35 ms·

Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

• Famara7 7y ago
  To be successful as an one person online business maker you need loads of self motivation & some self control over procrastination. If you're spending alot of time on your own, managing & building up your start up without alot of actual human engagement you need strong will power...& good ambient music on in the background ;-]
  • tluyben2 7y ago
    I had to look up what ambient music was and I found out that listening to it agitates and annoys me beyond belief. So that is rather a big assumption about music taste you have there.
    • Jaruzel 7y ago
      I found I needed music to keep me motivated, and after trying out Rock/Metal (my normally preferred genre), I cycled through baroque and classical, and eventually ended up settling on Trance/EDM. It ended up just being all about the BPM matching my typing speed (about 124bpm).
  • madsbuch 7y ago
    These kind of comments are very interesting, and I bump into them now and then when I express aspirations to do something. On the other hand driven people comment the same way on people "just" taking a job working 9 to 5 and appreciating being able to not work hard (well, procrastinate, not motivating one-self, etc.). I guess this is an area where empathy is really hard.
  • ezekg 7y ago
    I procrastinate like nobody's business and I still run my own SaaS business just fine. Just gotta ride those "productivity waves." ;)
• sdan 7y ago
  Heard some friends do dropshipping on places like Amazon or Shopify, although I can't attest to the validity/how successful it actually is.
  • gajus 7y ago
    I didn't know what dropshipping is. for others like me: https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/dropshipping/#5-hard-truths-about-dropshipping-no-one-talks-about https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/dropshipping/#5-hard-trut...
  • dajonker 7y ago
    Not a good idea if you have are required by law to take returns (e.g. the country where I live). Returns go to the seller, not the drop shipper. Read about some cases where the seller suddenly had to manage their own stock of returns and had to stop their business because of that.
• kgc 7y ago
  I'm guessing many Youtubers / Instagrammers would qualify.
  • onion2k 7y ago
    I doubt that. The success rate for running a profitable social media powered business is very, very low. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who try maybe 5% of them make any money, and 0.05% make enough to quit their jobs. The number of people who qualify as what most people would call financially successful (eg a stable mid 6 figures income) is even lower still. The creativity and freedom might still make it worthwhile, but the chances of being a breakout star are effectively zero.
    • Jaruzel 7y ago
      Not to mention, that the burnout rate is VERY high. People should not underestimate the pressure of producing interesting content every couple of days for years without being able to take a break.
      • michaelbuckbee 7y ago
        Which I think has only accelerated for things like Twitch streaming, where it's every single day for hours at a time.
  • barry-cotter 7y ago
    Not really. Social media is a horrible way to try and earn a living. The only way you can really do it is a patronage model like SubscribeStar or Patreon or some kind of gigging like live podcasts or selling merch like t-shirts or prints. You can be famous and make less than you would at McDonald’s easily.
    • campfireveteran 7y ago
      Incomes on social media are highly skewed power-law distribution. PieDiePie/Logan Paul make millions while everyone else makes pennies.
• pavish 7y ago
  I read an interesting article somewhere about Listen notes (https://www.listennotes.com/ https://www.listennotes.com/), which is owned and run by one person. Not sure how profitable it is, but you can get in touch with them to gain more info.
  • delta1 7y ago
    "The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company" https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-behind-listen-notes-56697c2e347b https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-behi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875
• vanni 7y ago
  Related: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783 752 points - 6 months ago
  • autotune 7y ago
    Kind of nice to be able to verify which one person shops are still operating.
• warent 7y ago
  I run a business called FontPeek (https://fontpeek.com https://fontpeek.com). It doesn't provide the majority of my income, but it does provide a meaningful amount and it's constantly growing (pretty linearly). It's a simple tool that allows font designers to add a secure font previewer to their web store. Only needs like an hour of technical support a week, and it's currently costing me nothing to run because Firebase has incredibly generous pricing. It started out because a designer who sells fonts wanted to hire me to build a font previewer for their website so that customers could demo the fonts without being able to steal them. I quoted them the price and they said it was out of their price range. I said I would build it for free if they subscribed for a low monthly payment. They were ecstatic at the deal and invited their friends to sign up. Turned out it was an unsolved niche in the font design community. I posted it to a few websites where people were asking for a tool that does this. The rest is history.
  • okramcivokram 7y ago
    (not a designer) I would not start my 7-day free trial without beforehand having more information on what the product looks and feels like. In the "How FontPeek Helps" section there's "Show your fonts" sections, but it shows no fonts. I'd love to see some demo fonts/pages with embedded fonts at least, perhaps a list of links to the designer's websites showing the widget (I assume it's a widget, there's no info on it) if they consent.
    • Freeboots 7y ago
      Yeah, super weird. Surely they could just slap the font viewer thing right there above the fold and be like, "this is it, here it is."
      • cawlin 7y ago
        If you are into typography you know what this thing looks like. This is super niche.
    • warent 7y ago
      Thanks for the perspective. It's been on my todo list to add customer testimonials with links back to their websites along with samples and tutorials. It's just a matter of getting it done :) Typically though people just email me or message me via Crisp asking for live examples.
• krm01 7y ago
  When I started http://fairpixels.pro http://fairpixels.pro (UX/UI Design for B2B Saas Companies) I grew it pretty quickly to a very profitable one-person business. (Not 1 person anymore) The origin story is somewhat organic. - Started as a logo design company - then kept getting requests to help with UI/UX Design so I did - then realised the most fun projects to work on were B2B SaaS companies - today we're still growing and can happily count Fortune 500 companies, an Elon Musk company alongside awesome startups to our client list. //Advice: Start with something small. Anything. Don't worry too much about how to grow. Then.. Just keep your eyes & ears open. Your customers will point you in the right direction towards bigger pinpoints & thus better growth opportunities. You don't always need a ton of traffic. Just start with something small and go from there.
  • iDemonix 7y ago
    Just FYI, do you know that your site is missing a <title> tag?
    • krm01 7y ago
      Yeah I know. The website hasn't been updated in a few years. We've been talking about a redesign for over a year (just didn't get to it because it was so busy) Finally added some extra hands to get it done. Should be live in 2 weeks or so. Despite the handful of technical issues we have today.. the conversion rate is still very healthy.
• khuknows 7y ago
  I run https://pageflows.com https://pageflows.com and have been living off it full time for a little over a year. The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a junior developer in London, so it's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough. It's a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some sort of micro saas, but it's I'm happy with how things have been so far. Happy to answer any questions you have.
  • sejtnjir 7y ago
    Neat! What's your business model?
    • khuknows 7y ago
      I literally just switched to a very limited freemium model yesterday (just trialling it for now), but before then it was just pay to access. It's $39 per quarter or $99 per year for access to all the content. Quite a low priced product with decently high churn, so I've been trying to find ways to increase the value.
      • deevus 7y ago
        Bonjoro is great for reducing churn. https://www.bonjoro.com https://www.bonjoro.com Check out how Matt Ragland from ConvertKit uses it here: https://www.bonjoro.com/uses https://www.bonjoro.com/uses Disclaimer: I'm the CTO
        • khuknows 7y ago
          Bonjoro is such an awesome idea! I was aware of it, but never thought to actually try it out myself. I'll look into it!
        • taneq 7y ago
          Honest question, doesn't this creep people out? I mean, I'm obviously not the target market but I find it awkward enough when sites pop up those "Hi I'm <name>, how can I help you?" chat windows even though I know they're just a script. I can't imagine how I'd feel if I'd bought something a while back from a site and I got a personalized video from the person running it. (Then again I did buy a Klein bottle a few years back and it came with basically a photo commentary of it being shipped and that was absolutely awesome, so...)
• phito 7y ago
  I sell carnivorous plants online. It's not my main job/revenue so it doesn't fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job. Here's a few things I do that made it "successful": - Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing. - Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere - Having a good website that works, is well organized and easy to use. - Friendly customer support, I like to talk to my customers as I would talk to a friend (to a certain extend). - Fast shipping after receiving an order, or at least let the customer know when their order will be shipped. - A good logo made by a designer, this has been super helpful for brand-awareness - Good packaging that minimize most damage the plants, with printed plastic labels for each plants (with my logo on them) - Active presence on social media, with good quality picture posts (with my logo on them) - Always give more to the customer than what they expected to get. Even a small surprise when they open their package will make them feel good about their purchase. - SEO optimisation so that people can find you on google. I struggle with this because google keeps autocorrecting my name. Most of these points feel obvious to me, but I would say 95% of the other sellers fail at multiple of them. Mainly the customer support point, a lot of them feel like I'm talking to a robot. I would say the part that I struggle the most with is staying on schedule and not forgetting about people who order via email/private message. Thankfully cold weather in the winter allow me to take a 6 months break each year. During that time I can relax and dive into other projets.
  • babycake 7y ago
    Can I ask how much profit you make off the plants?
    • phito 7y ago
      This year I made around 6000€ in profit. I could make more but the limiting factor here is mostly time. My main goal is to cover my hobby's expenses, which are mostly the electricity bill and acquiring new species.
      • collyw 7y ago
        Would it be worth hiring someone at this stage? Actually that was what I was curious about reading the title of the question. If you are successful as a one person business, it makes sense to scale it past a one person business.
• ThomPete 7y ago
  Ghostnote is a contextual notes and todo app. https://www.ghostnoteapp.com https://www.ghostnoteapp.com It is profitable but not enough to live of when you have a wife and too kids and live in new york. I build it because i needed it myself.
  • Insanity 7y ago
    That's a pretty cool idea actually :)
  • kossTKR 7y ago
    This is an awesome simple idea. Might buy this. Brainstorming a bit and the concept of "notes" in relations to static hashes/urls/paths can probably be expanded or to other domains.
    • ThomPete 7y ago
      Thank you so much. I have had people who used it for emac and you can with some proper configuration use it for things like Sublime. There is also a code editor so you can write your own scripts for apps we don't support as long as they allow for Applescript.
• fastbeef 7y ago
  I always hold up https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/ as a poster child for a successful one-man shop. It's so successful he takes several months off at a time, right now he's in HK reporting on the demonstrations. He's very generous with sharing his financials on his blog: https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
  • woutr_be 7y ago
    It's a shame he hasn't updated the financials since 2017 tho. I always liked reading up on it.
    • fastbeef 7y ago
      Did you read the latest blog post? I has financials for 2019
      • woutr_be 7y ago
        That's weird, when I click on "Pinboard blog", it redirects me to https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/, which stops at 2017. Just https://blog.pinboard.in/ https://blog.pinboard.in/ does show the 2019 one.
      • stephen 7y ago
        Hey! Been using pinboard for years, so I love it/huge thanks... but please make the web UI a responsive layout so that it's usable on mobile. :-) (I use the Android apps, and recently flipped from PinDroid to Pinkt, and both are usable but not enjoyable. The Pinkt UX looks great, it's just slow on all my bookmarks. If you don't like Android, maybe do a mini-partnership with the Pinkt guy to polish it into a great experience.)
        • nlh 7y ago
          FYI the person you replied to isn’t the owner (that would be user ‘idlewords’). Typo of It <-> I might have caused confusion.
• kolinko 7y ago
  I recently sunsetted it (as in - no longer accepting payments for it), but over 7 years I was running AppCodes.com. It’s a tool for app store seo, would be the first one on the market of it’s kind, if I launched it just 2 weeks earlier :,) Upon launch I announced it on hacker news, and wrote to the TC journalist that covered my competition. Got to front pages on both sites, and it was rather smooth sailing after that - I appeared on a few app store conferences and podcasts, did a bit of marketing, and all in all earned around $250k over the span of the few years (which is a very decent salary in Poland). Finance-wise, it was an extremely important thing in my life, since it was my first own project that allowed me to earn a decent living, after over 10 years of trying various things. Got me from “omg I can’t afford rent” to “omg, I can stop worrying about money for a while”. I also made a few important decisions over it’s lifespan: - not taking vc-funding, and keeping it a one-person operation. the downside was that I had much fewer resources, the upside was that I didn’t need to build a unicorn, and could focus on a small niche (indie app developers) - no free version, with good tutorials, good demo, and a good refund policy instead. twofold rationale: it takes some time to understand the tool, and I doubt free users would be so willing to take that time; getting free->paid funnel right can be challenging, and pushes the site into serving bigger clients really, not indie devs - decided to not go for corporate clients, as those require sales teams and much more support. perhaps I lost a few clients (a few significant publicly traded companies used it for at least a while) and a lot of money, but this was more in line with my personality - decided to move on to other things, again - more in line with my personality, where I like exploring new subjects, and don’t like staying in one place for too long :) - decided to not sell it - I prefer the site to stay as it is, than to earn a few bucks by passing all customer data to someone else, who would most likely scrap the site altogether and forward the domain to them - keep user privacy as the core principle - there’s a ton of cool stuff that could be built based on the data within that site, but it’s against the principles All in all, it was an amazing ride, that really got me off the ground as an antrepereneur, and I really hope provided a lot of value to the few thousands of paid users that passed through it over the years (written on mobile, sorry for formatting)
  • xcubic 7y ago
    So why the sunset?
