- it's a completely unnotable example compared to more well-known companies in the comments
- No one else thought to include further promo material like OP's linked interview for the service they answered
- OP's post history contains several failed attempts to promote 5things.xyz with HN submissions (demonstrating a tendency to self-promote)
- After these failed attempts OP made their only meaningful-looking contribution to the HN community by posting 'Ask HN: What are your favorite tech sites besides HN?'
- However, the aforementioned 5things.xyz is a competitor in this space
- And of course, this last post had a commenter answering 5things.xyz in the thread, with the user being registered the same day only to make that one comment, and even being given a random fake-sounding username: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=syrup89
- However, this shill comment was mostly ignored by everyone, and this failure apparently prompted OP to include their promoted answer in the body of their Ask HN post instead this time
Edit: My comment got downvoted twice within one minute of posting (:
Whilst I appreciate the OPs diligence, I would actually tend to disagree. The user may have seen it mentioned on indie hacker, which would be a plausible place to encounter 'a simple script that looked for available domains'
- code prettifiers,
- converting from X to PDF,
- converting image formats,
- YouTube downloaders,
- TimeZone converters,
- Online calculators,
- SQL formatters
Not a good business to go into right now. There have been some recent suspicious crackdowns of those[1].
[1]: https://torrentfreak.com/keepvid-site-no-longer-allows-users...
Think the question isn't what's easy money - you can have really simple ideas or products that just do one thing, but they're not necessarily easy to do.
wkhtmltopdf is pretty easy to use... there's some other tools...
At least it was pretty simple when it started. I think "ping my server from several locations and alert me when stuff doesn't work" is simple and they charge $10+/mo for that.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/
The model I really dig right now is "unlimited subscription for creative work." Such as manypixels.co, for graphic design and illustrations. Or even the Podscriptor transcription service ($10 per episode in 24 hr).
And though you can probably edit such a service down to a minimal quantum creative task. There's no shortcut to getting web-scale distribution.
Best of luck ;)
e.g., somewhere there may be a website that converts RS274 commands to an obsolete CNC command protocol so they can use their decades old machinery with modern CAM software. It has real value to a small number of users and it's the kind of thing you can write in an afternoon, but outside a small community, you're not likely to know about it.
Yeah, I know that's a bad example, but it's the first thing that came to mind :-)
Here's a full list of what they charge for.
It reminds you when your certificates are due for renewal, or if they have been configured incorrectly.
Ie CRMs and ERPs were really just basic CRUD applications when they started.
Not to belittle them, as there are years (Millenia perhaps?) of programming time that has gone into them since they started so they are far more extensive than when they started.
You could say Instagram is simple - create a user, upload a picture which people can see if they choose to add you as a friend. Simple at first, but then the application evolves to filters and sophticated algorithms for finding best content
Ironically, their success over the last 10-15 years, has made starting a software businesses relatively simple. My bet is that in the next 10-15 years the value is increasingly going to come from harder to start businesses.
It's probably not the simplest one, and the ecosystem around it is quite extensive, but at its core, the principle is very simple.