manmanic

Been using Hetzner Cloud for 18 months now, for various servers. Has proven incredibly reliable. Together with a very clear and straightforward management panel and unbeatable (AFAIK) performance/pricing, I haven't found a downside. A good alternative to their dedicated servers (which are also great) if you need more flexibility or less capacity.

After many years of using Hetzner dedicated servers, I recently started using their US cloud for a project. So far, extremely happy, and it's very cost effective. Even cheaper than Digital Ocean (which I also use extensively).

This is almost cool, unfortunately the product itself (a network of bots to allow websites to be scraped when they obviously don't want to be) seems a little shifty. For example, put these three exhibits together:

Exhibit 1: The ScrapingBee terms and conditions state "We assume that you use the Website Platform and Services legally and ethically and that you have obtained permission, if necessary, to use it on the targeted websites and/or other data sources." This is even backed up with an indemnity clause in which the user has to cover ScrapingBee for any third-party legal claim arising out of their use of the product.

Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/terms-and-conditions/

Exhibit 2: ScrapingBee explicitly advertises a feature allowing you to get Google search results via an API call. These results are presumably generated by scraping Google's search pages:

Reference: https://www.scrapingbee.com/features/google/

Exhibit 3: Google's own documentation explicitly states that automated querying is prohibited, so if you use this advertised ScrapingBee service, you are naturally violating Google's terms, and could be liable to cover ScrapingBee's legal costs if Google decide to come after them.

Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

$1MM in ARR is all well and good, but there's a limit to how large this business can grow without being pursued by the websites whose scraping they are enabling, and in the case of Google, explicitly promoting.

You’ve got to really find your niche. I make around $1.5M profit per year from an independent website that takes an hour of two of work per week, me only. It’s been running for 15 years. The whole thing was a freaky case of perfect product and timing and there was definitely luck involved.

Am I the only one who thinks they want to push the market into applying strategies that they can then trade against? This is classic Wall Street, persuading the masses to take the wrong side of bets.

I'm sorry but this does not always apply in the real world. Someone getting everyone onto a blockchain is a one-time project, perhaps with an annual maintenance fee. Running an industry organization is an order of magnitude (or two) more expensive. Trusting someone to build an (open source) application is not the same as trusting them to centrally host it.

There are a variety of formal consensus algorithms uses for enterprise blockchains, but they are all some variant of voting schemes based on validator signatures. Nothing like proof-of-work is needed to ensure that one bad actor, or a small number of bad actors, cannot break the network's consensus. If you have just one validator, like QLDB, then you're back to a centralized scenario.

Yes, that's true. But in some cases an industry mutual doesn't exist, and the regulator doesn't want to manage the database. Then what? It can be cheaper and easier to deploy a blockchain than to build the necessary organizational structure to run a central database. Like I said, it's niche but it happens.

I've been working on DLT / enterprise blockchain technologies since 2014 and have insight into hundreds of projects, a small number of which made it to live production. Here is the bottom line: yes, it's mostly hype, but this technology does have genuine use cases - when you want to build an interparty database-driven application, and cannot find a suitable place to put the database, because of business concerns or regulation. This is fairly niche, perhaps 1% of all interorganizational database applications, but there are certainly cases where it is the right solution. The majority of blockchain projects undertaken still do not make sense, but this is gradually getting better over time.

It's a nice idea in theory, but the problem is that only one side has actual control/ownership of the domain at any one time.

If the startup owner gets control, they can decide to stop paying, and the original domain owner has to sue for their money.

If the original domain owner keeps control, and the startup does well, they can be held to ransom by the domain owner threatening to redirect the domain.

Of course in theory all of this can be prevented through contracts, but the prospect of having to use the (international) court system to enforce one's rights is not an attractive one for either side. Startups often run out of money, and domainers like to spot an opportunity, so there's just too much risk.

As an aside, names aren't actually that important, so long as you can own your namespace. Flickr? Facebook? Craigslist? These are all pretty bad names, but it didn't seem to matter.

I've seen the best results with Tribal Fusion and Casale Media. Unless you're in a high-premium field, don't expect more than $2 EPM for a 300x250 (or equivalent area) spot.