• jawngee 7y ago
  I'm doing pretty well selling a WordPress plugin, https://mediacloud.press/ https://mediacloud.press/ It's an equal mix of rewarding and frustrating. It's a lot more work than you'd expect and now I've a deep understanding of why support tools are as obtuse as they are. It's generating enough income that's livable and freeing me up to focus on other related projects. I'm going to be launching a SAAS version of the plugin later this year.
  • WA 7y ago
    I can relate. Everything is always a lot more work than the usual "I can build this on a weekend". If it's a good product, there are so many details and edge cases the software considers, which aren't obvious if you simply build a clone. Only a true customer feedback and improvement cycle can make a product better.
  • hnick 7y ago
    Any thoughts on the Wordpress plugin ecosystem as a whole for building some income? I'm in a position where I need to learn more about Wordpress but not sure how deep I want to go.
• csallen 7y ago
  I run https://IndieHackers.com https://IndieHackers.com, which was inspired by threads like this one on HN. I've interviewed hundreds of people running successful one-person SaaS businesses, and many thousands more have created pages for their products here: https://www.indiehackers.com/products https://www.indiehackers.com/products Just a small handful of my favorites: - Simple Analytics by Adriaan van Rossum, making $2900/month (http://bit.ly/35QXFhY http://bit.ly/35QXFhY). Competing with Google Analytics and tons of well-funded competitors isn't easy, but Adriaan's focus on privacy and simplicity has a strong appeal. - Maker Mind by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, making $800/month (http://bit.ly/31FYK97 http://bit.ly/31FYK97). She's a neuroscience student and ex-Googler who writes fascinating articles about the intersection of neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and productivity. - Makerpad by Ben Tossell, making $24000/month (http://bit.ly/2JeIEg9 http://bit.ly/2JeIEg9). Makerpad helps non-developers build complex apps where you'd typically expect developers to be required. My favorite thing about Ben is that he basically refuses to run a business that's not 100% enjoyable. He's shut down a working company or two just because the business model wasn't shaping up to be something he was excited about in the long run. - Key Values by Lynne Tye, making $25000/month (https://www.keyvalues.com https://www.keyvalues.com). Lynne helps developers find roles at companies that share their values, and she shares a ton of helpful tips for job-seekers in her newsletter. Her business model involves charging companies to put together the super in-depth profiles on her site. - Carrd by @ajlkn, making over $30000/month (https://carrd.co https://carrd.co). Card is a one-page site builder. AJ's an amazing developer/designer combo with over a decade of experience building one-page website templates and builders. I can't name any web apps I've found easier to use and more polished than Carrd, so it's not surprising AJ has many thousands of paying customers. - Starter Story by Pat Walls, making $7100/month (http://bit.ly/35XdALQ http://bit.ly/35XdALQ). Pat interviews e-commerce founders about how they started their businesses. He was inspired by Indie Hackers itself and monetizes via sponsorships. Some people think you can't get an advertising model to work as a solo founder, but it's actually quite great if you're not afraid to do a little sales. Not only do you get to know your advertisers personally, but you can also hand-code your ads into your site instead of installing third-party JS that will track your visitors all over the web. It's late so I'll stop here, but there are many thousands more. The Internet obviously makes it easy to connect to millions of people across the world, which enables all sorts of niche businesses to exist that previously wouldn't have worked, because you couldn't have found critical mass in just your local environment. Plus it's cheaper and easier than ever to build and host your own apps. I think this is the future, and 10 years from now we'll see a staggering number of people (mostly devs) running their own one-person businesses instead of working jobs.
• gitgud 7y ago
  [1] Mike Carson is an interesting character, he runs a few websites single-handedly [2] park.io being one of the bigger ones. His [1] indie hacker interview is very interesting, as he resists growth and hiring people [1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-automating-tasks-helped-me-grow-revenue-to-over-125k-mo-73da9c0b51 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-automating-tasks-... [2] https://park.io https://park.io
  • johnmorrison 7y ago
    Thank you so much for linking park.io, you might have just given me a miracle.
    • stephen82 7y ago
      I see what you did there...well played even if it were unintentionally ^_^ haha!
      • johnmorrison 7y ago
        I don't see what I did, mind explaining the joke?
        • allannienhuis 7y ago
          possibly: https://www.linkinpark.com/ https://www.linkinpark.com/
          • stephen82 7y ago
            Bingo! :)
• sleepyhead 7y ago
  I'm running https://makeplans.net https://makeplans.net. SaaS online appointment booking. Bootstrapped and profitable. When I started it was because freelancing was terrible for me and also I wanted to have flexibility with time and location. But now I'm getting tired of working on my own, hoping to have a team soon. Currently there are too many ideas I am unable to implement due to time constraint and also sales/marketing isn't my expertise (I'm a tech/product dude).
• INTPenis 7y ago
  I know a successful two-person online cloud provider. One person is hard unless it's a very specific niche market. With two people you can have one with the gift of gab and one with the gift of code.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    It's also just a matter of being able to take time off. If it's just you, you're still going to have to respond to emails, fix problems, deal with clients, etc. which is at best a distraction and at worst makes it very hard to really get out of good connectivity range.
• abinaya_rl 7y ago
  I'm running http://remoteleaf.com http://remoteleaf.com - Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs based on your individual skill preferences & location. We source best remote jobs from over 20+ job boards and tons of individual company hiring pages.
  • mihaifm 7y ago
    That's brilliant, thanks for sharing.
• louisswiss 7y ago
  I run Sales for Founders (https://salesforfounders.com https://salesforfounders.com) - a course where I teach (mainly technical) founders just enough about sales to find their first customers and grow to $10k MRR. Since starting work on the course in May, I’ve been through 3 iterations and made about $40k. The ‘final’ version of the course will open for sale in early November, and I expect it to continue to be my main source of income for the next year or so at least. If you’re thinking about running a course (I was very sceptical at first) or want to hear more, you can check out my recent interview on the IndieHackers.com podcast.
• aparadja 7y ago
  Still the same answer, I develop the firewall app Radio Silence (https://radiosilenceapp.com https://radiosilenceapp.com) for macOS. It covers all my basic living costs. But I kind of got bored (again) of being happily unemployed (for the second time), and started a small consulting business on the side. A four-day workweek in addition to the Radio Silence stuff keeps me quite content.
• WA 7y ago
  I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while. Please don't ask what my business is. I rather share true numbers, but don't link to my product. I see no upside in being super transparent about the financials in a non-anonymous way (although I enjoy transparency from others ;)). What I think makes my product successful (and I keep this short, because luck plays an important role. Most startup stories suffer from survivorship and hindsight bias): - It serves a niche and does so very well, better than all others. I have clearly defined my niche, although it took me years to exactly pinpoint it. There's a tendency to want to grab a "bigger audience". Since I make more money than I ever imagined, there is no need to grow bigger or reach a wider audience. This would also make the product less focused on the specific niche. - Start working on something, release a prototype after 2-6 weeks. Don't invest months or years in something without users. - For me, marketing = SEO. I never really got into social media. But I have to admit that nowadays, my SEO rankings dropped a bit and people talk about my product in Facebook groups. - If there are two books I'd recommend: "Rework" by Basecamp. It helps you to focus on a minimal set of features and think about what's truly important. Couple this with "This is Marketing" from Seth Godin, where he explains how traditional marketing is dead and how it's important to find a niche. Don't read more books, interviews or whatever. Get into a "starter mindset" by reading and then do. - The subscription model helps you to stay afloat. People will pay for a product they use every day (and thus, derive value from every day). If your product is not used every day, but only once per month or so, expect way lower revenue.
  • wgx 7y ago
    I don't think I'm alone here in desperately wanting to know what business this is. :)
  • krn 7y ago
    > This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). Is your business focused on the German market or the US market? Or is it multi-lingual / international? What percentage of time is spent answering support requests? > The subscription model helps you to stay afloat. People will pay for a product they use every day (and thus, derive value from every day). Have you experimented with different pricing models? Is Duolingo / Tinder model (1 month / 6 months / 12 months) the best choice for B2C subscriptions without Spotify / Netflix-like licensing costs?
• mutatio 7y ago
  I run https://encycolorpedia.com/ https://encycolorpedia.com/ - its origins are from a "JavaScript as CSS" library I was developing - there were/are superior projects available, so ultimately I used the colour manipulation code to produce the site. The idea was to take a seed colour and render the page uniquely, additional on-page information grew from that. From feedback I guess the primary use of the site is paint searching and comparison. It's not massively profitable (it's a side gig), I've restricted monetisation to AdSense in an attempt to not ruin the experience for users. I suspect other avenues of revenue are hard to come by in the niche; I did reach out to paint suppliers in the UK in an attempt to re-sell / possibly rebrand paints, but had zero responses.
  • stanislavb 7y ago
    I didn't know about it. It's great. I dunno you could try with some minor AdSense. I've also submitted Encycolorpedia to SaaSHub. You should verify it there https://www.saashub.com/encycolorpedia https://www.saashub.com/encycolorpedia
  • mkl 7y ago
    If you also own encycolourpedia.com, you should probably set up a redirect. If it was someone else that grabbed it (registrar is different...), well that's unfortunate! I have a domain I got for a future project where there's a UK/US difference, so I made sure I got both.
    • mutatio 7y ago
      Thanks, I do own it, laziness on my part not to correctly forward.
  • zebraflask 7y ago
    Just wanted to chime in that your site is a go-to when looking for new color variations and palettes.
• lemming 7y ago
  I develop and sell Cursive (https://cursive-ide.com https://cursive-ide.com), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I'd be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I'm constantly amazed by how well Cursive does. The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent on support, both technical and sales, so when I work less I actually end up getting more frustrated because a higher percentage of the work is not as fun as writing new features. I've also had a bad year of having to work around IntelliJ bugs, but normally I like the actual development work a lot. I have friendly enthusiastic users who constantly make my day. It's a pretty sweet gig, and being able to decide how I spend my time, and which bits of my time I spend working, is priceless. I got started during a sabbatical from my last job, just building something that I wanted myself. It turns out that lots of other people wanted it too.
  • spv 7y ago
    I cannot believe that you make more from such a niche dev tool than your job at Google. I always thought people who use clojure/scheme would be using their custom setup in emacs or vim. I'm interested to learn more details, how things were when you first started out selling the app and the trend.
    • krn 7y ago
      > I cannot believe that you make more from such a niche dev tool than your job at Google. It's important to note, that there are markets where Google pays 70-90k / year[1]. [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Berlin-Salaries-EI_IE9079.0,6_IL.7,13_IM1020.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Berlin-Salaries-EI_I...
      • eafkuor 7y ago
        There are markets where it pays less - see Warsaw.
      • lemming 7y ago
• jwr 7y ago
  I created PartsBox (https://partsbox.io/ https://partsbox.io/) and I'm quite happy running it. It's a tool for companies building electronics (also available for free for hobbyists/makers). The business was (and is) a "freedom project" for me: I wanted to be independent of everyone, so no investors, no partners, and no employees. So far it has worked out pretty well. The nice thing about running a business in a niche is that you get to interact with nice people. My customers are engineers, I practically never get those mythical "toxic customers". The bad thing about running a solo-founder business is the stress and anxiety. These are difficult to deal with.
  • sellingwebsite 7y ago
    how did you find your first customers if you dont mind sharing that ?
