Ask HN: What is the simplest product that you know of that makes money?

10 points·juanse··6 comments

Salt or manure. Each requires very little processing and packaging, and are close to their natural form when you buy them. Its possible that each have been in use for over a millennia.

Uptime monitors.

Close, I think.

Context: I looked into uptime monitors quite deeply about 10 years ago when I thought about doing a SaaS.

Implementing a good uptime monitoring system is actually more complex than you would think from a technical perspective (dealing with network splits which could be the result of your network or the target endpoint's network, so you need to triangulate continuously between multiple network sensors).

Actually, something like pagerduty is even simpler from a technical perspective; but as a business, is probably a different story.

Firewood.

Firewood is quite complicated. You have to use special machines to get it out of the forest, chainsaws to log it, a large amount of manual labor to make it into the small pieces that can actually fit into a furnace and you should wait 1-2 years between cutting and burning.

Firewood is simple here. The only special machine used is a beat up old truck, because you don't throw wood in your nice truck. Equipment to get it out of the forest? A 100' cable to drag it out (because longer isn't allowed). Chainsaw? For sure. Waiting for it to dry? Nature does that. You don't cut the green trees, you cut the dead ones.

I wish people around me didn't burn wood, but since they will do it anyways I'm always pointing people to areas near me where there are dead trees standing. I'd rather have them pull it out than wait for a forest fire to clean it up.

It is impressive how fast one guy and a saw can fill his truck and be gone.

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