This is a great answer, thank you! Do you have any suggestions on how to "find a market"? What did you do, if you can share that? I think that would be incredibly helpful for the OP and many others.
Firstly, I should say, there's no "formula" here. If there was I probably wouldn't post it on the internet :) Luck plays a part. (But you can work to give yourself more chance of good luck.)
If I had to try and distil it down, we dabbled a bit here an there, but what ultimately made the difference was "marketing". In the sense that we travelled quite a lot in the beginning, went looking for distributors (in international markets), tried to connect with potential customers wherever they hung out, and so on.
For example we make plug-ins to a very niche tool - but the users of that tool would have (in person) user groups - typically 10 to 15 people or so. I travelled the world going to those group meetings, organising meetups in places that didn't have them, showing an interest, and of course selling plugins. Today our user base is "established" and I hardly ever travel anymore.
For a major commercial product I visited similar markets to ours, knocked on the doors of distributors, tried to find people who wanted to integrate our product into their market. I failed a lot but succeeded twice, and those 2 have been paying us lots of money every year for 20 years as they make sales.
Your approach may vary. Start locally. Talk to shop keepers, restaurants, businesses, charities, schools and so on. Look for markets that are not serviced (which is different to where the person is just too cheap, or adverse to tech for other reasons.)
Of course it's a LOT harder now to find unserviced markets. There's a lot more software out there now than there was when I started out. Ultimately though it's about connecting with people - real people not just sending out spam emails. And so meeting the right person at the right time is "lucky". But if you're not out there luck can't work with you. You need to give luck a chance.
> Firstly, I should say, there's no "formula" here.
There are a lot of variables, and luck does play a big role. But with that said, there is something very akin to a "formula" at the high level. That being Steve Blank's "Customer Development" methodology, as laid out in The Four Steps to the Epiphany.[1]
Sorry, that is explained in the linked article from Codeberg, but I just added this sentence in the beginning as well: "Attackers hijacked the commenting system to mention other users and use the email notifications to include hate speech."
Codeberg is a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) alternative to GitHub, in a way. Not sure if that's what you were asking about.
There are many other ways to prevent or mitigate this specific kind of situation, as were suggested in Codeberg (Forgejo is technically the software it builds upon), like limiting email notifications to a number of mentions/people, adding a "report" button in the comments, sending notifications in smaller batches, but in reality, while these limit the attack surface area, it'll still go out to someone initially, whereas with content moderation, it's much less likely it'll go out to _anyone_. I see those as _complementary_ to automated content moderation.
How serendipitous! I did an Ask HN last week [1] trying to get platform creators to talk about this without much success. In any case, I've built a solution for links and emails, with an API [2], in case that helps. No subscription and I'm happy to provide some credits for free, for you to test it. Reach out if you're interested!
Thanks! It was initially, and our first early users were individuals, but we received a few comments that this functionality would be more valuable and useful for platforms, so we're also exploring that now, with a couple of platform customers already!
Thanks for that input! I've used it before as well, it was really good for images indeed, though I haven't had a chance to compare it with OpenAI's Vision offers.
I've used RSS since Google Reader, then Feedly, then Flipboard. I eventually got more concerned about privacy and moved to self-hosting. I tried a few tools, built some, and ended up with NextCloud's News app, but when I built my own alternative to NextCloud [1], I made sure to build a "better version" of what I wanted from an RSS reader. If the feed has a short summary, it fetches the whole article and strips out all HTML, and if I want to read more, I can jump to the website/article, otherwise it's usually good enough for me.
I also try to never follow more than 10 feeds (right now I'm at 12 because a couple only publish 2-3x year). I only have a few really interesting things to read every day. FOMO was real when I started doing this years ago with NextCloud, but I learned to deal with that. I love this setup.
If you don't need/want integrations but want privacy and full control of your data with simplicity and ease of adding expenses, I can recommend Budget Zen [1], which I have built and have been using myself for over four years, now.
It's end-to-end encrypted, open source, and you can self-host it.
When you open it, you can see with a simple green/red bar with how much you've spent and how much you have left for the month (for the whole month and per budget), in case that helps.
I can get this started with a couple of projects that I've had running for over 3 years and have less than 20 customers combined (roughly $50 / month total):
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