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Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

• franciscop 10y ago
  Do you inlclude freelancers/contractors? I got started recently
  • conqrr 10y ago
    Better to keep that in a separate thread i guess .
  • blowski 10y ago
    To count as a startup you need a product. If you're freelancing or contracting or consulting, you are the means of production but the product belongs to whoever hires you.
    • franciscop 10y ago
      I know, I'm not claiming to be a startup. I am asking if the "/" in the title means AND or if it means OR. Also, from this: "By company, I mean something that generates (or is intending to generate) revenues" Nowhere it says "only startups" or "with a product", so I'm just asking if it's a question specifically for one person startups or for one person companies.
      • dhruvkar 10y ago
        I'd be interested to hear from you. I think freelancers fall into a grey area because while there are freelancers that treat their work as a business with the intent of scaling/automation/removing themselves as much as possible from admin tasks, there are also others that treat it very much like a high-paying job, without commitments. Share if it feels it applies to you.
• wsgolfer 10y ago
  Previous relevant discussion from a few weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937132
• colinbartlett 10y ago
  My side project StatusGator, which monitors service status pages, has been running profitably for the last year. It took about 3 months to become profitable and it's only so because my time is "free". (But isn't that always the case?) I don't do anything to promote it so growth has been entirely organic. I get a few free sign ups every day. Although they very infrequently convert to paid, I keep expenses low so it doesn't take many paid users to be profitable. If I had more knowledge of how to market such a thing, I believe it could be a reliable revenue source. But I'm otherwise happy that its relative profitability motivates me to maintain it, as I find it supremely useful for my own personal use.
  • pm 10y ago
    I don't know if statuspage.io is similar to what you're doing, but their blog documents much of how they got profitable. Makes for interesting reading.
    • colinbartlett 10y ago
      A little different: Services like statuspage.io, Runstatus, Cachet, Status.io, etc. all offer status pages. StatusGator aggregates all the status pages you care about into one status page for your own reference and also sends you alerts to email, Slack, etc, when those pages change. I love the idea of blogging about growth and profitability. Seems like that could be a good marketing channel, in addition to being very educational.
  • soared 10y ago
    Use your platform to make customers come to you. 1. Identify leads (comapnies + the email of the person who would be in charge of server status) 2. Create alerts for their services 3. Your system sends an alert when their service goes down. They instantly recognize the value of your service.
  • nickfromseattle 10y ago
    You can find out a lot of information about your customers by calling them. How did they find SG? Why do they need a meta status page? How much value does does SG provide over using disparate status pages? Why did they stop using SG after several days? Once you've talked to all your customers you should have a lot more info you can use to market to new customers.
• xpose2000 10y ago
  I run a single person company https://www.fantasysp.com https://www.fantasysp.com It is a fantasy sports company that helps you manage your team(s) by offering player projections, waiver suggestions, optimal lineups, trade suggestions, etc. We also help with fanduel/draft kings lineups. Revenue has increased steadily over the past 4 years in the range of 20%-30% year over year. User base growth is different as I focus more on active users rather than total new users. Active users increase around 15% year over year.
  • colinbartlett 10y ago
    Interesting, what metric do you use to consider "active"?
    • xpose2000 10y ago
      Signed in the past day or two.
• malux85 10y ago
  Yes, forex trading using deep learning, media monitoring two startups, both profitable I built, support and run them all myself (though everything is automated)
  • charlesdm 10y ago
    How big is the account you trade? How are the returns?
  • yankoff 10y ago
    Interesting, how stable the profits are and how long did it take you to get profitable?
  • grx 10y ago
    Do you have any recommendations for learning resources on this topic? How did you figure out the algorithms?
  • beagle3 10y ago
    Which venue do you trade forex in? I have either personal or 2nd hand horror stories from every platform I've heard of so far - once you get profitable, they start penalizing or just throw you out -- though my experience is 6 years old and may no longer be relevant.
    • JohnnyConatus 10y ago
      Also curious.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • deleted 10y ago
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  • nicholas73 10y ago
    I realize this may be your bread and butter, but what kind of news do you find tradable?
• stevesearer 10y ago
  I started https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com as a side project 9 years ago and it has been my full-time work for the last ~4 years. If you don't count the cost of me, it has always been profitable as the business costs itself are pretty low. I had zero business goals at the beginning and now it is probably the most popular site in its niche (office design). The thing most people are interested in here is that I moved from using Adsense to selling and hosting 100% of my own advertising a couple years ago. People seem to like how on-topic and relevant the ads are and that they are static graphics.
  • stemuk 10y ago
    How was your overall experience for the swich to self-hosted ads in terms of time and money you had to invest given that the main sellingpoint for Adsense is its ease of use?
    • stevesearer 10y ago
      I had Adsense and self-hosted ads simultaneously for a while and had built a decent base of advertisers and contacts over the years so there wasn't much additional investment of time above what I was already doing. Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping graphics in and out is the easy part.
      • jonah 10y ago
        Are you selling by impressions or clicks or time? Did you build your own ad serving and tracking software?
        • stevesearer 10y ago
          Ads are priced $/month and are sold in blocks from one month all the way to 12 months. The site is on Wordpress so I just use plugins to handle that stuff. I'm basically a publisher so Wordpress is perfect for almost anything I could need to do.
      • 10y ago
• deleted 10y ago
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• joshontheweb 10y ago
  I'm running https://zencastr.com https://zencastr.com as a solo founder. It isn't profitable because I haven't moved to paid plans yet. I haven't had any time to focus on marketing yet really but I get a steady stream of signups each day. So far around 10,000 hours have been recorded using the service.
  • 0XAFFE 10y ago
    If I'm visiting the site without javascript (using noscript) I get a blank page. Please add a error message that javascript is required.
    • ryanSrich 10y ago
      How do you use the internet in 2016 without JavaScript?
      • stenius 10y ago
        You disable it in your browser or most likely run something like noscript to maintain a white list.
        • raarts 10y ago
          I think parent meant: how is the Internet usable with javascript turned off? How can you bear it?
          • ryanSrich 10y ago
            ^ as evident by the replies I wasn't as obvious as I could have been.
      • zxexz 10y ago
        AFAIK all modern browsers offer the ability to turn off JavaScript globally. Add-ons such as NoScript for Firefox give you more control though. I use NoScript to have all JS disabled by default on a page, and turn on/enable specific sources as necessary. On zencastr, I noticed that the page wasn't loading so I temporarily white-listed the site, and it is visible now. A common and, IMO not-unreasonable view is that all content on the web should be viewable on the web with just HTML and CSS (sometimes even without the latter) and thus JS should never be required save for specific tasks such as in-browser computation and the like. That's a bit extreme for me, so I just white-list scripts as needed.
• miraclepanda 10y ago
  Half a year ago i've started http://www.appstoreoptimization.io/ http://www.appstoreoptimization.io/ - screenshot generator for app/play stores. For now there are no paid plans as i want to deliver as much useful functionality as possible before charging people
  • mooreds 10y ago
    A word of advice from an internet stranger: start charging as soon as you can. This will determine whether you are a running a business or a fun side project.
    • miraclepanda 10y ago
      Thanks for your advice. There are couple competitors on a market right now ( launchkit.com, storeshots.net etc. ) and they have richer functionality than my service. So i'm not sure why people would pay for my app rather than for theirs.
