36 ms·

I quit my job to make free web tools

317 points by pul 5y ago

pul 5y ago
Hi HN! Ruurtjan here, from NsLookup.io. I've read plenty of these kinds of blog posts, and they've been a big motivator for me to take the jump. So I thought I'd share my story here as well. Thanks everyone, for giving me the confidence to give entrepreneurship a try. I'll hang around today to answer any questions, so ask me anything :)
- hacknews20 5y ago
  Thanks and good for you! Keep going.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  Welcome to the club!
pul 5y ago
Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a bad connotation, mainly because they often track users across the web. Mine don't. For WhoIsMyISP.org, I've partnered with NordVPN, and have their ads with plain `<a href=...><img /></a>`. And for NsLookup.io, I've joined the Carbon network, which also doesn't have tracking.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  I hope the ad images are also hosted on your server, or they still can be tracking. Not criticism. I applaud your approach. I just point out that running non-tracking ads is harder than you would believe.
  - pul 5y ago
    Hmm, not that I've taken a second look, I noticed that I added a hidden image hosted on their servers when I implemented the ads. It's used for counting the ad impressions, but it looks like it drops a 1-day valid cookie as well :/
    - adolph 5y ago
      Good luck standing between those tricksy ad-folk and their quarry.
      - nr2x 5y ago
        It's called tracking for a reason.
    - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
      It's a little funny to me you added a literal tracking pixel to your website from a VPN company and then came to HN to preach that you don't do any tracking That said, due to third party cookie changes, tracking pixels have very limited usefulness these days and it's unlikely it actually tracks people over a full 1 day period
      - pul 5y ago
        I guess you're right.. And indeed, browsers fight back: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-protections/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-pro...
        weird-eye-issue 5y ago
        Safari started the trend 2-3 years ago
- stanislavb 5y ago
  Good luck, mate! If you bother to verify NsLookup.io on SaaSHub, I can get it on its weekly newsletter. That could help you a bit. (just ping me by email/twitter once done). Cheers!
  - pul 5y ago
    Thanks for the offer :) I already submitted it a while ago: https://www.saashub.com/nslookup-io-alternatives https://www.saashub.com/nslookup-io-alternatives
- weird-eye-issue 5y ago
  Are you not concerned that you are leaking exactly what domains people are looking up in realtime? If I used a service like that I would expect some degree of privacy that goes beyond this. It's crazy to me that you're doing this to be honest https://plausible.io/nslookup.io/pages?period=realtime https://plausible.io/nslookup.io/pages?period=realtime
  - teh_klev 5y ago
    There is no privacy issue here, there aren't source IP addresses attached, you can't tell who's looking these up. It's up there with Amazon's (for example) "other people bought" recommendations, you can't tell who did the looking up. They're just domain names which are effectively public records. And even if you thought you registered a super secret domain name (no such thing), maybe the registrar looked it up, or some bot found it through brute force (if nslookup.io is open to bots).
    - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
      What if someone looks up an internal domain which is actually publicly exposed. Granted they shouldn’t be secret, doesn’t mean you should broadcast them publicly.
      - pul 5y ago
        Internal domains generally resolve to private IP ranges, so don't do any harm when broadcasted. Besides, many people use Chrome, and who knows what they do by default with browsing history.
        hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
        You’ve obviously never seen orgs with /16 IP ranges, or developers/ops accidentally screw up, for that matter. Chrome don’t actively publish nslookups on public sites. I think you’ve missed the point.
        antonvs 5y ago
- waffle_maniac 5y ago
  Have you considered signing up as a Brave creator? Could generate more income from those that have auto contribute turned on.
  - osrec 5y ago
    Do enough people use that browser to make it worthwhile?
    - dudus 5y ago
      No.
      - moepstar 5y ago
        Oh, only 50+ million monthly active users as of January 2022 - who will both earn BAT and, by default, contribute back automatically...
        ffpip 5y ago
        BAT isn't turned on by default so the number will be a lot lower than 50 million. And I expect most people to turn off auto contribution to keep the money themselves or manually contribute to sites they like.
      - pul 5y ago
        I can confirm. I earn about 2-3 BAT (€1.5 - €2) each month for nslookup.io (without serving Brave ads) and whoismyisp.org (with Brave ads) combined. That's ~1M page views across all browsers. Not lucrative at all ;)
  - pul 5y ago
