[hiAndrewQuinn]

I often wonder about the long tail of small startups that must exist with minimal operating costs, down to a single VM, Django backend and SQLite database, that are still operating but not recieving updates because their owner is focused on something else, but which still make a hefty profit because of the domain knowledge baked in or something. It seems to me like the sustainable winning combination is domain expertise + moderate programming skills.

[moomin]

The closest thing I can think of is patio11’s Bingo Card Creator. But he moved on to… venture funded payments processing.

I think, though, the people who can and do bootstrap small businesses like that don’t necessarily hang out here. The site is literally VC-owned, after all.

[zer00eyz]

These are called lifestyle businesses.

There are tons of them out there.

You can do a lot with a small VPS and a fixed amount of bandwidth.

Find something that 100 people will use for 5 bucks a month. IF your bills are paid and you have a day job, that's some nice pocket money.

[DeathArrow]

Can you give us examples of such startups?

Also, the founders of Elo were creatives, not programmers. So they couldn't throw a microSaaS on a VM, forget it and go write the next microSaaS, rinse and repeat.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

No, that's why I asked. Where are they? What are they doing?