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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#51

Post by anyfactor »

wcedmisten wrote: post #44
anyfactor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps? I built an MVP on a 5 dollar VPS. But I had to recently upgrade to a 12 dollar VPS as some of my analytics process were being stopped because of low memory. Aside from writing better code, I found out that using linux utils/app via system calls is the most effective solution as nothing I can write can ever be even remotely as performant as something like grep. I am fol…

Not OP, but I started up a project running Postgres, a Python backend (with FastAPI), and a NextJS frontend on the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet. Hosting+domain came to $7.68/mo I can't say it's had very much production load testing, but using the site myself it seems to work fine. https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/stateful-webapp-on-7-68-budget/ https://github.com/wcedmisten/python-nextjs-template

Thank you for sharing.

I use mainly flask and restful flask. However restful flask has been deprecated, so I was really interested in FastAPI. Then someone pointed out the number of open issues on the FastAPI project, so I got spooked. Flask maybe has quite a few frameworks for implementing rest API. Not sure what the future holds for Flask.

As you pointed out

> A backend comes with all sorts of baggage: databases, managing user data, authentication, backups, and increased server load.

With Flask being a microframework and barebones, going through this list becomes a chore unless you have built dozens of webapp and have some kind of template.

So I kinda gave up on web-backend entirely and moved towards firebase. Most of the complicated stuff will happen on the VPS side of things and will be communicated to firebase via the SDK.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#52

Post by jarebear6expepj »

anyfactor wrote: post #47
jarebear6expepj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps? I don't know... from what I've used of Python it is pretty memory heavy and doesn't do well left alone unsupervised. I could be wrong but that was my experience trying various Py web frameworks. My app servers were all $5 VPS with only nginx, PHP/php-fpm, and Memcached. PHP was cached, nginx assets were cached, and data was cached in RAM with Memcached which was upda…

Thank you very much. The only thing I can think of while reading your comment was, "wow this is elegant." Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind license/supporting deal? Although a more marketable solution will be a redis + node based stack.

> "wow this is elegant." > Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind > license/supporting deal

uhhh it's really just a basic install of freebsd and a bunch of shell scripts! As far as I'm concerned anyone with a bit of time could google fu themselves in to production.

I am always happy to, and have, contracted to build similar setups for other people for CDN delivery, etc, but that was just another day in the life of a sysadmin basically.

Email in profile if you have any other questions.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#53

Post by kamphey »

For the past 3 years I've been running https://bettersheets.co/ Originally as a side project while I tried to start and run SaaS. But people kept buying memberships (lifetime deals) and I just kept adding content to it. In the past year I've hired a ruby on rails developer to help me scale, on a part-time basis.

And I've been making products within the Better Sheets umbrella myself in sheets. The developer is helping to add features to the site, but if/when they leave I can continue running completely solo. It's been my full time income for the past 1 year, and I expect to continue running it for a decade or more, at this rate.

I'm continually learning more ruby on rails to keep building tools baked into the site. And will ultimately combine Google Sheet integrated tools into Better Sheets instead of keeping them separate as it is now.

Better Sheets started as a purely content site. I started with with a carrd page and gumroad payment. Now it's all types of contents, courses, blogs, and tools. As well as a library of tutorials.

The recent trend of AI has made my extremely excited to keep building. I built a Google Sheets AI assistant: https://asa.bettersheets.co/ and will continue to work on it until Google releases their own and probably keep working on my even with a Google Sheets AI from Google. As I imagine I can take it in a iterated/pivoted direction once I see what they do release.

The total revenue each year, with roughly 40% going into my pocket each year.

1st Year: $34,000

2nd Year: $67,000

3rd Year: $95,000

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#55

Post by wcedmisten »

anyfactor wrote: post #51
wcedmisten wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I started up a project running Postgres, a Python backend (with FastAPI), and a NextJS frontend on the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet. Hosting+domain came to $7.68/mo I can't say it's had very much production load testing, but using the site myself it seems to work fine. https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/stateful-webapp-on-7-68-budget/ https://github.com/wcedmisten/python-nextjs-template

Thank you for sharing. I use mainly flask and restful flask. However restful flask has been deprecated, so I was really interested in FastAPI. Then someone pointed out the number of open issues on the FastAPI project, so I got spooked. Flask maybe has quite a few frameworks for implementing rest API. Not sure what the future holds for Flask. As you pointed out > A backend comes with all sorts of baggage: databases, m…

Yeah that sounds like a good choice for managing complexity.

Probably a trade-off with cost I'm guessing. For my project I was trying to get the cost as low as possible, since it's just a side project for me.

Interesting point about the open issues, I didn't notice that, but does seem like it could be an issue for the longevity of the project.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#57

Post by HWR_14 »

kljsclfdsklj wrote: post #37
HWR_14 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers. Well, not end users. They're getting ads. But I would assume that ad buyers and publishers have exclusive improvements. After all, it's not like the ad companies took a substantially smaller cut. It either lowers the cost to ad buyers or it increases the revenue to publishers. Since it's pretty much the same number, it doesn't seem both can be tru…

Lol what are you talking about? Any improvement in conversion rate is going to help the publisher, the network and the ad buyer. I’ll just ignore the part about what you said about end users other than to say it’s arguable.

> Any improvement in conversion rate is going to help the publisher, the network and the ad buyer.

Since ad buyers pay per conversion, I don't actually think it helps them to increase the conversion rate.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#58

Post by HWR_14 »

selcuka wrote: post #43
HWR_14 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers. Well, not end users. They're getting ads. But I would assume that ad buyers and publishers have exclusive improvements. After all, it's not like the ad companies took a substantially smaller cut. It either lowers the cost to ad buyers or it increases the revenue to publishers. Since it's pretty much the same number, it doesn't seem both can be tru…

> it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders > Well, not end users. They're getting ads. Why not? Would you prefer ads, or ads with terrible javascript loaders?

I would prefer ads with terrible javascript loaders, as they are easier to more completely and reliably block.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#59

Post by foolswisdom »

anyfactor wrote: post #51
wcedmisten wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I started up a project running Postgres, a Python backend (with FastAPI), and a NextJS frontend on the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet. Hosting+domain came to $7.68/mo I can't say it's had very much production load testing, but using the site myself it seems to work fine. https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/stateful-webapp-on-7-68-budget/ https://github.com/wcedmisten/python-nextjs-template

Thank you for sharing. I use mainly flask and restful flask. However restful flask has been deprecated, so I was really interested in FastAPI. Then someone pointed out the number of open issues on the FastAPI project, so I got spooked. Flask maybe has quite a few frameworks for implementing rest API. Not sure what the future holds for Flask. As you pointed out > A backend comes with all sorts of baggage: databases, m…

I always liked fastapi and didn't have any problems, so your comment on issues made me check. Currently there are 16 open issues.

However, I believe (based on vague memories) that there used to be a ton of issues on the fastapi repo that were basically support requests. Going throw some closed issues, it seems that these were closed and/or converted to discussions.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#60

Post by selcuka »

HWR_14 wrote: post #58
selcuka wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders > Well, not end users. They're getting ads. Why not? Would you prefer ads, or ads with terrible javascript loaders?

I would prefer ads with terrible javascript loaders, as they are easier to more completely and reliably block.

The ads still use javascript; they are just not as "terrible" (a.k.a. waterfall).
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