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 &#x27;invisible hand of the free market&#x27; dream too.

Though vidalia.onion would be a stylish domain name. It&#x27;d be better than vidaliaonion.io.\s

 Originally I was expecting an article about mining .onion domain names, but this is good too!

Not to mention he&#x27;s actually having a lot of fun doing this, and he specifically throws shade at what you&#x27;ve described above (and what we typically read about here on Hacker News)Them: We leverage automated machine learning to enhance your existing BI visualizations with more proactive insightsMe: I sell onions on the internetSo good.

Yes! This was an odd read (in a good way), and I definitely enjoyed. No cruft. No BS. No &quot;one weird trick&quot; hooks. Just a person stumbling into a business opportunity and taking a shot in the dark. Kudos.

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 :)

This doesn&#x27;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 &#x2F; having a good time.

Getting the story on HN can&#x27;t do any harm to the sales too

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.

&gt;writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll inThat made me chuckle because I recall walking across the office in 1992, looking at a machine in the corner, and thinking &quot;wow, with this Internet stuff the way it&#x27;s going I really want to write some clever software, put it on a machine like that and watch my bank account balance grow...&quot;.And it has been fun to watch out that all played out subsequently.

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:&gt; 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&#x27;s broken code. Maybe that&#x27;s possible, but I haven&#x27;t seen it.&gt; 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&#x27;d known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they&#x27;d have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that&#x27;s one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.&gt; Ignorance can&#x27;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 &quot;what problem should I solve?&quot; ask &quot;what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?&quot; 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] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;schlep.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;schlep.html</a>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;growth.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;growth.html</a>

&gt; ...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&#x27; lives better...Who are we kidding? Every startup is about making human lives better. &#x2F;s<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...</a>

&gt;Their ideal state is that &quot;business&quot; is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you&#x27;re just playing the rules to move it onto your square.Right. Terms used like &quot;gameplan&quot;, &quot;playing to win&quot;, etc., confirm it. In fact, although cliches definitely have their place, overuse of terms like that can be considered a &quot;biz smell&quot; (term I just coined - see what I did there? :), analogous to a &quot;code smell&quot; in programming.

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.

This reminds me of a story I read before.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 &quot;Mister, I&#x27;m not selling these to fishes.&quot;If these people are targeting VC money, they don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s so you can&#x27;t realistically expect the same results.It&#x27;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.

&gt; 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&#x27;m not an entrepreneur at all) is that so much business is VC-funded, which effectively means driven by finance people. Everyone who isn&#x27;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 &quot;if all you have is a hammer...&quot; 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 &quot;business&quot; is just some board game where the money is all on the board already and you&#x27;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&#x27; lives better and maybe make a little money in the process, Silicon Valley business culture is increasingly useless to you.

You&#x27;re welcome.  So now a more &quot;technical&quot; question for you. I grew up in Washington where we are home to the &quot;walla walla onion&quot; 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&#x2F;similarities between a Vidalia Onion and a Walla Walla onion.

Would you mind telling us what went wrong with the box order?

thank you jacurtis (Peter here, author).. your comments mean a lot. many thanks.

I don&#x27;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 &quot;stupid&quot; while holding him up as some kind of good ol&#x27; honest salt of the earth online onion man?

+1 to this.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 :)

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&#x27;t think of a good domain name that wasn&#x27;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&#x27;d start charging freelancers for &quot;Connects&quot; to send proposals to clients. I started ramping up the campaign as many were asking &quot;Where else can I look&quot; and quickly replied to someone saying I&#x27;d been working on this thing, however I was banned from &#x2F;r&#x2F;freelance for even citing it.I&#x27;m not banking on the fact that it&#x27;ll work, but I sincerely hope it does, for my sake and others. It&#x27;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&#x27;s made me realize how hard marketing is.

