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Ask HN: What are the most difficult aspects of running an online/app business?

17 points by aliston ↗ HN
For those who have significant income from side projects, apps, ecommerce sites, small businesses: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6431573) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467603) etc.

Particularly for those who have worked/work as a salaried software engineer and run a business, I'm curious how the work differs. Are there roles that you have been forced to take on that are particularly frustrating/exciting/challenging? What are the most difficult things that you have to deal with day in, day out? What are the most rewarding things?

4 comments

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digikk
I'm interested in this, too.
palidanx
I think one of things for me personally is learning to price things appropriately. As an engineer, I tend to want things for the cheapest price, because if things are too expensive, I'll code it myself.

However when I started my saas service, I totally underpriced my services. I realized that price sensitivity was much higher for my clients than I realized when i put away my cheapo software engineering mindset.

saasdude
customers: imagine a 50 something, single, white male from jersey. he asks you for a new feature and you explain that someday when you have time maybe. he launches in to a full tirade about being a paying customer and lets you know his whole frustration with the consumer experience. he has never done anything but work for someone else but yet he knows for certain how you should run your business. he takes it very personally that you don't value his impossible opinion and starts to send you creepy emails. the more you ignore him, the more he persists. forget it about a legal recourse. cops could give a shit. sure you can filter his emails, but the fact remains you have some old male obsessed and taking out his midlife crisis on you. im not joking when i tell you i literally have 5 guys like that.

also hard are partner relationships or supplier relationships where you don't have any clout. the uncertainty of internet biz in general. knowing google could throw you a curveball and not give two shits.

finally, competitors act in completely irrational and destructive ways because they're competitive and they just want to win. they're so driven they'll drop prices to zero when you could easily coexist. always worrying about stupid crap like that.

it sucks but it beats working for a dumbshit. i just want to be so rich one day that i can say fuck it all. that is my experience and very much how i feel.

redguava
To be successful, you can do nothing poorly. That's the trickiest bit.

If you do any of these poorly, you don't have much chance:

- Product Usefulness

- Usability

- Customer Support

- Pricing

- Advertising/Marketing

- Reliability (eg. uptime)

Just one of those being bad is enough to sink you. I think the hardest part is needing to not drop the ball on any of these things.

Don't just perfect one of them and hope it compensates the others. Our tendency is to work on the ones we're best at, but you just can't afford to neglect anything.