4 ms·
It's in his profile: http://www.searchtempest.com/ http://www.searchtempest.com/
by keltex 10y ago
It's in his profile: http://www.searchtempest.com/ http://www.searchtempest.com/
- tempestn 10y agoHa, ya, although I left out the get-rich-quick aspirations in my profile! At the time I was a poor grad student and was shopping for a portable AC unit to survive the summer in my sweltering apartment. There were about 5 craigslist sites within driving distance, and I was checking all of them, since saving 20 bucks was easily worth an extra hour of driving at that point. :) Figured a simple thing to learn some basics would be a page that would just spit out the links to multiple craigslist results pages matching a given search. I literally went to the library and got a book called something like, "Basic web development using PHP and MySQL". The initial site was... very basic. Before I made it I'd looked around for existing solutions, and so when it was done I replied to the few forum threads I'd found, where people were looking for the same thing. It basically grew organically from there. (And over time I made it somewhat less basic. Although the design is looking pretty dated at this point; we're currently working hard on a long-overdue responsive redesign.) A couple years later I made (an early version of) http://www.autotempest.com http://www.autotempest.com, which is like kayak.com for used cars. Then around 2009 I quit my day job and hired my first employee. Have been doing this ever since.
- point78 10y agoThis is incredible, I've been using your site for 5 years and I've always wondered "i wonder how much this site profits per month" Any way I can get this half decade long question answered? :)
- tempestn 10y agoGlad you like the site! It makes enough that I can keep investing in improvements, while support my family comfortably and saving for a rainy day.
- mysterydip 10y agoI've always wondered who created that site. I've used it to search for cars and parts for years! Thanks! :)
- point78 10y agoSounds like it must be 6 figures per year, congrats.
- Cyph0n 10y agoI stumbled across AutoTempest while doing some research to see whether or not auto search aggregators were popular here in the U.S. I was planning on creating a similar service for my home country, but grad school has started and I'm having less and less time :( Anyways, keep up the awesome work, and I'm glad it has all worked out for you!
- tempestn 10y agoIn case anyone else was curious, so far 766 people have clicked that link (over the past ~9 hours). (The AutoTempest one I buried at the end of my other reply has 106 so far.) Quite a bit more than I expected, given that this story only has 200 upvotes or so, and I'm sure only a small fraction of viewers would click the link. A lot of HN lurkers out there!
- icemelt8 10y agoThe more hostile the environment, the more lurkers there are. I read HN daily, but never comment because if you don't speak what the hivemind likes, they downvote you.
- tempestn 10y agoI haven't read any of your other comments, but it sort of seems like you're inviting the hostility with this one.