This is just a big ad for his website with no in-depth knowledge or insights provided. Literally just a list of tech someone uses and 4 or 5 links to his website. Is this what HN has become? I remember the content upvoted on this site being much better a couple years ago.
The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
61–70 of 464 posts
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#62This seems super complex to me. I am a single dev that runs a $30k\mo software based company off of PHP+MariaDB+bootstrap+jQuery+few other plugins. Hosted on a managed HIPPA setup. The firewall+app+DB servers run me about $550\month and I have excellent support. I spend effectively 100% of my time on business logic\ui and zero time keeping up to date on infrastructure (and learning it). Which means my customers benef…
Do you mind sharing what the managed HIPPA setup is? What vendor do you go with for that?
I've always wondered about how easy it would be to setup a SAAS that adheres to HIPPA.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#63I love these stories. I'm a one-person company too: contribsys.com. My production server stack is Apache + some Ruby CGI scripts, to serve static files and handle billing webhooks. I spend less than an hour per week on devops maintenance. KISS is the #1 principle when scaling a solo operation.
> some Ruby CGI scripts
Didn't ruby remove its CGI libraries from their standard library somewhat recently. I believe there were mostly helper libs, but I am curious how that works.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#64As someone still in school, this type of article -- though inspiring-- kind of scares me, to be honest. I don't think I could do any one of the things mentioned in this article.
Hello poidos, (I'm the author of this blog post) I couldn't do all these things when I was in school :) I worked in companies for a few years and learned some engineering practices. Then I had basic skills to prototype my own side projects. Then after working on many silly side projects, I started Listen Notes. And initially, Listen Notes was running on 3 tiny DigitalOcean servers ($5/month each?). I logged in each s…
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Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#65This dude is my hero. Keeping it simple and functional.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#66key missing info though: does it make money? I checked the site and it looks like a mix of ads (that are blocked of course) and a patreon with 5 supporters.
I'm wenbin, the author of this blog post & I built Listen Notes. Thanks for bringing up this question :) Yes, Listen Notes is making some money - not a lot, but enough to cover all the cost and bring in a bit profit as of today. The basic idea is that Listen Notes should be free to 99% of users, while making some money from 1% of super users. We run ads (obviously) on the website and we provide API: https://www.liste…
Glad to know it now can support you as a full-time job.
Just curious, is your company still one-person?
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#67That's awesome and it is a tech stack that I try to mirror and am confident running myself as well! It's incredible the amount of knowledge required for a single person tho when you think about it eh? It's the full frontend (which I would have more trouble with) + databases + caches + search engine + metrics + deployment + source control + sysadmin all baked in a single person who is also trying to make it a business…
as someone who has only worked on small teams, i thought this was normal. My current position is leading a small team, but we have interactions with a number of teams inside of FANG companies and it's amazing the limited amount of knowledge and access each position/person has. Most of my engineers can run circles around our partners. I always thought every engineer should know how to deploy a server, install deps, un…
You're right. That's been my experience, as well. But... the crème de la crème from FANG are different beasts altogether.
I must also point out that what FANG employees do get in abundance is the ability to learn from highly scalable systems that others build, cutting edge tech others work on, experiment on company's dime, pursue an eng/mgmt tract more in line with their personal interests, and job stability.
It also affords them an opportunity to be part of a team that one day builds a groundbreaking tech and pushes the envelope forward not just for the company but the entire industry.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#68As someone still in school, this type of article -- though inspiring-- kind of scares me, to be honest. I don't think I could do any one of the things mentioned in this article.
As a senior dev: it will take years of experience and constant learning to get to this point, but it is attainable. You don't have to be a master of each part of the stack and each tech within it - you just need to be able to do enough, and solve the problems you face. You can build a professional SaaS product with a simpler stack as well.
You take a project like this one step at a time. Some bits of it are relatively easy - setting up a few postgres servers doesn't take much knowledge. ElasticSearch is a little more obscure, but for the most part, things like this are running a few commands, and setting up a few config files with the help of docs and google. Same for Redis, nginx... etc. Which isn't to diminish devops - you can dive deep into each of these configurations and develop pretty complex setups, but by the time you actually need to you hope to be making enough money to pay someone else to do it.
You won't get everything perfect all the time. You'll have to revisit parts of the stack and tweak them. But you can take it a day at a time and do what you need to do.
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#69This looks like a great service; I just signed up for it and created my own listen later playlist. I spend 6-8h a week on my mountain bike and I use most of that time to listen to podcasts. The challenge with how I do it (using just an Apple Watch) is curating my feed. This is an excellent tool and a far better UI for curating a feed.
I also like the different and varied sources of income that you have, from the transcription service to ads to your API. Seems like you've built a great platform that you can use to experiment with different revenue models.
One additional question - your product is called Listen NOTES. Are you planning on adding note taking functionality to it at some point? One thing that I've always wanted to do was to jot down some set of notes to myself (typically during one of my bike rides). I always imagined that being some kind of voice activated thing, but I'd like that note sync'd to the spot within the podcast that I was listening to (and perhaps transcribed as well). Any thoughts about building something like this?
Thanks again for building this service!
Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)
#70First, that's a great stack and very well written/presented. One comment - he dismisses serverless as being overengineering . I think the correct POV, moreso for the single-man company, is that running a server to perform a task is the overengineered option. One can see from the snapshot the servers are indeed severely overprovisioned and underutilized. Building an api with api-gateway + lambda is less work than runn…
As team of one, you have to be very judicious with your time. You often have to have a philosophy of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Yeah they could burn a week or two switching over to lambda and whatnot but is it going to have a higher ROI than all the other things they could be working on?
As me how I know. When I was a solo dev doing my own thing, I'd spend way too much time working on things that really wouldn't affect the business but were "good engineering things" to do. If I spent more time working on things that would grow the business instead of wasting weeks writing fancy deployment scripts, maybe I'd still be doing my own thing now!