      • hornbaker 10y ago
        Busy devs aren't going to do a competitive services search... they're going to use the first tool they find / hear about. Focus on SEO, SEM, offer a free demo mode with watermarks, then charge around $5-10/mo recurring for unlimited usage for solo dev (maybe $20-30 for team use), and you'll be golden.
      • jjp 10y ago
        Because the features they are offering may not be something a prospective customer values.
      • udkl 10y ago
        If those are your only true competitors, you SHOULD start charging. I like storeshots per credit charge.. instead of a monthly charge. btw, launchkit redirects to : communautic. com ... looks like they were hacked.
  • udkl 10y ago
• zkhalique 10y ago
  YCombinator told us that we are essentially a single-founder company, based on our equity split. You can see our growth straight on our website: http://qbix.com/groups http://qbix.com/groups and http://qbix.com/calendar http://qbix.com/calendar Revenues per user are increasing slightly with each product version, but we haven't released a big game-changer yet.
  • hnjake 10y ago
    Quick tip add the controls (volume control ect) to your youtube videos. It's a pain not being able to control volume.
• boraturan 10y ago
  I am running Alvin5.com, automated video marketing app for local merchants on FB,Instagram,Messenger. Pre-revenue. Solo or 2-founder is fun. You can not go bankrupt Looking for a co-founder.
  • udkl 10y ago
    cool, I still have questions. So the user checks out online and presents the QR code to the merchant ? Sorry if that is obvious, I haven't used this flow before, nor do I use an iPhone.
    • boraturan 10y ago
      this is one of the options. Customer clicks on a video ad for a local offer on Instagram, purchases the offer (via Stripe/ApplePay web payment), get the QR code(or Apple Pay NFC pass), presents it to the cashier.
• santhosh_81 10y ago
  I have been working on http://www.guesto.io http://www.guesto.io for about six months. I am very close to finishing it and hoping to launch in August.
  • code777777 10y ago
    Nice! Agreed that this is an area that could use some tech. Looking forward to a Show HN or something similar for this one. How does one feed in the list of attendees? Will it work with Avery-labels and multiple printers?
• arc_of_descent 10y ago
  I'm running http://lickcreator.com http://lickcreator.com which is a web based music notation software. Still in Beta, so no revenue. Been at it for six months now, kinda slow, but I had some new stuff to learn like SVG and Web Audio API. Experimented a lot with AngularJS and React. Went back to Backbone.js and lost some time there. But good experience. My hopes are high for this product.
  • joshontheweb 10y ago
    Im curious why you switched from react to backbone. Ive been considering doing the opposite. Mostly because I want to be able to use redux for undo/redo functionality and also for user action replays I can use for debugging. Redux doesnt play well with the backbone.js paradigm.
    • arc_of_descent 10y ago
      I really liked React and the idea of components with two way data binding. Unfortunately I found it just doesn't work well with SVG. If you have some HTML divs to manipulate, great. Also if you have good experience in JavaScript overall, Backbone.js is fantastic. Combine this with Underscore/Lodash and Babel for ES6 and you have a good build system.
      • martin_drapeau 10y ago
        Its a great app idea. Will you release it for iOS using CocoonJS or PhoneGap? I haven't found a good one yet. I'm also with you on Backbone there. Good job and keep on going.
  • udkl 10y ago
    Looks really good (Looked at the video) Have you done any testing with real users ? What exactly are your hopes for it ?
    • arc_of_descent 10y ago
      Thanks. Its in Beta release and I've started advertising using Facebook and Google Adwords. So users can test and send feedback. My aim is to first provide a complete web based music notation app. And ultimately a library of licks and phrases which users can utilize to aid in their compositions. Basically I've loads of ideas with this product. Build practice routines, i.e practice scales, maintain a practice schedule, etc. So yeah, lots of stuff I can build into this.
• emanueld 10y ago
  I run https://qrready.com https://qrready.com as a solo founder. We had a soft launch late last month. I'd love to say we're profitable but it's a little early. I'm still learning how to market it properly.
• kiril-me 10y ago
  I started https://lookify.co https://lookify.co one year ago. Now I have one more co-founder and we still in private beta. We have the small number of customers. The company is not profitable yet. But as I can see we have big potential.
• jventura 10y ago
  I'm running a single person company at http://flatangle.com/ http://flatangle.com/, where I provide traditional astrology software and services. Last week I've made available my latest web app (http://elements.flatangle.com/ http://elements.flatangle.com/) but I also sell traditional astrology reports at http://flatangle.com/products/reports/ http://flatangle.com/products/reports/. The business costs are pretty low, but since I'm not very good at marketing, my revenue is also still quite low. I'm doing this fulltime, along with freelancing to have some cashflow..
  • udkl 10y ago
    Have you looked at the designs of other astrology related sites ? They do not have a clean, blog/article like look. When I first landed on the site, I was confused about what it offered. If you put up the charts app screenshot on the main page instead, that would have helped understand it immediately. Take this comment with a grain of salt though. I'm not big on astrology, so I could be way off. Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc ? or am I wrong about the customer profile you are looking to target ? Nice name, Btw.
    • jventura 10y ago
      > Have you looked at the designs of other astrology related sites? Other astrology sites are ugly as hell, and I had to make a break from that style. Look at this site from the largest software maker in the area, straight from the 90s: https://alabe.com/solargold.html https://alabe.com/solargold.html But yes, my site is very confusing because I'm still on the process of trying to find what works. I create all my applications as subdomains of flatangle.com, that is why my main site is still confusing on its offer. > Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc? I have an application which says the temperament of a person based on their birth data (think more extrovert or more introvert kind-of analysis). I though on creating a facebook app for this, but as a marketing tool for my other reports, so first I have to build them.
      • udkl 10y ago
        > Other astrology sites are ugly as hell, Users of astrology sites are used to these ugly designs. This is the case with arcade gaming sites too ... which is why you see modern arcade sites are ugly. You aren't designing the site for you. You are designing for the customer and the customer is used to and sometimes subconsciously prefers the ugly design. http://therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/the-reality-of-ugliness http://therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/the-reality-of-uglines... Because there is reasonable doubt of the newer cleaner design, I urge you to at-least A/B test an ugly looking design that your target users would be familiar with. ------------------ Signature : I use http://www.hnreplies.com/ http://www.hnreplies.com/ to track replies to my HN comments. Do you ?
• nhorob67 10y ago
  I launched a suite of farm business software tools 3 weeks ago at http://harvestprofit.com http://harvestprofit.com. 8 customers and approx $8k ARR so far. Price point is high enough where it's not likely a quick purchase but too low for an inside sales team. I'm working hard on content marketing to build trust in the market place to drive user growth while keeping my team small (just me so far)
  • CoachRufus87 10y ago
    How'd you go about getting those 8 initial customers?
    • nhorob67 10y ago
      I've been collecting emails for 9 months, primarily by spending $3k on Facebook ads to send traffic to blog posts. 1,500 emails so far. My acquisition process right now is a "call me to sign up" after showing prospects a demo video. Not ideal. I'm working on making the app (filled with a model farm's data) live for users to test for a couple days (gated behind an email opt-in) and then allow them to sign up online. We'll see!
• antoniuschan99 10y ago
  I started www.facebook.com/kokonautweathersensors Looking for people to participate in a pilot project now
  • Tyler-Durden 10y ago
    You started a Facebook group?
