> I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks & giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.
It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.
It seems there's a lot of interest in gardening / food production among tech people. For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it's totally different from working inside with machines, but there are important and unexpected overlaps. For example if you have a solid understanding of the OSI model which informs your method of system design, you can easily move into gardening where knowledge of the layers of a forest plays a similar role. Having this experience in tech makes it easy to zero in on similar structural principles in gardening, learn about them, and apply that knowledge whereas many others clearly don't.
Just like a person who doesn't understand the value of a proper foundation in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won't first seek to build strong healthy soil, and they will constantly fight against nature rather than work with it, doing more work while getting fewer results.
As an aside, regarding onions: last year I cut off some green onion bottoms from the store and put them in the ground (including the little roots). They grew back and gave several more green onion harvests before winter set in, and now they're back on their own! Permanent green onion. You can do this with a number of plants, btw. Try it!
> It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.
My life pivoted on a similar moment of whimsy. When I saw the post about the first startup school way back in the day, I just randomly decided "you know what, it's on the other side of the country but I'll just sign up and figure it out". Ended up flying to Boston on a super cheap flight, crashing on my friends couch who was in grad school at MIT, and meeting Steve and Alexis (of reddit), and that's how I ended up working for reddit 18 months later.
Moments of whimsy are some of the most important. It was a moment of whimsy that led to me studying abroad in college, and another moment of whimsy that led me to meet my wife while I was there. Couldn't have been more than 5 total minutes of thoughts no more complicated than "yeah, I guess I'll give it a go" that shaped my entire life.
And yet, I can spend another 5 minutes in the grocery store agonizing over which of two near-identical bags of chips to buy. Funny how that goes.
Check survivorship bias. The name refers to deadly scenarios, but what is fundamental to it is a bias in reporting that depends on the outcome of interest. The concept was first hammered out observing that warplanes never got hit in the engines -- well, the ones that made it back at least. Some people thought the areas with the most damage should be protected. Wald thought otherwise and it's him who is remembered to this day. "Moments of whimsy" are like anti-aircraft ammo. They hit everywhere, randomly. But we only report those that are associated with a life change.
Isn't that just confirmation bias though? If you hadn't made those decisions you just as likely could have met someone else some other way, married them and been just as happy or successful.
Indeed. For me that moment was a single split second where I decided to email my would-be wife. I almost didn’t, but decided to anyway. Of course, I have no idea how life may have played out had I not made that decision but here I am now, some thousands of miles away from my home country, from country I grew up in and in a new place I call home with a little kiddo that makes every day worth living. Funny how a single moment decided all of this.
Well, I met my wife on a train, in 2009. I was supposed to be on a plane, and she lost the previous train, and jumped in a random car in the train I was in, and there was me. Go figure :)
> It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.
I posted a bitchy comment using a throwaway account on Reddit about ten years ago.
It directly led to me moving across the country, getting hired at Google, and finding myself in my dream job doing programming language stuff full-time.
Life is weird, man.
Also, Vidalias (and, really, all of the alliums) are wonderful.
I was working at EA at the time. I got into the game industry because I loved making games. But I wasn't on a game team at work (which was good, because it meant I had a sane work schedule). And EA's employment contract basically forbids you from doing hobby game stuff in your free time since they would own the results.
So here I was "in the game industry" and spending zero time actually making games. I posted a rant complaining about that.
Some random redditor said, basically, "I work at Google. If you're a decent C++ programmer, I'll put in a referral for you."
Meanwhile, my wife and I had taken a trip to the Pacific Northwest and decided we wanted to move to that area. I started looking for jobs at other game companies in Seattle. I flew out there to interview at ArenaNet. Since I had a referral, a Google recruiter expedited an interview at the Seattle office while I was in town. I wasn't very seriously considering Google, but I wasn't about to say no.
I bombed the ArenaNet interview. (I think the main sticking point was a question around the time complexity of adding an element to a growable array. I said it was constant, but couldn't effectively explained amortized complexity to them and they didn't seem to understand that amortized complexity existed at all.)
Wonder of wonders, I just squeaked through the Google one.
I ended up on a random project doing front-end programming in JavaScript because I had UI experience. I didn't care for the product and programming UI in JS is, uh, not my idea of a good time, so it wasn't super fun.
However, I randomly took a one-day improve class that Google offerred. There, I met another Googler on another project and we started talking about language nerd stuff. He later ended up forming a team to work on Traceur, which was a project to prototype language changes to JS. They were ramping up, and he remembered I was into language things, so I asked me to join.
That project wound down later so I went looking for other projects to join. Dart was ramping up then and went there. It's been a blast.
But, literally, if I hadn't posted a comment on reddit and taken this improv class, my whole career might be different. I might have left Google to rejoin the game industry or something else entirely.
I often marvel at the seemingly trivial events that greatly shape my life. Just thinking about my professional life, I have:
My first job out of college happened because I met and befriended one specific person in college (was there for 5 years).
My second job (and first startup) happened because I went to a 4-person dinner/game-night at a friend's (who I met at that first job) house, and talked to one of the other attendees who was interviewing at this company, and was willing to refer me (was barely there for a year and a half, but it fundamentally changed my view of work and employment).
Fast forward, and my current job (nearly 8 years now) happened because I checked an email account that I hadn't looked at in several years (and saw a recruiting email of a type I'd usually ignore), because I was trying to sign into some random account on the internet and I'd used that email address as the recovery account, many years before.
Obviously there was more to it than those single events, but each of those things were essential in opening up the opportunity in the first place.
My personal life and social circles often grew from similar simple, one-off, surprise events.
Yes! It's easy to regrow kitchen scraps and so few people know anything about it which is a shame. For anyone interested, I recommend the book "No-Waste Kitchen Gardening"[1] for some useful tips.
I'm moving to New York after 6 years in San Francisco in a similar moment of whimsy, next month, and I have only loosey-goosey reasons to do it.
It's weird to think about being on this side of a potential life changing choice, but it's really not nearly as big of a deal to me (I'm keeping my fully remote-friendly job) as some people seem to think it is!
I really hope more people do it more often! It's a very effective and wholesome way to foster understanding and spreading of good ideas, and dampening the damning effects of a lot of tribalism in today's political climate.
I also planted the store bought green onions and it worked fine until the aphids showed up
- how do you control them? (they reproduce profusely and asexually basically cloning themselves)
It wasn't long ago when the knowledge that food is made of plants that grow on dirt was common knowledge, not a life hack. Schoolchildren used to grow plants from seed as homework.
> Schoolchildren used to grow plants from seed as homework.
They still do, depending on where you live. My daughter brought home a sunflower seed from a field trip last spring. By the end of summer we had a 7ft tall sunflower growing next to our deck. This year we have several more already sprouting in that area.
It also had a side effect of really enhancing the plot of pretty terrible clay soil we plucked it in. Lots of herbs we attempted (and failed) to grow last year are already starting to flourish this year in that spot.
Just look at the dignity here in this humble creation he has made!
> [...] she interrupted me mid-sentence and hollered in exaltation to her husband: ” THE VIDALIA MAN! THE VIDALIA MAN! PICK UP THE PHONE!”
The happiness I feel reading that is so sublime. His work is needed and appreciated -- and what a humble trade with a beautiful simplicity to it. It is repeatable; others could do this too! Imagine what our communities would be like if most families had a little something like this. It reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's "Three Acres and a Cow" [1] slogan (implying that can be enough).
I actually had this exact same idea in like...2011. So, ideas are worthless without execution. I used to work in Middle Georgia where Vidalia Onions are plentiful. I went to visit a friend in NYC, where Vidalia Onions are scarce. I brought some with me on the plane...
The plan was I'd just run to the local grocery store and just fulfill online orders and if demand was there, purchase from local farmers. I didn't get any further than than just mentioning the business idea. Kudos to Peter for executing and meeting a need. Looks like he also owns onions.com, so they are making enough money to acquire that domain name.
Sometimes even execution is worthless. It doesn't sound like this guy is making a ton of money and he says he's doing it for fun, not because it's profitable. Though I'm sure it turns a profit in general.
I looked this up one time, why this was such a big deal. Vidalia's are finicky like wine grapes. You need the right microbiome, you can't just plant them everywhere because demand is high. They might grow but don't taste right.
I suspect that, like vinyards, if demand stays up long enough we'll find all sorts of weird little spots all over the world with nearly the right kind of soil and moisture and heat.
[edit] Rereading: It's a regional appellation but the taste has much to do with low sulfur content in the soil.
I've never known NYC, the sitting famous for a bodega on almost every block, and street vendors with cars of produce, to be short on any produce available in USA.
Congratulations! You're an inspiration. A few questions, if I may:
1. Do you plan to expand to other produce other than just the onions?
2. How did you arrive at your current business model (like min order quantity, areas served, return policy, shipping rates etc)?
3. How do you deal with customer complaints, in particular, with something as prone to decay as organic produce?
4. What significant part of the way you do this business changed after v1? Esp, as multiple customers would have inevitably given you comments and suggestions.
5. You mentioned you're registered as a LLC. You don't intend to raise VC money? For instance, YC prefers not to invest in LLCs.
6. What does the tech stack look like (Shopify? Weebly? AWS? Frameworks? Payments? etc)?
1. Right now, we're concentrating on just Vidalias. We continue to grow at a pace I'm happy with, so there's no need to get complicated.
2. We learned it as we went along, really. ie, "Oh crap, X happened.. what do we do?" And then we figure out what's best for the customer, and do that.
3. We listen, and empathize. I want all our customers to get the onion they're expecting. If they don't, I'll cover the cost to get them more that meet their needs.
4. The logistic changed the most, by far. Our second year, we added order tracking, and that helped a lot too. (Our first season, the customers would call me and ask where their order was, and I'd manually look it up)
5. We're profitable. I have no interest in raising money or taking direction from a VC.
6. Tech stack (if I even understand what that means).. Wordpress, Shopify
Just chiming in to say that I loved reading your article, and I really wish you all the very best. I'm you have inspired many people in one way or another!
no kidding, here was the first negotiation. I'm at the shed, in the front office with the farmer. We talk about whether this could work. We realize it might. I then bring up how to split money. From my side, it seemed fair to pay him more, so I suggested they keep 60% of profit, and I keep 40%. He nodded, and agreed. So we went with that. We changed it slightly over the years, but it still falls around that range. You wanna know funny thing? UPS makes the most on the entire transaction (as we roll in shipping costs on all our orders).
Not even. Tried to start a small (friends and extended family) coffee roasting business. Most of the margin shipping a 12oz bag of coffee after all other costs is eaten by flat rate USPS shipping. Only made economic sense at a much greater scale, or for orders > 5lb.
Loved this story. Your writing style is succinct & speaks to the heart. You really should write more essays if possible (found only 4 here: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/essays).
What's been your feeling on generalizing the idea to other products?
There's certainly value in being The Vidalia Man, having connections within the industry, and owning the domain. At the same time, the lessons you've learned (not to mention the platform you've built) could apply to just about any other niche agricultural product, such as ramps in the northeast, or southern flour.
How do those two tensions play against each other when it comes to deciding where on the spectrum between "I sell onions and only onions" and "I will become the next Amazon" to fall?
Honestly, I don't want to build an amazon size business, so there's no tension. Too complicated. I sorta follow the same path at Paul Jarvis, and his book https://ofone.co/ . Right now, from a product standpoint, I focus on one thing, Vidalias. But I'll have to note that we also own the domain name 'Onions.com', so there's possible opportunity for growth down the road. Not right now, though.
I'm quite fond of buying domains myself. I just came here to tell you I'm so happy to have found someone with a hobby like mine, though it is more accurate to call yours a business. My wife hates it, but many of the ideas I have had, have started with a domain name and that being my lift off point.
I tend to buy 1 year registrations for $8 like they're lotto tickets or something.
You mention putting purpose over profit, but I assume you still make a reasonable living doing this from the sounds of things. Is this your only job currently? What's the tech stack like?
thank you so much! We'll start shipping next Monday, 4/29, and your order will leave the farm that week. We'll also send you a tracking link when UPS gets their hands on your box (fyi)
Could it be a good idea to combine a few orders for San Francisco customers like me? And then use the opportunity to just meet and share our 10 pounds of Vidalias and shake hands?
How close is M&T's operation to "organic"? I know some farmers follow a lot of the practices, but don't necessarily want to bother with the cost & hassle of the formal certification. Would love to see them or some future partner get into that. Any interest in that direction, or obstacles in the way?
We're about as close to organic without putting the label on it. But we are test growing some 100% organics now, trying to determine next steps with that..
Wouldn't it be better to be a direct redirect to vidaliaonions.com or maybe even have the website under both domains? onions.com is a great domain and it seems a bit of a shame to have the landing page about the domain name rather than the product
Where do you go to get the box made? What is its cost? And what is shipping cost (for ex within GA) per box? Does shipping cost increase by weight too?
Do you know anything about the demographic of your customers?
Are they people who graduated and moved away, looking for a little bit of home? I'm suspecting a fair number of Gatech alumni, for one. Or people like me who have to negotiate the onion content of dishes very carefully with friends and family (shallots and Vidalias make that easier).
Typically older demo.. over 35 usually.. I only know this cause I speak to so many customers on the phone.. Most customers are folks who are foodies and have read about Vidalias, or are already familiar with..
More seriously, how much interaction do you have with the farmer(s)? Seems like there would need to be a lot of communication to make something like this work.
Great question (do I like Vidalias).. I was indifferent on them at the start. But when you're surrounded by them, you start eating them. And now, I put Vidalias (or other sweet onions) on virtually anything. Eggs, Chili, burgers, list goes
on..
And yes, I communicate quite frequently with the farmer. We got along quite well, and I'm fortunate for the friendship I have with him & his team.
Hah, same here. I was indifferent but introduced to sweet onions while in Mexico when they were being served, grilled whole, by a street vendor. I have been hooked since and buying them now whenever in season.
