
Selling Juicer - timschu
https://www.goddamnyouryan.com/blog/selling-juicer/
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amitdangerpatel
Entertaining anecdote that didn’t make it into the blog post: people sometimes
mistook us (juicer.io) for Juicero, you know, the infamous $400 machine that
squeezed a juice packet. The day the Juicero news blew up, we got some
especially hateful posts on our Facebook page.

~~~
pteraspidomorph
That's what I thought I was going to read about before clicking through to the
article! (I didn't quite remember the thing's name.)

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blaisio
This article is much higher quality than most of the stuff that gets to the
front page. Awesome stuff.

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robocat
> Being employed by someone is by its very definition, an exploitative
> relationship, even if your job is great. Your employer can only afford to
> hire you if you make more money than you cost [] so no matter what, you are
> getting paid less than your true value.

Weird fallacy. If I am paid to dig ditches in Haiti, is my true value
different from digging ditches in Monaco?

The amount someone brings in depends on their context: what organisation, what
country, what city.

We don’t have a “true value”.

~~~
geomark
It's a hoot when you hear someone say something like that. I mean, nobody
works in a vacuum. The boss used her capital and labor to put in place all the
resources that enable you to work, and has to use his capital and labor to
maintain a going concern, and deserves to earn something for their labor as
well as a return on risked capital which is a risk you as the worker don't
take. I'm pretty happy to take a salary and go home at the end of the day
without having to worry about losing my entire investment due to the vagaries
of business or an employee's bad attitude.

~~~
missosoup
> The boss used her capital and labor to put in place all the resources that
> enable you to work

Capital accrued through the exploitation (yes, that's the legal and technical
term) of labour.

There is 0 evidence that we wouldn't have a more productive society overall,
if capital was more uniformly distributed across society; enabling more
individuals to work for themselves or in co-ops.

Capitalist organisation structures are a pyramid with a very small few at the
top collecting the vast majority of generated value. I don't think even the
staunchest capitalism proponents can argue that a CEO no matter how good, is
generating millions of times more value than a line worker at any org. Yet
that's the kind of income deltas we see.

And we already know what happens when capitalist orgs reach a certain size.
Rent seeking. They direct their resources towards preventing anyone else from
competing in their niche through regulation and other barriers to entry. 'Why
don't you go off and do your own thing?' Because it takes several million
dollars to overcome the barrier to entry and even take a shot in any
profitable industry. Exactly the kind of capital that average people don't
have with the currently massively skewed wealth distribution curve.

If everyone suddenly had 5m in their bank accounts, you can bet your ass of
millions of people would quit their jobs and go off to start their own things.

tl;dr: your employer isn't doing you any favours by hiring you and exploiting
your labour. The fact that they happen to possess the capital necessary to
profitably exploit you while you don't, doesn't turn them into a charity.

~~~
divbyzer0
So can we equeate the term 'offering employment' to 'offering exploitation'?

Unless exploited by force (slavery). The employed/expolited are free to find
their true value by alternavtive means? Find another job - less exploitive, or
make your own job.

There are many problems with capitalism, I would argue taxation, or more
appropriately lack of taxation is a greater concern.

As for the scenario if everyone had 5m in their accounts in the morning, only
the most foolish would quit their jobs as inflation would render the windfall
as null and void.

We all cannot be equally well-off. Value will always flow, and eventually
concentrate.

~~~
missosoup
57% of all americans have less than 1 paycheck worth of savings in their bank.
They don't have the option to shop around for other work or invest in personal
growth to attain their 'true value'.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery)

> We all cannot be equally well-off. Value will always flow, and eventually
> concentrate.

And eventually revolutions topple the structures where value has concentrated
when wealth disparity gets too big, and the cycle begins again. After several
risen and fallen civilisations/empires, maybe its time to try something other
than the one strategy that we for sure know the outcome of.

We don't need to be all equally well off, but we do need to compress the top
and bottom 10% of the income disparity curve. No one on this planet should
have billions of dollars in personal wealth, and no one on this planet should
be too poor to afford shelter healthcare and food.

~~~
divbyzer0
You've changed your comment while I was typing: youu mentioned a delta between
CEOs and average workers. But we're likely to share common ground. Your new
comment regarding revolutions. Not so fast!

The Chinese sufffered the same problems of inequallity and the plebs made the
same comparisons - for centuries.

So a delta is to be expected, the magnatude I'm not sure if that matters as
CEOs are outliers. I think the point you are leaning to is:

despite working full time, the average US resident cannot afford what we
perceive to be a 'good quality of life' (many people from developing countries
will find that statement hard to believe). This is subjective, and not likely
an issue of labour being exploitative.

It is a question on what type of a society Americans want (and vote for),
which is an entirely different discussion covering taxation, education, health
care, corpotate political donations/lobbying etc.

From a market perspective the delta represents supply and demand.

~~~
missosoup
I didn't change my comment. The only edit I made was to separate a para for
formatting. Maybe you were reading something else.

From a market perspective the delta has nothing to do with supply/demand.
Microeconomics and supply/demand theory doesn't really have any answers to the
fact that wealth and power tends to acrete. The textbook answer will be along
the lines of 'but then smaller more agile entities will arise that displace
the incumbents' but the incumbents have long ago figured out strategoes such
as rent seeking to prevent that.

Capitalism is fundamentally broken in several clear ways:

* It assumes that individuals are rational actors who are sufficiently informed to make generally optimal self-interest decisions

* It assumes that there's a force or mechanism to modulate or prevent acretion of wealth. So far the only such mechanism historically has been bloody revolutions

* It assumes that we know the 'true value' of things including externalities. The climate crisis is a huge example of how utterly wrong that is. If car and fossil fuel costs accounted for externalities, they'd cost somewhere in the vicinity of 10-100x more than they currently do. Would that have prevented the boom that led to current quality of life in the developed world? Probably. Would it also have prevented an existential threat to us? Certainly.

The pursuit of continuous growth has become clearly a self-terminal strategy
that not only failed multiple times in history before, but is threatening our
entire species via anthropogenic climate change now.

I'm advocating that we stop pursuing continuous growth and focus on collapsing
the insane wealth disparity and dismantling the structures that have acreted
unprecedented wealth and power into the hands of <100 people worldwide.

Someone who acreted sufficient wealth to extract profit from your labour more
effectively than you can alone, is not doing you favours, is not being
charitable, but merely exploiting you to acrete more wealth to exploit more
people ad infinitum.

