421–430 of 666 posts
Back in August I launched https://IndieHackers.com , a site where the founders of profitable online businesses share their stories and revenue transparently. I actually got the idea after reading lots of threads like this one on HN :D Indie Hackers is my full-time job now. Is it "successful"? I think so! I've done over 90 interviews, and they've been read over one million times in the past 5 months, largely by you gu…
My grandfather has Parkinson's disease and the hand tremors that go with. This makes using a mouse nearly impossible because the cursor flies all over the place. I created free software called SteadyMouse[1] back in 2005 to remove this tremor while letting normal mouse motion through. It eventually moved up near the top of Google's search results. At the same time, the free version began to show its age with compatib…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you share the store URL? Please check my profile. I wonder, how do you deal with customs issues? I've had issues in the past while shipping outside EU and customers always expected me to solve the issues for them
Yes, here's my URL, feel free to share =) http://modshop.guitars/ For customer issues, you just need to be responsive and as helpful as you can be. I've also had issues shipping outside the US, but Shopify (the platform that I use) lets you disable shipping outside of certain countries. I've had some issues shipping to Canada, (never had an EU customer), so I only ship within the USA now. And changing that was only a…
Something just seems... off.
I run https://PhantomJsCloud.com I started it as a free MVP about 2 years ago while in Thailand, and given that I was attracting a slow but steady stream of users I decided to build out a commercial v1 from it. The freemium SaaS went live in March and it's growing monthly. If I still lived in Thailand I would consider it very successful, but I am in the Seattle area now so it's ramen profitable. The biggest surprise…
I think this is what's changed from a few years ago. Expectations of usability, design, support, number of platforms, etc. have all gone up even from casual users.
37signals, probably the most-celebrated bootstrapper shop, grew up in the 90s. Imagine getting started today. You need a responsive, high-design website. You need to navigate an incredibly complex web of user acquisition channels spanning web search, paid and earned social, community, etc. You need some kind of mobile support (even if just an optimized website), real-time synchronization features, etc. It just doesn't end.
I'm not sure it's possible at all to build something yourself these days. You pretty much have to have a team, and pay them in stock/revenue share, or cash upfront, to get a real revenue-producing company going.
I think the one-man software shop is really on the decline.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
After inspecting your website, I realized that I had purchased your Build a SaaS App course once, on Udemy. I ended up asking for my money back after discovering that you don't actually build anything, the code is already written and the video lectures quickly breeze through explaining it. A few people mentioned this in the Udemy comments on your course, and you retorted with snarky replies. Not a fan of your marketi…
Hi, Sorry you didn't like the course. I don't recall any snarky replies, but you're right. There were a few people who would have preferred a "code everything from a blank page" approach. The problem is, how do you code up a 4,000+ line Python application with dozens of files and thousands of lines of HTML/CSS/JS together 1 character at a time? It would take 100+ hours of video and you would want to punch me in the f…
Learnpython.org and other interactive tutorials - passive income that gets me a full high tech salary. Got started when I realized there was a need for an interactive tutorial (before CodeAcademy went live). Wrote it, and that's about it :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started with around $15k, but that's nothing compared to what I've dumped into the business since then. If I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I would have started this. I have not written about it, yet.
> If I knew then what I know now, I'm not sure I would have started this. You said you are making more money from this than from your full-time job. So I'm assuming the business is profitable and has a ton of potential. Are you saying that it requires too much work, and that it wasn't worth it?
I launched http://ipinfo.io a few years ago. The API gets over 250 million requests a day, and is profitable. I left my job at CTO of calm.com at the end of last year to focus on it fulltime. There's more of the backstory here: https://getputpost.co/from-side-project-to-250-million-daily...
How does your geolocation accuracy compare to MaxMind?
If it's more accurate I might be able to send some business in your direction...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a cool project. I'm mostly a designer, but am familiar with PhantomJS. I don't see a blog on your site. Have you considered writing about the technology? I'd think search would be a great growth mechanism for something like this. Certainly there are a ton of people searching for questions related to Phantom. I'd look around Stack Overflow and possibly Quora for topic ideas and then write posts answering those…
Yes, "inbound marketing" (a blog) is probably the biggest accelerator to growth I can (and should) do. I'm holding off for now though, as I need to make the product more friendly to business users first. Right now PhantomJsCloud is focused on developers, so I need to make some non-dev friendly tooling first. That's my excuse at least. Regarding StackOverflow, yes, that's actually how I validated the free MVP (answeri…
I run two SaaS analytics services on my own, https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com . Improvely is 4 years old, W3Counter is 12 years old, and together they earn $45-50K/month.
I'm thinking about it for my own business, but I'm on the fence.