We're an LLC. Regarding tasks -- there really wasn't any deciding. We just starting doing stuff. The farmer grew the Onion, and I built out all the online stuff and logistics. When pain points arose, I tried my best to find software to shoulder those loads. But I made sure to never outsource my phone calls. I answer those. I wanna talk to my customers.
Sometimes I print the orders in my office and physically take them to the farm. Other times, I transmit the orders to them online, and they print them at the shed.
These days, the farmer and I are equally devoted to this. If the farm goes away, the farmer and I will start again somewhere else. Highly unlikely the farm goes away though.. The farm could possibly change names down the road.. small things like that.
A lot of different ways. A lot through word of mouth now. Some paid search, some organic search, some through other farms pointing customers our way, some though our billboard on i-95, and some through the magnets I have stuck on my car.
if you're referring to that 360-degree photo, you can make the same kind of image through the Google 'Street View' app.. you'll then upload to your Google account and share..
I want someone to write some analysis of this particular... voice, or style of writing, being used here.
"I'm a web guy. I’m not a farmer."
I already knew that, because in just a couple paragraphs, I was already recognizing the style of writing as... SEO, "influencer", I don't know what to call it?
It's a personal first-person voice, which right off the start tries to establish that the author is a human being writing about their life -- but also that they are an expert in what they are going to tell you about, and very successful too.
The text includes many one or two sentence paragraphs, and has aggressively styled pull quotes and/or callouts. Short sentences too. Not entirely complete sentences. Interspersed.
It makes sure to open up with some kind of very short story that is only tangentially related to the content but is folksy and cute. (Smuggled vidalia's onto cruise ship).
The information is very cleverly structured to keep you reading, by dropping just enough of the actual info, page to page, to pique your attention and make you think there's an interesting story here, but not enough that you can leave having actually learned anything before you've read a pretty big chunk. And is written artfully for this purpose, it works, and keeps you reading. Sometimes at the end you feel rewarded, other times you feel like it was a shaggy dog story. The best authors leave you happy, of course.
It's got information to convey, but the goal is not to convey the information as effectively as possible, but to keep you reading as long as possible -- and, usually, to sell you something.
I don't know if I have a value judgement on it exactly -- okay, I'll admit it annoys me, perhaps because it all sounds the same while trying to convince you it's a folksy authentic voice. But either way, it's a thing, a genre even, that I'm not sure I've seen anyone comment on.
It's: "Content Marketing Voice".
(Also selling people onions on the internet is "purpose over profit", really? What the world needs now is frictionless access to vidalia onions shipped directly to your home?)
I think it's possible to be using a genre voice unconsciously, or doing it consciously but for your own purpose. Just because the genre is X, doesn't mean we can assume the purpose.
I think you missed the point about "purpose over profit", it really gave this guy a feeling of that. And him telling that personal story is valid. It's interesting to think about why you seem to have deliberately side-stepped the point of the story.
Actually, analyzing and thinking about the way you wrote this comment, it seems you're just bitter that someone found something they really liked, that gave them a sense of purpose, and now you're trying to find some way to diminish that to yourself, to make yourself feel better, without actually taking the responsibility to do something to make your life better. Which tells us that you wished you had that purpose, but you feel you don't.
Some free advice: go about making that purpose for yourself, rather than making yourself feel better by trying to diminish the achievements of others that trigger you right in the feels. Another way to say it is, instead of making it all about this guy, when you get triggered, stop and think about "why do I feel that way?" and go deep into that. It's not about other people. What you feel is about you. Learn from that. Don't project, don't take it out, don't blame others, just learn from that uncomfortable emotion you're writing this thing to avoid.
Don't get me wrong, this is more than advice. I've seen that attitude cause a lot of unnecessary hurt and conflict in the world and in relationships, and I want people to stop it.
It's a pattern I've see a lot. Definitely has it's own genre voice as well.
> I think it's possible to be using a genre voice unconsciously, or doing it consciously but for your own purpose. Just because the genre is X, doesn't mean we can assume the purpose.
Certainly. It is still interesting to analyze as a genre, this is how we make sense of the written world. Perhaps you are doing that same assumption of purpose with my writing.
> I think you missed the point about "purpose over profit", it really gave this guy a feeling of that.
Is the point of "purpose over profit" to engender a feeling of purpose in the people who think they are doing it? Is that the "purpose"?
I think everyone should endeavor to treat their customers, suppliers, and coworkers with respect as human beings, instead of trying to take them for all they are worth. I agree doing so will make you happier. Which can perhaps be surprising to someone who tries it and has never done it before, how much it improves their own life. This is called being a decent human being, and there's no reason for everyone in every job not to do it. There's nothing wrong and a lot right with trying to behave like a decent human being in whatever business you are in, it's commendable, but it's not "purpose over profit."
I think it's disingenuous to elevate the idea of "treating people like humans instead of just instruments for my own profit, while at my profit-focused endeavor" to "purpose over profit", and disrespectful to people who really do make significant material sacrifices for a non-profit-oriented purpose.
What do you think his "purpose" was here, and in what ways were any profits sacrificed for it?
> Actually, analyzing and thinking about the way you wrote this comment, it seems you're just bitter that someone found something they really liked, that gave them a sense of purpose, and now you're trying to find some way to diminish that to yourself, to make yourself feel better, without actually taking the responsibility to do something to make your life better. Which tells us that you wished you had that purpose, but you feel you don't.
Wow. You sure read a lot into someone's analysis of a writing style. One that I think accurately described the details of the piece of writing. I'm trying to summarize my feelings on your post without actually being hostile, but I can't help but find your entire comment to be really low value, even if it was meant well.
This is an American dream-esque article about a boy and a domain name. They meet, he wins the auction, and they start spending time together. The domain name, she calls to him and eventually they hook up with an industry group and bring onions to the world.
While on the face of it, this may not seem like the best business plan - I actually really like it. He found something personal (domain knowledge from his home state industry), something with a good customer need, and filled a niche of better customer service and process. Here, everyone wins... So I guess it is also an 'invisible hand of the free market' dream too.
Grade your onions and sell the top 10% at a premium!
I sincerely believe that our society would be much happier and healthier if top-shelf/"celebrity" vegetables existed that could cost $XX, sort of like in Japan.
Someone would probably pay $1000+ for "The best dozen onions of the season"
"You eat with the eyes first" is a common cross-cultural idiom. I'm not saying it justifies the waste, just that it's probably an evolved human behavior that we're stuck catering to. At least there is a counter-culture ugly produce movement right now.
I think that increasing the unit price of produce would reduce pressure on farmers to optimize for volume. A lot of the waste is a result farmers optimizing volume over nutritional quality because the market doesn't really have a place for "top-shelf" produce currently.
Vegetables can vary by an order of magnitude in nutritional density based on growing and harvest conditions. I wish there was a way to pay 10x for vegetables that are reliably 10x more nutritionally dense (as verified by laboratory analysis of random samples from every harvest).
My knucklehead friend, who I grew up with, keeps insisting I ship the onions in a heavy wooden crate, for aesthetic value. He says I could upsell that "value-add". I've yet to implement that idea.
I was thinking something more like handcrafted artisanal compost, extra row spacing, daily weeding and hand watering? Kobe-beef of onions.
What could make an onion beautiful enough to buy for $100/ea? If you made these, I bet you'd find a market in Japan. Could make a good gift for people who like cooking.
I spent a minute thinking about a product local to me that had the same appeal. I typed http://michiganlamb.com into the browser and discovered the concept is not uncommon.
Yep. Even if it has never been easier for the maker/producer to setup their own Shopify store, it's still not enough.
Sure a decent website on shopify is better than nothing, but most likely only your current customers will go. You need extra skills to bring NEW customers: marketing, SEO, social media, etc.. and chances are that it's someone else that will have those skills.
That's awesome. A couple responses to yesterday's thread regarding bookmarked hn quotes really opened up my eyes regarding building and maintaining side projects. I picked up a book, "Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup" which has been informative (if a little dated). This article is a great supplement to that book, and is inspirational to a 9-5'er like me.
Your comment resonated with me. I'm just about the launch the a social network. Our whole goal was to design around authenticity, something that is severely lacking in other offerings.
If I were to offer some unsolicited advice. Authenticity arises out of real communities, and that is something social networks are quite bad at. They often focus on the self much more than communitiy participation. I think that's why old chat networks and forums were so good at building communities, as you had to truly contribute to be part of them. You didn't even have an identity until you contributed to the community and revealed it while doing so.
Current social networks allow you to hit "join" or "like" and that's all the participation you need to get your validation. You're part of the group just by signing up, rather than because you helped make it a community by contributing.
That's probably why this story resonates with people here so much. It's not just a tech business, it's an attempt to contribute and be an integral part of the local community. Not something every startup gets to do.
Absolutely agree. We have made some design decisions to force consideration into the social aspect in the aim of increasing the quality of interactions.
I don't want to spend too much time talking about it as I'd rather show it. I can say that we designed to focus on quality rather than getting drunk off the of the crowd as practically all other social apps do.
Edit: Send me an email and I will be happy to let you know when we launch.
It sounds like he created a co-operative. This is the case in Oregon where lots of milk growers...er...dairy farmers pool their resources into a funnel organization, Tillamook Farmer's Co-op, that handles packaging, distribution and marketing. This is such a wild story tho, I loved reading it.
Not really a co-op. Unless I misunderstood something, he contacted a single farm and is basically acting as their digital marketing side. They got so good at this that the other farms in the area decided to stop competing on this front(DTC online sales) and focus on other segments of their business. That's what I assumed he meant when he said "other farms started sending people our way".
There are very few co-ops in the South as compared to other parts of the world. There is a lot more direct-to-mass production/buyers farms here as well as a lot of "factory" farming.
That being said what he's doing is something that is hard to reproduce simply because Vidalia onions cannot be grown except in a certain geographic area. You can take the same onion and grow it elsewhere, it will taste exactly or very close to the same, you just cannot sell it as a Vidalia. I'm surprised that there aren't more of the boutique style shops for things like Vidalia onions, Georgia peaches, etc.
Source: born, raised, lived whole life in Ga within a farming family.
It's weird that this was done with special legislation. I see that the US does not have any general mechanism for such situations, although it has done this for these onions and for Tennessee whiskey specifically.
The EU has a system-wide concept of products (mostly but not exclusively foods) that are by definition produced in a set region, by a particular method etcetera called the Protected Designation of Origin. This is inspired by laws in some of its member states (most famously France's AOC laws which protect Champagne) but because it's a system rather than being stapled into the law for one specific product it makes it practical to use for less famous things where the heavy lifting of actual legislation would be too much to ask. If your town produces a peculiar furry hat, and then one day sales of the furry hats begin to drop off because it turns out somebody is making replicas in China and selling them under your town's name, applying for PDO is a relatively straight forwad way to fix that across the entire EU without trying to attract attention from legislators in two dozen countries.
Of course PDOs can be abused (e.g. arguably protection of Newcastle Brown Ale was pointless, its only producers were indeed in Newcastle, but when they decided to move they simply applied to discontinue the PDO status...) but overall it seems like having a framework makes more sense than only doing this as actual national legislation (a rule saying Vidalia onions are from Georgia only works because the US government enforces it, the part in Georgia state law has very little effect)
The effort was initially at the state (Georgia) level in 1986. Then the producers pushed to have the Department of Agriculture make the area the official designation at the federal level. This was done later in 1989.
The US doesn't have a lot of "protected region" products. Obviously things with a state name or place have to be from that place, but we don't really do that as much here as Europe. Just not the American way I guess.
It's why you can buy "Swiss Cheese" from Wisconsin and Bourbon Whiskey from Orlando.
That's fair. The US has a history of special interest groups petitioning the government for regulations that would benefit them. I suppose this happens in the EU too but it's all over the place here.
I didn't grow up in one of the counties that are considered under the bounds of the Vidalia area (although pretty close) but we grew the same onions. They tasted, smelled, and looked exactly the same. Were I to try to sell them as Vidalias I could have been sued, but we were growing them for personal consumption anyway.
For people like me with a family diaspora and australian quarantine, they also sell very cool teeshirts. I loved watching giant bricks of cheese come out of the cheese-a-mathon.
I actually wasn't joking, I did buy it (it was unregistered so it was only 6 quid), but now perhaps it was rather pointless if Vidalia onions only come from around Georgia. I just read the article and then googled to see if the uk domain was free.
The most impressive thing was the bit where he spent 2 grand on a domain name he didn't want and didn't think "Oh shit, I've just blown 2 grand I needed to..."
It was a fun read. But also a bit sad that it takes thousands of dollars and a lot of available time (which many people don't have) to do something as fundamental as this.
I think the thousands of dollars really just sped up the timeline. The domain definitely helps, but I don't think it's required. There's others that could have been used for a good business, it's only integral to this specific story. The $10k loss in boxes to me seems like he got ahead of himself and took a risk to save on shipping supplies, and got bitten for it. A slightly more conservative approach might have put that off and paid more for shipping for a while until some smaller amount of boxes could be tested from that supplier.
The good thing about a business like this is that it's much less likely someone is going to swoop in and steal your idea and customers because you took a little longer to work out the kinks.
True. You could to some extent. I think part of the story is the opportunity though. The domain name, the boxes and the time are all things that grant him the opportunity to do it. He probably could have sold them in plastic bags on eBay (someone probably already does), but it wouldn't be same thing.
We all seem to agree like things like this is a good thing, but then we undermine people's ability to do it by favoring things like real estate, domains and "middle man businesses" instead.
He could have sold them on ebay in plastic bags - but then he would learn a different expensive lessons: onions need to breath, don't ship in plastic. Actually it is more complex, if you ship fast enough in plastic you might be okay, and some types of plastic are better than others, thus this is a lesson that he might or might not have learned the hard way depending on if he was lucky enough.
Real business is hard because of all the not obvious things you need to account for.
In Shenzhen you might make hundred boards, go down to the market and buy a hundred boxes and leave them with the shipper. Boards don't work? Re-work them or make another hundred. Box doesn't work? Buy another box. You don't like your box supplier? There is a hundred others on Taobao.
