原文：https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/park-io
标题：How Automating Tasks Helped Me Grow Revenue to Over $125k/mo
Who are you and what are you working on?
My name is Mike Carson, and I’m a computer programmer and consider myself a hacker. I started a company called humb.ly that’s a parent company for all of my projects. It’s funny, as you get older you realize and understand yourself better. For me, it comes back to things I already knew when I was a teenager — I love building projects, and that’s what I want to do with my time. Especially things that people find useful.
file.io is a project I launched a little over a year ago. A lot of people use it and find it useful, but park.io continues to grow quickly and is making the most money. park.io is a service that allows people to backorder domain names — specifically “hacker-type” domains (e.g. .io, .ly, .me, etc) — for a fee that we charge only if we are successful in getting the domain for the user.
你是谁，你在做什么？
我的名字是迈克卡森，我是一名计算机程序员，认为自己是一名黑客。我创办了一家名为 humb.ly 的公司，它是我所有项目的母公司。这很有趣，随着年龄的增长，你会更好地意识到和理解自己。对我来说，这又回到了我十几岁时就已经知道的事情——我喜欢建筑项目，这就是我想利用我的时间做的事情。尤其是人们觉得有用的东西。
file.io 是我一年多前启动的一个项目。很多人使用它并发现它很有用，但 park.io 继续快速增长并且赚的钱最多。park.io 是一项服务，允许人们抢注域名 – 特别是“黑客类型”域名（例如.io，.ly，.me等） – 只有在我们成功获得用户域名时才收取费用。
How’d you get started with park.io?
There was a domain that had expired, and I wanted it for a project — smile.io. I knew that it would become available for registration sometime soon, but not exactly when, so I wrote a script that checked the domain every second and sent me an email if it was available.
One day I was sitting down to dinner with my wife when I checked my phone and saw that I got an email that the domain was available less than a minute ago. I rushed to my computer to register it, but it was already registered. This was frustrating, and led me to learn more about the whole system and to improve my scripts. Eventually they got very efficient, and always were able to get the domains I wanted, so I decided to sell this as a service.
There was a week or so of grunt work — setting up a UI, allowing user signups, payments, etc… It wasn’t as fun as the scripts to catch the dropping domains, but it allowed myself and others to use the system in an automated way. I never did any initial marketing — the only thing I did and continue to do today is put a parked page up by default on the domains that we get. You can see an example if you go here. In this way, those interested in the domains found park.io from the domains’ landing pages, and from there more people found out about it via word of mouth.
The first day I launched the service I got a few orders, and I have basically had orders every day since.
您是如何开始使用 park.io 的？
有一个域名已经过期，我想把它用于一个项目 – smile.io。我知道它很快就会可以注册，但不是确切的时间，所以我写了一个脚本，每秒检查一次域，如果可用，请给我发一封电子邮件。
有一天，当我检查手机时，我和妻子坐下来吃饭，看到不到一分钟前我收到了一封电子邮件，说域名可用。我赶紧到我的电脑前注册它，但它已经注册了。这很令人沮丧，并促使我更多地了解整个系统并改进我的脚本。最终他们变得非常高效，并且总是能够获得我想要的域名，所以我决定将其作为服务出售。
有一周左右的繁重工作 – 设置UI，允许用户注册，付款等……捕获丢弃域并不像脚本那样有趣，但它允许我和其他人以自动化的方式使用系统。我从未做过任何最初的营销——我今天做过并继续做的唯一一件事就是默认在我们获得的域名上放置一个停放页面。如果你去这里，你可以看到一个例子。通过这种方式，那些对域名感兴趣的人从域名的登录页面中找到了 park.io，从那里更多的人通过口耳相传发现了它。
在我推出服务的第一天，我收到了一些订单，从那以后我基本上每天都有订单。
How’d you find the time and funding to build your business?
It was more like a hobby — I just worked on it in my spare time. I’ve told other hackers I know not to even start with an idea. It seems like every time I started a project with an idea, it never really worked out. But with park.io it was just kind of a flow — action/reaction — I can’t even claim it was a real idea before I started it. When something is fun and a hobby, you don’t really think of it as an idea, and you put more time and care into it. And I think it shows in the product.
