Web analytics is boring. Cron job monitoring is boring. Running a backup service is boring. These businesses (the cron one is mine) are all doing great, making millions. But in this space the vast majority of devs are chasing fun and cool projects in web3 and AI that are more tied to cool ideas than actual business problems.
Businesses are, mostly, boring things. They have boring problems. If you’re doing something too interesting there’s a good chance you’re just playing around
Congratulations. It means your ideas are good and there is a proven market for them (assuming the solutions you find are generating revenue).
The fallacy that “there already is a product” out there doing something and as such you shouldnt would imply that we’d all wear identically looking jeans and there would be one car design and one type of phone.
Differentiate a bit. The only questions to answer are: can you execute on your idea, is there a market large enough to achieve your target revenue and is it overcrowded?
Take one of those ideas. Make a site that reviews all the current competitors in the market.
Put the one with the best existing seo strategy in first place.
Contact them and let them know and ask that they link to it, offer to write a guest blog post about how you reviewed every tool in the space and this one came out on top, and why.
Share the site all over where you can find people talking about the niche.
if the niche is not too big, this will often get you ranking for that term. Google loves “best ___ in 2023” content.
You are building a traffic source.
Then you can build a product and put your product in 1st place or even above the list entirely. Write a blog post about how you took the best of the other tool you reviewed and created the perfect tool for <certain persona>.
Ok, end riff, i have no idea if that will work but it seems repeatable and not too difficult. It really is all about getting traffic.
- Gitbook.io doesn't support i18n well. Not SEO friendly and not language detector. - Readme.io is too expensive for just product docs. - Hosting with NextJS etc.. is a pain if you need to support i18n and edit content using markdown.
Keep making things, iterating, grinding away.
Some things stick, some things don't.
You network and grow your business along the way.
That's the boring journey, but the reality for most of us.
What I never got about businesses doing technically boring things is that only the marketing/sales layer is adding value, so it's interesting people would chose a newer business over an older one. If you have a defining feature that sets you apart, that's not boring, it's innovative and interesting. So maybe web analytics/cron job/backups are still not boring because something is keeping major companies from crushing those specialties.
Web3's always been shit though.
One thing to remember about having competition is that most customers are not doing a “bake off” and they probably are not even aware of your competitors. If they found you, and you seem reputable, and you do what they need, and the price seems worth it, you can probably close the sale.
Of course the first one is key. That’s the hardest thing about starting from scratch. They have to find you.
it depends on if advancements will be slowdown. If capabilities will start growing exponentially aka singularity, then we will have very aggressive ride to the new level of humanity development.
We also have side projects/businesses that solve very boring problems in boring old fashioned ways using Ruby on Rails.
And we are making a living in a remotish part of Australia and I don't have to commute and answer to people I dont like very much! :-)
I think you are missing part of finding customers in crowded market. It is very not boring and not trivial.
For every sort of programming I can think of, I can think of people who find it boring (even machine learning!) and people who find it exciting (even cron monitoring!).
Clickable link:
Ed: (business) might be built in the open - but (product) isn't F/OSS?
It did stood out from the list actually.
Web analytics is very interesting from the UI/UX perspective. In fact that's exactly what make Plausible notable - their super-polished wonderful UI.
Backup service is no less interesting, but from the technical perspective, especially around hardware reliability issues.
Cron monitoring - yep, boring as hell.
It's incredibly powerful if you can have one cofounder (ideally who's good at marketing like Marko obviously is) focus on marketing exclusively.
I would be more worried about copycats. When you share your success, other developers want to have it too.
Even if you believe you are for the long run you lose money in the short term because of your ego.
I personally pay for Plausible because I like how much they share. They frequently pop up in discussion on HN, and I think their openness drives a lot of that mindshare among the crowd here.
If it's a service I care about, I don't want to be on the free tier because I want a mutually beneficial relationship with my service provider. It's cheaper for me to pay a few hundred dollars per year than to have to scramble and switch platforms when my vendor folds or drops their free tier.
I've been a paying customer for over 2 years and their transparency and overall a strong "sharing" culture played a big role. It's just easier to trust.
We are building windmill.dev this way and fully open-source, I'm less worried about copy-cats than about the project not taking off because of too much friction.
But Plausible was MIT licensed until 2020, so maybe a clone of early Plausible?
A lot of relatively new analytics services tend to have similar looking frontends these days I've noticed though.
A good rule of thumb: if you think something is original, chances are it’s because you’re just not very familiar with the space.
Ultimately, none of this matters. The goal of a product should be to help customers achieve the outcomes they want, not create something original.
Please notice that although they recommend docker for self hosting, it is very easy to self host an a bare RHEL server (you need to be a little familiar with Elixir though but not so much, you can take a peek at the docker entrypoint scripts to see what's going on) ; I'm doing exactly that for some months now and I'm happy with the results.
Now, obviously, my opinion doesn't hold a lot of weight by itself because it seems that they're quite profitable, but I will never understand that kind of pricing for something so basic.
And if you're not running a business, why do you care about analytics at all?
Most medium-large sized companies will pay people $150,000/yr just to translate the data from tools like plausible into ugly powerpoint presentations for management.
1) Pageviews do not equal revenue. The purpose of every website isn't inherently to make money.
2) The purpose of analytics is to understand your visitors and their interaction with content. There doesn't need to be a profit motive to want to do this. I've worked on plenty of nonprofit, informational, and discussion sites where we use analytics to discover what content is resonating with what kind of an audience, how people are discovering the site, what paths people take through the content, where errors are occurring, or just congratulate authors for writing things that got a lot of reads.
We’re plausible customers for our new thing because we wanted to take a privacy first approach. No need for a cookie banner, no weird permissions or opt out. Just a functional website. I understand GA is crazy powerful, but for what I’m actually using Plausible is so much easier to use.
I'm also not using them for my casual projects because I can't afford their cloud service, and I can't be bothered to self host, but they'll be totally fine without me.
I went with self hosted version for my personal sites.
Simple features and nothing too complex. Mostly I watch real-time stats, monthly page views and daily 404 pages.
> @ukutaht, Apr 27, 2021, Maintainer > The vision of this project is and has always been to be aggregate-only with no reporting on individual users or sessions.
