I still don’t really understand what this person is selling.
The headline doesn't help much. They are doing more than "writing order notes". It's a service to check whether an item (watch, purse, designer clothing, etc) is counterfeit, divided into 3 use cases:
-You’re about to buy an item and you’re not sure whether it’s authentic or not
-You’ve already bought an item and you don’t know if you’ve been scammed
-You’ve been scammed and you want to get your money back
We do more than writing order notes in the sense that we now have:
* A Price Comparison tool
* A SaaS for resellers (that sucks. we need to fix it)
* A lot of words written on public guides
* We just started a video library
But ultimately, the bread and butter is our service. And the workflow is:
* People place an order
* We handle it by replying to them via order notes
While that may be your workflow, that is almost never what any customer cares about or makes decisions based on. What they care about is how you are going to help THEM, by how much, and at what cost. The actual workflow is rarely even secondary, it usually the last step/usage thing post-buy decision for the vast majority of people.
The thread and feedback/discussion is clearly helping, as he’s getting a lot clearer on what he actually does and what the value is.
But my point stands. With someone who has business and sales sense, he could be doing dramatically better.
We are a scrappy company and we're looking to mature, given the figures we've done the last year. I'd love to know if you'd still have the same opinion after going through our customer workflow
(since yes, what we've discussed is our internal workflow)
You clearly have a viable product, and have already started doing some solid sales despite having no sales (or marketing) expertise - which is great, and you’re in an awesome place!
The next challenges are finding and scaling more ways to reach customers, conveying the value you can provide them in a way they can understand at scale, and converting those ‘take my money!’ potential folks into actual orders. Then executing on them at scale, of course.
The sales and the execution side are separate sets of expertise. Managing people from those backgrounds to get what you want is also a challenge for most execution/technical founders. Most folks with your background and having done what you have, will be quite comfortable with the execution side and people who also like it.
If you think of it as a computing system, you’ve got a great 32 core machine with an awesome GPU and 32GB of memory. You’re bottlenecking on the 80’s era Amiga tape drive you somehow managed to boot off of.
If you get yourself even a halfway decent 20GB drive from a decade+ ago, you’ll be doing leaps and bounds more business. If you find a modern SSD, even more.
There are a number of books out there for how to do sales as a technical founder, I can try to dig one up if you’re interested.
Is there any chance I can get your mentorship over a vid call? No commitment for more
The 32-core, 32 GB of memory made sense to me
EDIT: Just to not risk losing this in a not-seen-HN-reply — if yes, let me know where I can reach out, or my Twitter is this: https://twitter.com/chddaniel
You’ve also found a decent product with a clear market need and have turned it into positive cash flow. That is the start of something that can be leveraged very well if you know how to do it.
I’m just taking a wild guess here - take what’s useful and please ignore the rest. I don’t know you.
What may be helpful is realizing that much of what got you here may be getting in the way of getting you to the larger opportunity.
For one, being no BS means you may be neglecting good opportunities to get exposure and business because it feels fake. You may not be aware of the business models of the people who build large audiences or how to leverage them, of the influencer or advertising markets and tools for instance. I think you have some opportunity if you get someone clever who specializes in it. But first you need to find out someone who knows that that looks like, or iterate and learn yourself.
Your being locked into the product and able to see through bs may also be stopping you from truly understanding the mindset/awareness of the bulk of users (and their general lack of knowledge), in a way that you can clearly reach them. Knowledge of actual capabilities and the full system can be a real curse in selling, because it makes everything too complicated and makes it hard to understand where 99% of your potential customers will be - which is complete ignorance of you, your product, and the space.
And you have to make it easy for them to give you money, and use every opportunity you can to show your product and how it helps people, or you’re wasting visibility and leads you’ll never get back. This thread is obviously helping you, and I never cry over the past. Future posts could be even better (and get you more revenue) with a bit more work on some very minor (time wise) details.
I did make a prior employer a bit under half a billion ARR by identifying the need for, starting, and then leading an effort that fixed some similar (but not as severe from what I can tell) challenges for one of their products. This was from within Engineering as an Engineer and later senior Eng leadership. They did have a more established product and presence.
Unfortunately, I am also busy getting my third startup moving and this week and next are not great for taking on anything new.
A friend of mine who is very low BS and has given me some useful (and brutally direct) feedback that I’ve personally found invaluable is Naeem Zafar [https://www.naeemzafar.com/]. He’s done a lot of books and classes on various elements (mostly so he doesn’t have to keep repeating himself). I’d be curious what you learn if you go through the 7 Steps to a Successful Startup ebook. It’s only about 30 pages, quite to the point, and $10.
It may help you structure some of what you have now in a way that may point out the gaps in the skill sets on your team and the structure that could help you. It may not.
I don’t really use Twitter, but I’ll put it on my list to reach out in a couple weeks and see if any of this was helpful. I’ll make sure to mention this thread.
Best of luck! Making a viable business is one of life’s greatest challenges and you’re showing good promise.
Starting to read it.
> I don’t really use Twitter, but I’ll put it on my list to reach out in a couple weeks and see if any of this was helpful. I’ll make sure to mention this thread.
Please do! Can I get your contact in any way? Would really hate to let this connection slip
Everything you've advised made sense, though I've got more questions (and curiosity/hunger for knowledge). Despite your precautions that it may not apply to me, some parts do apply really hard.