&gt; DEETS&gt; 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&#x27;t matter. Then I figured people younger than me (maybe even just at heart...) probably don&#x27;t mind. And now I just feel like an old curmudgeon. :&#x2F;Good job on the site and business though, and good luck.

&gt;This is inspiring because anyone here could do it too if they wanted to. I don&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x27;ve processed almost 1,200 orders delivering cookies. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cravecookie.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cravecookie.co</a>I love to learn more about this stuff from other engineers. Really inspiring like you said.

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.

Agree with you.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!

Stories are often modified to make them more compelling, often to follow a 3 act play - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Three-act_structure" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Three-act_structure</a>A founder&#x27;s story (when it&#x27;s told for PR reasons) will rarely be so messy it&#x27;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 saw this comment yesterday but didn&#x27;t read beyond its first sentence, which is great. But looking it it now again, I&#x27;m sad to see that the discussion it evoked was more in response to the indignation in it (&quot;bullshit&quot;, &quot;stupid people&quot;, &quot;bullshit&quot;) 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&#x27;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&#x27;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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19729322" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19729322</a>. These kinds of subthread grow like weeds. They crowd out the quieter kinds that don&#x27;t fire up the generic anger that exists in all of us. This effect is collective, not individual; it&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;producers, etc and make the dream come to life.

I don&#x27;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 a potentially addictive and risky venture. I&#x27;ve personally bought hundreds of domains over the years, and professionally in the thousands. I&#x27;ve probably broken even or profited a little. Most of the domains I buy for the name just sit there unused for 5+ years.

My personal advice would be: Get the rest of the pieces in place before buying the domain name. I&#x27;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.I just never bothered.Bother first, domain second! :)

I&#x27;ve been umming-and-ahhing over an entrepreneurial endeavour for a while now. I&#x27;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.

Rob &amp; Mike&#x27;s podcast is great on this topic as well.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startupsfortherestofus.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.startupsfortherestofus.com</a>

This is one of the reasons why I love HN so much.

Author of Start Small, Stay Small here.&gt;&gt; if a little datedArgh! I know. I literally opened the Doc this week to start to parse out sections to update. It’s overdue ;-)

That&#x27;s awesome. A couple responses to yesterday&#x27;s thread regarding bookmarked hn quotes really opened up my eyes regarding building and maintaining side projects. I picked up a book, &quot;Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer&#x27;s Guide to Launching a Startup&quot; which has been informative (if a little dated). This article is a great supplement to that book, and is inspirational to a 9-5&#x27;er like me.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0615373968" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching...</a> | <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;startupbook.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;startupbook.net</a>

You don&#x27;t need a fancy site to have a viable business. You just need customers. Sounds like they have their 1,000 true fans[0].[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kk.org&#x2F;thetechnium&#x2F;1000-true-fans&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kk.org&#x2F;thetechnium&#x2F;1000-true-fans&#x2F;</a>

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&#x27;s the difference between opening an office supply store vs a site selling one specific type of rubberband.

Craigslist, or perhaps Tarsnap, or many others providing services to people who know exactly what they&#x27;re looking for.Being flashy helps sometimes if your customers are fickle and you need to sell them on something they didn&#x27;t know they wanted, but if you&#x27;ve got an enthusiast audience or specialized product, substance is all that is required - at least at a fundamental level.

The fact that it&#x27;s been running for 5+ years seems to suggest otherwise, mate.

It is not that viable to be fair.The costs of shipping is killer.

This is really inspirational: who knew that such a rudimentary site could be a viable business?

Drop in on your local bank and SBA. They are looking for people like you.

I&#x27;ve thought about this a lot lately. I have (some) money, but not a whole lot of time. It&#x27;s really hard to find reasonable direct investments for &quot;down payment on an investment property&quot; style money, with &quot;rent from an investment property&quot; expected returns. Seems all that&#x27;s available at that level is more or less gambling on potential unicorn style stuff.Or put other way - I&#x27;d love to find some great &quot;regular&quot; 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&#x2F;invest in&#x2F;be involved in what HN calls &quot;lifestyle business&quot; - 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&#x27;t exist and is &quot;hard&quot;, 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&amp;P500 or engaging it yet more rent-seeking by buying up small properties to turn into rentals.

