22 ms·
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?
This question was asked 3 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535) by mdoliwa, and I'm curious what it looks nowadays.
> 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.
- brettwill1025 6y agoI run DesignJoy.co (unlimited design service) solo and raked in over $300k this year.
- sachink30 6y agoI am running Accessibility Enabler[0] from last 2 years. It's a solo business . I do take a help of other freelancer when needed [0] https://hikeorders.com/accessibility/home https://hikeorders.com/accessibility/home
- vuciv1 6y agoWell, I hope to answer it in 2022, but I'm making Swapiverse. It allows you to trade books you want for books you have. https://www.swapiverse.com/ https://www.swapiverse.com/
- fumfhklo 6y agoSteel Bite Pro Besides limiting your intake of sugary treats, you should consider eating as few highly acidic foods as possible. This one should be a no-brainer. Foods high in acid, as well as teas and coffees, can wear down the health of the teeth and effectively poison the gums. While these things don’t do much to harm your dental health in the short-term, their long-term effects can be disastrous. The final piece of advice on the product website for Steel Bite Pro directly prompts consumers to consider their relatively high-end supplement. http://supplementsnetwork.org/steel-bite-pro/ http://supplementsnetwork.org/steel-bite-pro/ https://twitter.com/SteelBitePro3/status/1343575812616855553 https://twitter.com/SteelBitePro3/status/1343575812616855553 http://supplementsnetwork.org/ http://supplementsnetwork.org/ https://tocal.instructure.com/eportfolios/9590/ https://tocal.instructure.com/eportfolios/9590/ https://www.pexels.com/@steel-bite-pro-14866667 https://www.pexels.com/@steel-bite-pro-14866667 https://gocrowdera.com/US/other/steel-bite-pro/ https://gocrowdera.com/US/other/steel-bite-pro/ https://www.bonfire.com/steel-bite-pro/ https://www.bonfire.com/steel-bite-pro/ https://publons.com/researcher/4132847/steel-bite-pro-get-50-off-today/ https://publons.com/researcher/4132847/steel-bite-pro-get-50... https://www.stageit.com/SteelBitePro https://www.stageit.com/SteelBitePro https://teletype.in/@steelbitepro/zXzJRVoPp https://teletype.in/@steelbitepro/zXzJRVoPp https://share.naturalnews.com/p/3641359 https://share.naturalnews.com/p/3641359
- kohanz 6y agoAlso: 9 months ago [0] and a few weeks ago [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858035 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442652
- codesternews 6y agoThanks for adding.
- inglor_cz 6y agoI sell my own books. I started in 2018. As of 2020, that made about 80 % of my total income. Previous programming experience was useful, I could hack together some WooCommerce plugins that help me take care of the customers (generating invoices, communication with the Czech Post, pairing bank payments to orders and informing me about payments that could not be paired reliably). That saved me a lot of repetitive work.
- akudha 6y agoWhat subjects do you write about? Any place we can look at your books?
- inglor_cz 6y agoMostly popular history. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechlibar https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli... Everything so far has only been published in Czech, though.
- akudha 6y agoI’m surprised that you can live off of history books! Very cool.
- inglor_cz 6y agoBelieve me, I was surprised too. Very surprised. The stereotype of a famished author is pretty strong here :) Thing is, without middle-men (distributors, bookshops), most of the revenue accrues to you directly. Long live e-commerce.
- p2detar 6y agoI can imagine that you have built some sort of strong followers community to promote your books? I mean how do readers find your books?
- nicbou 6y agoI write content to help people settle in Germany. They need certain services, and I get a commission when I refer them to those services. I don't think I could trivially reproduce the results, but I'm happy to get paid for offering free advice. I hope it lasts.
- bitcoinmoney 6y agoHow much do you earn and is the space not saturated already? Are you expanding to new niches ?
