I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business • Hacker News Board

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#121

Post by busterbenson » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

blorenz wrote: post #120

busterbenson wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I looked over our financial statement from 2018, summed a few things up that would be way too boring to provide in detail, and turned the numbers into percentages so that you don't have to do all the math in your head. Here's what I have: 2018 costs: 48% to salaries and contractors (my wife and I are the only people on payroll, and draw $60k salaries for ourselves) 12.1% to operations (health insurance, renting…

I see that you have 4220 members that are subscription holders. I'm supposing that you have more that are active users but not Member/Patron status. What's average sessions? Is there anything you can do with the AWS allocation (ie. AWS configurations or infra swapping)? From my vantage point of what I perceives as your Service model, I'm not readily seeing any component of it that would be CPU intensive, but I'm just…

I get about 30-40K unique sessions per month, so a little over 10% are paying users. We gave all accounts that signed up prior to going paid free lifetime accounts, and many of them still use the site... so it's a weird mix.

There's definitely stuff I can do to make AWS cheaper. Starting with just remembering to pre-pay for my instances ahead of time. One of my least favorite things to do is to log into the AWS console, so I try to do it as little as possible.

The CPU intensive part is due to autosave. When a lot of people are writing concurrently (even on the order of hundreds), that was usually what would take down the site in the old days. The site is weird in the sense that there are 10x more writes than reads, and then doing all of the linguistic analysis, badge granting, stats generating cause spikes when they happen as well. I'm @buster on Twitter if you want to continue the discussion there.

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#122

Post by AlchemistCamp » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 9:41 PM UTC

vbsteven wrote: post #96

One of the main takeaways is that it’s still running on a very old version of Rails and JQuery. Maybe not great from a security standpoint but it shows that you do not need a Kubernetes cluster and a big HA setup and a modern language/framework for a profitable project. Btw, the site does not load past the initial splash quote in Firefox on iOS with Tracking Protection enabled. Disabling tracking protection fully loa…

And the site loads much faster than IH itself! I'd update it to a current version of Rails, though.

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#123

Post by darkwizard42 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

busterbenson wrote: post #110

blorenz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I, for one, would be keenly interested in this. I think it would enlighten about the operating costs and expenditures that are associated with this service and where they go. I'm hoping that the scrutiny of this might serve you well and you are able to get some takeaways to increase your profits. I appreciate your candidness and willing to be transparent to those ( at the head of the line, myself ) who you…

Okay, I looked over our financial statement from 2018, summed a few things up that would be way too boring to provide in detail, and turned the numbers into percentages so that you don't have to do all the math in your head. Here's what I have: 2018 costs: 48% to salaries and contractors (my wife and I are the only people on payroll, and draw $60k salaries for ourselves) 12.1% to operations (health insurance, renting…

Really appreciate your transparency here. I enjoyed the whole post and liked that you were willing to respond in the comments!

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#124

Post by yorwba » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 10:06 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #101

hinkley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions mobile and internationalization. In both cases hiring consultants may be more reliable than trying to build the expertise in-house. I've become the de facto internationalization expert at several companies and it's always rough. Everyone wants sentence structure to be simple and will fight you when you insist on something like interpolation instead of fancy string concatenation. Like Yoda, you will sound.…

> And then there are straight up dodges like using Arabic numbers for everything in Japan because they have multiple counting systems. Apples and humans use different words when counting. In Chinese, the Arabic numerals wouldn't get you out of this, as they replace the number, but not the measure word: 3 apples -- 三个苹果 -- 3个苹果 3 people [needing to sit in a restaurant, or being honored, or what have you] -- 三位 -- 3位.…

Japanese doesn't just have different measure words, but also different number words depending on the thing being counted. That said, the difference can be hidden in writing, so unless you need text-to-speech it is not much of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#125

Post by busterbenson » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

darkwizard42 wrote: post #123

busterbenson wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I looked over our financial statement from 2018, summed a few things up that would be way too boring to provide in detail, and turned the numbers into percentages so that you don't have to do all the math in your head. Here's what I have: 2018 costs: 48% to salaries and contractors (my wife and I are the only people on payroll, and draw $60k salaries for ourselves) 12.1% to operations (health insurance, renting…

Really appreciate your transparency here. I enjoyed the whole post and liked that you were willing to respond in the comments!

Thank you! I try to do what little I can to make these things less of a black box to people who are curious.

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#126

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 11:20 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #124

thaumasiotes wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then there are straight up dodges like using Arabic numbers for everything in Japan because they have multiple counting systems. Apples and humans use different words when counting. In Chinese, the Arabic numerals wouldn't get you out of this, as they replace the number, but not the measure word: 3 apples -- 三个苹果 -- 3个苹果 3 people [needing to sit in a restaurant, or being honored, or what have you] -- 三位 -- 3位.…

Japanese doesn't just have different measure words, but also different number words depending on the thing being counted. That said, the difference can be hidden in writing, so unless you need text-to-speech it is not much of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals

Is this the phenomenon you're referring to?

