amyhoy

I can’t reply to your nth nested comment so I’ll do it here.

You did call me racist, just like you did today. That’s how I knew EXACTLY which tweet it was 8 years later. Tweets can be deleted. I certainly don’t remember YOU as a person, you’re nobody to me.

You are being dishonest. You consistently saying things about me that are untrue. There was no racist tweet, I didn’t block Star — just you — and I didn’t flag your posts, among other lies.

You are using loaded questions and statements to try to assassinate my character.

You’re claiming I abuse people by blocking them.

You think you’re entitled to my tweets and attention. You fantasize we have some sort of relationships where I owe you conversation.

You’re obsessed with something that happened nearly a decade ago.

Bottom line: You need to stop talking about me and to me. I told you stop already and I’m telling you again: Stop.

Claiming I refused to “explicitly reject racism” “eight years ago” is a loaded statement. You might as well accuse me of having refused to deny I was beating me wife. That would also be true. And it would also be dishonest and manipulative.

I don’t have any ability to flag comments.

You need to stop inventing fantasies about me and claiming they’re true.

EDIT: and I switched accounts bc I forgot I made a newer one with my actual name bc I never log in here.

So you think you were trying to teach me with socratic dialogue by calling me racist? rather than asking, oh I don’t know, “what kind of goods”?

You made your decision — you called me racist then and now — and now you’re dishonestly trying to pretend it was more complicated and actually for my own good, really, when you think about it.

It’s super transparent tho so I appreciate all your replies that show just how twisted you’ve got it

Motivated reasoning.

“She blocked me therefore I must be right!”

Some people have since reached out to me and told me:

1. The CEO randomly picks on women on twitter he thinks subtweeted him and writes their bosses

2. The same lock-out mechanism — plus the queue for deletion — happens if eg your credit card expires or has an issue or sometimes randomly

How is it obnoxious to expect to be able to log in and add a payment plan yourself? Literally every other Saas that serves business customers does that. None glibly say “oh yeah and your data’s queued for deletion, but you can ASK to be let in to add a payment plan”

That is beyond unprofessional

You can email me at team@stackingthebricks.com

To anyone else reading: that’s a shared inbox, behave.

I really appreciate you saying that. Don’t worry about it, it’s not causing me any distress and I’m too sick to do anything productive right now anyway.

But this place is a cesspit. This is actually a better experience than I would’ve expected from years before, and it’s still terrible. Just something to take away from the experience.

“mass produced hand made artisan goods” is not a thing. You’re inventing things and putting words in my mouth, just like you did originally, which is why you’re blocked. No, you can’t put words in someone’s mouth and say “you blocked me so it’s true” either.

Dude are you mad I deprived you of my tweets for 8 years, or are you mad I’m supposedly a racist? You can’t have it both ways. This is weird. You should stop.

This is a really fun idea. Obviously when you do real user tests, they’re too professional to curse but finding and fixing UI friction by curses per minute is very appealing!

Yes she also willfully misread “mass produced goods” and asked me why I didn’t think Chinese artisans should use etsy for their handmade goods, a classic loaded question and a position I have never taken.

The mass produced goods — that didn’t belong on Etsy — were literally from China. Calling something Chinese doesn’t make it racist.

Here’s the tweet you claim is racist — I know bc it’s the only time anyone has called me racist. I complained that Etsy w searches were dominated by mass produced goods from China. Not a slur on Chinese craft or people, but dismay at the amount of AliExpress-type items.

https://twitter.com/amyhoy/status/407618941742510081?s=21

Over a decade, I went from doing grunt work freelancing — data entry, HTML conversion, etc — to charging about $500 an hour as a true consultant.

Freelancers do what they're told. Consultants advise the client on what they should do.

When you start out, it's natural to think you're Doing A Thing (whatever skill you have & want to charge for) rather than Running A Business. I started out thinking "I'm here to make web pages and get paid for it!" and that made it very easy for people to take advantage of me. I would do exactly what the client asked for and then they would complain about it.

By the end of my consulting career, VPs would come to me with their ideas and I'd feel free to say "I'd love to work with you, but that idea won't fly. Here's what you SHOULD do." And they would go with it!

