Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I quit my job to make free web tools

nslookup.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 105 posts

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#81

Post by pul »

hwers wrote: post #22

I'm always curious how many visitors you have to get to reach $500 per month numbers from ads. I understand the author probably can't reveal exact numbers here but if anyone knows rough but real life numbers I'd be curious to hear (I haven't ever done ad based revenue myself and I don't trust CPM numbers I'd read by googling, or the spread is just too broad).

> I understand the author probably can't reveal exact numbers

I do :) Here they are: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io Last month was exactly 400 USD from Carbon Ads. It does depend a lot on ad placement and target demographic, so your mileage may vary.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#83

Post by pul »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #58

it's interesting that the novel/hobby projects all failed. the ones that succeeded, are those that can be used for marketing by other companies (whoismyisp) or which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution. i was always into this idea of building mvp to test markets. but the main issue is getting an audience. often success is 98% luck and timing and 2% hard work.

> which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution.

100% this. I've completely moved away from trying to be novel. Pick a solution that is profitable, but you think you can improve. Execute it better and gain market share.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#84

Post by pul »

eatonphil wrote: post #36

Nice! I quit my job 8 months ago to build free data tools. https://github.com/multiprocessio

That's really cool! I'm following you on Twitter to see how you approach it :) It's a similar problem space to what I'm doing with nslookup.io, but you've chosen a different angle. Super interested to see how it works out for you.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#85

Post by pul »

weq wrote: post #55
xhevahir wrote: post #53

Seems like the kind of thing that's a lot more feasible in a functioning welfare state like NL.

My job is to make web tools that people use for free. I can set my own hours, live whenever i like, and someone else shoulders the stress of keeping a buisness afloat. Its the world we live in. Once you break free of the box, your parents dreams, you can realise your own version of what "life is".

What are you working on? Please reach out on Twitter to join our web tool makers community :) https://twitter.com/Ruurtjan

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#86

Post by pul »

scrapcode wrote: post #46
pul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope that you make more than your salary Not yet by a large margin, but it's going up slowly :) > how did you attract users to website? Currently, mainly through SEO. My stats are open [1], so you can see the percentage that comes in through search engines. In my case, there's a large search volume for 'nslookup', which is currently the largest chunk of traffic. An 'exact match domain' helped for sure. But in the…

I used to do a lot of research on SEO and the methods behind the madness of getting decent organic traffic, and it basically always boiled down to quality content built around targeted keywords, phrases, or related topics. The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format. It does not seem that you do this on these properties, so briefly wh…

I think you have a pretty good idea on how SEO works. I try to do multiple things, and hope some of them bear fruit.

1. This very blog post is part of the SEO effort. A temporary influx in traffic, a couple of backlinks, and a larger following on Twitter (+80 followers from this post alone).

> The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format.

2. I've got an ex-Microsoft employee that writes content on a freelance basis. We do around one knowledge base article or blog post per month.

3. Original content that's genuinely useful and bring something new to the table (like [1]) take a lot of time, but pay off in terms of backlinks. The image by the way is release under creative commons with attribution, so I occasionally look if websites use it and ask for a backlink.

[1] https://www.nslookup.io/learning/dns-record-types/

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#87

Post by pul »

iRobbery wrote: post #65

gazelle-kopen.nl Would have expected this could rake in some SEO traffic though, but surprised that didnt work for you. Or maybe surprised isnt the right word, maybe i have the initial high hope for it when you registered it and tried it :)

Maybe I should have stuck with it for longer, or just made the site better. The idea was that the official Gazelle site listed their dealers behind a postal code search form, that couldn't be indexed by search engines. So I scraped it and presented each one on a separate page, with overview pages per city. Didn't manage to get a lot of traffic, but I was also super new to SEO back then.

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#88

Post by pul »

thomas wrote: post #19

What's a good information source for this? Like is this just something built on the domain tools api? Or is more of a front end for dig? Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy.

Right now, it's just a glorified Dig wrapper. I'm slowly adding features that Dig is missing, like IP information (through ipinfo.io), favicons and logos.

> Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy.

Good to hear, thanks!

Re: I quit my job to make free web tools

#90

Post by dwild »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #41
teh_klev wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no privacy issue here, there aren't source IP addresses attached, you can't tell who's looking these up. It's up there with Amazon's (for example) "other people bought" recommendations, you can't tell who did the looking up. They're just domain names which are effectively public records. And even if you thought you registered a super secret domain name (no such thing), maybe the registrar looked it up, or so…

I do understand all of that, still it feels weird to me. If I'm looking up a staging domain I'm not trying to broadcast that to the world, for example You know the Qualsys SSL Tester tool? That has a checkbox about making the result public or not and that is because by default people wouldn't expect the domain to be leaked (even though it's already public information that doesn't really matter)

I agree with you completely. I just want to add for people that do care about domain privacy that there's many certificate provider that do publish the generated certificate over https://crt.sh/ . I did find a few staging subdomains in the past on that website.
Post reply on HN