    • jwr 7y ago
      They found me. I created the app, and people searching for certain phrases started finding it. There was some word-of-mount from hobbyists and makers, but not that much. To this day I mostly rely on search engines for customer acquisition (before you ask: yes, I tried, and measured carefully: every attempt at advertising had a net zero effect, e.g. I was putting money on fire for no good reason).
  • denishennessy 7y ago
    I'm really happy to find this (honestly, I haven't been looking that hard in the past - just assuming that spreadsheets were the best approach). The site looks really polished - well done.
• 0898 7y ago
  I run a series of events for people who run agencies. (By agency, I mean creative, marketing, or technology agencies.) Events are a good business to get into as a solo founder. You can book a venue, and you don't have to pay until a few weeks before the event. If you haven't sold any tickets you can just cancel the venue and walk away. I started Agency Hackers in 2017 and I'm almost ready to quit my job and focus on it full time. It took me two years to figure out that instead of selling individual tickets to events, I should offer a "membership" option where people can subscribe and just come to every event. Since I started offering membership last month I've signed up 30 agencies – for a MRR of £4,500. Once I hit 50 I will quit my job. To market the events, I don't run adverts or have much of a social presence. The only way I promote the events is via cold email - and an opt-in email list to customers. The cold email platform I use (Reply.io) did a case study on me if you're curious: [https://reply.io/case-study/agency-hackers/ https://reply.io/case-study/agency-hackers/]
  • boothead 7y ago
    I read that case study - really cool stuff!
• Jaruzel 7y ago
  For the period of 2008 to 2014 I built and ran an online webshop[1] selling Bath bombs and soaps - the product was specifically picked because in 2008 there wasn't that many online shops selling low cost bath products in the UK. What I did differently was I wrote everything from scratch, built the product databases, designed the graphics, wrote the front and back ends etc. I did it mainly as a learning exercise. It never made enough money for me to live on, but for someone with modest outgoings it could have replaced their income. Sales started to drop off as the site design started looking dated and due to no mobile device support. I was busy with my better paying day-job at the time, and had no impetus to fix the problems. I'm about to do the same again, but this time using dropshipping for stock and delivery, and I also intend to blog my journey (mainly as a record of what I've done) as I create each element of it, once again as a learning exercise using more modern tools/platforms. -- [1] http://www.jaruzel.com/files/fuzzybuttons-2012.jpg http://www.jaruzel.com/files/fuzzybuttons-2012.jpg
  • sellingwebsite 7y ago
    what were your marketing strategies at the time ?
    • Jaruzel 7y ago
      A little bit of social media (twitter posts, product page on FB), and a big push via Google AdWords at Easter and Christmas. Sales tended to be fairly seasonal so we focused on those periods. Also, spent a lot of time getting the meta tags on every product page exactly right - which I felt (at the time) was the benefit of rolling my own shop front-end instead of using one of the pre-made big name shop engines.
• treyfitty 7y ago
  I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago (https://www.mendskin.co https://www.mendskin.co) which isn’t “successful” yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time. It’s tough. There’s a reason a lot of companies spend $1MM from investors before launching a product, but I wanted to test the hypothesis that this need not be the case. “Beauty products” (for lack of a better term) definitely require heavy capital, and it’s becoming hard to do everything by myself. All the individual things that need to be done aren’t hard- it’s just that there’s so much to do in order to deliver successful physical products. But I enjoy it.
  • jklepatch 7y ago
    Cool! I used to run an ecommerce website a few years ago, 50K usd/month revenue. We used to get our customers from seo only. If I had to do it now I will probably try Facebook ads + email list. How do you acquire your customers?
    • treyfitty 7y ago
      That’s interesting. We too run ads on Instagram and Facebook and Google, but we’ve only found customers via Google Ads. I’ve tried campaigns for gathering email addresses, but that didn’t lead anywhere. Right now we’re testing affiliates
  • nickonline 7y ago
    From the list of businesses in this thread this was the one that caught my eye. However, I am Australian and a lot of the time businesses don't ship here. Like you say, it's a physical business, you need to move physical products. I opened your website and immediately looked for shipping, 'countries you ship to' is nowhere to be found until checkout, where there is a dropdown with no options other than the USA.
    • treyfitty 7y ago
      Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, shipping outside of the US is pretty much all we can do at this point, I’m sorry to say.
• BilalBudhani 7y ago
  I have been building https://www.flowboardpro.com https://www.flowboardpro.com - It is an artist management software for agencies. I went full-time on it in April of this year & have been working solo on it since. I have 3 agencies using it which is right now enough to pay off my bills. This month I'm wrapping up all the feature development to focus on the marketing side of it.
• techtor 7y ago
  I turned a software development blog into a profit-generating asset in 2 years. I then used it to market my skills as a Software developer and it helped me gained employment. I highly recommend any developer to start a blog, and just see where it takes you. My blog is https://zeroequalsfalse.com https://zeroequalsfalse.com
  • letitburn 7y ago
    Your python book recommendations for 2019 are crap.
  • igeligel_dev 7y ago
    How many views per month do you have and what are your income streams? Partnerships or ads?
• chrischen 7y ago
  I've been running Instapainting.com as a 1-person business since 2014. I started out with a single page with a Stripe checkout button on it. I've been living off of the income since inception, even though the first few years were poverty levels of income ;). Many have tried, but I'd say most just gave up when they realized they could make more money just getting a job.
  • LoSboccacc 7y ago
    just a curiosity: did style transfer services had an impact on your traffic?
    • chrischen 7y ago
      A lot of the initial style transfer users were users from Russia, who had little interest (possibly understanding?) of our main service which is matching with artists. Though this probably had more to do with the fact that they didn't speak English.
• johnmorrison 7y ago
  I heard levels.io (twitter.com/levelsio) makes like $50,000 per month off of Nomad List, and I'm pretty sure it's a one-person thing.
  • xcubic 7y ago
    Not anymore. I think he has at least a dev by now.
• msbroadf 7y ago
  I started https://www.virtualhere.com https://www.virtualhere.com about 10 years ago, it provides a good income. I developed/sell/support everything myself. I felt there was a need for this type of product 10 years ago and with cloud computing/gaming its become very useful for a lot of use-cases now.
  • julianwachholz 7y ago
    I've used VirtualHere a couple years ago when the Steam Link was brand new and used my racing wheel with it, worked like a charm!
• davej 7y ago
  I launched ToDesktop back in April, I'm ramen profitable and I'm working on it full-time. I don't know if I would call it a success yet. I want my revenue to reach six figures annually before I call it a success but I'm seeing good growth. Most of my growth now is coming from organic search engine traffic. I've posted some high-leverage page speed + SEO tips on Indie Hackers here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/marketing-tools-are-damaging-your-seo-and-how-to-fix-it-ed6d6d7bb4?commentId=-LnHh1mMxpDTsMUkhf2J https://www.indiehackers.com/post/marketing-tools-are-damagi... I'm a product/tech person with some graphic design experience but I was really weak on sales/marketing before I started working on ToDesktop. If you're like me (strong on tech/product, weak on sales/marketing) then I would highly recommend Julian Shapiro's guide on growth marketing. It's zero-fluff and written by someone with a technical mindset: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro A one-person business is tough, it's lonely at times. It can also be tough to work on the things you should be working on (as opposed to the things you want to work on). This is enjoyable sometimes though, for example, I made my test suite dance to Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk. Totally unnecessary but it renewed my enthusiasm and made for a fun tweet. https://twitter.com/DaveJ/status/1167386564240056321 https://twitter.com/DaveJ/status/1167386564240056321 Self-promo for those interested: ToDesktop automatically creates a desktop app from any web app. It's like Electron-as-a-Service with code signing, installer, auto-updates, app notarization taken care of. https://www.todesktop.com/ https://www.todesktop.com/
• sillycube 7y ago
  Just wonder how you guys got the idea? Any Sharing?
• fidla 7y ago
  I teach mandolin and violin lessons online, and sell related products https://sweetmusicstudio.net https://sweetmusicstudio.net. I make a modest income and profit.
  • agota 7y ago
    Do you mind me asking how you got your first clients? P.S. I clicked on the link, the website doesn't load, at least for me.
• temp_throw 7y ago
  I have a UK based e-business, I've turned over between £750,000 and now £950,000 over the past four years (ex VAT). (~76% net profit margin) Its just me, I'm a developer, which meant I could bootstrap the whole thing for zero cost (time not included) but I've always felt I knew I had what it takes to make a small business successful. Its an online service, we have a web site and apps in the app stores. I'd rather not say exactly what we do as this way I can be transparent on numbers. (Also, I am slightly paranoid of copy-cats) We have a paid for service, costs less than £50, its not a subscription, just a one off purchase. As has been said previously, luck plays a big part in success and I'm not going to pretend this is not true for me too. -The competition are £MM businesses, and this is probably why I am able to be so successful as I can move faster, adapt, and resolve issues. Over time, people notice this. They tend to buy the customer via adwords. -Word of mouth is a huge part of how the product has grown, people like the product and tell their friends/family, I spend less than £1500 p/m on advertising through the traditional online mediums. - I always try new ideas out, and find out if people like them. Its low risk, low cost, high reward. Big fan of XP, agile, etc - I'd recommend - Getting real (Basecamp) - https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real, its got some solid advice - A mentality of always wanting to make the product better, without bloating it, is key. - People always worry about support. It's really not a big deal, I've had hundreds of thousands of customers over the years, support contact is low. Happy to answer any questions if people find it useful.
  • fukuro 7y ago
    How did you find the product? And how long did it take you to generate your first revenue? (From the initial idea to the first user/euros) Basically how do you get started with such a venture as yours?
    • temp_throw 7y ago
      I found the product by chance really, I had a need for the product and I noticed that the websites of the competition were poor, in terms of usability, clarity, and functionality. It was clear that they were taking their users for granted, no innovation, no need to do anything different. i.e. perfect for me to disrupt. I worked on building the website (the apps came about a year later using Cordova so I could utilise my HTML/JS skills) in evenings and weekends for about 4 months. Not all of that was development, some of it was speaking with third parties I needed to get the product working. The first paying customer got a full refund, because, of course, it didnt work properly, but the most valuable lesson I learnt was just to deploy something and fix it ad-hoc, NOT wait for it to be perfect/feature complete. I had low expectations, and I didn't quit my day job, so it was low pressure "lets see what happens" Spending time making the website SEO friendly meant I didn't have to spend a penny in advertising for the first year as all of our traffic was organic. It wasn't until the annual revenues were around £400,000 that I started to spend ANY money on advertising.
• throwaway21212 7y ago
  I have a one-person lifestyle business. I like it primarily because it gives me the flexibility to live anywhere in the world. I hated my old desk job and the idea of 2 weeks vacation every year. I run a SaaS product that integrates with ERPs. I pretend to my customers that I have a team (so much so that I have multiple email addresses to people that don't exist that actually just forward to me). One of our customers thinks they're paying for a team of 6, but it's actually just me. My monthly billings last month was 73k USD. I am a tax resident of a tax haven although I do live 3-6 months at a time in a different country. The only advice I'd give anyone looking to build a lifestyle business is to keep your ambitions and by extension- product feature set in check. I know several other people who operate like me, and the common thread is we have businesses that can easily take VC funds, hire, and expand. But for lifestyle priorities, we chose not to. A lot of people I've met (particularly in Chiang Mai, Thailand) copy popular, common, and easy online businesses such as drop shipping, social media XYZ, or coding. Unless you live in a really low cost area, it's not a good life. The key is have a very specific niche that can be scaled upwards if you want, but you always have the option not to. Those the ideas and businesses that seems to provide the ideal balance in lifestyle. EDIT: The product came about at my last job where I built it to make my own job easier. Essentially it did 95% of what job which at the time enabled me to be the "best performer" while not actually working that hard.
  • esquire_900 7y ago
    Don't you find that whole pretending part to be unethical? With those kind of revenues it shouldn't be hard to either hire 2 and make factual claims, or just drop the whole we're-a-team claim. I can't imagine that building a foundation on these kind of lies towards your clients is going to be sustainable in the long run?
    • pc86 7y ago
      It is unethical, whether they find it that way or not. Nearly $1MM/year in revenue and they feel the need to email multiple times from different fake emails? Pathetic.
