drchiu

So I checked out the git branch for Next.js Commerce (https://github.com/vercel/commerce/). Aside from the missing documentation, there seems to be a lot of touch points where the code is tightly integrated with BigCommerce's npm library.

At this point, it does not feel like the headless ecommerce part swappable. I'm sure that with time, the team will probably extract this out so that it's more plug and play (https://github.com/vercel/commerce/issues/2) or will require the libraries (ie. for Shopify, etc) to follow a certain pattern.

If anyone on the Next.js Commerce team is reading this, the other thing I noticed is that this requires a BigCommerce account. Would be great to have a functionality where one could test out all the end points without needing a third party service in local development. I happen to have a sandbox BigCommerce shop, but there's quite a few steps to get one set up.

I wished I learned earlier in my life that hard work and success don't come hand-in-hand. There are a lot of hard working people in the world who never get to reap any reward from their labour.

At least for me, recognizing that success is nice, but not getting too hung up on it (or expecting it) and to enjoy the labour itself (and find fulfillment in it) helps.

Termius and several other SSH apps use this workaround as well.

It’s kind of funny they got Meg Whitman to be the CEO of Quibi. Pretty sure Bella Poarch (or someone similar) would be a more appropriate choice for knowing how to get something viral.

Yeah I remember that! Did med school in the early 2000s and they glossed over this part.

Strangely enough, I find the anesthesiologist sometimes knows the name of the vessels as well as the surgeon, especially for the run of the mill surgeries. Because it usually turns a 20 minute operation to 60-90 minutes (the added time to fix the mistake and find the bleeder, and go to plan B), and they miss their coffee break as a result!

I remember the cadaver labs during the school days. Really hard to spot certain (save for the really large organs which are obvious) unless you know what it is you’re looking for. Sometimes an illustration tells you it should be there but the actual structure is... underwhelming or barely visible/damaged from years of specimen abuse. Can see how things like this can be missed.

I'm also in the camp of not offering live support. For most businesses who don't have a 24/7 staffing for the live chat, it's best to avoid it altogether as it creates unrealistic expectations in the customers.

Customers who require instant support at whatever hours will likely find some dissatisfaction in working with your bootstrapped solo founder company now or in the near future. Best to offload them to companies who are ready and structured to help them.

A lot of hard work, judging by your write up. Congrats!

Tangential to this, I am noticing a lot of info product MVPs being built on Airtable.

This too was our experience. We had several clusters running on one of the managed services. The cost didn't justify what we could do with running it ourselves.

We're lucky to have experience with Postgres, performing backups (of the various types) and restoring DBs on production environments. We don't have things automated, but that would be next.

I think startups are hard to do it in-house, not for a lack of expertise (or willingness to get it), but the fact that there are already so many things to handle.

I think a strategy for launching something like this where an existing incumbent already exists (ie. StackOverflow) would be to niche down into a single programming topic, such that the answers within this micro community are much better than the ones found elsewhere. When this happens, then branch out. Good luck on the launch!

On this topic, if it's a domain that seems highly desirable (single word, good TLD extension), I typically register it for the max period (10 years), just in case the registrar's system has a glitch and doesn't auto renew when it should.

That's a good one (asking about how they came up with their decision). It helps elucidate their purchasing logic and process.

To elaborate on our last question, it's also a tactic used to help potential customers convince themselves to buy something. Hey (the email app) did this in their prelaunch by asking people who wanted to get on their early launch to email them with reasons why they wanted to be on the list. There's a bit of reverse psychology at play here. Cognitive dissonance must be resolved.

Questions that I've had good experience with:

* What's your problem? w/ Tell me more (as follow up)

* What are you doing right now for that problem?

* What other solutions have you tried?

* Are those other solutions working? Why / why not?

* Why do you feel our product might work for you?

The last question is a BS filter. If they're just using you for their own research purposes / get their existing vendor to bid lower, their response here will sound thin. Prospects who are early in their decision making won't have much to say here (or they are already late in their decision making and have made a decision to go with another vendor and are just going on a call with you to say that they've done their DD). The more they have to say, the closer they are to the finish line (ie. sale).

I’d say that the prevalence of marketing hacks out there have made people let their guard down. We assume businesses will lose money on purpose to gain traction to the degree that when we see deals like these, we jump at it without a second thought. No doubt there’s technical engineering that went into this scam, but the social engineering and manipulation of the target’s psychology is the real secret sauce.

Yep. Not everyone comes from the same baseline. Different biases, experiences, knowledge, affinity for a topic, capacity to understand something at a certain speed, etc.

Tangentially related, I’ve noticed some online products almost purposefully make their websites less appealing to filter out certain types of users. I think landing page copy call it “speaking to your audience,” but it’s the same thing where you’re selecting for the kind of customer you want.