I have available time. Get me someone with thousands of dollars (and willing to risk them) and let’s collaborate!

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&#x27;t be same thing.We all seem to agree like things like this is a good thing, but then we undermine people&#x27;s ability to do it by favoring things like real estate, domains and &quot;middle man businesses&quot; instead.I guess bunnie said it best: &quot;supply chains are made out of people&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bunniestudios.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=4266" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bunniestudios.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=4266</a>

I think the thousands of dollars really just sped up the timeline. The domain definitely helps, but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s required. There&#x27;s others that could have been used for a good business, it&#x27;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&#x27;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.

That&#x27;s why it&#x27;s a fundamental thing: it takes time, effort, and money. Things that take neither time nor effort vanish as trivialities, even if there&#x27;s an interesting story in how they got reduced to that point.

More generally, all open problems are hard, because the economy&#x27;s limiting reagent isn&#x27;t mildly intelligent people willing to do easy work for good money.

It is sad because it doesn&#x27;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 &quot;etsy for farmers&quot;.

All businesses take time and money to build. How is that sad?

Growing the onions is even more fundamental. It also takes even more money and a hell of a lot more time!That&#x27;s life in a nutshell, I guess.

I bet if you added up all the time in your day and cut things out you could find the time! :)

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&#x27;t have) to do something as fundamental as this.

Buy buy buy, they are shipping soon: (I&#x27;m not affiliated in any way)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vidaliaonions.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vidaliaonions.com&#x2F;</a>

Peter here (author).. happy to share a little more. I oddly enjoy the customer relations side the most. It&#x27;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.

Thoroughly enjoyed this. I&#x27;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?

I ultimately owe my software engineering career to wasting time posting on a phpBB for a webcomic.

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.

Moments of whimsy with a bit of perseverance. Without the second part, you&#x27;re just a wildcard.

Fredkin&#x27;s paradox: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fredkin%27s_paradox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fredkin%27s_paradox</a>

Isn&#x27;t that just confirmation bias though? If you hadn&#x27;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.

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 :)

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&#x27;s him who is remembered to this day. &quot;Moments of whimsy&quot; are like anti-aircraft ammo. They hit everywhere, randomly. But we only report those that are associated with a life change.

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&#x27;t have been more than 5 total minutes of thoughts no more complicated than &quot;yeah, I guess I&#x27;ll give it a go&quot; 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.

&gt; 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.

It wasn&#x27;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.

How did a bitchy comment lead to all that?

&gt; It&#x27;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.

Wow was that when Reddit was starting out, or more recently?

&gt; It&#x27;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 &quot;you know what, it&#x27;s on the other side of the country but I&#x27;ll just sign up and figure it out&quot;. 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&#x27;s how I ended up working for reddit 18 months later.

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&#x2F;game-night at a friend&#x27;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&#x27;t looked at in several years (and saw a recruiting email of a type I&#x27;d usually ignore), because I was trying to sign into some random account on the internet and I&#x27;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.

if you&#x27;re looking to sell whimsy on the internet momentofwhimsy.com is still available. and you don&#x27;t even need a whimsy packing shed.

My grandpa swore by Sevin, and my father in law uses diluted Dawn soap. Based solely on the chemical content, I&#x27;d start with the soap.Also - predators. You can buy ladybugs in most garden centers for almost nothing, and they eat aphids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Literally.

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)

Yes! It&#x27;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 &quot;No-Waste Kitchen Gardening&quot;[1] for some useful tips.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;39835357-no-waste-kitchen-gardening" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;book&#x2F;show&#x2F;39835357-no-waste-kitche...</a>

I&#x27;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&#x27;s weird to think about being on this side of a potential life changing choice, but it&#x27;s really not nearly as big of a deal to me (I&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s political climate.

