11 ms·
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
> How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?
> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.
Also, for the curious ones, I asked the same question exactly a year ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072
- giantg2 6y agoThanks for the link to last year's. I'm sort of looking forward to seeing who responds this year.
- dpflan 6y agoClickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072
- vangelis 6y agoThe Polish bookmarking service.
- m-i-l 6y agoOne you might like if you haven't seen it already (it is from a couple of years back) is "The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875 (and later https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23196626 ).
- VelNZ 6y agoI earn about 50% of my income from my business which currently includes https://LaTeXTemplates.com https://LaTeXTemplates.com and https://LaTeXTypesetting.com https://LaTeXTypesetting.com. In the coming months I'll be releasing a product in this space I've been working on for years so I'm pretty excited about that!
- mraza007 6y agoPretty cool man!! Do you create all the templates yourself or it’s community driven
- VelNZ 6y agoThanks! Most of the templates are existing ones people have made in the past, although I usually clean up the code quite a bit and make some design improvements. The site has been around since 2012 so I end up fixing bugs and making design improvements every few years. The great thing about LaTeX is it's relatively stable with few breaking changes with new releases.
- mraza007 6y agoYup I totally agree. I did came across this site when I was looking for Latex Templates especially for my resume. I am glad I met the founder today
- tartakovsky 6y agoCool! I stumbled upon your sites during my search for children's book templates last week. Fortunately for you, the only other template gallery I've found is on Overleaf and it's quite limited, so I'd imagine it's probably great for your typesetting service.
- VelNZ 6y agoThe Overleaf gallery is a grab bag of basically all templates that exist, whereas I try to enforce a consistent commenting style and generally only add high quality templates (at least for recent ones). I launched the site in 2012 while I was at university and was surprised there was no single repository of templates online at all at that point!
- xzel 6y agoYour typesetting website is absolutely gorgeous. I will totally keep it as a reference for beautifully simple websites. On the template front: this is exactly the type of resource I wish I had in college while learning and using Latex. Thank you for your contributions! I'm forwarding on to a few academic friends.
- marckohlbrugge 6y agoBetaList ( https://betalist.com https://betalist.com ) turned 10 years old today. For the majority of time it was run by just me, generating $100k/year in revenue on average (earlier years less, later years more). I’ve now delegated all the daily operations to a contractor who spends a few hours a day to keep things going. So technically it’s two people right now, but less than half a FTE total.
- mraza007 6y agoHey I just wanted to say I have been subscribed to BetaList email newsletter for more than a year ago and it has been really inspiring for me to see the products people are building and you guys highlighting those in your platform
- marckohlbrugge 6y agoThanks for sharing that. Appreciate it!
- mraza007 6y agoNo Problem man :)
- kevsim 6y agoBetaList is great! Along with ProductHunt it's how we got our initial user base at Kitemaker. So thanks!
- inshadows 6y agoHow does it make money? Can't see any pricing on the website. Ads?
- fbelzile 6y agoI run Cold Turkey: https://getcoldturkey.com https://getcoldturkey.com It started as a fun side project in university. My friends needed something to block themselves from playing WoW so that they could study. For three years after graduation, I've continued to work on it in my spare time. In 2015, I decided to see if people would buy the pro version with more features. As it turns out, yes! I was able to quit my job to work on it full time a few years ago.
- Malcx 6y agoA happy user here, thanks for building it. It enforces discipline on future me.
- soferio 6y agoHappy user here too. Well done! I wish you had an iOS version. Cheers.
- hluska 6y ago"Meet your match, Zuckerberg" is one of the best headlines I've read in a long time. You're a very entertaining writer - I can see why you're having success. Great job and I look forward to trying your product!!!
- fbelzile 6y agoThank you! I was thinking of switching it to "Your future self will thank you" because a results from a quick poll I did. Now I'm not sure :)
- c0nrad 6y agoI run https://csper.io https://csper.io. It's a web app that simplifies some web security stuff Content Security Policy (CSP). I helped setup CSP at a company back when I was an intern (2013). I learned that CSP can be an unpleasant experience. A year ago I decided I wanted to do something new with my life so I quit my job and Csper was born. Hopefully it makes CSP easier for other people. It's not super profitable, but it almost pays my rent, no complaints.
- gajus 6y agoIs CSP required by any security standard?
- hsbauauvhabzb 6y agoNot many mention it, but I would imagine 5 years from now many will.
- _wldu 6y agoNice website and service. I hope you do very well!
- mkrecny 6y agoThe copy in the subtitle has an error "the most advance set of ..." should be "the most advanced ..."
- Dragoman 6y agoSpelling mistake "Under the hood the extension injects ..." in 'How it works' section
- mraza007 6y agoHey you should check out indiehackers too It’s community of people running businesses as one man operation
- kamphey 6y agoyes come check out IH. We're friendly!