Especially the bit with "For one, being no BS means you may be neglecting good opportunities to get exposure and business because it feels fake." — this problem has been at the top of my list for the last year, and only now I've started to crack at it, as I started building an audience on Twitter ( went from 190 → almost 1,000 followers in a month).
That said, I'd love to avoid some mistakes and gain some insight from somebody like you who puts it this way
I don't want to push too hard the video call bit for like right now, but at least keep the door open for a moment in the future
Nope, we don't check for that. Others might do but that's outside our area of expertise.
We pretty much authenticate what we ourselves have 'earned' the right to authenticate, by covering the item in a free, public guide first: https://legitcheck.app/explore-the-library/
In all honesty, the post got inspired by this HackerNews hall-of-famer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132
It sounded like an interesting story
As we leave our scrappiness behind soon, I thought some hackers would like to hear our (scrappy) story
"I sell onions on the internet" is a fine HN title; it's unusual and intriguing without being overly sensational. "How I made $XXX per year" is not a good HN title; it's extremely common and $sensational $dollars are $sensational. But don't worry—it's far more important that the article itself be good!
I'd change the title to "I authenticate items for strangers for a living" — but if that doesn't fit either, the current title is ok
Thanks Dan!
Should've made it clearer - a mistake on my part.
So you know how there are fakes of Rolex, Nike, Louis Vuitton etc — some are scarily close. We make guides on how to tell the fake from the real item, with the best fakes.
We teach people (for free)
But we also have a service, if they want us to check it for them
Think: "your order has been shipped"
But we write it manually — "your item is authentic because X and Y" — that's our order note. And at the same time our service
What I tried to do with the title was show the scrappiness. Maybe even inspire some hackers to be scrappy or to look for something other than perfection first
Because if you're pitching to a VC that you're starting an authentication company for luxury items
And you'll claim that you'll use the WooCommerce 'order notes' section, you'd be laughed out of the room. And not like the Airbnb founders — without that second part of the story where you prove them wrong
Think: "your order has been shipped"
But we write it manually — "your item is authentic because X and Y" — that's our order note. And at the same time our service
What I tried to do with the title was show the scrappiness. Maybe even inspire some hackers to be scrappy or to look for something other than perfection first
Because if you're pitching to a VC that you're starting an authentication company for luxury items
And you'll claim that you'll use the WooCommerce 'order notes' section, you'd be laughed out of the room. And not like the Airbnb founders — without that second part of the story where you prove them wrong
The 'order notes' is a field in any e-commerce store, where you (the store) can send the customer a message
Think: "your order has been shipped"
But we write it manually — "your item is authentic because X and Y" — that's our order note. And at the same time our service
What I tried to do with the title was show the scrappiness. Maybe even inspire some hackers to be scrappy or to look for something other than perfection first
Because if you're pitching to a VC that you're starting an authentication company for luxury items
And you'll claim that you'll use the WooCommerce 'order notes' section, you'd be laughed out of the room. And not like the Airbnb founders — without that second part of the story where you prove them wrong
Think of the randomness inherent in the microscopically unique features of the original and how you might emulate them reliably with a margin that still lets you compete with its luxury pricing.
Not really. We give away everything we have. As others've mentioned, fake manufcaturers get diminishing results by spending the extra $$$ to go from 95% to 99%
Whe anyway, as part of 95%, the exterior side is 99% done. The last 5 bits are interior details unseen by anyone but the wearer
All they care about is selling more products to fake wearers. And fake wearers care only about exterior
I tend to see the following categories overall, and while I'm not at all interested in the label/authenticity side of things, I have a difficult time identifying well-constructed or poorly-constructed household items.
* Real label, high quality. Good to have, but much more expensive than I can usually justify.
* Real label, low quality. Typically when a brand has just been bought out, and is trying to cash in on a reputation while using cheaper construction.
* Fake/knock-off label, low quality. Trash, masquerading as a good deal.
* Fake/knock-off label, high quality. The absolute sweet spot, getting the higher quality build without needing to pay for the social "authenticity" of the brand label.
The brands know this happens, they really don't care, what the brand will do is send a couple workers to the factory to be QC buyers. The factory makes a million items, and the QC workers will go through and pick out the best 100,000. The other 900,000 will be sold in the the developing world. The brand will typically take the 100,000 then send them to the US or Europe to another factory where they will have tags sewn in them and possibly some more labels or insignia attached. If it's a particularly premium brand they will add some secret identifying marks that even this LegitCheck website is unlikely to know about.
Those secret marks are typically for extremely high end goods that have lifetime warranties etc and the only time it's checked is if you send it in for warranty work.
A LOT of these goods are completely indistinguishable and will even make it into the retail supply chain. Particularly at stores like TJ Maxx, Bealls, and Ross et al. Though they go through a series of distributors that will basically only exist for a few shipments to avoid liability after some previous large lawsuits.
Ross and Burlington will also knowingly buy the ghost shift goods but keep them unbranded and sell them in stores with no labeling at all. You can find these clothes and they will have a tag sewn into that has a lot number. You can take that lot number and put it in to import manifest search engines and find out what brand was also importing them.
This would be where you find your coveted Fake / Knock off high quality with the best success.