    I have. In fact, you can check this for any site using nslookup.io ;) (so meta) See the TXT records at https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/nslookup.io https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/nslookup.io
- kingcharles 5y ago
  I broke nslookup.io when I entered one of my emoji domains :)
  - pul 5y ago
    Which one? Because I explicitly added support for that and tested it.
- rogual 5y ago
  FYI, WhoIsMyISP.org tells me the name of my city is my ISP, "also known as" the actual ISP name.
text2db 5y ago
I hope that you make more than your salary, how did you attract users to website? Its very hard to get users to visit your site. I have posted my site (https://text2db.com/ https://text2db.com/) on hackernews, product hunt and reddit for getting reviews but got very few views (guess the idea is bad?), please do recommend me tips on how to increase traffic for site. Thanks.
- pul 5y ago
  > I hope that you make more than your salary Not yet by a large margin, but it's going up slowly :) > how did you attract users to website? Currently, mainly through SEO. My stats are open [1], so you can see the percentage that comes in through search engines. In my case, there's a large search volume for 'nslookup', which is currently the largest chunk of traffic. An 'exact match domain' helped for sure. But in the end, Google will be able to gauge how well you're able to solve the problem that made people search for something. So an excellent product * the search volume * backlink profile * how well Google can understand what you're solving will approximate the number of users that visit your site. You can use tools like ahrefs [2] (which also has a free tools) to get a sense of the search volume and competition on those keywords. Hope that helps! [1]: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io https://plausible.io/nslookup.io [2]: https://ahrefs.com/ https://ahrefs.com/
  - text2db 5y ago
    Awesome, thanks alot. :)
  - scrapcode 5y ago
    I used to do a lot of research on SEO and the methods behind the madness of getting decent organic traffic, and it basically always boiled down to quality content built around targeted keywords, phrases, or related topics. The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format. It does not seem that you do this on these properties, so briefly what kind of SEO optimization can be continually done outside of that? Are you still writing content as a guest poster and generating reputable backlinks? Engaging communities that are focused around your topic and promoting through those channels in hopes of generating backlinks? Or am I just in left field with all of this and what I thought I knew about SEO?
replwoacause 5y ago
I like the simplicity and cleanliness of the designs on both sites. Nice job.
- pul 5y ago
  Thank you! Nice to hear that one of my explicit design goals worked out :) In my opinion, these kinds of tools, which you only need once in a while, need to take as little cognitive load as possible. People have something to get done, don't get in their way.
mdrzn 5y ago
Great domains, and the service is straight to the point. Good luck!
- pul 5y ago
  Thank you :) Even though it's straight to the point, there's so much more to do to help people fix their DNS issues faster. I'll try not to compromise on the simplicity while adding more information.
jimkri 5y ago
Congrats on quitting your job! Thats a goal of mine as well, and I really like NsLookup and how the page is structured. I have used domainbigdata.com a lot and like how they show Other TLDs. I've been trying to find tools that would show other domains that are owned or associated with the domain that was searched. I work with a lot of sales leads and I think having information on other domains a company owns is super powerful for mapping companies and also understand company acquisitions, most companies transfer ownership of domains when they are purchased. I have a question and ask: 1. There are quite a few tools online that do the same thing, long term what is your goal to differentiate? or where do you want to focus? 2. Other TLDs or Other Associated Domains, is this something that you would be able to find? 3. Can you determine from a DNS search if a domain is owned by a company or by a non-corporate entity (Blog, personal)? Also from your blog post, I don't know if you were looking for any responses but: Plan B - Stage 2: Sell an API to visitors. >I would purchase and use this for a email verification process. I would rather go with a smaller company than large Plan C - Stage 1: Make a one-off DNS dataset, give it away to founders, and find out how they'd use it and what they need. >I would use this with Email Domain verification and Email format Verification. I worked with data teams that had to find emails formats & domains, if they had the domains it would save a ton of time and cost. As an end user how I think about this cost is I if I find a domain and run a MX or DNS check on it I will save the results and try now to run it on that domain again. That is why I like this plan, but the API would be super helpful as well.
- jasfi 5y ago
  A really great goal. I'm trying to help people with this aim with recommendations on what to do, get your business model figured out, etc. https://cxo.industries https://cxo.industries
