
I used LAMP to make a SaaS app with $3700/month profit - mskvsk
https://medium.com/@moskovski/i-used-lamp-to-make-a-saas-with-3700-mo-profit-heres-how-1c47033900e9#.ik5zvaj7l
======
jeffehobbs
"Anyway, I always hated manual labor and decided to make a little tool to help
me scrape the posts of my competitors and publish them to my group on a
regular basis.”

Other things you must hate: morality and ethics.

~~~
humanrebar
> I’d also removed the posts that were obviously copyrighted.

I'm not a lawyer, but in American copyright law, anything published is assumed
copyrighted by _someone_ , though it may not be clear exactly who.

I'm especially not an international copyright lawyer, so I can't say how
typical that is. Point being, you'll get in _legal_ trouble for doing this.
You _might_ win a lawsuit if what you are scraping is not copyrightable (raw
facts).

Anyway, OP might not be in the US, so maybe all this doesn't apply, but it's
generally good manners to ask someone before you copy their work, yes.

~~~
jorams
Because of the Berne Convention[1], that's how it works in the vast majority
of the world.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention)

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Existenceblinks
This simple story (I know the whole story is not simple especially ones can
make profit) gives me some hope. I am building a service by using
elixir/phoenix (yeah it seems an opposite direction to the OP's) and is very
frustrated from making decision in every module or line of code because my
obsession of good practice!

Thank you for sharing. I will be relaxing, writing shit and getting the
service done.

~~~
mskvsk
The responces like yours give me immense satisfaction. That's the reason I
wrote it.

Thanks a lot.

------
asadlionpk
Please don't listen to the naysayers here. You saw an opportunity and acted on
it. The problem of copyright here is of Facebook itself, they deliberately
allow this to happen to increase their engagement numbers. It is well-
documented at many places.

~~~
xiaoma
The OP was on VK, a Russian platform where full downloads of copyrighted
movies and songs were available until very recently (much as was the case in
China with Baidu and Youku/Tudou). Actually I think Baidu _still_ offers
copyrighted MP3s and PDFs and charges for it.

It's true that FB (and previously YouTube) played fast and loose with US
copyright laws, but it doesn't even come close to what is standard in Russia
or China.

I don't think it's any fairer to pile on and attack a _person_ playing within
the rules of their local culture that it would be to attack westerners for how
most of their meat is produced or how many cars they own. So many things in
the world beg for moral outrage—I'd rather save mine for actual suffering
rather than Russian social media marketing getting scraped.

~~~
diimdeep
VK still offers almost any MP3 you can imagine, slightly less than than Movies
and PDFs, and much more than that adult video content. At same time 90% of
Russia using VK. You don't need to imagine that, it is reality.

------
happy-go-lucky
> The top cause of death for indie startups is failure to delegate the tasks
> you're not good at and being overtaken by more social players.

Lesson learned.

~~~
mskvsk
It's too bad that it took me 2 years to learn that one. Oh well, better late
than never.

~~~
codesushi42
Kudos to your success. Refreshing to see a SAAS that generates enough revenue
for you to live off of instead of an overvalued SV company with no profit.

~~~
mskvsk
Thanks! And I think you're absolutely right, people got a bit tired of all
this unicorn nonsense.

------
wopwopwop
OP don't listen to the jelly haters. If you were making $100k/mo each of these
hypocrites would get knocked off their high horses and copy you. Well done,
congratulations!

~~~
mskvsk
Thank you so much!

------
crispyambulance
Totally lost here.

What service is this SaaS actually selling? What are people paying money for?

~~~
adventured
I'm equally lost. I can't tell what exactly the service is offering for sale
or the point of it. Usually when I see these low sales service posts (small
side projects), I expect to see something clever or unique, that's the only
reason to pay attention to something yielding a small amount of sales. If
you're going to tell me all you did was scrape and clone with a routine LAMP
setup, I don't get the point of the post.

~~~
brokenmachine
AFAIK, the point is that you can make money just by scraping and cloning using
a routine LAMP setup.

I found that interesting just by virtue of the idea that people would pay just
to get more useless "content" for their groups.

I suppose it's just automating a curated list.

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imaginenore
So you steal content and publish it as your own. You might as well torrent
movies, music and books, and sell them on your website. Way more profitable.

~~~
angry-hacker
It is profitable. Go ahead and do it, not all countries have same laws about
copyright.

All the big companies break laws and are unethical.. Youtube and copyright,
Uber and 'disruption' . Some small guy does shady things it's unethical and
worth pointing it out so many times in this thread?

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blubb-fish
The title consists of two parts:

1\. irrelevant information

2\. bragging

No way I'm going to read this ...

~~~
mskvsk
But how are you supposed to know the full story and hate me afterwards then?

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anandkulkarni
Interesting project and a good lesson in why careful data tracking is so
valuable. Thanks for sharing and congrats on the traction!

------
37
Much more than LAMP was used. I know LAMP and cannot use it to make $3700/mo.

~~~
mskvsk
Haha, good point. But I'm sure you will, it's just a matter of time and the
number of attempts.

------
defrun
OP, thank you for the story you have shared with us. It inspires me and other
idie devs for creating small to medium size SaaS.

------
daveroberts
How did you handle user signup / authentication to your service? Did it piggy-
back on VK's authentication?

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jsumrall
Plagiarizing and stealing content is immoral and unethical. "This is just how
we do things in Russia" is not an excuse. We shouldn't be promoting this
behavior. Anyone with half a brain can make money stealing stuff and serving
it via an API.

~~~
happy-go-lucky
The other day I was following this thread:

Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware [video] (2016) (youtube.com)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605599](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13605599)

I'm reproducing a part of a comment from there:

> One could say the evolutionary process is based on this principle.

> Copy. Paste. Improve. Repeat.

What have I just done? In no way am I supporting or suggesting that plagiarism
or content theft is a model to follow, but I do believe that people learn from
what others do and build on that.

~~~
mskvsk
Very true.

Running this SaaS lead me to the idea of launching a service where authors can
sell their content for social networks. It's going to be super hard doing this
in Russia but it's worth the try.

But some people simply can't understand the incremental evolution. They demand
turning a desert into a garden at once.

------
jwildeboer
TL;DR "I scrape content from others and sell them without any credit to or
rewards for the original creators" AFAICS.

~~~
mskvsk
Kindly read the article.

~~~
jwildeboer
I did:

"[I] decided to make a little tool to help me scrape the posts of my
competitors and publish them to my group on a regular basis."

And

"I had created a spicy mix of public domain content, some supposedly
copyrighted content from unknown authors, [...]"

I found this particularly striking:

"Usually it was the content of some authors that were difficult to track and
attribute to. Sometimes it was blatant plagiarism."

So you were/are well aware of the problem. But instead of Doing The Right
Thing (find out source, ask for permission) you just declare that to be
difficult (and yes. It is. Full ACK).

~~~
mskvsk
Yes, you're right. But my point was that it's not difficult to address this
issue. It's impossible in the Russian market.

That's why I asked you to reread the article (sorry, I should be more precise
on the reason).

