I released Humm[1] last week. Realtime speech-to-text with a focus on privacy. No backend, no telemetry - just a fast, nicely designed app wrapping local stt models.
A project that I launched on HN that became a business. Simplescraper rode the no-code wave of a few years back ('instant structured data without parsing html').
Now working on increasing the surface area for AI agents: MCP support, screenshots API, and (experimentally) x402[1]
> I'm always a bit wary of approaching these ideas though because I feel like nobody would ever pay for small web stuff?
Build them and find out! There's almost always room for something better, and if what you build is that, then some people will pay.
Unless the tools have large running costs, consider offering them for free (at least at first).
A few things are likely to happen:
Nobody cares enough to sign up – fine, zero users, zero costs.
People use it but don’t stick around – ask them what would make the tool more valuable.
People use it a lot – great, now you can charge for the value.
Two examples come to mind: spaced repetition app Mochi and markdown editor Typora. Mochi is $5 a month, I think. Typora was free and is now a $15 one-time purchase.
Both compete with free alternatives and still have many paying users.
1. Clicking the box programmatically – possible but inconsistent
2. Outsourcing the task to one of the many CAPTCHA-solving services (2Captcha etc) – better
3. Using a pool of reliable IP addresses so you don't encounter checkboxes or turnstiles – best
I run a web scraping startup (https://simplescraper.io) and this is usually the approach[0]. It has become more difficult, and I think a lot of the AI crawlers are peeing in the pool with aggressive scraping, which is making the web a little bit worse for everyone.
[0] Worth mentioning that once you're "in" past the captcha, a smart scraper will try to use fetch to access more pages on the same domain so you only need to solve a fraction of possible captchas.
Markdown extraction, improved Google search, workflows - search for this terms, visit the first N links, summarize etc. Big demand for (or rather, expectation of) this lately.
Things are much easier for one-person startups these days—it's a gift.
I remember building a todo app as my first SaaS project, and choosing something called Stormpath for authentication. It subsequently shut down, forcing me to do a last-minute migration from a hostel in Japan using Nitrous Cloud IDE (which also shut down). Just pain upon pain.[1]
Now, you can just pick a full-stack cloud service and run with it. My latest SaaS[2] is built on Google Cloud, so Authentication, Cloud Functions, Docker containers, logging, etc straight out of the box.
Not to mention, modern JavaScript and CSS are finally good. With so many fewer headaches, it’s a great time to build.
[1] Admittedly, I was new to software dev and made some rather poor tech choices
Sounds like you've learned a lot of what not to do, which will be invaluable when you try again.
It feels like the only areas where a solo builder can gain traction are in B2B products, or B2C if you're riding the latest trend (crypto yesterday, AI today).
Everything else requires an audience or a ton of capital if you hope to capture even a sliver of attention. Patience and persistence may get you there too, but it's going to take more than a year.
> perhaps you can simply ask the API to create Python or JS code that is deterministic, instead.
Had a conversation last week with a customer that did exactly that - spent 15 minutes in ChatGPT generating working Scrapy code. Neat to see people solve their own problem so easily but it doesn't yet erode our value.
I run https://simplescraper.io and a lot of value is integrations, scale, proxies, scheduling, UI, not-having-to-maintain-code etc.
More important than that though is time-saved. For many people, 15 minutes wrangling with ChatGPT will always remain less preferable than paying a few dollars and having everything Just Work.
AI is still a little too unreliable at extracting structured data from HTML, but excellent at auxiliary tasks like identifying randomized CSS selectors etc
This will change of course so the opportunity right now is one of arbitrage - use AI to improve your offering before it has a chance to subsume it.
Saved up, quit my job and went all in...on a todo app. Needless to say that idea didn't go far, but it taught me how to code.
When I was close to broke I pivoted to this product and finally gained traction and now it's doing well enough to be my main source of income.
I'm kind of following the "1000 true fans" ethos that pops up here occasionally. There's a dedicated group of customers who benefit from the ease and speed of the tool and they're like my product team.
I check in with them often, make sure they're happy and build features for them. Turns out, what they value other people value too, and so the product slowly but surely grows.
Learning to code was definitely one of the best decisions I've made. Felt like gaining wings.
Congrats on the persistence! The lesson: things take time.
Took me about a decade. I also tried a note-taking app (every new developer's rite of passage it seems), an event guide, digital magazine, and an assortment of other projects whose domain names no longer resolve.
Suck as it may, each failure is a lesson in what not to do. If you find yourself back at square one and still have the drive to keep trying then it's only a matter of time before you create enough value to open wallets.
Having scraped million of webpages, I find dynamic CSS selectors a bigger time sink than most anti-scraping tech encountered so far (if your goal is to extract structured data).
The beautiful thing about web scraping is that it automates so much tedious work that the benefits in saved time offsets the brittleness inherent in scraping data.
And with Puppeteer (also Playwright) it's never been easier. Recaptcha solving, Ad blocking etc. in just a few lines of code[1].
I've built a business on the back of Puppeteer - https://simplescraper.io. Ten months in and we've just passed 100 customers so there's mucho opportunities in solving these kind of problems.
I started building Lanes (https://lanes.io) in 2016 as a way to learn how to code. Don't talk about it because it's way overdue for an update.
But it plods along, earning enough to cover the bills for my second project, Simplescraper (https://simplescraper.io).
With Wunderlist shut down this year it was the perfect time to relaunch Lanes 2.0 to try capture some of those task-manager migrants. But if there's a single thing building side-projects has taught me it's that if you try and chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither.
[1] https://humm.so/