The first business I started never gained traction, so I sold it in 2021 (which was a completely different time compared to now).
Notion had announced that they'd launch a beta version of their API, so while waiting for the early access, I built a landing page, login/signup, and all other plumbing for the web app.
It was a rather underwhelming launch (both for the API and my business), but I gained my first customer within a month.
Honestly, it's been a slog running this business (Notion's API is surprisingly hard to work with, so it seemed that I was stuck for months on end), so knowing what I know now, I'd probably have started a different business. My burnout didn't help either.
Claude has been incredibly helpful these last few months in solving esoteric undocumented edge cases that were plaguing the codebase for years.
I have a healthy MRR/growth rate right now and the biggest product in the niche, so I'm grateful for that.
Ditto but for Claude -- blows GPT out of the water. Much better in coding and solving physics problems from the images (in foreign languages). GPT couldn't even read the image. The only annoying thing is that if you use Opus for coding, your usage will fill up pretty fast.
Notion's built-in PDF exporter is quite disappointing to say the least, so I built (well, Claude did) an alternative. It uses a hosted puppeteer service in the background (browserless.io) and allows for more customization.
I've been using Hetzner for my business and have been quite happy with it so far. I recently migrated to a slightly larger bare metal server with 64GB RAM, 16 cores, 4 SSDs (6.5TB in total), and unlimited bandwidth for $96 bucks.
I've been a customer of Big Cloud and Small Cloud (DO, Linode).
I've been running small SaaS businesses since 2019 with varying degrees of success (currently running a profitable one).
I never really got into JS front-end frameworks. The sheer complexity, and the idea of maintaining essentially 2 apps as a solo dev, never really appealed to me. The furthest I got into JS world was tinkering with Rails' Stimulus framework.
Rails, SQLite, Redis, all hosted on a bare metal server (Hetzner). Deploy with Capistrano (a fancy bash script). Tailwind for styling -- i heavily use their components/templates, which is quite convenient.
i built something similar in spirit a while back, but instead of a bar, it uses 144 rectangles, each representing 10 minutes of your day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30881096
I've been working on my business for 4 years now, sometimes taking extended breaks when I run out of motivation.
Lately, I've noticed that my (beefy) server is always clogged with background jobs that tend to run longer than they used to. It’s started impacting operations, as customers have been complaining about their backups running a bit late.
We're network bound, so I can't just add more compute power (Notion's API has a rate limit of 2700 req/15 mins). I suspect we're being getting rate limited left and right, which is causing these delays.
* SEO - I started way before I launched the product. I wrote an article on how to back up a Notion workspace using their (then newly-launched) API. It still brings in traffic to this day. Granted, there was almost no competition when I started
* r/Notion subreddit - only in relevant threads when someone is looking for a solution. After some time, some of my customers began recommending this tool to others
It's mostly feature complete at this point, but there are still some rough edges.
Notion's API is far from complete, and updates are few and far between. This has led me to work around some of its limitations in creative ways. For example, there is still no way to create top-level pages in Notion, which makes restores impossible. Instead, I ask customers to create a top-level page themselves and write backups there.
Personally, the hardest part of working on a project for an extended period is not getting burnt out repeteadly. Sometimes it helps to work on something else, and other times you just need to step away from the game entirely for a while
https://notionbackups.com
The first business I started never gained traction, so I sold it in 2021 (which was a completely different time compared to now).
Notion had announced that they'd launch a beta version of their API, so while waiting for the early access, I built a landing page, login/signup, and all other plumbing for the web app.
It was a rather underwhelming launch (both for the API and my business), but I gained my first customer within a month.
Honestly, it's been a slog running this business (Notion's API is surprisingly hard to work with, so it seemed that I was stuck for months on end), so knowing what I know now, I'd probably have started a different business. My burnout didn't help either.
Claude has been incredibly helpful these last few months in solving esoteric undocumented edge cases that were plaguing the codebase for years.
I have a healthy MRR/growth rate right now and the biggest product in the niche, so I'm grateful for that.