coderholic

We build our data sets on top of publicly available information (whois, BGP, rdns etc), but also combine it with lots of data we collect ourselves (ping & traceroute data from our probe network of over 100 locations). And then we do a whole lot of work with that data to produce our actual data sets. And there's a whole lot of work that goes into continuing to improve them, evaluate them, and ensure they're consistent etc. It's not easy!

And that's just producing the data. Making it available via a low latency and highly available API that handles over 100 billion requests per month requires some work, along with supporting data downloads in various file formats, and integrations into all of the various platforms that our customers want to use our data with.

And that's just on the engineering side of things!

But I'd say that even if our data was publicly availble (and to be fair some geolocation data is available for free - although it's generally not very accurate, and we also have other data sets beyond just geolocation) - there's still lots of value is making that accessible, easy to use and understand, and helping your customers get back to solving thier own problems while you worry about solving that piece for them.

Data.

This is a really incredible article about the economics of data businesses, if you haven't seen it: https://pivotal.substack.com/p/economics-of-data-biz?s=r

Yes, I think this is one of the most important pieces to solve! There have been some approaches (profit sharing, etc) but I think there's room for a lot of improvement & innovation here.

Yep, I have all those books behind me too :)

I do think there is space for a new category, or way of thinking about these businesses though. There's lots of great "regular / non-tech business" advice and books etc on how to operate in a non-VC way. But we're still talking about startups / tech companies here. So it's how do you marry the advice on operating a regular business with many of the dynamics of a VC backed business (that is, competative advantage, compounding growth, large market, high margins, attracting talent etc).

No, I actually think it's much more closely aligned with a VC business than a regular business. It's just a more "regular business" approach towards it. That is, it's still serving a large market, creating a competative advantage (which "regular businesses" rarely have), has compounding growth - it just doesn't need to rush to make it all happen in a few years in a very high risk way.

Thanks! Yeah I have talked about it a bit - I should probably talk about it more :)

https://saasclub.io/podcast/ipinfo-ben-dowling/

https://codestory.co/podcast/bonus-ben-dowling-ipinfo/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r79AuXgTy-4

Totally agree with this article. It's not just about funding methods, but also playbooks for these types of businesses, and best practices.

I've bootstrapped IPinfo.io to millions in revenue and a team of over 20 - so we're squarely in the "Middle class", and there's a tension between the "bootsrapper advice" (which mostly applies to optimizing for lifestyle and eliminating any risk) and "VC backed advice" (which mostly seems to optimize for scale and speed) - and a lack of advice for anything that balances those 2 (let's be ambitious and serve a large market and create the best products with great people, but let's run this as a marathon and not a sprint, and let's not risk everything on a big outcome).

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote (Anywhere) | Fulltime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io

IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles almost 100 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used. We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 20, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various roles we're looking to hire for:

- Senior Software Engineer - generalist engineer to help improve our data pipelines, ship new APIs and data sets, work on our SDKs and product integrations and more (ideally strong golang, bash, sql and node.js experience) https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=hn

- Senior Engineer / lead - Data Team - help build and maintain our data pipelines, including IP geolocation, VPN detection, build out new data sets and insights etc. Help roadmap and plan the data team activities. https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=aWQ9M...

- Operations Lead - first operations hire, help us build and improve processes, scale and grow the company and business - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25&source=hn

- Developer Relations - first dev rel hire. Help promote IPinfo in various developer communities, give talks and create tutorials and documentation (no role up yet - email Ben@ipinfo.I’m)

- DevOps / infra eng - our second infra hire. Should be familiar with google cloud, k8s, big query, airflow etc. help keep our api up and efficiently handling our volume. (No role up yet - email ben@ipinfo.io)

- Product Manager - first PM hire. Taking over main product responsibilities from me and working closely with me. Ideally familiar with DaaS or previous SaaS experience. https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=30&source=aWQ9M...