- kamphey 6y agoI make 100% of my income from Bettersheets.co and I'm one-person running it. The majority of sales comes from the AppSumo deal I'm running now.
- symplee 6y agoLooks cool, thanks for sharing. Just a quick feedback note, under the "free tutorials" section, I scrolled passed the images thinking they were just gifs. Then got to the bottom of the page thinking, "Hmm, It really would have been helpful if he included an example video..." Then scrolled back to the top and through all the content again to see if I missed something. I tried hovering over the "gif" and then realized it was a link to YouTube. Long story short, I think it would help the reader to have a "play button" or small icon overlayed on the image to indicate that it's a playable video, or (better?) embed the YouTube video directly in that space so the user doesn't have to leave the page. Hope this helps, but open to feedback if I'm just an outlier. You can try the change in an A/B test, and see if the conversion rate goes up for people who visit the site AND watch an example video.
- adjwilli 6y agoI’ve run the foreign-language education app https://pollylingu.al https://pollylingu.al few several years now
- sideproject 6y agoI run SideProjectors and Newsy. https://www.sideprojectors.com https://www.sideprojectors.com (a marketplace for people to buy and sell side projects) https://www.newsy.co https://www.newsy.co (a tool to turn your un-used domain into content-aggregator like Reddit) I launched monetization for both of them early this year and things have been slow but steady - looking forward to developing them more in 2021!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mattkevan 6y agoI've just had a look at Newsy and it seems great, really good work. Have put it on a domain I've had knocking around, and am seriously considering putting it on another. One thing, the Monetize help link doesn't seem to be working. Going to 'https://help.newsy.co/monetize https://help.newsy.co/monetize' results in 'A slightl problem, let us check.'
- joehx2 6y agoI noticed the same thing. Also, I just set it up for one of my domains, and am getting the same error message: http://news.puppy-snuggles.com/ http://news.puppy-snuggles.com/ I googled the error message and found the same thing on other sites such as his one: https://www.vanguardist.com/content/go/787290 https://www.vanguardist.com/content/go/787290?
- sideproject 6y agoWe've fixed that link!
- nikkwong 6y agoI Kickstarted Fractal Filters in 2014 and still derive ~90% of my income from it — www.getfractals.com. Amazon's widespread adoption in the US and foreign markets has terrible implications for several industries; but it has really been helpful for my business. This xmas I'm doing the biggest numbers I've ever done which has been fantastic.
- wcarss 6y agoI almost bought this just now on impulse as a gift, but I couldn't see anything on your site's product, tutorial, or resource pages about whether I can attach them to an iPhone, which is what the person I'm buying for has. If they work as made with phones, in my opinion you should say so, and if they don't ... well, I imagine there's money to be found in that market!
- nikkwong 6y agoI'm working very hard on that, thank you so much for the kind feedback. Hearing stuff like this is really what encourages me to keep moving forward. Thank you!!
- nikanj 6y ago" The filters are hand held with an ultra-clean, reflective aluminum handle allowing you to position the filter in front of your lens exactly as you'd like. " I think this means any camera would work, because you just hold the thing in your hand. I almost impulse bought before I realized it doesn't attach to your camera at all.
- ashkankiani 6y agoWhat I always wonder with selling physical goods is how the process of getting production lines going went. There have been times when I've wanted to sell a physical product, but the lack of experience in that area and relative risk (for financial buy in and mistakes) made me hesitate.
- nikkwong 6y ago
- yread 6y agoMaybe I'm paranoid but even when you're a single person business it's always better to have some warm bodies around you on the About Us page. Especially if you're a B2B. Single person companies automatically require a lot more scrutiny as a supplier in a lot of procurement departments.
- heliodor 6y agoI don't hide the fact that mine is a single person B2B SaaS. The scrutiny comes no matter what you put on the about-us page. Enterprise customers will schedule a call and dig from there. You'd have to be incompetent not to! I'm currently testing the "made by <my_name>" banner in the bottom-right corner: https://HostedMetrics.com https://HostedMetrics.com
- davidjade 6y agoI run TinyOctopus LLC. I create apps and software for niche markets. 100% a one person gig. All of my products have started as something I wanted for myself, but also realizing that others would likely pay for them too. My first iOS app is now 9 years old but it existed on the Pocket PC and the Palm Pilot years before that. https://TinyOctopus.net https://TinyOctopus.net edit: forgot to add, I do make the majority of my income from these apps. It is possible for small players to make real money on apps - 5 figures for me. A key for me has been to not undercharge. Despite my apps being priced much higher than others, I rarely get complaints about pricing.