    • bbcbasic 10y ago
      MVP my son
• 20years 10y ago
  I have been a single founder company for going on 10 years. Running multiple SaaS services over those years. Some have come and gone and a couple stuck around for 8+ years. Revenue has fluctuated anywhere from $800k+ yearly at its height (before 2008 crash) to as low as $250k yearly.
  • Lordarminius 10y ago
    >> single founder company...running multiple SaaS services This is the model I am biased towards. Mind giving out more information? What sectors do you operate? Do you currently have any employees? Any tips for a newbie?
    • 20years 10y ago
      All pretty niche services mostly in the real estate and home improvement type sectors. None have/had the potential to really be unicorns but all have/had the potential to be million dollar+ businesses. I didn't start off hiring employees. In the beginning I did everything myself (programming, marketing, customer support, accounting, etc.). A year in I hired my first customer support employee and throughout the years employee count fluctuated from just a couple to 13 at most. Many of which were part-time and worked remote. I have also had offices throughout the years but now focus totally on remote. I don't like the burden of an office. I think my #1 tip for a newbie would be to look for something niche that solves a pain point or allows your customer to make or save money. For example: if your customer can spend $10/mo on your software and make or save $30/mo from that, you will have no problem getting & keeping customers. #2. Don't focus on becoming a unicorn. You can make some serious money and build a very comfortable life running a $300k to $1m dollar business, and your chances of succeeding at that are much greater. #3. Look for things outside of tech. There are so many problems to solve in small businesses. Many will say there is no money to make with small businesses. My response to that is re-read #2. #4. Learn everything you can about advertising. Get really good at it and be willing to spend money on advertising. #5. Be willing to kill something off quickly if it doesn't make money. Test your market early to make sure people will pay for it. I have made the mistake of not doing this and I have lost a lot of money because of it. Now, I need to be able to see a positive ROI on my spend within 3 to 4 months. So if I spent $100 to acquire a customer, I want to be able to get that back + more within 3 to 4 months. I know this timeline is probably really short for a VC funded company, but I have always been bootstrapped so don't have the luxury of risking a longer time-frame for return.
• BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  I'm attempting to run a side project / business. I'm launching it this month (it's been slowly gaining in sign-ups prior to release which is a good sign in my opinion). It's https://www.simex.io/ https://www.simex.io/, a personal assistant you can give tasks to over email, sms and other protocols in the future. So no growth (unless you account my 50 sign-ups in the past 2 weeks, much higher than my sign-ups at the beginning of June when I added the form) or revenue yet. I'm hoping to launch in a couple of weeks and then immediately begin testing different monetization ideas (I have 3 and I don't think I should do all of them; would like to focus on one maybe two at the most so I need to do some testing). The A.I. / assistant space is becoming quickly crowded but I think I have a bit of a unique niche in that it'll handle tasks asynchronously (starting with meeting organization and overall asking a group of people a question and aggregating the results much like a map reduce over people (okay that sounds hyperbolic but I like the symbolism)).
  • kfrz 10y ago
    Just signed up. Can't wait to start talking to HAL
    • BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      Ha thanks :)
  • udkl 10y ago
    I would concentrate on a specific niche, instead of a general AI ... eg : Assistant for lawyers Answers questions like "When is the date for the next lawsuit ?" The site design needs to be professional.
    • BinaryIdiot 10y ago
      Thanks for the feedback! I love feedback but it's so hard to get it from outsiders without looking like I'm just trying to spam people :) > I would concentrate on a specific niche, instead of a general AI Yeah boiling the ocean would be amazing but at least initially I want to concentrate on a similar use case to that of x.ai where you're essentially using it as you would a personal assistant to schedule and gather information, likely in a corporate environment. I'd like to keep to a niche of asynchronous task handling but that's way too big to be considered a "niche" but more of a philosophy with how it should work. Hoping I can phone it in initially with scheduling and information gathering then others can use the SDK to do whatever they want with it. > The site design needs to be professional. Yeah it could use some more love; trying to balance working on the website and working on the actual product. Though currently I think it's decent enough.
• tjholowaychuk 10y ago
  I started Apex a few months ago, first product is a little uptime monitor built on AWS Lambda: http://apex.sh/ping/ http://apex.sh/ping/. Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that. Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're producing some form of positive income then great!
  • smcguinness 10y ago
    I'm working on something right now and legal is kicking me in the balls too. I've tried to delay the expense as long as possible but it is inevitable.
  • hobo_mark 10y ago
    (Very!) naive question: what were those 6k in legal bills for?
    • tjholowaychuk 10y ago
      For me a few things: - Incorporating the company - Terms of Service - Some weird stuff to transfer the existing product "into" the company That's about it, but at ~400/hr it adds up quick haha.
      • jeffmould 10y ago
        Ouch! That is really high for just that. Must have been some really one-off stuff for the transfer. Edit to add: I guess it really isn't that high at that rate. It made me curious as to what we paid for similar services at the same rate so I had to go check. Ours came in at just about $4000. The TOS/EULA/privacy policy are what ate into ours.
        • tjholowaychuk 10y ago
          I thought it was high too, I was expecting ~3k. Apparently the terms alone took them 6 hours haha.. pretty boilerplate stuff I'm sure, oh well, next time I'll try and push for faster results if they want the business
• joeyspn 10y ago
  I've been bootstrapping my last project basically all by myself (UX/UI, microservices, devops, mobile apps, etc) for the last 15 months. I'm saying basically because one of my former (failed) startup cofounders is helping me every now and then with some development tasks. It's a market data app with a custom technical indicator for a specific commodity. I've found an external commercial team specialised in this industry niche and they're going to start sales in the coming weeks (after the remaining regulatory hurdles are cleared). This is a top-notch sales team working for Fortune100 companies, so I'm doubling down on them for 15 to 50% of the revenue (depending on sales).... We tested the tool internally for some customers and was an incredible success. People is literally waiting in line to get it... so I'm also arranging external accounting + support teams. I hope (knocks on wood) it'll generate me x5 to x10 times the salary I was offered in management positions at 2 of the biggest spanish startups (tuenti and social point). In the coming months I hope to automate everything for all the teams via Slack ChatOps so I can have more free time and start new projects before Christmas...
• bsenftner 10y ago
  I created www.3D-Avatar-Store.com, a neural net driven, single photo to realistic lip syncing 3D avatar web service. It's a WebApp and WebAPI aimed at digital artists and game developers so they can put themselves, friends and customers into games, VR/AR, educational sims, advertising or whatever. I'm shutting down, as the revenues do not cover the extensive support requirements of indie and pro game developers, plus the hardware requirements force me to run a collocated server cluster that is moderately expensive to maintain - about $700 a month. Game developers, operating in their eternal crunch time panic, need a lot of support and they expect it to some with the API contract. I tried for years to raise financing, but investors need a lot of education to grasp 3D animation production, they have unrealistic expectations (always comparing our output to VFX from major release films), and often predatory terms that such investment never went through. If anybody wants to try taking over, they can contact me.
• jessegrosjean 10y ago
  I've run http://www.hogbaysoftware.com http://www.hogbaysoftware.com as my full time job since late 2003. Except for a few years (2010 to 2013) I've been the only employee. Dates might be off by 1 or 2 years but here's an abbreviated history: - 10k first two years. - Growing somewhat steadily to 250k around 2010 - Revenue (this is period when I was working 3 others) grew to 350k) by 2013 - Crashed to 40k in 2014, 2015 after cutting bunch of apps and going back to being just me as only employee. - With luck foundation is back in place (http://www.taskpaper.com http://www.taskpaper.com), hope to reach around 100k in 2016.