Any questions about the roles or IPinfo feel free to reach out to me directly at ben@ipinfo.io

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote (Anywhere) | Fulltime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io

IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles almost 100 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used. We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 20, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various roles we're looking to hire for:

- Senior Software Engineer - generalist engineer to help improve our data pipelines, ship new APIs and data sets, work on our SDKs and product integrations and more (ideally strong golang, bash, sql and node.js experience) https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=hn

- Senior Engineer / lead - Data Team - help build and maintain our data pipelines, including IP geolocation, VPN detection, build out new data sets and insights etc. Help roadmap and plan the data team activities. https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=aWQ9M...

- Jr Engineer / Data Analyst - Data Team - help maintain and debug our data pipelines, investigate and surface issues, pull custom data samples for customers, and help support the rest of the data team - https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=28&source=aWQ9M...

- Account Executive - We're growing our 2 person sales team, and are looking for an account executive with a technical background. https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=27&source=aWQ9M...

- Operations Lead - first operations hire, help us build and improve processes, scale and grow the company and business - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25&source=hn

Any questions about the roles or IPinfo feel free to reach out to me directly at ben@ipinfo.io

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote (Anywhere) | Fulltime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io

IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles almost 100 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used. We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 20, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various roles we're looking to hire for:

- Senior Software Engineer - generalist engineer to help improve our data pipelines, ship new APIs and data sets, work on our SDKs and product integrations and more (ideally strong golang, bash, sql and node.js experience) https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=hn

- Senior Engineer / lead - Data Team - help build and maintain our data pipelines, including IP geolocation, VPN detection, build out new data sets and insights etc. Help roadmap and plan the data team activities. https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=aWQ9M...

- Jr Engineer / Data Analyst - Data Team - help maintain and debug our data pipelines, investigate and surface issues, pull custom data samples for customers, and help support the rest of the data team - https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=28&source=aWQ9M...

- Account Executive - We're growing our 2 person sales team, and are looking for an account executive with a technical background. https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=27&source=aWQ9M...

- Operations Lead - first operations hire, help us build and improve processes, scale and grow the company and business - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25&source=hn

Any questions about the roles or IPinfo feel free to reach out to me directly at ben@ipinfo.io

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote (Anywhere) | Fulltime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles over 40 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used. We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 17, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more. We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles we're looking to hire for:

- Senior engineers - generalist engineer to help improve our data pipelines, ship new APIs and data sets, work on our SDKs and product integrations and more (ideally strong golang, bash, sql and node.js experience) https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=hn

- Senionr data engineer / lead - help build and maintain our data pipelines, including IP geolocation, VPN detection, build out new data sets and insights etc. Help roadmap and plan the data team activities. https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=aWQ9M...

- Operations lead - first operations hire, help us build and improve processes, scale and grow the company and business - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25&source=hn

- Success / support lead - our fist fulltime success & support hire. Help improve and grow our support team, and give our customers world class support interactions - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=23&source=hn

If you like what we're doing and think you could be a great addition to our team in a different role then let us know at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25.

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote (Anywhere) | Fulltime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles over 40 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used. We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 17, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles we're looking to hire for:

- Senior engineers - generalist engineer to help improve our data pipelines, ship new APIs and data sets, work on our SDKs and product integrations and more (ideally strong golang, bash, sql and node.js experience) https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21&source=hn

- Operations lead - first operations hire, help us build and improve processes, scale and grow the company and business - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25&source=hn

- Success / support lead - our fist fulltime success & support hire. Help improve and grow our support team, and give our customers world class support interactions - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=23&source=hn

If you like what we're doing and think you could be a great addition to our team in a different role then let us know at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25. Also feel free to ping me directly if you have questions about any of the roles or just want to chat about IP data sets :) ben@ipinfo.io

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote (Anywhere) | Fulltime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles over 40 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used.

We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 17, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles we're looking to hire for:

- Operations lead - first operations hire, help us build and improve processes, scale and grow the company and business - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25&source=hn

- Success / support lead - our fist fulltime success & support hire. Help improve and grow our support team, and give our customers world class support interactions - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=23&source=hn

If you like what we're doing and think you could be a great addition to our team in a different role then let us know at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25. Also feel free to ping me directly if you have questions about any of the roles or just want to chat about IP data sets :) ben@ipinfo.io

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote (Anywhere) | Fulltime / Parttime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io

IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles over 40 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used.

