NewsletterDB

Just launched NewsletterDB on Product Hunt!

We built this in 3 weeks with a team of 4 after going through 30 different product ideas, and decided on a niche, something that we can punch into the AI space with.

Read below to learn about our process 👇

Our tech stack is:
Lucky Framework + Redis + Postgres
Dokku to deploy everything
Browserflow.app for scraping with 12x VPS parallelism

Our approach is to use tech that we already know and are comfortable with, deploy using existing cloud compute, and no-code the hard stuff.

With a team of 2 devs and 2 designers, we set our budget to be around $3,500 to build the app. This included expenses like salary, and software tools.

Because of Hostari and Valheim Server Hosting, we had a lot of spare compute on our game server platform deployed our web services on bare metal 🖥️

For some people, deploying on IaaS or PaaS might be cheaper if you have 1 product to support. Since our roots were in game server hosting, I thought... why can't we spin up VMs or containers in our own data center and bring down costs further that way? And so we did, with Dokku.

For scraping, nobody in our team was a Selenium or Puppeteer expert, so we decided to spend $99 on Browserflow to mock up our initial scraping algorithm. It was easy to point and click to extract the data, and we just ran the scrape on a non-headless browser.

After we ship our V1 on Product Hunt, we're going to go heads-down to find product market fit by following battle-tested SaaS (and AI) playbooks to build out our PLG motion and practice more of our sales and demo skills. We'd still need to find our defensible moat 🏯