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Comment by cagenut | Hacker News Reader

key missing info though: does it make money? I checked the site and it looks like a mix of ads (that are blocked of course) and a patreon with 5 supporters.

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I'm wenbin, the author of this blog post & I built Listen Notes. Thanks for bringing up this question :)

Yes, Listen Notes is making some money - not a lot, but enough to cover all the cost and bring in a bit profit as of today.

The basic idea is that Listen Notes should be free to 99% of users, while making some money from 1% of super users.

We run ads (obviously) on the website and we provide API: https://www.listennotes.com/api/pricing/ And I've been experimenting some paid features that are needed for PR/marketing/journalists to do their job, e.g., https://www.listennotes.com/datasets/

And today is special, because on Sep 16, 2017 (Exactly 2 years ago today), I started to work on Listen Notes full-time!

Cool! When you say "making some money," is that over-and-above paying yourself a salary?

Glad to know it now can support you as a full-time job.

Just curious, is your company still one-person?

What are the pros and cons of charging a fee to transcribe someone else's audio content? Does ListenNotes need a lawyer to deal with contracts or problems related to original content creators?

Looks like they're taking an approach to transcribe first and then deal with it later. The transcription link has an FAQ asking them to contact them if they think they dont want others to transcribe their episode.

When you started working on this full time was there enough profit to pay yourself anything? How did you come to make the decision to work full time on it?

He says that he uses Stripe to get money from his users, specifically noting the API as a source of income.

Here is the pricing page: https://www.listennotes.com/api/pricing/

And does it make enough money to cover the time when it wasn't making money? As in: was the time spent bootstrapping worthwhile? The concept of a one-person company is extremely appealing in its simplicity and apparent lack of risk; however, the devil is in the details.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and confidently say he's doing fine. As he mentioned, he rented an expensive one person WeWork office in SF (when he doesn't even have to).

Why would that indicate he is making money?

I think the assumption is that ListenNotes is his only source of income and that he isn't burning personal savings or the capital he has invested on non-mandatory expenses.

Granted those assumptions, you've got to get pretty far up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to hit "rent a WeWork"

Same question I had. Startup = Money generator, so it's important to ask.

Looks like it's an ad-driven revenue model, and it looks like it gets ~ 1m views/month: https://www.similarweb.com/website/listennotes.com

Assuming $1 per 1,000 impressions, we get $1,000 / month.

That's purely the website. I can't speculate on the API side of his business though.

Actually it's not the missing info... because it's none of your business. It's a technical post about his solo founder and operator DevOps practice.

I respectfully disagree. HN is very much about the -business- of tech. Telling us how you made your mousetrap is all well and good... Having us ask how many mice it has captured is absolutely relevant. Germane even.

I disagree. This isn't Tech Business News or Startup News, it's Hacker News.

Hacker News was originally called "Startup News". At launch it was exclusively about startups.

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

But the name changed to reflect the broader focus. It's not just that anymore.

The subject has switched to business and management long ago

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