In NYC it might take you weeks to do the same thing while you are bleeding rent (and everything else) so you need the thousand boards and boxes to make it work (or you are selling very few in your spare time). And if something goes wrong you are probably fucked.
There are many things that can be done, especially online. The question is if you can do it in a way that make sense. I am sure there are many people from New York on tindie. It is just hard to make it into a full time small business if you have a high cost of living and a limited supply chain.
> He probably could have sold them in plastic bags on eBay
Well, there's a massive middle ground between plastic bags on eBay and placing a $10,000 order for boxes. I didn't mean to imply they couldn't eventually place a $10k order, but often you can order in smaller (but still large) quantities to check the quality. Or just use Uline for a while until you've gotten samples from enough locations to confirm a provider can service your needs.
We don't have the details of this part, so a lot of things could have gone into the decision to place a bit order which made it what appeared to be the correct choice at the time. I just thought it sounded a bit risky given the little information we have.
I've thought about this a lot lately. I have (some) money, but not a whole lot of time. It's really hard to find reasonable direct investments for "down payment on an investment property" style money, with "rent from an investment property" expected returns. Seems all that's available at that level is more or less gambling on potential unicorn style stuff.
Or put other way - I'd love to find some great "regular" business ideas to both fund and assist in getting off the ground to the tune of $5-50k, and if successful make a few thousand a month down the road in a couple years - not millions on some future exit.
Basically I want to seed-fund/invest in/be involved in what HN calls "lifestyle business" - just a regular old sustainable business expected to grow 10% a year and comfortably employ a couple founders and employees.
Many good reasons this market doesn't exist and is "hard", but one can wish. It would feel fare more satisfying to invest money in actual hard working people with real but boring (read: low risk) business models than tossing it into the S&P500 or engaging it yet more rent-seeking by buying up small properties to turn into rentals.
It gets better - in the UK you can offset 50% of the investment directly against your income tax (up to a limit, and if the company qualifies for SEIS) + and the returns are free of capital gains tax. The issue is finding good enough "regular" business ideas/teams
I listened (again) to an Indiehackers podcast with Rob Walling this morning where he described pretty much that problem. He had "lots of" cash and "little" time to spend in building a business from scratch. What worked was to find a business he liked that wasn't making much money, but could be bought for cheap (he overpaid!) and turned into something that made money.
To respond to the "rent from investment property" concept, you can get in on investment properties at a fairly low price (IIRC 40% discounts) if you invest when builders are looking for prospective buyers. i.e., before anything is built. I looked into doing this some time ago, but the builder couldn't find enough buyers, so the property was never built.
In-process construction is pretty difficult to evaluate the value of for banks. Often times, the market will value an investment property much higher than a bank will value it, because the banks aren't always in the business of real-estate speculation. a 40% discount on the price of the finished development is sometimes more than the land may be appraised to by a bank.
It comes down to: if you are interested in real estate investment (either renting or flipping), you are going to find the property more valuable than a bank, who isn't as interested and would just auction it off if they had to own it.
In a number of situations that I have been involved in (Canada), the builder cannot get funding from traditional sources because there's no tangible asset to fund, and the builder still hasn't obtained permits from the municipality, etc (the necessary boilerplate to get going on construction). In these cases some builders will seek out a lawyer that will pool together funds from various investors and the loan rate is typically 15%-25% which makes for a nice profit, but with the knowledge that it could blow up. Once the permits are in place, then traditional funding comes a lot more readily.
>But then I don't understand why so much capital would be required just for getting permits.
There are lots of permits that only become available much later in the process. For example, an occupancy permit is only granted once the building is in a habitable state.
There are always permit delays of some kind or another because no matter how much research and planning you do, there are things that are simply unknown or that have to be changed (and thus re-permitted) at the proverbial last minute.
I very likely got the percentage wrong. It was in the 2005 timeframe that I was looking at doing this.
I remember that it was a substantial savings, but I can't say exactly where the 40% number came from. It was condos in a retirement community so the builder was making a big deal of "these tenants won't leave until they die..."
You probably need to look somewhere were that amount of money would actually makes a big difference. It just doesn't go very far in many places today. Or you need to provide some other value.
Edit: Don't know why this is objectionable. $5k is like one months living costs in many places, and sometimes one months savings. You aren't going to get much in return for that. You need to go somewhere cheaper where that kind of money can buy someone some time. Unless you can provide something else.
There are tons of regular businesses available for sale (laundromats, car washes, hotels, bars, etc.). You could buy one and hire people to run it for you.
I do agree it’s an ideal kind of business to invest in, but it seems to me there’s one major reason they’re hard to find: had I that type of business, I wouldn’t accept outside money. I’m frugal in my living, so any business that brought in a few thousand a month would be enough to live from.
I could scrape the $5K to get an idea off the ground, but if it failed I’d regret it. Simply put, it’s not money to risk.
A business loan is issued to the business, not to you as an individual. Failing to repay the loan means your business goes into collections (and possible bankruptcy), not that you as an individual suffer for it.
Please don't speak of things you know nothing about. No brand-new business would ever get a loan issued without a signature from some person or established entity who can be held liable if the business defaults.
It is sad because it doesn't really go into the core business. He spends thousands of dollar on marketing, domains and suppliers just to have a farmer sell to consumers. It should almost be two clicks on "etsy for farmers".
> It should almost be two clicks on "etsy for farmers".
Sounds like a viable startup opportunity. Especially with the Beyond Meats S-1 post from yesterday where hackers talked about buying meat directly from farmers.
No, because the money would be going into the business of serving an entire nation of farmers with these services. The cost for each instance of doing the fundamental thing, having a farmer sell to consumers, would hopefully be low.
But on the other hand Etsy4Farmers (tm) would probably turn out like Etsy, and care progressively less about the farmers, more about money and eventually turn into just another online supermarket riddled with fake products and fake reviews (not suggesting Etsy has made it all the way there either btw).
This guy has one partner, Incentives are aligned, if I were one to buy onions online, I can see myself still being happy with them in 20 years time. Maybe it cost more, but they don't have a monopoly on Onions, their ability to pass on that cost is limited, which is the major concern, is it not?
I don't disagree. I am just saying that thousands of dollars to bring a farmers business online to consumers shouldn't necessarily just be seen as a success thirty years after AOL.
More generally, all open problems are hard, because the economy's limiting reagent isn't mildly intelligent people willing to do easy work for good money.
That's why it's a fundamental thing: it takes time, effort, and money. Things that take neither time nor effort vanish as trivialities, even if there's an interesting story in how they got reduced to that point.
> universally, the domain name always comes first, the business idea comes second.
I wonder what others think about this quote. Could he not have started the same exact business with another domain? Is owning the "right" domain that important that is should "come first" and be forgotten without it? naively I'd think Google@2019 gives more importance to content then to the domain name. No?
Feels like that's just his way of brainstorming ideas for side gig. Some of us get inspiration from problems we run int ourselves, some actively read blogs, blogs, trends, etc and try to find opportunities, while this man gets his from finding descriptive domain names.
Yeah, my first thought was, "why would you spend that much on a domain name?" Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, all could have done just as well with different domain names.
However, I guess it did function as a sort of method of brainstorming business ideas.
It seems like operating an online business is 5% software hackery and 95% finding a cool thing to sell, finding a supplier, building a supply chain and fulfillment system, and customer support. Think about it like this: if you can find a thing to sell on a street corner, you can sell it online. Seriously. Say you found these awesome fucking USB-C cables for about $1/each from a Chinese supplier. You think people will pay about $15/each for them, so you set up `awesome-fucking-cables.com` and start selling them. Registering a domain and setting up a web shop is the easy part, but it tends to be what people focus on.
Some ideas of the stuff you could sell:
- Kombucha
- Specialty sodas
- Heirloom seeds
- Specialty light bulbs and/or batteries
- Spice packets
- Carpet cleaning powder
- Dice
- Specialty candles
- Prepared origami paper
- Specialty pens/pencils/crayons
- Funky hair accessories (someone recently asked me why there aren't many superhero themed ones because it would be a huge market)
My wife paid for her grad school entirely by selling direct-from-manufacturer fashion goods, from China, to middle-aged upper/middle-class women in central Europe. The crazy thing that made it all work, IMO, was that the website was invite only. The women used the exclusivity as a status in their social circles, and invites as favors.
It's fascinating how these small market niches exist but it really is the other 95% that makes them take off.
you're welcome! Thank you for that feedback - I was concerned that it'd come across as a humblebrag.. I just like sharing neat things people can do on great domain names.
I buy domain names for weird and random ideas that come to me. I really like the reverse concept of buying interesting domain names and then letting them turn into something that you never anticipated. That sounds like a really fun and potentially highly rewarding hobby. It also seems to break every Startup book's rules, since you're looking for a problem to a solution, but who cares? This guy is having tons of fun and learning a lot, so good for him.
Thanks for such a great read. I have a somewhat similar story.
My brother and I started our company the moment after we bought our domain name: retreat.guru. We actually wanted a different domain but didn’t get it; retreat.guru was the runner up. Then we had a spontaneous 3 hour call where we mapped out the entire global wellness retreat marketplace we would build - all based off the domain name! 5 years later we are still going strong.
We are based out of a small mountain town in B.C. Nowhere near the buzz of Silicon Valley. We gradually took investment and grew from revenue as well. We are very vision driven.
What I liked most about this story was the fact that he went into it kind of ass-backwards - domain name first (almost by accident too), then the business.
Like the other reply says, it's probably just the farmers don't have time or don't want to.
I expect you could make the same comment about just about everything on the planet that is grown or made, but then sold by someone else. The original person could try to sell it to consumers, but that would take so much time and effort they wouldn't have time to grow/make the thing in the first place!
Peter here (author).. They didn't have a need, desire, or employee to run that type of operation. The farm didn't have a website when we started, so my sales pitch to them at the start was 'Even if we miserably fail in this project, at least you'll get a free website out of it'..
I think it's less about tech-savvy and more about deciding to go larger-scale and adopt all the problems that come with that. Handling order fulfillment and customer service isn't something most farmers probably want to do.
Craigslist, or perhaps Tarsnap, or many others providing services to people who know exactly what they're looking for.
Being flashy helps sometimes if your customers are fickle and you need to sell them on something they didn't know they wanted, but if you've got an enthusiast audience or specialized product, substance is all that is required - at least at a fundamental level.
Every junkyard website is basically just a business card with the ability to search their inventory (or the fraction of it they choose to list) on car-part iframed in.
Craigslist provides a very common, broad service to a broad demographic of people. Almost everyone will want to sell something or buy a used product once in their life.
This site provides one very specific thing to a niche market. It's the difference between opening an office supply store vs a site selling one specific type of rubberband.
I never said they were not. All I said was that in the long term, it will only be as viable as long as people are willing to pay that cost. If his onions are truly better than the onions you get in your local supermarket, then it will continue to be viable.
Thoroughly enjoyed this. I'd love to read a bit more detail on his process of spinning up the customer relations sides of the business that he mentioned. What was the hardest thing to get right? What were the unexpected pitfalls?
Peter here (author).. happy to share a little more. I oddly enjoy the customer relations side the most. It's so old school - alot of my customers are surprised when a real human picks up the phone to take their order. The hardest thing to get right (and we continue to refine) is the logistics part. The pitfalls I encounter are the very tight margins. If I take my eyes off of operations, I could quickly go under water.
Thanks for sharing your story. I think there are a lot of people out there like me not looking to be a unicorn company, but would love to be the next VidaliaOnions.com
That's the kind of lifestyle business I dream of finding myself into. Except maybe I'd want it less involved with customer service, but roughly similar. Somehow that's much more appealing to me than heading the next big buck hot startup out of my SF penthouse office. Guess there has to be some for everybody :)
That was a good read and I bet that to the core more people resonate with this than most startup jobs!
sorry about a tangent, but that Indian Jones scene bothers me so much. i mean... there are so many safer ways to validate you can take that first step. i'll name a few
1. crouch down and reach out your leg gently tapping the "invisible ground"
2. throw a pebble.
3. throw a bunch of sand to see exact available surface area.
Sure, but the point of the trial is that he needs to take a leap of faith. Within the world of the movie, I bet those tests would have failed.
Plus if there's "really" an invisible bridge you could throw a pebble at, it should already be covered in dust anyway. Unless the guy who lives in the grail room comes out and sweeps it or something.
It's a leap of faith, you're not supposed to cheat it. However after crossing the bridge, he DOES scatter sand over the surface area revealing the bridge (which was really just a camouflaged stone illusion shown by an alternate viewpoint)
"I'm addicted to Domain Names... but for kicks & giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200".
Not trying to be a killjoy, but everytime I hear about people reserving domains for fun or future, it just tells of so much privilege. Americans and other Westerners people have already reserved so many domains. Domain name squatting always is a rich-get-richer story.
I would say this is crazy, but truth be told... if I saw someone selling like super high quality heirloom tomatoes online... I'd probably buy some. But what I've actively searched out, and have yet to find is someone selling lobster stock. Sometimes if i'm lucky, I can pick up some from my local fish monger... but it's uncommon.
Probably what's holding that back is shipping cost since stock is mostly water, quite heavy and needs to be sent frozen or at least cooled with freezer packs, further adding to weight. My favorite place for andouille sausage [1] will ship cooled packages but the shipping costs are roughly equal to the product cost. So whenever I drive to New Orleans I take an ice chest with me netting twice the product for the same price.
There's a way to make it by reducing most of the water away so you get a 20x concentrate that's quite shelf stable... and probably cheap to ship. Here's an example (https://www.morethangourmet.com/) these stocks are quite good.
Amateur tomato grower here. One key difference between the flavorless tomatoes you typically find at the grocery and heirloom varieties is that the non-heirloom tomatoes are genetically optimized for shipping durability while the heirloom varieties are optimized for flavor. I'm not saying you can't ship heirloom tomatoes, but they're definitely more prone to bruising, so this is likely an obstacle in shipping them over longer distances.
So, only slightly related to this article, but I’ll say it anyway:
I’ve bought domains for years. Through that process, I’ve developed a specific routine to evaluate a name prior to purchasing.