&gt; I backordered the domain as a spectator, but for kicks &amp; giggles, I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid.It&#x27;s funny and beautiful how a moment of whimsy ends up being a fulcrum point in his life.It seems there&#x27;s a lot of interest in gardening &#x2F; food production among tech people. For me, one of the reasons I love gardening is because in many ways it&#x27;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&#x27;t.Just like a person who doesn&#x27;t understand the value of a proper foundation in tech (hardware, lower protocols like DNS, etc.), a similar gardener won&#x27;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&#x27;re back on their own! Permanent green onion. You can do this with a number of plants, btw. Try it!

Thank you for letting me know. I fixed it. +1

(FYI, using code indents for non-code here mostly prevents reading your story on mobile.)

Wise and truthful words my friend.You spoke the truth.

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.

&quot;Guys, anything you have ordered or planned to order, is on me.&quot;More than clapping :D The &quot;friends&quot; left completely humiliated.It&#x27;s a day that I will cherish for the rest of my life! :D

And who was that cheeky crepe shop owner? None other than Elon Musk!

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&#x27;t take whatever job lands on his doorstep.

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.

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&#x27;m sort of that story - however my high-school class mates are generally nice people and are more curious than condescending. I&#x27;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&#x27;m probably mistaken in motivation, but life does present us with choices that are seemingly easy yet are full of hidden costs.

I wish so I could add extra spices to it lol.What I know for sure is that my old friend has accomplished more things than our entire classroom as a whole.I don&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t think it does. Just sounds like a retelling where some readers focus on specifics rather than the essence.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;nothingeverhappens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;nothingeverhappens</a>

And everyone clapped.  And that man&#x27;s name?  Albert Einstein...

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.

This is certainly a feel good story, but there is a certain balance to be had regarding the &#x27;moral of the story&#x27;. For example:* The owner of the crepe shop may be 1 in 100,000 with the business acumen, drive &amp; 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 &#x27;degree&#x27; kid didn&#x27;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 &#x27;owner&#x27; 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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;careeroutlook&#x2F;2018&#x2F;data-on-display&#x2F;education-pays.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;careeroutlook&#x2F;2018&#x2F;data-on-display&#x2F;educa...</a>

He may have grossed that amount, but is that really take-home pay? Otherwise, we&#x27;re comparing applies &amp; oranges (&amp; crepes).

Crepes do not cost 15 euros... at the max 5 euros. But you misread the post; he didn&#x27;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.

Do you honestly believe crepes are the only thing sold at a crepe shop?

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.

Hmm - here&#x27;s how I did the back of napkin math:1,000,000 gross in a peak year.say business is open 290 days of the year.avg per day = 3448 euroif average customer order spend is ~15 euro, that&#x27;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&#x2F;hour.Key Questions: 
for the average case : is 38 orders&#x2F;hour OR 230 orders&#x2F;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?

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&#x27;s €3.2 milI&#x27;d imagine a decent crepes place the size of a McDonald&#x27;s in a good location could easily make €2 mil&#x2F;year turnover and half that much profit in a good year.

This shop does not sell only crepes, it sells also other related things, like donuts and waffles, organic juices, and the like.It works 24&#x2F;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.

While I am skeptical as well, there are a few other scenarios that aren&#x27;t being considered in your napkin math:- 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&#x2F;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, etcThere are probably many more things I&#x27;m not even considering.

Napkin math:One million Euro a year gross would imply more or less 3000 Euro a day. Open for 12 hours a day, that&#x27;s 250 Euro an hour. At 15 Euro a crepe, that&#x27;s a customer every 4 minutes the whole day. That would be a truly phenomenal success.And that&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s hard to imagine that this story, if true, didn&#x27;t involve an embellishment of scale.

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.