We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 17, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles we're looking to hire for:

- Full stack engineer - Work on our website, API, product optimization - full role details and apply at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=24

- Sales (Inbound / Enterprise) - See full role details and apply at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=22

- Operations lead - first operations hire, help us build and improve processes, scale and grow the company and business - apply via https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25

If you like what we're doing and think you could be a great addition to our team in a different role then let us know at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=25. Also feel free to ping me directly if you have questions about any of the roles or just want to chat about IP data sets :) ben@ipinfo.io

Yeah I've talked about it on a few podcasts. Here are a couple that focus a lot on the journey:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r79AuXgTy-4

https://saasclub.io/podcast/ipinfo-ben-dowling/

Initially it was mostly through upwork.com, and the HN monthly who's hiring posts. The first hires were either for specific project work, or part-time contractors. I kept giving the best ones more and more projects or hours until they eventually wound up full time :)

I started https://ipinfo.io as a side project, and eventually transitioned to working on it fulltime by myself for a while. I really enjoyed that time, but as things progressed it was a huge relief to bring in other people to help. Offloading support to people that were better suited to dealing with customer issues, and enjoyed doing that more than me. Then offloading design work to someone who can actually do a good job of design. Then getting help optimizing some DB queries. And before you know it we're a team of 17 globally :) I sometimes fondly remember the times that it was just me working in a coffee shop by myself, they were certainly simpler times. But the business would never have been able to get to the stage its at if I was doing this by myself.

Awesome!

No of course no reason to switch away from us! We provide many more details than icanhazip and others (geo, asn, anycast etc). We handle 40 billion requests a month,and plan to be around forever!

I'm just glad that icanhazip is staying up - it sucks when useful services go offline, and negatively impact all their users.

I'm glad icanhazip will live on! We also see a lot of malware and bot traffic to https://ipinfo.io, but nowhere near these levels!

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote | Fulltime / Parttime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles over 40 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used.

We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 14, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles we're looking to hire for:

- Senior Engineer - Data team - See full role details and apply at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21

- Sales (Inbound / Enterprise) - See full role details and apply at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=22

- Various non-eng roles (customer success, g-t-m, operations etc) - job posts coming online soon, email ben@ipinfo.io if you're interested

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote | Fulltime / Parttime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io

IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data. Our API handles over 40 billion requests a month, and we also license our data for use in many products and services you might have used.

We started as a side project back in 2013, offering a free geolocation API, and we've since bootstrapped ourselves to a profitable business with a global team of 14, and grown our data offerings to include geolocation, IP to company, carrier detection, and VPN detection. Our customers include T-Mobile, Nike, DataDog, DemandBase, Clearbit and many more.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles we're looking to hire for:

- Senior Engineer - Data team - See full role details and apply at https://ipinfo.bamboohr.com/jobs/view.php?id=21

- Various non-eng roles (senior sales, g-t-m, operations etc) - job posts coming online soon, email ben@ipinfo.io if you're interested

Some details about the ASN announcing the DoD prefixes: https://ipinfo.io/AS8003

It looks like they're not just announcing 11.0.0.0/8 but also a bunch of more specific routes, including 11.0.0.0/13 and 11.0.0.0/24

It looks like currently their only peer is Hurricane Electric: https://ipinfo.io/AS6939

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote | Fulltime / Parttime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io

IPinfo is an IP address information API and data provider. Our industry leading IP geolocation API handles over 40 billion API requests a month. We're bootstrapped, profitable, and growing. We have a small fully distributed team spread across the globe, we’re working on lots of exciting things, and we've got big ambitions!

We had an amazing 2020, dramatically improving the data accuracy of our geolocation data, and closing lots of great deals and partnerships (many excited ones to be announced soon), and launched our new domain data product & API at https://host.io.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles we're looking to hire for:

    - Head of Operations
    - Backend Eng / DevOps / Site Reliability (GCP experience favored)
    - Sales Engineer
    - Developer Relations / Evangelist

We'll be posting more detailed job descriptions in the next few weeks, but if you think working at IPinfo sounds interesting and you've got the skill set to match then reach out to me at ben@ipinfo.io and let's get the conversation started! Please include any details of your startup and remote work experience!