I’ve been sketching out a plan to build a web app that largely automates this evaluation process, that I would hope to release as a small side project SaaS in the future.
Can you share the "specific routine" you developed? I understand if it's your secret sauce and you want to keep it to yourself, but I also would never use this if I didn't know how it worked.
It's actually not that crazy/secret, it's simply compressing a many-step process down into a single, flat step. Whenever I'm looking for a good domain name, I'm trying to consider things like searchability, is the .com available, are there no shorter .com's taken, are there already projects/apps/sites with very similar names out there, do the Google SERPs come back with off-putting results, etc.
I have done this by hand for a long time, but it's error prone and time consuming. Very straightforward to automate down into a one step process.
Reading his article I cant help but wonder why he isnt scaling his entire setup to help ALL farmers, regardless of what they are farming, to sell online. Cant he create an online marketplace and onboard basically every portable vegetable? He should be able to replicate this same model with every veggie we got.
Is that a business opportunity? Something like "develop my domain"? Like a land-owner who lets tenants develop?
So, you pay for the domain name, list it on the development site, and a developer (say me) can pick and choose from what you have and build a product on your property.
There's a contract, you get x% of proceeds from my endeavor, I get a domain name specific to my needs, and we all benefit. The contract would also specify a dwell-time. I get 12 months, or 2 years, or whatever on the property.
Then the contract comes back up for negotiation. Maybe a sale is negotiated (you want my development, or I want your domain name).
If I have OnlineTumbleweeds.com and you like the idea of developing it, why wouldn't you just buy TumbleweedsOnline.com? I don't see what value the domain owner is adding. There's not going to be a ton of SEO value to an old domain that's just been parked.
Fair enough. I was thinking that perhaps owners of desirable domain names (short, catchy, specific, etc) who also don't have the time for development could benefit.
But, I think you're right. There'd be a lot of not-so-desirable domains to sort through.
A little bit like having a lease on your business address, yeah, I could see this work. It may be a lot better for the person owning the domain than for the person developing the property, though.
You'd need good contracts - you'd need clauses around trademarks, etc.
> It may be a lot better for the person owning the domain than for the person developing the property, though.
This is why I specified renting a redirect, so the developer maintains their IP. I suppose if I (the developer) were to build branding specifically around a domain name (which seems common) then renting could become more of an issue, especially if a new rental agreement cannot be negotiated.
> You'd need good contracts - you'd need clauses around trademarks, etc.
This is the other thing I was pondering. At the start it would essentially be a Craigslist sort of match-making service, and so solid contracts would have to be between individuals without guidance from the service.
Eventually, though, the goal could be to have the company be a registrar in order to control domain names under contract and payment processing (to make sure everyone gets what they agreed to).
I'm not sure the second point above is where a service like this should go, though.
This was an amazing read. Not only do you sell onions on the internet but you are an amazing writer! I had to stop and comment before I dived into what else you've written.
I copied the quote “take the path to Nothing, and go Nowhere until you reach it.” and got it turned into a canvas to hang above my desk.
Agree with the other comment saying this was fun and exciting to read -- very well written and makes a strong point. I fully hope, when I am able to get off my lazy ass and do something, to sell a simple physical product that people already want. Food's a great example of this.
I've been umming-and-ahhing over an entrepreneurial endeavour for a while now. I'm very tempted now to just go out there now and see if I can get a good domain name. Letting the domain make the business decision for me seems fun.
My personal advice would be: Get the rest of the pieces in place before buying the domain name. I've probably bought dozens of domains over the years with an eye to a specific Great Business Idea underpinning them, but for some reason the act of buying the domain seems to stall my interest.
They were all good ideas, not duffers, evidenced by subsequent pick up years after.
This is a potentially addictive and risky venture. I've personally bought hundreds of domains over the years, and professionally in the thousands. I've probably broken even or profited a little. Most of the domains I buy for the name just sit there unused for 5+ years.
I don't necessarily mean as a career path. More-so as an out-of-work hobby to keep me occupied. By buying a good domain name, that would probably give me the kick I need to do something with it!
This is awesome. Always great to read about someone's hard work and dedication paying off. I love a good onion, but am not within the 48 lower states, so unfortunately I'll have to wait for the international delivery option :(
I love this and can relate to it so much. This is very similar to how I ended up in the Japanese matchmaking industry. Noticed a good domain was available and ended up going on an odyssey of sorts.
Bravo. I love his approach and his analogy with fictional characters. Such a wonderful way to view your work - stop trying to force it and let it tell you what it wants to be.
This is part of the marketing too, right? Reach more potential customers by writing an article and getting it to the top of a popular news aggregator. Especially with an audience that 1) will find it genuine, and 2) is likely to try out an interesting online product.
They were all great, honestly. The first 2 had different operations. Farmer #1 would have worked, but they didn't have a packing shed. Farm #2 seemed ambivalent, so I was concerned whether my orders would go out on time.
The box integrity entirely failed in-transit. Rips, tears, bottoms falling out, tops crushed, everything. I had to refund and re-send orders as make-goods, in better boxes. When my customers showed me pics of the box conditions after delivery, it made my heart hurt (no lie). I thought it was all over. These days, we send all orders in a double-walled cardboard box, with a locking bottom, and aeration holes throughout. It's a tank of a box.
My understanding was that the actual domain name doesn't make much difference? I setup http://www.drivinglessonslimerick.com for a friend (I'm not a web dev) and it is on the second page of results when I search for Driving Lessons in Limerick. $2200 seems way too much, the value here is in this Onion business not the domain.
It's definitely the domain if you understand the clientele. I'm also from GA and old southerners are pretty particular which can be both good and bad. They only will search Vidalia Onions in google so having that domain + some good SEO definitely delivers them to you. I bet repeat customers still search that term instead of going directly to the domain.
Their benefit is that they love local things such as vidalia onions or boiled peanuts that they know are grown locally. I'd wager most of this guy's sales come from the south.
I know quite of young people for whom Google basically is the internet. They never enter addresses in the address bar, and always do a Google search for the site they're trying to get to.
These aren't dullards, either. They're smart people who are talented in their own fields. They're just not techies and the Googling-for-everything workflow works well for them.
SEO is more than just keywords in domain names, you're buying into a long-term investment. His domain cost $2200 because it likely had lots of backlinks and page rank in Google, which is how he was able to get 600 orders (about $30k in revenue if my math is right) in the first year.
It's also the perfect combination of the two keywords with nothing else. You'll automatically be at a disadvantage.
But every large market typically has 1 leader and 1-3 other smaller companies who can survive. I doubt this is a large enough market where being #2 or #3 is going to be lucrative. You might as well find other niche premium vegetables. Like 1-800-Flowers and Harry & David (which the author mentioned) does...
Good strategy. I've seen it suggested to check the wayback machine archive before buying a domain name to make sure you can recreate the same content and backlinks that already exist to take full advantage of any existing SEO.
Oh true. The author was also promoting domain name driven businesses [1] so I was mostly replying to that idea and other thoughts I had to sound off on the topic :p
I had another comment in this thread where I said I thought of this idea in 2011. And you know what's funny? I actually bought the domain yummmonion.com. I think I ran drupal (or some other open source CMS) on there as a place holder. I'm not sure how you came up with this option for domain names, but quite a coincidence?
I looked at doman name historical records and it said it was registered October 2008...which makes sense because that was the year after I graduated college to start my job in Middle Georgia (I'm a software engineer, if anyone knows that area you know who I worked for).
I visited my friend in NYC in September to watch the US Open, so makes sense that it was 2008 that I thought of it.
Wonderful! This quote sums it all up for me: ”I didn’t have other projects that were this front-facing, customer wise. And I discovered I immensely enjoyed it”. Wow, does it show :) By the way, the quote was not a TL;DR - it was an invitation to read a great story. I am glad I did.
I just have to stop and say that this was an immensely fun and exciting post to read.
So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid people getting lucky and riding on VC money while making more stupid decisions but ultimately dumping enough investor money into it that it works enough to get sold.
At which point, that founder then goes around and tells the same stereotypical story of dropping out of college, running out of money and getting investment on the day they were planning on giving up, etc. We have all heard the bullshit before.
So I was genuinely grateful to read a real business story. The owner saw an opportunity, took it when other people probably wouldn't have, and just genuinely worked hard to get where he is.
This is inspiring because anyone here could do it too if they wanted to. I don't mean selling onions specifically, but I mean they could just go out there find a product, work hard towards selling it, team up with manufacturers/producers, etc and make the dream come to life.
I saw this comment yesterday but didn't read beyond its first sentence, which is great. But looking it it now again, I'm sad to see that the discussion it evoked was more in response to the indignation in it ("bullshit", "stupid people", "bullshit") than to the inspiration in it.
Unfortunately, this is predictable. Indignation activates generic responses and, above all, attracts upvotes. It feels great in the short term but leads HN to duller, more obvious places. This pattern is dismayingly reliable. A large part of what we do as HN moderators is to try to counteract it. HN can't live by upvotes alone.
If I compare the relatively low quality of this subthread to the more modest and far more interesting responses that people had to the specific details of the article, the contrast is striking.
I don't mean to pick on you personally! We are all subject to this phenomenon and few of us are very conscious of it in ourselves. There was another example even in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729322. These kinds of subthread grow like weeds. They crowd out the quieter kinds that don't fire up the generic anger that exists in all of us. This effect is collective, not individual; it's a co-creation, and the upvotes probably do more harm than the comments. I am sure you had no intention of feeding it. Unfortunately it happens anyway.
p.s. Perhaps I should add that there's nothing wrong with a critique of VC on HN. HN has hosted countless such critiques. Possibly more have appeared here than anywhere else. The HN community is overwhelmingly (90+%) outside of Silicon Valley, and the majority of it strongly identifies against the VC system (while often feeling itself to be the minority, as if HN overall were of the opposite view).
Rather, the problem is that this was a less interesting direction for the discussion to go, when the actual topic—an onion business!—was much rarer and more curious. What fuels generic tangents is not intellectual curiosity, but a quite different cocktail of emotions. As I said, a large part of moderating HN consists of trying to tease those apart. Trying and mostly failing.
Not to mention he's actually having a lot of fun doing this, and he specifically throws shade at what you've described above (and what we typically read about here on Hacker News)
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> So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid people getting lucky and riding on VC money while making more stupid decisions but ultimately dumping enough investor money into it that it works enough to get sold.
My impression (from way outside, I'm not an entrepreneur at all) is that so much business is VC-funded, which effectively means driven by finance people. Everyone who isn't a VC is still chasing a VC, so VC culture ends up defining business culture.
People, especially left-brained ones like programmers and finance nerds have this really bad tendency to see problems in terms of their preferred solutions. The old "if all you have is a hammer..." thing. So finance people like to turn everything into a money problem that they can solve using spreadsheets and Jupyter notebooks or whatever else it is they use.
Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square.
...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better and maybe make a little money in the process, Silicon Valley business culture is increasingly useless to you.
If you want to understand how to make people’s lives better, first you have to go out and actually live.
Scrappy college kids making a startup don’t know how to live, they’ve just barely lived. And a lot of professionals in tech have no lives outside of work and tech: Wake up and go work in tech. Go home and go read about tech. Attend a party and talk about tech.
How can we expect these Silicon Valley people to create anything that makes life better? All they can do is make cheap permutations of the same tired ideas that have passed through the lips of wanna-be gonna-be entrepreneurs for decades. Ask them: This product makes my life better? Better for what exactly?
Here’s a man who understood that life is a bit better when you can bite into a tasty and juicy Vidalia Onion. This is something you can only know if you stop and take some time to live.
I'm reading this from the bus as the sun sets on 280, looking over south San Francisco. You're so right. I just quit my job so I can make furniture full time. Got accepted to a really good, niche school in a beautiful coastal town in the middle of no where I'm moving with my partner. I'm not going to miss this scene at all.
Would that happen to be Charleston? 10 years ago, a friend from South Carolina thought about doing an apprenticeship in custom furniture there but decided instead on his other dream job and became an Indy Car racing mechanic after completing a year-long course in the Jim Russell school up at Sonoma. He still talks about possibly getting into furniture, though.
The food scene in Charleston is amazing. I had a buddy who lived in Florence, and every six months or so I'd make the drive down to see him for an extended weekend. I'd never been to Charleston before and it blew my mind.
let me try to explain this Scrappy college kids VC dynamic to you.
it's popularized on myths like Facebook where the founder
actually retained control and got a good deal but that's not the reality and it's not what VC are trying to create.
the reason it's all Scrappy college kids because you need slaves going to work crazy hours and do what they're told but also be crazy and naive enough to believe in it, and low maintenance and confident enough that they can take some direction on their own. and you just need a lot of these people.
because not all of them are going to work well and not all of the ideas are going to pan out but you don't know that and you can afford to fund some of these. you are basically funding an array of experiments and you don't need people who are grown up, in as in mature people who kind of go well I don't think I'm getting a good deal here you need as many bodies as you can. just like the military in war time. and for VCs in their hunger for money for their partners this is like a kind of wartime for them so they're just trying to throw as many bodies as they can at the problem.
all that talk about changing world and saving the world all mythologizing about Facebook etc is to get all those young slaves motivated.
is YC any different? a lot of early writings of Paul Graham on what founders need to know and what makes good startups can be easily read as just propaganda for this sort of program. the bottom line is it's not about what works for founders it's about what works for VCs. and I guess everyone justifies by saying well if vcs get a good outcome then founders do too, but those two Venn diagrams don't necessarily always intersect.
A man approached the salesman upon seeing various colors of different fishing lures being on display. He asked whether those different colors actually work in attracting and catching fishes. The salesman promptly replied "Mister, I'm not selling these to fishes."
If these people are targeting VC money, they don't care if their products actually help solving problems for end consumers (aka the fishes), they just need to know what triggers the VC to invest. Even Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank, has lost $130 million in Bitcoin after listening to pitches from those crypto startup CEOs. This is how most businesses fail but hey at least it keeps the money flowing.