Another thing I’ve learned from running park.io is the power of being able to adapt to changes. I think this quote can be applied to business competition:
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” —Darwin
I think startups have a huge advantage over bigger companies, because they can adapt more quickly. There were times in the last couple of years where there were big changes that were pretty large obstacles to the business, but I think I was able to adapt to these changes pretty well, which enabled the business to grow and thrive.
Another thing that is a huge advantage to programmers is our ability to automate processes. Any time I find myself doing something over and over, I try to write a piece of code that will automate it. I have so many automated processes running now that I feel like I have a team of 50 employees working around the clock, constantly and accurately, always in the background. park.io is set to break over $1M in revenue this year and I am the only employee, but only because I am able to leverage all of the automated processes that are able to do the work for me.
您如何找到时间和资金来建立您的业务？
这更像是一种爱好——我只是在业余时间工作。我告诉其他我知道的黑客，甚至不要从一个想法开始。似乎每次我带着一个想法开始一个项目时，它从来没有真正成功过。但对于 park.io 来说，这只是一种流程——行动/反应——在我开始之前，我什至不能声称这是一个真实的想法。当某件事很有趣和爱好时，你不会真正把它当作一个想法，你会投入更多的时间和精力。我认为它体现在产品中。
我从跑步 park.io 中学到的另一件事是能够适应变化的力量。我认为这句话可以应用于商业竞争：
“生存下来的不是最强壮的物种，也不是生存下来的最聪明的物种。它是最能适应变化的。
我认为初创公司比大公司有巨大的优势，因为它们可以更快地适应。在过去的几年里，有些时候发生了很大的变化，这对业务来说是相当大的障碍，但我认为我能够很好地适应这些变化，这使业务得以成长和繁荣。
对程序员来说，另一个巨大的优势是我们自动化流程的能力。每当我发现自己一遍又一遍地做某事时，我都会尝试编写一段代码来自动化它。我现在有如此多的自动化流程在运行，我觉得我有一个由 50 名员工组成的团队，全天候、准确、始终在后台工作。park.io 今年的收入将突破100万美元，我是唯一的员工，但这只是因为我能够利用所有能够为我完成工作的自动化流程。
How have you attracted users and grown your business?
I have never paid for any marketing, except on one occasion when I paid a domain blogger to put an ad in the sidebar of his website, but mostly it was to establish a relationship with this blogger (who is also a happy park.io user).
I think the best way to attract users is with a good service and product, and it will spread from word of mouth from there. The domain parking pages I mentioned previously have probably attracted the most users — I didn’t have to do anything to get the first users — they just came from these pages.
Other than that, things that have helped attract users are a weekly newsletter, blog posts, interviews I have done, and domain donations I have made (e.g. angular.io to AngularJS, perl.io to the Perl Foundation, and gnome.io to the Gnome Foundation).
您如何吸引用户并发展业务？
我从来没有为任何营销付费，除了有一次我付钱给一个域名博主在他网站的侧边栏中放一个广告，但主要是与这个博主建立关系（他也是一个快乐的 park.io 用户）。
我认为吸引用户的最好方法是通过良好的服务和产品，它会从那里的口碑传播开来。我之前提到的域名停放页面可能吸引了最多的用户——我不需要做任何事情来吸引第一批用户——他们只是来自这些页面。
除此之外，帮助吸引用户的东西是每周的时事通讯，博客文章，我所做的采访，以及我所做的域名捐赠（例如 angular.io 给AngularJS，perl.io 给Perl基金会，gnome.io 给Gnome基金会）。
What’s the story behind your revenue?
I started charging right away and got a few orders and payments in the first 24 hours after launching. I wasn’t sure about pricing, but I thought $99 seemed like a good number since it is less than a hundred and more than covers expenses.
I use Stripe for payment processing, because it’s easy. My goal was to break $1M in revenue in a single year, and that should happen this year. This was my goal, because I heard that only 5% of software companies reach this milestone, and also I think it is the lower limit on getting on the Philly 100 list, which I would like to do again. (I have before with wizehive.com).
