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Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

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121–130 of 217 posts

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#121
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> B) Most companies will mark you as a temp email address and block sign ups, effectively making it useless This is valid point, I see both 33mail.com and users.idbloc.co are already on disposable blocklists (e.g. https://github.com/ivolo/disposable-email-domains/blob/maste... )

Can't you just buy domain names on a regular basis and use random ones? As long as you don't publish the list of the domains you have would be good.

You can - but it's an arms race at that point.

The question is - is this really the way we should be communicating online? Why can't we set up an anonymous account on a service?

The next step to all of this is an Oauth provider that's built around privacy. Imagine if you could sign in to apps with something other than facebook or google. "Sign In with " would be awesome. It's all technically possible today, and Mozilla nearly did it with persona, but gave up for some reason.

If anyone wants to fund this, for a mere 10-20 million USD I think it would be possible to create the service and market it to enough devs and end users to get traction.

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#122
I usually use mailinator.com for this purpose. In the past I found other similar services through Google search, but certainly didn't find yours. Probably working on your website SEO will increase your organic sign-ups. One thing I love about Mailinator is that all inboxes are public, this completely removes the overhead of creating a new email even in a disposable email service like yours. So probably something you may check for your product. Congrats for the achievement!

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just buy domain names on a regular basis and use random ones? As long as you don't publish the list of the domains you have would be good.

You can - but it's an arms race at that point. The question is - is this really the way we should be communicating online? Why can't we set up an anonymous account on a service? The next step to all of this is an Oauth provider that's built around privacy. Imagine if you could sign in to apps with something other than facebook or google. "Sign In with " would be awesome. It's all technically possible today, and Mozil…

I think you're describing Sign in with Apple[1]? Though I can see there'd be value in having this be standalone.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210318

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#124

Definitely double the prices right now. Since there is a free version that is generous, it won’t be “selling out”. I’m sure it felt right back years ago, but think of how much the product has improved since then. You can grandfather all current customers in (or just a year) if it makes it feel better. I am impressed by that video from 99designs. How much did you spend? Do you have a link to their profile?

This is basically saying: "You got them hooked, now squeeze every cent you can out of them", which I think is very dishonest advice. There is at least one costumer who won't (or can't) pay a penny more than they are currently paying, and "experimenting with prices" would be like telling them: "well, go away, there's a guy here in line with more dough than you". Given the very-skewed distribution of wealth, this line of thought leads to very expensive services for the rich, and the poor having to leave without them (housing market, I'm looking at you).

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#128

I usually use mailinator.com for this purpose. In the past I found other similar services through Google search, but certainly didn't find yours. Probably working on your website SEO will increase your organic sign-ups. One thing I love about Mailinator is that all inboxes are public, this completely removes the overhead of creating a new email even in a disposable email service like yours . So probably something you…

I appreciate mailinator, but mailinator’s domains are blocked in a lot of sites online; I know from experience some of their paid business is from companies using it for internal testing, which is far from great, and won’t sustain long-term, most likely.

Hats off to 33mail, though! Try not to get blacklisted.

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#129

I usually use mailinator.com for this purpose. In the past I found other similar services through Google search, but certainly didn't find yours. Probably working on your website SEO will increase your organic sign-ups. One thing I love about Mailinator is that all inboxes are public, this completely removes the overhead of creating a new email even in a disposable email service like yours . So probably something you…

Mailinator addresses (including its random domains) are somehow banned on ~90% of sites that I've recently tried it on.

Other, smaller anonymous mailboxes tend to work though. So it's a rare market that shows the opposite of "too big to fail".

Re: Show HN: After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue

#130
post #124

Definitely double the prices right now. Since there is a free version that is generous, it won’t be “selling out”. I’m sure it felt right back years ago, but think of how much the product has improved since then. You can grandfather all current customers in (or just a year) if it makes it feel better. I am impressed by that video from 99designs. How much did you spend? Do you have a link to their profile?

This is basically saying: "You got them hooked, now squeeze every cent you can out of them", which I think is very dishonest advice. There is at least one costumer who won't (or can't) pay a penny more than they are currently paying, and "experimenting with prices" would be like telling them: "well, go away, there's a guy here in line with more dough than you". Given the very-skewed distribution of wealth, this line…

Surely that depends what the price right now is. As the cheapest paid version is $1/month, I don't really think doubling it to $2/month would be excessive.
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