I used LAMP to make a SaaS app with $3700/month profit | Hacker News Reader

I used LAMP to make a SaaS app with $3700/month profit

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152 pointsmskvsk75 comments

"Anyway, I always hated manual labor and decided to make a little tool to help me scrape the posts of my competitors and publish them to my group on a regular basis.”

Other things you must hate: morality and ethics.

> "Other things you must hate: morality and ethics."

I'm less impressed with your own ethics than those of the OP.

The OP made a tool that served a market niche in a country that isn't so wealthy and then shared the story here to help other makers. You've taken exception with one small piece of the story and expanded it to claim the poster "must hate morality and ethics".

While it's a bit of a rabbit hole to get into ethics of the copyright and IP regime of the US and allies, it's worth keeping in mind that even multiple US legal scholars have expressed concerns—from Jefferson (who wrote at length about IP before drafting US law) to Lessig now. It's certainly not so clear cut as to justify vilifying those who disagree.

This goes doubly so, considering the poster did this in a country that has only fairly recently caved to international pressure to "harmonize" its copyright enforcement. The OP's project was built on VK, where downloads of copyrighted videos and songs were offered by the platform itself until very recently.

The tool OP made is neither technically challenging or interesting. The story is about what the tool was for, which is certainly not one small piece.

These types of stories are great and motivational, but not when it promotes people who are looking for inspiration to turn to stealing content and selling access to it.

Just because this kind of stuff is common in other countries or cultures doesn't change my opinion about it being wrong.

By stealing do you mean copying? What is the actual harm caused by social media marketing norms on VK?

Do you feel like Indians making generic copies of western cancer drugs is also wrong?

Most importantly, what kind of paragon of morality are you to pass such strident judgment on such a pedestrian issue?

Are you some super eco-conscious, vegetarian, volunteer worker who fights to stop the various unsavory things you have going on in your own country... or are your unyielding ethical judgments primarily reserved when for those living in much poorer countries and different cultures copy and share each other's social media ads?

I just don't understand why this is an issue worthwhile to try to shame strangers on the internet over.

Could you maybe explain how you compare copying a cancer drug to automatically putting your own watermark on other people's funny images?

Okay, kazga.

Both violate international IP treaties and both are absolutely normal behavior to many millions of people. Not amoral psychopaths for the most part, just normal people.

False. In Europe, you can IP the industrial process of making the drug, not the drug itself.

Well, your opinion won't change this kind of stuff in other countries either. Your actions will, though.

Exactly, which is why I think it's important to point out when something is wrong rather than try to promote it as an example for others to follow.

Sure, feel free to continue. Just don't come here looking for praise.

edit: *praise from everyone. It seems some people are impressed. Congrats.

And I'd like to address the "not technically challenging" part of your comment.

Do you have even slightest idea what it takes to juggle the APIs of 4 buggy social networks without passing it through to your customers?

I'm not saying I'm a high-league developer, but your remark seemed like an ignorant understatement to me.

Dude, look around. There's no shortage of people pointing to something.

It's not about shaming. It's not about praise.

It's about actually doing something, even if it seems dirty. Because one day it'll help you to actually change the whole system. There are a lot of examples of this phenomenon.

> I’d also removed the posts that were obviously copyrighted.

I'm not a lawyer, but in American copyright law, anything published is assumed copyrighted by someone, though it may not be clear exactly who.

I'm especially not an international copyright lawyer, so I can't say how typical that is. Point being, you'll get in legal trouble for doing this. You might win a lawsuit if what you are scraping is not copyrightable (raw facts).

Anyway, OP might not be in the US, so maybe all this doesn't apply, but it's generally good manners to ask someone before you copy their work, yes.

Because of the Berne Convention[1], that's how it works in the vast majority of the world.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

Same is true in Australia. Copyrights are not registered. You just automatically own the copyright to anything you write unless there's a specific reason not to.