  • desireco42 10y ago
    Hey I really like your products. I was a big fan of WriteRoom, was always to come up with great ideas using it. Thanks, hope you will continue to make stuff.
    • jessegrosjean 10y ago
      Will try, thanks!
• defied 10y ago
  I have been working on https://testingbot.com https://testingbot.com for 4 years now. Providing browser testing through automation. It's a lot of work, learned a lot in those years. Profitable after 1 year. Still growing year after year, eventhough there's quite a lot of competition
• eappleby 10y ago
  I started https://www.pubexchange.com https://www.pubexchange.com in 2013 and have been running it solo ever since. PubExchange is a platform that helps publishers establish traffic exchanges with other sites (similar to a social network) so that they can promote one another via widgets, social, and in-article links. It's been profitable since 2014 and I work with over 600 sites, including HuffPo, Refinery29, and POPSUGAR.
  • neil_s 10y ago
    Wow, that sounds like a modern version of Tony Hsieh's LinkExchange, from the 90s. Glad that the model is still working. How did you go about signing up such impressive publishers? Was it organic, or did you hustle to make it happen?
    • eappleby 10y ago
      Thanks! The LinkExchange model is actually pretty different, but I hear that a lot. LinkExchange, and other webrings, automatically connected sites and had them all link to one another. The main benefit of those exchanges (particularly in the 90s) was the SEO lift (which is now frowned upon by Google). In the past 4-5 years, most major publishers have begun establishing direct partnerships with other sites, so that they can promote one another on social and through other direct links. The main benefit of that type of partnership is the traffic, but also the editorial control, and brand association. The challenge is that it is a very time consuming process to put those deals together, manage the partnerships, and track the traffic. I used to lead business development at Rolling Stone and Us Weekly, and MTV before that, so I am familiar with all that goes into it, and I created PubExchange to address that. It did require hustle to get the first sites to use the platform, but since the platform works like a social network, most sites that join now, hear about it through word of mouth.
  • udkl 10y ago
    The tech wouldn't be the edge here. Contacts with these high flyer publishers would make or break the business.
    • 10y ago
• mark-ruwt 10y ago
  I run Are You Watching This?!, a B-to-B sports excitement analytics company that identifies exciting games in real time by analyzing live game data. Sports, media, and cable companies license that data for use on sites, in apps, and on cable boxes. A clone popped up in 2010 (Thuuz), run by a VC, with a dozen or so employees and 5M in funding. We're profitable, growing, and customers continue to choose us over the clone. It'll be 10 years this Fall, and we've been profitable since 2013.
  • hartator 10y ago
    Seems so unfair and unprofitable to me that a VC will spin up a competitor in this niche. Good luck!
    • mark-ruwt 10y ago
      Watching a VC being interviewed pretending he invented something that will be the second sentence in the first paragraph of your obituary, is stronger than 5 cups of coffee. It's a blessing.
      • soared 10y ago
        Beautiful.
  • CoachRufus87 10y ago
    I always thought RUWT was strictly a consumer product; the b2b model is genius. Well done!
    • mark-ruwt 10y ago
      Thanks! I get to watch sports all day--I try not to ever complain.
• rakeshmukundan 10y ago
  I started a side project unifispot.com almost an year back. Its profitable from day 1 since hardly have any cost except for the blog/forum hosting.Doing everything alone in my spare time so far. Revenue varies from 2k$ to 0$ monthly.
• wpietri 10y ago
  One other question for the the solo entrepreneurs: how do you keep momentum? I have a bucketful of ideas, and I'm endlessly energetic in a team context, but trying to do solo projects wears me down quickly. Maybe this is just a character difference, but if solo entrepreneurs have tricks or methods for keeping going and keeping focused, I'd love to hear them.
  • csallen 10y ago
    Spend time meeting with and talking to other entrepreneurs every week. Internalize the idea that you don't have to be motivated to get stuff done. It's okay to admit, "I'm not motivated right now", and then get to work regardless! Get into a routine for starting work, and try to never skip it, even when it feels unnecessary. Find blog posts, videos, and articles that motivate you. Revisit them often, or work them into your routine. I like DHH's talk from Startup School '08 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY), for example.
• throwaway58182 10y ago
  Just hit $1 million/year in sales :) About 20 years ago wrote a scratch-my-itch B2B desktop software for Windows. Side project for 10 years which is how long it took to reach about $120K to make the switch to full time. Added features and increased price accordingly. Hired a few more people. Growth is slow but steady. Yearly renewable support contracts are the secret. Coding is easy, marketing is hard. Persistence, persistence, persistence. In a very crowded niche. Desktop software is definitely not dead - you can charge a whole lot more for it, and ongoing costs (other than people) is comparable to trendy web apps. Using throwaway so customers don't find this comment.
  • tjholowaychuk 10y ago
    Nice congrats! I often hear the same thing, it doesn't matter what your product is, it's how you market it. I still want to make a nice product of course haha but marketing is new to me. Any generic software marketing tips? I promised myself I wouldn't be one of those annoying startups that emails you ever day or two
    • throwaway58182 10y ago
      We've tried everything, and the only two techniques that have paid off are: website SEO (including having a blog) and Adwords. Adwords is hard - we've thrown away many thousands of dollars on garbage traffic. And some keywords are in the $15-$30 per click range! (our competitors have deep pockets)
      • tjholowaychuk 10y ago
        Interesting, I was pretty much ignoring SEO since it's such a saturated market (for my stuff at least), good to know!
        • throwaway58182 10y ago
          Also in a very saturated market. Getting to the first page of Google is everything. It takes time work, editing each page, good content, and (though they seem to want to downplay it) good incoming links.
• wnm 10y ago
  I started https://presskithero.com https://presskithero.com as a Shopify App ~8 months ago, and it is doing around 1k MRR. A few weeks ago I launched a standalone version, which was well received on ProductHunt (https://www.producthunt.com/tech/presskithero https://www.producthunt.com/tech/presskithero). The Shopify App is growing about ~100$ each month without me doing much.
• ilamont 10y ago
  Is there a Y Combinator for single founders?
  • SwellJoe 10y ago
    Y Combinator has funded lot of single founder compnies. So, Y Combinator seems like it might be the Y Combinator for single founder companies. pg has said it's a negative, and it really is. The likelihood of a single founder company growing huge is smaller than if there's small team at the start, for all sorts of reasons (which pg and others have written about). But, if you've built something awesome, YC isn't going to say no just because you're a solo founder.
    • kevindeasis 10y ago
      Really? Dropbox is the only company that I know of and when Dropbox started in Ycombinator they were already a two-man team? I'm really interested in knowing the other companies that were only funded as a single founder company
      • SwellJoe 10y ago
        There have been quite a few of them. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=single+founder+y+combinator+companies https://duckduckgo.com/?q=single+founder+y+combinator+compan... Again, it's definitely a strike against you in the selection process (as it probably should be...I've started a company solo and I've started a company with a co-founder...the latter is clearly better), but it's not a deal-breaker.
• adjwilli 10y ago
  I've been running Pangaea Learning (https://www.pangaealearning.com https://www.pangaealearning.com) solo for about 6 years now. I recently found a guy who helps me manage the community around Polly Lingual (https://pollylingu.al https://pollylingu.al), but it's mainly me and a small cadre of freelancers. All of our projects have been bootstrapped. Since you're curious about profitability, I'll be honest and say that the golden years of the App Store are probably behind us (or at least me) and I'm starting to seriously entertain other work possibilities.
