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Comment by pistoriusp | Hacker News Reader

I wrote something similar to this a few years ago:

There's nothing wrong with a bit of competition and it makes me wonder if this space needs something... Why do these keep appearing?

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I think because it's a relatively easy idea to come up with, and the implementation details aren't earth-shattering. A year ago I was fixed on making a similar business called MeteorBill and worked part-time on it for a couple months before scrapping it .. I'm happy I did now, as my market research was clearly incomplete, and my UI was startlingly similar to yours and OP's. No great loss, I learned Erlang/OTP and Mnesia via that project.

I am interested in understanding why you decided not to continue with your business ? It looks like OP's company is doing pretty well. Customers would not be an issue for you. If you look at the number of employees OP has it is a possible market to persue. Competition exists everywhere.

I also wasn't so enamored anymore with the idea of spending lots of time on software to help people bill each other. Silly of course, as it's a real need, but I realized it just wasn't where my head was. Could I have made the business work? Maybe, but it would've felt like nothing but work.

I started my freelancing career with billable.me. Moved on to complexer tools by now, but I definitely made a few thousand euro with the help of your free tool.

Thanks!

What tools did you start using after billlableme?

I'm using InvoiceFox (https://www.invoicefox.com/) these days. It's really cool because it can remember all the different clients I have so I can just click "Invoice Company X for Y" and it also does some analytics of earnings and payments discipline.

That's really great to hear! :)

Ditto, but I never made it public.

I think things like this are nice because they are fun to design and build, but they also provide real value.

There's a big political push in the UK for "electronic invoicing". This makes sense in that context.

What technology did you use to build it? Or generate the PDF that fast?

It's built on node.js, there's a great command line tool called wkhtmltopdf:

https://github.com/antialize/wkhtmltopdf

I have an invoicing pipeline in the form of a Python command-line "wizard", which is effectively in interactive form, which then fills a restructured text document, which gets turned into HTML before becoming a PDF via wkhtml2pdf. However, wkhtml2pdf is kind of CPU hungry and not that fast. How did you make that scale?

Much better design, but you're right with "[..] it makes me wonder if this space needs something..."

There is no benefit in this, except that it's in the browser, but that's all.

Because it's a good source of lead generation.

Because it's so easy?

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