2=x^x^x^x... cannot be solved, since x^x^x^x... will only converge to 0 (if x=0) or 1 (0<x<=1) or -1 (x=-1), ignoring complex numbers. So the original equation is false.

I think about this all the time.

I didn't make "FU money" from an exit, but rather from the ongoing success of a couple of online businesses, which have been earning me far more than I know how to spend. When this started happening, my initial reaction was to be perplexed, because I no longer had a financial motivation to get up in the morning and work. Money had been the most salient part of my motivation for as long as I could remember.

But I found that I still wanted to work, and it took me a while to understand why. It turns out there are lots of other good reasons to create useful things that people will pay for, like self expression, connecting to others, a sense of achievement, and a feeling of contributing to the world. The money was still nice but became secondary. Still, it allows me the luxury of working on interesting things that I think people will like, even if I doubt I'll ever make much money from them.

I found that the main challenge of being rich is finding a way to spend the money in a way which contributes to my happiness, rather than detracts from it. This is harder than it sounds. The most obvious way to spend money is to buy an oversized home. But this is a really bad idea. First of all you have to spend a lot of time maintaining that home. But most importantly it will likely alienate your (presumably not so rich) real old friends who are still working daily to pay off the mortgage. How will they feel about inviting you over to their condo when you live in a palace?

The solution I found to the "friend alienation" problem is to spend money on personal experiences rather than visible possessions. You can eat out at fancy restaurants, travel the world and enjoy the best shows without your friends knowing what you're up to, at least not in detail. It really helps if you have a spouse and/or children that you can do this with, since they can make these experiences all the more fun.

BTW this also neatly dovetails with recent research on happiness:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/10/happiness.possessio...

The one rich guy possession I'm allowing myself to buy is a second home in a foreign country that I like to visit often. This will (hopefully) make those visits less hassle and more enjoyable, and again, none of my close friends need to know.

And yes, I worry about losing the money a little, and have taken a self-propelled crash course in personal wealth management. But luckily I find the subject quite interesting anyway, and I don't let myself lose any sleep over a couple of percentage points in yield. In the long run, we all die anyway.

To summarize, getting "FU money" been a net benefit in my life, but it took a lot of careful thought and planning to ensure it worked out that way.

Finally if anyone out there who's suddenly landed FU money is feeling a little disorientated by their new situation, I highly recommend reading "Escape from Freedom" by Erich Fromm, which is a wonderful book about the psychological and existential challenges that freedom brings.

7.8% is incredible. Based on my experience, I think 1-2% is benchmark.

But really it depends on how widely your service is known, and to what extent it appeals to the mass market. Make either of those variables higher, and you'll get a ton more free users, and quite a few more paying users, but your %age will be worse.

Bottom line: looking at your traffic, I'd focus on getting yourself better known and getting more users, rather than converting the people already coming to your site.

You don't need to move to Australia. I opened an Australian bank account precisely for this purpose. All I had to do was travel to their branch in London to identify myself.

Apart from high interest rates, there are other advantages to AUD: low government debt, and a commodity-rich country that is likely to thrive if things get tough for the world.

I also bought AUD from USD when it was 10% undervalued according to PPP, so that's already a 40% gain in USD terms:

http://fx.sauder.ubc.ca/PPP.html

Spend at least $50k of that visiting the Valley regularly, attending conferences, and building up a network of contacts. Otherwise you'll get crappy dealflow and almost definitely lose it all (if you decide to invest at all).

If it was my main life project, and the number of users signing up between each groin kick was increasing exponentially, my entrepreneurial fire would keep me going.

But when the ratio between groin kicks and sign ups started going in the wrong direction, I'd want out.

Hey, it was your metaphor, not mine... :)

It's impossible to know the answer, since it's hidden somewhere deep inside Mike's subconscious. My intuition says that he'd be more willing to put up with something like that if his company was still growing rapidly.

Disgusting as it clearly is, I feel the spitting incident is a bit of a red herring.

If this had happened 2 years ago during the rapid growth in Web 2.0 investment, I think Mike would have soldiered on.

Instead, he has a nasty experience while his business and kingdom are shrinking. Deep down, I suspect he wanted out already.

In his situation I would.

The only newspaper I would miss is The Economist - global, comprehensive, opinionated (for good or bad), analysis in depth. But I won't have to miss it, since The Economist is doing very well, probably for precisely the same reasons that so many people like me would miss it...

