Interview with the founder of Bearblog

What is Bearblog?

Bearblog is a minimalist blogging platform that focuses on simplicity and ease of use. It was designed to provide a straightforward and distraction-free environment for writers to create and publish content online.

Bearblog is a one-person operation, and the founder earns approximately $5000 per month through subscriptions.

In this interview, we ask Herman to share his story about Bearblog.

How did you come up with the idea for the business?

I really appreciate minimalist design that gets the job done with limited hassle. I wanted to write more and in the process of refurbishing my blog I just couldn't find a platform that worked the way I wanted it to. Essentially I needed an opinionated platform that did everything server side and was unintrusive. I had to build it myself.

How did you build the product?

I built the proof of concept over a 3 day weekend and moved all my writing over to it. It's built using battle-tested old-school web tech (Django/python) with the implicit intention of it "lasting forever". I actually did a full write up of it here.

How big was your team when you started?

Just me on my laptop during a pandemic.

How did you launch the business?

On the Tuesday after I'd built the proof of concept I posted it on Hacker News asking for feedback. It found its way to the top of the home page, received thousands of signups and crashed my server. I spent the next 4 hours doing damage control, fixing bugs, upgrading servers and making sure everything worked. I also wrote about that fiasco on my blog here.

How have you grown the business since its launch?

I maintain and improve Bear and write about it on my blog (which is the main source of traffic for Bear). I share interesting problems I face during development (the most recent one being combatting ChatGPT spam) and people read it and share it which serves as good traffic for Bear. It is also a self-perpetuating system. The more people that sign up, the more articles are published on the platform. This naturally leads to more people becoming aware of the platform which leads to more signups.

What is the business model (ads/subscription etc)?

Bear operates on the freemium model. It's free to use, but if you'd like to add a custom domain and other neat features you can upgrade for $5 per month.

What do your financials look like?

Revenue is pretty decent (I can pay myself an average developer salary) and increasing at about 10% per month (although I do expect this to slow down at some point).