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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?
Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.
- jonathan-kosgei 9y agoI'm running https://ipdata.co https://ipdata.co which is an IP Geolocation API. It's been 5 months so far with 20M API calls served last month. The project is not yet providing the majority of my income however there's been tremendous and very promising growth!
- zeckalpha 9y agoNewsblur and Overcast come to mind.
- napolux 9y agoSo today is the day of the week I feel stupid for not being rich (yet) thanks to my skills in coding. Thank you, @pyeu ;-)
- imhoguy 9y agoForemost you need soft skills to change that.
- gkya 9y agoI know me some languages (human ones) and some programming. I can read from people's faces that they think I'm a nutcase when they learn about that and then I tell them I want to become a comparative literature researcher instead of becoming rich.
- ataturk 9y agoA lot of sites like this one are geared to do just that so don't fall for it. Indie Hackers is another one. "You suck because you're not rich yet." Most small businesses fail. Some do well for a short time, then fail. There are a lot of completely miserable people out there. Your #1 job is to NOT be completely miserable. If you can succeed with a small business (or even a large one) that's great! But like I said in my other post, there's a ton of bs out there.
- techaddict009 9y ago10beasts.com Amazon Product Review site it was run by guy named Lukhman Khan and recently it got sold for some 600-700K USD.
- jbonniwell 9y agoAdditional discussion of one person businesses from about a year ago here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amrrs 9y agoNot sure if you've checked https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/ before, it's full of such stories and those are amazing and inspirational. Because those are not your Googles or Amazons, it's just solo business that are very practically approachable.
- iovrthoughtthis 9y agocsallen is the best. Love indie hackers so much.
- iovrthoughtthis 9y agoPieter Levels is the creator of: - https://nomadlist.com/ - https://remoteok.io/ - https://hoodmaps.com/ And he just broke €50,000/m a few days ago: https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/968027544103473152 https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/96802754410347315...
- superasn 9y agoYes, this guy is truly an inspiration. If you're a one person business, you will find this tweet very useful: https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/938707166508154880?lang=en https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/93870716650815488... (aka stop running after shiny new things and just do it!)
- _xzxj 9y agoNo offense but Pieter Levels seems like a bit of a bastard, and you can see it in that thread. I don't pay much attention to him, but when I do come across his social media posts they're pretty off-putting. He's pretty successful yes, but €50k/mo is not exactly f-you money.
- gkya 9y agoFrankly all the messages he has to put up with are plain stupid, so if he's being a bit of a bastard, rightly so. I just found about his websites, bookmarked nomadlist.com already. It's funny, to say the least, how people exaggerate taking some data from a database and spitting it out as HTML. The important bit here is the data and the presentation, nothing else. WRT $50k/mo, for any sane person that's two times more-than-enough. If I could stably do $5k/mo from an app or website I'd be happy.
- jgh 9y agoSo I'm going to reply here because I think this is a good one (of the replies I've gotten) to express my thoughts a little bit more clearly: 1) I was wrong about what was going on in that thread. I sort of scanned it at first and saw that snarky "this is why I build companies and you do contracts" post and it rubbed me the wrong way. 2) The $50k (or €50k, im not sure which it is now) number is a lot, but given the way I originally interpreted the thread my initial reaction was more of one like "who does this guy think he is?" 3) I later went back over the thread and saw that people were being needlessly critical of a tiny webapp. All that being said, I do agree with the replies that are being critical of my thinking here -- I just can't go back and edit it on HN!
- jacob_rezi 9y agoThis is my story I started a resume company focused strictly on ATS optimization immediately after college with my best friend after we noticed how many peers were woefully underemployed. A year later, after mild adoption and the co-founder deciding to focus on his career, I moved to South Korea to localize the company which the goal of supporting Korean universities & to escape the competitive pressures of the US. Things are going well these days. https://rezi.io/ https://rezi.io/
- kome 9y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords 's pinboard.
- majewsky 9y agoThat's https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in
- icebraining 9y agoAnd now https://del.icio.us/ https://del.icio.us/ too :D
- ikeboy 9y agoI sell random stuff on Amazon, buying wholesale. Current run rate is ~200k/month, more in Q4, figure profit somewhere between 5-20%. Started 2 years ago buying from stores etc, shifted to wholesale a year ago.
- philbarr 9y agowhat kinds of things do you sell? how do you advertise? do you have a marketing campaign? how do you know people will want to buy what you have?
- ikeboy 9y ago1. Random, electronics/toys/health/office supplies 2. Not much advertising, just checked and YTD spend is $600, most on a single product. Most traffic is organic 3. Mostly sell existing items that already have a lot of sales and we just get a share of those. That's what I'm paying Amazon enormous commissions for - to bring the eyeballs
- HatchedLake721 9y ago200k revenue or profit?
