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The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

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Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#91

Post by grepfru_it »

jcroll wrote: post #82

I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn't really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you m…

are there any groups out there for the small technology business owner? i'm extremely hesitant of asking about this because it's a fine line between brainstorming technology problems with like-minds and getting owners who want you to problem-solve for them.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#92

Post by jedberg »

earthboundkid wrote: post #60
mtnGoat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And the thing is, generalists do better work. They do less work overall because there are fewer of them, but compare a typical enterprise 50 person team to the output of a team of 5 generalists, hands down the generalists will make a better product every time because there's no buck passing or shoulder shrugging about problems.

I think specialists make more robust systems, but generalists get more done. When I work at large companies, it makes me sad how long it takes to get anything done. But once the work is complete, it is really solid. It scales well, it handles edge cases gracefully, it deploys cleanly, all because a large team of specialists made each part of the puzzle work really well.

The slow progress was dictated by the extra communication to coordinate the specialists, but at the end of the day it ends up being worth it.

(All of this of course assumes you work in an org with lots of really good specialists).

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#93

Post by xemdetia »

fovc wrote: post #39
avip wrote: post #30

First, 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…

Depends on what you're familiar with. If he already knows Ansible inside and out, why risk getting stuck with some undebuggable AWS failures? As a solo entrepreneur I can say time risk is a crucial thing to be mindful of. I'll take 10h +/-1h vs 5h +/- 15h any day.

Not to mention that he might not stick with AWS if he runs the numbers- he might hop ship to a different cloud provider if he gets a better deal. I don't think it's appropriate for such a fledgling enterprise to lock in to AWS-isms so they can keep the change provider cost as low as possible.

Also, people seem to be dismissing the value of a rock-solid local end-to-end dev stack which with the latest iteration of technology I feel has become very complicated and expensive. The OP can run the same Ansible for his dev stack as well as his prod and his dev stack doesn't turn into an AWS bill. Most of the AWS managed tech & services is only reliably testable on AWS at a functional/integration level, which is a cost that a company this small shouldn't have to absorb.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#94

Post by randiantech »

grepfru_it wrote: post #91
jcroll wrote: post #82

I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn't really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you m…

are there any groups out there for the small technology business owner? i'm extremely hesitant of asking about this because it's a fine line between brainstorming technology problems with like-minds and getting owners who want you to problem-solve for them.

Indiehacker is a good starting point

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#95

Post by mtnGoat »

jedberg wrote: post #92
earthboundkid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the thing is, generalists do better work. They do less work overall because there are fewer of them, but compare a typical enterprise 50 person team to the output of a team of 5 generalists, hands down the generalists will make a better product every time because there's no buck passing or shoulder shrugging about problems.

I think specialists make more robust systems, but generalists get more done. When I work at large companies, it makes me sad how long it takes to get anything done. But once the work is complete, it is really solid. It scales well, it handles edge cases gracefully, it deploys cleanly, all because a large team of specialists made each part of the puzzle work really well. The slow progress was dictated by the extra com…

i agree on this point. having highly specialized SMEs certainly helps with scale, for sure.

iteration is slower at bigger companies but some of those teams are inventing wheels as they go. which requires slower movement than general web/mobile dev.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#96

Post by cattlefarmer »

jcroll wrote: post #82

I ran a small company like this quite successfully earlier in my career. If you think this is awesome what goes unmentioned is how lonely it can get. Also, any issues you have (business or technology) you bear the brunt of alone. A coworking space doesn't really help either imo, if you like working with others you will miss having coworkers. Just something I think worth mentioning if you think this is something you m…

Yes, the worst thing is the huge amount of decision making even over very minor details that has to be done all the time. Coding and maintaining the servers isn't even that difficult. It's all the little stuff like scheduling with clients/vendors suppliers, wondering when is a good time to chase that invoice, which words to change in your proposal for this client, and so all. If you have employees, how to manage them, how to review their work, how to mentor them. It really is death by a thousand paper cuts.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#98

Post by bsaul »

This is one of the most important post i’ve seen on HN so far.

it teaches you that you don’t need all the fancy stuffs, but you may need some of them. That you don’t have to shoot for the unicorn project, that you don’t have to build an A+ people team, etc.

It’s intelligent and gives all the interesting details to not give any kind of false impression.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#99

Post by tudorpavel »

jedberg wrote: post #86

I'm impressed with the profit margins. It looks like one of the main sources of revenue is transcription. From what I can tell the price seems to be about $4/hr. OP said they are AWS. If they're using Amazon Transcribe, the cost for that is $1.44/hr. A 150%+ profit margin is awesome! Well for that one piece of the service. Obviously at least some of the cost of the website and database, etc must be included, but stil…

The post mentions using Google speech-to-text for transcription which seems to be even cheaper?

I'm not sure where you got the $4/hr price, but indeed kudos to OP for building a business around reselling cloud services for profit.

Re: The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company (2018)

#100

Post by pm »

grepfru_it wrote: post #88
aprdm wrote: post #10

That'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…

I finally created an account because your comment resonated with me. I have created 95% of my platform by myself which itself was the manifestation of several business ideas. I started out buying servers and starting a dedicated, then vps, then shared hosting farm that requires all of the frontends you mention. I took a different approach, I went all out open-source and spent time creating glue and flashy bootstrap f…

There are people who create consumer products, and there are people who create the products that power those products. It's no different to when id Software sold licences of their engines to other game developers. Perhaps you can turn your infrastructure into a business of its own.
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