hacker news

Earlier today, I saw a post on Hacker News titled "I sold my side-project for $30k".

Besides the point that the sale price was $10k plus up to $20k dependent on the growth of the sold entity, some in the comments worried that the sale would result in users becoming unhappy with the way the service was managed by its new owners.

That's a valid concern, as most acquisitions change the direction of a product, sometimes making radical departures that bewilder the original set of users—users who are often the most invested in what used to be a smaller project.

I've been running Server Check.in for just under eight years. It has a little over 100 paid users, and 30 of those users signed up in the first year.

I don't spend much time on maintenance, and the service has a 30% margin due to very low hosting costs, but I mainly built it to be a radically different tool than all the Pingdoms and New Relics of the world.

Reading a Hacker News post linked to a YouTube video yesterday, I spotted this comment by user tomerico:

I think [Shane Wighton's Stuff Made Here YouTube channel] illustrates well the transition from personal blogs to youtube videos.

If you go to his projects blog, https://shane.engineer/ you could see very detailed blog posts in the past that go deeply into the engineering, including code snippets. However, he only really go traction when starting to publish youtube videos, specifically youtube video with a clickbait subject (such as a self aiming basketball hoop).

What YouTube provides is a highly competitive environment that provides creators with constant feedback. This allowed him to identify and his niche as he uploaded more videos. With YouTube, the exposure these projects receive is orders of magnitude higher, while empowering its creators to be self sustainable with ads (and sponsors, patreon, and merch) revenue.