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Ask HN: What are some of the simplest software businesses that exist?
For example park.io was born out of a simple script that looked for available domains (https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-automating-tasks-helped-me-grow-revenue-to-over-125k-mo-73da9c0b51)
- GFischer 8y agoThere are a lot of websites that I'm not sure if they count as businesses but are reasonably simple: - code prettifiers, - converting from X to PDF, - converting image formats, - YouTube downloaders, - TimeZone converters, - Online calculators, - SQL formatters And so many more...
- eterm 8y agoConverting X to PDF is far from simple ( I wish it was! ).
- gremlinsinc 8y agoIt's actually not always hard (depending on use case and what 'x' is) if you use an existing api or something that has already been developed...why re-invent the wheel? wkhtmltopdf is pretty easy to use... there's some other tools...
- schoen 8y agoI think eterm's point is not that there aren't readily-available tools to do it, but that it's hard to do in full generality without loss of information.
- gremlinsinc 8y agomy point was if you just wanted a simple 'online tool' to slap some ads on, or have a fancier upgrade, it's probably doable without a ton of effort..obviously some integrations will be harder than others...
- maxxxxx 8y agoFrom my experience almost nothing around PDF is simple once you scratch the surface...
- config_yml 8y agosimplepdf did a great job, good example of doing something simple that’s actually not that simple
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y agoPDFSharp FTW!
- sudhirj 8y agoSimple != Easy. Think the question isn't what's easy money - you can have really simple ideas or products that just do one thing, but they're not necessarily easy to do.
- latexr 8y ago> YouTube downloaders Not a good business to go into right now. There have been some recent suspicious crackdowns of those[1]. [1]: https://torrentfreak.com/keepvid-site-no-longer-allows-users-to-keep-videos-180320/ https://torrentfreak.com/keepvid-site-no-longer-allows-users...
- imglorp 8y agoOn that note, hooktube says they got shut out of the YT API and can only do regular embedded videos now. Kinda no point.
- ChrisGranger 8y agoI still use HookTube to watch age-restricted videos when I don't feel like logging in.
- akx 8y agoI've been working on an omniglot code prettifier ( https://nicen.pw/ https://nicen.pw/ ), but I'm not sure how I could ever make it a business. :D
- gbear605 8y agoIt's not what I'd personally do, but the traditional solution is advertising.
- elago 8y agoI give a lot of page views to those ad-heavy online unit conversion calculators that are quite simple. While the page itself really just implements basic arithmetic, I have no idea how hard it is to get the 1st result from the search engine when you google "Convert 130 inch ounce to newton meters"
- cimmanom 8y agoAre you asking about simple software? Or simple business models? Or something else?
- polalavik 8y agosimple software that solved a common problem and has a pretty straightforward business model.
- axaxs 8y agoProbably craigslist, if you count that. It seems ultra low maintenance, and makes good money.
- hskalee123 8y agoThe backend doesn't seem that simple to me. Maybe it's just me.
- axaxs 8y agoIt's written in a standard Perl LAMP stack, and to my knowledge hasn't changed much since inception. It's not as simple as a converter script, sure, but by today's standards it's extremely simple.
- mi_lk 8y agoHow does craigslist make money? Ads?
- axaxs 8y agoAFAIK they charge money for some ads, such as job postings and housing ads.
- wilsonnb3 8y agoI believe they only charge to post job ads in big cities like New York and San Fransisco. Here's a full list of what they charge for. https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees https://www.craigslist.org/about/help/posting_fees
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sodafountan 8y agoYes
- kodablah 8y agohttps://www.statuspage.io/ https://www.statuspage.io/ (implementation may no longer be simple, but surely it was initially)
- stingraycharles 8y agoWasn’t that initially written for some kind of weekend “start your own startup” hackathon?
- 1_800_UNICORN 8y agoI had a job offer from the StatusPage guys a few years ago that I turned down (shortly before their acquisition by Atlassian, d'oh!). The feature set is relatively simple, but the underlying software is very complex. They need to be reliable enough and robust enough to work when other major sites go down, which is no easy feat. I'm sure that like most products they started simple, but to scale to any large meaningful customers they had to put a lot of complex engineering in place.
- ninjakeyboard 8y agoI think many saas solutions that exposes functionality of some command line tool. Eg video encoding, as mentioned html->pdf, barcode generation, even just storing and retrieving assets.
- brailsafe 8y agoIt depends. Usually, at some level you're going to find some crazy complexity. I think just about every flight hacking/booking website is simple in the sense that it just uses one API for data, but then there's complexity in the UI and behind the API they're using. Likewise, prpviding just an API to some otherwise unavailable data might be anywhere from simple to inifitely complex.
- is_true 8y agoWith your reply in mind I think that we should be talking of barriers of entry, not easy to write. Last time I checked a flight API costed 7500K USD monthly.
- OliverLassen 8y agoWhat about sites which allows users to create their own blogs. That seem pretty simple, but the content is the hard part.
- OliverLassen 8y agoActually it is hard to tell. Every application is simple from start, but then expand. You could say Instagram is simple - create a user, upload a picture which people can see if they choose to add you as a friend. Simple at first, but then the application evolves to filters and sophticated algorithms for finding best content
- hopesthoughts 8y agoThey can be simple like write.as or complex like wordpress.com, Blogger etc. Simple as in the just write kind of thing, and complex as in there are probably too many extra features.
