101–110 of 145 posts
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I've actually had this conversation with a SWer friend before, and she wouldn't budge over sharing 0% ["I have an EXPENSIVE lifestyle" she twits]!
LOL. Never spent a dollar on such stupidity, and would only do it for profit-sharing with some hard-working debutante =P
I actively avoid programmatic/invasive ads. My three income sources are: subscriptions (without paywalling anything), direct advertising deals, and content deals with other, bigger publications (they get priority to publish my stuff first, I publish later).
Last year I started an English-written blog[1], translating the best from my original, pt_BR one, in an attempt to reach a bigger, international audience. Slow start, but I'm fine with it — none of my business was an overnight success.
For anyone who's interested in answering, I'd be curious to hear your thinking on how you keep focused and avoid rabbit holes, particularly with build vs. buy decisions. I've had an intentionally-small business that I've been working on for a few years now, but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering. I've done a very good job of replacing Shopify with…
That's basically all I care about now as a one-person business. Too much support load means I get burnt out and can't work on the stuff I enjoy (coding). Too little revenue means I can't continue operating the business.
By thinking about the features in these terms it has helped me be clear about which features are really important to me right now. So if my support load is too high, I work on features that will reduce it.
I use Flutter which has saved me a ton of time - which is very limited in a solo business of course :)
I'm experiencing good growth currently, so I can't say recent trends have negatively affected me. I did notice a sharp ~20% reduction in Google traffic about 10 days ago, but that could be related to all kinds of things.
It will be interesting to see how the recently improved (push notifications) iOS PWA support will affect my business. On the one hand I'm stressing about it, on the other hand PWAs have existed for 10 years or something and barely any regular consumer has one "installed" on their smartphone. But who knows, maybe the improved iOS support will lead to more usage & customer education by businesses.
For the past 3 years I've been running https://bettersheets.co/ Originally as a side project while I tried to start and run SaaS. But people kept buying memberships (lifetime deals) and I just kept adding content to it. In the past year I've hired a ruby on rails developer to help me scale, on a part-time basis. And I've been making products within the Better Sheets umbrella myself in sheets. The developer is helping…
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... as long as she "cuts me in @ 25%+," I'm down. I've actually had this conversation with a SWer friend before, and she wouldn't budge over sharing 0% ["I have an EXPENSIVE lifestyle" she twits]! LOL. Never spent a dollar on such stupidity, and would only do it for profit-sharing with some hard-working debutante =P
Funny how that works.
I develop https://webtoapp.design on my own and have a handful of freelancers for translation & some repetitive tasks. Basically I turn websites into hybrid apps (some native components + WebView). I started in December 2019 and I'm now closing in on making a regular european junior developer salary (3.5k/month). I use Flutter which has saved me a ton of time - which is very limited in a solo business of course :) I'…
Not a great article, but explains a core update: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-rolls-out-march-2...
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> Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps? I don't know... from what I've used of Python it is pretty memory heavy and doesn't do well left alone unsupervised. I could be wrong but that was my experience trying various Py web frameworks. My app servers were all $5 VPS with only nginx, PHP/php-fpm, and Memcached. PHP was cached, nginx assets were cached, and data was cached in RAM with Memcached which was upda…
Did you use a dedicated database from the start of your project? Or did you use a simpler one like sqlite and then scaled up to your current architecture when you got more users/load to your site?
Over the years I have played with sqlite and postgress. I keep coming back to Mariadb for my web apps.
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>Well, not end users. They're getting ads. I think advertising is a powerful way to support 'free'ish content and there are ways to use advertising tastefully. People who don't want to participate have options to opt out and are obviously welcome to not make server requests.
I'm supposed to accurately predict whether a website will serve me ads or not, before I've ever connected to it? Right, not sure why we didn't think of that sooner.
I run Bear Blog ( https://bearblog.dev ) which is a privacy-centric, minimalist blogging platform. It's been running for over 4 years with about 10k active blogs. I'm the sole founder and maintainer. I write about it at https://herman.bearblog.dev It pays me an above average salary and is mostly unaffected by the recent financial trends. I have however been dealing with a lot more AI generated backlink spam since Cha…
edit: nvm. I saw the paid upgrade feature :)