You don't have to go register it, you don't have to put a copyright notice. You own the copyright as soon as you create it.

> it's generally good manners to ask someone before you copy their work, yes

This is what I do most of the time, if it's possible, given the environment the service operates in.

I encourage people to learn about it first, and only after that to jump into conclusions.

Google is in the US. The rest of this post is left as an exercise for the reader.

I believe that in the US you don't have to register the copyright, but if you don't, then you can only recover statutory infringement damages in a lawsuit.

I don't see why you have to attack the article's author. If you disagree with what he does, it might actually be interesting to read why. Instead you attack him from a moral high ground you don't even hold, assuming he is doing something immoral or unethical when he simply disagrees with your values.

Someone who disagrees with your values isn't necessarily immoral or unethical just because they disagree with you.

I don't think this is the case. You're imposing Western values on a Russian offering services in Russia, on a Russian platform.

If you haven't used VK before, I strongly suggest you do so. Have a look at the Music and Video sections for a bit of an idea of Russian appreciation for copyright.

And I don't really blame them for this. Do you remember the time when copying tapes/DVDs was very new and pretty much everyone was doing it? Do you remember those bootleg DVDs from Asia? Few people cared, there was little to no publicity about how it was bad and "stealing" for a good few years. Then came the ads on DVDs and in cinemas about how it was stealing, articles in the news about how it was hurting industry and such. In the west we were taught that copyright was good and the impact it had on the content creators. In Russia they were not.

They just don't think about it the same way we do and you can't make assumptions about their character for that any more than they can make assumptions about Americans for the things that are different in American culture.

Good point.

I prefer to do at least something addressing the issue in the ecosystem that does absolutely nothing, though.

And I'm open about it.

Russia in general has very lax attitudes towards copyright and did not even join the Berne Convention until 1995.

Some people talk, some people do.

This simple story (I know the whole story is not simple especially ones can make profit) gives me some hope. I am building a service by using elixir/phoenix (yeah it seems an opposite direction to the OP's) and is very frustrated from making decision in every module or line of code because my obsession of good practice!

Thank you for sharing. I will be relaxing, writing shit and getting the service done.

The responces like yours give me immense satisfaction. That's the reason I wrote it.

Thanks a lot.

Please don't listen to the naysayers here. You saw an opportunity and acted on it. The problem of copyright here is of Facebook itself, they deliberately allow this to happen to increase their engagement numbers. It is well-documented at many places.

The OP was on VK, a Russian platform where full downloads of copyrighted movies and songs were available until very recently (much as was the case in China with Baidu and Youku/Tudou). Actually I think Baidu still offers copyrighted MP3s and PDFs and charges for it.

It's true that FB (and previously YouTube) played fast and loose with US copyright laws, but it doesn't even come close to what is standard in Russia or China.

I don't think it's any fairer to pile on and attack a person playing within the rules of their local culture that it would be to attack westerners for how most of their meat is produced or how many cars they own. So many things in the world beg for moral outrage—I'd rather save mine for actual suffering rather than Russian social media marketing getting scraped.

VK still offers almost any MP3 you can imagine, slightly less than than Movies and PDFs, and much more than that adult video content. At same time 90% of Russia using VK. You don't need to imagine that, it is reality.

> The top cause of death for indie startups is failure to delegate the tasks you're not good at and being overtaken by more social players.

Lesson learned.

It's too bad that it took me 2 years to learn that one. Oh well, better late than never.

Kudos to your success. Refreshing to see a SAAS that generates enough revenue for you to live off of instead of an overvalued SV company with no profit.

Thanks! And I think you're absolutely right, people got a bit tired of all this unicorn nonsense.

It is refreshing and helps keep other SaaS developers from despair.

