The founder has some really informative and very detailed articles, e.g. this one about being rejected after his YC interview. https://www.listennotes.com/blog/my-y-combinator-interview-e... It's interesting to read why he thinks he got rejected.
Great article, but I think he's far too hard on himself and reading too deep into his rejection (plenty of immigrants, non-native English speakers and people in their 30's from non-Ivy League schools succeed at building businesses). He's built a bootstrapped site that is probably going to be able to sustain himself for years. But small businesses and big businesses are fundamentally different. I come from the restaur…
I think his earlier expectation that without a greencard he was summarily rejected might be true. It's a lot of risk to assume of "the founder/entire team might be deported".
Other than that, I think you are correct he was reading too much into his demographics/education.
"Hey, look at this guy over here, claiming to be a 'one-person company', when he pays for a VPS instead of constructing a server from hardware, then self-hosting it himself. Pfft, I'll bet he doesn't even personally service the AC that is used to cool the building the server is in either! Probably pays an ISP too, instead of creating his own Internet from scratch."
I think comparing the use of contractors to the use of cloud services is pretty disingenuous in this context. The reason that "one-person company" is emphasized in the title is because people will expect to find a list of technologies that make developing and maintaining all of the tech required to run a company do-able for a single person. Advice about which cloud services to use is exactly what I would expect to fi…
What about artwork?
UI design is for an artist, not a developer. I can build whatever someone wants with the same stack that the OP is using (Django, Postgres, Lucene-ish search db, etc), but I will freely admit to people that I suck at website design in the way that they think of website design (what it looks like). Bootstrap was made for dolts like me who don't know what buttons and forms are supposed to look like.
Is it cheating to hire an artist to design the front facing site components?
I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.
I'm one guy with a 7-figure ARR business. My tech is Stripe, Apache, Ruby CGI and CSV. Literally my database is a CSV file. Maybe that's too boring. But I spend about 10 hours a year maintaining it. The bulk of my devops this year was moving to Let's Encrypt.
Actually I find the CSV „db“ idea rather exciting. Too exciting for my taste!
I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.
I'm one guy with a 7-figure ARR business. My tech is Stripe, Apache, Ruby CGI and CSV. Literally my database is a CSV file. Maybe that's too boring. But I spend about 10 hours a year maintaining it. The bulk of my devops this year was moving to Let's Encrypt.
Why not SQLite which is even more boring and comes with better guarantees?
I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.
I'm one guy with a 7-figure ARR business. My tech is Stripe, Apache, Ruby CGI and CSV. Literally my database is a CSV file. Maybe that's too boring. But I spend about 10 hours a year maintaining it. The bulk of my devops this year was moving to Let's Encrypt.
I was expecting: PHP + MySQL + a bunch of shell scripts to install stuff on servers + reading logs via command line by ssh as root. Instead I found: Redis, Rabbitmq, DataDog, ES, React + Redux, Ansible, PagerDuty... I wouldn't call that "boring technology". Sure, you are not using Docker nor K8s... but still.
I'm currently reading logs via command line by ssh as you describe for a simple service and not satisfied with this. What would be a step up without a lot of extra infrastructure?
Run vector [1] on each host to collect logs and send them to New Relic's free tier.
No need to manage extra infrastructure for logging, New Relic works pretty well and also has alerts, and Vector makes it easy to move to a new provider or self-hosted solution without reinstalling agents: just add a new sink to your config file.
I'm one guy with a 7-figure ARR business. My tech is Stripe, Apache, Ruby CGI and CSV. Literally my database is a CSV file. Maybe that's too boring. But I spend about 10 hours a year maintaining it. The bulk of my devops this year was moving to Let's Encrypt.
listennotes has become my go to site when I want to find podcast for my daily commute (about 30min). Its got good UI/UX. Pretty well executed for a one man company. I wonder though if the niche search engine market can fetch them enough money to be profitable.
Regarding the profitability, the founder discusses in other posts, that they get the bulk of their revenue from their API (they also have some cash flow coming from ads). I think he was for a while bootstrapping, and then got some VC funding. Still he pays for a not that cheap office at a WeWork location in SF and from the API service numbers I saw, if they are legit, he should have more than enough ARR to live well from his site (and that's exactly the impression one gets from reading his blog posts). Nonetheless, he is totally against posting openly about the financials of his business, and showing actual data.
The founder has some really informative and very detailed articles, e.g. this one about being rejected after his YC interview. https://www.listennotes.com/blog/my-y-combinator-interview-e... It's interesting to read why he thinks he got rejected.
Great article, but I think he's far too hard on himself and reading too deep into his rejection (plenty of immigrants, non-native English speakers and people in their 30's from non-Ivy League schools succeed at building businesses). He's built a bootstrapped site that is probably going to be able to sustain himself for years. But small businesses and big businesses are fundamentally different. I come from the restaur…
Idk if he is even hard on himself. He actually sounds like someone happy with how the site ended up evolving. And maybe even looking back in hindsight to the YC experience, he realized that they might have not been a good fit anyways.
I mean, he says it quite bluntly, VCs are in the business to do money, they don't finance you as a charitable exercise or because they like tech for the sake of tech. He found a nice ARR through the API service, and if that sustains him well, and as he says, does not cause him much stress nor makes him work long hours, it's probably an even better outcome that being pressured by the VC to fulfill some exorbitant growth.
To me it sounds really cool to be a one-man band, and his posts describing the tech stack are really delightful to read (he's definitely someone who knows what he is doing, I guess that comes with being 'old' and having previous 'not-serial-entrepeneur' tech experience as a developer.
I'm one guy with a 7-figure ARR business. My tech is Stripe, Apache, Ruby CGI and CSV. Literally my database is a CSV file. Maybe that's too boring. But I spend about 10 hours a year maintaining it. The bulk of my devops this year was moving to Let's Encrypt.
Why not SQLite which is even more boring and comes with better guarantees?
My guess is that he does a lot of manual editing of entries which is fast in a text editor and somewhat annoying to form SQL statements to do.