I realized that I could have positioned myself as the expert much earlier on in my career, and saved myself a lot of stress of trying to do every little thing the client asked, no matter how foolish.

The business mindset also means service agreements with initial deposits, work schedule with intermediate payments, kill fees and more.

I now run a product biz — the star being a time tracking SaaS for freelancers http://nokotime.com

Turning my catch-as-catch-can freelance business into a real consultancy is what made me able to charge more, work fewer hours, and have less stressful projects (bc I was the actual boss rather than a tool to be used by the client) and build the SaaS on the side.

Someone else mentioned Freelancember. Guess who made it? Me! Based on all my mistakes and years coaching others to level up like I did. http://freelancember.com

I highly recommend the book The Secrets of Consulting, which is like "the inner game" rather than explicit stuff like contracts, taxes, etc which are covered elsewhere.

seminar -> mailing list (aka newsletter, aka free)

SEO bait -> a thing I wrote on my blog with the words "Apple Watch" in it like a million other pieces, there is literally zero chance of SEO doing a damn thing which, if you work in SEO, you know

the barest whiff of commercial activity sending a person "bitching" to a comment box -> 6 years in business, I still don't understand this

1. I linked to hundreds of people saying exactly that thing, plus it's all over Twitter, the op-ed-osphere, in-person conversations, etc.

2. I argued very clearly: Apple Watch is not a watch. It occupies a similar spot on the wrist and it has a time keeping app. That's where the similarities actually end, digital crown or no.

3. My point was never that "People buy Ferraris because they've been in business forever." That's irrelevant. My point is: There are plenty of very wealthy people who don't fret about $10k, or that it might be a "waste," because they're wealthy enough it doesn't matter. F Scott Fitzgerald and all that.

4. I think it's funny that you don't believe in the idea of "track records." Which invalidates skill, experience, customer loyalty, brand recognition, platform lock-in… all the things that drive sales. Apple products are not randomly generated in a vacuum.

5. Nope, it's not about conspicuous consumption. Never claimed it was. It only came up in my quoting that article about the "basic bitch" Birkin. Very wealthy people who are inclined to drop $10k on a whim could buy something much rarer and more impressive than a mass-produced electronic device. Which isn't to say there aren't stratified status layers inside the Watch editions/brands.

6. I never claimed "People will buy Apple Watch as a causal outcome of plane tickets." You missed the entire point of the article.

7. You probably should brush up on the definition of "straw man argument," since you made several. I didn't make any; straw man requires you to set up a false premise in order to knock it down. I made an argument by analogy.

8. You didn't cite any sources for your claims, or even quote the parts of my essay you were refuting, but you used a lot of Classic Style so it sounds impressive.

You call it the "shitty friend" thread is pretty inflammatory considering, again, that was the OP's own words (not mine). I turned on showdead and my dead comment that you're referring to sure looks reasoned and measured to me:

I never said anyone specific is self-centered. I said:

How self-centered do you have to be to not even wish a friend with obvious health problems "good luck" or "feel better"?

That's a rhetorical question.

Then, in the dead comment, I wrote:

Being a bad friend in this way doesn't make you a bad person…

But it does make it seem kinda iffy to write a blog post about it, even include screenshots of the conversation, and not (apparently?) be socially aware enough to realize that the deceased man was nearly begging his friend to express some interest and concern. And so many of the commenters, from my perspective, were not picking up on anything the OP did not explicitly lay out in the essay itself, which is to say: his friend was telegraphing his problems in every possible way, and the OP ignored it. People seem to be reading it and thinking, "Oh, just one of those things." But it's only one of those things if you don't think of, or care for, others.

Again, I didn't personally attack alexcap. You are quoting it out of context.

Real inflammatory stuff. If this is what I got hellbanned for, it really makes me wonder about the actual, deliberate, specific, personal cruelty that goes by on a regular basis without banning.