- ikeboy 9y agoRevenue
- 9y ago
- filipm 9y agoHere's a couple of links you might like, although not all of them are exactly what you're looking for: - https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/ (of course) - https://www.starterstory.com/ https://www.starterstory.com/ - https://www.authorityhacker.com/undercover/ https://www.authorityhacker.com/undercover/ - https://failory.com/ https://failory.com/ - Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? (Jan 5, 2017): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535 (thanks @jbonniwell) - Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? (Mar 9, 2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243 - Ask HN: Sideprojects/passive income businesses with little or no own coding?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15806208 - Pieter Levels - Turning Side Projects into Profitable Startups (1h presentation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6reLWfFNer0
- sixQuarks 9y agoI would say that these sites chronicle just the tip of the iceberg. I run a successful solo online business and would never agree to be profiled as I don't want to invite competition.
- overcast 9y agoIn my opinion, those site are just advertising for your business.
- goodJobWalrus 9y agoWhich means it only makes sense being profiled if the readers of those sites are your potential customers.
- sixQuarks 9y agoAgreed. I would only do it if I was targeting entrepreneurs
- nhorob67 9y agoI ran a one man side gig for a couple years (farm management software). Got it to $200k and growing after 6 months in the market but I needed to bring the development in-house. Could've used outsourced talent for all dev and customer support but interestingly enough the reason why I hired was "what happens to all of our customers if I die?". I felt like I owed it to them to put a team in place, albeit a small one.
- tomascot 9y agoHow do you get in a market like that? We tried but failed because the owners didnt like the fact that we where from "the city".
- nhorob67 9y agoI was doing consulting work in the space, saw a need, and built the product. I came into it knowing the traits of farmer, the lingo, etc. That and a good product have helped us gain trust
- hackerman12345 9y agoFind a cofounder who can talk comfortably with the country folk*.
- WalterGR 9y agoI created and run The Online Slang Dictionary - http://onlineslangdictionary.com/ http://onlineslangdictionary.com/ . It's the eldest slang dictionary on the web. I started it in 1997 when I was in highschool. I found it interesting that slang terms frequently heard just the year before were already passe. I thought it was something that was worth capturing. It affords me a modest salary in a fairly high-priced area, on around 2.1 million visitors a month. I estimate that it would get 2.5x - 3x the traffic (and hence the earnings) if google weren't up to strange shenanigans with the site's rankings.
- filipm 9y agoDo you only monetize it with Google Adsense?
- WalterGR 9y agoA small amount of Google AdSense (<$100 monthly.) Sortable makes up the vast majority - https://sortable.com/ https://sortable.com/ . Switching from only-AdSense to almost-entirely-Sortable is what made me able to afford to live off the site's revenue: my earnings doubled overnight.
- julienmarie 9y agomost impressive, builtwith.com, 2M / month
- wellboy 9y ago4chan as well
- maxxxxx 9y agoPlentyOfFish was run by a single guy for a long time AFAIK.
- blunte 9y agoTrue, but that was back in the day when standards and expectations were much lower. Now there are hundreds more dating sites, many built by skilled teams. So this ship has sailed. But his (Markus Frind's) story is a fun one. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped-plentyoffish-and-sold-it-for-575-million-2015-7?international=true&r=US&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped...
- coolso 9y agoAnd it makes sense. Why would you want to continue running an online dating site after entering into a relationship? Not only would I think the motivation would mostly disappear, or at least drop off precipitously; but also, you have to think your significant other would always be kind of suspicious, and rightfully so.
- maxxxxx 9y agoHe was single in the sense of the single person to work on.the site. I don't know what his relationship status was. His main motivation was probably financial, not finding a partner.
- pcthrowaway 9y agoI can't tell if coolso was being serious or not. I imagined it was a clever pun and got a good chuckle out of it, but it did drag on a bit, so it could go either way.
- lawlorino 9y agoI doubt he's single any more.
- jxub 9y ago
- MattBearman 9y agoI run BugMuncher on my own (https://www.bugmuncher.com https://www.bugmuncher.com), I've been working on it full time since October 2015, and it's been profitable since November 2016, providing all of my income. If you're interested I've been documenting the entire process of taking BugMuncher from a side project to my full-time job on my blog starting here - https://www.bugmuncher.com/blog/from-side-project-to-profitable-start-up-part-1 https://www.bugmuncher.com/blog/from-side-project-to-profita...
- Danielalonso91 9y agoJust checked out your website - great stuff, and super professional also.
- MattBearman 9y agoThanks! It's been a long journey, but totally worth it :)
- jandem 9y agoI get a certificate error on Firefox Nightly. This is likely caused by https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Upcoming_Distrust_Actions https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA/Upcoming_Distrust_Actions
- MattBearman 9y agoThanks for letting me know! I'll get that sorted
- pradeepchhetri 9y agoI think https://apex.sh https://apex.sh is run solely by TJ Holowaychuk.