    • blunte 7y ago
• pawurb 7y ago
  I've recently described my road to $10k profit from a bootstraped side project https://pawelurbanek.com/side-project-profit https://pawelurbanek.com/side-project-profit
• nickswan 7y ago
  I have been running https://www.sanitycheck.io https://www.sanitycheck.io - an SEO tool. I built it originally to help me with my own SEO consulting work, but it has grown from being a side project to my main source of income now. Literally just this month it has reached the point of being able to support me full time. It has taken 3 years to get to this point. It's just me - I have made use of the odd contractor for website design and copy. Upon starting the side project I wanted to see how large I could grow a business as a single person. It has been fun, but I also miss the team mate side of things such as brainstorming solutions and talking through problems.
  • graeme 7y ago
    Had a look at your site, and requested access, as I think it would be useful. That said, I'm not super clear on what it does. The landing pages could really benefit from listing a few specific features, and listing the business outcome that results from them. I get that it does automated page speed testing (is this different from kingdom). Other than that, the main thing I'm aware that it does it "improved google search console reports". But what does that do? Listing some specific report types and the resulting business outcomes would really help. (e.g. saved time on task X, increased ranking on page Y, more revenue from a higher CTR on product Z, I dunno)
    • nickswan 7y ago
      Thanks - great feedback. Always trying to improve the home and feature pages and I do agree on your points. Have considered getting an explainer video created.
  • shanecleveland 7y ago
    I enjoy listening to your podcast: http://www.britstrapped.com http://www.britstrapped.com Though, if I listen for too long the voice in my head begins speaking in a British accent! Congrats on getting to full time.
• snt 7y ago
  I run https://picojump.com https://picojump.com which I started this year. It evolved to scratch my own itch: simplifying the access, management, and monitoring of a fleet of distributed Raspberry Pis (running Raspbian, on private networks) without requiring any proprietary client-side code. Though it meets the submitter's criteria, it's not [yet] providing enough to live off.
  • imglorp 7y ago
    Nice job, I've been thinking about this for a while, perhaps leverage... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/fleets-remote-access.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/f...
    • snt 7y ago
      Thanks. I did not know about Amazon GameLift. I guess I just used the word "fleet" to mean "a collection of similar things under unified control". (Unified control being the aim of the project.) In this case, as building block, I'm using robust, persistent reverse SSH tunnels.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• bekman 7y ago
  I run a popular Quiz website. I make around $6,000 per month from Google adsense. I work between 2-3 hours a week usually posting quiz links on my Pinterest page. My only expense is hosting which is around $20 per month (Digital Ocean). I have never advertised my website and it gets all the traffic from Pinterest Organically. Compare to my salary, I'm an IT Administrator in my day job and make $400 per month. I live in Ethiopia :) I thought this inspires my fellow HN. Good day.
  • jfoster 7y ago
    If your job is less than 10% of your income, why keep it?
    • gowthamgts12 7y ago
      Some people stay in jobs not only for money but for other minor stuff. They continue because they don't want to work alone, keep pushing themselves, keeping a routine, etc.
      • ticmasta 7y ago
        >> but for other minor stuff. Like it provides deep satisfaction in an area they really value?
    • justaguyhere 7y ago
      Not OP, but some reasons could be: What happens if he gets banned by Adsense? In many countries, people don't understand the concept of lifestyle business (even if it brings multiples of salary in revenue, like this case). It is considered "prestigious" and safe to have a job (It doesn't make sense, but it is how it is).
      • gpm 7y ago
        > What happens if he gets banned by Adsense? They makes the same amount from AdSense in one month as they do from 15 months of their job. Assuming this has been going on for a few years, I doubt the money from the job is really effecting the size of their financial safety net. If they're spending within their means from the job they have a safety net that will last "forever". If not their real job isn't enough for them anyways. Non financial reasons for keeping the job could make a lot of sense though.
• nathan_f77 7y ago
  I'm working on FormAPI [1], which helps developers fill out PDF documents. I started working on this around 2 years ago. I was mostly working on it part-time, and I took a few breaks while I was doing freelance work to pay the bills. This year I raised some money from Earnest Capital [2], which has allowed me to go full-time and hire some contractors. I used to think that I wanted to build a one-person company and stay very small, but I wasn't able to pull that off. I picked a niche that was too small, and I also didn't have the skills to execute very well (especially in marketing, sales, etc.), so growth has been quite slow. So I've exploring some new features that could increase the number of potential customers, and the new scope is going to be way too much work for one person, so I'm looking forward to building a small team of 5-10 people. Earnest Capital has been really awesome, and I still think the SEAL is a good deal [3]. My experience has been similar to an accelerator program, but with a bit less pressure. I've had some really helpful calls with mentors, and the weekly update calls are also great for accountability. So I would recommend Earnest if you want to raise some money while building a sustainable company. [1] http://formapi.io http://formapi.io [2] http://earnestcapital.com http://earnestcapital.com [3] https://earnestcapital.com/shared-earnings-agreement/ https://earnestcapital.com/shared-earnings-agreement/
  • nmfisher 7y ago
    Interested to hear your experience with Earnest. Can you disclose how much you raised, what percentage earnings they take, and what the cap is?
    • nathan_f77 7y ago
      Unfortunately I'm not able to disclose the exact details of the offer, but it was a fairly close to the default offer that you will find in their examples and spreadsheets. And so far my experience has been great! The money has been a huge help, but it's also been really great to have access to the mentor network and other founders.
      • nmfisher 7y ago
        Thanks - the whole thing really intrigues me, I'll spend some time digging through the material today. Can you say what your monthly revenue was when you applied?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• adrienjarthon 7y ago
  I run https://updown.io https://updown.io since 2012, a website monitoring service I created. I'm working about 5-10 hours per week on it. It makes about $6,000 per month and is still growing linearly. I also keep a full-time job alongside for now as an engineering manager. The key for me is to take time, make something useful, delight your clients, and don't try to become uber or airbnb.
  • annamargot 7y ago
    Awesome job. This type of service is critical for e-commerce businesses like mine. Just curious, I see you accept payment in crypto. What percentage of customers pay with crypto, and how has that changed since 2012?
    • adrienjarthon 7y ago
      Thanks Haha, less than 1% now that the trend is over, when I added it (2014) it was around 5%.
      • ChicagoBoy11 7y ago
        Hope you kept those coins -- must've made a decent chunk of change on the valorization of those alone!
        • adrienjarthon 7y ago
          I kept only a small part, I sold most of them right away as there were already over-valued to me ^^
  • XIVMagnus 7y ago
    how much time do you spend maybe talking to people who are constant clients? or is there little interaction?
    • adrienjarthon 7y ago
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• thomasht 7y ago
  I run & operate a VPN company. Found a niche that at least 600 people would pay me a monthly amount for, totalling nearly $3k a month. Costs are < $70 a month. Everything is automated so it's probably less than an hour a week. It was my learn how to code project that has become my basic income. All the money is funding my secondary project.
  • foodscraps 7y ago
    Interesting! Any pointers or code you wouldn't mind sharing on how to do something like this myself? Thanks.
    • thomasht 7y ago
      Find a niche, build a product. A friend of mine realised that there's not much of a email testing platform. 4 months later, he released https://www.mailslurp.com https://www.mailslurp.com
  • awayitthrows 7y ago
    I was considering doing this recently, to help people in my home country get around censorship blocks. I was wondering, however, have you run into issues where you've had to turn over log/account data to law enforcement due to terrorism/child pornography/etc?
    • thomasht 7y ago
      It's a single purpose VPN, so I've only whitelisted 5 sites.
  • ronyfadel 7y ago
    I could be mistaken, but I believe I read your article on IndieHackers.com (Chrome extension etc..)? In all cases, kudos!
    • thomasht 7y ago
      Yes, you did. Thanks!
• truebosko 7y ago
  As someone who's been hacking away at his "boring", one-man company for a few months (after the 3 year old is in bed, so only about two hours a night, and only some nights) and has begun hitting those initial slumps, this is very inspiring Thanks for posting, and thanks to all who have commented with their success stories.
  • nlh 7y ago
    Keep it up! I have a bunch of friends who wish they had the motivation to put a few hours in every night post kid-bedtime, but don’t have the stamina. It can be tough but keep the momentum going and we’re all psyched to see what you put out the next time one of these threads rolls around :)
• trikko 7y ago
  Waiting for a post entitled "unsuccesful one-person online businesses"
• throwbusaway 7y ago
  I've run a niche ecommerce website by myself for 10+ years as my primary income. It's down to about 5-15 hours of work per week. I'm looking to sell if anyone is interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21118095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21118095
  • siscia 7y ago
    What is the website? What do you sell?
    • throwbusaway 7y ago
      The website is in the jewelry/gemstone space. The traffic is all organic and nets a few thousand dollars per month with no marketing, though could grow significantly with marketing and/or social media. Email is in my profile if you are interested.
• puranjay 7y ago
  I worked with a client recently who ran a successful site comparing products in a very popular and lucrative industry. His affiliate income was in the high six figures annually. He runs the entire business by himself Personally, it might not be completely successful yet, but I started a music blog a while back (don't want to share the URL) just to test some SEO strategies. It's pulling in low four figures every month with very little work on my part.
  • batesy 7y ago
    Really interested in hearing more about your music blog. I'm working on an online DJ education platform (pretty niche). DM me if you're up for connecting.
  • listenallyall 7y ago
    Mattresses? https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
• maxencecornet 7y ago
  It doesn't exactly qualify as a one-man business, but I'm running a few side projects bringing around $500/month: - https://batgrowth.com https://batgrowth.com: A website monitoring the growth of The Brave browser / Basic Attention Token, in terms of publishers adoption (Fun fact: Wikipedia founder, Larry Sanger, tweeted about the site) - https://ethereum-cours.com https://ethereum-cours.com: A CMC clone built mainly for fun, bringing some decent referral revenue - My tech blog I've built many more side projects, most were earning $0/month after a few months, but I've also sold 2 side projects, so overall it's worth the effort
  • justaguyhere 7y ago
    How does batgrowth make money? Interesting project.
    • maxencecornet 7y ago
      Do you see the "Try out the Brave Browser" button on the main page ? It redirects towards this page: https://brave.com/bat684 https://brave.com/bat684 I get payed by Brave Software around 5$ for each user that download the browser and use it for at least 30 days
      • justaguyhere 7y ago
        Ah sorry, missed it. Thank you for clarifying.
      • machbio 7y ago
        just FYI - "Try out the Brave Browser" button is blocked when using Ublock Origin
  • kleinishere 7y ago
    Can you elaborate on how you ended up selling the 2 businesses? Was it via in-bounds or using a marketplace for similar kinds of businesses?
• 0x0100 7y ago
  I created Mascot Gaming Logo Maker (https://mascotlogomaker.com/ https://mascotlogomaker.com/). It's a tool that allows you to create a gaming logo for your esports team. As of now I have private beta testers using it and while it's not enough to live on its awesome to help a community I care for gg.
• mpurham 7y ago
  I developed Semester Planner (https://semesterplanner.com https://semesterplanner.com) which is what helped me pay for college. It is a online student planner for college students that helps them keep tracks of their classes, notes, assignments, and documents. I am currently working on Enqode (https://enqode.io/ https://enqode.io/) which is platform that takes a hand-drawn wireframe and converts it into a design file or code. I would say that for any successful business requires a great deal of work to be done. On the surface it will appear that it is easy running such businesses but, in reality it is very difficult especially at scale.
• timed0 7y ago
  I run a blog to book service (https://pixxibook.com https://pixxibook.com) that while physical product, non-SaaS and firmly B2C has proved to be both low in support and reasonably profitable. Sold our first book about a year ago and has grown steadily to the point where it could replace my day job. I've done blissfully little marketing beyond buying ads. Currently spend less than 1 day per week on it and during summer holidays I was able to keep it running from my phone with irregular connectivity.
• adamqureshi 7y ago
  I run https://onlyusedtesla.com/ https://onlyusedtesla.com/ its an online marketplace to buy / sell a Used Tesla. I have been living off the income this whole year. This is my bread and butter. I do not have a 9-5. I launched the business with 4 listings in 2016. I live in New York. My main goal is building brand equity. Business Model. Private Seller $199 to list $299 to list with a social boost Dealer: $99-list I do not use cookies. No Tracking. No google adsense.
