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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!