https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47850854

Since then we've grown to more than 5k users across nearly 1k groups and have sent out more than 100k update prompts. The premise is simple - social media stinks and you either don't see updates from people you care about (they never post) or you miss the updates (flooded by other people's updates or an algorithm that downplays an update you'd care about even if it's seemingly unimportant). And we're ramen profitable (more so now that we've migrated the majority of our infrastructure off of Amazon and especially RDS).

A few things we do - the main organizer of a group only ever has to login to create a group. They invite everyone else via email address to which they accept the invite. After that, they all (including the organizer) has to click the link they get regularly (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or quarterly) and submit a short (char limited) update. No logging in and no bugging people to login, download an app, rate us on an app store, ads, or anything else.

The system combines the updates into a newsletter and sends it to the group. The updates are NEVER published on the web (thus shielded from search engines and AI scraping) and you can never do a reply-all to a newsletter. You can click on a person's name to reply back just to them and strengthen your one-to-one relationship. You're welcome to saving you from a flood of "Congrats!" emails from everyone in the group.

We're reposting now because in the great Atlanta example of MailChimp, we're looking at stats and seeing this just grow on its own without any marketing from us. So we've been spending more time on it to migrate the infrastructure and codebase to something more resilient and are looking to expand usage and impact. Plus more marketing than just word of mouth. :-)

Free for groups <10 and bi-weekly or less frequent. Great for families, book clubs, alumni groups, companies, etc. And before you ask, we've raised no money and have fully bootstrapped this since inception. Criticism only helps us get better so feel free to roast us.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47850854

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

That made me a solid Volvo buyer (I replaced that car with a newer XC90 T8 - a plug-in hybrid that I still have and is a great vehicle). That said, new versions of any product have issues sometimes but the loss of propulsion on the highway is extremely concerning. Hopefully Volvo comes through and irons this all out like they did for me.

What we did was more labor intensive and a function of these kinds of tools not existing (initial dot-com days). We would read the tech press, etc. and identify companies that might have a use for our tech. Then we would email the top person (guessing their email address usually - and most companies use a small number of variations for addresses) with a custom written, but short, tailored pitch to why they could use us and see if they wanted to talk. No pitch deck or attachments. Literally 2-3 sentences. Something that if even someone is going to quickly delete, something in those 2-3 sentences might catch their eye and make them reply instead of delete. We landed customers like Google (who we ended up later suing - that is a different tale), Doubleclick (who ended up being bought be Google), PayPal, Xbox, and a bunch of others through this method.

Happy to chat more. Startups are hard and all of us should help one another out to make the road a little less hard if possible. Keep at it - I know you'll get there. Hard work will get you there, shortcuts (usually) won't.

The business was very valuable across a lot of industries - gambling, encryption, advertising, security, adult entertainment, etc. - so there was a lot of demand that also helped smooth out the demand up/down cycles. If one market was cold, another was hot. But basically it's a lot of work and a lot of hand-to-hand combat. This is the best way to learn and get passionate customers. Show up, sell to them, and convince them they need you. You'll learn so much by doing this. And don't use the excuse that you're an introvert or not good at selling. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you need to learn and improve. No one is the best at anything on day one - you won't be either. But you'll get there if you keep at it.

Being the absolute best in the market meant that even having much more better funded competitors ($50m+ for competitors against our $12m in funding) meant we tended to win all the time. And before you ask, if I had this to do over again now, I could do this company for a LOT less money given how commoditized things are. I can tell you the time I almost spent $1m on a storage array until I found a cheaper vendor for $250k. Oh, that storage array was for 1TB of storage. So yeah.

Feel free to ask me anything. If there are enough people who have questions and want to do a chat I'd be happy to host a video call and get peppered with whatever questions you might have.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43325473

Points: 2

# Comments: 1