您的收入背后的故事是什么？
我立即开始充电，并在推出后的前 24 小时内收到了一些订单和付款。我不确定定价，但我认为 99 美元似乎是一个不错的数字，因为它不到一百，而且超过了费用。
我使用 Stripe 进行付款处理，因为它很容易。我的目标是在一年内突破100万美元的收入，这应该在今年发生。这是我的目标，因为我听说只有5%的软件公司达到了这个里程碑，而且我认为这是进入费城100强名单的下限，我想再做一次。（我以前有过 wizehive.com）。
What are your goals for park.io’s future?
My goal is to keep it as a great product, and to add some features that could further make it stand out in the domain industry. For example, I would like to make it so that users can auction their own domains. There are some existing platforms that do this, but they have a lot of issues. I have been thinking about those issues for a while, and think I may have an interesting solution.
If you had to start over, what would you do differently?
I don’t know if I would do much differently, since things have worked out pretty well. The competitive side of me thinks of the domains that I missed to competitors — I guess I would fix these specific issues. But instead of thinking of things I would change, here are a couple of things I think I did well:
Adapt. Just roll with whatever comes your way and try to make it work. There is most likely a way to make it work, no matter what happens.
Keep it simple. There are a lot of features that users say they want that I haven’t added because I thought it would stray from my main goal, and I think this simplicity has really helped the company. Also, I always meant to improve the design of the app (it just uses Twitter bootstrap), but this simplicity seems to make users happy, and I am reluctant to change things just for the sake of changing things. It’s working now, so I don’t see a reason to change it.
您对park.io的未来有什么目标？
我的目标是保持它作为一个伟大的产品，并添加一些功能，可以进一步使其在域名行业中脱颖而出。例如，我想这样做，以便用户可以拍卖自己的域名。有一些现有的平台可以做到这一点，但它们有很多问题。我一直在思考这些问题一段时间，并认为我可能有一个有趣的解决方案。
如果你必须重新开始，你会做什么不同的事情？
我不知道我是否会做很多不同的事情，因为事情进展得很顺利。我的竞争方面想到了我错过竞争对手的领域——我想我会解决这些具体问题。但是，与其考虑我会改变的事情，不如说这里有几件事我认为我做得很好：
适应。随心所欲，努力让它发挥作用。无论发生什么，很可能都有一种方法可以使其工作。
保持简单。用户说他们想要的很多功能我没有添加，因为我认为它会偏离我的主要目标，我认为这种简单性确实帮助了公司。另外，我一直想改进应用程序的设计（它只是使用Twitter引导程序），但这种简单性似乎让用户感到高兴，我不愿意仅仅为了改变而改变东西。它现在正在工作，所以我看不出有理由改变它。
What else has really worked in your favor?
I think the two biggest advantages I have are:
I am small (just me), so it’s easy for me to adapt to changes and move quickly. This gives me a huge advantage over larger companies.
Being a developer, I can automate so many tasks. I’ve mentioned before to others — I feel like I have a huge team of employees working around the clock.
还有什么真正对你有利？
我认为我拥有的两个最大优势是：
我很小（只有我自己），所以我很容易适应变化并快速行动。这使我比大公司具有巨大的优势。
作为一名开发人员，我可以自动执行很多任务。我之前已经向其他人提到过——我觉得我有一个庞大的员工团队全天候工作。
What’s your advice for aspiring indie hackers?
I guess my advice would be to not even start with an idea — just do what you find interesting, and keep in mind that maybe you could make it into a business. I personally also like having me be the only employee, I think the ability to adapt is probably the most important attribute, and as the sole founder, this makes it really easy. And, as I mentioned before, if you are a developer, leverage this skill to automate whatever you can.
Another thing I would advise, just from my own history and experience, is to move on quickly if it isn’t working. You will know when it is isn’t working and when it is, and it is best to just move on to the next thing quickly when it isn’t .