Those VC operate based on the principle in which if you throw enough spaghetti onto a wall, even though most will fall off but a few are always bound to stick.
Believe me, nobody knows anything in advance and everything is purely a game of chance, but once somebody gets lucky they can immediately declare themselves as the expert. They start selling books and everyone else would rush out to buy and follow exactly the same steps only to find out most of it just don't work. This same cycle just keeps repeating itself over and over again. Why? The market is not static, it constantly moves and changes around so you are already way behind by the time you apply those same strategies. Plus your personal life and connections are completely different than the other person's so you can't realistically expect the same results.
It's still necessary to learn what has worked because new levels are always built on top of the old ones. But this demonstrates why mathematics, or the rule of randomness, is a universal language that governs everything in our life.
>Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square.
Right. Terms used like "gameplan", "playing to win", etc., confirm it. In fact, although cliches definitely have their place, overuse of terms like that can be considered a "biz smell" (term I just coined - see what I did there? :), analogous to a "code smell" in programming.
> ...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better...
Who are we kidding? Every startup is about making human lives better. /s
pg wrote about this in a rather uncharacteristically short essay titled Schelp Blindness [0] where he specifically says that hackers ignore obvious problems [1] because they are... erm... blind.
Excerpts:
> No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.
> How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
> Ignorance can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. How do you see ideas like that? The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for.
>writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in
That made me chuckle because I recall walking across the office in 1992, looking at a machine in the corner, and thinking "wow, with this Internet stuff the way it's going I really want to write some clever software, put it on a machine like that and watch my bank account balance grow...".
And it has been fun to watch out that all played out subsequently.
Even before Paul Graham and Viaweb, the stats were that about 90% of new businesses fail and a big predictor of success (but still at low odds) was ignorance of those odds.
Our new business just "failed" after 15 years (it was designed to support our family, which unexpectedly grew). But, regardless, when I checked the failure rate reported in gov stats in UK was far lower than the common wisdom held; which surprised me somewhat.
Do you have a source of solid figures to back up that 90%?
The whole "90% of businesses fail" thing is pretty meaningless without a timespan attached to it. Obviously almost all companies eventually go out of business for some reason or another.
About three quarters last more than a year, about half last to 5 years, and about a third last to 10 years.
Also if you forget the whole startup "go big or go home", what also matters is whether the company left the people involved - the founders, the employees - richer than they were before, or did it ruin the founders. Because a business that lasted 5 years and closed because the market dried up, but in that time netted the founder more than a regular job would, is pretty successful in my books.
Thanks for posting that, TeMPOral. It helps to put things in a good perspective - our business has given us much joy, far more joy than a regular job would. Not so great on the money aspect; which I guess is why no-one has stepped up with interest to take it on.
Yes, sorry, the phrase repeated by nearly everyone was "90% [of [small] businesses] fail in the first year". Which compared to your 25% figure is pretty markedly different - that's the sort of discrepancy I was seeing.
It’s a completely made up statistic, as far as I can tell, and it’s repeated constantly.
It probably does a lot of harm, too, by discouraging people from having a go, people who might have actually got off their arses if they’d instead believed “half of all businesses fail within five years”.
> But, regardless, when I checked the failure rate reported in gov stats in UK was far lower than the common wisdom held; which surprised me somewhat.
Does the UK government split into VC backed and not VC-backed? I always thought that number only holds for the "go big or go home" type of business (i.e. VC backed), not for normal ones.
Perhaps they were aiming for 1 and they got 3 or 4? I remember a colleague a few years back had that 'problem' (planned 1 turned to 3) and he got a very generous raise that year.
It’s also possible for someone to become a child’s guardian if their parents lose the ability to fill that role. I don’t know how widespread this is across cultures, but in my family, parents of newborn children name a “godfather” and/or “godmother” (usually an aunt/uncle) who become responsible for this by default.
>> How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
It was a pleasingly refreshing reminder of the old days of the dotcom boom ... a web site for pets! a web site for hotels! a web site for buying onions! anything was possible in those days. Pleasant memories.
Turns out that a website for buying onions was a missed-trick back in those days! (...or was it?)
Great to hear about these business opportunities sprouting up and getting acted on in an honest and decent way.
>This is inspiring because anyone here could do it too if they wanted to. I don't mean selling onions specifically, but I mean they could just go out there find a product, work hard towards selling it, team up with manufacturers/producers, etc and make the dream come to life.
Sounds like my story, where i teamed up with a baker who makes really good cookies. I did all the design and development on nights and weekends. Its only been running for a few months but we've processed almost 1,200 orders delivering cookies. https://cravecookie.co
I love to learn more about this stuff from other engineers. Really inspiring like you said.
I really connected to this story because he looks at domain names the same way I do, just not as effective of turning them over into working businesses. I picked up a bunch of domains like weknow.services, weknow.technology, ...systems because they were on sale, and so they just sat there...
At the start of the year, the idea of creating a forum for professionals kept clawing at me, but I couldn't think of a good domain name that wasn't taken. I wanted a .com but I looked at the ones I owned and just went with it weknow.services. A month ago Upwork announced they'd start charging freelancers for "Connects" to send proposals to clients. I started ramping up the campaign as many were asking "Where else can I look" and quickly replied to someone saying I'd been working on this thing, however I was banned from /r/freelance for even citing it.
I'm not banking on the fact that it'll work, but I sincerely hope it does, for my sake and others. It's something that would help me as a freelancer, and I have future plans if things pan out and users find it useful. If anything it's made me realize how hard marketing is.
This sent me through a gamut of emotions. First, was some revulsion at how informal it was. Then I chastised myself because it doesn't matter. Then I figured people younger than me (maybe even just at heart...) probably don't mind. And now I just feel like an old curmudgeon. :/
Good job on the site and business though, and good luck.
Yes! This was an odd read (in a good way), and I definitely enjoyed. No cruft. No BS. No "one weird trick" hooks. Just a person stumbling into a business opportunity and taking a shot in the dark. Kudos.
This doesn't seem unlike super cool hip startups where the key to success is clearly hip company onion culture that could be better expressed with professional photos of the onions working in various locations / having a good time.
Or like the startup team page where they have, say, Vidalia (an onion, in a cool red-and-white gown of sheaths) instead of the obligatory human-named dog :)
You're welcome. So now a more "technical" question for you. I grew up in Washington where we are home to the "walla walla onion" which is also a sweet onion. I am not a farmer, nor do I claim any level of expertise here. But I just am curious if you could explain the differences/similarities between a Vidalia Onion and a Walla Walla onion.
The taste is very subjective. Most folks simply say that the Vidalia is the sweetest/mildest of them all. The Walla Walla, Texas 1015, the Peru, the Maui sweet are all legit sweet onions, and are all quite good (I now buy & taste onions cause I'm curious).. Some sweet onions might have a slight bite on the front end, others might have a little burn on the back end. Then some are smooth the entire time you chew.. I'd say Vidalias tend to be mild the entire time you chew. That being said, Mother Nature is mother nature, and she's gonna do what she wants to do, taste wise.
The box integrity entirely failed in-transit. Rips, tears, bottoms falling out, tops crushed, everything. I had to refund and re-send orders as make-goods, in better boxes. When my customers showed me pics of the box conditions after delivery, it made my heart hurt (no lie). I thought it was all over. These days, we send all orders in a double-walled cardboard box, with a locking bottom, and aeration holes throughout. It's a tank of a box.
And everyone out there is about becoming a billion $ or more company... What happened to normal ideas, ideas that can literally feed a few families and make you have a good life as well...
Person behind the article seems to enjoy himself and also seems to be feeding a few farms as well that provide him with onions. Amazing work!
There are tens of thousands of those companies out there, they get less attention (on a per company basis) than the billion $ ones for obvious reasons, and occasionally stories about them are posted on HN, where they not infrequently rise to the top.
A founder's story (when it's told for PR reasons) will rarely be so messy it's hard to follow, or so clean it lacks drama. The central conflict will usually be foreshadowed in the introduction, rear its ugly head half-way through, then come to a climax at the end of the narrative leaving just enough space for a sales pitch.
I don't understand this sort of attitude that there is some kind of moral superiority to non-VC funded businesses. In this case, the onion guy used a ton of VC funded businesses like Google and Shopify to make his business possible in the first place. How can you call them "stupid" while holding him up as some kind of good ol' honest salt of the earth online onion man?
This reminded me of an old friend from school. He finished high school and decided to work any type of job would land in front of him.
Meanwhile, his closest friends would finish school, go to colleges and universities and they would come back really proud for having a bachelor or masters degree.
One day they met at a crepe shop. He was making his orders along with the other folks that were behind their crepe pans.
"So...you work here mate?"
"Yep."
"Ah...shame. We make very good money, thanks to our degrees. Isn't a sad thing that you are forced to work in this shitty job?"
"First of all, I enjoy doing this job; and second of all, how much are you earning annually, if I may?"
"Around 35K euros".
He burst to hysterical laughter.
"I happen to make the least 1000 euros daily and this 'shitty job' happens to be mine; yep, I own the place. At my highest peak I earned 1 million euros and these guys you see working next to me are my employees which are getting paid more or less the same amount as you."
I happened to be there when this incident took place; it was the best day of my life! ^_^
One million Euro a year gross would imply more or less 3000 Euro a day. Open for 12 hours a day, that's 250 Euro an hour. At 15 Euro a crepe, that's a customer every 4 minutes the whole day. That would be a truly phenomenal success.
And that's gross. If you assume 50% margin on cost (insanely high) and that cost includes the apparently very high employee salaries. Then they need a customer every two minutes for the day. Let's say taxes take half of their net before taxes. they now need a customer every minute for 12 hours every day of the year to hit a million Euro net. All under a series of assumptions that are extremely generous to the firm.
It's hard to imagine that this story, if true, didn't involve an embellishment of scale.
Here are some actual numbers from Austria for some comparable venues:
- sausage kiosk average(!) turnover 180.000 € (sausages cost 2-3€, better kiosks make several times that easily)
- small Subway €900k approx.
- average McDonald's €3.2 mil
I'd imagine a decent crepes place the size of a McDonald's in a good location could easily make €2 mil/year turnover and half that much profit in a good year.
When I worked in food service long ago, the managers claimed the goal (of a Subway chain) was 30% gross margin. But that's gross margin, and doesn't account for overhead, and thus is not profit margin.
Sounds possible. He can also find other ways to make money - bake other stuff overnight and sell it to other cafe's wholesale, etc etc. I've known people who've done exactly this kind of thing. It's doable.
Crepes do not cost 15 euros... at the max 5 euros. But you misread the post; he didn't claim the guy made a million euros in a year, he just claimed 1 million, so it could have been spread over 10 years.
"At my highest peak" is meaningless to apply to a running total. It must be some period of time. A year would be implied, given the context of the conversation.
The numbers might line up a little more if there was a single brick and mortar and several carts throughout the city and assume the 1 million was gross not profit.
I believe it would be reasonable to assume that the combination of crepes and whatever else is sold would work out to be, generously, 15 Euro a customer. By all means feel free to disaggregate customer orders into crepes, tiramisu, and fancy coffee if you think it makes the math better.
This is certainly a feel good story, but there is a certain balance to be had regarding the 'moral of the story'. For example:
* The owner of the crepe shop may be 1 in 100,000 with the business acumen, drive & luck to reach the success he had.
* In the long-run, it continues to be beneficial to have a degree [1] since it is nigh impossible to determine whether the business will remain successful for decades.
* The 'degree' kid didn't have to be disrespectful to raise a point and in most cases, people are better off asking more questions before creating a picture of the situation.
* It is difficult to determine whether the 'owner' was actually the owner and whether the salary of the employees were what he said it was. When folks are driven into a corner, they either respond by fight-or-flight.
Degree success is not proven to be causative as opposed to a correlation. You get even stronger correlation to income from the colleges you apply to rather than graduate.
I strongly suggest that this is due to being colleges that you can afford if you get in which directly correlates to your parents' incomes, connections, and support which greatly increases your odds to becoming a richer adult.
Parental socioeconomic status has a greater correlation than income, and IQ has a greater correlation than that. If your parents are Syrian refugee doctors in Germany you’re going to do better than the average German even if your family arrived with no money and not speaking German. If you’re an American with two parents with JDs working as public defenders you’re not going to grow up rich bit the chances of ever being poor are quite slim.
Good business sense is something that some folks just have it seems.
People of a particular experience level see careers, money, life as a set of prescribed paths for everyone where in life things are far more random and unpredictable.
Perhaps we are missing a more complete picture of this individual. The sort of person who graduates school and resolves to take whatever job lands on his doorstep often has zero ambition, drive, or work ethic. However as we know he is successful with his crepe shop, he must in fact have some of those traits.
I think you have that the wrong way around. The person who graduates school and has zero ambition, drive, or work ethic is usually the one who won't take whatever job lands on his doorstep.
Speaking as someone who had very little ambition, drive, or work ethic, going to university seemed like a perfect opportunity to put off doing something with my life
The particulars are believable. Even the idea that it'd happen directly to the guys face is believable.
I've seen it happen. One of my friends felt sorry for another because he was merely a "mechanic" and we had gone through university, but as it turns out he was a Porsche mechanic pulling 68k which was a lot more than what a recent grad international studies intern makes.
Yeah, I literally cannot imagine anyone even saying that. As in "there does not exist a human being I've spoken to in my entire life who would use that sentence". Not exaggerating.
I hear, and think if you enjoy being a mechanic, the more power to you, but I feel like going to college opens up more doors for more money overall, especially 10 years down the road. only 1 of the 15 guys working in the shop can own it, so even if your friend ends up being the scrapy one who figures it out and buys it, there are still 14 other guys who aren't as lucky.
To me it just sounds like the OP is paraphrasing and getting the point of the story across without being word for word accurate.
The story is not that outrageous--Out of the thousands of people on hacker news, it seems likely enough to me that something close to that actually happened to one of them.
I'm sort of that story - however my high-school class mates are generally nice people and are more curious than condescending. I'm glad I chose to start my own small business as they share their woes of collage debt, office-politics, and dead end jobs that seemingly suck the joy out of life.
