oh good luck, it's a tough space to be. some indie makers have managed to make it work (like healthchecks.io for example) but it requires patience and dedication, esp dealing with some entitled people on the free plan.
1. uptime monitoring service [1]. launched in 2019. decided to enter a crowded niche so as not to reinvent the wheel and try to figure out distribution, but gave up. sold in early 2021. total sales before selling: $1,686
2. notion backups service [2]. launched in late 2021, total sales $100k, while still growing ~60% YoY. in hindsight, I should have picked an adjacent niche, since this business is technically difficult and not as easy to sell as a Notion site builder, for example.
3. churn analytics for stripe [3]. got accepted to the stripe marketplace, but still haven't gotten a single customer because I haven’t marketed it much. I use it daily and it is very helpful. for that reason alone, i don't want to kill it.
my hunch is that we're moving towards more surveillance, censorship and deplatforming in the future, and CBDCs are a major tool for that.
I like Bitcoin, despite its problems (price volatility and quantum vulnerability) but I think censorship-resistant stablecoins would be a better solution for people looking to protect themselves from Big Brother.
It is very basic now: it tells me which of the customers have cancelled their subscription and why (Stripe lets people choose the reason before cancelling). I've yet to gain a customer despite launching on the Stripe Marketplace but it's been personally helpful for me so far.
tangentially related, but as someone who built multiple internet businesses -- mostly unsuccessful, some mildly successful -- I barely have any new ideas to work on.
I don't know if this is the effect of relying on AI too much in my day-to-day work or leading a more monotonous life as of late, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. Lots of ideas that I could have built before LLMs took over now seem trivial to build with Claude & friends.
They're done. They export oil/LNG, import food, invest the proceeds in the US companies/treasuries and brand themselves as logistics hubs + safe havens for the global rich. It's all out of the window now.
yes. they export oil/LNG and import most of their food. and they invest their proceeds into the US economy/treasuries, which they're going to stop if this continues.
by some estimates, Qatar and Kuwait could experience ~14% GDP contraction this year if this goes on.
the closure of the strait (i.e. a toll booth by Iran) will cause massive inflation, destroy the GCC, and eventually lead to a global recession and the end of a petrodollar, which is how Iran is retaliating.
And if the US attempts a ground invasion to keep the strait open, it will be a complete disaster for the US.
I've finally finished the long-abandoned project that I've been meaning to build for a while.
If you use Stripe Billing for subscriptions, your customers can specify reasons why they cancelled (e.g. too expensive, not using it, switched to competitor, etc.). However, to access those, you either have to use Stripe Sigma or pull them from the API. I wanted to build a more convenient way to access those (and also act upon them).
I've submitted the app to Stripe's App Marketplace, but I have a limited number of test invites to send out if you're interested (I will happily waive your subscription for 3 months).
The first business I started never gained traction, so I sold it in 2021 (which was a completely different time compared to now).
Notion had announced that they'd launch a beta version of their API, so while waiting for the early access, I built a landing page, login/signup, and all other plumbing for the web app.
It was a rather underwhelming launch (both for the API and my business), but I gained my first customer within a month.
Honestly, it's been a slog running this business (Notion's API is surprisingly hard to work with, so it seemed that I was stuck for months on end), so knowing what I know now, I'd probably have started a different business. My burnout didn't help either.
Claude has been incredibly helpful these last few months in solving esoteric undocumented edge cases that were plaguing the codebase for years.
I have a healthy MRR/growth rate right now and the biggest product in the niche, so I'm grateful for that.
Ditto but for Claude -- blows GPT out of the water. Much better in coding and solving physics problems from the images (in foreign languages). GPT couldn't even read the image. The only annoying thing is that if you use Opus for coding, your usage will fill up pretty fast.
Notion's built-in PDF exporter is quite disappointing to say the least, so I built (well, Claude did) an alternative. It uses a hosted puppeteer service in the background (browserless.io) and allows for more customization.
I've been using Hetzner for my business and have been quite happy with it so far. I recently migrated to a slightly larger bare metal server with 64GB RAM, 16 cores, 4 SSDs (6.5TB in total), and unlimited bandwidth for $96 bucks.
I've been a customer of Big Cloud and Small Cloud (DO, Linode).
Rails, SQLite, Redis, all hosted on a bare metal server (Hetzner). Deploy with Capistrano (a fancy bash script). Tailwind for styling -- i heavily use their components/templates, which is quite convenient.
I've been running small SaaS businesses since 2019 with varying degrees of success (currently running a profitable one).
I never really got into JS front-end frameworks. The sheer complexity, and the idea of maintaining essentially 2 apps as a solo dev, never really appealed to me. The furthest I got into JS world was tinkering with Rails' Stimulus framework.
i built something similar in spirit a while back, but instead of a bar, it uses 144 rectangles, each representing 10 minutes of your day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881096
I've been working on my business for 4 years now, sometimes taking extended breaks when I run out of motivation.
Lately, I've noticed that my (beefy) server is always clogged with background jobs that tend to run longer than they used to. It’s started impacting operations, as customers have been complaining about their backups running a bit late.
We're network bound, so I can't just add more compute power (Notion's API has a rate limit of 2700 req/15 mins). I suspect we're being getting rate limited left and right, which is causing these delays.
* SEO - I started way before I launched the product. I wrote an article on how to back up a Notion workspace using their (then newly-launched) API. It still brings in traffic to this day. Granted, there was almost no competition when I started
* r/Notion subreddit - only in relevant threads when someone is looking for a solution. After some time, some of my customers began recommending this tool to others
btw, your docs pages look malformed; seems like markdown metadata slipping into the page content: https://boxwatch.app/docs/api/authentication