你对有抱负的独立黑客有什么建议？
我想我的建议是，甚至不要从一个想法开始——只做你觉得有趣的事情，并记住，也许你可以把它变成一个企业。我个人也喜欢让我成为唯一的员工，我认为适应能力可能是最重要的属性，作为唯一的创始人，这很容易。而且，正如我之前提到的，如果您是开发人员，请利用此技能来自动化任何可能的事情。
根据我自己的历史和经验，我建议的另一件事是，如果它不起作用，请迅速前进。您将知道它何时不起作用以及何时起作用，最好在它不起作用时快速继续下一件事。
Where can we learn more about you?
My parent company is located at http://humb.ly, and here are a couple of interviews I did on DomainSherpa:
Where to Buy the Hottest .IO Domain Names That Startups Want – With Mike Carson
The Rise of .io: How to Value and Sell for Profit – With Mike Carson
You can also find me on…
Hacker News: ca98am79
GitHub: ca98am79
Twitter: @ca98am79
my about.me page: mike.sh
the Indie Hackers forum or in the comment section below
—
Mike Carson
, Creator of park.io
Want to build your own business like park.io?
You should join the Indie Hackers community! 珞
We’re a few thousand founders helping each other build profitable businesses and side projects. Come share what you’re working on and get feedback from your peers.
Not ready to get started on your product yet? No problem. The community is a great place to meet people, learn, and get your feet wet. Feel free to just browse!
—
Courtland Allen
, Indie Hackers founder
44
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7
Hi Mike, it’d be interesting to know what kinds of tasks you’ve automated while working on park.io, and what tools you’ve used to help with the automation (IFTTT, Zapier, scraping, etc).
divideby0
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6 years ago
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A lot of the automation is collecting data and alerting me to things that may be of interest. Then there is a lot of checking on things, like checking domains to see if they were transferred away, etc.. The weekly newsletter is automated. There are features – things that I used to do manually, but I got too many requests that I now automate – for example, like pushing domains between accounts. Recently I created an automated task to check on the other automated tasks…
I use IFTTT for a couple of Stripe integrations – like sending daily reports, or getting a notification when a user adds a card to their account.
mc
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6 years ago
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Mike, amazing! My first thought is why did you decide to roll it yourself instead of using any of the other domain grabbers that have been about for 10+ years? (I dabbled in domaining in the early 00s)
I’m a dev myself by I would never think I could throw something together in a few weeks and beat the big companies that have been doing this for decade. What’s your success rate?
Thanks!
Costa
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6 years ago
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Thank you Mike for sharing this wealth of information here.
I have a few questions i would love you to help answer.
What are the things you look out for when choosing a project ?
At what point do you consider profitability or money ?
If there’s no clear chance of making money off an interesting project to you, do you still go ahead to build it ?
How would your answers change if you had a full time job and needed extra income from the project ?
Thank you
Tengine8800
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4 years ago
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Very interesting interview. Thanks for sharing!
Daanscholten
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4 years ago
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Helluu
Melo
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6 years ago
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How much traffic (pageviews, session) do you tend to see to park.io’s homepage? Has there been a noticeable bump for the past few days with the Indie Hackers feature? Had to ask 😉
csallen
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6 years ago
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With all of the parked domains we get a good amount of traffic – around 3-5k pageviews per day. But yes there was a big bump – went up to about 15k
mc
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6 years ago
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I’d like to know more about the choice domain extensions. Was the.io domain easier to get with so much less competition, or was it due to the fact that there are still some good names available in .io?
2113
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6 years ago
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.io is used a lot by tech companies and I personally use it, so this is why I started with .io. I’ve added some others along the way, which are also nice to use for domain hacks
mc
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6 years ago
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What a great post, very interesting. Mike, do you use your own registrar or another one?
marec
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6 years ago
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Thanks! yes we have our own registrars
mc
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6 years ago
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That’s great. I’m just comparing prices for .io registration/renewals, do you use your registers just for yourself or people are able to register domains through it? If yes, can you give me the links to those registrar sites? Thanks!
marec
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6 years ago
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Hey – super interesting post. I love the idea of working on something that isn’t forced, nurturing it with speed and a willingness to adapt along the way. It just seems like the most sensible thing to do.