I would say that for some, a family centered life and a humble trade could be better than chasing after what I perceive* to be vanity.
* I'm probably mistaken in motivation, but life does present us with choices that are seemingly easy yet are full of hidden costs.
That old ambiguous word “make”, could be revenue, could be profit. Most likely revenue on a good day.
But your point stands money is made by businesses. For every smart person getting 500k a year salary there’s a business behind that salary with investors making even more.
While unique and somewhat gratifying that you can build a business with just a chance at a good domain and some internal motivations, do you find yourself adding value over other means of onion sales?
It's funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.
It seems there's a lot of interest in gardening / food production among tech people. For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it's totally different from working inside with machines, but there are important and unexpected overlaps. For example if you have a solid understanding of the OSI model which informs your method of system design, you can easily move into gardening where knowledge of the layers of a forest plays a similar role. Having this experience in tech makes it easy to zero in on similar structural principles in gardening, learn about them, and apply that knowledge whereas many others clearly don't.
Just like a person who doesn't understand the value of a proper foundation in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won't first seek to build strong healthy soil, and they will constantly fight against nature rather than work with it, doing more work while getting fewer results.
As an aside, regarding onions: last year I cut off some green onion bottoms from the store and put them in the ground (including the little roots). They grew back and gave several more green onion harvests before winter set in, and now they're back on their own! Permanent green onion. You can do this with a number of plants, btw. Try it!
My life pivoted on a similar moment of whimsy. When I saw the post about the first startup school way back in the day, I just randomly decided "you know what, it's on the other side of the country but I'll just sign up and figure it out". Ended up flying to Boston on a super cheap flight, crashing on my friends couch who was in grad school at MIT, and meeting Steve and Alexis (of reddit), and that's how I ended up working for reddit 18 months later.
And yet, I can spend another 5 minutes in the grocery store agonizing over which of two near-identical bags of chips to buy. Funny how that goes.
I posted a bitchy comment using a throwaway account on Reddit about ten years ago.
It directly led to me moving across the country, getting hired at Google, and finding myself in my dream job doing programming language stuff full-time.
Life is weird, man.
Also, Vidalias (and, really, all of the alliums) are wonderful.
So here I was "in the game industry" and spending zero time actually making games. I posted a rant complaining about that.
Some random redditor said, basically, "I work at Google. If you're a decent C++ programmer, I'll put in a referral for you."
Meanwhile, my wife and I had taken a trip to the Pacific Northwest and decided we wanted to move to that area. I started looking for jobs at other game companies in Seattle. I flew out there to interview at ArenaNet. Since I had a referral, a Google recruiter expedited an interview at the Seattle office while I was in town. I wasn't very seriously considering Google, but I wasn't about to say no.
I bombed the ArenaNet interview. (I think the main sticking point was a question around the time complexity of adding an element to a growable array. I said it was constant, but couldn't effectively explained amortized complexity to them and they didn't seem to understand that amortized complexity existed at all.)
Wonder of wonders, I just squeaked through the Google one.
I ended up on a random project doing front-end programming in JavaScript because I had UI experience. I didn't care for the product and programming UI in JS is, uh, not my idea of a good time, so it wasn't super fun.
However, I randomly took a one-day improve class that Google offerred. There, I met another Googler on another project and we started talking about language nerd stuff. He later ended up forming a team to work on Traceur, which was a project to prototype language changes to JS. They were ramping up, and he remembered I was into language things, so I asked me to join.
That project wound down later so I went looking for other projects to join. Dart was ramping up then and went there. It's been a blast.
But, literally, if I hadn't posted a comment on reddit and taken this improv class, my whole career might be different. I might have left Google to rejoin the game industry or something else entirely.
My first job out of college happened because I met and befriended one specific person in college (was there for 5 years).
My second job (and first startup) happened because I went to a 4-person dinner/game-night at a friend's (who I met at that first job) house, and talked to one of the other attendees who was interviewing at this company, and was willing to refer me (was barely there for a year and a half, but it fundamentally changed my view of work and employment).
Fast forward, and my current job (nearly 8 years now) happened because I checked an email account that I hadn't looked at in several years (and saw a recruiting email of a type I'd usually ignore), because I was trying to sign into some random account on the internet and I'd used that email address as the recovery account, many years before.
Obviously there was more to it than those single events, but each of those things were essential in opening up the opportunity in the first place.
My personal life and social circles often grew from similar simple, one-off, surprise events.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39835357-no-waste-kitche...
It's weird to think about being on this side of a potential life changing choice, but it's really not nearly as big of a deal to me (I'm keeping my fully remote-friendly job) as some people seem to think it is!
I really hope more people do it more often! It's a very effective and wholesome way to foster understanding and spreading of good ideas, and dampening the damning effects of a lot of tribalism in today's political climate.
Also - predators. You can buy ladybugs in most garden centers for almost nothing, and they eat aphids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Literally.
They still do, depending on where you live. My daughter brought home a sunflower seed from a field trip last spring. By the end of summer we had a 7ft tall sunflower growing next to our deck. This year we have several more already sprouting in that area.
It also had a side effect of really enhancing the plot of pretty terrible clay soil we plucked it in. Lots of herbs we attempted (and failed) to grow last year are already starting to flourish this year in that spot.
> [...] she interrupted me mid-sentence and hollered in exaltation to her husband: ” THE VIDALIA MAN! THE VIDALIA MAN! PICK UP THE PHONE!”
The happiness I feel reading that is so sublime. His work is needed and appreciated -- and what a humble trade with a beautiful simplicity to it. It is repeatable; others could do this too! Imagine what our communities would be like if most families had a little something like this. It reminds me of G.K. Chesterton's "Three Acres and a Cow" [1] slogan (implying that can be enough).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism#Economic_theory
The plan was I'd just run to the local grocery store and just fulfill online orders and if demand was there, purchase from local farmers. I didn't get any further than than just mentioning the business idea. Kudos to Peter for executing and meeting a need. Looks like he also owns onions.com, so they are making enough money to acquire that domain name.
I suspect that, like vinyards, if demand stays up long enough we'll find all sorts of weird little spots all over the world with nearly the right kind of soil and moisture and heat.
[edit] Rereading: It's a regional appellation but the taste has much to do with low sulfur content in the soil.
This is such an excellent quote and motivational.
https://www.ideasarecheap.net
https://www.myfreshgrocer.com/nkz/exec/Phone/Product/Display...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/g7q4injeb2w8du8/Screenshot%202019-...
Congratulations! You're an inspiration. A few questions, if I may:
1. Do you plan to expand to other produce other than just the onions?
2. How did you arrive at your current business model (like min order quantity, areas served, return policy, shipping rates etc)?
3. How do you deal with customer complaints, in particular, with something as prone to decay as organic produce?
4. What significant part of the way you do this business changed after v1? Esp, as multiple customers would have inevitably given you comments and suggestions.
5. You mentioned you're registered as a LLC. You don't intend to raise VC money? For instance, YC prefers not to invest in LLCs.
6. What does the tech stack look like (Shopify? Weebly? AWS? Frameworks? Payments? etc)?
And this is what every company finds out eventually. Shipping is key and out of your control. Thus, Amazon starting its own fleet of air carriers.
I wouldn't say every company. Just the ones shipping products that are relatively heavy.
- A captivated reader
There's certainly value in being The Vidalia Man, having connections within the industry, and owning the domain. At the same time, the lessons you've learned (not to mention the platform you've built) could apply to just about any other niche agricultural product, such as ramps in the northeast, or southern flour.
How do those two tensions play against each other when it comes to deciding where on the spectrum between "I sell onions and only onions" and "I will become the next Amazon" to fall?
This is the first time this has ever happened to me in my life.
Though I've only been 35 or older for a year. Should I expect more decisions like this?
:)
I'm quite fond of buying domains myself. I just came here to tell you I'm so happy to have found someone with a hobby like mine, though it is more accurate to call yours a business. My wife hates it, but many of the ideas I have had, have started with a domain name and that being my lift off point.
I tend to buy 1 year registrations for $8 like they're lotto tickets or something.
Thanks for a great article :)
Are they people who graduated and moved away, looking for a little bit of home? I'm suspecting a fair number of Gatech alumni, for one. Or people like me who have to negotiate the onion content of dishes very carefully with friends and family (shallots and Vidalias make that easier).
More seriously, how much interaction do you have with the farmer(s)? Seems like there would need to be a lot of communication to make something like this work.
Super cool story!
And yes, I communicate quite frequently with the farmer. We got along quite well, and I'm fortunate for the friendship I have with him & his team.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19733080
"I'm a web guy. I’m not a farmer."
I already knew that, because in just a couple paragraphs, I was already recognizing the style of writing as... SEO, "influencer", I don't know what to call it?
It's a personal first-person voice, which right off the start tries to establish that the author is a human being writing about their life -- but also that they are an expert in what they are going to tell you about, and very successful too.
The text includes many one or two sentence paragraphs, and has aggressively styled pull quotes and/or callouts. Short sentences too. Not entirely complete sentences. Interspersed.
It makes sure to open up with some kind of very short story that is only tangentially related to the content but is folksy and cute. (Smuggled vidalia's onto cruise ship).
The information is very cleverly structured to keep you reading, by dropping just enough of the actual info, page to page, to pique your attention and make you think there's an interesting story here, but not enough that you can leave having actually learned anything before you've read a pretty big chunk. And is written artfully for this purpose, it works, and keeps you reading. Sometimes at the end you feel rewarded, other times you feel like it was a shaggy dog story. The best authors leave you happy, of course.
It's got information to convey, but the goal is not to convey the information as effectively as possible, but to keep you reading as long as possible -- and, usually, to sell you something.
I don't know if I have a value judgement on it exactly -- okay, I'll admit it annoys me, perhaps because it all sounds the same while trying to convince you it's a folksy authentic voice. But either way, it's a thing, a genre even, that I'm not sure I've seen anyone comment on.
It's: "Content Marketing Voice".
(Also selling people onions on the internet is "purpose over profit", really? What the world needs now is frictionless access to vidalia onions shipped directly to your home?)
Still, more interesting than most...
I think you missed the point about "purpose over profit", it really gave this guy a feeling of that. And him telling that personal story is valid. It's interesting to think about why you seem to have deliberately side-stepped the point of the story.
Actually, analyzing and thinking about the way you wrote this comment, it seems you're just bitter that someone found something they really liked, that gave them a sense of purpose, and now you're trying to find some way to diminish that to yourself, to make yourself feel better, without actually taking the responsibility to do something to make your life better. Which tells us that you wished you had that purpose, but you feel you don't.
Some free advice: go about making that purpose for yourself, rather than making yourself feel better by trying to diminish the achievements of others that trigger you right in the feels. Another way to say it is, instead of making it all about this guy, when you get triggered, stop and think about "why do I feel that way?" and go deep into that. It's not about other people. What you feel is about you. Learn from that. Don't project, don't take it out, don't blame others, just learn from that uncomfortable emotion you're writing this thing to avoid.
Don't get me wrong, this is more than advice. I've seen that attitude cause a lot of unnecessary hurt and conflict in the world and in relationships, and I want people to stop it.
It's a pattern I've see a lot. Definitely has it's own genre voice as well.
Certainly. It is still interesting to analyze as a genre, this is how we make sense of the written world. Perhaps you are doing that same assumption of purpose with my writing.
> I think you missed the point about "purpose over profit", it really gave this guy a feeling of that.
Is the point of "purpose over profit" to engender a feeling of purpose in the people who think they are doing it? Is that the "purpose"?
I think everyone should endeavor to treat their customers, suppliers, and coworkers with respect as human beings, instead of trying to take them for all they are worth. I agree doing so will make you happier. Which can perhaps be surprising to someone who tries it and has never done it before, how much it improves their own life. This is called being a decent human being, and there's no reason for everyone in every job not to do it. There's nothing wrong and a lot right with trying to behave like a decent human being in whatever business you are in, it's commendable, but it's not "purpose over profit."
I think it's disingenuous to elevate the idea of "treating people like humans instead of just instruments for my own profit, while at my profit-focused endeavor" to "purpose over profit", and disrespectful to people who really do make significant material sacrifices for a non-profit-oriented purpose.
What do you think his "purpose" was here, and in what ways were any profits sacrificed for it?
Wow. You sure read a lot into someone's analysis of a writing style. One that I think accurately described the details of the piece of writing. I'm trying to summarize my feelings on your post without actually being hostile, but I can't help but find your entire comment to be really low value, even if it was meant well.
- Least expensive order is a 5-pound box for $34.95
- Runs on Shopify
- As they're seasonal, there are some built-in scarcity aspects I hadn't thought of (which is kind of neat business wise).
Two aspects I might try if this was my business:
1. Some kind of "Chef/Restaurant" option
2. An option to send 1 beautiful onion (ala the referenced Harry and David's)
I sincerely believe that our society would be much happier and healthier if top-shelf/"celebrity" vegetables existed that could cost $XX, sort of like in Japan.
Someone would probably pay $1000+ for "The best dozen onions of the season"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/13/us-food-...
Vegetables can vary by an order of magnitude in nutritional density based on growing and harvest conditions. I wish there was a way to pay 10x for vegetables that are reliably 10x more nutritionally dense (as verified by laboratory analysis of random samples from every harvest).
What could make an onion beautiful enough to buy for $100/ea? If you made these, I bet you'd find a market in Japan. Could make a good gift for people who like cooking.
Reminds me that middlemen provide value in a lot of ways, even though they are hated and everyone thought the internet would disintermediate them all.
[0] - https://success.docker.com/article/docker-hub-user-notificat...
[0]https://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching... | https://startupbook.net
>> if a little dated
Argh! I know. I literally opened the Doc this week to start to parse out sections to update. It’s overdue ;-)
https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com
I'll see myself out.
But seriously, this is the type of side projects I dream of. Not the next soul sucking social network, but rather something meaningful and real.
Current social networks allow you to hit "join" or "like" and that's all the participation you need to get your validation. You're part of the group just by signing up, rather than because you helped make it a community by contributing.
