Hi! I’m Maks Surguy.
I know Andrey and Ian from Twitter and enjoy their discussions about Bootstrapped businesses.
While I don’t have an official business yet, I am going in that direction, especially with my most popular website to date - http://bootsnipp.com. Bootsnipp is a free code playground and repository of great looking code snippets for web developers and web designers who use a particular HTML/CSS framework that’s called “Bootstrap” (hmmm, bootstrapped.fm isn’t about Bootstrap?).
Bootsnipp was made while I got sick with flu, took 2 sick days off at my job and stayed at home for the weekend after that, working on the site which was my original idea at the time. It has been wildly popular since second day of its existence - somebody posted it on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com) where it stayed on first page for some time which brought 40,000 people to the site on a single day. Of course traffic leveled off after that but it has been growing constantly.
Currently the site is generating an OK profit using a single advertisement and some affiliate links but soon I’d want to offer premium features to its users and charge a small amount for using those features.
Beside Bootsnipp I have made quite a few other projects that people love using (maybe because they’re still free?):
- http://filegr.am - Temporary file sharing ,
- Mymaplist.com - create & share maps with a list of places.
By the way, all of my big projects were made with Laravel framework which was created by an employee of Ian’s.