Worked out I could comment here instead of sending you two consecutive tweets (which I have already done – @Michael_Wills).
I am really curious to learn more about how you nurtured early adopter engagement (finding people, engaging with people, maintaining and growing interest). Any trends / actions you can attribute to this space that really helped it continue on a healthy trajectory?
michaelwills
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6 years ago
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I think people were just interested in the domains, and the parked pages really helped to get users’ attention. Also, I believe the support you give is really important – especially when you are just starting out and giving a first impression. I still try to respond to any support emails very quickly.
mc
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6 years ago
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Want to fund an animation app with some of that revenue? “Think of the children!” -Maude Flanders
SurrenderComp1337
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6 years ago
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I’ve been reading some of Amy Hoy’s blog posts recently (https://unicornfree.com/), and generally her process for building a product is to observe users a lot, identify some of their pain points, and only then build a product that solves one of the pain points. Stories like this fly directly in the face of Amy’s wisdom though. Maybe a takeaway is that solving problems for yourself is equally viable, in the case that others have the same problems?
In any case, $125,000 a month is insane. :O
nucleartide
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6 years ago
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thanks, yes I personally prefer to just have fun and do something interesting, and then maybe make it a business as an afterthought.
mc
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6 years ago
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Hi Mike! Very interesting interview and the business! Really like how you saw and opportunity and took without thinking much.
If possible, would you be able to share what the user interface looks like? You mentioned twitter bootstrap, and I think its a great way to start off, but look into Semantic UI. Its as simple as bootstrap (probably even simpler), and looks incredible good and is very nice to work with.
Secondly, what are the languages that you use for automation? Python, nodejs, others?
Rtony
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6 years ago
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Hi, you can see the UI here: https://app.park.io/
Semantic UI looks nice, thanks.
I mostly use PHP and NodeJS for the automation, but I would like to learn Python one day
mc
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6 years ago
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REPLY
More Interviews
Read the stories behind hundreds of profitable businesses and side projects.
我们在哪里可以了解更多关于您的信息？
我的母公司位于 http://humb.ly，以下是我在DomainSherpa上进行的几次采访：
Where to Buy the Hottest .IO Domain Names That Startups Want – With Mike Carson
The Rise of .io: How to Value and Sell for Profit – With Mike Carson
你也可以在…
黑客新闻：ca98am79
GitHub： ca98am79
推特： @ca98am79
我的 about.me 页：mike.sh
独立黑客论坛或下面的评论部分
—
迈克·卡森
，park.io 的创造者
想像 park.io 一样建立自己的企业吗？
你应该加入独立黑客社区！珞
我们是几千名创始人，互相帮助建立有利可图的业务和副业。快来分享你正在做的事情，并从你的同行那里得到反馈。
还没准备好开始使用您的产品？没关系。社区是结识新朋友、学习和弄湿脚的好地方。随意浏览！
—
考特兰·艾伦
，独立黑客创始人
44
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发表评论
7
嗨，Mike，了解您在处理 park.io 时自动化了哪些类型的任务，以及您使用了哪些工具来帮助自动化（IFTTT、Zapier、抓取等）会很有趣。
除以0
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6年前
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答
6