Meanwhile the other dead comment… the one that's actually newest, not the one you claimed above was the newest… is about my bootstrapping conference and upcoming site:

Oh, good question. I can see why you'd think that. Nope, BB will be more like HN, but specifically for bootstrappers and related topics only. IOW: public-facing, free to use. (Although I think we're going to do a MeFi-style $5 or $10 join fee, to encourage good citizenship.) It's not going to be a product. I'm not going to run it unilaterally, either. It's for the community.

That is the last thing I posted before being hellbanned.

Neither of your things in "quotes" are things that I said. The "shitty friend" was alexcap's own words. The phrase "think of, or care for, others" didn't show up in my comment at all.

I didn't call him a shitty friend. He wrote, "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend" after his explanation of the events — which I quoted, in quotes, very clearly a direct quote from his own words — and I wrote "Yes" to answer the question. 95% of my comment was advice for people on what to do in the situation that the friend is reaching out to them as that friend did, who got ignored and later died and that person didn't know for years.

If you write an essay about something you did that you think was bad, and post it to Medium, and post it to HN, and then say "You probably think I did something bad," is it reaaaally so controversial to comment with "Yes, I agree, I think you did something bad"?

Also, if you thought that was my last comment, maybe you don't see my actual last exchange? It was about my bootstrapping conference and upcoming web site. Perhaps it's truly hell banned as in not visible? It was this:

http://skitch-replacement.s3.amazonaws.com/ahoyhere_s_commen...

Oooh, is being saucy or mildly disagreeable not allowed either? I get the hint.

Hi there.

Why not tell me why I was hellbanned then?

Here's my comment history. Such bullying, so horrible, wow: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ahoyhere

The only conclusion is that HN hellbans dissent. I'm about as far from a troll as you can get.

It's your platform; do what you want. But don't lie about it.

He's not belittling it, he's (politely and patio11-ly) saying: "Stop putting this huge space between me and you because it isn't there, and you're short-selling yourself by pretending it is."

Our business makes several times what patio11's does and we are not a runaway success, either, not by a long shot.

If you do not actually attempt to make a business — by selling something people need and already are willing to pay good money for — then yes, you don't tend to make any money. Just stabbing out in the dark with "good ideas" doesn't work.

I have helped my students gross more than $2 million in revenue from "lifestyle businesses." It is absolutely achievable and not rare.

This:

The reality is that a side project making $10K a month is even less likely than a multi million dollar acquisition of a venture funded startup.

…is factually wrong. Multi-million acquisitions are rarer than being struck by lightning, some 400-500 a year. There are at least an order of magnitude times new bootstrappers every year making well over $10k a month than there are acquisitions.

Startup acquisitions seem more common because they get talked about. Your basic availability heuristic (aka cognitive error) at work.

"The median outcome is not that you'll get 0.01% of a niche market, it's that you'll get 0%"

There are so many assumptions in here that it's useful to unpack. What makes you think you need to aim for 0.01% of a niche? Why do you think you need a niche? What's a niche mean to you?

It's the unspoken "knowledge" about "how to do it" that holds people back. Everybody "knows" you have to "find a niche." Meanwhile there are millions of painful business problems all around you that get ignored in favor of looking for some weird little niche market.

Take a peek at http://groupbuzz.com , developed by one of my students for just that problem. Its best use case is for paid communities of one kind or another.

What Dan said. Passion doesn't have to be for topic area. Passion can be for helping people, for solving problems (whatever they are), for seeing your work in the hands of people who benefit from it, for creating a comfortable & happy life for yourself & your family.

"Passion" is a cheap word. It can mean anything. But it's taken to mean "something that overpowers your sense of judgment and reason" in the startup world. Doesn't have to be so.

That is a mischaracterization, don't you think?

Every post I write says that conventional wisdom -- e.g. creating a product people want & need, and charging for it -- is right. And most of my blog posts are full of value, and actionable things a reader could do right there, for free:

http://unicornfree.com/2013/how-i-increased-conversion-2-4x-...

People who want more, have more money than time, who value an expert demonstration, and live exercises graded by a teacher… take my class. But I've known many people who had more time than money who implemented the principles in all my free content and turned that into valuable businesses.

Good for them. That's why I put it out there.