- pul 5y ago
  Thanks for your kind words :) > long term what is your goal to differentiate? or where do you want to focus? Most other tools have clunky UX, dated design, or are painfully slow. I'm differentiating in ease of use, clarity and speed. Still a lot to be done, but I think I'm already doing okay compared to other sites. > Other TLDs or Other Associated Domains, is this something that you would be able to find? Since GDPR, nearly all WHOIS queries get their owner details purged. You also can't link it based on resolving IP addresses, as many sites use a shared CDN. There might be some signals left, but definitely not enough to give any kind of meaningful coverage to make it useful. > Can you determine from a DNS search if a domain is owned by a company or by a non-corporate entity (Blog, personal)? No, for the same reason as above. Here you could scrape the site and look for 'about' sections and do some ML, but that'd be quite involved. > I would purchase and use this for a email verification process. What would you like to use DNS for in email verification? > Email format Verification As in, detect 'firstname.lastname' for 'john.doe@company.com'? There's already a SaaS that does just that: https://hunter.io/ https://hunter.io/
openfuture 5y ago
The way I read that title makes me think he quit a "real job" (meatspace) to work in FAANG not that he was already a software developer.
thomas 5y ago
What's a good information source for this? Like is this just something built on the domain tools api? Or is more of a front end for dig? Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy.
- pul 5y ago
  Right now, it's just a glorified Dig wrapper. I'm slowly adding features that Dig is missing, like IP information (through ipinfo.io), favicons and logos. > Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy. Good to hear, thanks!
hwers 5y ago
I'm always curious how many visitors you have to get to reach $500 per month numbers from ads. I understand the author probably can't reveal exact numbers here but if anyone knows rough but real life numbers I'd be curious to hear (I haven't ever done ad based revenue myself and I don't trust CPM numbers I'd read by googling, or the spread is just too broad).
- chillfox 5y ago
  The spread is broad because the type of visitor (market), ad network, time on page, type of ad and amount of ads makes a huge difference.
- andris9 5y ago
  Just to compare, https://nodemailer.com https://nodemailer.com had 194k pageviews (42k “active users” as reported by Google Analytics, whatever that means) in January and the BuySellAds payout was $156.45
  - tppiotrowski 5y ago
    I've used nodemailer. Thanks for building it. I have similar stats on my personal project and those earnings are discouraging. Any luck with donations? I've used ko-fi with limited success. Thanks for putting some numbers out there.
    - collaborative 5y ago
      Very discouraging indeed. I gave ads a try on 6groups.com and quickly ran away from them. As an advertiser (because of some other online shops I run), I also know how much it costs to get your ads clicked on. The payout offered to affiliated sites by ad networks is a disgrace and definitely not worth the space and distraction they add
    - andris9 5y ago
      Github sponsors payout in January was $159 and one-off donations via Paypal $15. That makes the grand total of $330/mo. It was a regular month as well.
jasondigitized 5y ago
Kudos to you! I wish you all the success in the world. I greatly admire people who take this path and aren't trying to be the next unicorn.
- pul 5y ago
  Thanks Jason, I appreciate it :)
imgabe 5y ago
> Mobile game that divides the earth in hexagons Interesting that I hear about this twice in the space of a week or so. Neal Stephenson was talking about it on the Lex Fridman podcast too. Apparently it's not possible. You'll always need a certain number of pentagons to complete the tiling.
- _gtly 5y ago
  Some code that might help with hexagons here: https://observablehq.com/@nrabinowitz/h3-tutorial-heatmap-rendering https://observablehq.com/@nrabinowitz/h3-tutorial-heatmap-re...
  - throwoutway 5y ago
    This does not seem to address the pentagon issue though?
    - krebby 5y ago
      Yes, but there exists an orientation in which all of the pentagons are over water (h3 uses this). It's impossible to create a global tessellation with only hexagons.
- pushcx 5y ago
  Nah, you just cheat a little and the error is small enough to handwave: https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2017/bridges2017-237.pdf https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2017/bridges2017-237.pdf
  - imgabe 5y ago
    Classic engineer vs. mathematician mindset
    - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
      Perfect is the enemy of good vs. wars are fought over disputed boundaries. Depends on what's riding on it. It'd be "funny" if whatever gaps in humanity's best tesselation effort are marked as no-go zones, essentially non-existent to the digital / electronic world; Un-mappable therefore illegal to inhabit; there be dragons.
eatonphil 5y ago