- mikekchar 9y agoI didn't actually realise he started a company. The funny thing about this one is that you have to think, "Hmm... I'll start a company just like TJ. Now, all I have to do is be as good and prolific a programmer as TJ..." It's a pretty high bar ;-)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- turrini 9y agoShameless plug: Revela Preço, an app to do price surveys (brazilian market) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.com.revelapreco https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=br.com.revelap... Well, not profitable yet, but promising :D
- JuliaChernykh 9y agoThis article can be useful for you: https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/86-what-is-a-marketplace-briefly-about-the-popular-topic https://roobykon.com/blog/posts/86-what-is-a-marketplace-bri...
- debeers 9y agoI run one-man security consulting business. Pays well enough to live comfortably and provides enough free time to work on side-projects. Six months ago I started transitioning from service to product oriented approach with online vulnerability scanning service https://getroot.sh https://getroot.sh aimed at network administrators and webmasters. I have another product targeted at penetration testers in works, to be released in couple of months.
- Covzire 9y agoHow long did it take to get your first client and do you have any advice for someone who would want to become a security consultant without having a large network of business contacts?
- debeers 9y agoInitially I advertised among friends and former co-workers that I knew needed this kind of service for their own infrastructure. They became my first customers pretty much right away, but my first organic users came couple months later. I marketed primarily by writing articles on LinkedIn. For the second part of the question - I'd say do some original research and publish it. Hang out where other security people are. Still, the easiest way is to build street cred and professional network while you work for someone else.
- mezod 9y agoHere's an awesome list of resources for indie makers :P https://github.com/mezod/awesome-indie https://github.com/mezod/awesome-indie
- coollector 9y agoCoollector Movie Database: https://www.coollector.com/ https://www.coollector.com/ Small income, but profitable.
- rypskar 9y agoLooks great, will check it out in the weekend. Do you have any plans for an Android app which can read bar-codes to register DVDs? Have planned to make that for years but never got around to actually do it. Have tested several before but all have had major problems
- coollector 9y agoI can't wait to start working on the Android app, but as a single-person shop, maintaining the desktop app is already taking most of my time. When you're alone, everything takes longer :(
- rypskar 9y agoI understand that, is the same reason why my version is still at the planning stage
- niko001 9y agoI run IdeaCheck, which validates startup ideas by running a survey within the idea's target audience. Started in early 2017 and it can now sustain me full-time. https://ideacheck.io https://ideacheck.io
- badestrand 9y agoAmazing! How do/did you market the service? And how long did it take to make you quit your job?
- zweicoder 9y agoThis is interesting. How did you actually find people to respond to the surveys?
- hprotagonist 9y agoi am not he, but i believe that macej is the only person behind pinboard.in (which i love to pieces and pay for gladly)
- idlewords 9y agoThat is correct (and thank you!)
- hprotagonist 9y agoyou enable me to be even more annoying in conversations by emailing links to people on the spot! i don’t know if this helps you sleep better or worse at night but it’s been really nice for me.
- 0xmohit 9y agoCoderpad [1], an interviewing platform, is run by Vincent Woo [2]. [1] https://coderpad.io https://coderpad.io [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=akanet https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=akanet
- graystevens 9y agoBreach Insider is a one person bootstrapped company: https://breachinsider.com https://breachinsider.com Been live for a few months now and enjoyed finding the balance between sales and producing new features.
- scyclow 9y agoI've only made about $5.00 on it so far (certainly not enough to retire on), but my latest endeavor is looking quite promising: http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz
- paulcnichols 9y agoLegit
- yread 9y agobut WHY?
- scyclow 9y agowhy NOT?
- subpar 9y agoLove this. Any interest in a merger with the cash machine that is http://subpar.biz/ http://subpar.biz/
- scyclow 9y agoI talked to the board, and they say that we're not taking merger requests at the moment, but would be open to a licensing agreement :P
- HeyLaughingBoy 9y agoOh my god. I'm trying so hard to keep from laughing my ass off!
- athenot 9y agoThis is absolutely hilarious! Geocities meets cryptocurrencies.
- ai_ia 9y agoI laughed for full three minutes. Thanks for this stranger.
- lettergram 9y agoNot quite at the majority yet, but at the current rate it should be by end of year. I run two websites: https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/ I launched that in January, but the investment advice I've used for years (when it was a couple python scripts). It's regularly making 100% yoy returns for me, so I'm happy. Kind of different than most startups / businesses though. In late January I launched the paid version, and I'm getting a few trickling in every day. We offer one month free, every month you provide feedback (meaning I get feedback more than money ATM) My other business is https://easy-a.net https://easy-a.net - it makes me a lesser amount of money, but enough to keep both projects running without me paying for infrastructure. Those are combined under my C Corp, so I look at it as a single online business. Utilizing same tech stacks, methods, etc.
