The tooling has become insanely good, so long as you trust the shoulders of the giants you’re standing on. For example, a month ago the Electron team introduced a bug that made my Microsoft Store app think it was outside the store. The users of my app were not happy - so I looked into how I could test the app “in the store” as a beta ... it’s basically an exercise in frustration. Package flights are a joke, build numbers don’t make a package unique. Just all sorts of hassle for a store that’s 1% (I’m being generous) the size of Apple’s.

Anywho, I’m a solo developer that created a desktop electron app that lets you design and print labels (either roll or sheets) and can import spreadsheet data for use in text, barcodes and even colors. It’s been a hell of a ride so far because my customers run the gamut of “organizing my yarn” to “storing nuclear isotopes.” I get emails and calls like, “I need to print 15,000 labels by Tuesday or I’m fired!” Those are always fun. My customers are in my small town of Minnesota USA, California, UAE, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia, NZ. I have global reach in this funky little niche.

All this made possible by some insane tooling (and toiling). It’s a really fun time to be a developer... even if my app takes up 500MB memory. Ha!

You can download my app from https://label.live

I don't have anything to contribute to the greater discussion, but I just wanted to thank you for building your app and sharing a link to it. Making labels isn't something that I often do, but when I have to do it, I need to make a lot of them, and that's always a pain. I'm going to give your solution a try as soon as I get off of work.

Hey, thanks! I didn't grow up dreaming of becoming a label printer app expert, but here I am... at your service. I'm glad to be here for you. Please reach out (via Label LIVE support) if you have any questions/comments.

That's pretty cool, very niche yet still an interesting concept. You should try to get on the indie hackers podcast. How's the income stream on this sort of business? And it sounds like its a 1 man/woman operation where you do handle everything from support to marketing?

I'm ramen profitable at this point. Sales are increasing each month. And yes, one person operation. There are only a few players in this market, and their solutions cost upwards of $500 per license, plus yearly support/maintenance. Right now I'm selling licenses for $47.99 one-time. In other words, there is some room to increase the price of my product, or move to a different monetization strategy. The low price today helps me get users/feedback.

I'll sell my 1000th license sometime before the end of the year. There's a lot of interesting roads to take... for example, I could become more serious about selling a bundled solution where I'm the only label printer distributor to own their own inexpensive software. Or maybe move to cloud? Or a portion of the functionality to the cloud. Or start targeting mobile/tablet more seriously. I don't know, yet... the future seems bright.

Craigslist is a model company imo

Absolutely! The notion that the only successful web business can be billion dollar unicorns is nuts. More small web businesses!

My current project is a service for writers that at best might be able to provide me with a full-time income and at least will not lose money for me. Since it's something I want/need/use, I'm willing to donate my time to it as necessary and let it be what it'll be.

My favorite is https://readwise.io

Is there any existing directory of similar products? Small team, sustainable.

I ask because I know one of the big tradeoffs of bootstrapping is no growth "war chest" — but I would love to find and use more of these!

Indie Hackers has a pretty big database of products: https://www.indiehackers.com/products

itch.io fits that. It's still just a two person shop, afaik.

AFAICT Clerky is another example.