

I quit my job, and am building Tindie fulltime - emilepetrone
https://tindie.com/blog/i-have-some-news/

======
OzzyB
Hi Emile! So I just poked around on your site and see that you started a
99designs campaign to get a "dog mascot" logo...

This is the one you should go with -- the ones designed by WorkHorse; I would
totally put one of those on my Macbook! The others? Not so much.

[http://99designs.com/illustrations/contests/illustration-
tin...](http://99designs.com/illustrations/contests/illustration-
tindie-162449?filter=eliminated&sorting=rating&show=shortlisted)

[http://99designs.com/illustrations/contests/illustration-
tin...](http://99designs.com/illustrations/contests/illustration-
tindie-162449/entries/32)

You can thank me later :)

~~~
emilepetrone
Thanks! I think you just tipped that one into the lead. You mean the more
developed one, not the simple version right?

~~~
OzzyB
Well, I think the one that's a little more detailed works better and is more
"roboty" and has more charm/character etc.

The other minimal versions are nice too -- perhaps you could use a less
detailed version for small 16px icon sizes etc. i.e no bolts.

But, hey as long as its one of them!

And congrats on your bold move & initial success :)

------
emilepetrone
Some data:

-1 developer (me)

-$646 transacted in July

-Over $1800 transacted last month

-Shipped to 20 countries & every continent except Antartica

-Avg 30k visitors a month the last 2 months

~~~
notatoad
If you're taking 5%, that means a gross revenue of $90 for the month of
August? Seems a little early to be quitting your day job.

~~~
RobAley
For many projects, if you wait until you're profitable before you jump in full
time, you may never take that step. Some projects just need full-time
attention to get them to the point where they pay your mortgage. Presumably
(or rather, hopefully!) Emile has looked at the current revenue growth and
(with the attention he can give it full-time) projected the revenue he thinks
it will generate in X months, X months being the end of whatever runway
bootstap/funding money he has, and has concluded that at that point he will be
able to pay his wages.

Statistically speaking he will fail, and I'm sure he has already thought of
that and has a plan B in mind incase that happens. (Thats my devils advocate
speaking, its a good idea and I have no other information about Emile, so he
may very well beat the odds and I hope he does).

~~~
emilepetrone
Thanks Rob! I figured it is growing, and should grow quicker if I am working
on it fulltime. If I kept at a job, that growth would be slower, a competitor
might emerge- who knows. Only thing that is certain is the data- site is
cranking so time to kick it into the next gear

------
mikepurvis
This is really cool. I have a project I'm working on now which I'll be listing
on there for sure. Shameless plug—it's a small IR receiver board which
provides input switching and volume control to a stereo amplifier. I'm using
it to upgrade a 1970s solid-state amp, but the intended user would be a
chipamp builder. The MCU is an atmega168/328, so it's completely hackable.

The site is down right now, but would there be a way in tindie to get a volume
commitment, a la Kickstarter? It would be great to be able to have a chunk of
cash upfront, to pay things like setup fees for PCB fab and assembly.

~~~
emilepetrone
Hey Mike, sound great! I'm actually working on that right now. So it should be
out in the next few weeks. - emile

------
hugs
Very thrilled about this! As a Tindie seller [1], I've had an excellent
experience so far. Congrats, emile!

I put this in an email to Emile earlier, but would like to say it here, too...
I think Tindie is _perfect_ for people like me. I don't have the time (yet!)
to dedicate a huge effort putting my projects up on Kickstarter. But by
putting the project up on Tindie, and having a cap on my inventory, I can
organically improve the project within my personal time constraints. I fully
expect to ramp up inventory over time, but it's nice I can start at one or two
items... and grow at a pace I'm comfortable with. Thank you so much for
creating the site!

[1]: <https://tindie.com/hugs/robot-that-plays-angry-birds/>

~~~
emilepetrone
Thanks Jason!

------
noonespecial
That's awesome. Tindie was one of those things that I found so cool that I was
actually a bit perturbed to find out that it was just someone's side project.
Some ideas just deserve more. Best of luck.

------
alecthomas
Congratulations.

You should now update your HN profile with pride, to read "Founder @ Tindie"
rather than "Engineer @ UrbanAirship" :)

~~~
emilepetrone
Oops fixed!

------
dangrossman
Every time I see someone announce a new startup on HN, and they can't keep a
blog online through a little spurt of traffic, it makes me think very poorly
of their business. That if they can't configure a web server to not fall over,
they can't program a stable, secure app either.

My own experience is that even the smallest Linode VPS, with an out-of-the-box
WordPress install, serving a blog live from the database without a cache
plugin, can handle all the traffic HN throws at even a #1 story on a work day
afternoon. All it takes is setting the Apache config such that it won't spawn
more processes than there's memory available, or using something lighter
weight than Apache in the first place.

I _know_ this is a foolish connection to make, that their ability to keep a
blog online isn't connected to the things that will actually determine whether
the business succeeds or fails, but I can't avoid thinking it nonetheless.

