Apps I pay for as a bootstrapped business
daily.patwalls.co
daily.patwalls.co
Here is the process for everyone. Insert your tool in #2
1) Create post about the tools you use 2) Include Webase [1] 3) Watch traffic roll in! :-)
Is his app really the best option in that product space?
I know most people around here will applaud the effort as clever, but I think it's the type of tactic that's ruining the internet. Nothing gets published without some marketing related alterior motive.
Does it have to be the best? Is the best for you? or for the consumer segment he targeted? Who's judging?
> I think it's unethical. It's very similar to all of the paid content garbage that's saturated Google over the last few years.
Do you prefer cold-call? Door-too-door salesman? One of your subscriber emails slip it in?
> Nothing gets published without some marketing related alterior motive.
Why is this ruining the internet? 99% of the content is about the SaaS he used to run his businesses and one of them happened to be "X" that he mentioned down the list. He disclose it and he's nothing more than dog-fooding his own stuff.
This is MILESSSS better than anything else out there.
By your litmus-test, YCombinator (and hackernews) have some marketing related ulterior motives as well.
He didn't say it was the best. He said he pays for it and uses it. Nothing wrong with dogfooding. I'd be worried if he wasn't using it. And he offers a full disclaimer.
Yes, people are always selling you something and that is annoying, but I would much rather an honest post with a small self-serving ad than the alternative which seems to be a top 10 list written by a freelancer for $5 and ranked by referral payouts. Well-researched articles written for no reason are few and far between.
Disclosure: I was (briefly) VP Mktg at Buffer. While there I pushed more for creating evergreen content than tool lists
https://medium.com/@reid.sherman/deploying-and-configuring-a...
Change costs for me might be high. I'd rather spend time on marketing / features that could get me 3 more customers/month to make up for it...
I learned Heroku at my coding boot camp and they have made thousands of $$ off of me since...
How many people running their own DO droplet even have a convenient way
One of the main perks of Heroku that makes it worth the cost imo is having a standard way to do everything whether you have one or 100 projects. You certainly don't have to go all the way in either, you can use Heroku just for your app servers and then host the rest of your infra on AWS like your DB (RDS).
Support does not migrate accounts on the shared IP pool to another IP, basically leaving me unable to send email for days.
Might be worth upgrading to their Pro plan ($90/mo). This gets you your own dedicated IP so this won't bite you in the future.
Ideal solution would be a provider that only allows trusted people on shared IPs. Generally a non-free provider will be best for that.
A quick note to their support and they switched the free plan to a new ip. Zero hassle.
Same problem here with SendGrid, very annoying. Answer of the SendGrid support:
> I have looped in our Compliance team to start the delisting process. I am unable to provide you with an exact ETA for when this will be complete
After days it's still not resolved, and emails still bounce for all recipients at Hotmail.
The only solution seems to be the $90/mo plan with dedicated IP... Pretty expensive for < 5,000 emails per month.
how do you handle VAT / GST globally ? Are your customers restricted to some locations ? Do you file VAT / GST return only for a few states ?
Yet even I thought the font was too big in this one. I _didn't_ have to shrink the text to be more readable but I had to scroll more than usual.
Upwork (~$1000/month): Freelancers.
I especially use Upwork because I don't have
to think about all the billing stuff and time tracking, etc.
I guess time tracking tool could enter this market
I think another benefit of using Upwork for this is the hours get logged on their Upwork profile which makes them more "active" and preferred in the Upwork algo?
As to "how will they catch us" it would seem to fairly obvious from the freelancers schedule
(also I've been told this clause is only for the 2 first years.. ?)
* No billing support, but they do have an API.
If you're spending >$10,000 on an individual freelancer it seems it might make more sense to hire someone?
(Getting started working with ~$500 webdev contracts on Upwork recently so very familiar with these numbers)
My wife has a consulting business, so forwarded your practical list of service to her.
https://github.com/gkiely/ydnw
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/you-don-t-need-wordpress
I would as well echo support for adding RSS capabilities here.
Thinking about ways to keep people updated, but I want to keep it minimal with no CTAs or email list. RSS is easy to add.
Open to suggestions.
I use SendGrid for when users sign up, reset password, etc.
Alternatively, this could mean that actual contractor bills add up to about $1000 per month total, including Upwork fees.
Do you also use an accounting tool like QuickBooks or Xero?
Can you clarify on your point, though? PH has been around since at least 2013. The .chat TLD didn't go live until 2015, and that specific domain was registered is late 2017. Do you mean a specific features like todo or something?
Both sites are ostensibly primarily motivated by self-promotion, usually under the guise of some sort of public productivity tools.
BetaList (startup discovery platform) was created before Product Hunt, and WIP (our community for makers) is an offshoot of that. Product Hunt eventually launched a similar service.
FWIW, I have to strongly disagree that WIP is primarily motivated for self-promotion. It's really more like a virtual co-working spaces where we all share what we're working on (hence the name), exchange feedback, keep each other accountable, etc.
BetaList and Product Hunt are indeed partly about self-promotion and partly about discovery.
Our focus has been on increasing the product for our existing members, but eventually we'll be improving the homepage/etc for people not yet familiar with the service.