> In modern Japanese, cardinal numbers are given the on readings except 4 and 7, which are called yon and nana respectively. Alternate readings are used in month names, day-of-month names, and fixed phrases. For instance, the decimal fraction 4.79 is always read yon-ten nana kyū, though April, July, and September are called shi-gatsu (4th month), shichi-gatsu (7th month), and ku-gatsu (9th month) respectively. The on readings are also used when shouting out headcounts (e.g. ichi-ni-san-shi).

For names and fixed phrases, there's at least an argument that e.g. "shi" is just a part of the word historically descending from a then-current word for 4, as opposed to the word for 4 being different when it identifies April. (That argument definitely won't apply to headcounts, though.)

The decimal example made me curious whether decimal numbers like 4.79 might ever be written out in kanji rather than Arabic numerals. Decimals are enough of a recent foreign import that I might expect them not to have a native, character-based representation.

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#127

Post by thaumasiotes » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 11:29 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #101

hinkley wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions mobile and internationalization. In both cases hiring consultants may be more reliable than trying to build the expertise in-house. I've become the de facto internationalization expert at several companies and it's always rough. Everyone wants sentence structure to be simple and will fight you when you insist on something like interpolation instead of fancy string concatenation. Like Yoda, you will sound.…

> And then there are straight up dodges like using Arabic numbers for everything in Japan because they have multiple counting systems. Apples and humans use different words when counting. In Chinese, the Arabic numerals wouldn't get you out of this, as they replace the number, but not the measure word: 3 apples -- 三个苹果 -- 3个苹果 3 people [needing to sit in a restaurant, or being honored, or what have you] -- 三位 -- 3位.…

It occurs to me that I should probably note that the nouns in those examples are 苹果 (apple), 人 (person), and 猫 (cat); they appear (or don't) along with the measure words they require[1] when being enumerated, 个, 位, and 只. The measure words are not part of the noun and don't occur in other contexts, e.g. 我 [I] 喜欢 [like] 吃 [to eat] 苹果 [apples].

[1] The ordinary measure word for 人 is 个, the same as for apples. 位 is more formal.

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#128

Post by mrunkel » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 11:33 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #126

yorwba wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese doesn't just have different measure words, but also different number words depending on the thing being counted. That said, the difference can be hidden in writing, so unless you need text-to-speech it is not much of a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_numerals

Is this the phenomenon you're referring to? > In modern Japanese, cardinal numbers are given the on readings except 4 and 7, which are called yon and nana respectively. Alternate readings are used in month names, day-of-month names, and fixed phrases. For instance, the decimal fraction 4.79 is always read yon-ten nana kyū, though April, July, and September are called shi-gatsu (4th month), shichi-gatsu (7th month), a…

No, I believe the GP is referring to the fact that in japanese when you ask for 'four beers' the word for 'four' is different than when you ask for 'four chairs.'

I don't fully understand it, but that is what a native speaker told me.

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#129

Post by weaksauce » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 11:35 PM UTC

busterbenson wrote: post #110

blorenz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I, for one, would be keenly interested in this. I think it would enlighten about the operating costs and expenditures that are associated with this service and where they go. I'm hoping that the scrutiny of this might serve you well and you are able to get some takeaways to increase your profits. I appreciate your candidness and willing to be transparent to those ( at the head of the line, myself ) who you…

Okay, I looked over our financial statement from 2018, summed a few things up that would be way too boring to provide in detail, and turned the numbers into percentages so that you don't have to do all the math in your head. Here's what I have: 2018 costs: 48% to salaries and contractors (my wife and I are the only people on payroll, and draw $60k salaries for ourselves) 12.1% to operations (health insurance, renting…

Thanks for the transparency! one question I have is how is your aws setup? one server on all the time or do you scale it up based on demand? could you get by on something on digital ocean or the like?

Re: I bootstrapped my private-journaling project into a lifestyle business

#130

Post by troydavis » Wed, Jun 26, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

busterbenson wrote: post #110

blorenz wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I, for one, would be keenly interested in this. I think it would enlighten about the operating costs and expenditures that are associated with this service and where they go. I'm hoping that the scrutiny of this might serve you well and you are able to get some takeaways to increase your profits. I appreciate your candidness and willing to be transparent to those ( at the head of the line, myself ) who you…

Okay, I looked over our financial statement from 2018, summed a few things up that would be way too boring to provide in detail, and turned the numbers into percentages so that you don't have to do all the math in your head. Here's what I have: 2018 costs: 48% to salaries and contractors (my wife and I are the only people on payroll, and draw $60k salaries for ourselves) 12.1% to operations (health insurance, renting…

If anyone wants to read more of Buster's incredibly transparent updates, check out https://busterbenson.com/ and https://buster.substack.com/about. I'm a very small-time supporter/patron and enjoy Buster's approach to everything he does.