HN user
Founder. Webmaster.
Building notionbackups.com and dunningbear.com, also rectangles.app and httpguides.com
Previously, was running a consulting business and sold an uptime monitoring business.
jmstfv.com | https://twitter.com/jmstfv | https://github.com/jmstfv
Reach out (no spam please): hn@jmstfv.com
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.
btw, your docs pages look malformed; seems like markdown metadata slipping into the page content: https://boxwatch.app/docs/api/authentication
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.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210515005206/https://tryhexade...
I can't open that link. seems like no DNS records associated with the site?
> nslookup cauenapier.townsquare.com
Server: 192.0.2.42
Address: 192.0.2.42#53
server can't find cauenapier.townsquare.com: NXDOMAINStablecoins are typically pegged to something, like USD or EUR, so their exchange rate vis-a-vis that currency is stable
this is interesting.
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.
I recently launched a churn analysis tool for Stripe:
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).
I've been working on the same business since 2021:
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.
anyway, cancelled my chatgpt subscription.
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.
2 things worked well for NotionBackups:
* 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
I've been building https://notionbackups.com for almost 4 years now.
It's mostly feature complete at this point, but there are still some rough edges.
Notion's API is far from complete, and updates are few and far between. This has led me to work around some of its limitations in creative ways. For example, there is still no way to create top-level pages in Notion, which makes restores impossible. Instead, I ask customers to create a top-level page themselves and write backups there.
Personally, the hardest part of working on a project for an extended period is not getting burnt out repeteadly. Sometimes it helps to work on something else, and other times you just need to step away from the game entirely for a while
Rails is pretty good - built my current business on Rails, building a new one on Rails as well.
In fact, I switched to Rails from Django because the latter was lacking.
I built a website that draws 144 rectangles, where each rectangle represents 10 minutes of your day. Some people even use it every day!
ruby on rails, sqlite, sidekiq + redis, and caddy, all hosted on a single hetzner dedicated server. no front-end frameworks, only tailwind.
tarsnap and restic for offsite backups.
I push code to github; then capistrano (think bash script with some bells and whistles) deploys that code to the server and restarts systemd processes.
I've been running this saas business for 3+ years and wouldn't change a thing. I'm also working on a new business with the exact same stack.
in 2021, after selling my unsuccessful saas business, i began searching for the next thing. as a result of my research, i noticed several things:
* Notion.so had a growing user base, and customers loved it
* More and more people (and businesses) were storing important info in their workspaces
* Notion users were publicly complaining about the lack of a decent backup option (i.e. they cared enough to complain)
* Notion announced that they would be launching an API soon
Basically, there was untapped demand and no competition whatsoever. I was undecided between 2 ideas, so I built 2 landing pages and started talking about both. I noticed that one of them received more attention than the other. As soon as I gained the early access to the API, I started building.
The rest is history.
https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm - a forum for small internet business owners. we still have the archive tho!
if you're running a small operation, as I do, there aren't many reasons to use Big Cloud.
i've been running my tiny business on the same provider as op for more than a year, and i've done very little maintenance to keep things up and running. granted, you need to set things up the first time, but after that, it just keeps chugging along.
for folks running their own businesses, have you managed to switch from xero to ledger/beancount? anything to look out for?
xero keeps raising their prices every few months, which is annoying (the whole attitude of 'you won't switch anyway, so we'll do whatever we want').
I'm in my 3rd year with Notion Backups, helping Notion users back up and restore their workspaces:
I'm going through something similar right now. They disabled my business account with no warnings, and now I'll spend my entire weekend cleaning up this mess.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139559
my expectations for them were low anyway, but good Lord...