If you think it's worth one more subscription to cut down the work bookkeeping for all the other subscriptions, then check out receiptrunner.com
Also, I wrote a little bit about my approach to freelancers, may give you some more context on that $1k/month: https://www.starterstory.com/hire-freelancers
- send me X top tweets from X user in last month
- send me all tweets with the words "XYZ"
And for the obvious reasons it keeps me off twitter and less subject to their addictive design/UI.
I need to zoom my browser down to 50% (a quarter of the pixel area) just to make it readable.
This trend of gargantuan body text in blogs has been going on for a while, but this is the worst I've ever seen.
When the size of each letter is something like six times the area of letters in my computer's menu bar, something is seriously wrong.
Is it unreasonable to expect body text on the web to be roughly the same size as the body text used in my computer's menus and dialogs? Obviously those should already be set to the ideal legible size, so what is with these blogs deciding to choose mega-sized letters instead??
Regardless, the point is that it's important for body text sizes to be roughly consistent across sites, so that you can find the zoom level that's right for you and stick with it, rather than have to adjust it for each new site.
There's nothing beautiful about individual blogs choosing text sizes wildly outside of the mainstream, so that I have to adjust my zoom on them individually. That's just an annoyance.
I have the mentality of self hosting and diy, cheap, better understanding, and imo more reliable.
Most these services have a learning curve anyway. Are the services really worth it?
Yes.
> self hosting and diy, cheap, better understanding, and imo more reliable.
What is the cost to get something that has a better uptime than the SLA's of the services you are replacing?
Focus on getting to paying customers. After that, you'll see where your time is better off spent.
Example: I just signed up for a trial for Stripe Sigma. I was going to build my own basic BI using their API. Instead it costs my business ~$10/mo at our size. Now I can spend what would have been time to build, test, deploy that service, to instead just answer the business questions I had.
I have a buddy who’s an amazing engineer, he takes pride in doing everything himself and spent years building a platform from the ground up. Elegant, fully automated, built in his favorite languages and frameworks. 3 years in it makes 50k a year.
I have another buddy who is non-technical, 2 years ago he built an ugly, janky platform off Wordpress and some plugins in a month. He does nothing himself, outsources everything. His business does $4mil a year.
I find it really helps to put a dollar value on an hour of my time. In that context, if 1 hour of my time is worth $75 and I've spent 4 hours setting up this mail server, I've spent $300 on my labor in addition to the $60/year for the cost of the server. Obviously this doesn't work in all cases but it really helps me determine when it's worth it for me to spend my time doing something and when it's better to outsource it.
There is no telling if it will actually save time. You could be messing with configurations, have to learn their docs, etc... Or future migration could be expensive in both time and money.
The cost savings can/do exist. Especially as things scale or last a long time.
Custom is more configurable.
People overestimate their time worth? Sure you can theoretically work for 75$/hr, but can you get overtime/additional revenue that easily?
What is your value add? If it's software, I might suggest custom is best because that's your business. If you mash a bunch of software suppliers together, you become a middle man. I'm not saying that doesn't work, but I've seen companies go back and forth on this.
This refers to self-hosted / diy tools: you have to do them all up-front. Most SaaS don't require configs or deep-learning compare to FOSS. Self-Hosted/DIY tools also require future migration. Especially when the self-hosted/DIY tools did not capture future requirements due to limited vision.
> Custom is more configurable
Technically SaaS provides API which allows folks to stitch up a few SaaS-es to automate their workflow if needs be.
There's a 95% chance your business won't last long enough to reach any scaling or migration issues. Tackle those problems when they start surfacing.
Sure. Every situation is different. This isn't meant to be universal. There absolutely are cases where rolling your own may be more efficient. However, my argument wasn't that existing solutions are no effort, just that they are often less effort than trying to do something completely custom or self managed.
Regarding future migrations, the same can be said in the opposite direction as well. You may get to a point where you need to migrate away from your custom solution to something more standard and you'll face similar time/money issues.
> Custom is more configurable.
Sometimes this is the case and sometimes it's not. Sometimes custom is very narrowly focused and as new use cases emerge requires significant rework.
> People overestimate their time worth? Sure you can theoretically work for 75$/hr, but can you get overtime/additional revenue that easily?
The number will vary for everyone. $75 may be too high for some and too low for others. If you're an attorney sacrificing billable time to do something administrative that could be outsourced, $75 may be low. The idea is to tie an actual realistic number to the value of your time.
> What is your value add? If it's software, I might suggest custom is best because that's your business. If you mash a bunch of software suppliers together, you become a middle man. I'm not saying that doesn't work, but I've seen companies go back and forth on this.
In software, I think it's important to know what your product is and to focus on your core competencies. I've seen lots of engineers decide that they need to build something from scratch that doesn't directly relate to their product. Could you build your own credit card processing system? Sure, but unless your business is credit card processing, it probably makes more sense to use something like Stripe. The same goes for lots of different aspects of your product and business.
I'm simply suggesting that you have a limited amount of time in each day and you should do what you can to get the most value out of that time. Don't ignore the value of your time and sacrifice it needlessly.
But I do understand the point you're trying to make. Obsessing over doing it yourself and perpetuating the NIH syndrome does more harm than good. There is a lot more chance that one's business will go out by their doing compared to going out because one of the services they depended on went out.
The tradeoff of buying is that yes, you are at the will of the service provider, but the alternative is taking on all the technical debt of building your own services. For most, $N/month is cheaper than putting the maintenance hours in, even if it means needing to find another service provider if one is changing.