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.&quot;So...you work here mate?&quot;&quot;Yep.&quot;&quot;Ah...shame. We make very good money, thanks to our degrees. Isn&#x27;t a sad thing that you are forced to work in this shitty job?&quot;&quot;First of all, I enjoy doing this job; and second of all, how much are you earning annually, if I may?&quot;&quot;Around 35K euros&quot;.He burst to hysterical laughter.&quot;I happen to make the least 1000 euros daily and this &#x27;shitty job&#x27; 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.&quot;I happened to be there when this incident took place; it was the best day of my life! ^_^

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&#x27;s a great example of this.

This is awesome. Always great to read about someone&#x27;s hard work and dedication paying off. I love a good onion, but am not within the 48 lower states, so unfortunately I&#x27;ll have to wait for the international delivery option :(

Interesting, could you elaborate on the authenticity bit? How will it differentiate from current 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&#x27;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&#x27;t even have an identity until you contributed to the community and revealed it while doing so.Current social networks allow you to hit &quot;join&quot; or &quot;like&quot; and that&#x27;s all the participation you need to get your validation. You&#x27;re part of the group just by signing up, rather than because you helped make it a community by contributing.That&#x27;s probably why this story resonates with people here so much. It&#x27;s not just a tech business, it&#x27;s an attempt to contribute and be an integral part of the local community. Not something every startup gets to do.

Your comment resonated with me. I&#x27;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.

&gt; This story brings a tear to my eye.Like an onion

This story brings a tear to my eye.I&#x27;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.

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&#x2F;&quot;celebrity&quot; vegetables existed that could cost $XX, sort of like in Japan.Someone would probably pay $1000+ for &quot;The best dozen onions of the season&quot;

Seconded: I would totally pay for &#x27;ship this person an onion&#x27;

This was really fun, so I checked out the site- Least expensive order is a 5-pound box for $34.95- Runs on Shopify- As they&#x27;re seasonal, there are some built-in scarcity aspects I hadn&#x27;t thought of (which is kind of neat business wise).Two aspects I might try if this was my business:1. Some kind of &quot;Chef&#x2F;Restaurant&quot; option2. An option to send 1 beautiful onion (ala the referenced Harry and David&#x27;s)

There&#x27;s a way to make it by reducing most of the water away so you get a 20x concentrate that&#x27;s quite shelf stable... and probably cheap to ship. Here&#x27;s an example (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morethangourmet.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.morethangourmet.com&#x2F;</a>) these stocks are quite good.

Probably what&#x27;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.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cajunsausage.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cajunsausage.com&#x2F;</a>

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&#x27;m not saying you can&#x27;t ship heirloom tomatoes, but they&#x27;re definitely more prone to bruising, so this is likely an obstacle in shipping them over longer distances.

I would say this is crazy, but truth be told... if I saw someone selling like super high quality heirloom tomatoes online... I&#x27;d probably buy some.  But what I&#x27;ve actively searched out, and have yet to find is someone selling lobster stock.  Sometimes if i&#x27;m lucky, I can pick up some from my local fish monger... but it&#x27;s uncommon.

My wife is from Georgia, and I&#x27;ve visited many times.I don&#x27;t really like onions. But real Georgia Vidalias are something special.

Sometimes even execution is worthless. It doesn&#x27;t sound like this guy is making a ton of money and he says he&#x27;s doing it for fun, not because it&#x27;s profitable. Though I&#x27;m sure it turns a profit in general.

Case in point - they appear to be short.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;g7q4injeb2w8du8&#x2F;Screenshot%202019-04-23%2010.57.28.jpg?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;g7q4injeb2w8du8&#x2F;Screenshot%202019-...</a>

I&#x27;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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.myfreshgrocer.com&#x2F;nkz&#x2F;exec&#x2F;Phone&#x2F;Product&#x2F;Display?productId=260093330" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.myfreshgrocer.com&#x2F;nkz&#x2F;exec&#x2F;Phone&#x2F;Product&#x2F;Display...</a>

I looked this up one time, why this was such a big deal. Vidalia&#x27;s are finicky like wine grapes. You need the right microbiome, you can&#x27;t just plant them everywhere because demand is high. They might grow but don&#x27;t taste right.I suspect that, like vinyards, if demand stays up long enough we&#x27;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&#x27;s a regional appellation but the taste has much to do with low sulfur content in the soil.

