rozumem

We have more food surplus now than ever before. But we also have more distractions than ever before.

Buddha: he survived without a safety net, that's my point.

Having kids and dependents makes it harder, but not impossible. You may have to leave them. Again, OP never said it would be easy.

> the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net

Not really. If you go back in history, many figures did not have the capital / social safety net to follow their principles. Diogenes comes to mind. Buddha shunned his princely life. Epicurus. The OP did not say it would be easy.

Does something need to?

I run a site which gets around 60k real MAUs per month and have had to deal with this in some shape or form. I haven't given it as much attention as you have though, because it started to feel like whack-a-mole like you describe and other things took priority. I've concluded that the most viable long term solution is to move most pages behind a login wall. And only keep a page public if I see the ROI from the page being scraped by AI bots, Google, etc... for you this could be only the really high-profile donor pages, but not the long tail pages. Once pages are behind a login wall, we can track anomalous activity at a behavioral / account level and automatically suspend those accounts. For example, an account visiting every donor page will be easy to detect.

Made me chuckle. I say have winnable goals

Depends on the company. Some companies have done a great job with their AI chat bots and I've been very impressed with the quality of service, even for queries which I consider quite complex.

For most users, link navigation for single page apps is far better than making round trips to servers which the 'traditional' browser would do.

Nice. I run a site that depends on user submitted content, and it's really interesting to observe how some people try to get around the guardrails. Not sure if your tool does this, but I would perform some additional checks for comments that have links in them.

I fell into the same trap of "build, and they will come" multiple times. Reading The Mom Test changed my perspective on things. I cannot recommend that book enough. Good luck. It's possible. I started my SaaS 8 yrs ago and it more than pays for my lifestyle.

> It's just simply much harder as a small/smaller business to make money and compete with the big boys.

You're conflating two different things. Thanks to software, it's easier today than it's ever been to make money as a small business / solopreneur. It's also harder to compete with the big boys, possibly for the same reason and due to economies of scale.

That's why I don't bother entering the same markets the big boys are in. There are plenty of niche markets which they don't bother touching where a small business can thrive.

Thanks for the tips and catching the typo (fixed).

Is 40k tranasactional emails a month enough to keep a dedicated IP warm? That's my main concern for not using a dedicated IP for transactional emails.

What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?

Curious how you're thinking about getting around anti-bot protection. I scrape a lot and I've noticed many highly trafficked sites investing in anti-bot measures recently, with the rise of AI browsers and such. Still, cool idea, congrats on the launch.

Many people have mentioned gym. I second that wholeheartedly. Running, especially has improved my mental health considerably. Also, writing. Maybe start by writing about all the times you wished you were alone and how that will now be possible :)

I can relate to this. Coding satisifies my urge to build and ship and have an impact on the world. But it doesn't make me think hard. Two things which I've recently gravitated to outside of coding which make me think: blogging and playing chess.

Maybe I subconsciously picked these up because my Thinker side was starved for attention. Nice post.

Reminded me of one of Paul Graham's maxims: "do things that don't scale"