- nicbou 6y agoThe space isn't saturated, but there is some competition. However the quality is often lacking. I maintain a smaller set of high quality articles, and keep those updated. I also have a more simple, direct writing style, and designed the website for readability. I considered expanding to other places or bringing other people on board, but I doubt I could maintain the same level of quality. Those articles require far more research and domain-specific knowledge than your typical SEO spam. I'm also not that interested in growing. I want more time, not more disposable income. I am sitting on a few decent business ideas, and this website could easily grow to cover other countries, but I'd rather do more pleasant things. > How much do you earn About the same as I did as a developer, though it's hard to get a precise number since it varies a lot.
- 0x426577617265 6y agoWhere do I find your service? I am planning on moving soon.
- nicbou 6y agohttps://allaboutberlin.com https://allaboutberlin.com - I don't offer any services, only free content. However I do have a small network of trusted people I work with, if you need extra help.
- 6y ago
- mg 6y agoI run https://www.gnod.com https://www.gnod.com
- m_km 6y agoThank you for making it
- The_rationalist 6y agoExtremely great projects!
- codesternews 6y agoWow!!, How much money you are making with this? How long it took you to build this? How you are marketing this? Can you please give some advice on marketing.
- LaundroMat 6y agoPlease license gnod to Netflix :)
- moconnor 6y agoTip: for each artist or author you recommend, put their top books under the name with the picture from amazon and link there with an affiliate account. An unfamiliar author’s name means nothing to me, but I might have heard of some of their books. And I’ll open tabs to check them out later. For artists I’d love to SEE their pictures. I don’t know many artist’s names!
- giarc 6y agoAgree with the artist comment. I input 3 of my favourite artists and got some recommendations. I selected "I don't know" because I didn't know who they were. Could just show the top 5 results from a Google image search for their name, or an image from their wiki page.
- 6510 6y agoproduct explorer should ask what device you came from and set the minimum spec to match. It can probably pushState all the search params into the url so that these beautiful result sets can be shared.
- pasttense01 6y agoA great many people [including myself] have a successful online business flipping which is buying and selling of goods (more used than new). Buying is from local thrift shops, auctions, garage sales, Craiglist, Facebook Marketplace, etc and selling is at Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, etc. If interested follow the Reddit sub-reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/
- WanderPanda 6y agoIsn’t this almost a zero sum game?
- newguy1234 6y agoYes. It is a lot harder to do than people make it out to be.
- blackrock 6y agoThe juice doesn’t seem worth the squeeze. I can’t even be bothered to sell my own used junk. But it is a low tech way to do e-commerce.
- 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. I created it to scratch my own itch while working freelance on other websites. There was one website in particular where minor changes on one page was breaking unrelated pages so a localhost web crawler that checked for issues was invaluable when doing small and large refactors. The guide I wrote that explains all the page factors Checkbot tests for (https://www.checkbot.io/guide/ https://www.checkbot.io/guide/) also helped me brush up on current web best practices. People treat SEO like a scammy word but the general recommendations are good for humans too!
- electriclove 6y agoHow much has this been bringing in for you?
- lcx3 6y agoLunch Money (https://lunchmoney.app/ https://lunchmoney.app/) is run by one person. It is a personal budgeting app that is very well-designed and easy to use. The founder's journey is also quite interesting as she has been traveling as a digital nomad while building Lunch Money.
- jyothepro 6y agoI wish they also pulled in brokerage account transactions
- zarfius 6y agoI wrote an OFX importer for Lunch Money just last week. Do the brokerage accounts support that?
- makeee 6y agoBig fan. The founder is worth following: https://twitter.com/lunchbag https://twitter.com/lunchbag
- jnfr 6y agoJen here– thank you so much for the mention!
- damechen 6y agoFounder Jen is such an inspirational and helpful woman! Worth to follow her journey on twitter
- ratsimihah 6y agoI'll be starting a Youtube channel shortly about solo bootstrapping a tech business around a mobile app and everything that's involved, from idea validation to implementation, launch and marketing. Let me know if that's everything you're interested in
- jituc 6y agoyes, please.
- failedsides 6y agoI'd be interested!
- akulbe 6y agoYes please!!
- kjakm 6y agoCould you share the business you’ve bootstrapped?