- seanwilson 6y agoI run https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/ :) > Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find critical SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to find and eliminate broken links, duplicate content, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and 50+ other common website problems. It grew from automating manual audits I was doing for client work. It was especially useful when I was making risky changes and big refactors to large websites where it was hard to predict which pages would break.
- nanook 6y agoI wish more people wrote up blogposts like these: https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
- crb002 6y agohttps://redocker.com https://redocker.com profile guided recompilations of Linux containers, AWSLinux2 packages, macOS arm64 Homebrew packages, and maybe a PGO WSL2 5.x kernel. Downloads for optimized binaries and profiler binaries will be requester pay S3 buckets that anyone is free to mirror. It will monetize from re-compilation as a service, and eventually compete with AWS Codebuild to generate faster builds at a fraction of the cost with an interface as simple as yum/apt. Also some UNIX CLI tooling as a service behind Lambda/Batch where you provide a signed S3 URI to operate on. Looking for a better payment/auth provider than RapidAPI.
- antman 6y agoSeems to be down?
- agscala 6y agoI run an ecommerce business selling board games accessories. It's been way more successful than I thought it was going to end up being. https://www.burgertokens.com https://www.burgertokens.com
- ryanchants 6y agoLove it! I looked into doing something similar years ago. I had also considered selling boxes/redesigned vacuum formed inserts since a lot of board games don't come with them, or they are minimally designed.
- Lucent 6y agoPtable.com provides most of my earned income. Spent quarantine doing a major redesign. No frameworks or libraries and the full payload, WebGL, property data and all in under 64K.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thrower 6y agoIs your avoidance of frameworks/libraries based on principle or performance?
- Lucent 6y agoMostly being troubled the value added isn't proportionate to the payload increase. Double my LoC because I don't like typing out "getElementById" or want a throttle/debounce function or two or don't want to deal with hash changes? It seems unjustified if I'm targeting modern browsers.
- thrower 6y agoThat mostly makes sense. Would you recommend going towards this route for other developers?
- awillen 6y agoI posted about my new company in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 and got some good feedback and a bunch of orders about six months ago. Now I've started getting some decent traction (nothing crazy, but numbers keep going the right direction steadily and I just introduced a new product for Black Friday that brought my average purchase up significantly). I've redesigned the site (in hindsight it looked pretty terrible when I first posted it) and am having professional photos taken of the products as we speak. It's really exciting, and I'm thankful for the bit of early validation I got from HN. The company is Cooper's Treats, a dog treat business: https://coopersdogtreats.com/ https://coopersdogtreats.com/
- rmykhajliw 6y agoMe for the last 8 years. Sometimes it's difficult, but I'm trying to outsource tasks to some freelancers when it's possible.
- mceachen 6y agohttps://PhotoStructure.com https://PhotoStructure.com is just me, and I'm delighted daily by great user feedback. > Defining successful as a profitable business Ooooh. _That_ kind of successful. Nope, not profitable yet.
- jmathai 6y agoThat looks really great. I've built quite a few photo services and the last 2 aimed to fill a similar niche and PhotoStructure looks really impressive. Congrats - looks like a lot of work went into it and I hope you find a path to profitability.
- enos_feedler 6y agoStock trading
- timetrax 6y agoI started http://folkd.com http://folkd.com a social bookmarking service back in 2006. At the time Mashable called it a decent digg clone ;) I almost moved to the valley in the web2.0 phase to seek funding, but decided to stay in my home country to finish university. For 14 years now the site is providing a solid passive income from ads and freemium accounts as I was doing all of the coding and hosting myself. I moved on to other things for quite a while now, but the site is still going with good traffic and minimal effort. I think it could be much more, but I lack the motivation to rewrite the old PHP base. If someone wants to take over, shoot me an email to bk@folkd.com
- mpenn 6y agoTry contacting Tiny / Andrew Wilkinson; you may be able to sell it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lucaspanjaard 6y agoStarted my e-commerce business back in 2009 to earn some pocket money while studying and dabbling with entrepreneurship. Since 2018 I work on it full time and have grown annual revenue triple digits 3 years in a row. In 2020, the company generated an average €56k per month at around 11% profit through 8 webshops in niches in the beauty sector. I hired some specialist freelancers to improve SEO and SEA but let them go bcs of COVID. 3 weeks ago hired my first “employee” (freelancer 1hr per day) for customer service as I’m finding answering emails very annoying and time consuming. Hopefully it’ll allow me more time to develop the company further. I have more niches in mind and can always expand into other countries with my current niches (which is not always successful). The work itself is liberating, though and frustrating. I often flow from feeling alone and incapable to victorious and relaxed, and back. I personally know few people who own a company and I know no one who owns an e-commerce. Something which makes asking questions or getting help difficult. Online I often feel overlooked; the startup world focuses a lot on programming and building software. I’m fully aware building your own product ánd a business at the same time is million times harder than what I do. Nevertheless, I’d love to be in contact with people going through similar issues and phases as me. Not sure the ending of this post totally fits the topic intended, so to finish on a positive note: Only a small percentage of companies make it to €1M annual rev, a barrier I expect to pass in 2021. Moreover, growing a company brings hard and interesting challenges; eg being a solo entrepreneur I’ll need to let go of my individualistic nature and improve my social and management skills in order to work well with my current and hopefully future employees. For the curious, one of my shops is https://electricnailfiles.co.uk https://electricnailfiles.co.uk.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoI contacted you, but i'm not sure the email form works on the supplied site. Greetings from Belgium :) If required, email is on my profile
- lucaspanjaard 6y agoHi Nico! Funny, in 2017 I had a webshop in craft beers but we shut it down; curious to hear how you solved the VAT and alcohol taxes declarations for shipping abroad. Contact form is working :-) otherwise you can send a message to the info@ address.
