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In the tech industry, a "Full Stack Software Engineer" is somebody who is single-handedly capable of writing all of the source code needed for an application (especially in the context of web applications). That is, they are able to develop both the 'Back End' code (the part that runs on the server side, which handles your business logic, databases, authentication & security, API, etc.) as well as the 'Front End' code (the user interface that your customers will see: like a website's layout, design and controls).

Some Full Stack Engineers also know about the DevOps or deployment side of things: how you actually take all that source code and deploy it to your production web servers, and make it scalable for thousands (or millions) of concurrent users and keep it all running smoothly and securely.

In my 18-years long career in professional software engineering, I had always been a Full Stack Engineer. I may have only began my professional career in 2008, at twenty years old, but I had already been writing software for much longer ago than that! Back when I was just a teenager in high school, I already had developed and released several open source projects and I had a handful of production websites already under my belt, including one time a full MySpace clone I had programmed when I was 16. So, by the time I entered the workforce, I already knew how to fully write & ship a production application all on my own: the back-end, the front-end, and the deployment to production -- the complete lifecycle.

In 2026, I took things a step further and successfully launched my own company to monetize one of my most successful side projects, taking my "Full Stack Engineer" title and expanding it to "Full Stack Entrepreneur!"

That is: I had single handedly built a whole entire product, all by myself, from scratch -- and I didn't even use A.I. to help me build it!

In this blog post, I link to a Live Demo Website where I can show off what I built and you can play around and explore it, as well as an Open Source version of my product so you can see some of my code. And then I will tell my story about how this project became successful enough to launch my own profitable company around it!

Show and Tell

So, what exactly was the project I built and formed a whole successful company around?

The project was basically a social networking website for a niche hobby interest group that I am a part of. Like any social networking website, the "1.0" version -- the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) -- included all of the basic features at launch that any website like this would need: Profile Pages, Friend Requests, Messages, Forums, Photo Galleries, and a Member Directory for people to find each other.

The MVP was fully developed & deployed in only three weeks! The first lines of code were written on August 9 and the full release announcement for the production-ready website happened on August 30, 2022. It had all of the basic "1.0" features described above, including even the boring parts: forgotten password reset workflows, admin features to collect feedback & reports, etc. which I will talk more about below.

A Live Demo & Open Source Release

I have a live demo version of this project and an open source release that you can look at.

Live Demo: See GoSocial.Cuvou.com

This is a pared down, 'white labeled' copy of my successful production website's codebase, and it includes all of the current features that my production website has.
Source Code: On GitHub at github.com/cuvou/gosocial

This open source release is stripped back down to the essentials, similar to my "1.0 MVP" product: a good strong foundation for a basic social networking website that others can freely build on top of, released under the GNU General Public License.

A tour of my app in the form of screenshots will be included at the bottom of this post, so scroll and check that out too!

For the rest of this blog post, I will tell the story of my project's inception, how it became successful, and how I launched my own company to monetize it.

The Minimum Viable Product

Let's go all the way back to the beginning: August of 2022.

I got the idea then to begin work on this project. I wrote the first lines of code for it on August 9, and, while only working on it during nights and weekends (as I had a day job doing software development as well), I was able to launch the "1.0" website on August 30.

That's right: only three weeks of part-time work on this project and I had a fully ready, feature complete, basic social networking website deployed to production and ready for real users to sign up. This 1.0 release already had all of the basic features that any social website would need, including:

User Accounts & Profile Pages
Friends & Friend Requests
Messages so people can chat with each other
Forums so people can meet around topics of shared interest
Photo Galleries so people can share their pictures
A Member Directory so people can browse and find each other
All of the boring things too: 'forgotten password' reset workflows by e-mail, admin features fleshed out so users can easily flag and report content they see on the site, etc.
Basic security features: CSRF protection, rate limiting for failed login attempts, etc.

In my professional career as a software engineer, I had worked on projects like this many times at work. A project with the minimum feature set described above would normally have taken at least one full year to release at any place I have worked: when you take into account all of the overhead and planning that goes on. There would be weeks or months of just design work and nailing down what the MVP features would be, all of the overhead of Scrum and Agile methodology, all of the hours spent in team meetings, all of the QA testing cycles, all of the waiting on Marketing for final text copy and approval, a long and drawn out beta testing cycle.