- JamesLeonis 9y agoPaging patio11[1]. Patrick McKenzie is a HN celebrity that, in a previous life, blogged about his small consultancy and SaaS products[2]. His insights about A/B testing and automated sales emails are worth their word-count in gold. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patio11 [2]: https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
- acabal 9y agoI run Scribophile, one of the largest writing communities online, as a one-person business, though I have a ton of help from our volunteer forums moderators. The story is pretty unimpressive... I had the idea back in the days when web 2.0 was the new hotness, so I decided to make it happen and use it as an excuse to learn web 2.0 technologies. It was a freemium model from day 1, though I didn't expect many people to buy the paid upgrade. People seemed to like it, paid upgrades were getting sold, and after a while of it being a hobby I realized I could live off the earnings and decided to make it full time. It allowed me to spend many years being a digital nomad back when that sort of thing wasn't quite popular yet. I traveled to a lot of places and met a lot of fascinating people. Now I'm settled at home but those years of my life were priceless. These days we're one of the largest and most respected writing communities online, at least 3 of our members have been in Writers of the Future awards ceremonies, and our members regularly go on to be published by major publishers and smaller outfits. I should also emphasize that having one's own business doesn't mean you're a millionare, like many assume. I make a comfortable living but much less than you'd think if you pictured a "business owner guy". I still very much consider myself a success, because I get to do what I love, and on my own schedule. (For example I took a little time off to start a new hobby, standardebooks.org, which produces high-quality, modern ebook editions of public domain literature, and releases them free of cost and via CC0.)
- jasim 9y agoSo you're the wonderful person who started standardebooks. Many thanks!
- vram22 9y agoJust checked out standardebooks.org a bit. Seems like a great idea. Will check it out more and share it with others via my social media channels.
- vram22 9y agoI checked out a couple of books there. Neither had PDF as an available format. Why is this? Is PDF not considered an ebook format?
- csallen 9y agoWorking on a new view for Indie Hackers that will allow you to filter more powerfully. For example, revenue-generating businesses with a solo technical founder and no employees: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?employeeCount=0&founderCount=1&techSkills=code https://www.indiehackers.com/products?employeeCount=0&founde...
- lmcnish14 9y agoSidekiq is a one person business. The creator, Mike Perham, gave an interview about what it was like building his business: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/sidekiq-6e71309457 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/sidekiq-6e71309457
- mperham 9y agoAMA!
- mindhash 9y agoMost of my worry with one person business is what happens when you are not well or need to take personal vacation. How to arrange an ongoing support ?
- mperham 9y agoMy business is based on OSS; people are used to no support. I've tried to guide my customers to open issues and stackoverflow questions to get a response from the community. This makes for a nice historical archive that others can search and find similar questions and answers. I explicitly state in my support policy that emailed questions can take 48 business hours to answer. I take my laptop with me on vacation to answer support questions every morning. The rest of the day is free. You could also contract out support for a week if you really want to avoid the laptop. Pay a contractor friend $$$ to answer your support emails for a week. My main issue is that collecting money takes as much time/email as support. ~30% of my customers have some need for a manual touch during their annual renewal: forgot password, change email, billing question, etc. My first hire is likely to be an AR person who can handle that administration.
- rbucks 9y agoThat Sidekiq is a one-man business which allows me to exist as a one-man business (by simplifying a critical processing function and being free) is beautifully meta. Thank you kind sir for sharing your wizardry with us mortals.
- cperciva 9y agoTarsnap. I have an employee now, but I ran the company myself for the first ten years and from ~2011 onwards Tarsnap has been the vast majority of my income. I got started by... well, sitting down and scratching my itch. I wanted good backups, and it turned out that other people wanted them too.
- iUsedToCode 9y agoTarsnap is great. I love supporting it.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoCan you give a simple explanation why a Tarsnap backup is superior to competitors, but for someone who isn't going to understand the research paper? Does it backup my website like S3, or does it back up my personal files like Dropbox?
- cperciva 9y agoDoes it backup my website like S3, or does it back up my personal files like Dropbox? No. It backs up your files like tar. (Except with deduplication and encryption and cryptographic signing and off-site storage.)
- 3riverdev 9y agoI'll add another "Thank you for Tarsnap!"
- SimplyUseless 9y agoI love tarsnap
- zerr 9y agoI guess this is the trade-off - you should spend a significant time (or maybe a whole life) on one thing (e.g. backups) to become successful, so the price is to miss out on a lot of other stuff.
- coaxial 9y ago
- fecak 9y agoFor the past 20 years I've been a recruiter, and a few years back I started a resume writing and career consulting business called Resume Raiders (http://resumeraiders.com http://resumeraiders.com). It's a literal mom & pop operation and I do 99% of the projects myself. I started the business because I've always loved writing, am good at navigating tricky job search and career situations (I've seen it all after 20 yrs in recruiting), and I enjoy it more than recruiting. I also noticed most resume writers didn't really have a background in hiring, but rather were just trained writers that probably had a hard time making it in journalism or other areas. I'd been writing resumes for my recruiting candidates for many years, and many of those candidates would rely on me for career advice as well. It was odd to provide career advice as a third-party recruiter, as there were times when I might have some financial interest in what a person does. As an example, if someone approached me and said "Should I leave my job?", a recruiter might say "yes" with the thought that if this person leaves I might get a placement fee if I help them find work. Resume Raiders is now my primary focus and has been quite profitable since it started. There is very little overhead. I live in a pretty expensive area, but my clients come from all over the world. I also offer a discount to HN'ers (see my profile page).
