20years

You can configure your email sending with a reply-to email (example customers@mydomain.com) and not have auto replies or bounces go to that reply-to address.

The auto replies will go to the envelope sender email. I prefer to set that to something like email@mydomain.com rather than noreply@mydomain.com because noreply just looks so unfriendly.

Replies from real people will go to the reply-to email (customers@mydomain.com) and bounces/auto-replies will go to the sender address (email@mydomain.com). You can then write a script that automatically clears the auto-replies and handles the bounces from the email@mydomain.com inbox.

This will allow you to still handle real customer inquiries that come into the reply-to email without being bombarded with bounces and auto-replies.

I have built multiple SaaS products. I spend about a month building the first version. I get that out in front of users and continue to build upon it if I see traction and based on feedback. If traction isn't there or it becomes obvious user won't pay, I generally move onto something else.

After the initial prototype, it generally takes another 3 to 4 months to build out a full fledged app that I can offer to the masses. It doesn't stop after that though. There is always more to develop and improve including a lot of re-factoring.

I currently have 4 SaaS products on the market and another one in the works.

As of 2015 Craigslist was valued at an estimated $5 billion and had annual revenues in excess of $381 million. Not sure what it is today 2 years later but my guess is more now. Plus CL has been around for 20 years now. It is a cash cow and serves over 20 million page views a month. I don't really consider that a downfall.

Search engines, social media, videos, content, etc. A variety of different ways.

I had a similar experience when I released an open source real estate search plugin for Wordpress years ago. It gained traction and was covered by a few very prominent real estate blogs/news sites which resulted in over 10,000 downloads in 2 weeks.

There were some people who were not able to get it to work with their theme, shared hosting environment, other plugin conflicts, etc. and expected me to install/troubleshoot. I was spending almost my entire day trying to help people and I couldn't handle the demand especially with that many downloads in such a short period of time.

So I decided to put up paid support versions ranging from $50 to $150. People flipped out when I did that and literally attacked me in comment threads. I tried explaining the time commitment this entailed and that it was taking me away from my core business but the mob didn't care. They were mad that I wasn't willing to install or troubleshoot their environment for free.

I ended up taking the plugin down and since then (it's been 7 years) I haven't open sourced anything major and will probably never release a Wordpress plugin to the public again.

In hindsight, I probably could have made decent money from that plugin if I charged for it initially. It probably would not have gained as much traction or popularity but I think the outcome would have been very different.

Custom Woocommerce implementation on Wordpress. Custom plugins for automating things such as shipping labels, packing slips, etc. Hosted on DigitalOcean.

No drop shipping. We spend about 20 to 30 minutes per week packing and shipping inventory from our garage.

Cool story. Congrats on this accomplishment especially considering you only started learning how to program in 2014. Most people have a hard time even shipping a product. You did that and made money on it. Awesome!

Small ecommerce site selling fidget spinners. It's sold $4k worth of fidget spinners in the past 2 months.

Hosting costs $10/mo Shipping & support take about 5 to 10 hours total per month.

I started this with my 13 year old son over the summer as a way of teaching him how to launch a website, advertise it and sell products through the site.

Now that school will be starting up again here soon, we will not have the time to put into it. I have a few other sites/SaaS products that take up most of my time and he is going to be busy with school so I am looking to offload the site.

Email: bizdiscussions at gmail dot com

Does anyone know if Jeff has made these types of investments in other companies? The return rate he got is really good. Granted, most other SaaS companies are not as successful or stick around as long as Basecamp but I wonder if that would be different if others worked out these types of investments vs taking VC.

"All else being equal, someone with a relevant degree will have an easier time being a successful entrepreneur"

I think that is where we may disagree.

Plenty of Entrepreneurs who made it big without a degree. Some of the top of our time actually. http://www.businessinsider.com/top-100-entrepreneurs-who-mad...

"for most people is an unreasonable trade-off of safety, personal time, health and comfort for nebulous "freedom" and a very unlikely chance at striking gold."

This I somewhat agree with but I oftentimes wonder if a lot of the "very unlikely chance" part of it has to do with the inaccurate and unrealistic image the start-up scene places along with the lack of good education on starting a business. You can build a very comfortable life running your own business without being a unicorn but seems as though most are shooting for unicorn level. That I believe is where most of the failure comes from.

