localhost.run

When someone signs in to my custom domain admin console I schedule a follow up email in 7 days. It will either be a thank you or an offer of help, depending on if they set up a paid plan or not. I hate marketing emails, so I've tried to make this one as personal and 1 time sounding as possible, but with almost 20 signups a day but only maybe 2 conversions a week I felt it was necessary to have that touch point.

I'll likely add a 1 or 2 question survey to the email at some point, to try to understand why people do or don't follow thru with a custom domain plan, but for now I'll just see if the re-engagement makes any noticeable difference to the rate of subscriptions.

For a brief but glorious time i was in the top ten. I'm currently at 12th with 18 points, granted this isn't huge, but it's good to know peeps saw it. It didn't translate into a significant change in traffic tho, the tunnel rate has been bouncing around about 250 tunnels per hour for a while and show HN didn't make a visual difference to the graph. Maybe the thing to think about is how to convince those mostly free tunnels to grab a paid plan 🤔️

I've been around 40 users for a while now. I got there quickly, but I've done nothing to market. I've fixed some critical issues, reworked billing, basically technical behind the scenes work that needed to happen. Maybe not all of it, maybe there's been some procrastination on my part, but certainly there was some that I couldn't have gotten away without doing.

I am now focusing on marketing this thing, my goal is growth, so hopefully I'll have more updates on that specifically over the coming months.

I'm making $3.50 a month 💪

This is a huge milestone for me, I've built many things but I've never seen them thru to the point where someone can pay me.

I know $3.50 isn't a lot, but knowing that someone, even 1 person, will pay that to use my product is a huge confidence boost.

Announced over SSH of course (and twitter).

$3.50 a month will let peeps bring their own stable domain name to localhost.run, and give them better speeds.

I'm super nervous about the shape of the billing, the api, the whole thing really. I've tested it with my own card, I've tested like crazy in dev, I've had friends, family, even pets try to break it, and it seems solid, but the proof is in the shipping.

Hopefully I get a customer soon 🤞

I've had a neat idea to see if I can interact with my users. Everyone SSHes in to my server to set up their tunnel, right? So I have a captive audience. What happens if I send a SSH banner asking peeps to follow me on twitter dot com? Could I get a few dozen followers? I'm shipping that banner today to find out...

Domain names now have a salted hash of todays date appended. without the salt it's impossible to predict tomorrows url, so the longest a phishing page can last is 24 hours. I'll monitor, but this should hopefully stop the phishing complaints that were now coming in thick and fast

What's this now? I'm not running anything that could be hijacked for phishing, no wordpress, no long running servers, nothing.

Ooooohh, it's my old reverse tunnel service... Has someone somehow broken into it? I've not security patched it in a while, but the only interface in is my custom SSH server. Maybe someone's found a vulnerability in it?

Turns out someone was using it to host a phishing site, I guess giving people a stable home on the internet and anonymity wasn't the best idea. I'll sort it.

While investigating my phishing problem I rease that I have a little over 600 concurrent users connected. This is a good thing, but given I haven't done anything beyond someone making me a website in 10 minutes and the smallest spend allowed on adwords to get there I'm genuinely surprised.

Once I sort out my phishing problem this needs a closer look. My service is a SSH server, and the rule of the internet is if you put something on it bots will connect, so I need to rework things to make this figure more accurate. Best guess at this point, based on requests for ssh tunnels and not just connections, is about 100 of those are legit users, but still, that's huge for a thing I did almost entirely by mistake. Have I accidentally done a startup?

Once yesterdays excitement over opening my service up to anyone was over, I immediately forgot about my adwords and my landing page and went back to my day job. I still used the product regularly myself and occasionally peeps that worked with me would comment that they do too, but I didn't really give any thought to turning it into anything more for many years.