I was just thinking this as well when I read that sentence.

Plain text emails are a pretty low bar in terms of technical challenges if one could submit Linux kernel patches.

From experience, Shopify's app store is great for developers who want to build something and don't want to involve themselves into thinking about distribution. It was one of my first forays into building a SAAS, and I was able to scale to 5-figure ARR.

Churn is incredibly high, unfortunately. And merchant reviews are ruthless. There's some consensus amongst Shopify devs (at least in a particular Facebook group) that Shopify isn't doing enough in weeding out unreasonable reviews and fake reviews. So it's quite possible you launch your app and get killed in your first week. I've experienced it (as well as others) where merchants take you (the dev) hostage by threatening to write a poor review (which will affect your ranking) if you don't create a feature just for them.

I no longer need to develop for their app store anymore, but it's still a good start if you're just breaking into side projects and want to monetize them.

You should consult with a trademark lawyer (I'm not a lawyer), but my understanding from lawyers who've trademarked for me is that you must have used (or will use via the intention to use filing) the mark in commerce.

If you have not, then the mark is not active. Because Transistor fm has used their mark in commerce, then they will hold rights to it already even if they have not officially trademarked (not sure if this is so). So a useful way to handle this is to quickly make your first sale if you're trademarking something new (and issue an invoice).

They can also contest your mark during the trademarking process.

The above is the way it works in the US; not sure about other countries.

I did this with a Honda minivan a few years back. Got one of these buying agents to negotiate and get the deal. Just went into the dealership and got the car. In and out within 15-20 mins to sign paper and pick up the keys.

I can relate about the dance though. The popular Japanese imports last basically forever and the salespeople’s tactics aren’t great. I’ve said to myself more than a few times I’d get a Tesla so I could just get everything done in a web browser.

I don’t think there’s particularly a right or wrong here. I’m solo myself and have felt for a long time to be in an inferior position because I don’t fit into the ideal 2.3 founders statistic. It took more than a few years for me to move past this as a major disadvantage. There are positives and negatives, as with anything.

Can this be mitigated by using something like ufw and restricting the IP access?

I remember some of the most mind bending topics in med school were courses surrounding consent and ethics. The superficial perspectives never seem to do these topics justice once one actually performs deep analysis into them.

It seems that societally, we must decide where we draw the lines on things (ie. what is acceptable and reasonable vs what is not). The professor seemed to enjoy working us into a conundrum and then throwing that as the analysis.

I mean... this depends. I use Rails mostly in my work, and in recent years I’ve pared down the libraries I would use (ie. that will go into the Gemfile). I generally stay away from any other externalities beside this list of libraries, and so I make it so that they’re almost “my own.” Seems to be a good balance between getting too dependency dependent vs veering off to reinvent the wheel.

This is consistent with when I practiced medicine. No matter how hard you try, there’s always some percentage of people who try to take advantage of the system in what would publicly be considered inappropriate. Credit rating and systems such as the ones you described seem to be born out of the need to filter them out.

I’ve used this trick in the past. More than a few times the bad customer tries to quickly do a 180 and be superficially apologetic to prolong the relationship. Unfortunately, behaving in this way, at least in their minds, represents an effective strategy for getting what they want. I’d be curious to hear what others have done in these cases? Raise prices even more? Refer to competitors?

I think what the commenter is suggesting is that there’s an asymmetric cost for the parties involved. In this case, the legal costs for Apple is negligible. There’s a whole legal department whose sole job is to find and engage in cases like this. For the pear company, the cost to defend necessarily means the owners (likely) have to stop what they’re doing to work on a defence case. Apple can keep chugging along while Pear Co likely needs to drop everything and focus on this.

My Digital Ocean load balancer went down. I think there's probably some internal routing? Would be interested to understand more.

Just got a whole bunch of alerts that my services are down. Tried logging into Digital Ocean (who it seems uses Cloudflare) to get it fixed. Could not access their dashboard to reroute things.

It was a plugin, so I relied on the plugin directory to do the marketing for me. Other than that, it was priced competitively. Enough people matriculated through. The app itself sucked (was new to programming), but it did made money.

Since then, I've actually tried to do a lot of what's considered "best practices". Ironically, none of these techniques (which many thought leaders promote) actually worked for me. It may have worked for them (eg. prelaunch list building, getting influencers to use their app and promote it) but as a relative nobody, I think the rules are different for folks like me. I like to think I need to be scrappier and to simply do things that are counter-trend.

I suspect there's a large contingent of developers making a decent side living who aren't really talking much about things (too busy, family, other hobbies) and what they did to get there. Sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's just doing really dumb (but obvious in hindsight) type of things.

Over the years, I've grown skeptical about a lot of existing indie start up dogma that's been built up over the years.