I built a website that draws 144 rectangles, where each rectangle represents 10 minutes of your day. Some people even use it every day!

https://rectangles.app

ruby on rails, sqlite, sidekiq + redis, and caddy, all hosted on a single hetzner dedicated server. no front-end frameworks, only tailwind.

tarsnap and restic for offsite backups.

I push code to github; then capistrano (think bash script with some bells and whistles) deploys that code to the server and restarts systemd processes.

I've been running this saas business for 3+ years and wouldn't change a thing. I'm also working on a new business with the exact same stack.

in 2021, after selling my unsuccessful saas business, i began searching for the next thing. as a result of my research, i noticed several things:

* Notion.so had a growing user base, and customers loved it

* More and more people (and businesses) were storing important info in their workspaces

* Notion users were publicly complaining about the lack of a decent backup option (i.e. they cared enough to complain)

* Notion announced that they would be launching an API soon

Basically, there was untapped demand and no competition whatsoever. I was undecided between 2 ideas, so I built 2 landing pages and started talking about both. I noticed that one of them received more attention than the other. As soon as I gained the early access to the API, I started building.

The rest is history.

https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm - a forum for small internet business owners. we still have the archive tho!

if you're running a small operation, as I do, there aren't many reasons to use Big Cloud.

i've been running my tiny business on the same provider as op for more than a year, and i've done very little maintenance to keep things up and running. granted, you need to set things up the first time, but after that, it just keeps chugging along.

for folks running their own businesses, have you managed to switch from xero to ledger/beancount? anything to look out for?

xero keeps raising their prices every few months, which is annoying (the whole attitude of 'you won't switch anyway, so we'll do whatever we want').

I'm in my 3rd year with Notion Backups, helping Notion users back up and restore their workspaces:

https://notionbackups.com

I'm going through something similar right now. They disabled my business account with no warnings, and now I'll spend my entire weekend cleaning up this mess.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139559

my expectations for them were low anyway, but good Lord...

It definitely wasn't a usage limit since I have fewer than 200 customers. I have a verified app, which has been up and running for almost three years now.

I suspect it happened either due to accessing my account from an unknown IP or creating and editing a Profit and Loss statement in Google Sheets, which normally shouldn't trigger any alarms, but algorithms move in mysterious ways...

accessing your account from another part of the world can trigger the kill switch.

What's baffling is that I received no communication whatsoever, not even from Google Cloud.

I already had low expectations from Google, but this is unprecedented even for them.

wtf

Is this documented somewhere? Can one notify them ahead of time?

as someone who's living off of the tiny business income, there are plenty of opportunities to be found on the internets. some of these opportunities have a shorter shelf life than others, and that's okay; you can still make a killing before moving on to the next wave.

you probably won't start ranking as easily as you could have 10 or 20 years ago, and there is lots of competition these days — that's true.