My answer seems to differ from most people here.

I do all sales and support once per day, first thing in the morning, getting the mailboxes to completely empty. I then glance at the mailboxes a few more times during the day, but don't send any more replies till the next morning. The only exception is if there's an urgent issue or serious bug.

This works for me because:

* I can concentrate on productive work (building new features) most of the day without serious distraction. If I were to reply to emails all day long, I'd get far less done.

* In my experience, users put that little bit more effort into solving problems themselves, if they're given the motivation to do so. They read documentation and FAQs. If you reply to emails within half an hour, you'll often find yourself in a lengthy back-and-forth that takes up a lot of time.

This second point might sound like heresy in a world where the customer is always right. But it's not so bad to lose customers whose opportunity cost in time is greater than their revenue is ever going to be worth.

While a small minority of users are unhappy to wait more than an hour or two for a reply, a guaranteed 24 hour turnaround is still pretty good compared to large companies.

Energy is the big challenge of our generation, not computer technology. Climate change is part of it, but it's not the main issue. At some time during the next few decades we're going to hit crunch point in terms of oil and gas reserves. Not only because few new resources are being found, but also because their depletion is accelerating, especially due to China and India's stellar economic growth.

Humanity will get through the energy crunch, probably with a 20-year depression and government commandeering of manufacturing resources to build renewable energy capacity. During that time there will be huge unemployment, war, and for many poorer countries, likely starvation. The food chain is deeply dependent on fertilizer, made from oil.

So the key for the next two decades is to do as much as we can to prepare for this period. Ideally we'd completely wean ourselves off oil and gas, like Sweden or Norway, but that seems unlikely to happen. But at least, it means investing in renewable energy capacity and technology, so that things don't completely grind to a halt.

Trouble is, this isn't really a computer problem, so how to help?

I started about 12 years ago writing shareware apps for the Mac, towards the end of high school. It was easier then since there was much less competition, so I think you'd have to pick your niche pretty carefully now.

My business (actually just me) made a small name for itself on the Mac scene (again, easier then than now) and pretty quickly hit around $50K/yr in revenue. It stayed around that level for many years, sometimes peaking at $7K/month after a significant release.

I haven't released any significant updates for years, yet it still brings around $30K/yr. This is in exchange for a couple of hours of sales and support per month. That's what great about shareware - just like a well-designed web business, once you've written the code, it can become a tidy passive income stream. And I've no doubt I could have made more of it by marketing it better, but I never quite had the inclination.

Two concrete bits of advice:

1. My two best and longest-selling products are tools for small (and occasionally large) businesses to get things done easier and quicker.

2. Work the feedback loop. My top selling product ended up being used in a way I never predicted. I heard about this from my customers and over time made it highly specialized for that purpose.

When it comes to acquiring wealth, did shareware make a millionaire? No - more like 1/3 of the way there, after tax.

But shareware did give me the income and freedom to not have to seek a job when I graduated, and in turn that let me pursue further study, and in parallel develop other (web-based) ideas which turned out to be the real earners.

I can vouch for the freemium approach. Your free service is there to create word-of-web and word-of-mouth growth. You may even want to hold off on the premium version for a year or so. There's some conflict between being non-commercial and buzzworthy, and pushing your premium version to get subscriptions.

Learning about your customer is crucial. The easy and cheap way to do this is run a survey on your site, while your service is still in the free phase. You can promote this survey aggressively to a portion of your user base and expect around a 15% response rate. One of my businesses had some obvious quantifiable differences between a free and premium version, so the survey included these 3 questions:

* Would you be willing to pay more for an enhanced service?

* How many Xs, Ys and Zs would you want?

* How much would you be willing to pay for this per month?

After collecting thousands of responses, I ran them through a Bayesian clustering algorithm (which can handle missing answers) and it spat out a bunch of service levels and price points that made a lot of intuitive sense. These were $5, $10 and $20/month, and later we added $40/month. Interestingly there was one big cluster that wanted the world for $1/month, whom we naturally decided not to cater for. We also learned that some features, such as RSS, didn't correlate at all with people's willingness to pay, so we added them into the free version.