That's probably why this story resonates with people here so much. It's not just a tech business, it's an attempt to contribute and be an integral part of the local community. Not something every startup gets to do.
Edit: Send me an email and I will be happy to let you know when we launch.
Like an onion
I believe M&T is a single farm/growing operation.
That being said what he's doing is something that is hard to reproduce simply because Vidalia onions cannot be grown except in a certain geographic area. You can take the same onion and grow it elsewhere, it will taste exactly or very close to the same, you just cannot sell it as a Vidalia. I'm surprised that there aren't more of the boutique style shops for things like Vidalia onions, Georgia peaches, etc.
Source: born, raised, lived whole life in Ga within a farming family.
The EU has a system-wide concept of products (mostly but not exclusively foods) that are by definition produced in a set region, by a particular method etcetera called the Protected Designation of Origin. This is inspired by laws in some of its member states (most famously France's AOC laws which protect Champagne) but because it's a system rather than being stapled into the law for one specific product it makes it practical to use for less famous things where the heavy lifting of actual legislation would be too much to ask. If your town produces a peculiar furry hat, and then one day sales of the furry hats begin to drop off because it turns out somebody is making replicas in China and selling them under your town's name, applying for PDO is a relatively straight forwad way to fix that across the entire EU without trying to attract attention from legislators in two dozen countries.
Of course PDOs can be abused (e.g. arguably protection of Newcastle Brown Ale was pointless, its only producers were indeed in Newcastle, but when they decided to move they simply applied to discontinue the PDO status...) but overall it seems like having a framework makes more sense than only doing this as actual national legislation (a rule saying Vidalia onions are from Georgia only works because the US government enforces it, the part in Georgia state law has very little effect)
It's why you can buy "Swiss Cheese" from Wisconsin and Bourbon Whiskey from Orlando.
I didn't grow up in one of the counties that are considered under the bounds of the Vidalia area (although pretty close) but we grew the same onions. They tasted, smelled, and looked exactly the same. Were I to try to sell them as Vidalias I could have been sued, but we were growing them for personal consumption anyway.
4165 Highway 101 North, Tillamook, OR 97141
I know you're probably joking, but you should order some. They're delicious.
Even more simple than that really, taking an existing industry and using a domain name to create a front end to that industry.
There is opportunity everywhere. Especially if you don't require creating a billion dollar company.
Thanks for sharing Vidalia Man.
The good thing about a business like this is that it's much less likely someone is going to swoop in and steal your idea and customers because you took a little longer to work out the kinks.
We all seem to agree like things like this is a good thing, but then we undermine people's ability to do it by favoring things like real estate, domains and "middle man businesses" instead.
I guess bunnie said it best: "supply chains are made out of people" https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266
Real business is hard because of all the not obvious things you need to account for.
In Shenzhen you might make hundred boards, go down to the market and buy a hundred boxes and leave them with the shipper. Boards don't work? Re-work them or make another hundred. Box doesn't work? Buy another box. You don't like your box supplier? There is a hundred others on Taobao.
In NYC it might take you weeks to do the same thing while you are bleeding rent (and everything else) so you need the thousand boards and boxes to make it work (or you are selling very few in your spare time). And if something goes wrong you are probably fucked.
I am exaggerating, but you get the idea.
Well, there's a massive middle ground between plastic bags on eBay and placing a $10,000 order for boxes. I didn't mean to imply they couldn't eventually place a $10k order, but often you can order in smaller (but still large) quantities to check the quality. Or just use Uline for a while until you've gotten samples from enough locations to confirm a provider can service your needs.
We don't have the details of this part, so a lot of things could have gone into the decision to place a bit order which made it what appeared to be the correct choice at the time. I just thought it sounded a bit risky given the little information we have.
That's life in a nutshell, I guess.
Or put other way - I'd love to find some great "regular" business ideas to both fund and assist in getting off the ground to the tune of $5-50k, and if successful make a few thousand a month down the road in a couple years - not millions on some future exit.
Basically I want to seed-fund/invest in/be involved in what HN calls "lifestyle business" - just a regular old sustainable business expected to grow 10% a year and comfortably employ a couple founders and employees.
Many good reasons this market doesn't exist and is "hard", but one can wish. It would feel fare more satisfying to invest money in actual hard working people with real but boring (read: low risk) business models than tossing it into the S&P500 or engaging it yet more rent-seeking by buying up small properties to turn into rentals.
To respond to the "rent from investment property" concept, you can get in on investment properties at a fairly low price (IIRC 40% discounts) if you invest when builders are looking for prospective buyers. i.e., before anything is built. I looked into doing this some time ago, but the builder couldn't find enough buyers, so the property was never built.
I've been trying to work this out, that seems like a massive discount, what's the expected profit margin for the builder? Surely not much more.
Why not get a loan? Would be cheaper, certainly on the land. I don't get it, something doesn't add up for me.
It comes down to: if you are interested in real estate investment (either renting or flipping), you are going to find the property more valuable than a bank, who isn't as interested and would just auction it off if they had to own it.
The situation you're describing seems to suggest that it would be better to split up the permitting and the building.
Company A buys land, gets permits, then either sells on to a builder, or contracts a builder.
But then I don't understand why so much capital would be required just for getting permits.
I'm guessing it's another example of different countries doing house buying/building differently, and none of them optimal.
There are lots of permits that only become available much later in the process. For example, an occupancy permit is only granted once the building is in a habitable state.
There are always permit delays of some kind or another because no matter how much research and planning you do, there are things that are simply unknown or that have to be changed (and thus re-permitted) at the proverbial last minute.
I remember that it was a substantial savings, but I can't say exactly where the 40% number came from. It was condos in a retirement community so the builder was making a big deal of "these tenants won't leave until they die..."
Edit: Don't know why this is objectionable. $5k is like one months living costs in many places, and sometimes one months savings. You aren't going to get much in return for that. You need to go somewhere cheaper where that kind of money can buy someone some time. Unless you can provide something else.
I could scrape the $5K to get an idea off the ground, but if it failed I’d regret it. Simply put, it’s not money to risk.
https://www.seedrs.com/
This is why it’s more common for people that are already well off to be entrepreneurs[1] — they have a safety net.
[1]: https://qz.com/455109/entrepreneurs-dont-have-a-special-gene...
Source: I have owned multiple small businesses.
Sounds like a viable startup opportunity. Especially with the Beyond Meats S-1 post from yesterday where hackers talked about buying meat directly from farmers.
Its the nature of the beast, you invest money to make money, the internet is no different.
This guy has one partner, Incentives are aligned, if I were one to buy onions online, I can see myself still being happy with them in 20 years time. Maybe it cost more, but they don't have a monopoly on Onions, their ability to pass on that cost is limited, which is the major concern, is it not?
I wonder what others think about this quote. Could he not have started the same exact business with another domain? Is owning the "right" domain that important that is should "come first" and be forgotten without it? naively I'd think Google@2019 gives more importance to content then to the domain name. No?
However, I guess it did function as a sort of method of brainstorming business ideas.
Some ideas of the stuff you could sell:
- Kombucha
- Specialty sodas
- Heirloom seeds
- Specialty light bulbs and/or batteries
- Spice packets
- Carpet cleaning powder
- Dice
- Specialty candles
- Prepared origami paper
- Specialty pens/pencils/crayons
- Funky hair accessories (someone recently asked me why there aren't many superhero themed ones because it would be a huge market)
It's fascinating how these small market niches exist but it really is the other 95% that makes them take off.
\s
Thanks for sharing this!
Edit: Looks like they have some competition: https://www.vidaliaonion.org
My brother and I started our company the moment after we bought our domain name: retreat.guru. We actually wanted a different domain but didn’t get it; retreat.guru was the runner up. Then we had a spontaneous 3 hour call where we mapped out the entire global wellness retreat marketplace we would build - all based off the domain name! 5 years later we are still going strong.
We are based out of a small mountain town in B.C. Nowhere near the buzz of Silicon Valley. We gradually took investment and grew from revenue as well. We are very vision driven.
‘I sell ayahuasca retreats on the internet’
:D
These stories are good to tell, sometimes what can help a farmer the most is just someone who can help market and sell their crop.
(They’re real good)
I'm not downplaying what he did - it's really cool - what I'm trying is to get a better sense of the business dynamics here.
I expect you could make the same comment about just about everything on the planet that is grown or made, but then sold by someone else. The original person could try to sell it to consumers, but that would take so much time and effort they wouldn't have time to grow/make the thing in the first place!
[1] https://www.deepsouthventures.com/slow-down-wander/
Being flashy helps sometimes if your customers are fickle and you need to sell them on something they didn't know they wanted, but if you've got an enthusiast audience or specialized product, substance is all that is required - at least at a fundamental level.
This site provides one very specific thing to a niche market. It's the difference between opening an office supply store vs a site selling one specific type of rubberband.
[0]: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
The costs of shipping is killer.
Can you think of any example where this is not true?
https://www.vidaliaonions.com/
You're now ranked #1 for "vidalia onions" in Google -- but, I'm really curious what the evolution was after buying the domain?
Whole wheat bread, lightly toasted with a smear of mayo and a thick slice of Vidalia. Mmmm... So good.
Plus if there's "really" an invisible bridge you could throw a pebble at, it should already be covered in dust anyway. Unless the guy who lives in the grail room comes out and sweeps it or something.
that's the point of my rant! :)
I checked using the search box, and it appears this the 12th most voted post of all time (so far!).
Not trying to be a killjoy, but everytime I hear about people reserving domains for fun or future, it just tells of so much privilege. Americans and other Westerners people have already reserved so many domains. Domain name squatting always is a rich-get-richer story.
[1] https://www.cajunsausage.com/
I’ve bought domains for years. Through that process, I’ve developed a specific routine to evaluate a name prior to purchasing.
I’ve been sketching out a plan to build a web app that largely automates this evaluation process, that I would hope to release as a small side project SaaS in the future.
Anyone here interested in such a thing?
I have done this by hand for a long time, but it's error prone and time consuming. Very straightforward to automate down into a one step process.
I don't really like onions. But real Georgia Vidalias are something special.
https://www.business-opportunities.biz/2013/04/10/the-worlds...
So, you pay for the domain name, list it on the development site, and a developer (say me) can pick and choose from what you have and build a product on your property.
There's a contract, you get x% of proceeds from my endeavor, I get a domain name specific to my needs, and we all benefit. The contract would also specify a dwell-time. I get 12 months, or 2 years, or whatever on the property.
Then the contract comes back up for negotiation. Maybe a sale is negotiated (you want my development, or I want your domain name).
But, I think you're right. There'd be a lot of not-so-desirable domains to sort through.
You'd need good contracts - you'd need clauses around trademarks, etc.
This is why I specified renting a redirect, so the developer maintains their IP. I suppose if I (the developer) were to build branding specifically around a domain name (which seems common) then renting could become more of an issue, especially if a new rental agreement cannot be negotiated.
> You'd need good contracts - you'd need clauses around trademarks, etc.
This is the other thing I was pondering. At the start it would essentially be a Craigslist sort of match-making service, and so solid contracts would have to be between individuals without guidance from the service.
Eventually, though, the goal could be to have the company be a registrar in order to control domain names under contract and payment processing (to make sure everyone gets what they agreed to).
I'm not sure the second point above is where a service like this should go, though.
I copied the quote “take the path to Nothing, and go Nowhere until you reach it.” and got it turned into a canvas to hang above my desk.
They were all good ideas, not duffers, evidenced by subsequent pick up years after.
I just never bothered.
Bother first, domain second! :)
Am I the only one here who has a problem with this kind of "business"? I see it as a very asshole thing to dedicate oneself to.
Law 30: Make your accomplishments seem effortless
[1] http://the48lawsofpower.com/summary
How can I possibly be the first person to get stuck on the fact that this fellow dropped $2200 on a niche domain without a business plan in mind?
Most people don't have that kind of whimsy cash, sadly.
My current business and startup take too much time, but some day..
Because I'm a big fan of onions, but an even bigger fan of onion sites...
Just curious, how were the first two farmers you met?
Who would have thought that content marketing would work to sell onions through hacker news!!
Their benefit is that they love local things such as vidalia onions or boiled peanuts that they know are grown locally. I'd wager most of this guy's sales come from the south.
I know quite of young people for whom Google basically is the internet. They never enter addresses in the address bar, and always do a Google search for the site they're trying to get to.
These aren't dullards, either. They're smart people who are talented in their own fields. They're just not techies and the Googling-for-everything workflow works well for them.
For those that are looking to replicate the success of this Vidalia Onion business only have a $10 budget for a domain here are some other options:
onlyvidalias.com
vidalias.net
tryvidalias.com
yummyonions.com
ordervidalias.com
buyvidalias.com
organicvidalias.com
vidaliafarm.com
allvidalias.com
simplyvidalias.com
It's also the perfect combination of the two keywords with nothing else. You'll automatically be at a disadvantage.
But every large market typically has 1 leader and 1-3 other smaller companies who can survive. I doubt this is a large enough market where being #2 or #3 is going to be lucrative. You might as well find other niche premium vegetables. Like 1-800-Flowers and Harry & David (which the author mentioned) does...
https://www.wolfermans.com made a decent-sized business selling premium english muffins.
And someone was running the same business on it just before him: https://web.archive.org/web/19961215000000*/VidaliaOnions.co...
Good strategy. I've seen it suggested to check the wayback machine archive before buying a domain name to make sure you can recreate the same content and backlinks that already exist to take full advantage of any existing SEO.
https://www.deepsouthventures.com/build-a-side-business/
I looked at doman name historical records and it said it was registered October 2008...which makes sense because that was the year after I graduated college to start my job in Middle Georgia (I'm a software engineer, if anyone knows that area you know who I worked for).
I visited my friend in NYC in September to watch the US Open, so makes sense that it was 2008 that I thought of it.
Late April: Season Begins.
So much of the business stuff we read now is bullshit. It is stupid people getting lucky and riding on VC money while making more stupid decisions but ultimately dumping enough investor money into it that it works enough to get sold.
