<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: alanorourke</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alanorourke</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 23 Oct 2026 09:03:07 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=alanorourke" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "The bootstrapper's EU stack for under €10 per month"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A European alternative to Substack is <a href="https://www.getlouderlines.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getlouderlines.com/</a>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 07:00:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333451</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333451</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48333451</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "You don't have to use Substack"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We have a handy guide  comparing all the substack alternatives that we have just updated. <a href="https://www.getlouderlines.com/substack-vs-ghost-vs-beehiiv-vs-buttondown-vs-louderlines-alternatives/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getlouderlines.com/substack-vs-ghost-vs-beehiiv-...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 23:28:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316975</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316975</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316975</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: What are you using for blogging?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We at Louderlines have a handy guide  comparing all the substack alternatives that we just updated. <a href="https://www.getlouderlines.com/substack-vs-ghost-vs-beehiiv-vs-buttondown-vs-louderlines-alternatives/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getlouderlines.com/substack-vs-ghost-vs-beehiiv-...</a> . I have tried to be as non biased as possible.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 23:25:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316960</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316960</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316960</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: What are you working on (non-AI)?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ever stuck for what to write or what marketing to do to grow your project?<p>I have hand written a question prompt for every question you need to answer to engage new users and customers. One question delivered to you every day, and all the tools to share your answer and build your audience.<p><a href="https://www.getlouderlines.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getlouderlines.com/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 21:38:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48242023</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48242023</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48242023</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: How do you keep up with blogs from people you follow?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Subscribe via email.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 15 May 2026 05:58:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145054</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145054</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48145054</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: People who moved away from tech business/career, what do you do?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was a designer > Marketer > CMO > CEO.
Now I write and illustrate children's books with various publishers.<p>But then of course I started seeing gaps and issues in the process, so now my side project from illustrating for kids is a marketing platform for the more creatively minded :)
<a href="https://www.getlouderlines.com/artists/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getlouderlines.com/artists/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 01 May 2026 20:32:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47979909</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47979909</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47979909</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Delivery Disruption Alerts for All ECommerce Shipping"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks Paul.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Feb 2019 14:10:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254388</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254388</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19254388</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Delivery Disruption Alerts for All ECommerce Shipping"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi HN, I have been working with this company and developed this service as a skunkworks project within the team.<p>It is free a daily email alert to notify e-commerce businesses if there are delays with shipping and delivery.
It tracks issues with Carriers, Traffic, Borders, Strikes and weather and alerts shop owners and customer service.<p>Just the UK and Europe are being covered at the moment but I am hoping to expand that pretty quickly.<p>You do not need to sign-up to test it out. An example of the daily email you would get is here: <a href="http://www2.scurri.co.uk/webmail/385842/696462373/38f9db97d41876cc4131b8df5e8e67a372648be40476b11d4d652bed288f3222" rel="nofollow">http://www2.scurri.co.uk/webmail/385842/696462373/38f9db97d4...</a><p>Future plans would be better personalisation so you can choose just the areas and carriers that affect you and also a feed so you can integrate it with your own support systems.<p>Let me know what you think.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Feb 2019 17:19:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192238</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192238</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192238</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Delivery Disruption Alerts for All ECommerce Shipping]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.scurri.com/delivery-disruption-alerts/">https://www.scurri.com/delivery-disruption-alerts/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192236">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192236</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 3</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 Feb 2019 17:18:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.scurri.com/delivery-disruption-alerts/</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192236</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19192236</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: Anyone having trouble with their CRM/marketing automation?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would be quite technical. 
I have a bare bones setup that does not satisfy all my needs.
BUT!
This is because I constantly have to weigh up the time and cost to implement and set up each piece of tech.
Time and money that is being taken away from sales and marketing activities.
I would suggest that non tech people are making similar choices.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Jul 2017 15:16:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14696349</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14696349</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14696349</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Sales for Developers – Free 6 part sales course for devs]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.onepagecrm.com/sales-course?lding=web%20development">https://www.onepagecrm.com/sales-course?lding=web%20development</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13746838">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13746838</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Feb 2017 19:04:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.onepagecrm.com/sales-course?lding=web%20development</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13746838</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13746838</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: Does bootstrapping a clone within an established market make sense?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I honestly beleive taking this approach puts you at an advantage and a better chance of success. Everyone else has done the ground work for you and educated the market. Just do not be worse than them and you have a good business.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Jan 2017 19:19:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412198</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412198</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13412198</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: Integrating early-days startup with giant CRMs – like SAP?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am not totally clear on your question.