Nice! I quit my job 8 months ago to build free data tools. https://github.com/multiprocessio https://github.com/multiprocessio
- stillblue 5y ago
  I just took a short look at it and seems very polished. You did it all in 8 months? I'm beyond impressed. Great job dude!!
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    Thank you!
- pul 5y ago
  That's really cool! I'm following you on Twitter to see how you approach it :) It's a similar problem space to what I'm doing with nslookup.io, but you've chosen a different angle. Super interested to see how it works out for you.
xhevahir 5y ago
Seems like the kind of thing that's a lot more feasible in a functioning welfare state like NL.
- weq 5y ago
  My job is to make web tools that people use for free. I can set my own hours, live whenever i like, and someone else shoulders the stress of keeping a buisness afloat. Its the world we live in. Once you break free of the box, your parents dreams, you can realise your own version of what "life is".
  - pul 5y ago
    What are you working on? Please reach out on Twitter to join our web tool makers community :) https://twitter.com/Ruurtjan https://twitter.com/Ruurtjan
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
it's interesting that the novel/hobby projects all failed. the ones that succeeded, are those that can be used for marketing by other companies (whoismyisp) or which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution. i was always into this idea of building mvp to test markets. but the main issue is getting an audience. often success is 98% luck and timing and 2% hard work.
- pul 5y ago
  > which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution. 100% this. I've completely moved away from trying to be novel. Pick a solution that is profitable, but you think you can improve. Execute it better and gain market share.
iRobbery 5y ago
gazelle-kopen.nl Would have expected this could rake in some SEO traffic though, but surprised that didnt work for you. Or maybe surprised isnt the right word, maybe i have the initial high hope for it when you registered it and tried it :)
- pul 5y ago
  Maybe I should have stuck with it for longer, or just made the site better. The idea was that the official Gazelle site listed their dealers behind a postal code search form, that couldn't be indexed by search engines. So I scraped it and presented each one on a separate page, with overview pages per city. Didn't manage to get a lot of traffic, but I was also super new to SEO back then.
anormalpapier 5y ago
Why is he saying he created Project Euler? Colin Hughes created Project Euler.
- pul 5y ago
  You're the second to misinterpret that, so I'll reformulate to make it clearer. I did project Euler exercises as a learning project.
hathym 5y ago
Please tell me how do you make money with nslookup? (because I have dozen other commands I'de like to menetize :)
- pul 5y ago
  I run ads on nslookup.io (400 USD/month) and an API (100 USD/month). Stats are here: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io https://plausible.io/nslookup.io
joejohns 5y ago
Is it hard making a living in the beginning?
- pul 5y ago
  I’m not yet making a living and it took me years to get to this point. I think I’ve got a reasonable shot to make a living off this now, though.
shanecleveland 5y ago
Your traffic is incredible. I would work to understand the business use cases better and create a B2B niche service tailored specifically to one or more of those (API, more detailed info, custom solution, etc.). I don't know that growing your traffic overall needs to be a target. Rather, catering to an existing segment and/or growing that segment may be a better use of time and resources.
jjav 5y ago
Maybe this is a "who whould ever use dropbox" question? I'm curious what is the use case for something like nslookup.io since I can more conveniently get the same info from the CLI? In any case congratulations for finding a use case!
- pul 5y ago
  > conveniently For many people it's more convenient to do DNS lookups on nslookup.io than googling the syntax and order of dig arguments, opening a terminal and entering it themselves. Plus, it can be convenient to get an overview of the popular record types, instead of doing 7 dig queries yourself. > the same info Nslookup.io provides more info than dig/nslookup CLIs: info about the A/AAAA IPs, logos for hosting providers, parsing DNS records, and more to come ;) > In any case congratulations for finding a use case! Thank you!
robinrheem 5y ago
It's so nice to see these examples are increasing every now and then. Hope to learn a lot and I also would like to know about the use cases of nslookup dot io. One thing that's coming out of my head would be if I would ought to make a non-targeting crawler of some sort and not implement my own dns crawling infrastructure and just use nslookup.io and just cache the results.
- pul 5y ago
  If you like these kinds of stories, check out indiehackers.com. I took a lot of inspiration from them, and was part of the reason I made the jump.
durmonski 5y ago
Hey. I'm cheering for you. Wishing you a lot of success! :))) Hopefully the next post will be about how you now make 4000 a month.