- ratsimihah 6y agoThis will be a new business from scratch, built with the community. I'm thinking about using a sleep diary app I've already mostly built
- blowfish721 6y agoDefinitely!
- bitcoinmoney 6y agoFollowing!
- gnicholas 6y agoI bet you could find some interesting guests in this thread. I'd be happy to share my experience, for what it's worth — feel free to contact through my profile.
- masa331 6y agoI run a paid addon for local e-commerce platform(with 25k shops build on it). It all started about 15 month ago when i was still working in a web development company. The platform owners came to us and offered us a partnership. We would develop some new addons for them, run them, and split the profits(80% for us, 20% for them). As i was the one most interested in this i got the first project and developed and supported it for about 9 month. I saw it could have a nice future and bought it from the web development company and quit the job. Now i run it by myself and i love it. The addon provides an easy way to print paper labels for products and other things listed in the shops.
- NicoJuicy 6y agoCan I contact you? I have an overlap in interest ( I'm building an e-commerce platform and things are getting real :) )
- masa331 6y agoyup, definitely, it's pdonat@seznam.cz
- giarc 6y agoDid you have to buy out the web dev company you were working for? Did they not want their cut?
- masa331 6y agoI bought the addon from them. They wanted to run it however since i developed most of the app and supported it they would have to train new person for it and dedicate his/her time to it and nobody wanted to be that person.
- aantix 6y agohttps://hauling.market/ https://hauling.market/ Andrew is killing it. Already over one million in bids on his platform.
- pbrb 6y agoThis is super unique, really cool to see.
- jdmg94 6y agoI think there was a TLC show about this industry and how they negotiated their routes and stuff, really cool project
- giarc 6y agoThis is interesting. The copy on the page is pretty broad (beyond this single spot about horses and all small animals), suggesting they accept any type of shipment. However, when you look at the request they are almost 100% horses or other small animals. I wonder if the founder should niche down and focus on the animal market, seems like there is demand.
- aantix 6y agoHe runs at least 8 Facebook animal hauling groups, so he's well acquainted with the niche. His mom started the horse hauling group many years ago, and Andrew took over.
- fxtentacle 6y agoI feel like the question is wrong. I used to run a profitable one-person online business. And I felt miserable every time I had to get up at night to fix server issues, or when I had to do customer support from my laptop while I was supposed to be on vacation instead. Now that we're a team, I feel so much better about the whole thing, even though profit margins are slightly lower than before.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lightning19 6y agoI work for a large ISP as a software dev and still have to wake up at 11am to fix server issues, I also got called to fix something on Dec 31 while I was on leave. I'd rather be working after hours for myself than for my a-hole boss
- mmmmmbop 6y agoWhile I don't know your usual sleep schedule, waking up at 11am does not sound too bad to me.
- vb6sp6 6y agoI know quite a few people who answer emails on vacation and who do on call rotations at their "normal" jobs. So I think part of the appeal of these types of questions is that the individual gets to reap the benefits of their extraordinary effort instead of passing the profit upstream.
- codesternews 6y agoWhat is your business can you please elaborate. Its fine. You started with 1 person thats great accomplishment to have team.
- khuknows 6y agohttps://pageflows.com https://pageflows.com has been paying my bills for a couple of years now To give you an idea of revenue, it’s about as much as I’d be getting paid as a junior-mid developer in London and requires a day or two of work a week unless I’m adding a new feature, redesigning etc. https://screenjar.com https://screenjar.com is also making a small amount of revenue, but nothing meaningful yet.
- masa331 6y agoScreenjar looks very cool. Great idea! Bookmarking for later use
- vinteruggla 6y agoBrilliant. Are all those screenshots and videos made manually? Hard work
- khuknows 6y agoYep - I've looked into automating or hiring this out, but spending Monday every week updating/adding a product has been the simplest solution so far
- paledot 6y agoMy former employer's support department uses TeamViewer with customers. A web-based equivalent would be a game changer for them, if you can go real-time.