It is amazing, isn't it, how quickly a Full Stack Engineer can build and deploy a whole entire web app when they are working alone? And it isn't as though my "1.0" release was a buggy mess, either: over the years that followed and as I built on top of this codebase, very few bugs were found in this foundational base of my code. I credit that both to my experience as a software engineer, and to the software stack I chose to develop my project in (Go, with its strong typing and mature standard library).

After its launch in 2022, many more features were built out over time, including a fully custom WebRTC webcam video chat room and features like Events, Places, Blogs, Who's Nearby, custom themes for profile pages, and so much more. All of these modern features can be seen on the Live Demo Website that I linked to above, so definitely check it out!

How It Became Successful

My software engineering skills are solid, but my weakness is marketing.

After I launched my app, I did very little to actually advertise it or let people know about it. I posted some blurbs about it on social media and allowed my site's community members to spread the word to their friends from there.

That is, I had very modest expectations at the beginning. This isn't the first side project of mine that I ever deployed to production, and most of them were lucky if they got even a hundred users. I knew that there would be some audience for this project though, from the niche hobby interest group that I'm in, and the network of peers I had on social media.

To my surprise, purely through word of mouth, news about my project spread and the community on it began to grow. Slowly, at first, and then more rapidly.

At the end of the first year, we had 815 members.
On the second year, that grew to 4,776 members.
On the third anniversary, it doubled to 8,745 by August 30, 2025.

By the tail end of December 2025 we crossed the major threshold of 10,000 members and, at time of writing in June 2026, we are at nearly 12,000 now.

Note: those 12,000 members are not random spam bots, either. My community has a mandatory 'Certification Photo' workflow to set a barrier to entry that keeps the spam bots and dishonest profiles away, where members need to snap a selfie with a piece of paper in it to verify they are a real person. This 12,000 number is the amount of people who have gone through that effort to onboard to the website.

In terms of Daily Active Users, at time of writing I am happy with these numbers as well:

About 3,500 distinct members log on to the website each and every day.
On the chat room, about 1,500 distinct members log in each day. At any given instance, there are often around 100 different people online together at the same time.

With a little old website that grows in popularity like this, so too did my web hosting costs begin to grow, and I would soon need to find a way to monetize this project and set it up for success into the future.

How I Was Able to Keep It Free

Way back in 2022 when I first launched this project, even though I was keeping my expectations tempered, I knew (from my professional experience) that eventually, web hosting costs would increase over time if this project really began to take off.

My standard hosting costs for the first few years were very consistent: $24/mo. for a modest web server that had two CPU cores, 4 GB RAM, and 80 GB of disk space. Aside from occasional incidentals, such as domain renewal fees of $9/yr., my monthly costs were a very flat and consistent $24 per month which is totally affordable for me to run a free project of passion like this one.

From the early days, I built some features into my codebase to help me control and limit the growth of my hosting costs so that I would avoid being surprised one day by a sudden spike in my web hosting bill.

Some of those early design decisions include:

A media quota limit per person.

My website has a Photo Gallery that users can share their media on, and to avoid my hard drive running out of space too quickly, I set an initial limit where each user could upload 24 photos to their gallery -- just to be conservative at the beginning.

Once a handful of us had reached that limit, I ran some numbers to see what we're looking at, and raised the limit to 100 photos per person. For people who uploaded all 100 of their photos, on average this used only around 25 MiB of storage space per person.

Later down the road, as my Bandwidth Costs began to climb, I decided to re-encode everybody's photos from JPEG into WebP format. WebP images are, on average, 50% smaller than JPEG images of equivalent visual quality. This slashed my bandwidth and disk storage costs by half, and around this time, I changed the media quota feature to be filesize-based instead of a fixed quantity of photos.

With a 25 MiB quota limit per person, and smaller WebP images, this meant that everybody now could share about 200 photos.
On the Webcam Chat Room, only have peer-to-peer webcams.

For my community, I had also built a fully custom Webcam Chat Room app from scratch that uses WebRTC to transport webcam video streams between the chatters.

WebRTC can enable "peer-to-peer" connections directly between the chatters, so that those video streams do not pass through my server, and so I don't have to eat the bandwidth cost for them. This worked very well for "most" users, but a small minority of them could not connect directly to others and webcams wouldn't work for those people.

The Slow Growth of Hosting Costs

With my web hosting company, because of the number of servers I had with them (not only for this project, but all my other side projects), my hosting company gave me a generous allowance of monthly bandwidth.

About 9 TeraBytes of free monthly bandwidth in total.