317 points by pul 5y ago

pul 5y ago

Hi HN! Ruurtjan here, from NsLookup.io. I've read plenty of these kinds of blog posts, and they've been a big motivator for me to take the jump. So I thought I'd share my story here as well. Thanks everyone, for giving me the confidence to give entrepreneurship a try. I'll hang around today to answer any questions, so ask me anything :)

hacknews20 5y ago
Thanks and good for you! Keep going.
mathgladiator 5y ago
Welcome to the club!

pul 5y ago

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too. Right now, we're living off our savings and my wife's salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I've recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD / month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I'm confident I can increase it over time. Ads have a bad connotation, mainly because they often track users across the web. Mine don't. For WhoIsMyISP.org, I've partnered with NordVPN, and have their ads with plain `<a href=...><img /></a>`. And for NsLookup.io, I've joined the Carbon network, which also doesn't have tracking.

DocTomoe 5y ago
I hope the ad images are also hosted on your server, or they still can be tracking. Not criticism. I applaud your approach. I just point out that running non-tracking ads is harder than you would believe.
- pul 5y ago
  Hmm, not that I've taken a second look, I noticed that I added a hidden image hosted on their servers when I implemented the ads. It's used for counting the ad impressions, but it looks like it drops a 1-day valid cookie as well :/
  - adolph 5y ago
    Good luck standing between those tricksy ad-folk and their quarry.
    - nr2x 5y ago
      It's called tracking for a reason.
  - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
    It's a little funny to me you added a literal tracking pixel to your website from a VPN company and then came to HN to preach that you don't do any tracking That said, due to third party cookie changes, tracking pixels have very limited usefulness these days and it's unlikely it actually tracks people over a full 1 day period
    - pul 5y ago
      I guess you're right.. And indeed, browsers fight back: https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-protections/ https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/01/26/supercookie-pro...
      - weird-eye-issue 5y ago
        Safari started the trend 2-3 years ago
stanislavb 5y ago
Good luck, mate! If you bother to verify NsLookup.io on SaaSHub, I can get it on its weekly newsletter. That could help you a bit. (just ping me by email/twitter once done). Cheers!
- pul 5y ago
  Thanks for the offer :) I already submitted it a while ago: https://www.saashub.com/nslookup-io-alternatives https://www.saashub.com/nslookup-io-alternatives
weird-eye-issue 5y ago
Are you not concerned that you are leaking exactly what domains people are looking up in realtime? If I used a service like that I would expect some degree of privacy that goes beyond this. It's crazy to me that you're doing this to be honest https://plausible.io/nslookup.io/pages?period=realtime https://plausible.io/nslookup.io/pages?period=realtime
- teh_klev 5y ago
  There is no privacy issue here, there aren't source IP addresses attached, you can't tell who's looking these up. It's up there with Amazon's (for example) "other people bought" recommendations, you can't tell who did the looking up. They're just domain names which are effectively public records. And even if you thought you registered a super secret domain name (no such thing), maybe the registrar looked it up, or some bot found it through brute force (if nslookup.io is open to bots).
  - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
    What if someone looks up an internal domain which is actually publicly exposed. Granted they shouldn’t be secret, doesn’t mean you should broadcast them publicly.
    - pul 5y ago
      Internal domains generally resolve to private IP ranges, so don't do any harm when broadcasted. Besides, many people use Chrome, and who knows what they do by default with browsing history.
      - hsbauauvhabzb 5y ago
        You’ve obviously never seen orgs with /16 IP ranges, or developers/ops accidentally screw up, for that matter. Chrome don’t actively publish nslookups on public sites. I think you’ve missed the point.
      - antonvs 5y ago
waffle_maniac 5y ago
Have you considered signing up as a Brave creator? Could generate more income from those that have auto contribute turned on.
- osrec 5y ago
  Do enough people use that browser to make it worthwhile?
  - dudus 5y ago
    No.
    - moepstar 5y ago
      Oh, only 50+ million monthly active users as of January 2022 - who will both earn BAT and, by default, contribute back automatically...
      - ffpip 5y ago
        BAT isn't turned on by default so the number will be a lot lower than 50 million. And I expect most people to turn off auto contribution to keep the money themselves or manually contribute to sites they like.
    - pul 5y ago
      I can confirm. I earn about 2-3 BAT (€1.5 - €2) each month for nslookup.io (without serving Brave ads) and whoismyisp.org (with Brave ads) combined. That's ~1M page views across all browsers. Not lucrative at all ;)
- pul 5y ago
  I have. In fact, you can check this for any site using nslookup.io ;) (so meta) See the TXT records at https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/nslookup.io https://www.nslookup.io/dns-records/nslookup.io
kingcharles 5y ago
I broke nslookup.io when I entered one of my emoji domains :)
- pul 5y ago
  Which one? Because I explicitly added support for that and tested it.
rogual 5y ago
FYI, WhoIsMyISP.org tells me the name of my city is my ISP, "also known as" the actual ISP name.

