jdquey

> I wonder if CC companies have a way of punishing companies for this.

Yes, if they get enough people doing chargebacks. The challenge is most of these big co's seem to be in the "too big to punish" camp. This is both you need a large amount of chargebacks and perhaps they may not want to fire the companies (though this is speculative).

> At least in my circles, the sense of security from having charge-backs is a huge reason a lot of people even use CCs.

I'm with you that this is still important and valuable because many companies don't blacklist you. Furthermore I'd rather have that protection and testing a service which could be no service than no service at all.

Yes, it's a tool, as is all technology. But unlike woodshop or a metalwork class, there's no instructor. The other day I asked ChatGPT to give me a paragraph about hunting tech startups and I got back that it could not do so due to moral issues. While I get that some people have moral issues with hunting, I would venture to guess it's a small minority of people. It could easily give a statement without any big subjective bias, but it didn't do so. If it has issues with something fairly basic, how can we trust it to help senior citizens who are less tech savvy and go to it for simple unbiased medical advice?

Search is a hard problem, which increases the barriers to entry. But once a competitor has a method to crawl the Internet, that particular defensibility is gone.

I'd argue the data network effect is what gives them most of their defense. Now that they have a corner on what creates better search results, this is harder for others to defend against.

The Gap Analysis helped me get clarity on these five business questions:

Who are Decibite’s customers? How have Decibite acquired customers? How should Decibite be different than its competitors? How should Decibite price their product? To improve their product, where should Decibite focus moving forward?

After talking to Decibite's customers, I found out they are non-technical entrepreneurs. They gave me responses like, "I don't even know the technical side. I don't have the patience to learn the technical side. I’d rather do face-to-face work with the client. I'm all for outsourcing parts of the business you don't like, to do more of what you do like to do." Later on, I used this info to target Reddit's entrepreneur subreddit and use similar messaging on the website.

There wasn't much clarity how they acquired customers in the past beyond finding them on Reddit. Ideally my goal is to construct the customer journey by working backwards. One person mentioned they heard about Decibite in a Facebook Group, but I wasn't able to find which group they mentioned.

Lots of info in the article about how they different from competitors. Tl;dr - I positioned them as "Decibite offers 15% or faster hosting, guaranteed."

As for pricing the product, I found out Decibite was underpricing their hosting products. The business hosting plan was $5 CAD per month (about $3.75 USD). The data showed I could bump this up to $10 USD per month without losing growth, an increase of 167%. The VPS hosting plan was $10 CAD per month (about $7.50 USD). The data showed I could increase this to $25 USD per month without losing growth, an increase of 233%.

Wasn't much clarity on where to improve the product beyond the USP of faster hosting. Most of Decibite customers loved what they were doing. They just needed to improve their positioning and messaging.

Personal blog or business blog?

If personal, any self-hosted platform will work (WordPress, blogger.com, or Webflow).

If business, you can post articles on your site. Some well-known marketers only post once a month. But they do a ton of promotion + optimize to rank in search. From what I've observed, it's not necessary to keep a consistent posting schedule, but it helps in other ways like building up the habit. More in-depth content tends to increase search traffic. That's why you'll see bigger brands like Shopify write a ton of articles daily.

The advantage of using another platform is it gives you the possibility you'll get some of their traffic if you understand their system.

Hi HN!

I'm Jason, founder of GrowthRamp.io. Last April, I began working with Decibite, an early-stage web hosting startup. There's a lot of challenges growing from idea to scale, so I wanted to share my approach to early-stage product marketing for those with less than 1000 customers.

After reading the work of the ad executive Rosser Reeves, I wanted to test his theory on the power of a unique selling proposition (USP). The results were positive. In 6 months, Decibite's annualized revenue went up 127%, monthly traffic up 241%, and organic traffic 331%. In this article I am sharing everything I did to grow Decibite step-by-step. My goal is to give you a do-it-yourself manual of sorts as I know early-stage marketing can be a challenge.

I'd love to hear your feedback (pricing strategy, positioning, go-to-market strategy, etc) and personal experiences when it comes to launching a product. I'm eager to learn from others who've had success getting traction early on.

Thank you so much!

-Jason

People know exactly what to expect when they speak of the company "Dementia Village." They may not hear about the "Dementia care facility" if it's just subtext.

Further, this begins to give people the impression they specialize in Dementia patients only. You can't say the same for another name like "River Falls Village," as someone else suggested.

This is all part of the trade-offs in naming a business.

Ha! Hubspot got thrown under the bus because of their "unlimited vacation policy" - http://nypost.com/2016/04/03/millennials-are-being-dot-conne...

What genres have artists that do not sell anything outside of their music?

What if the music industry saw the sales of their music more as a marketing awareness play than an income generator?

Songs played on Youtube, Spotify, Pandora, etc. and their covers drives little direct revenue to the artist. I doubt that will change anytime soon.

However, that drives serious brand awareness to the artist, who could then sell other add-ons (music tickets, t-shirts, limited edition releases, etc)

Maybe I'm naive to the industry. But most business owners I know would kill for marketing that paid them and returned an ROI.

To be fair, he's not saying other topics don't have their major disputes. Just that they don't happen as often.

Agreed. I find it depends on how people go about talking about the subjects.

I think it has to do more with the potential impact it has on us and others. Not to mention how much broad appeal there is.

I don't know much about Javascript, but debates about how to properly use it aren't going to change a nation. Or the implication of someone's life, both now and after death.

People have a lot of opinions on baking. You don't need to be an expert to blog about it (e.g. probably 1/2 the mommy blogs out there). But again, who cares if you add organic cheese to your chili or sour cream? Very few. And most would remove it if not important.

With point 4, it's a sad reality when you feel you need to get drunk to have fun.

People are interested to know why things happen the way they do; looking at the card, I can completely understand the mistake as the formatting leads one to not really look at the true winner.

Kind of like getting a beat version of a book? Intriguing.

I'd be interested to hear what authors think about people reading over their shoulder while they write.

While I agree that has to suck, isn't that the risk of being an early adopter?

Don't get me wrong, spending the money from Google feels like it should be a safe bet. But life is not always going to work as we want it to.

Additionally, as pointed out, it isn't the end for Glass, just the Explorer program.

Am I missing something here?