Like I said earlier, most of my little old side projects were not terribly popular, so I was making barely a dent in my bandwidth limit. I had plenty of breathing room to be a little experimental.

On my Webcam Chat Room, as mentioned earlier, webcam streams were all sent peer-to-peer and some users were unable to get them to work. So, I added what's called a "TURN Server" for my chat room: the idea is that, in case a pair of users can not directly connect, the TURN server will carry their video feeds for them, passing it thru the server to make it work. This naturally would eat some of my bandwidth, but I had plenty to spare and for years, I did not see any additional cost yet from this. This project was still only a flat $24/mo. for me to run for a very long time.

Eventually, though, my bandwidth usage finally began to overflow and I was charged some small overage fees:

In February 2025, my hosting bill had an extra $22 on it.

By this time, the TURN server on the chat room was a big culprit but the second biggest was simple bandwidth costs for the Photo Gallery! There were around 68,794 photos so far that the community had shared and a lot of people were browsing the gallery and this bandwidth was adding up.

This is around the time that I converted everybody's photos from JPEG into WebP format, which slashed my storage and bandwidth costs for the photo gallery by 50%.

Even with the TURN server still on for the chat room, my excess bandwidth fees went away again for 7 full months!
In September 2025, my bandwidth overages came back and I was charged $40 extra this month!

Again, the TURN server I didn't want to touch yet, and I could instead do some more work to optimize the Photo Gallery bandwidth.

At this time, I turned to Cloudflare to help me manage my bandwidth fees: Cloudflare provides a 100% Free CDN where they could help me cache the Photo Gallery media and massively save on my upstream bandwidth. And indeed, this worked! My bandwidth overages again dropped back to zero.

The writing was on the wall, though: soon I would need to monetize my project so that it can pay for itself. As the community continued to grow, it would soon become impossible to keep its monthly bandwidth under control forever.

Forming a Company to Monetize My Project

By the end of December 2025, my community had just passed the 10,000 members mark, and my hosting costs were beginning to climb beyond "passion project" territory.

And, all the while, members of my community loved my site -- people were always asking me how they could donate money to me to help me keep the site going!

So, I decided it would be my New Year's Resolution for 2026 that I finally sit down and figure out how to create a proper company and add a paid supporter tier to my site.

This part may be boring to any business folks reading this, but for me it was the first time I ever started a proper business of my own. I had usually just been a salaried W-4 employee for most of my career, and I knew business people went to University to learn specifically how to manage a business, so for me this was all new stuff to learn about.

The basic steps that got me started were:

I formed an LLC business in Oregon that I called Cuvou LLC.

Cuvou is a name I've been sitting on since 2006, and I wasn't using it for anything now. I already owned the .com, .net and .org domains for it, and once upon a time my Kirsle.net blog was named Cuvou as well. It made for a perfect business name: unique, not a real word, a name I've owned for decades; nice and generic to form a small tech company around it.

Registering an LLC is fast and easy. It is recommended that you hire a Registered Agent, and I did so, and then the LLC paperwork itself could be filed easily online with only a $100 filing fee to pay, and then in an instant, I had an officially registered presence in Oregon.
Then I had to apply for a tax number for my business (an EIN, or Employer Identification Number, from the IRS). This part was 100% free to file online and instantly I had an EIN number.
Next I applied for a business banking account, which can be done at any bank, and they just need the above two items (your business to be registered and have a tax number).
Finally, I could reach out to payment gateway providers and get the ball rolling on adding payment support to my website.

Success!

With my 10,000 members and a long line of people who love my platform and had been wanting to give me money for years, my small new company was immediately successful!

I had 'soft launched' the payments feature of my site on March 1 (with MasterCard and other major brands accepted already, but I was waiting on finalization with Visa) -- and despite not even having Visa ready yet, I already brought in over $13,000 in that first month alone! That amount already more than pays for my web hosting costs for the rest of the entire year and then some. I had Visa support enabled by April and things have been sailing along smoothly from there.

Summary

My advice for anyone reading this who has thought about starting their own small business to monetize their side projects: I say just do it! It's really not that hard or scary to form a small LLC business of your own.

Demo Screenshots

Here are some screenshots of my GoSocial demo website, in case you want to take a quick peek.

To play with my live demo site, visit GoSocial.Cuvou.com and create an account. The demo site is configured to allow quick & easy signups, without any e-mail verification needed (e-mail sending is actually disabled altogether on the demo instance -- you can enter any random fake e-mail address you want!)