- abinaya_rl 6y agoThanks for sharing, screenjar looks interesting. I'll try it out in a few days.
- khuknows 6y agoAwesome, thanks - let me know if you have any questions or feedback
- hermitcrab 6y agoI've run my own one-man[1] software business selling desktop software for Windows and Mac since 2005. Products with launch date: https://www.perfecttableplan.com https://www.perfecttableplan.com (2005) https://www.hyperplan.com https://www.hyperplan.com (2015) https://www.easydatatransform.com https://www.easydatatransform.com (2019) 2020 wasn't a great year due to the effect of COVID on PerfectTablePlan sales. But I've been profitable every year. [1] With a bit of help from my wife on the accounts and freelancers for web design, testing etc.
- exdsq 6y agoReally tiny comment, but I noticed on Perfect Table Plan you have an example seating plan for a lodge with peoples names? As a member myself I know there are quite a few people who prefer to remain anonymous, so not sure if they'd like that image to be up (albeit the risk is very very low that they'd be identified from a table planning app!).
- hermitcrab 6y agoAny names you see in seating plans on the PerfectTablePlan website are ficticious. BTW the fact that the seating plan isn't stored on a third party server is a selling point for privacy minded users/organizations. Particularly when it comes to politicians/royalty/celebrities etc.
- myth_drannon 6y agoI used to read your blog back when I was into shareware. What a trip down the memory lane. Glad to see you are still in the biz!
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoI think I remember you from the BoS forum.
- hermitcrab 6y agoAh yes, the BoS forum. I was one of the moderators. Some of the BoS regulars can still occasionally be found at: https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/ https://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/
- gnicholas 6y agoI run BeeLine Reader, [1] which launched on HN years ago. [2] BeeLine makes reading on screen easier and faster. At first, most of the revenue came from B2C mobile apps and browser plugins, but in 2020 it hit a tipping point and most of the revenue now comes from B2B technology licensing. Blackboard recently adopted the BeeLine technology, and there are several other large education platforms that are planning to adopt in 2021. Licensing revenue is uncommon for startups, but it's nice because it's very high margin. I actually used to be a lawyer, so I can keep the main licensing cost (legal fees) under control. 1: http://www.beelinereader.com http://www.beelinereader.com 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6335784
- fxtentacle 6y agoWhat a brilliant idea :) Plus I like the name, it very nicely summarizes the product.
- gnicholas 6y agoGlad you like it! Happy to send HNers a monthlong free pass — I'm nick@[domain].
- ISL 6y agoWhat makes licensing possible -- do you have a patent? Reimplementing by a competitor, at least at first blush, seems like it might be feasible?
- gnicholas 6y agoYeah, patents. But many licensees are also just happy to have use of our JS, and to be able to use the name. The name has decent recognition in assistive technology circles and is gaining traction in among university students as well.
- andai 6y agoHomepage looks a bit funky on iPhone SE (2016) https://i.imgur.com/QcaZVx8.png https://i.imgur.com/QcaZVx8.png I see this sometimes and then zooming out gives me the full view, but it's already zoomed out here. Great idea btw! update: Also checked on desktop, the site transfers 8.5MB and takes 13 seconds to load (the gradients). (My download speed is 7MB/s.)
- huhtenberg 6y agoBeware of the selection bias before making any conclusions. For every person who currently does X successfully, there will be a multiple of those who failed at the (nearly) same and aren't chiming in.
- cambalache 6y agoWell, but that is the idea, the selection bias is in the question not in the answers. He is not asking what % of one-person online business are successful.
- huhtenberg 6y agoSure, but this renders most of the answers useless. Interesting, entertaining, curious, but useless.
- cambalache 6y agoNot at all. That's how people have learned to do stuff for thousand of years, you copy the successful cases.
- brabel 6y agoI think that what OP is saying is that copying the successful case will not make you successful - otherwise everyone could be successful after reading a few discussions like this, or reading millionaire's books about how they became successful.