• stonedge 10y ago
  I run https://www.vinyl-deals.com https://www.vinyl-deals.com . It started out as just a thing that I wanted for myself, to keep track of vinyl price drops without having to know what was out there. It's been running for a little over a year, growing every month, but still very small.
• Pephers 10y ago
  I too was very inspired by the Pinboard numbers, and this story and others have inspired me to start my own business. I'm running a booking system SaaS (https://zapla.co https://zapla.co) which basically allows embeddings a booking widget in any website. It's currently generating $1100 MRR after ~18 months in business. It's a solo side-business as of now, but I'm hoping for it to become my primary business.
  • udkl 10y ago
    Looks cool, how did you go about marketing it ?
    • Pephers 10y ago
      Thanks, I appreciate it! I must admit that marketing is my absolute weak side, but I've had the most success using organic SEO backed by some SEM campaigns. Since my product requires customers to have a website, I've created landing pages targeted at major WYSIWYG/DIY website builders. If they search for e.g. "booking system for <platform>" they'll have a chance to find a Zapla landing page for that platform :)
      • udkl 10y ago
        oh oh ... MS just came out with a similar booking software integrated into Outlook.... don't think it will affect you much though ...
• Brandwagon 10y ago
  I launched ClosingBell (http://closingbell.co/download http://closingbell.co/download) 2 years ago to help retail stock traders collaborate and share investing ideas. Never raised. Never got press. Never had a team to help. But I managed to grow it to 14,600 members, and over 1,170 have connected their Robinhood brokerage account via a partnership with them earlier this year. I launched a freemium model in May that now does ~500/mo. I never marketed it as I am still experimenting with the business model. I have tried growth hacking tactics in the past. I recently made a Slack app to raise awareness: http://closingbell.co/slack http://closingbell.co/slack
  • udkl 10y ago
    Stock traders can be a passionate bunch. What would be interesting is to understand how many of them are active each week/day. Installed it btw :)
• bluecalm 10y ago
  I've started http://www.piosolver.com http://www.piosolver.com and I run it with a friend. It's a very small niche and getting less popular but we are still doing very well. It was my hobby project for more than a year before any commercial plans appeared. It took very little money to start (basic Shopify plan, github, Dropbox, a few hundred $ for sponsored thread on a popular forum) but it took a lot of time. I am not a millionaire yet but well on the path to become one. I've learnt a lot about product development, handling customers and had many choices along the way I was completely confused about. I hope to put it all in text one day but for now I am too busy adding features, developing new products and optimizing the code :)
  • sputknick 10y ago
    Why did you chose to sell your software versus a subscription model? Was it just easier, or did you do research and find that selling was more profitable?
    • bluecalm 10y ago
      I tried to do research by asking more experienced people in the niche. I've got many conflicting suggestions and advice so I went with my gut feeling. I felt there was some reluctance in the gambling world against subscription model and I felt one time fee would maximize chances to get it going. As to the cloud vs stand-alone dilemma, the reasons for choosing stand-alone were: -everyone has a CPU at home and those could be utilized; building CPU heavy infrastructure so people could run it there would be very expensive and I have 0 clue how to go about it; it seems there are no CPU-heavy reasonably priced options on AWS for example (most instances are geared towards network/storage/RAM but there are none which are both decent when it comes to CPU performance and RAM, the ones which are the closest are very expensive) -people who play for significant money don't trust cloud in general; especially for high stakes players it's important that no one could access their calculations As to one time fee (and then maybe another for 2.0 version) vs subscription for updates, I feel maybe subscription for updates would be a better model but it was easier to start with something simpler. I had no idea if it's going to take off and I didn't like the idea of very few buyers demanding updates after 6 months or so when it's clear the product flopped (it didn't happen but it could). It was a difficult decision though. I still don't know if I've got it right but I feel I did (some competition who went with cloud model didn't do as well from what I understand).
• braindead_in 10y ago
  I have been running https://scribie.com https://scribie.com for over 8 years now. We have more than 11,000 freelancers and are closing in on 1.5 Million minutes of transcription. Growth has been fluctuating from 25% to 100% depending on the year. We never did much marketing except regularly updating the blog and some AdWords.
  • soared 10y ago
    Pretty much the most important pieces of marketing - organic search and paid traffic.
  • frankacter 10y ago
    Hey Rajiv, I just ran a 4 hour set of interviews through Scribie and have nothing but great things to say about the platform, the staff and most importantly the results. Great job and continued success.
• vital101 10y ago
  I started https://kernl.us https://kernl.us last May and brought it out of beta in January. I've been growing at the rate of around 5 new paying customers a month. After the closed beta I started out with about $140 / month in profits, which has grown to $330 / month over time. The growth rate has been pretty steady, but nothing so large that I could go full time on it.
  • udkl 10y ago
    Clever. Do you market it on the WP plugin market ? What is a common user profile of your average user ?
• 55555 10y ago
  I run http://choosejarvis.com http://choosejarvis.com with a friend. It's not profitable yet but is getting there. We've just iterated on the product and feel that we're finally making a good enough value proposition to ramp up marketing. I previously ran http://amzshark.com http://amzshark.com with a friend, which was very profitable within a year (~360k ARR) and ramen profitable within 3 months.
  • udkl 10y ago
    Good job on amzshark ..... I would be interested to understand how you scrape data from Amazon ... I assume crawling would be a significant portion of your operating cost.... and how you do it without violating their ToS.... choosejarvis, why did you think there was a market need for such a product ? How is it different from buffer.io ?
• asavinov 10y ago
  A couple of years ago I started DataCommandr which was supposed to be an Excel for big data - an easy to use self-service tool for data transformation and analysis: http://conceptoriented.com http://conceptoriented.com . Yet, I had to split between several quite different activities: development, marketing, prototyping (it is an innovative product). Eventually, I decided that the process is too slow and with this speed I will never reach the goal. So I decided to re-position the technology: instead of developing a classical WPF desktop application targeted at Excel-like users, I started developing a Java cloud service for in-stream analytics (for IoT). The main goal is to decrease marketing so that the product can sell itself.
  • asavinov 10y ago
    So running a single-person startup is not a problem by itself - it can be either a positive factor or negative factor: NEGATIVE: * It is very difficult to attract investments because of some formal requirements like "no one-man teams" or "no marriged couples" * You need to choose a product and business model where it is enough to focus on one or two major activites at least before the scaling phase. POSITIVE: * it is much easier to change strategy (pivot) for any reason (say, you fell in love and want to suspend the project) * It is much easier to make strategic decisions like partnering or relocating
  • udkl 10y ago
    "Transform data into the desired custom format by taking into account semantic relationships and relying on a novel concept-oriented model of data" Way too complex for an introductory line. I had to read it multiple times to get a faint idea of what you might be doing. Screenshots and illustrations might work even better. The design does not look professional. You might want to look at other SaaS sites and themes from themeforest or somewhere to get ideas on the page design. The tools is interesting. What is your target market ? Who are your users ? What are some use cases ? How do you plan on marketing the application ?
