Ask HN: What business service would you pay $100/mo for
Published in 2017, this chronicle by @jscodermonk details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Key verified financial milestone: $100/mo.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 57 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 69 comments
An AI or concierge who reads all my emails, Slack, iMessage, WhatsApp messages, and alerts me when something is very important right now, and otherwise lets me fetch aggregated inquiries when I have time to. The data I get should all have a 2-3 sentence TLDR so I can quickly skip them, and provide some sensible replies I can choose to accept or decline inquiries. Long informative WhatsApp/Slack conversations should be greatly reduced in length to just tell the story without omitting vital details. Since many emails require some kind of action from me, the non-complex ones should be doable via the AI or concierge, e.g. schedule a call or put reminders in the calendar.
Example: A potential customer and I want to go to lunch. They write me an email asking for the exact place and time. The service recognizes that this is quite urgent, and presents me a digest of the message, plus a selection box for time slots (with my schedule overlaid for context), and 3 of my favorite places. I choose a slot and a restaurant, and the service writes the answer in a polite tone, matching my writing and verbosity style. The potential customer then writes back an email saying they are looking forward to the meeting. The service knows from previous incidents that I prefer a canned response in that case and auto-replies "Looking forward", and adds a suffix the calendar entry "- confirmed".
It would be worth it just for the feeling of not being alone with that amount of messages crashing in on me every day. A personal assistant for everyone.
Better internal documentation hosting.
I want something that can pull in documentation generated from code (from tools like godoc or javadoc), README files checked into code, plus other more wiki style documentation.
With all this documentation in one place, I want it to be smart about helping me deal with dead links and suggest pages that might need update when code updates. For example, say a wiki page references running a command with a certain flag. If I check in a change removing that flag from that command, the wiki should let me know that the page might need to be updated.
Ideally, this wiki would also have a stack-overflow -like Q&A feature to reduce the time spent helping other team members.
(Assuming a few employees at least)
Accounting system, Timesheets, payroll system, backup service, cell phone/internet plans, City Centre meeting rooms that can be booked online, HR services (measure employee satisfaction etc.), fruit delivery to the office, flower delivery to the office, excellent quality VOIP with screen sharing.
There are many more, but above are just a few that I'd consider worth it.
Probably something that would lead me into a new profession or 2x my salary rate.
Some things come into mind:
-I pay $20/month for videos to learn 3D modeling and animation
-I payed for a while a subscription to treehouse, where I could learn mobile and web development
-$40 dollars for a book to learn OpenCV3
It would be an easier question to ask what would a business pay $100/month for.
I have a few different types of outdoor flowers. I spend enough time on maintaining them and a lawn. I would pay 100 a month to have two 30 minute sessions with a really experienced gardener who would show up and help me with all of the different seasonal issues.
I have heard you could have roses blooming all summer if you care for them right. I have no clue on how to do this.