- cambalache 6y ago> otherwise everyone could be successful after reading a few discussions like this, or reading millionaire's books about how they became successful. None of those things are actually copying, arent they? They are just reading. Do I believe that everybody who actually creates a small SAAS emulating some of the ideas presenting here will be a smashing success? Of course not! Do I believe many will succeed? Of course! This is like saying, how do I get to the NBA? Well, train hard everyday, eat well, get into a competitive basketball program since HS. None of those things are sufficient, but for sure are a great blueprint.
- quelsolaar 6y agoI license a fully automated UV unwrapping tool at MinistryOfFlat.com . UV mapping is the task of unwrapping a 3D model to a flat surface in order to put textures on it. Ive been at it for about 3 years, and last year I made 7 figures. I do sell directly to 3D artists. You probably know some VFX companies and game companies that have licensed my tool. I make a good amount from people coming to the web site, but the majority is made licensing the technology to various companies. The online sales are mostly there to spread the word, and gather user feedback. UV mapping is a very difficult problem mostly because artist have very specific ideas of what constitutes good UV mapping and it doesn't conform to any simple heuristics. Its about a megabyte of C code without any dependencies, and that makes very attractive to licensees.
- jituc 6y agoThat's really cool. I have really hard time calculating the prospect price for commercial usage of software. can you share the average commercial license pricing range for a product? and how much does it differ from pricing for individuals? Thanks for sharing your stats.
- leetrout 6y agoThat’s really cool. Do you worry about licensees keeping the code and using it without you knowing if they cancel? Or an employee at a licensee walking off with the code / binary etc? We’ve talked about some of these risks at my current job which ships code as our product so curious how other people navigate this. Congrats on the success!
- quelsolaar 6y agoThanks! First of all I sell perpetual licenses. For everything else I rely entirely on the honor system. I wont spend my time chasing some student who pirates a copy. The real money comes from the larger companies and they are terrified of getting in legal trouble for breaking any kind of license agreement, so they have no reason to screw me over. I worry a lot more about making things complicated for licensees then I do about them taking advantage of me.
- makeee 6y agoDivjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :) It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance. The conventional wisdom is that devs won't pay for software (especially code!), but I've found it to be the opposite. There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend. [0] https://divjoy.com https://divjoy.com [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044 [2] https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2019-grant-recipients/ https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-the-startup-school-2...
- codesternews 6y agoIts amazing! thanks for sharing. Can you please tell from where you are getting the users? How you got your first users and what you are doing for marketing? Thanks a lot.
- makeee 6y agoMy first batch of alpha testers came from a single Twitter reply [0] that got retweeted by a prominent person in the React community. It certainly helped that I had an okay Twitter following at the time (I think around 1k), but it doesn't need to be huge. You just need the right person to retweet you. That was enough to iterate on until I had an MVP. Then my Show HN [1] sent like 15k visitors in a day and that led to a ton of usage. I think something like 4k projects were created that day. I wasn't yet charging at the point, but probably for the best, since high usage meant a lot of feedback. A few months later I launched on Product Hunt and that went well [2]. Beyond that, just improving the product every day, sharing my progress on Twitter, and trying really hard to turn every new feature into an exciting launch event. I also started a React hooks blog [3] that sends me a handful of customers every month. I could probably do a better job of promoting Divjoy on there. Haven't delved into SEO (barely rank for anything), content marketing, paid advertising, etc, so it's still very much a learning process for me. [0] https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1108875975494795265 https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1108875975494795265 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044 [2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/divjoy-4 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/divjoy-4 [3] https://usehooks.com https://usehooks.com
- lemming 6y agoI develop Cursive - https://cursive-ide.com https://cursive-ide.com, a plugin for Clojure development in IntelliJ. I started working on it seriously in 2014, started selling it in 2015 after about 2 years in beta (during which time I had a daughter) and it has provided all my income since then. The sales are more than my salary + bonus (but less than total comp) at my last job at Google. This year is the first year that sales have dipped slightly, probably due to COVID and a better competitor for VS Code, but it's still very profitable.
