500,000 users per month after quitting his developer job

Today's interview is with Ruurtjan, a Dutch founder whose two sites get 500,000 users per month. Ruurtjan quit his job to go all in on his business and you can learn how he is progressing as an entrepreneur in this chat we had. Edit: Ruurtjan now has a course out, DNS for Developers (affiliate) where you can learn about domains, protocols and much more.

Can you tell us about why you started NSLookup and What is my ISP?

It all started back when I was a student. I remember wondering what internet provider my university was using. After some searching, I found an API that offers this information, but no single-purpose website. So I decided to make one with PHP and Bootstrap and put it live without much thought. More of a learning experience than a deliberate plan to start a business, if anything.

Fast-forward 10 years, and it has slowly grown to a tool that is used by about 150,000 people every month. Since its inception, I've moved from whoismyisp.org to whatismyisp.com, and partnered with NordVPN. It now keeps running with about one day of work per month.

NsLookup was a different story. I started it two and half years ago with the goal of making a living from it. This site helps people inspect the configuration of domain names. This data is stored in the DNS and is publicly available to anyone using command line tools. NsLookup makes it easier to navigate and adds additional information to debug DNS issues.

When it started to take off after about a year, I decided to quit my job to focus on these projects. Now that I'm working full-time on them for a bit over a year, I'm getting close to replacing my previous income with them.

What have been your biggest achievements so far?

That would be the fact that I dared to give up stability to take the leap into the unknown. I didn't know anything about entrepreneurship, accounting, marketing and sales when I started. In fact, growth in these areas was one of the main reasons I decided to go for it.

Other than that, it still blows my mind that about half a million people use whatismyisp.com and nslookup.io. That's one in every 16,000 people alive today 🤯 It’s crazy to me that something I made helps that many people, even if it’s just a tiny bit.

How have you monetized your sites?