Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

A few months ago I launched SpiesInDC - https://spiesindc.com, a mail-based (as in the real mail) subscription service about Cold War history. Subscribers, ahem secret agents, receive packages every few weeks containing reproductions of famous documents, stanps from the USSR, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, coins, and other fun stuff. I keep refining the packages every week to make it better and it is so much fun.

How are you handling the mailing? I love the idea of a mail-based project, but I worry that I would forget to go to the post office occasionally.

Great, novel idea and great that you've been enjoying the process on your end. Is it possible to gift this? I couldn't tell from the Subscribe section where there's a shipping address field but no billing address information was needed. Sometimes the billing and shipping info have to be the same for payment to go through.

Yep it is possible to gift and in fact that is how most subscriptions come in. The latest round was because of Father’s Day. As for matching billing and shipping fields, not sure, everything has worked fine so far!

So the answer to this question is a funny one. I started using a Google spreadsheet to manage shipping dates and that quickly became a chore so like any good nerd would do I built a CRM which is now live if anyone wants to try it: https://6dollarcrm.com/

Wasn’t planning on announcing it here but what the hell.

Wonderful. Thank you.

If you don't mind answering, does this have any users besides you? I've got a few internal tools developed over the years that I don't have the bandwidth to turn into a proper SaaS (not much time for support, polish, new features, etc) but could potentially offer on an "as-is" basis for a token monthly sum but not sure if it would be worth the trouble.

This seems a dangerous game to play in the era of Donald Trump. Imagine you or your subscribers get their houses searched...

Yep has several users, people I know personally have been beta testing it for a few months now. I haven't started marketing it yet because I have been dogfooding it since February in order to build exactly the CRM I personally want to use.

Also has > 800 automated feature tests, in app documentation, gone through security audits using tools like Zap, etc. I've built a lot of SaaS products over the years, and I'm building 6DollarCRM from the standpoint of having learned a lot of things the hard way. I'm currently working on data importers and browser extensions for easily adding new contacts.

Give it a spin and let me know what you think.

I might have missed something but don't think nerdy stamp collectors are on any watch lists.

Something similar regarding American history by mail was pitched as a successful business on shark tank this season:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA4h3WBeohc

Are you concerned about the possibility of 5 dollar crm?

In fact we have been laughing about this because it reminds us of the There's Something About Mary bit regarding 7 minute abs.