- maxk42 9y agoHa! Hi Dave! I've been watching your little business flourish via your LinkedIn page for a couple years now and it's been a joy to observe it blossoming. Keep up the good work and I bid you continued luck in the future!
- fecak 9y agoThanks! I used to enjoy doing social media ads for my recruiting business (my 3yo daughter will likely kill me when she's older as she was featured in most of the memes), and I'm still figuring out social for my resume business. People are more likely to follow a recruiting biz on social (might have a job for me?), but a resume biz is very time specific. Thanks for keeping an eye on me!
- bredren 9y agoI worked with Dave, too! While I didn’t get the gig I was after at the time, I was super happy with the help I got from him. Not surprised, but glad to hear the biz is working.
- brandfountain 9y agohttps://brandfountain.com https://brandfountain.com I have curated a stellar portfolio of brandable domains geared to startup community, allows me to dev other projects without raising seed. I succeed by being flexible/sympathetic with early stage companies, expect to reach six digit sales on almost autopilot.
- mailjenil 9y agoHow often your domains are sold? Are those all inbound inquiries?
- brandfountain 9y agoI rely on word of mouth and random visitors for sales. With very little time, interest or expertise (in marketing) my approach is quite basic - offer domains that I would buy for my own projects and be humane with pricing. The extent of my customer strategy can be summed up in: if a customer has a good experience they will tell a friend. If they have a bad experience they will tell 10. I'm not trying to build an empire with Brandfountain, small is perfect for me as I am very busy with another project.
- Jack000 9y agohow do you price them? eg. I'm not sure how you would price cookry.com at 7k vs chefgram.com at 3k etc
- brandfountain 9y agoNot 100% science but typically: length of name and number of words are biggest factors. Category can matter as well - eg 'crypto' names are very hot at the moment.
- mi100hael 9y agoIMO these two are mutually exclusive: > successful profitable business > provides the majority of the owner's income Building a business takes a lot of time & dedication. It's going to be very challenging to reach long-term stability and profitability if you go into it with your sights so low that you think "this will be successful and I can coast if it makes $100k per year." Play to win.
- kerbalspacepro 9y agoThey're not mutually exclusive. It depends on how much the owner values their income/free time. If you really value income, then its obviously nothing great. Go and get a job at GAAF. But if you value your free time, a $100k/yr business can get you a life of free time in ~5 years.
- nickjj 9y agoI do freelance development work and sell video courses focused on building and deploying web apps. I started by thinking to myself "what would happen if I tried to make training videos?", slept on it and dove right into it the next day without knowing anything about creating videos. Hosting fees and a hell of a lot of time are my only expenses.
- mrskitch 9y agoI've started one after listening to a lot of indiehackers podcast's. Mine is https://browserless.io https://browserless.io, which is IaaS, and I just hist ~$1k/mo at about the 3 month mark. Still not providing the majority of my income, however it's growing to the point where it will in a year or so, depending how things go. If anything else it's been a wickedly fun ride, and I've learned quite a bit in doing it.
- newusertoday 9y agoyou already provide docker image in github, how do you make money ? by running the customer's script in your infrastructure?
- mrskitch 9y agoApologies on not replying, I seemed to have missed your comment. Money comes in two ways: hosted plans on browserless.io and via commercial licensing. Happy to answer any more questions you have
- osrec 9y agoI do employ a few people now, but in the beginning, it was just me for about 4 years: OSREC - https://osrec.co.uk https://osrec.co.uk Bx - https://usebx.com https://usebx.com Got started with OSREC because I could see a gap for a good suite of tools that could automate mundane data tasks in banks and hedge funds. Also, I did not enjoy my investment banking job. Got started with Bx because many people complained to me about Quickbooks/Sage/Xero and I thought I could do better :)
- umen 9y agothis look great what is more profitable the online Batch processor or the accounting app? can you explain the technical side of things ?
- osrec 9y agoBoth are fairly profitable, however the bulk of our income is via HeavyMETL as we can get customers that are willing to commit to big contracts (>$1MM/year). Bx was a labour of love, because I too did not like the existing bookkeeping packages. We're going to be releasing an improved version of Bx with some additional project management and task management functionality, so stay tuned! It's going to be a pretty awesome addition to the basic project management stuff on there already, so be sure to check back in a month or two :)
- dvko 9y agoI have been running a very unsexy business selling WordPress plugins for the last 5 years, averaging about $30K in revenue a month. Only expense is my time spent and a $5 Linode VPS that hosts my shop & update server.
- illegalsmile 9y agoAre these your wordpress plugins or is it an affiliate site? Any advertising?
