itengelhardt

Interesting piece of software; Really small app. definitely a good way to get your feet wet in the product business.

Congratulations on shipping!

I think Brecht is hilarious - and I really like that they are constantly swearing on the podcast. Plus kids in the background keep it real.

In that case you are doomed. You'll have to change all passwords to all sites after one has been compromised.

Nathan is no longer consulting, solely doing products. So for him there isn't a linear relation between time worked and money earned. Check his 2013 in review post: http://nathanbarry.com/2013-review/

I strongly believe Nathan will be fine - even if he doesn't work a crazy schedule :)

IMHO that guy IS retiring... for 6 months every year. 4HWW-style. It makes a lot more sense if you see it like this. Plus he's enjoying his life while he is young and has enough energy to travel etc.

He's not running the risk of dying at 60 and never experiencing retirement.

I like the transparency in this post. It's great that you let us look at your numbers so willingly (e.g. https://demo.baremetrics.io)

It will be interesting to see, if there is a "ad blindness" effect kicking in after a few months. I would love to read a report in 3-6 months.

BTW: Your style of writing is great :-)

+1 for building a StackOverflow/github presence. I don't have many points (about 2,500) on SO - back from when I spent a solid hour or two on the site every day. This eventually allowed me to create a profile on SO careers. I get about one lead a month now.

I don't know if this was inspired by your post, but Brennan Dunn( of Planscope.io) just published a blog post about that same topic: http://planscope.io/blog/quit-your-job/ - might be worth a read for you.

I guess it depends on the data transferred. For an engine you probably have data like altitude, revolutions/second, fuel intake, pressure, etc. To get a status on the engines you probably don't NEED long/lat data. So it might not be in the transmitted bursts.

Maybe there is a way of interpreting the data that tells you when/if the plane turned. e.g. "the chamber pressure in engine 2 is 5% higher than engine 1 ==> the plane was turning left at a rate of 15° per minute". Something crazy like that

I image cross-platform compatibility is a PITA. But I find it interesting that people who pay for ebook design, don't care about website design. Mind you: That's no criticism of you OR your work. I just love the fact that people are more interested in the value than in the website design, even if they get value out of design work.

Hope that makes things clearer. Again: You're doing a great job!

Interesting, considering that you actually DESIGN their products. :)

Excellent idea. :-)

I love the tone

Hi David! Great to hear that you are doing well with LiberWriter. That definitely is a pain point for people.

I like that you kept the layout simple using only bootstrap. that's a lot faster & cheaper than doing a full blown design.

I don't know whether HN is the right place to ask this question. The crowd for this frequents either http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm or http://academy.micropreneur.com

There's also a number of podcasts (notably "Startups for the Rest of Us" and "Bootstrapped With Kids")

Well yes. Of course 30mm rounds are effective against tanks. It's simply a matter of how MANY you throw at the beast. At 3,000 rounds/minute you can hit the tank up real good.

Secondly, not every enemy has the latest tank. In fact, most potentially hostile nations (speaking from the POV of NATO) do NOT have modern tanks.

Absolutely brilliant to show case your own financial data. Also very ballsy IMHO.

Patrick already mentioned the best way to get email addresses.

However, for my use case (i.e. emailing cold contacts) you usually don't get their address handed to you. I just looked them up with a combination of Yellow Pages and Google-Fu.

Now that I think of it, I could probably ask the people on my list for interviews. Thanks for the idea, Patrick :-)

Well, arguably there was no established customer base for WPEngine before the launch. You either were a hobbyist and hosted for free on wordpress.com. Or you were a multi-billion dollar enterprise and used Automattic's premium hosting service (serious $$$).

OK. Thinking about it, there might have been a market there all along, but how come no one served it before? I mean Jason is crazy brilliant (talk to him, it's an experience!), but surely others could have come up with the same idea - right? I guess we'll never know, but my guess is that not too many people went out and searched for a thing like WPEngine before WPEngine

I do both. Sometimes I look for long tail keywords (< 200 local exact match searches in Google's Keyword Planner tool). I then write mildly optimized posts for that. On other days I am like "that should be an interesting topic and I want to write about it". When I do this I don't even think about SEO.

There were numerous WP consultants when he did this. They were his target customers. He interviewed them about their pain points and found that their pain was in line with what he had in mind for WPEngine (easy, fast, secure, no-friction hosting for WP) He asked them to write him a check at the end of the interview. BAM, customers. (I make this sound easier than it is..)

Here's a tactic that has worked for me so far

1. Set up a blog on your domain

2. write 20+ articles on industry-related topics (this alone will bring in some traffic)

3. get a number of emails from prospective customers

4. write a PERSONALIZED email to everyone on the list and ask if they are interested in an interview to be published on your blog. Offer a link from your blog as additional incentive

My response rate so far was >80%

He's so right about the whole "work on things you can show to the next prospect" thing. I wish my 20-year-old self would have known that.

I like how you make it sound so incredibly easy - especially thinking back to how much I struggled with the math behind this :-) (To be very clear: There's nothing wrong with explaining things in a simple way and leaving out the scary parts)

Great post.

I am seriously interested in this topic, but I find it really hard to work with personas. I've tried it numerous times in other fields (e.g. software development), but it just never worked for me. Maybe this is a personality thing :-/

I've seen this work in all kinds of situation. Especially with people thrown into leadership roles at young ages (e.g. military). First they are scared, but then they adjust and stick to the mantra :-)

Shouldn't that be handled by existing laws - i.e. you charge the perp with rape and let the court decide?

(15a+363d)old boy + 18yo girlfriend = prison for the girl? (Assuming the sex being consensual)

The question should never be "What's the benefit of NOT prohibiting something" - that's why we call it a free society.

That being said, I think that the spanish law is rather reasonable by not strictly enforcing 16 and allowing exceptions when everyone is about the same age. IMHO that is one problem with the age of consent: There need to be exceptions for cases where both teenagers are about the same age. E.g. what happens when a 15yo boy wants to have consensual sex with his 17yo girlfriend? What when she is 18yo? What happens when they have sex and afterwards his parents find out and call the police?

I love how she gives away the name of the actual software (desire2learn) in the tag. :-)

You know that prices are (often) more a function of marketing than of competence...