101–110 of 464 posts
> Kaiser Permanente for health insurance. Super important part. Any details about how much it costs for single person company? :-)
https://individual-family.kaiserpermanente.org/healthinsuran...
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…
It's so hard sometimes. No one to really bounce ideas off of, every little thing you have to do yourself. Staying inspired to work is sometimes difficult, because you are literally doing everything yourself it just gets so overwhelming.
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.
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…
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…
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.
I'm still not exactly certain where I fall on this topic. What I do know is that I don't like frameworks that conceal the plumbing and leave you with declarative bits that require memorization. Lack of discoverability is a huge barrier to mastery. The best code invites you to determine why something is happening.
What I've been thinking about lately that this article drew out for me again was that it's a shame that so many tools and libraries come not ready for production by default.
It would be nice to have some curated base file sets where insecure defaults were overridden, and all of the metrics and logging logic were wired up. You get the turn-key solution but you still have code that is more discoverable, and you can veto a few choices without too much effort.
key 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…
I 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.
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…
The only issue I've found about using serverless is the database. In most cases (Firebase, Fauna, Cosmos, DynamoDB) you have to couple your stack to the DBaaS provider which is not a great idea. AWS recently announced Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless but while it allows you to use regular Postgres tools/queries you are again tied to AWS.