IPinfo.io | Various Roles | Remote | Fulltime / Parttime / Contract | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io

IPinfo is an IP address information API and data provider. Our industry leading IP geolocation API handles over 40 billion API requests a month. We're bootstrapped, profitable, and growing. We have a small fully distributed team spread across the globe, we’re working on lots of exciting things, and we've got big ambitions!

We had an amazing 2020, dramatically improving the data accuracy of our geolocation data, and closing lots of great deals and partnerships (many excited ones to be announced soon), and launched our new domain data product & API at https://host.io.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles we're looking to hire for:

    - VP / Director of Operations
    - Backend Eng / DevOps / Site Reliability
    - Sales Engineer
    - Developer Relations / Evangelist
    - UI/UX Designer
    - Product Manager

We'll be posting more detailed job descriptions in the next few weeks, but if you think working at IPinfo sounds interesting and you've got the skill set to match then reach out to me at ben@ipinfo.io and let's get the conversation started!

IPinfo.io | Data / Eng / Sales / Product / Ops / QA | Remote | Fulltime | https://ipinfo.io & https://host.io

IPinfo is an IP address information API and data provider. Our industry leading IP geolocation API handles over 40 billion API requests a month. We're bootstrapped, profitable, and growing. We have a small fully distributed team spread across the globe, we’re working on lots of exciting things, and we've got big ambitions!

We had an amazing 2020, dramatically improving the data accuracy of our geolocation data, and closing lots of great deals and partnerships (many excited ones to be announced soon), and launched our new domain data product & API at https://host.io.

We're looking for exceptional and ambitious people to join our team - we've got various senior roles in operations, product, eng, sales and data QA. We'll be posting more detailed job descriptions and specific roles in early 2021, but if you think working at IPinfo sounds interesting and you've got the skill set to match then reach out to me personally now to ben@ipinfo.io and let's get the conversation started!

At https://host.io we scrape every registered domain once a month, and make the meta data available freely over an API. You could use that to get a title for a domain (although not for a URL that's not the main domain), eg:

    $ curl https://host.io/api/web/facebook.com?token=$TOKEN
    {
      "domain": "facebook.com",
      "rank": 2,
      "url": "https://www.facebook.com/",
      "ip": "157.240.11.35",
      "date": "2020-08-26T17:39:17.981Z",
      "length": 160817,
      "encoding": "utf8",
      "copyright": "Facebook © 2020",
      "title": "Facebook - Log In or Sign Up",
      "description": "Create an account or log into Facebook. Connect with friends, family and other people you know. Share photos and videos, send messages and get updates.",
      "links": [
        "messenger.com",
        "oculus.com"
      ]
   }

See https://host.io/docs for more details about the API and what else you can do with it (eg. find backlinks to domains, domains with the same adsense ID etc)

When I was 16 I beta-tested Black & White at Lionhead Studios, and met Peter Molyneux and his team. They were my heroes at the time, as I dreamt of one day being a game developer. I stayed by myself in a B&B, testing the game all day, reading my coding books and copies of EDGE magazine :)

I remember Peter telling his team that if the game went well he'd take the whole team (around 40 people, IIRC) on a big yacht. It was all very exciting!

Peter came and chatted with me and the other tests (most of who were about 10, and friends of the kids of the other developers), and asked about my interest in programming. I told him I'd been working on a snakes like game, and he said he'd love to look at the code, which sadly I didn't have (no laptops back in those days, and I didn't bring a floppy).

I never ended up becoming a game developer. I discovered web development, and startups, and never looked back :)

> This is just a paid, public gripe that a lot of people can relate with

It is

> but what purpose does it serve?

It lets the millions of other parents who find themselves suddenly in the same situation, feeling the same things, know they're not alone, and that the struggle is real!

I don't think the point is it can't be done. I think it's just acknowledging that it's HARD. Both for the kids, and the parents.

Me too! We're jugging 3 kids and working from home, and I thought the article was on point. My guess is that most of the dismissive comments are from people without kids!