4 ms·
Improvely (https://www.improvely.com https://www.improvely.com) and W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com) have grown to $45,000 MRR.
by dangrossman 11y ago
Improvely (https://www.improvely.com https://www.improvely.com) and W3Counter (https://www.w3counter.com https://www.w3counter.com) have grown to $45,000 MRR.
W3Counter is completely passive -- no new code or features in over a year, no customer support load, autoscaling frontend (EC2) and backend (Aurora). Improvely gets feature updates a few times a year and has some light e-mail support load.
I also added a single banner ad to each of my open source projects' documentation sites, and that's added ~$200/month via AdSense. Developers are surprisingly lucrative targets for advertisers I guess.
- lukestevens 11y agoIncredible. You're the unsung, bootstrap SaaS success story of HN imo :)
- going_to_800 11y agoMate, this looks like a modified version of piwik, how much is different from it?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dangrossman 11y agoI don't know, I've never used Piwik. W3Counter predates it by a couple years. Back in the '90s and early '00s, you either had a daily barebones report from a basic log analyzer, or you paid hundreds to thousands of dollars for a license to good analytics software, most of which was just a fancier log analyzer. I never had that kind of money to spend on analytics back then, so I built my own. My first free "hit counter" with reports service was part of Website Goodies, a site I started around 1996, but didn't have its own domain until 1999. W3Counter was a spin-off of that tool into its own site in 2004. Google Analytics didn't come about (by acquiring Urchin and making their newest product free) until the end of 2005. Piwik's from late 2007 according to Wikipedia.