- dvko 9y agoMy own plugins, all with a free version that's hosted on WordPress.org. The free version of my most popular product has hundreds of thousands of users and is what brings in the bulk of my customers. No paid advertising. I tried but it never really got to a point where it was worth it. Sorry for being a little vague, I'd rather not state my revenue and product together. And sine I've already mentioned my revenue, I won't mention the product. ;)
- stevesearer 9y agoI run https://officesnapshots.com https://officesnapshots.com which highlights office design projects from around the world. I guess I don't technically qualify for these posts anymore since I've hired a couple employees, but it was a one-person business for 9 years before doing so. The basic origin was seeing photos of Google's offices and looking for a website that showed photos of other offices. There wasn't one so I made it.
- goshx 9y agoI've been visiting your website for years and never realized it was an actual business. Have you written or presented about it somewhere? I'd love to learn your process.
- stevesearer 9y agoWhen I talk about it on HN it is mostly in the context of not using ad networks and selling/hosting our own advertising since that is of interested to the folks here. Other than that though, the audience here isn't the main one we're trying to build so I haven't spent much time talking about the process of building the site.
- msaharia 9y agoDo you get the snapshots from the companies themselves or your employees collect them? What's the incentive?
- stevesearer 9y agoWe receive the project photography from architecture and design firms responsible for designing the offices. The incentive is to promote their work for others to see.
- msaharia 9y agoThank you.
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- ArtisanOfWar 9y agoIt's tough. I've tried several. I run into motivation issues fairly early on if I'm by myself. If I have a partner it really helps keep me on track.
- bonestamp2 9y agoThink about a product/solution/service that scales revenue without scaling directly with your own time. For example, tutoring would suck because the revenue is tied directly to how much time you spend. However, a tutoring portal where you connect tutors with students can scale in revenue beyond the number of hours you can put into it. In other words, you want something that makes money while you sleep.
- SirLJ 9y agoStock trading robots, everything on autopilot, makes much more money than my "real job" as technical team lead for big corp. Truly lifestyle business running from the cloud and not looking for investor, customers or employees... One day will leave to my kids to run...
- malchow 9y agoWhat do you trade and how? No need for reproducible details, but useful to know something. I have been writing options scripts (short puts) for a couple years and have had a lot of fun solving puzzles there.
- SirLJ 9y agoHighly liquid US equities, using discount broker API to find, initiate, monitor and exit trades - everything written in Python and hosted on few VPS around the world (for redundancy) ... Options are to complicated for me :-)
- nhylated 9y agoWhat books/blogs/forums/libraries/frameworks would you recommend to get started?
- SirLJ 9y agoI cannot recommend anything concrete, all authors are selling either ideas that do not work anymore or just selling the dream... No one will publish a working trading strategy and even someone crazy enough to do it, it will be arbitraged pretty quickly... The best way is to buy stock market data and start testing ideas until you find your edge... All that said, here are the books I usually recommend, more for motivation and inspiration: The Asian Saga by James Clavell, reading as a kid on how to rule your life, business and create a dynasty... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asian_Saga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Asian_Saga More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby - on how to rule the world :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God A Man For All Markets by Edward O. Thorp - basically the father of quant/systematic trading and one of the greatest minds of our time... http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/a-man-for-all-markets/ http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/a-man-for-all-markets/
- imaginenore 9y agoSmartPassiveIncome podcast had tons of stories about successful one-person startups.
- mittermayr 9y agoI built a fully automated self-service Instagram publishing system, no private API hacks or such, but instead, by completely automating lots of Android phones (OCR, pattern recognition, etc.). Mainly offered this to small businesses and friends. Took off due to Instagram’s popularity and made six figures after a while. Now contemplating to shut down, as Instagram has opened up publishing access to hand-picked partners. A second business focused solely on Twitter analytics. Was about to shut that down years ago when Twitter suddenly offered free analytics, but it barely changed sign-up rates, so I kept it going. On good days, I answer one or two emails, that’s it. The occasional one-week-of-hell when things go sideways mixed in every few months, of course. Now looking for the next project.
- lemming 9y agoI develop Cursive (https://cursive-ide.com https://cursive-ide.com), an IDE for Clojure code based on IntelliJ. Strictly speaking it's just a plugin right now, but that's how most of my users use it. I worked on it for about 2 years, mostly in open beta, and started selling it in December 2015. It's been the only thing I work on and has provided all my income since then.
- joeevans1000 9y agoAnd what a wonderful tool it is! Thank you so much for Cursive. For all of you folks wanting to try Clojure, this is a great way to go.
- lemming 9y agoThanks! I'm glad it's working well for you, that's always great to hear. If anyone is planning to try out Clojure, Cursive is free for non-commercial use (OSS, personal hacking, student work) so it's easy to give it a try. I make my money principally from companies buying licences for their devs.