text2db 5y ago

I hope that you make more than your salary, how did you attract users to website? Its very hard to get users to visit your site. I have posted my site (https://text2db.com/ https://text2db.com/) on hackernews, product hunt and reddit for getting reviews but got very few views (guess the idea is bad?), please do recommend me tips on how to increase traffic for site. Thanks.

pul 5y ago
> I hope that you make more than your salary Not yet by a large margin, but it's going up slowly :) > how did you attract users to website? Currently, mainly through SEO. My stats are open [1], so you can see the percentage that comes in through search engines. In my case, there's a large search volume for 'nslookup', which is currently the largest chunk of traffic. An 'exact match domain' helped for sure. But in the end, Google will be able to gauge how well you're able to solve the problem that made people search for something. So an excellent product * the search volume * backlink profile * how well Google can understand what you're solving will approximate the number of users that visit your site. You can use tools like ahrefs [2] (which also has a free tools) to get a sense of the search volume and competition on those keywords. Hope that helps! [1]: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io https://plausible.io/nslookup.io [2]: https://ahrefs.com/ https://ahrefs.com/
- text2db 5y ago
  Awesome, thanks alot. :)
- scrapcode 5y ago
  I used to do a lot of research on SEO and the methods behind the madness of getting decent organic traffic, and it basically always boiled down to quality content built around targeted keywords, phrases, or related topics. The way I always imagined to accomplish this was to write or hire someone to write this content and present it in a blog format. It does not seem that you do this on these properties, so briefly what kind of SEO optimization can be continually done outside of that? Are you still writing content as a guest poster and generating reputable backlinks? Engaging communities that are focused around your topic and promoting through those channels in hopes of generating backlinks? Or am I just in left field with all of this and what I thought I knew about SEO?

replwoacause 5y ago

I like the simplicity and cleanliness of the designs on both sites. Nice job.

pul 5y ago
Thank you! Nice to hear that one of my explicit design goals worked out :) In my opinion, these kinds of tools, which you only need once in a while, need to take as little cognitive load as possible. People have something to get done, don't get in their way.

mdrzn 5y ago

Great domains, and the service is straight to the point. Good luck!

pul 5y ago
Thank you :) Even though it's straight to the point, there's so much more to do to help people fix their DNS issues faster. I'll try not to compromise on the simplicity while adding more information.

jimkri 5y ago

Congrats on quitting your job! Thats a goal of mine as well, and I really like NsLookup and how the page is structured. I have used domainbigdata.com a lot and like how they show Other TLDs. I've been trying to find tools that would show other domains that are owned or associated with the domain that was searched. I work with a lot of sales leads and I think having information on other domains a company owns is super powerful for mapping companies and also understand company acquisitions, most companies transfer ownership of domains when they are purchased. I have a question and ask: 1. There are quite a few tools online that do the same thing, long term what is your goal to differentiate? or where do you want to focus? 2. Other TLDs or Other Associated Domains, is this something that you would be able to find? 3. Can you determine from a DNS search if a domain is owned by a company or by a non-corporate entity (Blog, personal)? Also from your blog post, I don't know if you were looking for any responses but: Plan B - Stage 2: Sell an API to visitors. >I would purchase and use this for a email verification process. I would rather go with a smaller company than large Plan C - Stage 1: Make a one-off DNS dataset, give it away to founders, and find out how they'd use it and what they need. >I would use this with Email Domain verification and Email format Verification. I worked with data teams that had to find emails formats & domains, if they had the domains it would save a ton of time and cost. As an end user how I think about this cost is I if I find a domain and run a MX or DNS check on it I will save the results and try now to run it on that domain again. That is why I like this plan, but the API would be super helpful as well.

