technology, but like you would love to find a similar site aimed more at physical businesses.

I feel every physical business can outperform their counter parts through use of innovative technology.

For example, recently one of our delivery trucks was misbehaving. I took it to this mechanic shop, a really old school type place, with just the shop owner and his two helpers. Pretty much as low tech as you can get.

The shop owner, who was in his seventies, was trying to diagnose the problem. It was something he had never seen before and the symptoms were not listed in any of the truck manufacturer's service bulletins that he had online access to. He logs into an online forum type site where he finds other mechanics that had the same problem with this particular model and reported their solution. His keyboard was so covered in grease that you could barely make out the letters. An hour and twenty minutes later the truck is back in service.

I asked him about the site. As part of the service he is required to report back what worked for him. He says 'I spend $100 a month for it, but it is worth ten times that.'

"First, welcome to HackerNews. ;)"

Actually been a HackerNews reader/lurker for a while, but never felt compelled to post any comments until reading your post on SoFL entrepreneur groups.

We moved one business (http://EventDecoratingAcademy.com) to Miami about two years ago. We love Miami. It is a much more vibrant community than Milwaukee, where we also have businesses. I am very pro SoFL. Being in an environment like Miami helps one see possibilities you otherwise would not have seen. Some of the fun art work my wife does is at http://GotLatex.com. This work is directly a result from being in Miami.

Our current businesses have physical presence, so we are not a tech folks per se. However every business that wishes to succeed today must have a tech undercurrent/backbone. The main reason I follow HackerNews is to find new ideas for our brick and mortar type business.

I also have an interest in tech since back in the late seventies/ early eighties when I programed metal working machine tools using a teletype to make a paper punch tape to run the program. We also wrote inventory databases using dBase on CP/M machines with 8" 100k floppy drives... yes, back then a whole business could reside on 100k of data. No fancy GUI, turn the machine on a single period was displayed on a monochrome screen.

Tim

"- I regularly brainstorm with others in the SoFL entrepreneurial and tech circles as we look for ways to grow our community and attract talent to our market."

Tell us more...

Thanks Tim - an entrepreneur/small biz owner who spend half his time in SoFL