This thread is really good and just what I was looking for - thanks!

What makes you want to use Elixir, Phoenix, and LiveView? I've never even heard of these before

Back when I dabbled in web dev in college, people only talked about the MERN stack lol

For an audience filled with hackers and founders, I'd love to get some feedback:

• How helpful/valuable this is? • What type of businesses/stories are best? • Optimal word count/read time

Thanks!

Sorry, I interviewed Ivan and he said roughly 90% of the revenue comes from ads.

I also asked him if he considered creating his own header bidding system, but he said this wasn’t worth it

Look at photopea.com/ads.txt. He's allowed most of adtech to sell his traffic.

Ok nice thanks for the clarification

This is a great takeaway! In short, I think it just starts with making people money.

Then you just have to find your slice

Given that it was the mid-2000s, I think dot com was fairly positive to be the general assumption.

But thanks for the feedback, I'll make sure I clarify in future posts

I’d also avoid capitalizing any part of the domain name.

Hi, I'm the OP. I have no connection with the founder actually. I just like to research success stories like this to help inform and inspire people

I also don't mean to bring harm to the founder. I'm sure he's created scrapers, historical data, and built loyalty that's difficult to replicate

If there's something about this story that I got wrong or if it wasn't as helpful as I intended, do please let me know though!

This is actually really interesting to hear.

I always hear the argument "you don't need a fancy website or UI, when I started my site/app looked like ___"

These people created MVPs in 2010. You're now competing with MVPs that can be built with way more features, the latest tech stacks, and more in the same period of time.

This can proably be attributed to the barrier for entry for competition being so much lower , so the definition of an MVP has changed. And equally, expectations from end users have risen. Recent anecdotal example of this is the frenetic pace of development in the ML/AI space with opensource tools like Stable Diffusion practically almost rendering moot the business model of OpenAI’s DALLE-2.

To win out MVPs have to either be a value proposition currently not available that people need, or to win a popularity contest based on UX, design and branding. That there are still project management tools being developed and succeeding in a saturated market tells me that the popularity contest never really stops.

I also had a successful SAAS around that period while my later ones failed.

Start a SAAS in a new market, not an established one. Back then every market was wide open.

A lot of the stuff is automated at this point. Datasets are pulled automatically and website scrapers have been built for 15+ years.

Gary Brewer probably just maintains the system by himself these days.