It took me 14 hours to make this thread, finished at 5am. Pls, be nice.
HN user
johnrushx
Founder of marsx.dev.
My website builder https://unicornplatform.com/
All my 20 products https://johnrush.me/
I post daily here https://twitter.com/johnrushx
yeah that's my key concern.
or it might also be the opposite and junior devs may be using AI and learn faster.
In my own biz, I stopped hiring junior devs because it's faster for me to use AI for coding than to explain what I need and then validate the implementation with code-review...
I didn't mean all-dev, but "junior" devs.
I was planning to build 100 mini tools for SEO. The goal was to hire a dev team. I approached an oursroucing agency and they told one tool will cost 1k-4k. So the budget is between $100k-$400k.
I decided to try to do it with AI developers. Tried bolt.new, v0 and then replit. Replit did the work the best. It took me less than half an hour to make the tool I wanted. Now I wanna spend the next 10 days making all these tools myself.
Anyone doing the same?
I made a 100% free directory for open source and self-hosted tools. Enjoy saving your hard earned money by not paying for all those expensive SaaS alternatives
with countvisits you can customize the public dashboard - date range - sections - type of stats - colors - background - fonts - styles: cornder radius, cards....
So basically you can make really good looking public dashboard that is matching your brand
I guess it relates to blog articles with lists. where my list is a product itself and pretty relevant for everyone here. Am I wrong?
thx I do that all the time now. I set up a landing page with a waitlist. If i see many people signing up, I add stripe payment link with 50% off presale. Maybe try this
I said the "project economy". I didn't say: "I spent". In the end, I calculated the profit as if I didn't use my own tools, because that's what the reader of the case study wants to see.
The point of the whole post is to take one real case study. If you follow my steps, you have to pay for tools, so for the reader it's not important at all if I personally paid or not.
You don't get the point of the post at all. It's a case study on how I brought an idea to implementation and grew it to 7k revenue. What's the point of bringing up all those details? I didn't "fabricate" this case. This is a real case.
If I used other tools that aren't mine(i used godaddy and hosting..) would there be even the slightest difference for the key point of the article? If I start the article but saying: "I used my own tools...." would it make any difference to the main point of the article? for the case study?
it's the Holding Org that unites all 20+ tools under one umbrella, both tehcnically (all these tools are built using marsx.dev) and legally (all these tools are owned my marsx (the company i own)
this is "Show HN". So showing my product is the goal of this label. Regarding the rest of my products used in the process of growing Index Rusher, what's wrong with it? Should I use Webflow instead of the unicorn platform for my website? Should I hide in the step-by-step story the fact that I used Unicorn? I'm not really getting why some readers focus on this. If the key point of the story is to describe every step.
very simple. as you see in this post, 3 products used to grow the main products are also my products. So basically I build products to solve my own pains and problems. Every day I get new problems, I solve them manually first, then I turn this solution into a product, use it for myself, iterate, once Im happy I let other founders try it and that's how the new product is being born
thank you, busy founders who have websites with over 20 pages
the reason I didn't add the "disclosure" is that it's "Show HN". My guess was that adding this lable means "I'm showing my tool".
Anyway, I added the comment. not sure if there is any effect on the overall point of the post and its value.
disclosure: 3 tools used to grow the main tools are also my tools(I'm the author). - unicorn platform - listingbott - seobot ai.
(can't edit the post, so I'm writing it in the comment)
I can show you real example. In Nov I launched https://allgpts.co/ and https://osssoftware.org/ Both went viral in internet with millions of visitors.
Since I have ai agents, it was pretty relevant to place links to my agents on allgpts and it drove very good traffic. So allgpts served as a a marketing channel for my ai agents.
Same happened with osssoftware. Directories are one of the best and cheapest ways to win traffic.
I use intuition. I have a discord channel with all the events: sign-ups, payments.. So whenever I do an action on social media or anywhere else, I see those notifications and often my intuition gives me a pretty good answer if it works or not.
Overall, social media is the single best way to promote saas tools.
thank you
it's a good question. In my case, I have 20+ products. So if one product dies due to google cutting their apis, I will be fine. But if this was my only product, I'd be stressed tbh. I remember what happened to founders building on top of twitter api when twitter cut the apis and made it super expensive. Lot's of founders still didn't recover from that
really? How does it get indexed by google so fast? posted an hour ago. pretty cool
it's an existing connection. I've never tried to hire on a marketplace. The prices are either insane. Or if you go for an affordable price, then the quality is super low.
I you need advice, I'd say: find some folks on twitter who build MVP on fixed price. They care a lot about their reputation. Also you can see on their twitter feed how they communicate and etc
to be honest, I exchange value for attention. That's what good internet is about. Im not just promoting stuff for my own sake. My key goal here is to give as much value as I can first. If I earn respect this way, then I'm allowed to share my tool.
is that allowed? don't wanna get banned :)
thx for support Brian
you're welcome
disclaimer: I'm the author of this tool too
what you say makes sense for corporate software, where LTV is high and customers stay with you for years or even decades.
In microsaas b2b that targets other startups, the average customer churns in about 4 to 18 months.
So let's say I priced my tool at $15/mo, as many of the competitors. This would mean that an average user LifeTimeValue would be somewhere around $199. Which means that selling it for $199 upfront actually is a better option for me, because I get money upfront and it's exact same LTV.
Some users will pay 199 and stay with for 10 years. But some will close down their site in 3 months. So in average, I will get same outcome.
When it comes to sign ups, if the startup is healty, its signup must be growing Month over MOnth. Not just as cumulative value, but in general, if I had 10 sign ups this month, I must get at least 11 next month, to maintain 10% MoM growth and double every year. In this case, my revenue is not recurring, but if you zoom out and look at the numbers, then it's like a floating window, I get growing monthly revenues, even from LTDs.
So long story short: revenuewise, there is no difference between $199 LTD or $19/mo. But marketing-wise, LTDs are far better, I stand out from all the competitors now and my growth rate is pretty high.
yeah. I ended up building most of the tools I needed to get more productive on doing the growth and marketing for my products. I'm a solo bootstrapped marketer. So I had no choice.
yeah. I save them all in database to keep track of the stats. Submitted pages might get deindexed by google later, so I keep checking their status every day.
if you think this is AI, you never used Ai to write text:)