    • asavinov 10y ago
      Thanks for your comments and suggestions. Your observations actually confirm that it is not the best idea to do everything yourself. In fact, I pivoted three times during the last several years: 1. Windows (WPF) application targeting approximately the same users as Excel, PowerBI, Tableau, Qlikview but providing self-service data wrangling functionatliy (rather than visual analytics). Problem: after finishing 90% of work I understood that I have to do the next 90% - UI development ate all my time. 2. Java framework for complex analytical data transformations targeted as the same users and tasks as, for example, Apache Spark, but providing higher performance at run time and development time (in-memory column-oriented approach). Problem: again, difficulty to attract attention which is necessary to get critical mass of users. Probably the market of classical big data technologies is too tough nowdays. 3. StreamCommandr. Same as previous but focused on in-stream analytics (instead of batch analytics) and IoT. This market seems to be empty (very rare event) and I want to provde the technology as a cloud service (PaaS), say, in IBM Bluemix, GE Predix or AWS. The users of the in-stream analytics service are supposed to be solution/application developers who want to analyze their data (e.g., from devices) in real time. So I am working on this third hypothesis by taking into account my previous mistakes and collected experience. In particular, I am going to maximally simplify everthing even if I sacrify significant pieces of functionality. Time is more important than quality.
• bert2002 10y ago
  I work on https://www.blabladns.co https://www.blabladns.co - a free dynamic dns service with an easy api and many integrations (e.g. Slack, PagerDuty, Messenger, etc.). Working Solo on it and its not profitably, because there is no paid plan yet. More premium features will cost and will be integrated soon. Growth? Very slowly with one to two user per week. Probably because I dont do marketing at all (only the blog).
  • udkl 10y ago
    Wait, what are some use cases for this service ?
    • bert2002 10y ago
      E.g. you want to access some server or services at your home, but your ISP is changing your ip address every 24 hours. With a DDNS service you can always use the same dns name, only the a/aaaa records of these will be updated when you get a new ip address from your isp.
      • udkl 10y ago
        Interesting ... any enterprise oriented use-cases ?
        • bert2002 10y ago
          There are some uses cases, e.g. you have many external devices that are not having reliable internet connections and are not smart. The real enterprise use case is rather a full dns service for domains with some additional services (that will be available soon on BlaBlaDNS ;)
  • judiso 10y ago
    Why wouldn't one use any of "dynamic dns free" services instead? How is yours better?
• hexsprite 10y ago
  I’ve been working on http://focuster.com http://focuster.com for about 2 years now as a side project. It’s a productivity tool for entrepreneurs and freelancers that turns your todo list into a schedule in your calendar, and then gives you smart notifications to keep you focused on the highest priorities. Basically solves the problem of getting distracted and not knowing what to work on next. Launched on Product Hunt in January 2016 and we were #2 for the day. It’s generating revenue now, though not enough to give up my other gig yet. But I have customers that are giving me some great feedback. Initially I did everything myself (including UI/UX) but last year I hired a designer to help with a redesign. Also even though I am a developer I hired another developer to help when I had some other things to look after in my consulting business. LOOKING FOR COFOUNDER: Do you have the marketing and business development chops that will complement my technical and product experience? Drop me a PM or email to jordan @ my domain.
• DizzyDoo 10y ago
  I do, I run a small video games company, making games that one person can make, like this one: http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900 http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900. I've posted about it here once before, but my 'thing' (if I have a thing) is that I do both the programming, but also the art side. Computer Science is my training, so I can do the software development, what is less common is that I also have some skill in painting, design, animation, so unlike many games developers it is actually quite sensible to be a one-man unit. The actual number of copies that I need to sell is very low even compared to the numbers of friends of mine who have a team or two or three. Even <10,000 copies can be successful for me. I do contract with a couple of audio people, who are just better at that side than I am.
  • toqueteos 10y ago
    That's a cute little game, very nice work on the design! It feels super polished (both gameplay and aesthetically). If only I could be half that skilled with the art side... Have you considered translating it to other languages?
    • DizzyDoo 10y ago
      Thanks! I certainly have considered translating it, but at this stage I believe it's too late to be worth it. Not only is there the cost of translators, but in this instance there is an engineering cost as I made the classic mistake of baking the text all over the place, in binary level files, in json files, and hardcoded. Slicing it up and moving all the text into one place would take a while, especially as I'd want to guarantee not reducing stability. If I could make a bet that adding, let's say, French, German and Chinese would cause... 700 more sales, I would probably bother, but I don't think this sort of feature 10 months after release would generate that. I'm treating this more as a 'lesson learned', and approaching my next project with localisation in mind. Translating to a bunch of languages is one of my main goals. A final thought; I love that in 2016 a lone developer can make a silly puzzle game about cats and sell it in 80+ countries. The internet!
      • toqueteos 10y ago
• soamv 10y ago
  I run https://glimmer.cc https://glimmer.cc. It pays for its own hosting costs. It's not very profitable but it's steadily growing.
• itengelhardt 10y ago
  I run SaaS products (https://www.linksspy.com https://www.linksspy.com and http://www.terminretter.de http://www.terminretter.de) as profitable side projects. I'm also working on a book on email marketing for SaaS products that details what I've learned from marketing my own products: http://saasemailmarketing.net http://saasemailmarketing.net
• tajen 10y ago
  I'm single-running an Atlassian add-on, $4000 the first year, $40k the second year, $55k the 3rd. APIs are young and change often (=maintenance costs), market is not saturated yet, but the competition is competent. It's a real benefit (=3 month savings) to your startup if you don't have to build the sales engine: I've sold to very, very famous names, that I could never have had if it wasn't through Atlassian's appstore. If you're thinking about coming in: - Build a real, big product, after doing some customer interviews, - (but get revenue from month #1, obviously, as any competent startup), - If you go for a Cloud add-on, maybe think of doing software that can be used independently, - and there is the Codegeist competition currently running on, until something like October! It's designed to get newcomers. Think about it, winning is a great way to launch! (And it's every year)
  • farkas 10y ago
    Thanks for the testimonial! For others reading - we have hundreds of examples like this - single person companies that have grown inside the Atlassian ecosystem. From people like Bob Swift, who grew his company and was then acquired, to companies like Gliffy and Balsamiq Mockups who built multi-dozen person companies on the back of the Atlassian ecosystem. Get started here: https://developer.atlassian.com/index.html https://developer.atlassian.com/index.html
    • tajen 10y ago
      They're not exactly relevant examples because they were introduced a dozen years ago when the landscape was completely different. Among those introduced in 2014, I haven't found people who live off their sales. I'd love to know whether there are such recent successes.
  • udkl 10y ago
    @tajen, how can I contact you ?
  • csallen 10y ago
    I'd like to contact you, too, if you see this comment! You can email me here: csallen at alum.mit.edu
• xavi 10y ago
  I started https://omnimemory.com https://omnimemory.com nearly 1 year ago. It's a spaced repetition flashcard system with a minimalist UI designed for both desktop and mobile. It has a freemium model. It only has 35 signed-up users and nobody is paying. I only did some "marketing" for a couple of weekends (this is a side project), posting about it in some blogs, forums, Hacker News... I quickly got tired of this marketing work and moved on to other projects.
  • yranadive 10y ago
    What is your bounce rate? Did you do anything like SEO? If you have a high bounce rate, you might want to show the user a demo of how the product works.
    • xavi 10y ago
      Bounce rate for past June was 18.75%. As for SEO, I just got a couple of backlinks by posting about Omnimemory on some websites. I considered content marketing but I haven't actually written anything yet.