I don't know Russian. I'm going by Google Translate, which points me to some inconsistency in the choice of words used for menu div: at the top, they're Register, Log in and at the bottom I see SIGN UP, SIGN IN buttons. Register and SIGN UP are doing the same thing and likewise Log in and SIGN IN. I would rather be consistent with them :)

The difference between them is that it's nouns at the top and verbs in the bottom. But yeah, I think you're right :)

Lost in translation.

What is a "more social player" in this context? Somebody who does lots of networking and is good at hiring or is it related to social media like VK, FB, etc?

Yes, it's about networking and the ability to delegate.

I've been struggle with it for years. Felt like if I entrusted some part of work to someone else, they wouldn't give it 100% of their attention. Then I realized that it's true most of the time, but the trick is it they don't have to in order to finish the task.

OP don't listen to the jelly haters. If you were making $100k/mo each of these hypocrites would get knocked off their high horses and copy you. Well done, congratulations!

Thank you so much!

Totally lost here.

What service is this SaaS actually selling? What are people paying money for?

Nevermind it doesn't matter anymore. Just pick the side you'd like to fight on.

Jk, the service helps people to post relevant content to their groups in the Russian market and charges them on a per post basis. Some of its content is of unknown origin and haven't been attributed to that unknown someone properly. People think that it's plagiarism and rightly so. That's why we have all this mess here.

I'm equally lost. I can't tell what exactly the service is offering for sale or the point of it. Usually when I see these low sales service posts (small side projects), I expect to see something clever or unique, that's the only reason to pay attention to something yielding a small amount of sales. If you're going to tell me all you did was scrape and clone with a routine LAMP setup, I don't get the point of the post.

AFAIK, the point is that you can make money just by scraping and cloning using a routine LAMP setup.

I found that interesting just by virtue of the idea that people would pay just to get more useless "content" for their groups.

I suppose it's just automating a curated list.

Memes, seems like

So you steal content and publish it as your own. You might as well torrent movies, music and books, and sell them on your website. Way more profitable.

It is profitable. Go ahead and do it, not all countries have same laws about copyright.

All the big companies break laws and are unethical.. Youtube and copyright, Uber and 'disruption' . Some small guy does shady things it's unethical and worth pointing it out so many times in this thread?

Thanks for the suggestion. It's so on point.

The title consists of two parts:

1. irrelevant information

2. bragging

No way I'm going to read this ...

But how are you supposed to know the full story and hate me afterwards then?

Interesting project and a good lesson in why careful data tracking is so valuable. Thanks for sharing and congrats on the traction!

Much more than LAMP was used. I know LAMP and cannot use it to make $3700/mo.

Haha, good point. But I'm sure you will, it's just a matter of time and the number of attempts.

OP, thank you for the story you have shared with us. It inspires me and other idie devs for creating small to medium size SaaS.

How did you handle user signup / authentication to your service? Did it piggy-back on VK's authentication?

Plagiarizing and stealing content is immoral and unethical. "This is just how we do things in Russia" is not an excuse. We shouldn't be promoting this behavior. Anyone with half a brain can make money stealing stuff and serving it via an API.

The other day I was following this thread:

Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware [video] (2016) (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605599

I'm reproducing a part of a comment from there:

> One could say the evolutionary process is based on this principle.

> Copy. Paste. Improve. Repeat.

What have I just done? In no way am I supporting or suggesting that plagiarism or content theft is a model to follow, but I do believe that people learn from what others do and build on that.

Very true.

Running this SaaS lead me to the idea of launching a service where authors can sell their content for social networks. It's going to be super hard doing this in Russia but it's worth the try.

But some people simply can't understand the incremental evolution. They demand turning a desert into a garden at once.

This is very strong words and you're right. I welcome you to come over and fix this country. And the rest of the developing world, while you at it.

The issue here is not with your country but with your personal behavior. People in this thread are criticising you for actively contributing to the problem (building a tool for stealing stuff), and you're brushing it off, blaming it on your "market".

Instead of warping your mind with a set of rationalizations that excuse your behavior, maybe try to accept the responsibility.

