check-if-email-exists VS awesome-weekly-robotics

The point is not about ideological debates, making money from GPL software is purely a practical business decision. Many people are doing it, see e.g. https://reacher.email/ (written in Rust btw).

I started with open-source.

I initially created https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists, after some years it got to ~50 stars and nice overall feedback, that's when I thought of a SaaS wrapper on top of it.

So a possible path is "idea -> open-source -> monetize". I find the first arrow to be easier to execute than a direct idea to monetization leap.

We forked (this repository)[https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists] and made a few modifications.

I run an open-source [1] email verification API, called Reacher. I managed to hit 10k ARR this year (1st year).

It's written in Rust, self-hostable, and does not use a DB of emails (like some competitors do).

Landing page: https://reacher.email.

[1]: https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists

Check If Email Exists\ (205 comments)

GitHub issues like this one warm my heart:

https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists/issues/91

Identifying something that needs doing, especially when you have no idea how to do it, is a bold skill.

Too often have I seen engineers be reluctant to open an issue because they don’t know how to implement it, technically. I still do it, myself. If you need it then you’ll find a way.

The converse is also true: losing focus by filing tasks and procrastinating on features because you know how to build them, not because you actually need them to move your business / project forward.

I maintain a list of interesting robotics projects (https://github.com/msadowski/awesome-weekly-robotics). You will find a simulator section there but whether they are useful for you will depend on the details of your project. I don’t think it’s there but you could also check out MuJoCo.

3 years ago I started a newsletter about robotics (https://weeklyrobotics.com/) and about month ago I opened it to advertisers and started earning about $600 a month from ads.

If by any chance you are interested in Robotics I happen to run a curated newsletter on robotics: https://weeklyrobotics.com/

I would hugely appriacte roasting my newsletter: https://weeklyrobotics.com/. Thanks!

Here are some that I've been following why working on my [newsletter](https://weeklyrobotics.com/). These will be mostly robotics oriented, and some of them might be inactive:

* [Robots&Chisel](http://www.robotandchisel.com/blog/) - a blog by Michael Ferguson, he did a very nice series of posts on restoring a UBR-1 robot and implementing ROS-2 on it

SEEKING FREELANCER | Remote

Hi,

I’m looking for a freelancer that could help me take my newsletter [0] to the next level. Currently the website is done using jekyll and I’d like to start looking into making the design cleaner and start automatically generating e-mails when a new issue is ready. I could also use help with creating a neat e-mail template for everything.

[0] https://weeklyrobotics.com/

I maintain a similar list of open source projects/frameworks etc. that were featured in Weekly Robotics. Maybe you will find something interesting to cross-post to your list: https://github.com/msadowski/awesome-weekly-robotics