I quit my job to make free web tools

Someone on Reddit asked how I make a living. Might be interesting for folks here too.<p>Right now, we&#x27;re living off our savings and my wife&#x27;s salary. Both sites are already profitable, though. I&#x27;ve recently launched an API for NsLookup, which now generates around 100 USD &#x2F; month, and both sites have ads that generate income. Not enough to replace my salary yet, but I&#x27;m confident I can increase it over time.<p>Ads have a bad connotation, mainly because they often track users across the web. Mine don&#x27;t. For WhoIsMyISP.org, I&#x27;ve partnered with NordVPN, and have their ads with plain `&lt;a href=...&gt;&lt;img &#x2F;&gt;&lt;&#x2F;a&gt;`. And for NsLookup.io, I&#x27;ve joined the Carbon network, which also doesn&#x27;t have tracking.

Congrats on quitting your job! Thats a goal of mine as well, and I really like NsLookup and how the page is structured. I have used domainbigdata.com a lot and like how they show Other TLDs.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to find tools that would show other domains that are owned or associated with the domain that was searched. I work with a lot of sales leads and I think having information on other domains a company owns is super powerful for mapping companies and also understand company acquisitions, most companies transfer ownership of domains when they are purchased.<p>I have a question and ask:<p>1. There are quite a few tools online that do the same thing, long term what is your goal to differentiate? or where do you want to focus?<p>2. Other TLDs or Other Associated Domains, is this something that you would be able to find?<p>3. Can you determine from a DNS search if a domain is owned by a company or by a non-corporate entity (Blog, personal)?<p>Also from your blog post, I don&#x27;t know if you were looking for any responses but:<p>Plan B - Stage 2: Sell an API to visitors.<p>&gt;I would purchase and use this for a email verification process. I would rather go with a smaller company than large<p>Plan C - Stage 1: Make a one-off DNS dataset, give it away to founders, and find out how they&#x27;d use it and what they need.<p>&gt;I would use this with Email Domain verification and Email format Verification. I worked with data teams that had to find emails formats &amp; domains, if they had the domains it would save a ton of time and cost. As an end user how I think about this cost is I if I find a domain and run a MX or DNS check on it I will save the results and try now to run it on that domain again. That is why I like this plan, but the API would be super helpful as well.

Hi HN!<p>Ruurtjan here, from NsLookup.io. I&#x27;ve read plenty of these kinds of blog posts, and they&#x27;ve been a big motivator for me to take the jump. So I thought I&#x27;d share my story here as well. Thanks everyone, for giving me the confidence to give entrepreneurship a try.<p>I&#x27;ll hang around today to answer any questions, so ask me anything :)

&gt; Mobile game that divides the earth in hexagons<p>Interesting that I hear about this twice in the space of a week or so. Neal Stephenson was talking about it on the Lex Fridman podcast too. Apparently it&#x27;s not possible. You&#x27;ll always need a certain number of pentagons to complete the tiling.

I&#x27;m always curious how many visitors you have to get to reach $500 per month numbers from ads. I understand the author probably can&#x27;t reveal exact numbers here but if anyone knows rough but real life numbers I&#x27;d be curious to hear (I haven&#x27;t ever done ad based revenue myself and I don&#x27;t trust CPM numbers I&#x27;d read by googling, or the spread is just too broad).

it&#x27;s interesting that the novel&#x2F;hobby projects all failed.<p>the ones that succeeded, are those that can be used for marketing by other companies (whoismyisp) or which already exist (nslookup) so there is a proven demand but you made a cleaner solution.<p>i was always into this idea of building mvp to test markets. but the main issue is getting an audience. often success is 98% luck and timing and 2% hard work.

Maybe this is a &quot;who whould ever use dropbox&quot; question?<p>I&#x27;m curious what is the use case for something like nslookup.io since I can more conveniently get the same info from the CLI?<p>In any case congratulations for finding a use case!

Nice! I quit my job 8 months ago to build free data tools.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;multiprocessio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;multiprocessio</a>

Your traffic is incredible. I would work to understand the business use cases better and create a B2B niche service tailored specifically to one or more of those (API, more detailed info, custom solution, etc.). I don&#x27;t know that growing your traffic overall needs to be a target. Rather, catering to an existing segment and&#x2F;or growing that segment may be a better use of time and resources.

I hope that you make more than your salary, how did you attract users to website? Its very hard to get users to visit your site.<p>I have posted my site (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;text2db.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;text2db.com&#x2F;</a>) on hackernews, product hunt and reddit for getting reviews but got very few views (guess the idea is bad?), please do recommend me tips on how to increase traffic for site.<p>Thanks.

It&#x27;s so nice to see these examples are increasing every now and then. Hope to learn a lot and I also would like to know about the use cases of nslookup dot io. One thing that&#x27;s coming out of my head would be if I would ought to make a non-targeting crawler of some sort and not implement my own dns crawling infrastructure and just use nslookup.io and just cache the results.

Why is he saying he created Project Euler? Colin Hughes created Project Euler.

What&#x27;s a good information source for this? Like is this just something built on the domain tools api? Or is more of a front end for dig?<p>Congrats though, great looking site and it&#x27;s super snappy.

Great domains, and the service is straight to the point. Good luck!

Kudos to you! I wish you all the success in the world. I greatly admire people who take this path and aren&#x27;t trying to be the next unicorn.

Hey. I&#x27;m cheering for you. Wishing you a lot of success! :))) Hopefully the next post will be about how you now make 4000 a month.

Seems like the kind of thing that&#x27;s a lot more feasible in a functioning welfare state like NL.

gazelle-kopen.nl<p>Would have expected this could rake in some SEO traffic though, but surprised that didnt work for you. Or maybe surprised isnt the right word, maybe i have the initial high hope for it when you registered it and tried it :)

I like the simplicity and cleanliness of the designs on both sites. Nice job.

The way I read that title makes me think he quit a &quot;real job&quot; (meatspace) to work in FAANG not that he was already a software developer.

Is it hard making a living in the beginning?

Please tell me how do you make money with nslookup? (because I have dozen other commands I&#x27;de like to menetize :)