It really isn't all that difficult to build a $200k to $500k+ year small business. Easier today than ever. But that's not sexy so people shoot for the stars and miss more often than not.

"A fully qualified engineer will be in a much better position to provide valuable products and services than an 18 year old noob."

Not sure I totally agree with this. I have meet a ton of very smart fully qualified engineers who have no business sense whatsoever.

That does not mean I am discounting the engineering degree. Not at all. At least an engineering degree will generally give you a very nice return. What makes a good engineer though is not often the same as what makes a good entrepreneur.

"you need to nurture the entrepreneur in your child before giving them the money."

This is key imo. Even if it means starting small little business type things like selling candy at school. Teach them how to keep track of profit/losses/expenses, how to recognize opportunities and how to test the waters before jumping fully in. I do this with my 13 year old son. His most successful business so far has brought him $4500 in revenue.

I don't call it entrepreneur training or even training at all. He doesn't even really realize he is learning. It is something fun we do together and he has tasted what it feels like to make his own money. It has allowed him to save and buy his own things.

When he graduates from high school, I won't push him one way or another (college vs entrepreneurship). I will leave that up to him but I hope at least I will have given him a little taste of entrepreneurship so he can make his own choice when the time comes. I will also heavily encourage him to work a few jobs at other companies first. That in itself is a huge learning experience.

I agree with everything you said. I am also not convinced that "these online courses are 100% independently viable" especially for the younger kids. I didn't think this a year ago but my opinion has really changed since having the opportunity to teach kids in person in a class. I use online tools in the class and they are awesome but would have lost 90% of the kids if they didn't have someone there to guide/explain things in more detail.

I was also pleasantly surprised how often kids asked "how can I make it do this" which was something outside of what the online tutorial taught. The tutorials were great at sparking their interest but can't really accommodate all of the edge cases especially for those more creative thinkers. I also learned that most of the kids got bored fairly quickly following step-by-step tutorials. They wanted to hack and play around with what they were learning. So I changed the tutorials to be much smaller with very small steps and at the end of each mini tutorial, I encouraged them to hack and try different things based on what they learned.

Maybe with a live online teacher available this would be less of an issue but even with that you lose the personal interaction the kids have with each other and the teacher. Things like showing each other what they created and working directly with the teacher/other kids to expand on that. I think a lot of younger kids really do need that interaction and in-person feedback and I am not sure how that can be re-created online.

Exactly this!

I think I fall mostly into your #2. I have been self employed for 15 years and for the past year have been volunteering at my sons middle school 1 hour per week. I am not retired but have financial stability from my own business.

Your points about dealing with the administration are so true. It is beyond frustrating. I understand their hands are tied on certain things because they have guidelines, etc. to follow but it really has made me realize I would never consider teaching for a living in the current education system. Not only because the pay is low but because of all of the political crap you have to deal with. I have been approaching it as don't ask first and do things the way I want until they tell me no. It has caused friction with the administration but I don't really care because the kids are getting so much from it and the classes always book up super fast with a waiting list. I am doing this for free so what is the worst they can do? Cut me off? That would a disservice to the kids not to me.

Your #1 point is what I see the most and some of what is being taught or lack there of is mind blowing.

I think a lot of the times what is missing in this conversation is the need to first get teachers in the classroom that know how to code and want to teach it. Unfortunately a teachers salary is much, much lower than what someone who does know how to code can make elsewhere.

I understand that there are a lot of online tools that make learning/teaching coding easier but I do believe the person teaching it still needs to have a decent understanding. Kids ask tons of questions on how to accomplish certain things and if the teacher doesn't really know how to code, they won't be able to help those students who will then lose interest.

Held for 180-day period. Far longer than needed for customers to get returns and far from sane imo.

Wasn't rude in my initial reply. Just the opposite actually.

*Edit - It was the 3rd go around with their support before I started to get rude and pointed out a ton of Chinese products. By this time it was a week after they closed my shop and I was done with even trying with them.

Thanks! I will check them out.

I did email them but when I pointed out the Chinese knockoffs, that didn't go over too well. I guess I could have handled my response differently but come on!

The fact that they closed my shop without pre-warning when I had sales along with pending orders really made me lose complete trust in them. Especially considering the endless Chinese products on there that are obviously not handmade.