很多自动化都在收集数据，并提醒我注意可能感兴趣的事情。然后有很多检查，比如检查域名以查看它们是否被转移走了，等等。每周通讯是自动化的。有一些功能 – 我以前手动执行的事情，但现在我收到了太多自动化的请求 – 例如，在帐户之间推送域。最近我创建了一个自动化任务来检查其他自动化任务……
我将 IFTTT 用于一些 Stripe 集成 – 例如发送每日报告，或在用户向其帐户添加卡时收到通知。
司仪
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6年前
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答
3
迈克，太棒了！我的第一个想法是，为什么你决定自己滚动它，而不是使用任何其他已经存在了10 +年的域名抓取器？（我在 00 年代初涉足域名）
我自己就是一名开发人员，我永远不会想到我可以在几周内把一些东西放在一起，并击败已经这样做了十年的大公司。你的成功率是多少？
谢谢！
哥斯达黎加
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6年前
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答
1
谢谢迈克在这里分享这些丰富的信息。
我有几个问题，希望您帮助回答。
您在选择项目时要注意哪些事项？
在什么时候你考虑盈利能力或金钱？
如果没有明确的机会从你感兴趣的项目中赚钱，你还会继续建造它吗？
如果您有一份全职工作并且需要从项目中获得额外收入，您的答案会如何变化？
谢谢
发动机8800
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4年前
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非常有趣的采访。感谢分享！
丹斯乔滕
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4年前
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1
海鲁
梅洛
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6年前
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您倾向于在park.io的主页上看到多少流量（网页浏览量，会话量）？过去几天独立黑客功能是否有明显的颠簸？不得不问;-）
卡伦
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6年前
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对于所有停放的域，我们获得了大量的流量 – 每天大约 3-5k 的浏览量。但是，是的，有一个很大的颠簸 – 上升到大约 15k
司仪
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6年前
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我想了解更多关于选择域扩展的信息。the.io 域名更容易获得，竞争要少得多，还是因为.io中仍然有一些好名字？
2113
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6年前
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.io被科技公司大量使用，我个人也使用它，所以这就是我从.io开始的原因。在此过程中，我添加了其他一些其他内容，它们也非常适合用于域黑客
司仪
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6年前
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多么棒的帖子，非常有趣。迈克，你使用自己的注册商还是其他注册商？
马雷克
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6年前
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谢谢！是的，我们有自己的注册商
司仪
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6年前
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真棒。我只是在比较.io注册/续订的价格，您是只为自己使用您的注册器，还是人们可以通过它注册域名？如果是，你能给我这些注册商网站的链接吗？谢谢！
马雷克
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6年前
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嘿 – 超级有趣的帖子。我喜欢做一些非强迫性的事情，用速度和适应的意愿来培养它的想法。这似乎是最明智的做法。
计算出我可以在这里发表评论，而不是向您发送连续两条推文（我已经这样做了 – @Michael_Wills）。
我真的很想知道更多关于你如何培养早期采用者的参与度（寻找人，与人互动，保持和增长兴趣）。您可以归因于这个真正帮助它继续健康轨迹的趋势/行动吗？
迈克尔威尔斯
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6年前
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1
我认为人们只是对这些域名感兴趣，而停放的页面确实有助于吸引用户的注意力。此外，我相信您给予的支持非常重要 – 尤其是当您刚刚起步并给人留下第一印象时。我仍然尝试非常快速地回复任何支持电子邮件。
司仪
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6年前
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想用部分收入资助动画应用吗？“想想孩子们！”
投降公司1337
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6年前
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我最近（https://unicornfree.com/）一直在阅读Amy Hoy的一些博客文章，一般来说，她构建产品的过程是大量观察用户，找出他们的一些痛点，然后才构建一个解决其中一个痛点的产品。不过，像这样的故事直接与艾米的智慧背道而驰。也许一个结论是，在别人有同样问题的情况下，为自己解决问题同样可行？
无论如何，每月125，000美元是疯狂的。：O
核潮
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6年前
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谢谢，是的，我个人更喜欢玩得开心，做一些有趣的事情，然后也许把它作为事后的想法。
司仪
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6年前
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嗨，迈克！非常有趣的采访和业务！真的很喜欢你看到的机会，不假思索地拿走了。
如果可能，您是否能够分享用户界面的外观？你提到了 twitter bootstrap，我认为这是一个很好的开始方式，但要看看语义 UI。它就像引导一样简单（可能更简单），看起来非常好，非常好用。
其次，您使用哪些语言来实现自动化？Python，nodejs，其他？
雷托尼
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6年前
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嗨，您可以在此处看到 UI：https://app.park.io/
语义 UI 看起来不错，谢谢。
我主要使用PHP和NodeJS进行自动化，但我想有一天学习Python。
司仪
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6年前
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