- rbucks 9y agoCurrently doing ~$20K combined from https://www.toofr.com https://www.toofr.com and https://www.inlistio.com https://www.inlistio.com. Also have these in the hopper - https://www.thinboxapp.com https://www.thinboxapp.com, https://www.enps.co https://www.enps.co, http://www.glist.io http://www.glist.io, https://www.voxloca.com https://www.voxloca.com Idea is I'd love to cycle through them, sell whatever's working after a couple years. It takes time to find the right business at the right time so I advocate 'incubating' a project in the background, building SEO, seeing if it catches. It just takes time. I'm polishing off a book about it now -- http://www.parallelentrepreneurship.com http://www.parallelentrepreneurship.com. It incorporates a lot of the wisdom in the comments here. (And I'm taking notes on the stuff I missed.)
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- busymichael 9y agoI run https://dndemail.com https://dndemail.com -- do not disturb for your gmail. I launched in 2016 and have solid growth. It is the 3rd web business I have launched. My first was in 1998.
- vinrob92 9y ago$50k/month with my current business: Manypixels (https://www.manypixels.co https://www.manypixels.co) I do work with many freelancers though.
- jonathan-kosgei 9y agoHey vinrob, big fan!
- ktta 9y agohttps://stratechery.com/ https://stratechery.com/ Not exactly a conventional business, but I believe he does pretty well for himself.
- kevin_indig 9y agoLove that site! Do you know of any other ones who are doing that?
- ktta 9y agoNot really. Anything remotely close that comes to mind is phoronix, but that is in an different class entirely.
- xstartup 9y ago1. Ad scraping business. We scrap ads and expose the bad guys. Let me tell you there are many bad guys injecting bad just because the ad exchanges do not care. Most of them do it because "no one would know". So, we just scrap ads and put them on display. 2. We sell a subscription to our service where we charge $200-400 month for access to this data. Many malware researchers, ad agencies, regulators are subscribed to our data set. 3. It's a private business, high 5 figure revenue. Scraping cost per customer is $10
- anonyx69 9y agoI'm interested as a potential customer. Where can I get more information?
- mariushop 9y agoI freelance in building Web Apps for companies so I can build free Web Apps in my free time. ' Guess I love building stuff. Last finished: https://eddtor.com https://eddtor.com
- patrickdotnet 9y agoI run patrick.net. For a few years it was the top result on Google and other search engines for "housing crash", "housing market", and similar terms. I made a living off of it for a while, but after the bubble did indeed burst, the topic became less popular and revenue fell. I got started just by writing about what I saw in reality, and how it contradicted what we see in the press. The press for the most part just prints the stories that realtors feed it, which is not a good situation. Realtors and the NAR are hardly unbiased reporters about housing. Their sole goal is to get you to spend as much as you possibly can, and beyond, to maximize their own profits. This resonated with a lot of people, and told others. The key for me, I think, was that the press's lack of good judgement (and the revenue provided by real estate ads) created a gap in the media where certain things were just missing even though people wanted to see them. Lately I feel the California market is shaky, so I'm starting to get back into writing about housing.
- mylh 9y ago(Un)successfull one-person business is https://botproxy.net https://botproxy.net (rotating proxy) Started couple of months ago as I needed such a service for my other project and I thought why not to make it as Saas. Now I have a dozen of active subscriptions and balancing around 0 in monthly profit while having to do a lot of work to keep things going. If I knew in advance all the stuff I know now would never start anything like this but now I feel sorry for the effort spent to just quit. literally everything went not as expected. So I warned you.
- thenaturalist 9y agoCare to elaborate on what exactly you didn't anticipate? Unsustainable unit economics? I guess bootstrapping anything alone is a stressful to get the wheels rolling. What keeps you from a) shutting down or b) experimenting with prices etc.?
- mylh 9y agoEvery part of the project went not as planned. Most bright example is billing. I was initially implemented everything using PayPal preauthorized payments API and only going live it appeared that this API only available to merchants with personal account manager, and to get one you need to already accepting more than 2500$/mo in paypal. So I have to re-implement it. And not only billing as subscription management also depends on billing. Then getting many IP addresses for outgoing proxies appeared to be much more problematic than I was expecting. Answering the second part of the question. I use it for my other project where I need to pull data from many websites on a daily basis. And I use it in my browser to change IP location and avoid country level blocks. I hope that eventually I can convert it into more or less profitable project, but the main lesson I learned from this is that when something looks simple it doesn't mean it simple in reality.
- ca98am79 9y agoHi, I started and run park.io by myself. It is a place to backorder expiring domain names. I started it for fun and it grew into a business. You can read or listen to an interview I did on Indiehackers here: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park-io https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park...