jasfi 5y ago
A really great goal. I'm trying to help people with this aim with recommendations on what to do, get your business model figured out, etc. https://cxo.industries https://cxo.industries
pul 5y ago
Thanks for your kind words :) > long term what is your goal to differentiate? or where do you want to focus? Most other tools have clunky UX, dated design, or are painfully slow. I'm differentiating in ease of use, clarity and speed. Still a lot to be done, but I think I'm already doing okay compared to other sites. > Other TLDs or Other Associated Domains, is this something that you would be able to find? Since GDPR, nearly all WHOIS queries get their owner details purged. You also can't link it based on resolving IP addresses, as many sites use a shared CDN. There might be some signals left, but definitely not enough to give any kind of meaningful coverage to make it useful. > Can you determine from a DNS search if a domain is owned by a company or by a non-corporate entity (Blog, personal)? No, for the same reason as above. Here you could scrape the site and look for 'about' sections and do some ML, but that'd be quite involved. > I would purchase and use this for a email verification process. What would you like to use DNS for in email verification? > Email format Verification As in, detect 'firstname.lastname' for 'john.doe@company.com'? There's already a SaaS that does just that: https://hunter.io/ https://hunter.io/

openfuture 5y ago

The way I read that title makes me think he quit a "real job" (meatspace) to work in FAANG not that he was already a software developer.

thomas 5y ago

What's a good information source for this? Like is this just something built on the domain tools api? Or is more of a front end for dig? Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy.

pul 5y ago
Right now, it's just a glorified Dig wrapper. I'm slowly adding features that Dig is missing, like IP information (through ipinfo.io), favicons and logos. > Congrats though, great looking site and it's super snappy. Good to hear, thanks!

hwers 5y ago

I'm always curious how many visitors you have to get to reach $500 per month numbers from ads. I understand the author probably can't reveal exact numbers here but if anyone knows rough but real life numbers I'd be curious to hear (I haven't ever done ad based revenue myself and I don't trust CPM numbers I'd read by googling, or the spread is just too broad).

chillfox 5y ago
The spread is broad because the type of visitor (market), ad network, time on page, type of ad and amount of ads makes a huge difference.
andris9 5y ago
Just to compare, https://nodemailer.com https://nodemailer.com had 194k pageviews (42k “active users” as reported by Google Analytics, whatever that means) in January and the BuySellAds payout was $156.45
- tppiotrowski 5y ago
  I've used nodemailer. Thanks for building it. I have similar stats on my personal project and those earnings are discouraging. Any luck with donations? I've used ko-fi with limited success. Thanks for putting some numbers out there.
  - collaborative 5y ago
    Very discouraging indeed. I gave ads a try on 6groups.com and quickly ran away from them. As an advertiser (because of some other online shops I run), I also know how much it costs to get your ads clicked on. The payout offered to affiliated sites by ad networks is a disgrace and definitely not worth the space and distraction they add
  - andris9 5y ago
    Github sponsors payout in January was $159 and one-off donations via Paypal $15. That makes the grand total of $330/mo. It was a regular month as well.

jasondigitized 5y ago

Kudos to you! I wish you all the success in the world. I greatly admire people who take this path and aren't trying to be the next unicorn.

pul 5y ago
Thanks Jason, I appreciate it :)

imgabe 5y ago

> Mobile game that divides the earth in hexagons Interesting that I hear about this twice in the space of a week or so. Neal Stephenson was talking about it on the Lex Fridman podcast too. Apparently it's not possible. You'll always need a certain number of pentagons to complete the tiling.

_gtly 5y ago
Some code that might help with hexagons here: https://observablehq.com/@nrabinowitz/h3-tutorial-heatmap-rendering https://observablehq.com/@nrabinowitz/h3-tutorial-heatmap-re...
- throwoutway 5y ago
  This does not seem to address the pentagon issue though?
  - krebby 5y ago
    Yes, but there exists an orientation in which all of the pentagons are over water (h3 uses this). It's impossible to create a global tessellation with only hexagons.
pushcx 5y ago
Nah, you just cheat a little and the error is small enough to handwave: https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2017/bridges2017-237.pdf https://archive.bridgesmathart.org/2017/bridges2017-237.pdf
- imgabe 5y ago
  Classic engineer vs. mathematician mindset
  - BLKNSLVR 5y ago
    Perfect is the enemy of good vs. wars are fought over disputed boundaries. Depends on what's riding on it. It'd be "funny" if whatever gaps in humanity's best tesselation effort are marked as no-go zones, essentially non-existent to the digital / electronic world; Un-mappable therefore illegal to inhabit; there be dragons.