  • acoyfellow 7y ago
    Awesome work. What does your overhead look like roughly?
    • adamqureshi 7y ago
      Rent. Food. Utilities. $3,500-month Server $150-month Facebook $35/month
      • HatchedLake721 7y ago
        I had to read your comment 3 times before pressing “reply” asking you how do you spend $3.5k a month on a server, then realising it’s for rent, food and utilities. May the commas be with you
        • icebraining 7y ago
          Same here, my heart skipped a beat when reading that. Even $1800/y seems high, but I can't argue with success.
      • listenallyall 7y ago
        Very impressive, any reason you haven't cloned the site for other car makes? Porsche, BMW, Audi...
        • adamqureshi 7y ago
• seanwilson 7y ago
  I run https://www.checkbot.io https://www.checkbot.io myself. :) It's a paid Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed and security best practices. While working as a web developer, I found myself having to do a lot of manual checks or write scripts to test if new pages or changes to existing pages were following a long list of web best practices. I eventually wrapped up all this knowledge and automation into a finish product that others have found useful.
• dsfuefueh 7y ago
  try hacker typer its awesome yeeeeet
• insaider 7y ago
  I made https://www.golfforecast.co.uk https://www.golfforecast.co.uk - an ML algorithm to predict golf. After 5 years it's making enough from subscriptions for me to live off (3K gbp/mo). The algorithm is always a work in progress but it's seeing consistent returns now so I'm making money from that too :) plus it makes golf a lot more entertaining.
  • dbancajas 7y ago
    if you have an edge why not keep it to yourself and bet the farm as they say?
    • mac01021 7y ago
      This is lower risk
      • insaider 7y ago
        Yea I don't have a farm to bet just yet. This means two income streams. Plus I love working on the website
  • xcubic 7y ago
    Do you know ML or learned just for this?
• docsapp_io 7y ago
  I've been running docsapp.io, a SaaS for documentation hub. It is growing and profitable but not a lot. I work between 1-8 hours per month, mostly development and little support.
• WillPontificate 7y ago
  I bootstrapped a digital publishing business to over $200K per year. Started 8 years ago, developed and published our first website for under $250 (I code, which helps). Learned SEO via trial & error, benefiting from the post-Penguin and Panda implosions that kicked a bunch of spam sites out of our target searches. Started putting together a predictive analytics package for investing in digital content, so we have an idea of how content will pull before we create it. After that it was scaling and project management. Which has been a real learning experience, since a lot of publishing basically sucks... many people cranking out the same stuff. Very hard to keep "that special spark" in content at scale. Still have the day job. Digital publishing is an 11 on the hot / crazy scale in terms of revenue stability (50% swings in monthly revenue on established sites aren't uncommon), so have a reliable pay check & health insurance reduces stress substantially. Plus I enjoy the work, most of the time. One other benefit of having a "cover" day job: it allows you to "stay off the radar" as a small business owner and fairly affluent member of your local society. You've got a socially acceptable answer ("I punch a clock at company X") and don't stand out. Most people have no clue about the true scope and intensity of my side business, which simplifies things...
• thomaspark 7y ago
  I run Codepip (https://codepip.com https://codepip.com), coding games for learning web dev. Started out making a single game as a weekend project, it got a good reception, so there was obvious demand for learning to code in this interactive way. Have since branched out to more games covering different HTML, CSS, and JS topics with more coming. It's continued as a one-person operation, for the time being.
  • calmworm 7y ago
    I've used this. Nice work and thank you!
  • umen 7y ago
    is it profitable?
  • potentural 7y ago
    Love these games, use them with my web dev students all the time! What topics are you thinking about for future games?
• mrskitch 7y ago
  I run a headless browser service called browserless.io. Got started due to lack of a comparable service, and all others seemed more geared for testing. It’s been around two years now, and makes more than any prior engineering job I’ve ever had. You do have a lot of other stresses you might not otherwise have, but you’ll also work a lot less than at a traditional job! I’m working on a few interviews for some sites, which go more into the details, and will post here when they’re done. EDIT: feel free to comment here on anything or email me at joel at browserless dot io
  • cdolan 7y ago
    Can this be used for automated complex web scraping (for downloading invoices behind authorized web portals on event or schedule, etc)?
    • mrskitch 7y ago
      We don't yet do scheduled "jobs", per se, though that's coming soon. You can do pretty much any site out there since it's full-blown Chrome doing the work. As long as you have credentials to log into the portals (and they're not behind some intranet or VPN) then you should be able to do it. You can just try it out on our live debugger: https://chrome.browserless.io https://chrome.browserless.io
  • jdc0589 7y ago
    I almost got in to this space a few years ago, but didn't for some reason. there are a lot of fun things to work on in that problem space.
  • andy800 7y ago
    Not too excited that you just doubled the prices, but the service is very good and I've found it to be much more effective than running locally. And you've also been very very good with personal replies to support requests. Congrats on your success.
    • mrskitch 7y ago
• fecak 7y ago
  I'm a resume writer that also provides career consultation and job search strategy sessions, LinkedIn and cover letter writing, executive bios, etc. I work from home, am able to set my own schedule and spend time with my kids, and do quite well financially with very little overhead. I've worked with a number of HN readers over the years.
• josephwegner 7y ago
  Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. For the rest of the folks like me, I will share a small tidbit of wisdom: Starting a business is really hard and it's totally OK to just go work for Salesforce. You do you.
  • es-hn 7y ago
    A lot of folks would look at you and feel the same way. Count your blessings. You have a lot going for you! Salesforce today, side business tomorrow. Or not.
  • Insanity 7y ago
    It's not for everyone. I love working on complex systems and would probably get burned out doing the simple-but-necessary parts of building an entire product. :/
  • ratsimihah 7y ago
    What's preventing from starting something small while at Salesforce that could eventually grow into something bigger?
    • komali2 7y ago
      Too busy tryna learn to play the damn piano
    • pc86 7y ago
      Desire. Priorities. Not wanting to spend 8-10 hours a day at the office plus another two hours every weeknight and most of your weekend programming. Being content making income in the top 2% nationally and not wanting to kill yourself to try to break into the top 1%. Wanting to have a family. Wanting to spend time with your family. Lots of reasons.
  • drawkbox 7y ago
    > Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. It is always good to see people with successes that granted them some amount of freedom. Though it looks daunting in a time/competition sense, it is one day at a time towards a goal, and compounding focus amounts to large efforts that look daunting. These threads are great because they motivate and show you what is possible, should you choose to pursue. Not everyone has success either, these are survivorship bias. However, the reality is the ability to succeed is there. Many of these ideas, big business would not pursue due to market size, but for one man/small teams these are perfect. With enough time put towards something and smart tuning to niche/market/needs, efforts can be fruitful.
• tardis_thad 7y ago
  I run https://tardis.dev https://tardis.dev - tick-level cryptocurrency market data API. It's profitable and I'm working full time on it for almost a year now. Released it in August, so there's nothing statistically significant regarding profits.
• brddg 7y ago
  test
• jordigh 7y ago
  Not me, but Sourcehut seems to be doing okay so far. https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-21-sourcehut-q3-2019-financial-report/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-21-sourcehut-q3-2019-fina... Drew did some Q&A on Lobsters about it: https://lobste.rs/s/r41yfm/sourcehut_q3_2019_financial_report https://lobste.rs/s/r41yfm/sourcehut_q3_2019_financial_repor... Drew wants to run a business completely on free software and for free software, and he seems to be doing it.
• fbelzile 7y ago
  I sell freemium software that blocks distractions on your computer so that you can focus on doing work. Unlike my competitors, it's a one-time payment business model. The idea for my product first came to me when a friend in university had trouble staying focused on writing papers. He was constantly playing World of Warcraft and needed a way to temporarily block himself from playing the game. So I quickly made a little VB.NET app and service that would watch for the game executable and kill the process if it starts. It did the job well enough and he ended up graduating :) At that point, some other students approached me and asked for my little app to help them study. That's when, half-way through university (2010), I made a website for my app and had it available for free. I continued to maintain it and over 4 years, added more features including: blocking websites, adding breaks, scheduling, and passwords. In 2014, I split the product into a free and paid tier. It wasn't an easy decision, but I was spending a lot of time on it by this point and customer support was also starting to take a serious hit on my personal time. In about two years (2016), I was making more money from the paid product than my well paying government day job. So, I decided to quit my job and work on my business full time. Although I felt it was risky, the alternative was passing up an opportunity many people dreamed of having. I never planned to start a business in the first place and I kind of felt/still feel imposter syndrome. For now, I'm just enjoying my new found freedom and continue to be thankful for my new job. I'm going to keep it a lifestyle business for now, but I wouldn't be opposed to selling it as my exit plan. I've spent (effectively) $0 in advertising since developing it and I'd say my customers come from organic search, external links, and word-of-mouth.
  • shadowfax92 7y ago
    Can you share numbers airing how much you Male yearly from this?
    • cityzen 7y ago
      great autocorrect!
      • shadowfax92 7y ago
        damn, typed on my iPhone :(
• zrail 7y ago
  Six and a half years ago I launched https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/ https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/, a book to teach people how to integrate Stripe with their Rails app. It generated almost $80k of revenue, mostly front loaded but with a really long tail. Recently I turned off sales because I was feeling more and more guilty about not having time to update it, and now that I work for Stripe updating it involves a layer of approval. Of course, now I work for Stripe so I'd say it was a success :)
  • pknerd 7y ago
    How did Stripe hire you?
    • zrail 7y ago
      I attended a remote coffee chat[1] and then applied at the jobs page[2] :) I did already know a handful of people that already work there as well. [1]: https://stripe.events/remote-coffee https://stripe.events/remote-coffee [2]: https://stripe.com/jobs https://stripe.com/jobs
• brddg 7y ago
  You could say I run an import business. I import mainly Chinese cellphones and gagdets that are not officially distributed in my country and even after taxes I can sell them at an attractive price via Facebook marketplace and a local equivalent to Craigslist. I make twice what I make in my day job as an engineer. I'm aware that one day I might not be able to continue (regulations, taxing, etc) so I'm not going too crazy about it.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• 19216834203 7y ago
  I run https://dailytweetalerts.com https://dailytweetalerts.com , no subscribers and I have no idea how to monetize it. I made it basically to scratch my itch.
• gogoyubari 7y ago
  I run a data analysis bot that looks for patterns which occur prior to a price breaktrough on Telegram. https://t.me/BitAssist https://t.me/BitAssist I monetize via a subscription-based model.
• holoduke 7y ago
  Started with apps in the early ios and Android days. Made quickly about 300k a year with them. I quit my job as a developer and focused on apps only. They still make roughly 0.5 million a year these days. I bought several real estate in the years after and they give me about 15k monthly in rental income. I did spend 2 years doing almost nothing except traveling and spending lots of time with my kids. Then I co founded a more serious company where I act as the CTO. We got quite some people working for us so I back in normal work life. Work 4 days a week from 10 to 6. I actually enjoy it more than before. Being somehow free of constant thinking about money is a really nice thing though.
  • codesternews 7y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Which category your apps have? Do you think the current situation of appstores(google and apple) apps can earn money? Any advice for app developer who want to make and sell apps?