- umen 9y agowhat about solo game makers like: Slither.io
- vshabanov 9y agoI'm running BazQux https://bazqux.com https://bazqux.com paid feed reader. It's my only source of revenue. I wanted to read comments in feed reader (there were few forums with very interesting discussions) and Google Reader only allowed to read blog posts. So I've started developing my own feed reader. I believed that comments reading feature is killer and thought that Internet is big and many people will like it and I will be rich soon ;) I saved some money and quit my job to focus completely on my product. Guess what? After initial release nobody purchased my product. I was quite disappointed and started asking people what they didn't liked (turned out to be the most important thing to do). And I've started to add features they've missed, asked again, improved again. And got first purchase few months later and second purchase few more months later. Few times I thought to abandon project. But then Google announced it will discontinue Google Reader. By that time I had more or less usable product and got a lot of new clients and a lot of feedback (which is very important). Worked like crazy for a few months and after Google Reader was closed I've had enough clients to pay the bills. It's still in active development with a huge TODO list. Can't say that it is success. I would make more if I go to day job (and won't worry as much about what to do next to have income in the future) but I'm working on my own project, talking with my own clients, using technologies selected by me and can work on my own schedule (although after being burned out and birth of baby I returned to working 5 days a week in office -- my own office indeed, with piano ;) Having one-person online business is definitely possible but it's not as romantic/easy as it sometimes shown. "Wow, this guy could work on the beach" is actually "damn, I must work even on the beach".
- odonnellryan 9y ago> "Wow, this guy could work on the beach" is actually "damn, I must work even on the beach". This is a fantastic way to put it.
- heyhey123t 9y agoi just launched http://startmydomain.com http://startmydomain.com as I want to quit the 9 to five grind. The premise of the site is that you can create a coming soon website without any coding or even hosting would love to get some feed back
- ksaitor 9y agoHeya! Depends what's your definition of "successful", of course, but would like to plug in CJL - job board for blockchain companies. - https://cryptojobslist.com https://cryptojobslist.com - current progress https://twitter.com/ksaitor/status/968690695031500800 https://twitter.com/ksaitor/status/968690695031500800 - will share revenue figures shortly, but TL;DR — it's ramen profitable Been running it solo and launched in October 2017. Previously did a few other consumer+saas startups with a team, funding, etc — and this simple job board seems to be having way more traction and revenue than other funded projects with fancy apps that I've built before. AMA :)
- mattbgates 9y agoI specialize in creating useful apps that help me, first and foremost, and then share them with the world. I have released these two products: https://callmeprivate.com https://callmeprivate.com https://textmeprivate.com https://textmeprivate.com Working on some apps that I haven't released yet dealing with some telecom API, I got the idea of having a phone number without having a phone number to stop scam callers from calling me. But that evolved, of course... I started a virtual number service that privatizes your phone number with many added options -- basically your phone number can become a very useful piece of software. I released Call Me Private about 3 months ago on Hacker News ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15905375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15905375 ) and just started marketing it a lot the past few weeks.. so far, I've got about 12 customers or so. Since I've released it ... I've also had a few organizations contact me for some minor customization requests, which I was able to make happen. My early customers are definitely helping the product to evolve more to suit their needs... and what they are asking for.. I usually weigh whether it would be beneficial to that one person ... or many. If its able to help many, I spend more time on it. If just that one person.. I might or might not, depending on the usefulness of the feature.
- owenwil 9y agoI built a daily technology briefing + community because I got pretty tired of the way technology sites work (just a vomit of news stories) and make about $2,200/month at this point, so I recently gave up my job to work on it. It's growing fairly steadily, because people really value not being advertised to, and that's been fantastic. I'm also pulling together a bunch of disparate services to make it a great experience, including SSO to the community, paywalled content and a custom emailer that integrates deeply with the CMS. So far, so good, and I basically slammed it all together until it worked over the space of a year -- but the real work was three years of sending a weekly newsletter as well to build up an audience before I even launched this thing. At some point I'm planning to sell the application I wrote that powers it, because there's a distinct lack of 'community in a box' platforms that can solve this problem. First I have to finish it, but that's kinda the end goal. https://char.gd/recharged https://char.gd/recharged if you'd like to try it! The code best-friends gives 25% off for three months.
- sixfoot3 9y agoWhat are some of the key things you've learned along the way? E.g. More community interaction helped grow the newsletter, etc. I would be curious to know what your roadmap for the "additional features." What are the advantages you've found "slamming together" the system vs. having a custom system built?
- owenwil 9y agoHey! Great questions, thanks! Well, so far: 1) Focus on the community, then the content. I thought the content would be some sort of mish-mash of opinion and really more long form stuff, but people prefer compact, quick takes, in 3-4 paragraphs. Makes sense, but hard to see as a maker! 2) Additional features is a great question! I plan a few different things: - Community integration with the newsletter - Integration with 'real-time chat services' like Discord, as I do think they serve a purpose - Web push for notifying of "big" news outside of the band of the slow newsletters for those that want it - Alternate delivery mechanisms for the newsletters (perhaps as simple, short FB Messenger pieces) - Calendar subscription for events in the industry - A bunch more I've forgotten already :). 3) Technically the system is custom built, I guess I'm referring to how it feels to have done that myself. I tried to hack it all together via existing stuff at first, but it was clearly not going to work, so I built a deep Craft CMS integration with my app to get where we are now. It's a great way to work because it's all built on top of relational content!
- anotheryou 9y agoAny unsuccessful one-person online businesses? How did it fail? (I'm asking to dent out the survivors bias a bit)