At which point, that founder then goes around and tells the same stereotypical story of dropping out of college, running out of money and getting investment on the day they were planning on giving up, etc. We have all heard the bullshit before.
So I was genuinely grateful to read a real business story. The owner saw an opportunity, took it when other people probably wouldn't have, and just genuinely worked hard to get where he is.
This is inspiring because anyone here could do it too if they wanted to. I don't mean selling onions specifically, but I mean they could just go out there find a product, work hard towards selling it, team up with manufacturers/producers, etc and make the dream come to life.
Unfortunately, this is predictable. Indignation activates generic responses and, above all, attracts upvotes. It feels great in the short term but leads HN to duller, more obvious places. This pattern is dismayingly reliable. A large part of what we do as HN moderators is to try to counteract it. HN can't live by upvotes alone.
If I compare the relatively low quality of this subthread to the more modest and far more interesting responses that people had to the specific details of the article, the contrast is striking.
I don't mean to pick on you personally! We are all subject to this phenomenon and few of us are very conscious of it in ourselves. There was another example even in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19729322. These kinds of subthread grow like weeds. They crowd out the quieter kinds that don't fire up the generic anger that exists in all of us. This effect is collective, not individual; it's a co-creation, and the upvotes probably do more harm than the comments. I am sure you had no intention of feeding it. Unfortunately it happens anyway.
p.s. Perhaps I should add that there's nothing wrong with a critique of VC on HN. HN has hosted countless such critiques. Possibly more have appeared here than anywhere else. The HN community is overwhelmingly (90+%) outside of Silicon Valley, and the majority of it strongly identifies against the VC system (while often feeling itself to be the minority, as if HN overall were of the opposite view).
Rather, the problem is that this was a less interesting direction for the discussion to go, when the actual topic—an onion business!—was much rarer and more curious. What fuels generic tangents is not intellectual curiosity, but a quite different cocktail of emotions. As I said, a large part of moderating HN consists of trying to tease those apart. Trying and mostly failing.
Them: We leverage automated machine learning to enhance your existing BI visualizations with more proactive insights
Me: I sell onions on the internet
So good.
My impression (from way outside, I'm not an entrepreneur at all) is that so much business is VC-funded, which effectively means driven by finance people. Everyone who isn't a VC is still chasing a VC, so VC culture ends up defining business culture.
People, especially left-brained ones like programmers and finance nerds have this really bad tendency to see problems in terms of their preferred solutions. The old "if all you have is a hammer..." thing. So finance people like to turn everything into a money problem that they can solve using spreadsheets and Jupyter notebooks or whatever else it is they use.
Their ideal state is that "business" is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you're just playing the rules to move it onto your square.
...which is of course completely antithetical to any kind of business that actually matters to real humans. If you want to actually solve a human problem, make peoples' lives better and maybe make a little money in the process, Silicon Valley business culture is increasingly useless to you.
Scrappy college kids making a startup don’t know how to live, they’ve just barely lived. And a lot of professionals in tech have no lives outside of work and tech: Wake up and go work in tech. Go home and go read about tech. Attend a party and talk about tech.
How can we expect these Silicon Valley people to create anything that makes life better? All they can do is make cheap permutations of the same tired ideas that have passed through the lips of wanna-be gonna-be entrepreneurs for decades. Ask them: This product makes my life better? Better for what exactly?
Here’s a man who understood that life is a bit better when you can bite into a tasty and juicy Vidalia Onion. This is something you can only know if you stop and take some time to live.
it's popularized on myths like Facebook where the founder actually retained control and got a good deal but that's not the reality and it's not what VC are trying to create.
the reason it's all Scrappy college kids because you need slaves going to work crazy hours and do what they're told but also be crazy and naive enough to believe in it, and low maintenance and confident enough that they can take some direction on their own. and you just need a lot of these people.
because not all of them are going to work well and not all of the ideas are going to pan out but you don't know that and you can afford to fund some of these. you are basically funding an array of experiments and you don't need people who are grown up, in as in mature people who kind of go well I don't think I'm getting a good deal here you need as many bodies as you can. just like the military in war time. and for VCs in their hunger for money for their partners this is like a kind of wartime for them so they're just trying to throw as many bodies as they can at the problem.
all that talk about changing world and saving the world all mythologizing about Facebook etc is to get all those young slaves motivated.
is YC any different? a lot of early writings of Paul Graham on what founders need to know and what makes good startups can be easily read as just propaganda for this sort of program. the bottom line is it's not about what works for founders it's about what works for VCs. and I guess everyone justifies by saying well if vcs get a good outcome then founders do too, but those two Venn diagrams don't necessarily always intersect.
A man approached the salesman upon seeing various colors of different fishing lures being on display. He asked whether those different colors actually work in attracting and catching fishes. The salesman promptly replied "Mister, I'm not selling these to fishes."
If these people are targeting VC money, they don't care if their products actually help solving problems for end consumers (aka the fishes), they just need to know what triggers the VC to invest. Even Masayoshi Son, the head of SoftBank, has lost $130 million in Bitcoin after listening to pitches from those crypto startup CEOs. This is how most businesses fail but hey at least it keeps the money flowing.
Those VC operate based on the principle in which if you throw enough spaghetti onto a wall, even though most will fall off but a few are always bound to stick.
Believe me, nobody knows anything in advance and everything is purely a game of chance, but once somebody gets lucky they can immediately declare themselves as the expert. They start selling books and everyone else would rush out to buy and follow exactly the same steps only to find out most of it just don't work. This same cycle just keeps repeating itself over and over again. Why? The market is not static, it constantly moves and changes around so you are already way behind by the time you apply those same strategies. Plus your personal life and connections are completely different than the other person's so you can't realistically expect the same results.
It's still necessary to learn what has worked because new levels are always built on top of the old ones. But this demonstrates why mathematics, or the rule of randomness, is a universal language that governs everything in our life.
Right. Terms used like "gameplan", "playing to win", etc., confirm it. In fact, although cliches definitely have their place, overuse of terms like that can be considered a "biz smell" (term I just coined - see what I did there? :), analogous to a "code smell" in programming.
Who are we kidding? Every startup is about making human lives better. /s
http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
Excerpts:
> No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.
> How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.
> Ignorance can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. How do you see ideas like that? The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for.
[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
[1] http://paulgraham.com/growth.html
That made me chuckle because I recall walking across the office in 1992, looking at a machine in the corner, and thinking "wow, with this Internet stuff the way it's going I really want to write some clever software, put it on a machine like that and watch my bank account balance grow...".
And it has been fun to watch out that all played out subsequently.
Do you have a source of solid figures to back up that 90%?
About three quarters last more than a year, about half last to 5 years, and about a third last to 10 years.
https://www.fundera.com/blog/small-business-survival
It probably does a lot of harm, too, by discouraging people from having a go, people who might have actually got off their arses if they’d instead believed “half of all businesses fail within five years”.
Does the UK government split into VC backed and not VC-backed? I always thought that number only holds for the "go big or go home" type of business (i.e. VC backed), not for normal ones.
Guess i should give up on that dream then..
It was a pleasingly refreshing reminder of the old days of the dotcom boom ... a web site for pets! a web site for hotels! a web site for buying onions! anything was possible in those days. Pleasant memories.
Turns out that a website for buying onions was a missed-trick back in those days! (...or was it?)
Great to hear about these business opportunities sprouting up and getting acted on in an honest and decent way.
Good read. Thanks :)
Sounds like my story, where i teamed up with a baker who makes really good cookies. I did all the design and development on nights and weekends. Its only been running for a few months but we've processed almost 1,200 orders delivering cookies. https://cravecookie.co
I love to learn more about this stuff from other engineers. Really inspiring like you said.
At the start of the year, the idea of creating a forum for professionals kept clawing at me, but I couldn't think of a good domain name that wasn't taken. I wanted a .com but I looked at the ones I owned and just went with it weknow.services. A month ago Upwork announced they'd start charging freelancers for "Connects" to send proposals to clients. I started ramping up the campaign as many were asking "Where else can I look" and quickly replied to someone saying I'd been working on this thing, however I was banned from /r/freelance for even citing it.
I'm not banking on the fact that it'll work, but I sincerely hope it does, for my sake and others. It's something that would help me as a freelancer, and I have future plans if things pan out and users find it useful. If anything it's made me realize how hard marketing is.
> Wanna see behind the scenes?
This sent me through a gamut of emotions. First, was some revulsion at how informal it was. Then I chastised myself because it doesn't matter. Then I figured people younger than me (maybe even just at heart...) probably don't mind. And now I just feel like an old curmudgeon. :/
Good job on the site and business though, and good luck.
Here's an article that attempts to answer your question, and goes into great detail:
https://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/2012/07/which_sweet_onion...
TLDR: Vidalia is milder. Walla Walla has a more complex flavor profile.
And everyone out there is about becoming a billion $ or more company... What happened to normal ideas, ideas that can literally feed a few families and make you have a good life as well...
Person behind the article seems to enjoy himself and also seems to be feeding a few farms as well that provide him with onions. Amazing work!
A founder's story (when it's told for PR reasons) will rarely be so messy it's hard to follow, or so clean it lacks drama. The central conflict will usually be foreshadowed in the introduction, rear its ugly head half-way through, then come to a climax at the end of the narrative leaving just enough space for a sales pitch.
Meanwhile, his closest friends would finish school, go to colleges and universities and they would come back really proud for having a bachelor or masters degree.
One day they met at a crepe shop. He was making his orders along with the other folks that were behind their crepe pans.
"So...you work here mate?"
"Yep."
"Ah...shame. We make very good money, thanks to our degrees. Isn't a sad thing that you are forced to work in this shitty job?"
"First of all, I enjoy doing this job; and second of all, how much are you earning annually, if I may?"
"Around 35K euros".
He burst to hysterical laughter.
"I happen to make the least 1000 euros daily and this 'shitty job' happens to be mine; yep, I own the place. At my highest peak I earned 1 million euros and these guys you see working next to me are my employees which are getting paid more or less the same amount as you."
I happened to be there when this incident took place; it was the best day of my life! ^_^
One million Euro a year gross would imply more or less 3000 Euro a day. Open for 12 hours a day, that's 250 Euro an hour. At 15 Euro a crepe, that's a customer every 4 minutes the whole day. That would be a truly phenomenal success.
And that's gross. If you assume 50% margin on cost (insanely high) and that cost includes the apparently very high employee salaries. Then they need a customer every two minutes for the day. Let's say taxes take half of their net before taxes. they now need a customer every minute for 12 hours every day of the year to hit a million Euro net. All under a series of assumptions that are extremely generous to the firm.
It's hard to imagine that this story, if true, didn't involve an embellishment of scale.
- sausage kiosk average(!) turnover 180.000 € (sausages cost 2-3€, better kiosks make several times that easily)
- small Subway €900k approx.
- average McDonald's €3.2 mil
I'd imagine a decent crepes place the size of a McDonald's in a good location could easily make €2 mil/year turnover and half that much profit in a good year.
When I worked in food service long ago, the managers claimed the goal (of a Subway chain) was 30% gross margin. But that's gross margin, and doesn't account for overhead, and thus is not profit margin.
No
It works 24/7 with shifts and has delivery that covers the whole city.
To reach that amount, this guy worked his butt off for 3 years non-stop.
1,000,000 gross in a peak year.
say business is open 290 days of the year.
avg per day = 3448 euro
if average customer order spend is ~15 euro, that's ~230 orders per day that must be made to sustain the 1mm euro gross.
So - if the biz is open 6 hours (optimized around eating times) - that would be ~38 orders/hour.
Key Questions: for the average case : is 38 orders/hour OR 230 orders/day reasonable or not?
for the non-average case: can they make 2x the orders really busy days - i.e. what is the absolute peak orders than can make in a day?
- Selling items other than crepes: coffee, tea, alcohol, soft drinks, snacks, etc all have great margins.
- If the place is a cafe, customers may stay and work/read and run a tab, increasing the average revenue per customer.
- Multiple customers may arrive as a group and run up a higher tab.
- Multiple locations: compounding revenue, higher reach, etc
There are probably many more things I'm not even considering.
* The owner of the crepe shop may be 1 in 100,000 with the business acumen, drive & luck to reach the success he had.
* In the long-run, it continues to be beneficial to have a degree [1] since it is nigh impossible to determine whether the business will remain successful for decades.
* The 'degree' kid didn't have to be disrespectful to raise a point and in most cases, people are better off asking more questions before creating a picture of the situation.
* It is difficult to determine whether the 'owner' was actually the owner and whether the salary of the employees were what he said it was. When folks are driven into a corner, they either respond by fight-or-flight.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/data-on-display/educa...
People of a particular experience level see careers, money, life as a set of prescribed paths for everyone where in life things are far more random and unpredictable.
You spoke the truth.
https://fs.blog/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-to-hume-logan/
Seems like a bit of reading that fits, right now.
More than clapping :D The "friends" left completely humiliated.
It's a day that I will cherish for the rest of my life! :D
I've seen it happen. One of my friends felt sorry for another because he was merely a "mechanic" and we had gone through university, but as it turns out he was a Porsche mechanic pulling 68k which was a lot more than what a recent grad international studies intern makes.
"Ah...shame. We make very good money, thanks to our degrees. Isn't a sad thing that you are forced to work in this shitty job?"
The story is not that outrageous--Out of the thousands of people on hacker news, it seems likely enough to me that something close to that actually happened to one of them.
I would say that for some, a family centered life and a humble trade could be better than chasing after what I perceive* to be vanity.
* I'm probably mistaken in motivation, but life does present us with choices that are seemingly easy yet are full of hidden costs.
What I know for sure is that my old friend has accomplished more things than our entire classroom as a whole.
I don't care whether people believe the story or not, or whether he actually paid his staff the money he said he had.
All I did was to share with you people his story as I have witnessed it myself.
But your point stands money is made by businesses. For every smart person getting 500k a year salary there’s a business behind that salary with investors making even more.
Oh, and please downvote. Thank you.