~~~
kkarakk
It's only threatening our species coz space research was quite purposefully
stalled while old world global political tensions were simmering at their
hottest.

Once there is an off-planet colony i expect the resource pressure that is
starting to show will ease up considerably. Capturing asteroid/mining other
planets for resources - there are a lot of ways for things to course correct.
Everything we're facing right now is coz of an artifical bottleneck in our
species expansion

It will also render existential threats moot coz there will be off planet
resources to rebuild a civilization in case things do go catastrophically
wrong.

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tunesmith
I wonder if there are common best practices on throttling growth for a
lifestyle company or bootstrapped startup? I guess it can be as simple as
turning off new registrations for periods of time or only allowing invitations
at arbitrary times. Has this worked well for any SaaS businesses? Once you hit
your financial goals, it could help forestall burnout, but I suppose there's a
lot of risk there too - if there's enough unmet demand, someone could replace
you.

~~~
trevyn
1) Turn off any explicit advertising/marketing/drip/promotion systems, even if
they’re automated and profitable — they’re hacks that distort your view of the
product. Let people sign up, but organic word-of-mouth only.

2) Consider a more relaxed pace of life. Travel widely. The startup world is a
microcosm, and if you haven’t personally experienced and understood _how
people live_ outside of it for several months or years, it’s easy to overwork
yourself and think it’s completely normal. There’s a reason “digital nomad” is
a thing — a recurring story is that people try it out on a whim or by chance
and then get absolutely hooked.

3) If you still want to invest time, what are _you_ personally interested in
building into the product?

I think the traditional “talk to your customers” is great for staying grounded
and understanding pain points, but you can get stuck in a local maximum. As an
engineer/product person, you have a unique insight into what is technically
possible in your space, which new technological capabilities will become
relevant as time progresses, and the general direction of the market over
longer time spans. This is an opportunity to be a long-term thinker and focus
on building features or related products that are specifically targeted at
highly technical early adopters, so that by the time the idea becomes
mainstream, you’ll have a substantial head-start.

Be a craftsman and use your skill to more deeply address the problem space.

If you’ve hit sustainability, are as lean as most bootstrapped lifestyle
companies, and churn is not a major issue in general, I think the risk of
being replaced by new contenders is actually a very slow-motion risk — people
are not so good at changing their habits. :-)

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leetrout
I would love to have some reference to selling amount.

It sounds like it was easily over $1m but was it 2-4? 5-10? Very curious.

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dabeeeenster
5x revenue is very good going in this sort of scenario

~~~
leetrout
Right, that is in the article, but there is no mention of their revenue unless
I missed something.

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glofish
Thanks for the writeup - it is great to hear stories of getting bootstrapped
from zero - one customer at time.

We do live in wondrous times when this doable for many more people that
previously was possible.

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natrik
Great article.

Important takeaways for me -

`Being employed by someone is by its very definition, an exploitative
relationship, even if your job is great. Your employer can only afford to hire
you if you make more money than you cost (again, with a few exceptions of
course) so no matter what you are getting paid less than your true value.`

`It’s much, much easier to get to the top, or near the top of the wordpress
plugin directory than it is google (essentially it’s making sure the
description of your plugin has the right keywords, and then you’ll be there
essentially instantly).`

~~~
Benjammer
>Your employer can only afford to hire you if you make more money than you
cost (again, with a few exceptions of course) so no matter what you are
getting paid less than your true value.

This seems like a somewhat simplistic way to view a company. The amount you
"make" for the company isn't the same thing as your "true value," because that
isn't a real concept. The value you are able to provide changes based on
context and objectives. It's leverage in the moment, not "value" in some
inherent sense. Do you think every employee in the world should be able to
just quit their job and suddenly realize the same return without changing
their costs at all?

~~~
grrowl
I code, and probably get paid less than I output in value; but what I output
would not be nearly as valuable if not for the others that contribute to the
company. My boss, having created the initial value, and other investors and
shareholders take the overage.

~~~
jcims
This is so important. I used to actually hate the sales team at my very first
'real job'...so much that any time I had to go to the bathroom I would walk
down two flights of stairs to pollute the air on their floor. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, this dislike came from their tendency to stretch everything and over-
commit to get a sale. It ended up souring my opinion of the entire profession
and I had zero respect for it...until I tried it myself. I went through this
process a few times until I really came to an understanding of how many
different personalities and proclivities it takes to successfully run any
company of appreciable size.

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Thorentis
As somebody thinking of starting a SaaS soon, this was a great and insightful
read. The one thing this does confirm for me, is that the best ideas are those
that solve problems you already have (or create tools or services you wish you
had, etc.) Well done!

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tomlagier
Really interesting post, thanks for highlighting all of the inflection points
in your journey to sale. Inspired me to think really hard about what pain
points I have when I freelance.

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Yuioup
I seriously read the url as "God Damn Your Yan"

~~~
nkrisc
Is that not it? Now I feel dumb because I can't see what else it could
possibly be.

~~~
miloignis
I believe the end is "you Ryan"

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majortennis
what no numbers? come on

