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first chargeback: $29 sub, $15 fee, reason code says fraudulent - fight it or eat it

Two things that cut mine to near zero and neither is glamorous.

One: an email that goes out 72 hours before every renewal with the amount, the date, and a one-click cancel link. My churn went up very slightly. Disputes went from about one a month to two in the following year.

Two: instant refunds, no questions, on anything under about $60 if it is the first request. I lose maybe $150 a year to it. That is cheaper than the fee on a single dispute plus the hour I spend on evidence plus the risk of the ratio.

I still fight disputes where I have hard usage logs, mostly because losing without responding gets recorded as a loss anyway and the evidence takes 20 minutes once you have the template.

121 · in/refunds-and-abuse ·

the band where testimonials go is just empty - what do you put there with four users

Whenever you do get a name worth showing, ask before you use it. Company logos and used by claims can land you in a trademark conversation you cannot afford, and the customer contact you burn is worth more than the logo.

The email is two lines and works about half the time: would you be comfortable with me putting your company name and one sentence from your last email on the site, and here is exactly how it would look, with a screenshot. Giving them the exact wording to approve is the trick - people say no to a vague request and yes to a specific one.

30 · in/sunset-or-sell ·

Anyone run a Fifine mic for a year or more? How did it actually hold up?

Owned three cheap mics over the years and kept one. The two I got rid of were both condensers that heard the whole room; the survivor is a dynamic that I bought for about the money you are talking about and it has been on the arm for three years. At this price the model matters less than the pattern, so buy whichever cheap dynamic is available near you rather than the specific one a video told you about.

164 · in/webcam-and-mic ·

Is the DJI Mic Mini overkill for talking-head video shot at a desk?

For a fixed desk shot, yes, mostly. The thing that kit solves is getting a microphone close to a moving person without a visible boom, and you have neither problem. What you actually want is to get the mic out of frame, which is a stand or an arm and about twenty dollars, not a radio system. That said, a clipped transmitter is genuinely invisible on camera in a way that no desk mic is, so if the frame matters more than the money it is not a stupid purchase.

234 · in/webcam-and-mic ·

do i need 3 domains and 9 mailboxes to send 30 cold emails a day, or is that advice for people sending 3000

Going to disagree with the whole premise. If your list is 400 companies you aren't doing cold email, you're doing 400 conversations, and the infrastructure question is a distraction from the fact that you'll be through the list in thirteen working days.

Send from your normal address, plain text, no tracking pixel, no images, no sequence. The deliverability problem people solve with domain rotation is a problem created by the tools they use to avoid writing 400 emails.

52 · in/mrr-and-margins ·

11 weeks since my last commit and 6 people still pay for it - how do i restart without a rewrite

Write a file called STATE.md before you write any code. What it does, what is broken, what you were in the middle of, what you decided and why. One page. Then commit it.

The reason you closed the repo is not the dependencies, it is that you no longer have the mental model in your head and rebuilding it feels like more work than starting over. That file is the mental model, and next time you go cold for two months it is a ten minute reload instead of a wall.

231 · in/stalled-projects ·

the api i want to build on bans 'substantially similar' products in its terms - has anyone actually been cut off

Built on two platform APIs, got squeezed on one. Nobody read the terms and served me a letter. What happened was the OAuth verification review - we asked for a scope that let us read attendee data, the reviewer sat on it for six weeks, then approved it with a restriction. Six months later our per-minute quota got cut roughly in half with an email that said it was to ensure platform stability. No appeal that went anywhere.

That's the shape it takes. Not a ban, just slow strangulation until the product stops feeling good. Build so a user can export everything, and so that at least part of your value is what you do with the data rather than having access to it.

61 · in/before-you-code ·

One flat, four years in: has being a small landlord actually been worth it for you?

One flat for nine years and the honest answer is that a single unit has no averaging. A portfolio absorbs a void month across twelve properties; you absorb it entirely. My rule after year three was to hold six months of the mortgage payment plus £3,000 in a separate account and treat anything above that as the actual return. On that basis my real return has been positive but far lower than the headline £180 a month suggested, and there were two years where it was negative.

289 · in/rent-vs-buy ·

Using a mirrorless body as a stream camera: worth the cables and the heat?

The overheating question depends heavily on the body and the output resolution, and a lot of the horror stories come from recording internally at high frame rates rather than from a clean output at streaming resolution. Test yours for a full two-hour session before you buy the capture hardware. If it does shut down, dropping the output resolution and removing the battery door cover fixes it more often than people expect.

198 · in/webcam-and-mic ·