    • holoduke 7y ago
      I am mainly in sports apps. I think it is still possible to have succes. It requires a lot of patience. Don't focus on the revenue part. And don't try to build a new hype. Very slim chance you build the next angry birds. Instead try to build a product that is based on an already successful specific category/ product. Very important is that you understand your customer and genuinely try to make a product that is better than the competition. You should love your own product. The good thing is that bigger companies tend to destroy their own product with too many ads, notifications, non relevant features etc. Furthermore I believe it's important that your product contents can be automated without too much manual work. After all you are the only person with only so much time. I know a guy who created a fitness diet app. He cooked and photographed more than a thousand meals. He wrote many articles. In the end he gave up. It took him 80 hours per week to maintain and update all the content. His app was making maybe 100 a month. I know another guy who created a successful formula 1 live app. He is using paid data feeds and scrapes a lot of additional data. Everything automated. Spends like 10 hours a week maintaining things. Makes about 100k a month. Similar story for a guy who created a popular weather app. In essence the only thing what they do is aggregation of data and present it in a relatively simple app. Also don't spend too much time on analytics, seo and other optimizations. It may take 2 years before you get traction anyway. First the product then after (if it's worth) the optimization. One concrete product where I think you can still have success is a baby monitor with 2 phones. Couple of good apps only. All premium priced. Not too difficult technically. I don't have time for it, so go for it :)
• daneyh 7y ago
  Thought i'd flag that threads like these with insightful comments is what makes HN my favourite online community
• ronyfadel 7y ago
  I've recently moved to somewhere where it's much cheaper to live (Europe -> Latin America) and I'm creating products that scratch my own itch. In a couple of months it's already paying for my expenses. For now I'm fixing things that frustrate me while I work on my Mac (managing windows, tracking all my devices). I have a long list of things I'd like to see fixed in products I use and products I'd like to see come to life, so I'm planning to spend this year working on that. Site: https://fadel.io/ https://fadel.io/
• wenbin 7y ago
  1. The first two years of Pocket (getpocket.com) was a one-person business. 2. The first four years of Plenty Of Fish (POF.com) was a one-person business. https://codecondo.com/plenty-of-fish-adsense-earnings/ https://codecondo.com/plenty-of-fish-adsense-earnings/ 3. Overcast (overcast.fm) 4. stratechery.com
• bochoh 7y ago
  I run a Shopify store selling customized holiday gift wrap. So far it's been fairly lucrative. Makegiftwrap.com
• ikeboy 7y ago
  I ran a business buying products wholesale and selling on Amazon. Did about 2 million in sales last year at around 20% margins. We were then attacked by competition and shut down, leading us to sue in federal court. See Thimes Solutions Inc v Tp-link et al https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15690011/thimes-solutions-inc-v-tp-link-usa-corporation/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15690011/thimes-solutio...
• inkeddev 7y ago
  I make websites for a niche market where I found that they often use freelancers and the bar was set pretty low for customer service and expectations. I've been doing this since mid 2016. Over the past 18 months I got so busy that I've started hiring people to do specific jobs. So I'm in this transition from one man band to 'real' agency. The majority of the money comes from providing ongoing service agreements after we finish the website. For 2019 I'll close around $800,000 which is about a 90% revenue growth over 2018. I'll draw a salary of $200,000. I've got some good prospects lined up for 2020 and believe I'll get up to $1.1m
• wakatime 7y ago
  Seven years ago I solo-started an automatic time tracker for programmers called WakaTime [1] and launched here on HN [2]. Partly from listening to developers too much, I waited way too long (almost a year) before adding a paid plan, but now it generates more MRR than an SF developer salary not including stock options. Technically I make more from RSUs and stock from past startups as a regular employee, but if I wasn't lucky with those then it would be my highest income stream. 1: https://wakatime.com/about https://wakatime.com/about 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227 For anyone thinking it's egregiously difficult to start a solo-project: You're right, but if you stick with it your persistence will pay off. For solo-products, I think grit is the deciding factor between success and failure.
  • ratsimihah 7y ago
    How does top 1 code for 13 hours per day? o_o
    • wakatime 7y ago
      Not sustainably... I've done that myself: it's hella fun but towards the end of the week the code stopped making sense and had to sleep for a whole day. WakaTime is very accurate so my daily average is only 4 hours of actual typing per day: https://wakatime.com/a-look-back-at-2018 https://wakatime.com/a-look-back-at-2018 https://wakatime.com/@alan https://wakatime.com/@alan
    • MrDresden 7y ago
      I've used Wakatime now for a few years (I highly recommend it), and have been going through one of the toughest projects of my life in the last 8 months. At one point I reached ~16 hours per day (for only a couple of days). This kind of output is not sustainable for more than a few days without incurring serious problems from it. I have now gone back down to a more normal 6-9 hours per day.
      • wakatime 7y ago
        Tip: Turn up your timeout preference. https://wakatime.com/blog/37-when-is-time-tracking-too-accurate https://wakatime.com/blog/37-when-is-time-tracking-too-accur... The default 15 mins is very accurate, and only represents time typing not time working.
• Wh1skey 7y ago
  Start-up and entrepreneurial related questions like these don’t get asked enough here. Thank you
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• pknerd 7y ago
  Not sure it qualifies as a solo business but I run a tech blog that not only helped me to get my current job but also side gigs and contracts. Besides that I was contacted by tech companies to write paid guest posts for them. Recently a few companies offers me percentage of amount prompting their products via posts. One of them helping me to earn good referral amount. So far gave them 30+ customers in 2-3 months. They are web scraping service. I am thinking to contact a few companies myself in a near future. My blog URL is: http://blog.adnansiddiqi.me http://blog.adnansiddiqi.me
  • wayoverthecloud 7y ago
    Very interesting and congratulations. Do you promote your posts via social media? I mean how do you get traffic? SEO?
    • pknerd 7y ago
      Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I do promote occasionally via Social Media but 78% of my traffic is organic that is, people find me via Google.
• mittermayr 7y ago
  My business is in my bio, don't want to link it here. Pays about the same as my previous job at Microsoft did, but with a lot less involvement — I haven't touched the main code in about a year now. I probably spend about two or three hours a week on customer support, that's it, really. No marketing spend, all word-of-mouth and Google. The idea came about when I wanted to post to Instagram, but the API didn't allow it. So I spent about a week trying to automate the process using a phone, with screenshot OCR and a state machine. After a lot of messing around with it, I had a working prototype. Made a website, added a $5/month Stripe plan to see if people were willing to pay for it, sent it to a few friends, posted it on Twitter, and eventually, people signed up and tried it out. It worked, then it didn't work, then I fixed it, then it worked again, this went on and on for a few weeks until it became quite useable. About two months in, local offices of Toyota and Samsung signed up, and they loved it, money wasn't an issue. That was the moment I realized it may be worth doing it properly. It grew organically, and I bought lots and lots of Android phones, which are simple workers getting jobs off a queue, and host them in two locations roughly. Phones last for about two years, then I buy new ones (<$100 a phone). Each phone pays for itself in less than a month, server costs are less than $200 a month. Facebook tried to sue me after I filed for a trademark, we figured it out (I rebranded). Been going steady ever since, but I consider it to be shut down by yet another Instagram move sooner or later. But I said that after 3 weeks of running it, and it's been almost five years I think. I made it a point to not use any private Instagram APIs, like all my competitors did — instead, I don't emulate the Instagram app, I emulate the person tapping the phone, and use only the official app for it. I think that let me survive this long.
  • cpeterso 7y ago
    Very cool idea to use the real app. Do you have a rack of real devices or do you use emulators, if you don't mind sharing? How do you differentiate Busy from competitors like Buffer (with its 69 employees, according to Wikipedia)? btw, there is a small typo on your "How it works" page: "secure and: affordable" should just be "secure and affordable". :)
    • mittermayr 7y ago
      Real devices yes! I tried to use emulators a couple of times, but the first few attempts failed due to Instagram detecting it (missing cameras, etc.), and later attempts failed when I realized it's not going to save me a lot if I went the emulator route, because they need quite a lot of resources too, and you can't just run 10 emulators on a regular computer unless you optimise them extremely well and know what you're doing (custom Android build as a minimum). So it actually turned out to be easier with real devices. Plus, there's been some IP/VPN/Proxy emergencies, where it was super handy to pop in a 3G/4G sim card into the phone, and have it work 100% like a real person's phone. The cost is considerably higher (~ 15-50 GB per phone a month), but I am still looking into doing that, as it would allow the "phone agents" to become completely independent from location. Buffer: I haven't done much in terms of "battling" with competition, simply because my users will tell me what they want, and that's an easier crowd to serve than trying to follow a competitor who may be running down the wrong path without knowing yet. If a bunch of users ask me for the same feature multiple times, then I look into what it takes to make it happen, or I'll explain why I can't offer that, and that's what's been driving it from day one. Thanks for your note about the typo, I am actually always a bit ashamed of my landing pages, because they feel the least fun to make (to me at least), when they drive most of the conversion of course.
• falco925 7y ago
  I run an edtech platform that helps users improve their analytical skills and prepare them for technical interviews. It's somewhat niche in that it's a platform focused on beginner marketing analytics and data science. I launched it 2 years ago, mainly to help me teach a university class more effectively (I wanted something easy for non-technical beginners to learn). I spend about 5-10 hrs a week bouncing around developing and marketing. I make enough to hire a part-time developer that helps me with engineering. Otherwise, I do everything else myself. The toughest part for me is marketing. Currently, I do a lot of writing on Medium to talk about the industry and will include a short call out to my platform at the end. I've tried other marketing channels like Youtube and Google ads but haven't found anything that beats writing articles. While the platform is only 2 years old, I make almost 6 figures in revenue and it keeps growing linearly. My ultimate goal is to passively have this income take over my professional salary so that I can have financial freedom. I plan to continue to work, teach, and run this side business because I love all the different aspects that each venture provides me.
• dglass 7y ago
  While it's not proving the majority of my income, I've been growing BannerJS for a couple of months from a side project for some of my own sites into some nice income on the side. https://bannerjs.com https://bannerjs.com
• binarysolo 7y ago
  My former one-person online biz (2013) is now 10 people - we run Amazon end-to-end ops for a few large brands and manage ~100k SKUs -- basically the work is all operations research + grunt work. We do mid eight digits in revenue. A friend of a friend was the COO of a brand, spent a couple mil to position themselves online strategically, but that team couldn't deliver results. As a grad student in ML I spent a disproportional time procrastinating on Craigslist and Slickdeals and flipping inventory between those venues, SUPost (school-centric CL basically), and eBay, so I ended up being rather saavy at ecommerce. I offered to help out their store, then took it over when I got some initial results. Ironically I think from a pure EV standpoint I shoulda stayed with my ML degree - my friends in the same cohort are averaging a mil a year in combined salary + bigcorp options. There were a lot of heartache and sleepless nights associated with running a company, and looking back honestly I would've had a more peaceful life toeing the 9-5. ===== I have a few one-person side projects right now concurrently that are providing five-digit revenue that are hard for me to scale, but are enjoyable for me to do: 1. Domain expert in a hobbyist niche with high gatekeeping (skill and/or money) - I create a couple high quality content a year and make residuals off affiliate fees. 2. I flip small businesses in a very specific niche of ecommerce when they don't layer into my big business. Note: this seems mildly prolific but honestly I have between 2-5 ideas a year of which I try to execute on 1-2 of them. I think of them as cognitive surplus, "Art projects for Fun and Profit-TM". Most ideas end up not working out, so the payoff really has to be about the process, not the result.
  • noobly 7y ago
    >I spent a disproportional time procrastinating on Craigslist and Slickdeals and flipping inventory between those venues Did you do this manually, or did you have some automation to help you out (finding deals, relisting, etc)? If so, what did that look like? And, out of curiosity, what's the hobbyist niche?
    • binarysolo 7y ago
      Semi-automated -- with CL you have (had?) RSS feeds that post search queries to you, now I think there are email options as well? I wrote my own reader for fun and it would basically ping me when a certain combination of items hit the site - say "lot Aeron" or something to that effect. The hobbyist niche is a pricey and time-consuming athletic activity. :)
• abhikarthick 7y ago
  I'm running http://remoteleaf.com http://remoteleaf.com - Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs that are made for you from about 20+ job boards & 100+ company pages. - Using filters based on your skill preferences & location, Remote leaf would be able to know that job that befits you and send you job postings daily or weekly to your inbox.
  • SamReidHughes 7y ago
    Wat. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332773
• ezekg 7y ago
  I've been running https://keygen.sh https://keygen.sh by myself for a little over 3 years. It currently makes $5.3k MRR. Still a side gig, but it's getting there.
  • zenlibs 7y ago
    Your IH interview [1] is one of my favorites! Highly recommend any bootstrapper to read it. Wishing you continued success! [1]: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/2fa6c5e1eb https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/2fa6c5e1eb
    • ezekg 7y ago
      Thank you for sharing those kind words! I wonder from time to time if anybody found that interview valuable. :)
• tempsy 7y ago
  Does anyone know where someone can buy a business? I've seen some spammy posts when googling for how-tos but curious if anyone has bought one and whether it worked out?
