
Ask HN: Who is running a profitable productized service business? - vinrob92
Hey guys,<p>I am a non-technical entrepreneur interested in building startups.<p>During my studies I grew a profitable, $250k&#x2F;year productized service business (an online letting agency for international students) and I am now doing the same but for design services ($12.5k&#x2F;month in revenue currently)<p>I was wondering if any other HN&#x27;ers are running a productized service business or if you know any examples. In addition, I would love to hear your thoughts on the future of productized service business in the era of automation &#x2F; AI and whether we have a chance of serving on the long term!<p>Thanks!
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niko001
I run IdeaCheck.io [0] where we try to validate startup ideas by running a
survey within the target audience and develop a report based on the results.
We've automated everything that we were able to automate so that we can spend
our energy on the 'important' bits that provide the most value to our clients.

Especially in design, I think that there will continue to be a market for
both, automation and individualized services. Customers who don't want to
spend a lot of money are happy with self-service automated tools like Canva or
Logojoy, but I believe that creativity (coming up with a "clever" logo that
stands out) will be one of the last areas to be automated away.

[0] [https://ideacheck.io](https://ideacheck.io)

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TaylorGood
Well done. Would you mind sharing details for your design-related productized
service?

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vinrob92
Sure! My service is called Manypixels
([https://www.manypixels.co](https://www.manypixels.co))

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SirLJ
I am running stock trading robots in the cloud and they are fully automated
and AI based in the decision making...

Essentially it is a productized service business with only one client -
myself... and the future is great!

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justaguyhere
could you share more? what kind of stocks do you trade, do you trade crypto
etc? Of course, as much as you are willing to share without giving away your
secret sauce, that is

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SirLJ
Sure, it would work perfectly for crypto, because of the constant volatility,
but there is no way in hell I am going to transfer quarter or half a million
to one of those exchanges, where it can be hacked, stolen, etc and there is
not government protection to get my money back...

That's why I focus on on high quality / volume stocks traded on the major
stock exchanges and I am using the APIs (provided by the well know discount
brokers), been doing it for years and the compounding is what makes it worth
while...

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odonnellryan
How have you performed against the market the last year? Let's just say a
well-balanced portfolio, maybe a little risky, returned ~11% last year.

A portfolio with just equities in varying sectors, I think a good number is
probably around 20% return for 2017. Not extremely high-risk assets, but a
reasonable amount in small cap, em, and international equities.

Did you return greater than 20% last year? If so, that is quite remarkable in
my opinion!

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SirLJ
On average my returns have been in the double digits and much better than the
market 20%, even with back to back losing years - for some reason I am losing
money at the bottom of the market cycles, when the market starts to rebound...

I find it easier to have those kind of returns with small account (less than
5M/10M lets say), more than this and you are starting to move the market when
placing trades, so it is much harder and cannot be back tested properly...

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odonnellryan
I'll be honest and say I don't believe you, because there's only three likely
scenarios in my mind if you're telling the truth:

1) You are extremely smart, much more brilliant than people working at larger
funds

2) You got extremely lucky with your strategy

3) Neither of these, it's actually "just that easy" to make money with these
trading strategies

None of these even approach the likelihood of it not being true... sorry. I
don't mean to be negative, it's just, to me seems very dangerous to preach
"you can make money in the market, too!" and anyone, in my experience, who
says that has something to sell :)

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SirLJ
Frankly I don't care, because I am not looking for customers, investors or
employees :-)

And I truly believe everyone can be a doctor, professional athlete, successful
entrepreneur or stock market speculator, you just have to put the work
required...

Don't remember saying it was "easy", but for sure it is one hell of rewarding
hobby and not hard to start, get some data, small linux system and start
testing...

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odonnellryan
I've built a few algo trading bots. There are a lot of challenging problems
and it's very rewarding, just no direct financial reward.

I was focusing on pure technical analysis, so maybe I was doing something
wrong, but there weren't any strategies that I saw would work. No statistical
analysis that I could do of the data could give me any insight. Testing out
theories did not work, either!

I didn't use ML or anything, research I did there didn't seem like it made
sense to look into.

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SirLJ
Welcome to my world :-)

I was like you and took me few years to realize the technical analysis and
candle shticks simply do not work... All those books, online trading courses
and coaches are simply charlatans making money from teaching and not from
trading... Maybe it did work in ancient Japan, but today even if you find
someone crazy enough to sell you a working trading strategy, it will be
quickly arbitraged by all the people using it... One advice: first focus on
risk management; even with marginal trading strategy, with good risk
management, you can still make constantly money in the stock market...

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odonnellryan
Risk management barely answers the question. I can sell when I go below a
threshold, but how do I buy back in?

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SirLJ
Obviously you need a strategy, otherwise the whole exercise is pointless...

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odonnellryan
Well, yes. But then that brings us back to the question, how to determine a
strategy?

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SirLJ
OK, this is how I did it: I went and back tested any trading strategy I could
find, of course they all failed, but it gave me the feel for the market and I
started having my own ideas and this is basically how I found my edge...

Always remember what my good friend from high school Mark Twain once said:
"The harder I work, the luckier I get." ;-)

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odonnellryan
People also just get flat lucky, all the time!