  • udkl 10y ago
    Why would I pay to use your app when there are freeish alternatives available ? You do not seem to have a mobile app too. A mobile app would be most ideal as I could revise while travelling. You could gauge market acceptance by advertising/promoting on school and college (SAT/GRE/IELTS) blogs and sites. Also language learning sites and forums.
• reppic 10y ago
  2 weeks ago I launched a platform for reading and writing interactive stories as a single founder. It's called Yarn (see: https://www.useyarn.com https://www.useyarn.com). None of my numbers are very large (yet) but the response from users has been great.
  • udkl 10y ago
    I've seen yarn before. Good looking site. It's hard to get users hooked into a consumer app. Have you tried advertising on Amazon ? in the kindle category ?
• throwaway7312 10y ago
  I'm a single founder. We do ~$150K / year in revenue right now. We did $15,000 in 2011 (our first year in business). $55,000 in 2012. $96,000 in 2013. $157,000 in 2014. Dropped to $133,000 in 2015, our first year of negative growth. From 2011 to mid-2014, I worked constantly to improve our basic product. But in 2014 I realized we'd never compete with the big guys in our industry, who do $10MM to $30MM / year. So I started attending summits with those guys to pick their brains, and hired a marketing coach. And I stopped working on improving our core product, just maintaining it. Spent ~$35,000 on marketing training since late 2014, and I've spent $20,000 (and about 8 hours a day, 7 days a week) on new product development this year. But in about 2 months we should have a product that can put us up there with the big guys and get us out of the middle-of-the-pack revenues we've been stuck in for a few years. The hardest part of being a single founder, at least in my business, is the need to maintain your current business to keep the income flowing and the customers around while you build the product that the business needs to leap forward. At that point, you're basically running two companies, the old one and the new one. And you can't just throw money at it because you're bootstrapped and only have revenues + credit to play with (assuming you haven't taken funding).
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  • csallen 10y ago
    Thanks for sharing! Would you mind if I pick your brain a little bit? You can email me (csallen at alum.mit.edu), or I'm happy to chat here anonymously if that's better for you!
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• azeirah 10y ago
  I wrote a utility script for Twitch streamers to show in text what music they're currently playing on Spotify or YouTube, and many other music players. Has been a stable 1k per month for quite a while now. As a student, this is really nice extra income :) Especially because I don't have any other expenses besides my 5 eur/month webserver. https://martijnbrekelmans.com/SMG/ https://martijnbrekelmans.com/SMG/ Any tips?
  • udkl 10y ago
    How did you arrive at the 4.99 price ? Streamers buy $40-60 games regularly ..... why do you think they won't pay more ? Could you sell a yearly license if users want updates ?
    • azeirah 10y ago
      I don't want to increase the price because it's a tiny tool with a really simple goal. I honestly don't expect anyone to pay over at best 10€ for this tool. I certainly wouldn't. Entitling people to one year of free updates wouldn't be a bad idea however. Might look into a subscription based approach for continued updates.
      • udkl 10y ago
        Is that price point based off of your assumption or streamer feedback ? Are you a streamer ? I would love to have a quick chat with you over slack or skype or whatever to know more about the tool & your experience as a streamer. You can reply here or to the alias email listed on my profile.
        • azeirah 10y ago
          I'm not a streamer myself, though I do stream occasionally, a week per year kind of occasionally. I'd love to talk to you, but am unable to do that right now. Is it ok to contact you in ~2 weeks?
          • 10y ago
• matchagaucho 10y ago
  Some numbers on my single-person company: Market: Add-on tools/plugins/components for enterprise software platforms. Customers: ~30 Growth rate: Adding about 1 new customer per month Revenue: $550K ($300K product / $250K consulting) Gross profit margin: 80% Costs are basically hosting, occasional marketing campaigns, some offshore development, and various SaaS subscriptions to operate the business. The product often requires consulting services to customize, which can be lucrative. I bootstrapped the product development via consulting and am transitioning to a full-time focus on product dev/support... recruiting SI partners to do customizations. Note: This is purely a lifestyle business. My true goals are digital nomad in nature.... traveling, writing code from a hammock in the Philippines, spending Winters in Mexico, work 6-9 months per year, etc... The income is nice, but freedom and mobility are far more valuable. My wife increasingly spends more time on front/back-office tasks, so technically this is a 1.5 person company :-)
  • tjholowaychuk 10y ago
    That's my goal as well, as long as I can make a comfortable living, hack on a bunch of stuff from nice places all over the world I'll be more than happy!
  • udkl 10y ago
    I'm curious, how did you break into ? Wherever I look, the enterprise add-on space seems to be already captured.
    • matchagaucho 10y ago
      Enterprise cloud platforms are captured. Niche apps, like "Forecasting for Media Revenue models" or "Foreign Exchange Risk Management for Discrete Manufacturers" are in strong demand. Really any forecasting, CPQ, quote-to-order, or month end close app that saves users a few hours and clicks per month will demonstrate immediate value and sell itself. There's always a risk that the platform vendor will fill the niche, so I keep iterating and addressing more edge cases to become the "premium" product with high touch support. Also.... basically just be happy with 42 customers and let the whales have the other 98% of the market :-)
• cheez 10y ago
  I run something that has been going for about 8 years. I can't seem to break the 6 figure level but I haven't done any marketing yet. I'm currently trying to get better at this.
  • udkl 10y ago
    Can you give us some more details ?
• throwaway29464 10y ago
  I'm a single founder of a B2B SAAS - took 3 years to get to 10K MRR. From Jan 1 of this year MRR has grown from 10K MRR to 27K MRR. Likely due to a combination of better product market fit, getting some very marquee name clients and price increases. Finally quit my full time gig in April - never looking back I hope!
  • dhruvkar 10y ago
    Awesome! What worked in order to get from 0 MRR to 10K MRR?
    • throwaway29464 10y ago
      thanks! talking to customers and grinding away almost every night and weekend (started as a part time project).
• pieterhg 10y ago
  I'm a single founder, I'm nearing $400k/y revenue. It started a side project on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 and then grew over the last 2 years. 2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too that! This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to Nomad List: http://remoteok.io http://remoteok.io. It's now a cost of living and city database with 1,000+ cities, and monetized with a 10,000+ people membership community of digital nomads, remote workers and general travelers. They pay $75/year to be a member (not everyone is recurring, I just started with that) I haven't had a lot of costs as most of it I do myself. Although it's been very hard work, especially in the beginning before I automated everything. I do have to charge 21% sales tax, and Dutch tax is relatively high but I've just opened a Ltd. so it'll be less now. The hardest part? I think early on capturing a new market quickly, keeping it while lots of competitors (including funded ones) keep coming in again and again and try to copy everything you did but do it better. And then hopefully don't get traction, haha. Also dealing with the hate you get when you charge for an online service requires you to grow a thick skin. It's mostly been an extremely fun experience though and I'm really happy and proud of what I made ^_^ P.S. I've been lurking on HN since 2010, that made me learn to code seriously and build stuff. I'd read patio11's posts and was super inspired. So I'm really thankful that HN existed and helped me get here.
  • contingencies 10y ago
    Sincere congrats on your success. Found this the other day: nomads: people who have larger collections of coffee shop wifi passwords than clothes - @jongold
    • pieterhg 10y ago
      Haha, that's probably true!
  • Bromskloss 10y ago
    I didn't even know that that site had a source of revenue. Where does it come from?