  • newusertoday 7y ago
    https://feinternational.com/ https://feinternational.com/ https://flippa.com/ https://flippa.com/
    • caspar 7y ago
      patio11's post over at https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_software_business https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s... provides a bit more color too. Also, a friend of mine used FE International to sell a moderate side project of theirs and they were very happy with using FE as the brokers.
• 3minus1 7y ago
  "I sell onions on the internet" was posted 6 months back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132
  • ZoomStop 7y ago
    Would you be willing to talk about what affect the exposure on HN had on your business?
    • 3minus1 7y ago
      not my site :)
• braindead_in 7y ago
  I am the solo founder of a crowdsourcing business. We are into audio/video transcription. I've been at it since 2008, fully bootstrapped. I tried very hard to convert it into a high growth startup. I even got called for an YC interview in 2016, but didn't make it. I have lost a lot of money over the years on experiments which didn't work. I didn't get rich but I make enough to beat the market rate salary. Last year, I finally decided to treat it as a lifestyle business and just focus on a niche market. We are never gonna be a unicorn, but I think we'll still be in business 10 years from now. Looking forward to the 2029 thread! Here's my post on the 2014 thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7368727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7368727
  • codesushi42 7y ago
    Nothing to be ashamed of, congrats. But ML is likely to automate this away in less than 10 years.
• duanem 7y ago
  I develop Flowx [https://www.flowx.io https://www.flowx.io], an Android weather app. It makes around $2,500 USD/month with about $500/month in costs excluding my time. It covers about 60% of my total costs including my time which is 40+ hours a week. I cover my remaining costs through contract work. This might not seem like a success but the business allowed us to move to the Rarotonga, Cook Islands from Auckland, New Zealand. Lifestyle-wise and building-a-business-wise, I think it's a success.
  • duanem 7y ago
    Just an added note. I started Flowx as a side-project in 2012. In 2016, we moved to Rarotonga and we decided then to try to grow it into a business. It was making ~$100/month at that stage. Since then, it has grown it to $2500/month through added pro features and a better subscription prices.
  • zenlibs 7y ago
    Congrats - this is certainly a success, especially for monetizing in a heavily crowded space with many free alternatives available. Can you share a few pointers on competing in a crowded market.
    • duanem 7y ago
      The app space in general might be crowded but the weather market for the Flowx type of app is not so crowded. Windy (and Ventusky) is our closest competitor. Windy initially targeted extreme sports but now seems to target the larger extreme weather (hurricanes) notification and warning market, i.e., high-volume. I believe there is enough room for Flowx alongside Windy, etc... by targeting a niche market that require more in-depth and technical weather data, e.g. farmers. Technically, Windy is based on the code from https://earth.nullschool.net https://earth.nullschool.net which limits them to that code-base. Flowx is written from scratch and is different by design. This means I can do different things, e.g., the smooth swiping. So I think I can compete with different techniques. As an engineer, I am guilty of focusing on features and the product over marketing. So my marketing is lacking. Though, I'm looking into writing about my experiences with the weather app. In summary, I think there is enough room in the advanced weather data market and can compete through niche markets and technical features.
• mraudiobook_com 7y ago
  Audiobookreviews.com is my hobby project and right now my only income. I stated 2.years ago just for fun and now pay for my life with just this one page
• blhack 7y ago
  I have a CRM/business intelligence product that targets a very specific niche of an industry. I'm the only employee, although I am currently looking to expand by hiring a sales person and a support person. Here's a startup idea I want, by the way. If this exists somebody please tell me: I'm good at creating products. I'm a good programmer, I can do design well, I understand marketing well, I can sell things, etc. However, the things I am TERRIBLE at are basically anything involving paperwork. I hate these tasks, and I am terrible at them. I want a company that I can hire that will take care of all of my backoffice/HR tasks. So: -An accountant. -A lawyer. -An HR person who can deal with compliance around hiring and firing staff. Many of the aspects of software businesses can be looked at services, and fit well into an engineering mindset. Hosting is from digital ocean, costs $f00, and gets mentally compartmentalized. I don't care very much about how DA deals with routing, provisioning their own resources, etc. I tell them in abstract terms the things I want, and they provide them in a package for me to consume. Twilio does similar things for me for telephony. Coworking spaces do this for physical offices. I want more of that for more traditional parts of business. Essentially I want to hire a controller in the cloud (or at least the way that controllers have been used at various companies I have worked at in the past). IF this exists, please reply with the name of the company! Maybe this means this is something I should start myself.
  • sah2ed 7y ago
    > I want a company that I can hire that will take care of all of my backoffice/HR tasks. Hopefully one of these companies should offer something that meets your HR needs (in reverse alphabetical order): - https://www.trinet.com/ https://www.trinet.com/ - https://www.safeguardglobal.com/ https://www.safeguardglobal.com/ - https://www.rippling.com/ https://www.rippling.com/ - https://gusto.com/ https://gusto.com/ - https://www.adp.com/ https://www.adp.com/
• notadoc 7y ago
  These are always fun threads, thanks to those who share their experiences.
• latest-release 7y ago
  Am running a website https://www.nmmapper.com/ https://www.nmmapper.com/ that offers Pentesting tools Most of this pentesting tools are being moved from Kali linux to used online without installing Kali linux. This is an interesting project in less than a year I had over 160+ active years. this is a one man work. And drive the traffic from organic search.
• camping-monitor 7y ago
  I am running http://mysalesteam.landen.co http://mysalesteam.landen.co, where startups can simply outsource their sales team or outbound calling process.
• udayrddy 7y ago
  My definition of "Success" at this point (launched 4 apps earlier never tried to generate revenue) is generating revenue. Launched couple of months back - https://extracttable.com https://extracttable.com adding paid clients at an average of 3-4 per week.
• aacook 7y ago
  I'm working on NanaGram (https://nanagram.co https://nanagram.co). The tagline: Text or email your photos and we'll send 4x6 prints to your loved ones. It doesn't provide the majority of my income (yet) but by far and away it provides the majority of my life's meaning. I haven't crossed the mental hurdle of sharing all my numbers publicly yet but let's just say it is turning a profit and there are thousands of happy NanaGrammers. I got started on it at my grandfather's 94th birthday party when by brother 1-uppped my gift of live lobsters with the gift of "InstaGrandpa." He prototyped it the night before and asked me to help build it. Working solo is a challenge for many reasons. One thing I did early was automate the customer feedback loops. I set up an automated loop to collect customer reviews (https://nanagram.co/#happy https://nanagram.co/#happy). Collecting feedback from grandparents is a bit tougher so I set up a phone line for them to dial in and leave voicemails (https://nanagram.co/#happynanas https://nanagram.co/#happynanas). I get a couple voicemails and reviews each week and it's like maker fuel. Another big challenge is fighting isolation. I like to practice deep work but there's a fine line between deep work and isolation. I would've given up a year ago if it weren't for the advisor-like support from my brother and my friend Dan. I did YC Startup School last summer and that was huge as well; I remember sharing with the group that I was on the edge of throwing in the towel, then last December MRR grew by over 2X. The next big thing I plan to change in my life is adding weekly volunteering.
  • skratlo 7y ago
    That looks like a nice service
    • aacook 7y ago
      Thank you!
  • tagawa 7y ago
    Very cool. Can I ask what marketing you do? Seems like it would be popular once people know about it, but that first step to building awareness must be tough.
    • 7y ago
• rglover 7y ago
  Howdy! I run a business teaching people how to build their own software business using JavaScript: https://cleverbeagle.com https://cleverbeagle.com. I got started doing it as a fluke of writing tutorials and then realizing a pattern around people using the OSS tools I made to help me write the tutorials (people were using the tools to build their apps and then coming to me for help and I realized "oh hey, this is a business!").
• odomojuli 7y ago
  I ran a Shopify site selling meme shirts for 3 years. You might recognize classics such as "Legalize 4Loko 2020" and "BREAD" as featured in Elle magazine. All on-demand printing. Order goes through Shopify's API to the supply center, order gets fulfilled, shipped. No inventory. Kinda pricey, but zero maintenance. Set and forget. Find the most extremely dank and niche memes possible so you hit the little nugget inside of someone's brain that makes them want to spend $15-30 on a t-shirt. A good print would net me somewhere like 300 orders a month. A sweatshirt could go for $50-60. You have options.
  • notfromhere 7y ago
    What kind of monthly revenue were you seeing?
• mraza007 7y ago
  I am loving this threading as I am currently a student whos looking into new ideas to venture into. Instead of working corporate jobs I rather works as A contractor or build a saas business to remain sustain. Any Ideas or help would be highly appreciated
• pruthvishetty 7y ago
  I ran an online consultancy in 2014 - 2015 for grad school applications, between the time I applied and started school (for almost a year). Zero operational expenses, as I ran the whole thing as a Facebook page with a Gmail id. This was in India, and I made about 800-1000 USD a month. Only reason to close it was I couldn't give it time once grad school started.
• jerojasro 7y ago
  how come nobody has mentioned pinboard.in ?
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• daniel-dev 7y ago
  what is the name of the website ?
• daniel-dev 7y ago
  what is the name of the website?
• topicseed 7y ago
  I have a niche blog yielding £10,000+ per month in affiliate marketing, ads, and own info products. Mostly SEO-based and paying experts to write for it. Working on two other projects — one's a hobby, and one's a SaaS that's scratching my own itch.
• lugg 7y ago
  For those interested in the topic Paul Jarvis has a quickish read on the topic of "Company of one". https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FQ2PFNN/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FQ2PFNN/ https://pjrvs.com/ https://pjrvs.com/ I take it's probably a roundup of his newsletter but I found the book half way decent with mostly fresh insights that is, it wasn't heavily recycled compared to most books on this sort of thing.
• michaelmanley 7y ago
  I run https://hypley.com https://hypley.com / http://hypley.com.au/ http://hypley.com.au/ by myself. Was with a co-founder.
• sideproject 7y ago
  I run SideProjectors (https://www.sideprojectors.com https://www.sideprojectors.com) - a market place for indie entrepreneurs to buy and sell their online businesses, projects etc. I created it in 2014, neglected it for awhile, and it was running on its own. It started to form a little community around it, so I finally got myself motivated to re-design this year. It never made any money up until quite recently through some affiliate marketing channels, so it's not huge, but it covers the operating cost, which is very small. For those who are looking to get into running your own little projects, come and have a look around. If you want to sell your projects and move on, then well, I'm happy to host your project for sale! :)
• savanpatel 7y ago
  I have an idea. How about creating a website that tracks timeline of an important news event. Like for example Impeachment. Often times, readers get confused with ongoing stories without context. Often times, cases lose their media coverage and don't know if justice was done. Some thing that represents in a timeline way hilighting important events and links to (news) sources. Users can follow and platform would deliver notification upon updates.
• m4tthumphrey 7y ago
  My friend recently sold his lead generation business for around 5m GBP. It was making around 140k a month. I built the website and did some maintenance but was basically just him.
  • xeornet 7y ago
    Lead generation for local business? Or sales orgs?
• fjordan 7y ago
  https://www.indiehackers.com/ https://www.indiehackers.com/ is a great source for this sort of question. They provide various filtering mechanisms as well such as revenue, number of employees, business model, location, etc.
• cleverfoo 7y ago
  For the last 9+ years I've worked on https://scanii.com https://scanii.com, a content identification service (think of it as the unix file command on steroids wrapped around an easy to use API). Started with a real MVP hacked on a weekend (https://web.archive.org/web/20101209005314/http://scanii.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101209005314/http://scanii.com...) after identifying the need on a day job I had a long time ago. With 0 marketing and sales it took a while to start gaining traction but I always knew that we were solving a real problem with a good and fair-priced product. Nowadays it’s big enough to be classified as a lifestyle business and that’s all right by me.
• person_of_color 7y ago
  How are people starting and maintaining these side projects and still finding the time to satisfy human needs? I'm mid to late 20s, single, and there's no way I could spend the time whilst also having a robust social life. I would like to know a sampling of age or status. Are people with the successful side projects fairly settled down?
  • thrower123 7y ago
    I can't imagine. With a fiance and two dogs and a house, I barely have time to steal an hour or two before bed to play with my side projects. My weekends are spoken for. If we had kids, I can't imagine I'd have a moment to myself.
