Startup Lessons Learned

I built a journal-over-email app that has been a profitable side business since day one. Defining "profitable" is necessary, I think - in this case it's covering it's own costs + more. This isn't my full-time gig, so I'm not counting any sort of hourly rate for my own time. The MVP is something I built over a long weekend, and I occasionally work on it while my wife and I watch TV/movies (so the time investment hasn't been too drastic, and the alternative is $0/hr).

The app is called Dabble Me (https://dabble.me) and you can read about the inspiration and costs to run here: https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/increase-your-happiness-with-daily-journaling-8109b0700506#.bbzx2grd9

Today (18mos since launch) it's generating around $500/mo in passive income. I played around with a few different pricing models. The first was a "donate whatever you can" for a few pro options (did not generate what I expected), the next was a pretty lenient freemium model (lacked the upgrades), and what seems to be working best is a very stringent freemium model.

A big part of Dabble Me and my passion for the project arises from this being a "scratch your own itch" build. I want this service to exist more than anyone else...so I built it and charged others to use it. That seems to be a theme that has a higher success rate than others.

Sure. We simply emailed other YC founders asking if they had advice on the interview process.

The questions are no secret. It's really only 3 questions: 1. what are you working on. 2. How do you grow. 3. How does this become a billion dollar company.

Articulating the problem, how it scales and is defensible is key.

Here are a few links we used

- http://henrikzillmer.com/dos-and-donts-at-the-y-combinator-interview
- http://blog.trak.io/ycombinator-our-interview-experience-after-flying-5351-miles-for-10-minutes/
- https://medium.com/@octal/maximizing-your-chances-of-getting-into-y-combinator-summer-2014-b0a75aa7401f#.ysammbhed
- https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/we-just-interviewed-at-ycombinator-heres-the-full-transcript-187312cd2cf5#.2o9l3aimh

OT I was looking for attribution for a little more context but the only clue comes from the footer:

“This article was first published in Medium and appeared in VentureBeat & Business Insider”

I get the syndication and the other outlets using this content at the time it was written (2016). There’s just something very dishonest about the slapping the words on a page with some stock images 6 years later though.

I don’t really have a point - maybe it would be better to link to the original medium (I know) post though?

https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/why-i-turned-down-500k-pissed-off-my-investors-and-shut-down-my-startup-2645c4ca1354

Edit: on the other hand the article itself is very honest. And it’s an interesting question.

Is really hard to sell something to the hotels, in our own experience: https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/our-real-love-are-business-travelers-e98c98080e61

But if is something not so hard to manage, i think that you could find some Wordpress Themes for Hotels and to talk with the developers of each one and works with them in the integration using WP.

Another strategy is connecting directly in Linkedin with: Ecommercer or Revenue Managers.

Best!