To turn this rant into something possibly useful, maybe some advice: it's
important to figure out the basics of setting up a web server, not because
it's a terrible thing for your blog to go down, but because you're losing out
on all the prospective users/customers that come with being linked to and
discussed on HN or other sites. Even if they can read a cached blog post,
you're probably less likely to get them to go visit the startup you're
blogging about during this short moment you have their attention.

~~~
patio11
Keeping WordPress up was a black hole of my time and talent, despite having
shipped applications with substantially higher performance requirements than
"Serve 20,000 visitors mostly static content over an eight hour period." This
is totally orthogonal to programming skill or creating things that solve
problems for customers.

The optimizations you need to make are fiddly black magic ("Your blog goes
down too often? #1 culprit: a _performance optimization called KeepAlive_ ",
"How many worker processes fit in 1 GB of RAM if each take ~20 MB on average?
Did you answer 48? Crashes a day later. Did you answer 36? Crashes a week
later. Did you answer 24? Crashes sporadically. Did you answer 20? Hasn't
crashed... yet." "Blog still going down? OK, let's break with every quickstart
guide on the Internet, throw out all the work you did for Apache, and switch
you to Nginx. Now we'll have _new_ failure modes!", "You incompetent
nincompoop! You just need to add caching. Oh, you already cache everything?
The KeepAlive issue can kill a blog hosting a simple static .txt file? Hmm,
good point... put Varnish in front of it! A nice, simple solution! And if that
doesn't work add cache to your caching so you've got caches for your
caches!").

There's no point at which WordPress announces "OK, I'm ready!" -- you just
pick your optimizations in advance then discover new requests-per-minute
numbers or access patterns or what have you which cause it to degrade or bloom
into a timed-out fireball of death.

Now I write a check every month for $200 to my hosting provider. Best money I
ever spent, because this has lead to a 100% decrease in me having to wake up
at 3 AM in the morning because Jimmy Wales decided to tweet a link to my blog.

~~~
jbigelow76

        Keeping WordPress up was a black hole of my time and talent, despite having shipped applications with substantially higher performance requirements than "Serve 20,000 visitors mostly static content over an eight hour period." This is totally orthogonal to programming skill or creating things that solve problems for customers.
    

Good point but if you go from being an employee to an entrepreneur you'll need
to pick up a lot orthoganal skillsets beyond programming: sys admin'ing, basic
accounting, copywriting, etc...

I recall you tweeted a few weeks back, the gist of it being "if all you want
to do is program you're better off being an employee".

That being said, congrats to the OP on taking the plunge, when I checked the
site was back up and and it looks like you've got a solid concept. Best of
luck to you.

~~~
wensing
Yes on learning new skills, but the nuance is that you quickly identify which
of those are not core to your business and offload/delegate them as soon as
possible.

------
ThomPete
Great work and don't mind the uptime critique.

Anyone who have launched know that shit happens sometimes and that it has
nothing to do with whether you have the ability or not.

Most people who know how to configure a server only do that (nothing wrong
with that btw), you do much more so of course sometimes things fucks up.

Congratulations on the great start, will be sure to let my electronic geek
friends know.

~~~
emilepetrone
thanks much appreciated!

------
adaml_623
Looks like it might have legs. I want to be able to limit myself to vendors on
my side of the Atlantic. Better filtering please.

~~~
emilepetrone
Great comment. I'll add a filter by country.

------
grumps
Seeing that I'm much more of a "builder" then I'm a creator, I really have to
admire someone who drops there job, to do something full time that hasn't
proven a source of income yet.

Personally I love the idea of the site. I'm not sure it has anything that I
would buy yet, but I'm still a huge fan of it. I keep looking for something
I'd want off there.

That being said, I'm not sure what the market is, out there for these kinds of
things.

~~~
emilepetrone
Thanks- yeah that is part of the gamble. Timing is never something people know
until you are in it.

------
vasco
Down for me at least. Cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Ftindie.com%2Fblog%2Fi-
have-some-news%2F)

~~~
emilepetrone
Yep, on it. Getting slammed by Hacker News and Reddit..double wammy

------
topbanana
Hi. This is a site I would use personally, if you could provide a meaningful
view for a European, filtering out items that sellers aren't prepared to post
to me. (Postage within Europe is quite cheap).

~~~
emilepetrone
On the top of my todo.. should be out in the next 24 hours

------
wizard_2
This is awesome! I think I know where I can offload my assembled older
projects when I'm done with them. =)

One note: When singing up you should redirect away from the registration page.

~~~
emilepetrone
Sounds good! Will do!

------
itmag
Does the site have some kind of "request commission" feature? Ie I can send
out a request for a specific gadget I need made and people can bid on the
project.

~~~
emilepetrone
On the way...

------
aimatt
Please, oh please, list the price in the list pages.

~~~
emilepetrone
I had it up there for a while, however it cuts down on pageviews. I think
people will see the price and not try to click the link to learn more about it
& the value/ why it is that price.

------
laserDinosaur
Tindie is one of the few websites I've seen on HN that actually got me
excited. Great idea, great execution. Best of luck!

------
yllus
I upvoted purely because of what a great website Tindie is. Congratulations on
the decision and best of luck!

~~~
emilepetrone
Thanks!

------
Kilimanjaro
That's a million dollar domain you got there.

Tindie, really catchy. I wish you the best.

~~~
emilepetrone
Thanks! Best $8 I've ever spent!

~~~
Kilimanjaro
Btw, start expanding your business to everything home made, so you can compete
with sites like etsy, in billion dollar markets.

Aim for the moon!

------
jmsduran
Very interesting site. Keep up the good work!

~~~
emilepetrone
much appreciated!

------
jdanoz
how are you managing the titles for the requests? I think you are saving items
in one table with unique id, but the url is with text/title. Are you looking
over a full-text indexed column for every request for an individual item?

------
noirman
Congratulation, Emile!

------
brianmwang
Congratulations on the jump, Emile :)

------
CanadaKaz
Good luck!

~~~
emilepetrone
Thank you!

------
imknight
congra, proudn00b !

~~~
emilepetrone
Thanks!

