Given the amount of customer service per user, feature support, technical support and dev-ops that will be required to run this, I doubt there is any way this business could be sustainable at $29/year/user. Not to mention how you’d actually need to grow via marketing.
If I were you I would stop on this idea immediately and come up with somewhere where the average user would expect to pay $50-$1000 per month for the service. I don’t think this is a good vertical to get into. Your competition are both better than you at the bottom of the market (free alternatives) and the top of the market and there is very little left for you. And even if you do get tens or hundreds of users, it will be just as unsustainable and you’ll also have the guilt when you decide to shut it down and kick all your users off.
The fact that any business is sustainable at this price point is not a relevant point, it might have been a bad choice for them too. What you are offering is also a lot more complicated.
Not to mention it’s in the vertical of blogging which has been around for 20 years, in which your offering is very similar to every other alternative, and there are many well known free alternatives.
If you have the technical skill to make a service this complicated, make something that people value more than $2 a month, and make something that hasn’t been made 100 times before. Execution is more important than idea only if the idea isn’t terrible.
Agreed. Your main product is treated as the compliment by companies like domain registrars. They make it easy and nearly free just to sell more domains.
Looks interesting, but the website doesn't give nearly enough information for me to even consider signing up.
What are the themes? What are the custom optimisation options? Can I tweak the CSS? What sites are already using it? Can I see examples? What content modelling options are there? Is there a free trial? Am I locked in? Can I export my data?
Yeah the landing page is pretty poor at this moment, I did not work on the landing page yet. There are currently two different themes. Example blog can be seen here https://nanodevpro.com/blog
$29 is charged to attach to custom domain or /blog
Wordpress is free, and you can pick up a VPS these days for $1/mo. You can't just be another solution, you have to be really, really, really good. You have to deliver something that is head and shoulders above the competition.
You have a few features here, but everything you show in the demo is just table stakes.
1 GB KVM VPS
1x vCPU Core
14 GB PURE SSD RAID-10 Storage
1 GB RAM
2000GB Monthly Bandwidth
1Gbps Public Network Port
Full Root Admin Access
1 Dedicated IPv4 Address
KVM / SolusVM Control Panel
Available in Multiple Locations
$11.38/yr
The biggest thing is, is this a sustainable price? And what if I want to move elsewhere?
WordPress is still pretty popular because you can pack up and take your WordPress content and data anywhere (either built-in export/import; or something like All in One Migration)
They’ve definitely put a lot of thought into the CLI.
For instance, you can stand up a new Ghost blog completely unattended and I figured out how to set a reasonably long admin password using curl rather than leave the admin setup page at domain.com/ghost exposed on the Internet where anyone can easily takeover the blog if they land on that page before you. The risk of it happening is quite low, but it’s still a risk I’m not comfortable with.
Also, the export-import flow using the CLI works pretty well but there are some manual steps involved which I’m working to automate when migrating between hosts.
I’m willing to bet they already have tools for doing what I plan to do with ghost.sh in-house.
Too bad Ghost’s focus is on driving people to sign up for their DFY (Done For You) paid service that is Ghost(Pro).
Meta observation: the initial comments on most articles are often low quality, and it seems to be especially true of Show HNs. It takes time to look at a submission in enough detail to comment on it constructively, which means that the thoughtful comments will invariably come in a few minutes after the shallow dismissals.
https://esyblog.com comes with built in WYSWYG editor. Content stays in esyblog.com's server. Please watch the landing page video. You would understand.
I have disabled Google Docs import feature for now because of low interest. If you want I can enable that again.
Shameless plug: I've been working on Hyvor Blogs (https://blogs.hyvor.com), a blogging platform with multi-language support, custom themes, in-built SEO, custom domain, AI translations, and options to self-serve the blog from your Laravel/Symfony/NextJS apps. It's been very interesting (and not so easy) so far to work on a very competitive market.
> you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem
No, you're right, it's not that extreme. I wrote the comparison before going back and actually finding the quote, and the quote was much worse (better?) than I remembered!
> Keep your readers engaged with our newsletter feature.
Can you elaborate on the newsletter feature? Can I e.g. prepare custom content and send any number of emails at any time? Or is this more like an automatic notification after a new post is published?
For now, A post is sent as all the subscriber to your blog. More custom feature like subscriber analytics, article only post, newsletter only post and article + newsletter post would be implemented this August.
If I were you I would stop on this idea immediately and come up with somewhere where the average user would expect to pay $50-$1000 per month for the service. I don’t think this is a good vertical to get into. Your competition are both better than you at the bottom of the market (free alternatives) and the top of the market and there is very little left for you. And even if you do get tens or hundreds of users, it will be just as unsustainable and you’ll also have the guilt when you decide to shut it down and kick all your users off.