http://LessAccounting.com does this too.

Great breakdown

Thank you!

I don't even know what "investing in people" means. We're a small team, our newest employee has been with us for 3 years.

Having met most of the LessEverything guys, I'd definitely say they know what they are doing.

It's very hard to generalize pricing, we're $36/mo which is the top of our market with pricing.

Thanks Dan, GrooveHQ.com is sweet!

You win.

I'm sure you have, congrats, but the vast majority of people aren't selling impulse buys targeting developers.

Good try, but not an impulse buy and doesn't target devs. Actually, very few devs would be attracted to the product.

Any particular reason you aren't revealing your product, given that you've already posted about it on HN?

Posted about it under a different handle. This is my "venting" handle. I didn't want to talk about the product under my real handle for competitive reasons. The amount of money that we're making is not immediately obvious to outsiders.

But then how do we know you aren't just making this statement up?

Which would you find more important: protecting your ~$5mil business or proving to anonymous people on the internet you're not lying? Food for thought.

If you're not going to back up your claim, why tell people you're making $5mil at all?

Just a day ago, there was a topic of people sharing their earnings. Half of them preferred to stay anonymous for the same reason.

Why not rant over them, but only this guy who simply pointed out, that HN is not useless for marketing the product.

Again congrats on your successes, I don't think hackernews should be a marketing tactic for most businesses but it could probably work for a small select few. (Github, Sublime Text, Twilio, SendGrid etc.)

Understandable. Are there any non-identifying details you're able to provide that might elucidate what separates your business from those who are unable to achieve such success from posting on HN? Do you think the HN post itself was critical to your success, or would it have been just the same if you'd been featured on Reddit, TechCrunch, Pando, Lifehacker, NYT, etc?

Sure!

The product is priced highly ($10k minimum) and provides a tremendous amount of value. We only need ~350 customers to get to $5M. (The serviceable market is something like 10M in the US alone, so it's not very niche either).

I think HN gave us a great launching pad, and because we have a lot of friends who read HN, it was easy to push our product announcement to the front page. Wouldn't have been easy to do on Reddit. Techcrunch still won't cover us :) That said, we've been covered by larger outlets than Techcrunch and yeah, they have a similar effect to HN.

Oh no! <puts gun to head>

Getting Basecamp linked up with any mention of Ruby on Rails helps too. Outliners (like 37Signals) work hard and do great work but they're not the standard we should compare ourselves to. Well unless you always want to fall short and feel like shit.

1) Creating any business is hard, unless you sell blue meth. 2) Creating two businesses is even harder (bootstrapping + consulting to make a living). 3) Technical hurdles are getting easier but rarely does the best product win. Marketing is hugely more important that product, although I wish that wasn't true.

I suspect you'll find even the meth business is tricky. Indeed, I believe there's a popular TV series about it.

Serously, Breaking Bad is an excellent primer on entrepreneurship. It covers everything: distribution, marketing, negotiation, finding business partners, scaling, exit strategies...