Net result after a few years is about 1.5% of active users are on one of the premium levels, with the number approximately halving as you go from each price point to the next. Since the price doubles at each level, the total revenue from each price point is about the same. And it's a very tidy living for me and my partner.

One last thing: pay a lot of attention to what happens when people's subscriptions end involuntarily, because their credit card expired or stopped accepting payments. This happens a lot. You want to target these people with reminders about the premium service's benefits, and a discount promotion to sign up again with their new card.

I've think there are a couple of hidden factors which help explain the correlation between frugality and startup success - economic intuition, and the sense of entitlement.

Many startup founders don't have good economic intuition, and this expresses itself both in a lack of frugality, and an inability to come up with a realistic business model. In other words, similar skills and experience are needed to answer both these questions:

1. How long do we need our investment money to last, and what is the best way of spending it over that time?

2. What kind of products will people will pay for, and how much will they be willing to pay?

So you'll often see a startup which is spending money unnecessarily, and also finding it impossible to bring enough in.

On the second point, some startup founders have a sense of 'entitlement'. By this I mean a belief that the world owes them a good life without them having to earn it. Perhaps this is because investment is too easy to come by in the current environment.

Instead of feeling a heavy sense of responsibility and guardianship over their investors' money, and focusing on providing a return, these founders think they've been given a free ticket to go pursue their dreams. This will express itself both in a lack of frugality regarding money, and also an unwillingness to put in the long hours necessary to make their startup succeed.

I did a PhD while continuing to pursue an entrepreneurial career. While it worked out well in the end, I borderline regret it.

I found academia incredibly frustrating. If you're used to Internet time, the pace will drive you insane. You submit a paper to a journal, get comments back 2 months later, submit a revised version, than get approved 1 month after that. Then you're published 6 months later, and then 9 months after that (do the math) the first citations of your work start to appear. So the feedback cycle is around 18 months. And instead of having your ideas tested in the marketplace (near impossible to fake), you're judged by a small number of people who are highly protective of their egos and careers. The whole industry is driven by a need to get published and get grant funding, not to make or promote useful things.

Kissinger said that the reason academic fights are so brutal is that the stakes are so low. A lot of truth in that.

On the other hand, if you want to be a top-notch tech entrepreneur, a PhD is CS has a huge amount of value. Just make sure you pursue a field which lets you learn and apply lots of useful algorithms and data mining techniques, e.g. bioinformatics, information retrieval, image analysis. I regularly use a lot of the things I learnt during my PhD - not the theoretical stuff, but the experience I gained in dealing with messy data. These kind of "deep tech" skills are desperately lacking in the Web 2.0 developer community, and will help you truly delight your customers. You needn't look any further than Google to get the point. My two most successful web projects both have a strong mathematical/algorithmic element which has made them very hard for most programmers to reproduce.

Still, these kinds of techniques are becoming better known in the Web developer mainstream. For example, the book "Programming Collective Intelligence" is a good first taste. So on balance, I'd say skip the PhD, but invest seriously in educating yourself about the kinds of things that are still mostly taught at PhD level.

From an economic perspective, you want somewhere with a high standard of living (to support the necessary infrastructure), but a low cost of living (the $ you make over the Internet are disconnected from the local economy.)

On this basis the UK is far from ideal - it's an expensive country where the $ doesn't get you far. For this reason the talent in London goes into banking, law and medicine, where the fat salaries are.

Tiger economies like Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel are much better suited - they offer advanced tech infrastructure, but a much lower cost of living. In Israel for example, the talented head for tech in their droves, since it's the best paying sector in the economy.

Here are 3 ways I've identified highly profitable ideas:

a) Having a problem that needs solving. It's OK if it's a focused need, so long as you're not addressing a market which is too small. The world of people who research online is big enough. The world of Web 2.0 developers is not.

b) Careful listening to user feedback. Often users of one of my products have given me an inkling of the need for another. This will happen if (1) the original product works well, (2) the new product appeals to a similar audience, (3) you make it easy for people to give you feedback, and read it religiously and with empathy.

c) Being in-the-know about breaking trends. Make sure you regularly read (or at least skim) some high quality international publications. I read The Economist cover-to-cover every week, along with BusinessWeek. Worth every minute.

For me, each of these methods has been the catalyst for creating at least one successful online business.