So much so that I made this for fun a few months ago :)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ideasarecheap.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ideasarecheap.net</a>

&gt; So, ideas are worthless without execution.This is such an excellent quote and motivational.

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&#x27;d just run to the local grocery store and just fulfill online orders and if demand was there, purchase from local farmers. I didn&#x27;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.

Great story. One quick bug report: your Bulk &amp; Wholesale page has a broken contact form: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vidaliaonions.com&#x2F;bulk-wholesale&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vidaliaonions.com&#x2F;bulk-wholesale&#x2F;</a>

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&#x2F;buyers farms here as well as a lot of &quot;factory&quot; farming.That being said what he&#x27;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&#x27;m surprised that there aren&#x27;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.

Peter here - you&#x27;re correct. M&amp;T is a single farm, growing &amp; packing our own onions.

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&#x27;s what I assumed he meant when he said &quot;other farms started sending people our way&quot;.I believe M&amp;T is a single farm&#x2F;growing operation.

See also Organic Valley, and Kerrygold (which I just learned) are also co-ops.

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 toured the Tillamook plant a couple months ago. It&#x27;s worth stopping by if you&#x27;re in the area. The cheese was delicious :)4165 Highway 101 North, Tillamook, OR 97141

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&#x27;s Co-op, that handles packaging, distribution and marketing. This is such a wild story tho, I loved reading it.

I wonder about the domain name snapping business. Are there  people doing this full-time, buying expired domains in bulk?

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s just old southerners.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&#x27;re trying to get to.These aren&#x27;t dullards, either. They&#x27;re smart people who are talented in their own fields. They&#x27;re just not techies and the Googling-for-everything workflow works well for them.

It&#x27;s definitely the domain if you understand the clientele. I&#x27;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&#x27;d wager most of this guy&#x27;s sales come from the south.

My understanding was that the actual domain name doesn&#x27;t make much difference? I setup <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drivinglessonslimerick.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.drivinglessonslimerick.com</a> for a friend (I&#x27;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.

Funny article. Like a lot of people I also collect domain names, some day hoping to make a business out of them. :)My current business and startup take too much time, but some day..

What is your opinion of that book? I just looked up the summary of the 48 rules [1] and it seems pretty morally questionable. Maybe that&#x27;s the point?[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;the48lawsofpower.com&#x2F;summary" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;the48lawsofpower.com&#x2F;summary</a>

This post makes good use of one of the 48 laws of power.Law 30: Make your accomplishments seem effortless

History back to 1996: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19961215000000*&#x2F;VidaliaOnions.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19961215000000*&#x2F;VidaliaOnions.co...</a>And someone was running the same business on it just before him: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19961215000000*&#x2F;VidaliaOnions.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19961215000000*&#x2F;VidaliaOnions.co...</a>Good strategy. I&#x27;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.

SEO is more than just keywords in domain names, you&#x27;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&#x27;s also the perfect combination of the two keywords with nothing else. You&#x27;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 &amp; David (which the author mentioned) does...<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolfermans.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wolfermans.com</a> made a decent-sized business selling premium english muffins.

