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Sure. My company sells Conveyor, a CLI build tool for deploying desktop apps. https://hydraulic.dev/ https://hydraulic.dev/ (yes the domain name is silly, reb

Sure. My company sells Conveyor, a CLI build tool for deploying desktop apps. https://hydraulic.dev/ https://hydraulic.dev/ (yes the domain name is silly, rebranding is on the todo list but customers come first). It has plenty of customers paying a $45/month subscription, some of which are big name companies that unfortunately don't like to have their logo put on the web page. But it's a CLI tool, and it's monetized. What do you want to know?

AznHisoka 2y ago
What’s wrong with that domain name? I personally view it as OK and even a bit memorable
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  The problem is that the company is named Hydraulic, but it only has one product, so it's confused branding. I think a lot of startups make this mistake so I don't beat myself up about it too much. The product has a different name to the company, but it's the product name people know, and so then they have to realign the branding around that - something I've never done. For better or worse there are enough users and customers (it's free for open source devs), that fixing problems and addressing feature requests/support tickets tends to suck up the available time. I still live in hope that one day I will drain the high priority queue enough to be able to reorganize the docs and redo the web presence.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Basecamp the company changed their names after their main product, Basecamp, became successful. They only changed it back when they had more than one successful product. I wouldn't worry about your company name to be honest.
  - ericb 2y ago
    I like it too. Memorable is good! Why not just put Hydraulic in front of the name of each other product? Hydraulic Deploy. Hydraulic Build. Etc. Seems scalable.
ludovicianul 2y ago
I was curious about the journey. It's quite a niche market (in my view at least) and harder to monetise than SaaS.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Really? I think it's easier to monetize! There are tons of zombie or dying SaaS firms out there with large monthly AWS bills due to overbuilt infrastructure, yet hardly any users. Conveyor has very small server footprint and I use a rented Hetzner machine as the primary server for everything (there are backup replicas for the licensing servers). Customers pay for the CPU load, disk storage costs etc because it runs locally. So the ongoing baseline costs are very low. There's also no costs involved with handling customer data, which can be significant for a SaaS, much lower demands on the security and enterprise compliance side because we don't have any sensitive access and so on. It's definitely a niche product area. I didn't pick it because I thought it'd make me rich. It was a sort of retirement/burnout project, I was tired of doing projects in organizations or groups that ended up killing themselves through political activism and backstabbing. I was fortunate enough to be able to self fund the company until the product was mature, without needing a VC raise, so I was able to do things exactly as I wanted to. The code is clean, the customers are great: they are people just like me so we understand each other very well. The nice thing about Conveyor is that it's such an unfashionable and small market, there's almost no competition and isn't going to be any. It doesn't yet replace a tech salary but it grows steadily as a business, and I don't have to worry about some VC-pumped startup giving away my product for free for a decade, killing me and later discovering they don't know how to monetize themselves.
  - ludovicianul 2y ago
    Thanks!

AznHisoka 2y ago

What’s wrong with that domain name? I personally view it as OK and even a bit memorable

mike_hearn 2y ago
The problem is that the company is named Hydraulic, but it only has one product, so it's confused branding. I think a lot of startups make this mistake so I don't beat myself up about it too much. The product has a different name to the company, but it's the product name people know, and so then they have to realign the branding around that - something I've never done. For better or worse there are enough users and customers (it's free for open source devs), that fixing problems and addressing feature requests/support tickets tends to suck up the available time. I still live in hope that one day I will drain the high priority queue enough to be able to reorganize the docs and redo the web presence.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Basecamp the company changed their names after their main product, Basecamp, became successful. They only changed it back when they had more than one successful product. I wouldn't worry about your company name to be honest.
- ericb 2y ago
  I like it too. Memorable is good! Why not just put Hydraulic in front of the name of each other product? Hydraulic Deploy. Hydraulic Build. Etc. Seems scalable.

ludovicianul 2y ago

I was curious about the journey. It's quite a niche market (in my view at least) and harder to monetise than SaaS.

mike_hearn 2y ago
Really? I think it's easier to monetize! There are tons of zombie or dying SaaS firms out there with large monthly AWS bills due to overbuilt infrastructure, yet hardly any users. Conveyor has very small server footprint and I use a rented Hetzner machine as the primary server for everything (there are backup replicas for the licensing servers). Customers pay for the CPU load, disk storage costs etc because it runs locally. So the ongoing baseline costs are very low. There's also no costs involved with handling customer data, which can be significant for a SaaS, much lower demands on the security and enterprise compliance side because we don't have any sensitive access and so on. It's definitely a niche product area. I didn't pick it because I thought it'd make me rich. It was a sort of retirement/burnout project, I was tired of doing projects in organizations or groups that ended up killing themselves through political activism and backstabbing. I was fortunate enough to be able to self fund the company until the product was mature, without needing a VC raise, so I was able to do things exactly as I wanted to. The code is clean, the customers are great: they are people just like me so we understand each other very well. The nice thing about Conveyor is that it's such an unfashionable and small market, there's almost no competition and isn't going to be any. It doesn't yet replace a tech salary but it grows steadily as a business, and I don't have to worry about some VC-pumped startup giving away my product for free for a decade, killing me and later discovering they don't know how to monetize themselves.
- ludovicianul 2y ago
  Thanks!