If they had contacted me inquiring about my products before closing my shop, that would have been a different story but that is not what happened. I refuse to do business with reckless providers.

I tried using Etsy only to have them close my shop due to my products "not being handcrafted" according to them. These were small things that I 3D printed and people were actually buying. They shut me down but allowed similar endless China produced products to stay. They were not too happy when I pointed out those China knockoffs. They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made.

I will never again use or trust Etsy and I discourage every small seller I know that makes custom things to stay away.

Does anyone think that Amazon could be eying Uber but waiting for them to lose value? Seems like it would be a natural fit for their delivery network especially considering their recent purchase of Whole Foods.

It was a site about Minecraft mods which don't garner as much traffic as they once did. I did consider selling it at one point and even spoke with a web broker. The biggest concerns were trademark stuff especially now that Microsoft owns it. Letting a content site just "sit there" is the same thing as letting it die, which is what I pretty much did. You gotta keep on generating good content if you want to make $$ at it. In addition to that, the content you do generate needs to be able to garner enough traffic to make that $$.

Yes, Netflix is still popular but they were not pushing as many display ads as they once were when the site was doing its best. Plus the TV show line up sucked after that summer and nothing really was sticking. After taking into account the cost to hire and manage contract TV show writers, cost to advertise it, hosting, etc. the revenue it was making wasn't enough for it to be worthwhile. Especially considering our SaaS products and Advertising Agency were growing.

Thanks. I don't run either anymore. The TV show site started off as a side project to train a new employee and ended up turning into a nice little business for awhile. When summer hit, the site plummeted in traffic & revenue and when the TV show seasons started again both Hulu and Netflix where not advertising the same anymore. That combined with the TV show line up was horrible so the traction just wasn't there anymore. It was fun while it lasted.

I shut down the Minecraft site about 6 months ago. Traffic also plummeted being that mods are not as popular because lots of the kids are now playing Minecraft with the app or consoles.

It's not my full-time job. It's always been more of a side thing. I don't think I would be able to sleep at night if it were my full-time job. Way too much risk with it.

"Wouldn't you still come out ahead because with more ads you get more impressions?"

You would think but actually no at least not for all of the tests I did and I did a lot of them. You don't really make your $$ from impressions. You make $$ when people click on your ads. If the ads that are displayed are very relevant and your CTR is really good, you make more money.

Every single one of your pages I visited shows me a remarketing ad. This tells me that Google can't find good matching advertisers for your content so they show remarketing ads instead. Remarketing ads always pay out much, much less.

It varies greatly based on type of content. The most I have made was $20k per month on a TV show review site. We had Netflix and Hulu advertising on in through Adsense for awhile and their ads were specific to the individual TV shows we were writing about. The RPM's were amazing.

I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it made $9k/mo with about 130k unique visitor per month.

More tech content sites or other more general sites I have ran haven't gotten anywhere close to those #'s.

Games and entertainment content geared towards youth do well.

Ad placement also makes a difference. 1 well placed in-content ad can make you a lot more than 3 ads. That one well placed in-content ad can generate a higher CTR and CPC vs. if you place 3 ads. When you place multiple ads, the CTR on all of them even the well placed in-content ad is much lower as well the the CPC. I have tested this extensively.

Not sure how well that Holacracy movement is doing for them

http://fortune.com/zappos-tony-hsieh-holacracy/

https://qz.com/849980/zappos-is-struggling-with-holacracy-be...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/zappos-...

Yes :)

Does anyone else think that this purchase is largely in part so they can get AmazonFresh in a lot more places quickly?

In my area where there is a big college campus, they have been hiring for AmazonFresh devs for over a year. We have no AmazonFresh here but we do have a Whole Foods.

Following is how I usually prioritize in order.

1. Fix unexpected security issues that may be found

2. Implement features that will result in more new users signing up and paying

3. Implement features that will result in existing users paying more than they already are

4. Implement features that will lower churn

5. Implement features that will save the company money such as more automation to reduce manual work

2 to 4 requires you to engage with your customers and get good at filtering out a lot of noise on what some customers may want but the majority may not. Usually if it's going to make the majority of your customers money or save the majority of them money, it's something they will pay more for.

From this it appears as though a full stack developer makes about the same or just a little more than a front end or back end developer. Wonder why this is. I would expect a full stack developer to make at least 1.5x of a FE or BE being that they are working in both among other things.