YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Running a bootstrapped SaaS for 20 years with my brother

59 points whyleyc 1 day ago 16 comments

theanonymousone 1 hour ago | parent

Really happy for you. It's my dream to run such a business for so long, as a side, with a real user base, and not for money.

CalRobert 1 hour ago | parent

How is it a business if not for money?

throwaway83772 35 minutes ago | parent

I interpreted it as "enough to live a comfortable life".

Money is part of how you get there, but it is not a goal in itself. Many start businesses where money is the main goal, and where the amount that you are satisfied with inevitably shifts once you get richer

teiferer 3 minutes ago | parent

Considering that their cheapest pricing is $12 (per month, 1 month minimum) and they claim 550 million users, either they made tons of riches or the numbers are to be questioned. I leave it to you to estimate which is more likely.

kubbity 1 hour ago | parent

Hi. Congratulations and thanks; it just happened that today I needed an .mp3 to .txt conversion and used your site. Nice to see it here now. All the best!

timcobb 22 minutes ago | parent

> I needed an .mp3 to .txt conversion

?

guydoom 10 minutes ago | parent

Also known as transcription, I suppose.

piker 1 hour ago | parent

How has revenue changed during the AI period? Are you guys able to maintain or grow with the rise of coding agents?

[edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]

f311a 41 minutes ago | parent

I’m pretty sure more than 90 percent of their audience never heard of Claude.

They are regular users, not developers.

FearNotDaniel 24 minutes ago | parent

Respectfully, it sounds as if your assumptions about the market for LLM/Agent tools is out of date by a long way. I don’t have any stats but it’s easy to observe that Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT et al are aggressively marketing their products to non developer business users, and pretty much everyone I know who is non technical has heard of at least one of those and uses it regularly in their work.

teiferer 38 minutes ago | parent

Always glad to see success stories. But some stuff does not check out.

> Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch,

There are 8.3 billion people on earth. You are saying that about 1 in 42 have used your service? I had never heard of it and I don't know anybody who had. And that's a sample that should be biased in your favor. Sorry, does not pass the smell test.

Or maybe they were not unique visitors, containing duplicates? How many? This makes me skeptical of the remaining statistics on the page.

> converting over 766 million files. We now process over 1 million API requests per day.

1 million per day now and 766 million over 20 years? At the current rate you'd achieve that in about 2 years. This would indicate a rapid growth in the last couple years or even just months. It is unclear why that would be reasonable. Especially since you'd probably have emphasized this explosion more if your service was essentially dormant for 19 years and just recently went through the roof. (Sth like "how we handled 100x growth of our SaaS business over 3 months")

After these two data points I stopped reading. Something doesn't feel right.

MiscIdeaMaker99 36 minutes ago | parent

Who cares?

teiferer 30 minutes ago | parent

You don't care whether an article that ends up on HN front page contains legit information?

txtlog 16 minutes ago | parent

Maybe because it smells like self promotion? Anyway, good work if it's actually true

throwaway83772 29 minutes ago | parent

Looking at their website they support file uploads and API. They probably count those separately.

The numbers make sense to me, because I assume an API is used for high volume processing by other businesses and manual upload of files is done by individuals

They may have been inaccurate in their description, but that's what happens when regular people write articles and not scientists, engineers or LLM

sakjur 23 minutes ago | parent

Each file should be represented by at least three API requests, one to upload the file, one or more to check whether it's done, and one to download it. Together with the other calls of their API, I'd guess a files-to-API request ratio in the order of 1:10 rather than 1:1.