301–310 of 466 posts
Scraping Fish - a web scraping API powered by custom-build, ethical, mobile proxy pool: https://scrapingfish.com/
Looks like great service. If I may ask, what do you mean by ethical?
I got mad, so I built a service that snapshot tested the API response every 60 seconds, and sent a Slack alert whenever it failed. I called it OnlineOrNot.
I spent a year trying to sell that MVP to startups around Sydney, but there were maybe a handful of other companies using GraphQL at that time, and they weren't willing to take a chance on a part-time business solving this problem.
Fast-forward 2 years, and several other failed projects, I decide to rebuild it from scratch, but this time as a general uptime monitoring service.
The URL is https://onlineornot.com, I've been iteratively working on it for around 2 hours per workday since early 2020 (I ruthlessly cut features down into 2 hour blocks, and use feature flags to deploy safely).
These days it's more of a status page, with built-in uptime monitoring (and has integrations to other monitors).
---
Folks tend to ask what makes OnlineOrNot special, trying to figure out what the moat is - it's me.
I've worked on the web for Atlassian and Cloudflare, I've seen what works and doesn't work for self-serve web apps. So OnlineOrNot has:
- a business model that won't suddenly fail (I'm full-time employed so that I can work on OnlineOrNot, I'm not going to shut it down for not making enough money)
- docs written in clear English that load fast, and are up to date
- a modern, responsive web UI with errors that don't make you feel dumb
- uptime monitoring for websites, web apps, and APIs that Just Works
https://extensionpay.com — A really simple way for browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions. I made it to use in my own extensions since it's a pain in the butt to take payments in browser extensions. It has an open source library that works across all browsers and allows for one-time or subscription payments. Since 2021 developers have made over $125k with ExtensionPay which makes me happy :…
I have two projects, combined doing ~€1500/mo https://fider.io - an open source alternative to UserVoice. I started this one 6 years ago to learn Go and React. I’ve seen thousands of instances out there being self hosted, so I started a cloud hosting to those who don’t want to manage it themselves. https://aptakube.com - Desktop Client for Kubernetes. This is very recent, launch was 2 weeks ago, so it’s only starting…
I sell handmade sculptures of influential people and famous monuments on Etsy - https://www.etsy.com/shop/jurgenstudio . Revenue is 2-6k USD depending on the season. I hired someone part time who took over production and shipping. it's mostly passive revenue for me apart from growing the business by developing new products when I feel like it. The profit margin is around 50% after all material and labor costs are pai…
I'm curious because I have an Etsy shop and love to talk all things about optimising the shop front. The competition is steep nowadays over there!
I’ve mentioned before on HN how I make around ~$7k from my Lunar app nowadays [0] but controlling monitors is a larger niche and the app was developed and perfected over the course of 5 years. This time I’d like to show you the progress of my last year’s project, https://lowtechguys.com . It’s a small macOS app studio and here are my App Store sales for the last month: https://f.alinpanaitiu.com/gjxBpg/Image.png You…
I have an idea for rcmd -- if possible, it would be great to be able to assign a right-cmd-key to -- or open one if none is. Likewise for calendar.google.com and probably others. I'd pay an extra few dollars for that feature, as I'm forever opening because my tab hygiene is lacking. I read your piece on window switching -- would AppleScript work? This works: tell application "Safari" tell item 4 of windows set the cu…
I could maybe try to implement the main part of the “find and switch to the tab if it exists” so that users can simply assign the URL.
Thanks for reminding about this use case!
https://www.arbeitnow.com - a job board for Germany. It's been up for two years this January and it keeps me going! Revenue and traffic fluctuate a lot, does not really matter to me as long as people keep finding jobs through it so I'll keep working on it as long as I can.
Nice. Did you code it yourself?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the selection and I'm thinking of buying a couple! Is it possible to have special requests made? Wittgenstein would be a great addition (the tryptic Nietzsche / Freud / Wittgenstein has been what forged my weltanschauung )
Thank you for your kind words. I have Wittgenstein on my TODO! Should be in the shop within a year.
I'm making https://simplescraper.io - a no-code web scraping tool. Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say that idea didn't go far, but it taught me how to code. When I was close to broke I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income. I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. The…
My tiny game has been bringing in at least $5k a month since I released on mobile, it's fully passive now. https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian I feel doubly blessed that it worked out with no ads or micropayment sinks of any sort, just a demo and a single $5 purchase.
How do people discover it?
I used to do guerilla marketting a bunch, mostly on Reddit, certainly a lot before and around release. I got some ok youtuber and streamer coverage around this time. Ended up releasing on Steam with 10k wishlists, which was enough to provide an initial visibility boost.
Soon before releasing on mobile, I participated in the Humble Stand with Ukraine Bundle, where I distributed 200k+ free keys for charity. Marketing value wasn't what was on my mind at the time, but I know quite a lot of people who picked up the bundle tried out the game, thought "neat but I'd prefer to play this on mobile", and then helped to drive a lot of initial traffic and get picked up by the algo.
I also got featured a bunch in both Google's an Apple's curated game collections.