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I still remember one of the first HN stories that caught my eye was the developer who created bingo cards and was making a good living selling his cards online
by at-fates-hands 9y ago
I still remember one of the first HN stories that caught my eye was the developer who created bingo cards and was making a good living selling his cards online and to bingo parlors.
He did the same thing. Found a niche industry which needed this service and he was doing well all by himself with nearly zero overhead.
It really made me start looking at very small niches for opportunities since there's already a ton of people trying to disrupt large entrenched technologies.
- roel_v 9y agoI think you're referencing bingocardcreator.com, which made software for diy bingo cards. Also it never made a living, let alone a good living. It ended up selling for low 5 digits IIRC.
- will_brown 9y agoWell maybe that makes it all the more impressive because it got him notarity in a community which he parlayed into a great job with a unicorn startup company.
- pvitz 9y agoNevertheless 25.000 to 40.000,- USD profits per year without spending a lot of time on it sounds nice.
- jpindar 9y agoOnly in SV is $40,000 profit not making a living.
- anitil 9y agoThis would be https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11
- prawn 9y agoIn those days, SEO was fairly trivial. You could easily rank well for a keyphrase with a matching domain or get longtail hits with a script that dynamically built pages. It's much, much harder now. At one point in that era, I ranked top two in Australia for "make money" with one page about AdSense on an otherwise unrelated site. I had another site that took half a day to build, and involved no upkeep, making similar money to Patrick's BCC. I stupidly let it (and other sites) languish and it was slowly overtaken by competitors and SEO changes.