• jayarcanum 10y ago
  So funny to read some of the marketing folks in this thread writing their stories and tooting their horns. Oh wow, I actually read "marketing is way harder than coding" I learn new things every day.
• sblawrie 10y ago
  A friend and I have been running WeScreenplay (https://www.wescreenplay.com https://www.wescreenplay.com), a very niche service for screenwriters, for about 2.5 years now. I recently separated the backend platform that manages and coordinates everything and spun it off into Coverfly (https://www.coverfly.io https://www.coverfly.io), which we sell to film festivals to manage their screenplay contests. Between the 2 products (which use the same codebase), we've tripled in size every year. $27k in 2014, $80k in 2015, and we're projecting to do $250k+ in revenue this year. Hoping to do $1m in 2017. For marketing: affiliate programs, paid SEO, organic SEO, Facebook, Twitter, cold calling, sponsoring events with writers
  • udkl 10y ago
    Which marketing channel worked the best for you ? How can you create a 5 page, detailed report for just $65 ? How are you different from a brick-mortar service with a website ?
    • sblawrie 10y ago
      Of those, Paid SEO's worked the best, but I forgot to mention we also pay for email blasts to subscribers of other screenwriting related blogs and services, and that's really been the most effective. 5 pages of notes takes a reader roughly 3 hours, and there are plenty of people in Hollywood happy to make $15/hr working from home during their downtime. I'm not sure I follow your last question - it wouldn't make a lot of sense for a script coverage company to have a brick and mortar store.
• madmadjo 10y ago
  Hi there! Even though I'm a full-stack developer, during the previous year I had to build several Bootstrap UI Kits. I think I became pretty good at it so a week ago I started http://www.bootstrapuikits.com http://www.bootstrapuikits.com (worked on it for a couple of months before launching). Currently I run it as a store where I sell my own Bootstrap UI Kits (OK, one kit for now, but two more nice ones are in the works!) but the idea is to expand into a marketplace so that others could sell their own quality UI Kits. Besides that, the idea is for each UI kit to cover at least 10 cases (in at least one version) through example pages (store, social network, portfolio...). Of course, it's not profitable yet, but I plan to offer great support(!) and great Bootstrap UI Kits (each with 10+ themes) so we'll see. My analysis tells me that I could probably earn $600-800 per UI Kit (created by me) per month. I'm thinking about publishing the results in 3-4 months on Bootstrap UI Kits blog (soon to be created) so stay tuned. Hopefully that would be enough for me to provide for my family so that, as some people mentioned, I could work on some other things I'm interested in like A LOT (like mathematics, physics, chemistry, electronics...). Wish me luck! Nah, kidding... I don't believe in luck, just in hard work.
  • udkl 10y ago
    Why don't you list them on sites like themeforest ? That should get you more customers for the minimum effort. Your site design needs to be improved. It's confusing right now and some of the menu items do not work.
    • madmadjo 10y ago
      Hi udkl! Thanks for your comment. I am thinking about publishing something on themeforest BUT: 1. I don't think there is a section with UI Kits. I think that there is a section with HTML themes and I might (but just might) test that eventually; 2. it is very hard to differentiate yourself in a place where you have a lot of people doing something similar; 3. there isn't a lot of places on Internet where you could sell a UI Kit so I might try to create one by myself; What is the thing (or things) that you think should be changed? It's true that I've left some links unset (I've fixed that, like an hour ago, to a certain level - but it will be much better soon). The thing I noticed is that people didn't get that the image (on the card with premium Kit) is a part of a carousel, so I set that to autoplay, for now. The part where you have a card with a premium UI Kit and the card with the free UI Kit should be straightforward, and all buttons work as they are supposed to. Is there something you think should be changed, or if something is unclear...and if there is - what exactly? Once again, thanks for the feedback. It means a world to me, especially now when I'm still at the beginning of this business! Mladen p.s. Sorry if there is a lot of grammatical errors. I'm too tired currently and English is not my first language.
• rrecuero 10y ago
  Thanks everyone for sharing the stories. I have been working on a startup for several months, pivoted and I'll release the new concept in the next weeks. I think the biggest hurdle of doing something alone is keeping yourself emotionally stable. If there are more people, when you are down the others can balance it out. Has anyone experienced this?
• gonzo 10y ago
  Bill Joy says the number of smart people in your company..
• pramit 10y ago
  My run at it: Running a news site (Bighow.com), selling an all-in-one skills guide (thesuccessmanual.in), and an educational quizzing tool (basicversity.com)
• brendonv 10y ago
  I have spent the last 6 mos working on a music-creation app: http://doyt.io http://doyt.io The idea for the app comes from growing up with garageband and missing the hours spent messing around and making silly songs with friends and family. Trying to bring that fun to mobile in a social way (think smashing garageband into snapchat). The hardest thing has got to be soliciting feedback and hearing criticism. I have the tendency of turtle response- stay safe, stay inside. Actively working on getting out of my safe zone :) If anyone is interested feel free to email me at brendon at doyt dot io.
  • lotask 10y ago
    The idea looks great! The background on your website is not :D My eyes are bleeding, and I'm going color blind. Thnx
• arisAlexis 10y ago
  I would be very interested to hear also stories about when/why people decided to drop their single founder company/side project
• michaeloblak 10y ago
  Does anyone with single-person company have sold it and can share experience?
  • outdooricon 10y ago
    this would be a good separate Ask HN
    • michaeloblak 10y ago
      Here you go https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12071129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12071129
• richardknop 10y ago
  Here is my project: https://pingli.st/ https://pingli.st/ Started only couple of months ago. Small number of users so far. I work as a single man company at the moment :)
  • udkl 10y ago
    Interesting service. * How did you get your first users ? * What is your marketing plan ? * How do you do sales ?
• patleeman 10y ago
  How do you founders find an idea? I want to work on projects but I can't find any ideas that could potentially become a business. Where do you look? Who do you talk to?
  • aseoconnor 10y ago
    Solve a problem. Find out what pisses people off, and do something to fix that.
  • udkl 10y ago
    This question could have it's own separate thread. How do you approach ideation right now ? While I won't say I have implemented any ideas recently, my approach is very straightforward. Look at what is working (on threads like these), understand why it is working, and assimilate those points while ideating.
  • webtechgal 10y ago
    > How do you founders find an idea? One simple way: Keep a sharp lookout for any difficulty you face while doing/using something - everything. The moment you hit a problem, think if you can find a way to improve it. Bingo!!
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• atlet 10y ago
  I'm running SaaS for B2B and it's successful now for 2 years. I started in 2008 and till 2014 was only covering the expenses. I changed my thinking from "If You Build It, They Will Come" to marketing and this really changed acquisition of new users. In 2013 I also started another SaaS - monitoring service (Piltek - http://www.piltek.com/ http://www.piltek.com/), but it doesn't have a lot of customers as the only thing I did was developing it an put it online. I didn't do any marketing (only 1 week at the beginning) as I focus on my first SaaS. It takes a lot of time to build and grow a company (if you are alone and bootstrapped).
  • dhruvkar 10y ago
    >I changed my thinking from "If You Build It, They Will Come" to marketing and this really changed acquisition of new users. What all did you change? What worked?
    • atlet 10y ago
      I started spending money on advertising, before that I only used to do free advertising (mostly SEO) and not a lot: - Adwords - advertising in magazines (it was not worth) - sending letters and cold calling - Facebook ads - Linkedin ads