Running a bootstrapped SaaS for 20 years with my brother

(blog.zamzar.com)

43 points | by whyleyc 1 day ago

4 comments

  • kubbity 52 minutes ago
    Hi. Congratulations and thanks; it just happened that today I needed an .mp3 to .txt conversion and used your site. Nice to see it here now. All the best!
  • theanonymousone 53 minutes ago
    Really happy for you. It's my dream to run such a business for so long, as a side, with a real user base, and not for money.
    • CalRobert 32 minutes ago
      How is it a business if not for money?
      • throwaway83772 6 minutes ago
        I interpreted it as "enough to live a comfortable life".

        Money is part of how you get there, but it is not a goal in itself. Many start businesses where money is the main goal, and where the amount that you are satisfied with inevitably shifts once you get richer

  • piker 31 minutes ago
    How has revenue changed during the AI period? Are you guys able to maintain or grow with the rise of coding agents?

    [edit: what’s with the downvotes? I love the story and am curious if Claude etc have affected their business.]

    • f311a 12 minutes ago
      I’m pretty sure more than 90 percent of their audience never heard of Claude.

      They are regular users, not developers.

  • teiferer 9 minutes ago
    Always glad to see success stories. But some stuff does not check out.

    > Over 550 million people have used Zamzar since launch,

    There are 8.3 billion people on earth. You are saying that about 1 in 42 have used your service? I had never heard of it and I don't know anybody who had. And that's a sample that should be biased in your favor. Sorry, does not pass the smell test.

    Or maybe they were not unique visitors, containing duplicates? How many? This makes me skeptical of the remaining statistics on the page.

    > converting over 766 million files. We now process over 1 million API requests per day.

    1 million per day now and 766 million over 20 years? At the current rate you'd achieve that in about 2 years. This would indicate a rapid growth in the last couple years or even just months. It is unclear why that would be reasonable. Especially since you'd probably have emphasized this explosion more if your service was essentially dormant for 19 years and just recently went through the roof.

    After these two data points I stopped reading. Something doesn't feel right.

    • throwaway83772 0 minutes ago
      Looking at their website they support file uploads and API. They probably count those separately.
    • MiscIdeaMaker99 6 minutes ago
      Who cares?
      • teiferer 1 minute ago
        You don't care whether an article that ends up on HN front page contains legit information?