- sideproject 6y agoI had many un-used domains I've purchased over the years (>40) and I wanted to make use of them without having to spend time, so I built Newsy - launched 9 months ago. https://www.newsy.co https://www.newsy.co It turns your un-used domain into a Reddit-like content aggregator with all sorts of features - membership, voting, comments, newsletters and monetization. The best thing for me is that it is completely automated and all of my domains are hosted on the platform. :) Not Ramen-profitable yet, but pushing it to get there.
- electriclove 6y agoGreat idea! How much does a typical unused domain make using this?
- sideproject 6y agoIt varies.. some ad platforms are quite poor in terms of their payout (definitely not in AdSense league), but we are working on various features for more monetization options (e.g. direct advertising)
- pythonbase 6y agoHow you got these approved from Adsense? Heard that usually have issues with content aggregators claiming such sites do not have original content.
- sideproject 6y agoSome sites have already been approved prior. We generally discourage our users to apply for AdSense initially (most likely it'll get rejected anyway) - so instead we recommend using other ad platforms (there are plenty).
- ganeshkrishnan 6y agoI couldn't PM you via your contact details on HN. I can help you with this. Is there a way I can message you?
- stephen_greet 6y agoClose Tools [1] is run by one person and they're currently at $40k MRR. [1] https://jdnoc.com/open/ https://jdnoc.com/open/
- ahpearce 6y agoTalk about Fomo :|
- giarc 6y agoI was listening to My First Million podcast the other day and they mentioned a product that was specific to Poshmark, I wonder if this was it. They went on to talk about getting in early to platforms and making a killing (ex. when FB opened their API, Shopify marketplace, Google Ad words). Poshmark seems like a giant service that likely has a lot of area ripe for development.
- vmception 6y agoYes, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been very lucrative Basically its great because everything is client side so all you have to is make frontend websites for people to interact with, and even that isn't really necessary. You just need people, with wallets, to be able to interact with your smart contract easily. The smart contract you deploy has to address a pain point for existing users, typically by consolidating multiple transactions they are doing into a single transaction. Your smart contract can take a cut of the transactions that flow through it. The ongoing overhead costs are practically non-existent. The initial costs to deploy your smart contracts can vary to be several hundred dollars at time of writing. It doesn't really matter what people think is happening in the blockchain space, or their infinitely moving goal post to reinforce their view about a lack of use case. The reality is that there is a market and there are market needs, just like any other market. The distinctions in this space is that the payment system is built in and all the users bring their own connection to the nearest servers which store all your variables. It's not different than any other financial services, just way faster and permissionless to get a foothold in.
- zenyc 6y agoIs there a way I can contact you? Interested in learning more.
- vmception 6y agovmception00 [at] gmail [dot] com I don't check it, but I'll try
- _laiq 6y agoI would like to know more about the subject. Is there any way I can contact you ?
- vmception 6y agovmception00 [at] gmail [dot] com I don't check it, but I'll try
- LittlePeter 6y ago
- bluedevil2k 6y agoI created AuctionGo (https://auction-go.com https://auction-go.com) about 18 months ago and started getting traction really quickly through Google Ads. It’s white label auction software (like creating a private Ebay of your own). I had envisioned many medium sized businesses in the US would use it to sell commodities or host reverse auctions for suppliers, but all the interest has come from overseas companies selling all kids of things, especially real estate.
- tony0x02 6y agoWhat is your tech stack?
- dowakin 6y agoOptDuty [0] is ramen profitable in my place (like $1k per month) after 4 months from launching. Although it's still side project for me. Everything started from a Show HN post and one comment on HN. Majority of paying clients are from HN too. I started the project in May, and launched in August. And after 2 months I was thinking it's total failure, because target audience is too specific and my marketing skills sucks. But by keep talking to a few early users I finally managed to convince them to use the product and than paid for yearly subscription. [0] https://optduty.com/ https://optduty.com/
- dividuum 6y agoI'm running https://info-beamer.com https://info-beamer.com, a digital signage hosted service using the Raspberry Pi. It started as a for-fun project 8 years ago when I decided to do the digital info system for a local hacker conference and didn't find anything that allows quick prototyping and rapid iteration/live coding of content. I then switch from "desktop Linux" to Raspberries and added a web based service around the fairly low-level command line tool. It's my main source of income for 4 years now.