• gkontos 7y ago
  This thread is pure magic. I love the grit and creativity of these stories. There's been some talk of survivorship bias. I can relate to both sides of that. About 15 years ago I ran an online shop selling auto accessories. I did that for about 5 years and made a decent living with about 10 hours of work per week (more during the holiday season). The business folded as shipping expenses and competition rose around 2008. (In my downfall story, I like to ignore the fact that I worked 10 hours per week rather than expand the business). My successful business started due to a combination of ability and luck. I 'lucked' into a situation where I had a B2B sales position (commission only) and I was able to sell products to my own website. In that case, I took a bad job and had the ability to develop it into an online business. Since then I have launched a number of largely unsuccessful online businesses. I've done paper mache for hire, crawl space 'clamps', an online game, a video aggregation service, several blogs, an android todo list app, and a few machinery based things that never rose to the level of 'fail' (those ended in the "didn't really try" phase). Currently, I have a new project that I am trying to focus into a market at https://gasket.appspot.com https://gasket.appspot.com. The reason I bring up survivorship bias here is to point out that the bias doesn't really matter. In aggregate the solo businesses which succeed are creative applications of an uncommon skill. Based on this thread those skills are currently ML and data aggregation. In 2002 those skills were web development and online ad purchasing. Businesses fail because either the idea is meh (ie paper mache for hire) or the creator doesn't bake in the feedback mechanisms they need to keep going (ie, requiring payment for an online game). Other people's failure does not shed any useful light on what you should try yourself (unless you want to start an online business creating customer paper mache; don't do that, it's a dumb idea [unless it works]).
• efader 7y ago
  I run a network of newsletters the first one is https://trendslates.substack.com https://trendslates.substack.com
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• b00tstrapp3r 7y ago
  I started a SaaS business with 2 friends maybe 5 years ago, it generates $150,000/mo in profit. Initially we worked on it almost full time for a year but now we spend together maybe 2 hours a month on it now. We charge SMBs less than $10/mo and have over 80k paying customers. We kind of hit the equilibrium between churn and new users so it may grow a little more but we have likely peaked. AMA
  • wayoverthecloud 7y ago
    Care to share the URL?
    • b00tstrapp3r 7y ago
      I prefer to keep the actual link private, we've never shared revenue numbers and I prefer to keep it that way. As long as I keep it anonymous I'm glad to share details on everything.
      • sah2ed 7y ago
        1. Do you have employees (or virtual assistants) to handle support requests? 2. What is your competition like?
      • umen 7y ago
        what niche? what type of saas (high level)
• XG6 7y ago
  I created a SaaS website builder for a small niche market. I've been running it for about 8 years. I gross a bit over $14,000 per month with about $500 in expenses for servers and third-party APIs. I work 1-2 hours per week answering customer support emails. Basically, I automated away my old job as a web designer :) The smartest decision I made was targeting a small niche market that larger businesses wouldn't bother with. I often get kind emails from customers thanking me for helping their industry. I kept things simple, didn't add features unless I really believed customers needed them, and didn't try to generalize the solution. I think those are the main reasons why the product worked. By far the hardest part was/is marketing. I'm still bad at it. I've tried may things. Most failed or were too hard to sustain. Some succeeded, like Facebook ads, but those successes were often hard to recreate. At this point it's mostly word of mouth. Working alone can be psychologically challenging. When I have a problem, there's no one to help because no one else knows how the platform works. With no one to bounce ideas off of, it's easy to get stuck in a rut going round and round the same set of possible solutions. And I really have to monitor myself to ensure that I don't get too isolated. This was an issue in the early years, but now I have a routine that gets me up and out and into the world every day. I would strongly advise anyone considering the solo route to carefully consider the social and mental health aspects of working alone. I feel very grateful to my former self for doing the hard work that pays my bills today. And I'm tremendously grateful for open source tools and resources like Stack Overflow without which I would never have made it this far alone.
  • kossTKR 7y ago
    Cool! How have you avoided being overshadowed by generalised tools like Squarespace or Wix though? Personally i have had a few projects where "large competitors" suddenly overtook the market. I guess you have some plugins that are very niche specific, or an interface geared towards creating designs for that sector?
• uri_merhav 7y ago
  I own Product Pix (https://www.proproductpix.org https://www.proproductpix.org). It removes the background from product photos, with the intended audience being mostly people who sell stuff online and need to set their background against a white background. It makes $1300/month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source of income, so I'm not gonna call it "successful" just yet. How I got started: I do machine learning, and I methodically searched for places where people buy a service transactionally on platforms like Fiverr and that I think can be automated away (or greatly automated with human reviewers in the loop) with state of the art machine learning models. There are hundreds or thousands of such opportunities that individuals can solve on their own. I'll be more comfortable giving sage advice once I've crossed the $10K/month threshold, but still I'd say a willingness to try a lot of shit out and get digging on stuff you have 0 familiarity with is mandatory. In this project I've had to learn javascript, frontend, photography, google ads campaign management etc. Another tip I wish someone had told me is, build a pricing page from day one. The temptation to get _some_ signal you're useful to people will drive you to offer stuff for free, but that will end up getting you a lot of unwanted attention from people who will never ever pay.
  • alexcnwy 7y ago
    Very cool and super inspiring, well done! Can you give any detail on how you're getting customers... you mention learning google campaign management, is all your traffic via google or have you found any other distribution channels that work (e.g. posting on Fiverr forums yourself kind of thing?)
    • uri_merhav 7y ago
      Post on refit and all the Facebook groups. Unfortunately people’s patience with you runs out pretty much immediately doing this. I’m also pushing people to give out referrals with limited success. My SEO game is non existent. I tried a blog post or two with nothing to show for it. I should reach out to sales gurus and such that reach Etsy/amazon sellers how to sell. I’ve only made halfhearted efforts there. I think that now that I have a pretty decent api going and some users for that, I should probably make a medium blog post about my journey. Might land some more api customers.
• ecofreemanly 7y ago
  I need enlightenment
• christiangenco 7y ago
  I've been working on https://fileinbox.com https://fileinbox.com full time for about the last five years. It's been pretty consistently making about $4k/month (I haven't been spending much money, so don't need a lot to go full time), and recently focusing more on marketing has bumped it up to $6.5k MRR and growing. It's amazing. I get to work on whatever I want, I get to take as much time off as I want whenever I want, and I've never felt like I wasn't doing meaningful work. This business has been a huge source of security in my life that's freed up a bunch of time for me to focus on more meaningful life improvements, like diving into hobbies (outdoor climbing, improv and standup comedy, musical theatre, travel, and other more fleeting passions) and optimizing wellness (sleep, exercise, meditation, relationships). I think it's the best possible way to make money. I got started by stumbling on patio11's side-project-turned-full-time-business Bingo Card Creator. I remember reading about how he was able to quit his shitty job and just work on his Rails app that generated bingo cards and thinking "well shoot, I could do that." I saw that Patrick was in a community of people doing a similar thing that all go to the same conference: Microconf. Tickets were pricy for me right out of college (I think they were around $800 at the time), but I promised myself I'd buy a ticket with my first $800 in profit so I could fly out and thank him in person. I had a high level game plan for how I was going to be working on a side project like Bingo Card Creator while I was working as a software developer. Part of that plan was needing to figure out how to accept credit card payments online. I found Stripe and thought it was the coolest API ever, so I picked up one of the side projects I'd made in college that had a bunch of people bugging me with emails asking for new features. I implemented the features, but added some extra code that put them behind a paywall. They'd have to pay me to use features I'd already coded, the fools! Bwahaha. I was pretty surprised when—the same week I was finalizing my very first Real Job out of college—that side project started making $300/day. I thought it was a fluke, but it kept rolling in. I didn't do any marketing or have a business plan or know who my customers were. I'd built a thing for myself and other people apparently wanted it too. I bought my microconf ticket three weeks later. Patrick and I have been friends since :) My path is totally not the route I'd recommend. I think I got pretty lucky with stumbling on product market fit. If you're reading this and are interested in doing something similar, I've learned a lot more about what I did accidentally right from taking notes on all the Microconf talks[1] and chatting with more people in the Microconf community that have made similar businesses. I'd love to help coach you through how to build one of these puppies for yourself! The classic mistake I see people making is obsessing over an idea instead of a group of people with a problem you can help solve. Your idea almost doesn't matter at all and it's probably not even a good idea. Focus on who you're helping and the things they complain about instead. PS: I go into a little more detail about how I got started on Episode 23 of the OK Productive Podcast[2]. 1. https://microconf.gen.co https://microconf.gen.co 2. https://okproductive.com/episodes/023-3-hat-productivity-with-christian-genco https://okproductive.com/episodes/023-3-hat-productivity-wit...
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• commandersaki 7y ago
  I would've thought the poster child for this would be tarsnap.com. In any case it isn't really a one person business anymore, I see Colin's brother provide support from time to time.
  • cperciva 7y ago
    Indeed; Tarsnap was a one-person company for almost a decade, but now it's a two-person company (which is why I didn't post about it here).
• erumnaz 7y ago
  Good
• avb333 7y ago
  I think my first million podcast has a lot of them who created 6-7 figure businesses mostly on their own
• caviv 7y ago
  I ran many different websites. I just enjoy development and new ideas. My best profitable website is a Gematria Calculator https://www.germatrix.org https://www.germatrix.org which I also have in Hebrew https://www.gimatria.co.il/ https://www.gimatria.co.il/. But the main idea is combining many many different ideas and website, like https://www.understandmydreams.com https://www.understandmydreams.com (also in Hebrew https://he.understandmydreams.com https://he.understandmydreams.com) and more... you can see here https://www.c2kb.com https://www.c2kb.com
• 1hakr 7y ago
  Last year i have launched https://visalist.io https://visalist.io which helps people find where they can travel with your passport tension free. Im currently making $2500 per month and it's going to cross $4000 hopefully. My revenue is from adsense, pro subscription, iVisa affiliate and Skyscanner affiliate. Most of traffic is organic. I stared visa list as i found contradicting, confusing and outdated information about visas. So i tried to solve my own problem and it turns out there more than 300k users with similar problem every month.
  • hedi0058 7y ago
    Well done ! If I may ask, what ratio of your revenue comes from adsense / subscription / and affiliate ?
• hedi0058 7y ago
  I have a couple of website I monetize through Adsense. It all started in 2009 (10 years ago) when my PhD candidate salary was not enough to make a living. I started earning around 300€ after six months. I was extremely happy with that as it gave me a breath of fresh air. I managed to make around 1500€ after a year and a half. I quit my job once it reached 2000€ and reached 3000€ after a year. All traffic was coming from google search and was organic. I was focusing on ideas requiring very little update to the websites content. That said, it is very difficult to run a one-person business working from home. You don't have colleagues, people to discucss with, people to ask when you have questions, or to learn from. I was living in France by then and I decided to go back to my home country as I would live much better there with that income. I started working as an assistant professor (30% of my time) and hired 2 developers to grow the business. That didn't scale well as the success came from my ability of being fast developer, good in SEO while always trying new website ideas. I ended up again with a one-person business. But revenues are dropping and I find it harder and harder to be motivated to continue working on my websites. So now I work nearly 0 hour a week on my website and I am fully dedicated to a corporate job (not in academia anymore) even though I make equal money from both jobs. If I can have an advice : try not to quit your day job. Work is not only about money. It is also about having social life, a career and a common goal to achieve with you co-workers. Working in a good company keeps you up with new technologies and trends. Running a one-person online business can be psychologically challenging. And once you earn enough money, the work to do can be become boring as no new challenges are there.
• tonixx 7y ago
  I've launched https://contact.do https://contact.do for me initially, at the beginning of 2019. Here are the stats since launch: - 132,775 messages sent - 1,196 contact links - 133 custom links If you think you'll use it, I can offer you a custom link for free. Please get in touch: https://contact.do/toni https://contact.do/toni
• albogdano 7y ago
  I develop and sell a Q&A platform since 2017 (https://scoold.com https://scoold.com). It started off as Stack Overflow clone but now it has features which are quite niche and missing from SO like geolocation and spaces for teams. The project is open source but has a Pro version which generates around 4000€ per month. I spend around 30% of my work day on support and emails. The rest of the day I fix issues and develop new features. I'm a solo developer and work full time on the project. Accounting & legal is handled by an external company. I operate as a limited company within the EU.