I had another comment in this thread where I said I thought of this idea in 2011. And you know what&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

&gt; I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid. 5 minutes later, I was the proud owner of VidaliaOnions.comFor 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.comvidalias.nettryvidalias.comyummyonions.comordervidalias.combuyvidalias.comorganicvidalias.comvidaliafarm.comallvidalias.comsimplyvidalias.com

It&#x27;s actually not that crazy&#x2F;secret, it&#x27;s simply compressing a many-step process down into a single, flat step. Whenever I&#x27;m looking for a good domain name, I&#x27;m trying to consider things like searchability, is the .com available, are there no shorter .com&#x27;s taken, are there already projects&#x2F;apps&#x2F;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&#x27;s error prone and time consuming. Very straightforward to automate down into a one step process.

Can you share the &quot;specific routine&quot; you developed? I understand if it&#x27;s your secret sauce and you want to keep it to yourself, but I also would never use this if I didn&#x27;t know how it worked.

I&#x27;ve been interested in doing something like this. My email is in my profile.

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.Anyone here interested in such a thing?

I’m a sweet onion fan. I didn’t realize that Texas sweet onions were a different variety: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.texasmonthly.com&#x2F;food&#x2F;the-texas-sweet-onion&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.texasmonthly.com&#x2F;food&#x2F;the-texas-sweet-onion&#x2F;</a>(They’re real good)

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&#x27;d need good contracts - you&#x27;d need clauses around trademarks, etc.

If I have OnlineTumbleweeds.com and you like the idea of developing it, why wouldn&#x27;t you just buy TumbleweedsOnline.com? I don&#x27;t see what value the domain owner is adding. There&#x27;s not going to be a ton of SEO value to an old domain that&#x27;s just been parked.

Is that a business opportunity? Something like &quot;develop my domain&quot;? 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&#x27;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).

Reminds me of the accidental tumbleweed magnate:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.business-opportunities.biz&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-worlds-most-successful-accidental-tumbleweed-saleswoman&#x2F;?amp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.business-opportunities.biz&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-worlds...</a>

I think it&#x27;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&#x27;t something most farmers probably want to do.

Like the other reply says, it&#x27;s probably just the farmers don&#x27;t have time or don&#x27;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&#x27;t have time to grow&#x2F;make the thing in the first place!

Peter here (author).. They didn&#x27;t have a need, desire, or employee to run that type of operation. The farm didn&#x27;t have a website when we started, so my sales pitch to them at the start was &#x27;Even if we miserably fail in this project, at least you&#x27;ll get a free website out of it&#x27;..

Why didn&#x27;t the farmers just independently open an Amazon shop before he came along? Is it just the case that they&#x27;re not tech savvy enough?I&#x27;m not downplaying what he did - it&#x27;s really cool - what I&#x27;m trying is to get a better sense of the business dynamics here.

This is by far my favorite post on Hacker News. :D

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=elzEOs2pY38" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=elzEOs2pY38</a>

I hope I wasn’t the only person here who thought of the egg man scene in Pink Flamingos when they read this :)

Just look at the dignity here in this humble creation he has made!&gt; [...] 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&#x27;s &quot;Three Acres and a Cow&quot; [1] slogan (implying that can be enough).[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Distributism#Economic_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Distributism#Economic_theory</a>

the only people who hate middlemen are people who cannot into economics.

Yep. Even if it has never been easier for the maker&#x2F;producer to setup their own Shopify store, it&#x27;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&#x27;s someone else that will have those skills.

Yes, I think it&#x27;s pretty common (here&#x27;s one around me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;locavoredelivery.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;locavoredelivery.com&#x2F;</a> ), but still delivers value and can be a good business.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.

I remembered this comment when I noticed that the person that wrote the Dockerhub breach blog post [0] was a Mr. Kent Lamb. Baader-Meinhof?[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;success.docker.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;docker-hub-user-notification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;success.docker.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;docker-hub-user-notificat...</a>

I typed in &quot;Kentlamb.com&quot; and found out Kent Lamb is the name of an attorney.

I spent a minute thinking about a product local to me that had the same appeal. I typed <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michiganlamb.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;michiganlamb.com</a> into the browser and discovered the concept is not uncommon.