eatonphil 5y ago

Nice! I quit my job 8 months ago to build free data tools. https://github.com/multiprocessio https://github.com/multiprocessio

stillblue 5y ago
I just took a short look at it and seems very polished. You did it all in 8 months? I'm beyond impressed. Great job dude!!
- eatonphil 5y ago
  Thank you!
pul 5y ago
That's really cool! I'm following you on Twitter to see how you approach it :) It's a similar problem space to what I'm doing with nslookup.io, but you've chosen a different angle. Super interested to see how it works out for you.

xhevahir 5y ago

Seems like the kind of thing that's a lot more feasible in a functioning welfare state like NL.

weq 5y ago
My job is to make web tools that people use for free. I can set my own hours, live whenever i like, and someone else shoulders the stress of keeping a buisness afloat. Its the world we live in. Once you break free of the box, your parents dreams, you can realise your own version of what "life is".
- pul 5y ago
  What are you working on? Please reach out on Twitter to join our web tool makers community :) https://twitter.com/Ruurtjan https://twitter.com/Ruurtjan

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

it's interesting that the novel/hobby projects all failed. the ones that succeeded, are those that can be used for marketing by other companies (whoismyisp) or which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution. i was always into this idea of building mvp to test markets. but the main issue is getting an audience. often success is 98% luck and timing and 2% hard work.

pul 5y ago
> which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution. 100% this. I've completely moved away from trying to be novel. Pick a solution that is profitable, but you think you can improve. Execute it better and gain market share.

iRobbery 5y ago

gazelle-kopen.nl Would have expected this could rake in some SEO traffic though, but surprised that didnt work for you. Or maybe surprised isnt the right word, maybe i have the initial high hope for it when you registered it and tried it :)

pul 5y ago
Maybe I should have stuck with it for longer, or just made the site better. The idea was that the official Gazelle site listed their dealers behind a postal code search form, that couldn't be indexed by search engines. So I scraped it and presented each one on a separate page, with overview pages per city. Didn't manage to get a lot of traffic, but I was also super new to SEO back then.

anormalpapier 5y ago

Why is he saying he created Project Euler? Colin Hughes created Project Euler.

pul 5y ago
You're the second to misinterpret that, so I'll reformulate to make it clearer. I did project Euler exercises as a learning project.

hathym 5y ago

Please tell me how do you make money with nslookup? (because I have dozen other commands I'de like to menetize :)

pul 5y ago
I run ads on nslookup.io (400 USD/month) and an API (100 USD/month). Stats are here: https://plausible.io/nslookup.io https://plausible.io/nslookup.io

joejohns 5y ago

Is it hard making a living in the beginning?

pul 5y ago
I’m not yet making a living and it took me years to get to this point. I think I’ve got a reasonable shot to make a living off this now, though.

shanecleveland 5y ago

Your traffic is incredible. I would work to understand the business use cases better and create a B2B niche service tailored specifically to one or more of those (API, more detailed info, custom solution, etc.). I don't know that growing your traffic overall needs to be a target. Rather, catering to an existing segment and/or growing that segment may be a better use of time and resources.

jjav 5y ago

Maybe this is a "who whould ever use dropbox" question? I'm curious what is the use case for something like nslookup.io since I can more conveniently get the same info from the CLI? In any case congratulations for finding a use case!

pul 5y ago
> conveniently For many people it's more convenient to do DNS lookups on nslookup.io than googling the syntax and order of dig arguments, opening a terminal and entering it themselves. Plus, it can be convenient to get an overview of the popular record types, instead of doing 7 dig queries yourself. > the same info Nslookup.io provides more info than dig/nslookup CLIs: info about the A/AAAA IPs, logos for hosting providers, parsing DNS records, and more to come ;) > In any case congratulations for finding a use case! Thank you!

robinrheem 5y ago

It's so nice to see these examples are increasing every now and then. Hope to learn a lot and I also would like to know about the use cases of nslookup dot io. One thing that's coming out of my head would be if I would ought to make a non-targeting crawler of some sort and not implement my own dns crawling infrastructure and just use nslookup.io and just cache the results.

pul 5y ago
If you like these kinds of stories, check out indiehackers.com. I took a lot of inspiration from them, and was part of the reason I made the jump.

durmonski 5y ago

Hey. I'm cheering for you. Wishing you a lot of success! :))) Hopefully the next post will be about how you now make 4000 a month.