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I started a paper website business

daily.tinyprojects.dev

221–230 of 268 posts

Re: I started a paper website business

#221

This is a great idea and I’d love a future with an explosion of paper websites. However, I’m saddened that after all the attention and clicks the annual revenue is only $3600. It really shows the difficulty of getting someone to pay for your service. I wonder if an alternate revenue model would have been more successful?

The goal doesn't need to be to make money. The goal could just be to think of something new and have fun. And I think the author has clearly done that.

Re: I started a paper website business

#226

So I diligently kept a pen and paper journal about my game designs for three years (wrote about 100,000+ words on paper). Switched to digital for a year, wrote 120,000 words just in 2019 (starting every morning sitting at a Starbucks and writing it helped), switched back, then switched back again, doing less and less words each year (for 2021 I'm at like 15,000 words, so pathetic, it's only like 12 entries total, nee…

I diligently kept ideas in notebooks for eight years while in jail. When I moved from one jail to another, in year five, the guards lost all of them and I had to start again. When I got out a few months ago I left one of my two notebooks on a table and my friend's dog ate it.

Re: I started a paper website business

#227
post #120

Ben Stokes is an inspiration to me. I get excited reading any of the TinyProjects posts. It's so refreshing to see a solo dev building and shipping so much. Hoping I'm tracking for that kind of ability as a full stack dev.

I'm mostly curious to know about the long term financials and time dedicated to support. I really want to know if these are viable means of spending your time or if they make you a decent amount of cash at first, then fall off immediately. On top of that, I'd like to know hours spent. As it stands, he's definitely in a deficit when we include time spent and taxes taken out. Although if it took 40 hours to make, sure it probably wasn't so bad. If it took 80+, then yeah he's not making much more than some Wal-mart employees. Which is why I'd like to see the long term feasibility of this.

Re: I started a paper website business

#228

A lot of this seems manageable to me - like I could imagine myself being able to build it - but I have no idea how the author handled the domain names part and hosting all these websites. How did you just "throw together" a registrar and a hosting service? Seems like they built heroku and namecheap as side facets to their "tiny project." I must be missing something.

Startup Founders often say, “do things that don’t scale”. If I were trying this, I might just register the domains in my account, list myself as the admin, and list them for everything else. No building necessary until you prove the idea.

Exactly. For a $99/year subscription it makes sense to manually perform a one-time setup. That being said, domain name registration APIs are a thing [1]. Hosting should be even more trivial with a multi-tenant architecture.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/APIReference/API_...

Re: I started a paper website business

#229
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. You might find it simple, if you don't compare to places that are easier. First you need to file all the paperwork. Then you wait. Once you get approvals, you can't do anything without a bank account, and opening the bank account is a lot of trouble too, because they want to triple check everything. From zero to operational is a long way, and with lots of legal liability along the way. I have a company…

Stripe's Atlas program seems to be available in Brazil? https://stripe.com/atlas

He would still need to pay taxes in Brazil, and explain why it's not international money laundering. Same if the money touches the US, will have to pay taxes there too, then transfer it to Brazil for more taxes and paperwork.

Re: I started a paper website business

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true to an extent, but I find that reddit culture seeps its way into all subs. There is a overreaching lack of seriousness. It's my observation that the average redditor is more interested in gaining upvotes via silly class-clown behavior, than actually contributing meaningful conversation. Or interested in upvoting silly comments. Even in subreddits where the topic of discussion is something serious, such as…

Definitely true about most subs, but not all. Some, such as /r/askhistorians, are very strict about low effort posts so what you end up seeing (amongst a handful of deleted replies) are very well resourced to whatever the subject of the thread is. Of course, this requires an engaged moderating team which not all subs have. That being said, it still doesn't quite match the magic of stumbleupon and clicking a link to b…

I feel like even with moderation, Reddit has a natural limitation by dint of being "adoration by upvote". You can't start a conversation outside of the boxes defined by the sub. If your post comes across as even slightly promoting of an undesired subject it mostly falls into the spam and downvote bucket, unless the sub is very specifically trying to include that, you have gained pre-approval, or you have manufactured some kind of storyline that loopholes both rules and human emotions. The average mod team is prone to abuse of power, so they also come down hard on anything potentially disruptive to the intended discourse. The incentives then move towards posting on Reddit in an intentionally deceptive "influencer" mode at all times - equal parts hype, pity, and outrage.

And there's both a reason for that being the case(nobody wants spam, and moderating can curate effectively in the best subs) and for it being harmful(community interaction ossifies into a familiar set of things that get upvotes, which subsequently pollutes every thread).

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