[haywirez]

What a hero — love how the story of Pinboard stacks up against the long-term unsustainability of VC-funded and overhyped startups. Quote from the 2011 article[0]:

"My dream is to keep this a one-person project," says Ceglowski. "I am competing against billionaires like the YouTube guys running Delicious and I can hold my own. The tools I use have gotten so good and they are the same ones that Yahoo and Google use."

I hope to do the same one day with Soundcloud!

[0] http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,288...

[duxup]

It does seem like there might be room out there for things that aren't unicorns, but are sustainable / good products that can operate, even at a profit, with small teams.

I always think of / mention Gumroad when I think of that:

https://sahillavingia.com/reflecting

I worry in the rush to the tip top we lose some good products / services / economic activity that are billion dollar wins... but are still way good ideas.

[semireg]

The tooling has become insanely good, so long as you trust the shoulders of the giants you’re standing on. For example, a month ago the Electron team introduced a bug that made my Microsoft Store app think it was outside the store. The users of my app were not happy - so I looked into how I could test the app “in the store” as a beta ... it’s basically an exercise in frustration. Package flights are a joke, build numbers don’t make a package unique. Just all sorts of hassle for a store that’s 1% (I’m being generous) the size of Apple’s.

Anywho, I’m a solo developer that created a desktop electron app that lets you design and print labels (either roll or sheets) and can import spreadsheet data for use in text, barcodes and even colors. It’s been a hell of a ride so far because my customers run the gamut of “organizing my yarn” to “storing nuclear isotopes.” I get emails and calls like, “I need to print 15,000 labels by Tuesday or I’m fired!” Those are always fun. My customers are in my small town of Minnesota USA, California, UAE, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia, NZ. I have global reach in this funky little niche.

All this made possible by some insane tooling (and toiling). It’s a really fun time to be a developer... even if my app takes up 500MB memory. Ha!

You can download my app from https://label.live

[vandahm]

I don't have anything to contribute to the greater discussion, but I just wanted to thank you for building your app and sharing a link to it. Making labels isn't something that I often do, but when I have to do it, I need to make a lot of them, and that's always a pain. I'm going to give your solution a try as soon as I get off of work.

[semireg]

Hey, thanks! I didn't grow up dreaming of becoming a label printer app expert, but here I am... at your service. I'm glad to be here for you. Please reach out (via Label LIVE support) if you have any questions/comments.

[hckr_news]

That's pretty cool, very niche yet still an interesting concept. You should try to get on the indie hackers podcast. How's the income stream on this sort of business? And it sounds like its a 1 man/woman operation where you do handle everything from support to marketing?

[semireg]

I'm ramen profitable at this point. Sales are increasing each month. And yes, one person operation. There are only a few players in this market, and their solutions cost upwards of $500 per license, plus yearly support/maintenance. Right now I'm selling licenses for $47.99 one-time. In other words, there is some room to increase the price of my product, or move to a different monetization strategy. The low price today helps me get users/feedback.

I'll sell my 1000th license sometime before the end of the year. There's a lot of interesting roads to take... for example, I could become more serious about selling a bundled solution where I'm the only label printer distributor to own their own inexpensive software. Or maybe move to cloud? Or a portion of the functionality to the cloud. Or start targeting mobile/tablet more seriously. I don't know, yet... the future seems bright.

[wasdfff]

Craigslist is a model company imo

[a_band]

Absolutely! The notion that the only successful web business can be billion dollar unicorns is nuts. More small web businesses!

[dhosek]

My current project is a service for writers that at best might be able to provide me with a full-time income and at least will not lose money for me. Since it's something I want/need/use, I'm willing to donate my time to it as necessary and let it be what it'll be.

[spieden]

My favorite is https://readwise.io

[daguar]

Is there any existing directory of similar products? Small team, sustainable.

I ask because I know one of the big tradeoffs of bootstrapping is no growth "war chest" — but I would love to find and use more of these!

[simantel]

Indie Hackers has a pretty big database of products: https://www.indiehackers.com/products

[chc4]

itch.io fits that. It's still just a two person shop, afaik.

[jonwalch]

AFAICT Clerky is another example.

[cced]

Anyone have any idea what he’s referring to when he brings up his use of tools?

[idlewords]

I mean vanilla stuff like MySQL and PHP. In the Old Times both were considered toy projects unworthy of running a production website, while now both have been patched and improved into complete stability.

[pedrosanta]

He has some (funny) info on Pinboard About page (https://pinboard.in/about) regarding 'the technology', perhaps he was mentioning that...

> Pinboard is written in PHP and Perl. The site uses MySQL for data storage, Sphinx for search, Beanstalk as a message queue, and a combination of storage appliances and Amazon S3 to store backups. There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature!

[SllX]

This is the kind of thing that made it easy for me to justify $39/year (for full page archives). Boring technology isn’t going to excite anyone, but it sure as hell will keep ticking along so long as someone’s at the wheel.

[gonational]

Probably WRT opensource tools (machine learning, databases, frameworks, etc.) that are now 80%[1] as good as what the biggest firms have access to.

1. entirely made-up number

[jacobsenscott]

It has been a while since I worked at a big firm, but my experience has always been that open source tools are always far superior.

[neon_electro]

Do you mean that you intend to buy Soundcloud's assets if they go under?

[randall]

*when lol.

[flanbiscuit]

Your Songsling project seems really interesting but not fully understanding how it works. Are you generating a site+server and uploading it to the "linked" domains? Is "linking" asking for some kind of upload/write access to their host?

https://songsling.studio/

[haywirez]

Thanks! It works through DNS — you point your domain’s nameservers to Songsling, then it manages all the other necessary records automatically behind the scenes. Basically it points the domain at the generated site. It’s still early, rough around the edges, but slowly getting there. The new audio engine that’s in the works is on a whole another level, focusing mostly on that at the moment.

[techntoke]

There are a lot of room for open source improvements when it comes to bookmark management. I envision a CLI and web server that uses TOML, YAML and JSON like Hugo.

[chrisweekly]

Soundcloud is awesome! Keep it up!

[lcnmrn]

I'm doing the same thing with Subreply against Facebook, Twitter, Gab, Mastodon. There are others like me: GoatCounter, Micro.blog, Midnight.pub, Lobste.rs, etc.

[technoplato]

Forgive me if I’m out of the loop but are we really considering gab and mastadon to be the “big players now”?

[andrewxhonson]

I'm looking at Subreply, and notice you said it's English-only on the about page. Is that something you enforce? What's your reasoning if you don't mind my asking?