- tallmansixfour 6y agoExcellent product. I've been testing it out and find very useful - especially dual-hdmi support.
- olegakbarov 6y agohttps://profunctor.io/ https://profunctor.io/ Job board for developers with cross post to popular Telegram channel. Might come in handy if you hire devs and don't mind to work with people in EU Timezone. Job posting is free of charge. I made some money with ads last year, tho.
- putin_sodomit 6y agoМоя кошка нашла тут работу, спасибо
- Omavel 6y agoNot your personal army.
- msangel 6y agoAnother sink where the recruiter will get you... No thanks, I'm fine with having a LinkedIn(and never opening it).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JustinHaas 6y agoThis website is a complete shit. Especially that "Login" button.
- old_borov 6y agoso make better huh?
- JustinHaas 6y agoWhy I should make it?
- uglyfish 6y agoЯ js-макака. 3 года искал работу пока не наткнулся на охуенные мемы и вакансии от Profunctor. Сейчас вообще похуй куда устроится, залетаю на совбес, лид смотрит презрительно а я ему сразу мемы насыпаю, оказался норм штрихуля, hr-шу нахуй послали и ее зп мне на бонус кинули. Вакансии заебись. От души, рекомендую.
- amaurymartiny 6y agoDuring the pandemic, I launched [link redacted], an open-source tool to check if an email exists, without sending any email. Not sure what "successful" means here, but I have a couple dozens of customers, which for me is a success.
- gnicholas 6y agoI'll definitely check this out. This would make it easier to move things from LinkedIn messaging (super annoying and low-frequency for many people) to email. There used to be a Chrome extension that made this possible (Rapportive?), but I think they got acquired by LI. Are there other efficient ways of doing this? I'm not looking to spam strangers — just to migrate conversations with actual connections off the LI platform.
- node-bayarea 6y agoVery cool! How does this actually check without sending any email?
- meowster 6y agoYou can initiate a connection with the mail server, and then query it. I read about it years ago, never done it myself though.
- snowwrestler 6y agoWorth pointing out that it’s possible to configure an email server to not respond to these types of queries and many high-value targets (large corporate email systems) do.
- biot 6y agoFrom the GitHub source, it connects to the mail server for the domain’s MX record and issues a “RCPT TO:” command and looks for a non-rejection. Back when I was managing email servers, this option was typically disabled to prevent address enumeration and I’d be surprised if it still works reliably. Many mail servers function by answering all “RCPT TO:” commands (for the domains served) with a success message that is effectively “Yeah, sure... give it a try” and, if the mailbox doesn’t exist, will email the sender a bounce message.
- damechen 6y agoI solely started https://testimonial.to https://testimonial.to 2 weeks ago, and it generated over $5k revenue for me since its launch. I wouldn't say success, but at least it's my best launch ever. Well, the website is an app to help collect video testimonials for your businesses. I offered a lifetime deal, all my revenue is from the lifetime deal. Now the deal is gone. In 2021, I will be only focus on recurring revenue. Start all over again :)
- yroc92 6y agoSimple idea, love it. Well done.
- damechen 6y agoThank you! Yes, it's damn simple ;)
- bluehatbrit 6y agoMay I ask what you did to promote it adn get that initial traffic?
- damechen 6y agoMost of the traffic comes from Product Hunt and Twitter. I'd share my update very frequently in my tweets. Also, I will study who is my initial paying customer, so I get to know which industry has potential market, then I just go after/outreach those potential users in particular area.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tomcam 6y agoI am in my 21st year of running a service that places bids the last few seconds on eBay. I am the sole employee and I outsource all of the heavy lifting. I have been doing the four hour work week since Tim Ferriss was in middle school. My house and farm in the Seattle area are both fully paid for. It allowed me to enjoy my children as they grew up and to afford serious medical bills (two of them are handicapped). It also allowed me to buy housing for several relatives, study constantly, and do a lot of pro bono work. It also allowed me to make some very expensive mistakes, but we were always careful enough not to do things that were fatal to our finances. It’s been an amazing set of experiences.
