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Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by todd3834 on Sunday October 07, 2018 @11:02AM (#18160883)
The fact that it is easy to set up a VPN does make this more competitive but that doesn’t mean you can’t build a business. Think about who your customers will be. Is there an underserved niche that you can reach? It might take a HN reader 10 minutes to set up a VPN but my mom wouldn’t be able to figure it out if you gave her 10 months.

My battle plan for assessing whether or not I would pursued this would be the following:

1. Who is my target market?

2. How big is that market?

3. How will you reach that market?

4. How can you test whether or not you can reach that market before getting fully invested?

5. Test out several ways to reach your market. Try changing the niche and marketing plan until you can find some positive signals.

6. Analyze the data and make an educated guess whether this is worth your time or if you would enjoy doing something else more.

As far as legal issues, I don’t have any good advice but talk to a lawyer. Look at some terms of use of existing VPNs. Find out where you are liable and try to mitigate your risks the best you can.

If you ever want to brainstorm some ideas hit me up at my email on my profile.

Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by mtmail on Sunday October 07, 2018 @11:11AM (#18160932)
Adding an example of a niche: Those who wish to crawl Google/Bing/Amazon/Youtube results for SEO analysis around the world. You'd write a wrapper or other positive list of domains allowed through the proxy.
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by rsync on Sunday October 07, 2018 @12:55PM (#18161503)
One very interesting niche that I recently learned about was providing a VPN with a "residential" IP block that could be used to geo-shift netflix viewing:

https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/138668/vps-for-us-netf...

Apparently there are a lot of people who would like to watch "US Netflix" but cannot do so from their location.

Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by zakk on Sunday October 07, 2018 @02:42PM (#18162003)
That’s a good idea, but usually Netflix can blacklist domains faster then a VPN provider can acquire new “residential” blocks.
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by robben1234 on Sunday October 07, 2018 @02:10PM (#18161858)
It's the main usage of VPN (as well as region locked mmos) for those who are not doing it for security.
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by bigger_cheese on Sunday October 07, 2018 @09:59PM (#18163658)
The Consumer advocacy group here in Australia, CHOICE, specifically recommends using a VPN service to avoid geoblocking (https://www.choice.com.au/electronics-and-technology/interne...). So there is definitely a market for this type of service.
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by eli on Sunday October 07, 2018 @02:18PM (#18161892)
Plan to spend most of your time dealing with captchas and anti-scraping technology
Re:Ask HN: What is it like to run a VPN as a business? by lilbobbytables on Sunday October 07, 2018 @04:09PM (#18162379)
Here you can purchase dedicated or semi dedicated proxy ip's. Easy to use with network request libraries.