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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Hey there. /raises hand.

https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com

Five figures a month, just me, I've written about my solo business a couple times in other Ask HN threads. Ten years ago (almost to the day), in my college dorm, I was looking at the Webalizer web stats report my web host provided for my blog, and thought "I could do something much cooler than this". So I did. I had built a few educational sites and threw some ads on them for a couple years before that, but W3Counter was the first service I actually charged a subscription for, and now I make a living building and selling this stuff.

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Ghostery blocks w3counter so it blocked pretty much everything on the actual site, maybe use a static domain that isn't blocked by ghostery. :O

You're running Ghostery for the purpose of blocking W3Counter and every other site like it. You can't really do that then lament the fact that it worked. I'm not going to invest time and effort into evading you; if you want to see web stats sites, you can just turn off the extension. Somehow I don't think there are any Ghostery users looking to sign up.

I meant you should use a different domain for static content on your marketing page, and I'm not lamenting anything. Just giving you some advice. Ghostery has been installed over 1 million times just in Chrome. Any one has ghostery installed and is going to your site will see a completely broken webpage.

Why was leobelle being downvoted? I can understand disagreeing with what they were saying. It's an opinion after all. But, what they were saying wasn't that far off base..

Maybe if Ghostery was developed in a half way decent manner it wouldn't have a bad history of breaking sites and would block tracking more intelligently rather than blanket blocks of domains.

Probably because the adverts that are blocked pay for the site. Kind of like asking musicians for zippy share links to their music.

Ghostery isn't an ad blocker, it's an analytics blocker. It's for people that don't want to be tracked on the web.

If you don't mind me asking, what is your background? Do you have any advice for someone who aspires to follow in your footsteps?

I was just a kid whose family bought a computer at the right time. I got hooked, taught myself programming from online tutorials, and never stopped creating things. The stuff I made got more complex and more polished each time, until it got to the point that I can create stuff other people are willing to pay to use. There's really no prerequisite other than a computer and an interest in programming.

Awesome. Thanks for the response! It's always nice to get some motivation to crack open a few books on a Saturday night.

Do you have lots of users for W3Counter? How much users do you need for offering free content and making a profit from advertising? I'm interested.

There are about 70,000 users.

Hey Dan, Improvely looks like an awesome product. Incredible work for a one-person shop. Our company was talking about a click fraud monitoring system last week. I'm going to pitch this to the rest of our agency tomorrow.

Awesome Dan, thanks for sharing. Very inspiring to see a one man show producing such fine products. Is there anything you outsource? You should write a book on the details of how you did it, I'd buy it in a heartbeat!

Do you have a way to track call metrics? We'd like to be able to track conversions from a Google Voice number.

Nope. Call tracking is difficult and expensive, both in terms of money and complexity; I'd have to 10x my prices before even touching it. You also wouldn't be using a Google Voice number -- call tracking services work by renting huge numbers of phone numbers, and assigning a unique number to each visitor to your site for some time. Each person sees a different number, and their calls get routed to whatever your real number is after being logged for analytics. Improvely only tracks stuff that happens on your website.

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