Ask HN: How profitable is your productised service? - cronjobma
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mtmail
We gave up. The business was selling geographical data services. Most clients
wanted sample data and far over 50% of the time spend was creating those, so
we'd invest a lot of time and still risk the client bailing. Any strategy to
sell regular updates (e.g. every three month re-extract the road network of a
country) didn't work out. All clients prefered "let's see how we use the first
extract first" and never came back. With one exception all clients wanted
different data and not enough scripts/systems/logic was reusable. On top the
largest clients took longest to pay their bills.

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mtmail
What is your experience? Have you productised your own service (referring to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14953847))?

I notice you ask many AskHN questions, sometimes multiple per day, but don't
share insights or seem to read the answers. Referring to
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15017173](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15017173)

~~~
CamelCaseName
Hopefully I am not misinterpreting your second line, but asking good questions
that elicit insightful responses is a positive contribution, even if the
author doesn't share their own insights or read the responses.

~~~
mtmail
Good open question are indeed excellent discussion material, no doubt.
/r/askreddit (100x the answers) shows that every day. Even when some popular
questions come up regularly.

I'm just puzzled why even with trivial questions like "what 5 websites do you
visit everyday?" or "what skill do you wish to have?" or the more interesting
"What is your biggest business expense besides salaries?" a submitter wouldn't
share their own answer. And then (sometimes) within the same hour ask the next
question.

~~~
mtmail
Follow-up after checking other submissions:

On the AskHN page right now 28 of 30 submissions are questions. 11 times the
submitter wrote an introduction usually describing their own viewpoint. Only
three times the submitter commented, of those only one was an answer.

That means I shouldn't be surprised, it's normal.