It makes enough to make me happy. And yes, I have other projects (jobs) that bring in revenue.

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&#x27;s the tech stack like?Thanks for a great article :)

We&#x27;re an LLC. Regarding tasks -- there really wasn&#x27;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.

Great post! How do you decide which tasks to do yourself and which to outsource? Also, at what point do you consider incorporation?

Great question (do I like Vidalias).. I was indifferent on them at the start. But when you&#x27;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&#x27;m fortunate for the friendship I have with him &amp; his team.

Do you like Vidalia onions?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!

no kidding, here was the first negotiation. I&#x27;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).

Is it a 50&#x2F;50 partnership with the farmer? What was that negotiation like?

thank you so much! We&#x27;ll start shipping next Monday, 4&#x2F;29, and your order will leave the farm that week. We&#x27;ll also send you a tracking link when UPS gets their hands on your box (fyi)

Just bought a 10 lb box. Supporting a fellow hacker &#x2F; business person. I look forward to them with my eggs and bacon.

thank you. I&#x27;d love to write more, it&#x27;s just time consuming. That onion post took me, off-and-on, over 6 months to write.

Loved this story. Your writing style is succinct &amp; speaks to the heart. You really should write more essays if possible (found only 4 here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepsouthventures.com&#x2F;essays" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deepsouthventures.com&#x2F;essays</a>).- A captivated reader

Honestly, I don&#x27;t want to build an amazon size business, so there&#x27;s no tension. Too complicated. I sorta follow the same path at Paul Jarvis, and his book <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ofone.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ofone.co&#x2F;</a> . Right now, from a product standpoint, I focus on one thing, Vidalias. But I&#x27;ll have to note that we also own the domain name &#x27;Onions.com&#x27;, so there&#x27;s possible opportunity for growth down the road. Not right now, though.

What&#x27;s been your feeling on generalizing the idea to other products?There&#x27;s certainly value in being The Vidalia Man, having connections within the industry, and owning the domain. At the same time, the lessons you&#x27;ve learned (not to mention the platform you&#x27;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 &quot;I sell onions and only onions&quot; and &quot;I will become the next Amazon&quot; to fall?

1. Right now, we&#x27;re concentrating on just Vidalias. We continue to grow at a pace I&#x27;m happy with, so there&#x27;s no need to get complicated.
2. We learned it as we went along, really. ie, &quot;Oh crap, X happened.. what do we do?&quot; And then we figure out what&#x27;s best for the customer, and do that.
3. We listen, and empathize. I want all our customers to get the onion they&#x27;re expecting. If they don&#x27;t, I&#x27;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&#x27;d manually look it up)
5. We&#x27;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

Hi Peter,Congratulations! You&#x27;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&#x27;re registered as a LLC. You don&#x27;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)?

they weren&#x27;t strong enough, and crushed heavily during shipment. I had to refund alot of orders, and eat (no pun intended) the cost of the boxes.

What was the issue with the faulty shipping boxes?

We&#x27;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..

How close is M&amp;T&#x27;s operation to &quot;organic&quot;?  I know some farmers follow a lot of the practices, but don&#x27;t necessarily want to bother with the cost &amp; 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?

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.

How do potential customers find you? Do you do spend a lot on marketing?

How do you take care of the shipping? Do you pick up the onions and ship them? Or do you have the farmer do that?

Hey Peter,I&#x27;m quite fond of buying domains myself. I just came here to tell you I&#x27;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&#x27;re lotto tickets or something.

if you&#x27;re referring to that 360-degree photo, you can make the same kind of image through the Google &#x27;Street View&#x27; app.. you&#x27;ll then upload to your Google account and share..

Is the image a composite of many? If so, how is it created?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19733080" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19733080</a>

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..

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&#x27;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).

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.

If the farmer infrastructure goes away, would you look for another partner, or just find something else to do?

Peter here (author) - happy to answer any questions..

I Sell Onions on the Internet