- wilsonnb3 8y agoA lot of WordPress plugins that cost money are very simple.
- et-al 8y agoDoodle.com is super simple and super useful when coordinating with more than four people.
- apapli 8y agoI’d say a lot of enterprise software fits into this category.... just that they are very evolved now so pack a lot more functionality in than what they started with. Ie CRMs and ERPs were really just basic CRUD applications when they started. Not to belittle them, as there are years (Millenia perhaps?) of programming time that has gone into them since they started so they are far more extensive than when they started.
- maxxxxx 8y agoMost Enterprise software turns into incredibly complex beasts once you have a few customers and years of usage. Definitely not simple by any measure.
- icedchai 8y agoIt starts off simple. Then someone wants to customize things. Then someone else wants to customize things a bit differently, on and on. That field you give everyone by default and made mandatory? Turns on 1 huge customer doesn't actually want it. That needs to be configurable, too. Pretty soon everything almost is configurable and it's 1000x more complex...
- BLanen 8y agoDon't forget building it in a way to allow the user(ie, expensive consultants why you may be supplying yourself or grant certificates too) to customize it themselves!
- kuwze 8y agohttps://gumroad.com/ https://gumroad.com/
- taprun 8y agoI bet they do some complicated anti-fraud stuff though...
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y agoMost of the really simple businesses are going to be B2B in very niche markets, so you're not likely to hear about them. e.g., somewhere there may be a website that converts RS274 commands to an obsolete CNC command protocol so they can use their decades old machinery with modern CAM software. It has real value to a small number of users and it's the kind of thing you can write in an afternoon, but outside a small community, you're not likely to know about it. Yeah, I know that's a bad example, but it's the first thing that came to mind :-)
- hiccuphippo 8y agoPinboard's business model is pretty simple. Monthly charge for usage of their service. And the service itself is pretty simple, bookmark storage with tags.
- kej 8y ago*annual charge
- kettenken 8y agoPingdom.com? At least it was pretty simple when it started. I think "ping my server from several locations and alert me when stuff doesn't work" is simple and they charge $10+/mo for that.
- barbarr 8y agojscrambler.com. Sell the fact that you can do something that can already be done, slap on some business talk, and you've got $2m in venture funding.
- bakli 8y agoI made https://monitorcertificates.com https://monitorcertificates.com from this simple script - https://hackernoon.com/monitor-your-https-certificate-expiry-with-this-script-1338bf5acfe9 https://hackernoon.com/monitor-your-https-certificate-expiry... It reminds you when your certificates are due for renewal, or if they have been configured incorrectly.
- underyx 8y agoI suspect that OP owns park.io and created this post just to covertly market that website. Signs that point to this: - it's a completely unnotable example compared to more well-known companies in the comments - No one else thought to include further promo material like OP's linked interview for the service they answered - OP's post history contains several failed attempts to promote 5things.xyz with HN submissions (demonstrating a tendency to self-promote) - After these failed attempts OP made their only meaningful-looking contribution to the HN community by posting 'Ask HN: What are your favorite tech sites besides HN?' - However, the aforementioned 5things.xyz is a competitor in this space - And of course, this last post had a commenter answering 5things.xyz in the thread, with the user being registered the same day only to make that one comment, and even being given a random fake-sounding username: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=syrup89 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=syrup89 - However, this shill comment was mostly ignored by everyone, and this failure apparently prompted OP to include their promoted answer in the body of their Ask HN post instead this time Edit: My comment got downvoted twice within one minute of posting (:
- qaq 8y agoI agree with you def. looks like marketing for park.io
- lossolo 8y agoI lately noticed a lot of threads similar to these with a lot of meaningless comments like for example "What a great product!", "WoW! Finally! Waited for this so long", "Perfect product, will be using!" from accounts that were made 30 days ago or 3 days ago, or same time as thread were created.
- aunty_helen 8y agoThat's just the Eternal September. Whilst I appreciate the OPs diligence, I would actually tend to disagree. The user may have seen it mentioned on indie hacker, which would be a plausible place to encounter 'a simple script that looked for available domains'
- ArtWomb 8y agoReminds me of Jeff Atwood's "Code: It's Trivial" post: https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/ The model I really dig right now is "unlimited subscription for creative work." Such as manypixels.co, for graphic design and illustrations. Or even the Podscriptor transcription service ($10 per episode in 24 hr). And though you can probably edit such a service down to a minimal quantum creative task. There's no shortcut to getting web-scale distribution. Best of luck ;)
- a_d 8y agoThe first version of some astonishingly successful businesses were quite simple. Including and certainly not limited to: AirBnB, Groupon, Facebook, Zenefits, ZenPayroll (now Gusto), YouTube, Twitter etc were quite simple. Ironically, their success over the last 10-15 years, has made starting a software businesses relatively simple. My bet is that in the next 10-15 years the value is increasingly going to come from harder to start businesses.
- antisthenes 8y agoSublime Text comes to mind. It's probably not the simplest one, and the ecosystem around it is quite extensive, but at its core, the principle is very simple.
- germainelol 8y agoBut how many people click the button to buy a license? :D
- qop 8y agoTwilio, craigslist, twitter, wikipedia, are all pretty simple from the top view.
- CraneWorm 8y ago5things yeah!