First, I accept the responsibility to some degree, and I'm open about it. Second, it's not "a tool for stealing stuff".

I just somewhat dislike people shouting moral slogans, that's all. Especially people that have little understanding of the ecosystem in general. Sorry.

What's wrong with moral slogans? I don't know where the GP got "This is just how we do things in Russia" from, but you don't represent Russia, do you? When you make a Show HN here, it's open for discussion on what's good and what's not about your thing, based on which you may want to improve the thing. By the way, most of us feel concern for other posters.

Moral slogans are good per se, indeed. But I have zero patience for black and white conclusions without understanding the context, irrespective of the topic. Especially when the topic is about making a SaaS, not the moral grounds.

You saw a niche and exploited it. That's a good thing.

Morality/ethics/blah blah is always based on local customs. As people were fine with doing this anyway, then there is no need to import/impose "American" morality.

Don't let any of these high-horse/armchair quarterbacks tell you any different.

Thanks for taking the time to write an article. Hope this doesn't introduce a bunch of competitors into your market!

Thank you, I wish more people had your mindset.

TL;DR "I scrape content from others and sell them without any credit to or rewards for the original creators" AFAICS.

Guys, 99.9% of posts in VK.com - it's not a real content. It's more like repost of repost of repost of repost... They are just something like photo of cute cat with funny description below. And this is actually not copyrighted content. So all groups just copy content from each another. Infinite carousel of content.

This service is 100% clean from side of morality

Lol, "Infinite carousel of content."

It took millions of years of evolution to get to this point... An infinite carousel of cute cats with captions.

I love it!

Kindly read the article.

I did:

"[I] decided to make a little tool to help me scrape the posts of my competitors and publish them to my group on a regular basis."

And

"I had created a spicy mix of public domain content, some supposedly copyrighted content from unknown authors, [...]"

I found this particularly striking:

"Usually it was the content of some authors that were difficult to track and attribute to. Sometimes it was blatant plagiarism."

So you were/are well aware of the problem. But instead of Doing The Right Thing (find out source, ask for permission) you just declare that to be difficult (and yes. It is. Full ACK).

Yes, you're right. But my point was that it's not difficult to address this issue. It's impossible in the Russian market.

That's why I asked you to reread the article (sorry, I should be more precise on the reason).

Okay, I went and read it, and GP appears to be right. The basis for the whole thing is "a little tool to help me scrape the posts of my competitors and publish them to my group on a regular basis" upgraded and offered to others in a SAAS model. Don't get me wrong, the engineering is decent, the marketing is brilliant (if questionable - if you mention that you're exploiting a loophole to message clients, maybe you are actually spamming), and the whole thing is well executed. None of that gets around the fact that this is all built around a tool that literally exists to automate plagiarism.

You are absolutely right, the entire ecosystem facilitates plagiarism. And I don't mean Postio only, Vk.com and all other Russian social platforms do very little to protect copyrighted content. In fact, they do nothing.

However, even in this ecosystem, I tried to do my best to deal with that issue by paying at least some attention to crediting the authors back by means of watermarks and negotiating the conditions upon which their content is taken.

This is the reason I asked to reread the article. Remember, it's the Russian market, and some things that will apply in the global market, simply don't apply there. Whether it's good or bad is besides the point of this article.

Thanks for the raising the question, it's absolutely legit.

edit: similar thread exists

> Copyright is also a legitimate concern

Spoken like someone with no understanding of the local market. ;)

Just as an example, until not that long ago VK was used to post music and films without any restrictions. I think this has now been stopped (not a VK user but there was a court case a few years ago about it and the government has since tightened copyright enforcement) but should give you an idea about how little concern people attach to copyright.

You should also keep in mind that copyright didn't exist in the Soviet Union as such, so the idea is quite alien to people and they are still getting used to it.

Exactly. Thanks for the clarification. I should have addressed this issue in the article, though.

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