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Comment by wenbin | Hacker News Reader

(author of this blog post here)

The hardest part of building this business is to keep motivated for a relatively long period of time. I'm still early in this startup journey. This is only the 2nd year of me working full-time on Listen Notes.

I think it would be helpful to surround yourself with like-minded people (online or offline) -- we are social animals. Indie Hackers is pretty good: https://www.indiehackers.com/

I live in San Francisco and I used to work for companies, so at least I can often hang out with some friends/former coworkers who are doing startups or working in tiny startups.

In my coworker space, people from different companies rarely talk to each other...

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Why did you choose to have ec2s with postgres rather than using RDS? I've found it saves me a ton of time dealing with upgrades worrying about backups etc to have RDS handle it.

Not OP, but I set up a SaaS platform, and I also ran on straight Postgres (RDS wasn't an option, we weren't on AWS). In my experience, after setting up WAL-E to continuously backup to S3 and giving it plenty of extra disk space (for stalled WAL segments), it worked pretty well with no intervention. Restores occasionally took a bit, but they never failed (we managed a couple dozen databases over five years).

I love RDS, but having maintained complicated Postgres setups before (at my previous employer we had a few dozen Postgres servers for different big clients, all set up with replication to different geographical locations etc. as well as automated log shipping and backups going to a "homegrown" blob store), it's not that much effort.

What you gain is the flexibility to control e.g. which extensions you want to run, and exactly how you want to set it up. How important that is really depends on what you want to do.

If you know what you're doing (important qualifier), I'd imagine cost is a huge factor too. RDS is pretty often a significant % of your AWS bill - how valuable this is, entirely depends on how confident you are doing it yourself.

Hey, thanks for building LN. I was actually admiring the site design just yesterday while I scrolled through some episodes. "Dang, I hope I can build something like this one day."

You managed to pull me away from my previous preference, player.fm. Good job!

Interesting to hear that your WeWork building isn't an especially social space. I know you talk about why you picked a dedicated office in a coworking space over coffee shops etc., but why did you pick WeWork in particular?

because it's 2-minute walk distance from my apartment :) don't like spending too much time in commute

That coit tower view is pretty killer as well.

At the 4 year in make building a professional services firm in Shanghai, old school work, but looking constantly for online B2C and B2B opportunities, I love IH for the community aspect. Although I find one has to be careful with balancing the amount of work allocated to seeing what others are doing and the hard but inevitably more important grinding out of one's own business aspirations. Great conversation!

Was it hard to come up with the idea and believe in it enough to pursuit it to where you are today? I think self doubt must be a challenge, especially when you are alone and still far from a proven concept and nothing so show to customers. Was this idea the only one you evaluated before you chose it or did you also have other ideas, of which this one you liked best?

Hey wenbin (and any others pursuing indie-hacking), I run a virtual meetup about once a month you might find fulfilling for meeting like minded people.

We just made a Twitter recently, but it has all the links: https://twitter.com/ih_worldwide

do you need to live in SF?

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