[dheera]

I don't know StoryGraph's story, but it's a lot easier if:

- You don't take VC money

- You are okay with it not becoming a billion dollar unicorn

- You are okay with occasional downtime (this isn't being deployed in a hospital emergency room after all)

- You don't plan to feature bloat it

- You are okay with it living its life and eventually being out-competed

I had a webapp once with 250K monthly active users for several years (Fooplot). I was the sole developer. It eventually got increasingly out-competed by VC-funded Desmos and eventually got involuntarily shutdown when AWS decided to stop supporting EC2 classic instances. But I just let it be. Its ad revenue made me a good amount of side income when I was a PhD student. It had frequent downtime when people would try to export an overly complicated graph, which would crash the server. I just restarted it when I noticed. Sometimes it would be a few days later. It died eventually when AWS terminated it. I moved onto other things.

Yeah, I wasn't the best maintainer, but the ~$30K I made from its ad revenue over the years was a pretty good payout for about 10 hours of work.