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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

I run Improvely (https://www.improvely.com) and W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com) alone. I initially developed Improvely in 2012, and W3Counter in 2004. They, along with some other side projects, are how I have made a living for most of the past 10 years.

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Glad to see you're still around. I remember when you used to post on SitePoint often. I always looked up to your work. Just felt like saying that.

Hey, thanks. I remember the old SitePoint forums fondly, and other people there inspired and helped me get W3Counter off the ground. I occasionally check up on people I knew from there as well... Zach Holman (lo0ol) sold Good-Tutorials and became one of the first engineers at GitHub, Josh Pigford (shpigford) went on to make Baremetrics, Roger Stringer (freekrai) made Flybase, Josh Catone (bleys) became a writer then executive for RWW/Mashable... SPF was our HN before HN.

I miss the old SP days, I wasn't very active as a user, but I did a lot of business there buying services. The redo messed that all up and since I haven't had as good of luck finding talent. :/

Ah, man...I LOVED the old SP forums. I spent an absurd amount of time there back in the day. Seriously nostalgic.

I like your landing pages.

How do you monetize W3Counter? I'd imagine you compete directly with Google Analytics, which is free.

It's freemium. People pay between $5 and $50 per month for extra features. It's really not hard to compete with Google Analytics (especially when you start before GA existed). There are a ton of large companies making millions and billions in the analytics space.

How do you handle taxes? Did you incorporate?

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