Hacker News: simantel

New comment by simantel in "SpaceX S-1"

simantel — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:50:20 +0000

Total market funds like VTSAX (the largest mutual fund in the world) will have to buy it as well.

New comment by simantel in "Ask HN: Go all in on startup idea, or stay W2"

simantel — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:05:52 +0000

> not having a network to bounce ideas off of or even try the app makes that part difficult to go from 0 to 1

This wouldn't change if you quit your job.

Keep your job, stop building, and start talking to potential customers.

New comment by simantel in "Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own"

simantel — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:18:44 +0000

How can someone steal MIT-licensed software? The license says:

Permission is hereby granted [...] to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software [...]

If you don't want other people to be able to sell it, don't use an MIT license.

New comment by simantel in "A ngrok-style secure tunnel server written in Rust and Open Source"

simantel — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:45:06 +0000

Wow I had no idea ngrok had raised $50M, that's wild!

New comment by simantel in "What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)"

simantel — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 18:25:00 +0000

purple.com had a similar page for years, and eventually the mattress company rolled up with a dumptruck load of cash

New comment by simantel in "OpenAI should build Slack"

simantel — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:43:10 +0000

IBM has ~300k employees and uses Slack.

New comment by simantel in "React vs. Backbone in 2025"

simantel — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 16:54:14 +0000

Don't forget Underscore!

New comment by simantel in "Behind the scenes of Bun Install"

simantel — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:59:48 +0000

Node also has a built-in server and SQLite these days though? Or if you want a lot more functionality with just one dependency, Hono is great.

New comment by simantel in "U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier"

simantel — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:09:35 +0000

Who do you want to hear from that you're not seeing make statements? Hakeem Jeffries? Chuck Schumer? Ken Martin?

New comment by simantel in "Ask HN: Tools for Crossword Puzzle Generation?"

simantel — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:58:58 +0000

I had no luck generating full-size, NYT-style puzzles, but was able to generate 5x5 minis!

I pre-defined a handful of layouts (minis generally just have corners blacked out), and brute-forced puzzles with all 4 or 5-letter words (depending on the space available, given the blacked-out squares) using a word list from Wordnik. I used an LLM to generate clues.

New comment by simantel in "Tell HN: Somebody please make a faster task management system"

simantel — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:34:31 +0000

Have you checked out Linear (https://linear.app)?

New comment by simantel in "The Coming Robot Home Invasion"

simantel — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 17:57:31 +0000

$300k puts you in the 94th percentile for household income, so objectively no, it's not that common.

In tech though, especially in the Bay Area, it feels like the norm.

New comment by simantel in "The Coming Robot Home Invasion"

simantel — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:55:22 +0000

Yeah $1,000 a month would be $250 a week, which is 2-3 person hours of a housecleaner or landscaper's time, so like a 2 person crew for an hour or 90 minutes.

If you and your spouse each make $150k (so $300k household income), paying 8% of your income ($24k/year) to have 6 extra hours a week to spend with your kids seems like a fair trade.

Two people working in tech could easily be making more like a $5-600k household income though, at which point $24k is only 4-5%.

New comment by simantel in "The Coming Robot Home Invasion"

simantel — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:08:39 +0000

At $250/visit, that's just weekly landscaping and housecleaning. More than I pay for myself (we have a housecleaner that comes monthly), but not unreasonable, especially for a well-paid dual-income household.

Re: Your compensation, Levels can be eye opening: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Microsoft,Google,Am...

New comment by simantel in "Ask HN: How Hard Is $10K MRR in a B2C SaaS?"

simantel — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:49:00 +0000

At that point it's not really B2C, but dual-funnel?

New comment by simantel in "Ask HN: How Hard Is $10K MRR in a B2C SaaS?"

simantel — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 23:30:05 +0000

Contrast that with B2B where churn rates are generally <10% (or better yet, net-negative revenue churn) and LTV is often $10k+, and you can see why it's a lot more appealing.

New comment by simantel in "Ask HN: How Hard Is $10K MRR in a B2C SaaS?"

simantel — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 23:27:48 +0000

At $15/month with 10% churn (which would be an unbelievably good churn rate for a paid B2C product) would make your LTV $150. An optimistic conversion rate from visitor to paid would be like 2% (imagine you convert 20% of visitors to a trial, and 10% of those to paid). In this incredibly optimistic world, you break even paying $3 to acquire a visitor.

Congrats you have a money printing machine!

More realistically though, you'll have like 33% monthly churn, $45 LTV, and 0.5% visitor-to-paid conversion. In that case you break even at $0.22 per visitor, which is a lot harder to make work.

The game is building a valuable product with good onboarding and retention, then finding ad creative that works. It's not easy!

New comment by simantel in "NautilusTrader: Open-source algorithmic trading platform"

simantel — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 19:41:34 +0000

The Medallion Fund does use a better strategy than REIF. It only worked up to a certain scale where they started moving the market though, which is why they ended up kicking out outsiders.

REIF just lets them use Medallion as marketing while getting those sweet AUM fees on a massive fund.

New comment by simantel in "Ask HN: Should I pay for marketing to this B2C SaaS product? (~8% paying rate)"

simantel — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 15:01:59 +0000

If your visitor-to-paid conversion rate is actually 1.5% (12% of 13%), with an LTV of $23 you break even at $0.34 per per click.

And again, I'd expect the conversion rate of ad-driven traffic to be quite a bit lower than that from organic word of mouth traffic, but worth testing out!

New comment by simantel in "Ask HN: Should I pay for marketing to this B2C SaaS product? (~8% paying rate)"

simantel — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 23:00:37 +0000

If we assume your LTV is $30 and a 5% conversion rate (since your organic traffic is likely to be higher intent than people who clicked an ad), a visitor is worth $1.50 on average.

The questions are:

1. What's your LTV?

2. What's the conversion rate of ad-generated traffic?

3. Can you buy clicks for less than $1.50 (or whatever the real number is)?