- blackrock 6y agoSome of these HN pages are gold. This is one of them. Thanks to everyone for their great feedback here. It’s an inspiration for us all.
- niftylettuce 6y agoI launched https://forwardemail.net https://forwardemail.net out of beta on Nov 23. Within twelve days had thousands in sales. This is also an open startup at https://forwardemail.net/open-startup https://forwardemail.net/open-startup.
- hackaholicjack 6y agoCongrats!
- nadiaxo 6y agoLove the open startup page, appreciate companies being open and honest.
- 1nikoalvin1 6y agoLooks awesome! Was looking for something like this for my website, just signed up for the enhanced protection plan.
- Kalekoa 6y agoyes! i use it for forwarding emails from my photography page :)
- mikesabbagh 6y agoimpressive traction!! Congratulations! where do u get most of ur customers? did u advertise?
- niftylettuce 6y ago#1 on Google
- lemonlizzie 6y agohappy user here! thank you so much for creating this, it has helped me tremendously with communicating with my customers on my Shopify store :)
- scott31 6y agoHacker News[1] is pretty much a one-person (dang) business [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/
- barry27 6y agoHacker News is a business?
- orasis 6y agoYes, app publisher. The first version of my biggest app I wrote in 4 hours.
- nicbou 6y agoI help people settle in Berlin and deal with German bureaucracy. I started it a few years ago, and now I live from it. It's a really satisfying job. https://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com
- ambivalents 6y agoThis is so neat! Curious how you monetize this? From what I can quickly glean all of the content is free.
- nicbou 6y agoYes, by design. This sort of information should be free. The website is monetized through affiliate links.
- derfabianpeter 6y agoI’m running https://www.p3r.one https://www.p3r.one I’m building Open Source tooling in the DevOps area and custom SaaS platforms for startups. Doing this from germany and making 100% of my income with it.
- ezekg 6y agoI built and run https://keygen.sh https://keygen.sh.
- Anish01 6y agoHey I am Anish, and I am into a very successful stream which is digital marketing and for my business I have got a project to publish <a href="https://www.amogue.com/collections/nehru-jackets https://www.amogue.com/collections/nehru-jackets" rel="nofollow">Nehru Jackets</a> from Amogue and I am getting paid alot for it.
- aussieguy1234 6y agohttps://expose.sh https://expose.sh It's a tool that will expose a local web server to the internet. Used for webhook testing, client demos etc. Simpler CLI interface compared to ngrok.
- Taurenking 6y agoI've been profitable with this little side project of mine that connects Calendly to Slack https://www.calenduck.co/ https://www.calenduck.co/
- the__alchemist 6y agoI've been selling pH, ORP, and temperature sensors for MCUs (in practice, most users use it with Raspberry Pi) for a few months. Not enough for a significant income, but fun, and I hope to expand it with the addition of a standalone, multi-sensor device soon. Great experience learning, and communicating with customers, even though the profit isn't there. https://www.anyleaf.org/ https://www.anyleaf.org/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- yunzhu-li 6y agoBy OP’s definition mine is not a successful business, but wanted to share anyway. I build and run https://onetracker.app https://onetracker.app. In 2020 it generated about $1-2k/month in revenue from ads and IAP. I started it due to my need for a privacy-respecting and automated service for tracking deliveries. It’s nowhere close to becoming the majority of my income, but it’s been a fun experience developing and running it.
- optemization 6y agoI run https://optemization.com https://optemization.com. Formally, its a "digital operations" agency but I'm experimenting with a newsletter, YouTube videos and selling Notion templates. Made $55k in 8 months. Idk if that's successful but I'm having a blast.