Come on guys, this is definitely a fake message used to promote his widget on HN. What do you mean by "I do not know how I made $200,000?"
This does not make any sense at all. You get email notifications from PayPal once you are paid, you have definitely received emails from customers regarding technical support and/or presales questions. Also - you say you do not have any money at the moment, yet for 6 months you have tens of thousands of dollars in PayPal and you make no effort to actually claim them? What were you waiting for - to get to 1 million in PayPal before actually getting the money, while you stay penniless and hungry? Sorry, this is bullshit.
Sorry, I do not buy it and I find this method of "promotion" lame. At least next time try to make this a bit more believable, cause now it's hilariously stupid and I am wondering how many people here fell for this cheap trick.
Totally normal, except for the cashier salary bit. Your perceived impact on sales is not related to that, 90% is actually too low, often it could be more. Code quality is often good, but usually is much less important in what we developers tend to think.
That's why VB6 product market still exists.
Think of it this way - 100% of ANY business is maintenance. Once you build McDonalds and In-and-Out, the rest is 100% maintenance and just actually producing the burgers (what you call maintenance)
Sorry if I sound rude, but you are very, very naive. Before you even think about this, do this:
1. Create a product/service, website and in general - get the product ready.
2. Register with a payment provider. I recommend FastSpring. They offer a) direct bank transfers to your PERSONAL bank account. b) they can send you Payoneer (payoneer.com) Mastercard cards where they flush your money twice a month
They handle all payments (credit card, paypal, purchase orders) on your behalf an send you the money bi-monthly using one of the schemes described above. The rates may vary, on average 5%.
Do this for an year or two. Make sure you have customers and recurring income that is worth the risk. If you wish to pay taxes, tax them as personal consulting income.
JUST AFTER THAT, go with the steps you mention. At this point, if successful, you'll be able to register anywhere. I'm doing this from a shady Eastern European country and pulling 7-figures net. I do not have a company yet.
This is how ridiculous the open source model is. They bust their asses working and reach a billion after so many years, building on top of so much work and complexity.
Yes, we make development tools for .NET and PHP. Two of us, started an year ago and are on track to make $300K in revenue for this year (but we have almost no expenses, other than small hosting plan). We had a fairly popular open source product before that, though, and we created commercial tools on top if it.
Excellent move. It worked very well for you mostly because you were not approved by YC. If you were, you'd spent several months with paperwork and empty conversations and could miss the moment.
We don't get anyone to contribute to open sours project, not only designers, but also business type, docs guys etc. Because, most of these guys actually have a life and a family to feed and will not do suck enormous stupidity to dabble with open source, let alone contribute to it.
Because you my friend are an annoying prick. I bet $100 that you are also the guy who always finds problems in restaurants and hotels and thinks something is wrong there. This type of attitude is typical of annoying guys like yourself.
You do not have 10,00 friends. In fact, you probably do not even have 10 friends. Just shut the fuck up.
Oh. And the site does not work. Next time you choose a stupid non-web technology to power your WEB site, do it in a way that makes it work. That is kinda important.
I'm watching this in pure joy, since the HN crowd typically consists of homo-erotic Apple fanboys. Having their gay nature into account, they obviously like to get screwed by Apple on a daily basis and yet maintain the "anti-Microsoft" attitude.
The mere fact he says that is contradictory. If something is dead/not-relevant - people just not talk about it.
We have daily Microsoft dead posts here. Meanwhile Microsoft is far from dead, netting 6 billion in PROFIT each QUARTER. And growing steadily with 20% per year.
Get your common sense right. Microsoft is a revenue stream - XNA can make your code run on phones and XBox alike and you can profit twice with the same codebase. Use the eco-system, do not lose revenue stream out of stupid prejudice.
It is a very sad story, but... well, I do not like to sound like a dick, but there are many people worse off and they manage to get by and even make other people happy.
For example I do not really even had a family AT ALL. I know people that have been born disabled, etc. It is not really fair to compare abuse with that, but - problems tend to happen and we need to deal with them.
Again - if this is his choice and this is how he chose to deal with that - that's fine, but this kind of public stunt at then end + dissing his family publicly is not really the best way he could have dealt with it.
From his post he seems to have had deep clinical depression and while his traumatic experience in the past might have been at the root of this, this certainly does not justify 30+ years of constant depression. Literally half of the people in this world have witnessed friends die, live in pain/problems, depression - but choose to keep low profile with that. Public suicide on the internet - not cool.
It was, but lately it is not. News are constantly repeating and the target group is the "I do not have money, but I want to do something" group, which is largely dissatisfying as far as opinions go.
This does not make any sense at all. You get email notifications from PayPal once you are paid, you have definitely received emails from customers regarding technical support and/or presales questions. Also - you say you do not have any money at the moment, yet for 6 months you have tens of thousands of dollars in PayPal and you make no effort to actually claim them? What were you waiting for - to get to 1 million in PayPal before actually getting the money, while you stay penniless and hungry? Sorry, this is bullshit.
Sorry, I do not buy it and I find this method of "promotion" lame. At least next time try to make this a bit more believable, cause now it's hilariously stupid and I am wondering how many people here fell for this cheap trick.