But instead on integrating directly could you integrate your app with Zappier and use this? <a href="https://support.sapanywhere.com/confluence/sapkb/improving-your-business/apps-integrations/sap-anywhere-app-store/zapier" rel="nofollow">https://support.sapanywhere.com/confluence/sapkb/improving-y...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Oct 2016 15:15:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725708</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725708</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12725708</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[The most recommended sales books of all time from Reddit and Quora]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I got curious as to what were the most recommended sales books on Reddit /r/sales. I thought it would be a quick automated data job and make a nice quick blog post. Famous last words. Weeks later and manually going through the entire history of /r/sales and then also deciding to include data from Quora.com to get a bigger sample I have put together the 47 most recommended sales books of all time. A little about my methodology. First I found every mention of a sales book and created a master list. Then I found how many times that book was mentioned and how many upvotes that mention got. Final scores were counted up and the books were ranked. There were hundreds of other books that got a single mention but they needed more than 1 to get on the list. So apologies if your favourite book is not here and please start recommending it to others. The one weak area of the list I think is categorising each book. Because I have not read them all I had to guess from the recommendation what area of sales the book fits in. Please feel free to comment below to correct me. Total reading time for all these books is 170 hours. Or 7 days if you do not sleep and connect a coffee drip to your arm :) Lastly I teamed up with a few sales partners and we are giving away the full 47 books. I would love to be there when that crate arrives.<p>The full list of 47 books and scoring is here: https://www.onepagecrm.com/topsalesbooks<p>Have you any suggestions for improving this list?</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701654">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701654</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Oct 2016 16:01:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701654</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701654</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12701654</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Engineering as Marketing: How to outrank Wikipedia with a simple calculator]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-engineering-marketing.html">http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-engineering-marketing.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429441">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429441</a></p>
<p>Points: 3</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Sep 2016 11:01:13 +0000</pubDate><link>http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-engineering-marketing.html</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429441</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429441</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: Which CRM do you use? Any open source / self-hosted?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I liked the simple CRM <a href="https://www.onepagecrm.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.onepagecrm.com/</a> so much I started working for them after a few years of being a customer :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Sep 2016 08:35:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12428929</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12428929</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12428929</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alanorourke in "Ask HN: I don't enjoy being a CTO.  Now what?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't it crazy, you spend so many years training and building your experience to become great at your job. So much so that you get rewarded with a promotion to management. A position you are given no training for. It is a hard transition and most people have difficulty with it.<p>First of all, congrats on the promotion.<p>You need to ask yourself, was coding what made you leap out of bed in the morning or was it that you were building something?<p>If it was coding then you need to go back to your old role. Please repeat to yourself this is not a failure despite what popular media and the start-up bro culture tells you. If you find a job and role that you love you are beating 90% of the workforce and win at life!<p>If it was building then you might still be able to make this CTO role work, just in a different way than you are used to.<p>Forget about technology, you are now a people manager. People are now your tools to build something. Fighting fires and dealing with everyone's crap is usually a sign of some kind of micromanagement. Have you placed yourself in the middle of everyone's decision making process? Are you their road bock for getting stuff done? This is often a result of giving your team tasks to do instead of goals.<p>Activities describe how people spend their time, whereas goals are the results that they seek.<p>Give each team member a goal and some kind of structure on how they can make their own decisions to achieve their goal. For example you can tell everyone any decision that takes less then half a day to implement they can decide. Anything that takes more time than that they should discuss with you.
Your goal is to set their goal and then get out of their way. You need to run interference between them and distractions from other parts of the company. Check in with them regularly to mentor and coach them to achieve their goal.
Can you empower team leads below yourself to do some of the mundane management?
When I worked for a performance management company I posted this over on Quora on goal setting. <a href="https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-a-goal-and-a-task" rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-a-goal-an...</a>
Setting a goal changes the conversation from them coming to you with problems to coming to you with ideas and solutions.<p>One lesson I learnt when dealing with other managers, departments and up the line is that you have to over communicate. Everyone is mad busy in a start up and they will not remember what you discussed and all agreed last month. You almost need to market yourself, your team, goals and achievements to get their buy in.  Run some regular workshops to get further buy in from them.<p>Your depression may stem from the feeling that you are not doing a good job more than the role itself so keep that in mind.<p>I have gone through the painful transition myself from doer to manager and I have made all the mistakes :) Design and marketing is my area, not tech.
Happy to answer any questions you might have alan at spoiltchild.com<p>Alan</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:50:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923338</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923338</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923338</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[How to newsjack any conference in 1 hour]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="http://irishtechnews.net/ITN3/2-ways-to-newsjack-a-conference-event-for-leads-and-traffic-even-if-you-do-not-attend-by-alan-orourke/">http://irishtechnews.net/ITN3/2-ways-to-newsjack-a-conference-event-for-leads-and-traffic-even-if-you-do-not-attend-by-alan-orourke/</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11223257">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11223257</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 04 Mar 2016 12:14:21 +0000</pubDate><link>http://irishtechnews.net/ITN3/2-ways-to-newsjack-a-conference-event-for-leads-and-traffic-even-if-you-do-not-attend-by-alan-orourke/</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11223257</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11223257</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[I stopped Inbound Mkting and focused on Outbound and tripled our leads – Here’s how]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-one-month-micro-b2b-marketing-plan-infographic.html">http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-one-month-micro-b2b-marketing-plan-infographic.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662539">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662539</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 02 Dec 2015 12:31:05 +0000</pubDate><link>http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-one-month-micro-b2b-marketing-plan-infographic.html</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662539</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10662539</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[The micro B2B marketing plan that increased our leads by 300% – Infographic]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-one-month-micro-b2b-marketing-plan-infographic.html">http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-one-month-micro-b2b-marketing-plan-infographic.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10615571">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10615571</a></p>
<p>Points: 1</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Nov 2015 16:53:38 +0000</pubDate><link>http://audiencestack.com/static/blog-one-month-micro-b2b-marketing-plan-infographic.html</link><dc:creator>alanorourke</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10615571</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10615571</guid></item></channel></rss>