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Comment by msbroadf | Hacker News Reader

I have run my one-man business for 13 years now. https://www.virtualhere.com . Back then I saw the market moving to the cloud and thought bringing device access there was needed. There was no one really doing this cheaply and easily. I posted a link to my software on the raspberrypi forum when that board came out and started getting my customers immediately that way. It took a year to write the initial software. Ive been adding updates and features ever since. I have made several million dollars in profit since then and its still going strong. I dont really have any competition at my price point .

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I've been using VirtualHere since 2015, with multiple paid licenses.

It's a great tool with infinite use cases. I'm glad that it's a successful business for you!

This looks fantastic. I sometimes do audio mixing and I dread the day that I leave home for a session and forget to throw my iLok in my bag. I see someone’s already proven it works with that. Exciting!

That’s awesome! Congrats.

Are there any feature requests / product directions that have been requested, that you’ve rejected / neglected? For better or worse.

Solo building is often about hard decisions on what NOT to do. And with a generic piece of software like this, I imagine there are plenty of niche operators asking for “just one thing to make it perfect for xxxxx”

Yes generally i reject any request if its customization just for one customer. I try to generalize the change by e.g adding an API call. Also i get requests to keep xp/win7 support which i reject often.

The biggest thing I learned is to basically do nothing on the product, unless its needed. I used to be tempted to change things/add features for fun and for a challenge but its a mistake. The reason is it might introduce bugs. Too many customers and big companies rely on virtualhere now day-to-day and the software is complex enough that its hard to tell if the bug was always there or just from the new addition. Im very relucatnt to even upgrade the compiler unless i have to for a new OS etc.

> Also i get requests to keep xp/win7 support which i reject often

XP sure but win7?

Microsoft ended extended support for Win7 in 2020 and security updates in Jan this year. Seems reasonable to stop supporting it for third party, networked software.

What skills are needed to make this kind of low level application? Nitty gritty driver and kernel knowledge? C, C#?

Yes kernel knowledge and a lot of plain C. Surprisingly didnt have to read too much of the USB spec for the first few years.

Oh, the VirtualHere website does a really good job of hiding the fact that it's paid - I did all the research and was really excited about a convenient solution until I found out that it's $50. Whoops.

Though I guess I should've expected that on a comment thread about businesses, heh~

But... there's literally a "Purchase" link in the top menu bar. Should it have a big blinking box saying "IT AIN'T FREE"?

> there's literally a "Purchase" link in the top menu bar

Yeah, that's... how I found out? It actually took me around a minute to find that once I started looking for some sort of download. Maybe I just scan websites differently than you do, but it was somehow difficult.

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