- kristianp 6y agoAs someone who has sold something on Ebay and seen the last minute bid, the fact that shopping works really frustrates me. It's such a bad feature of Ebay that the auction end time is fixed regardless of bids.
- tomcam 6y agoI think you mean sniping, not shopping, and I can certainly see your point. Believe me, when I bought the business I carefully thought through the ethics. At this point it is unlikely eBay changes its policy because the pros and cons both are run surprisingly deep. FWIW there were a few studies done on it in the early days of eBay, and it appears that sniping tends to bring more buyers to the table, even though sellers can feel uncomfortable with it.
- kristianp 6y agoYes, sniping sorry. It definitely seems to be a policy made to please buyers, but even on the buyers side it has a bad connotation for those who miss out by a few seconds. I agree its unlikely ebay will change it now.
- downandout 6y agoThat sounds awesome. What is the name of the service?
- xchaotic 6y agoI hope it’s not off topic but it seems to show that one person businesses are probably not the way to go for most people- you will have a much more predictable income in a larger organisation and on average you will be better off financially too. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably a VC trying to make you work for them (or fail competing against them)
- KirillPanov 6y agoAgency and independence are priceless to some people, myself included.
- cosmodisk 6y agoNobody is arguing with it, however if I had to choose between 100K in corporate world and 80K running on my own, I'd go with latter no questions asked.
- kewball 6y agoI asked this question back in 2014 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243) hoping to start something myself. It's now 2021 and I still have nothing to show but failed attempts. Looking through the list of businesses from 2014 and a vast majority of them look like they are still active which is great! Thanks for the trip down memory lane. It is tougher to find the time these days with 2 kids, but I am setting myself the goal of $25K from non hour based work this year. Well done to all of you that have succeeded. To all of us dreamers, this could be the year!
- XCSme 6y agoI am building a feature-rich and highly performant self-hosted analytics platform: https://www.usertrack.net https://www.usertrack.net It is profitable as the running costs are very low, but currently my income is only around $1k-$2k/month. It started as a side-project but I have been working full-time on it since last year when the gaming company I was working for went bankrupt. Being a dev I am too focused on product and I always want to "fix one more thing" before marketing it. As my savings got lower the product got better, I think I am now at that point when I can start finding customers without having to worry that "maybe my product is not good enough".
- level09 6y agoI created "Mixed CRM" https://www.mixedcrm.com/ https://www.mixedcrm.com/ to solve my client's problem: collaborative sales of apartments in realtime. later on, added automation features got generating sales offers/contracts/agreements, then a payment plan editor, and later on added activity tracking and more advanced user management etc .. Pretty successful start, and getting many real estate businesses who would like to give it a try, a few more clients and might become my full time project of 2021. Hit me up if you would like to try a demo.
- lcall 6y agoIt's not me personally doing it, but a relative is an effective teacher of 2D game development (godot, gamemaker, pixel art), with good pacing, helpful to customers &c (and pleasant to be around). Some examples of his work, which supports their family: https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course-youtube?r_done=1 https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course-youtube?r_do...
- cloogshicer 6y agoSuper cool! Thanks for sharing. How does did he initially get customers? How does he keep growing?
- lcall 6y agoAsking him would get a more currently accurate answer, but the parts I do know include that he had the knowledge and so wrote a self-published book (paper and digital) about GameMaker some years back, and he is good at knowing about and being a positive part of his gaming communities, so he has built his name recognition over time, initially while working a full-time job and going to school. And I think toward his customers ("students"), he treats them with respect, and they say good things about him. I think he has a designated # of hours per week he spends on things like those. Plus, his personality and strengths line up well with the kind of work he does: he likes art, and gaming, and talking about them, and helping people, and has a sort of natural sense about people and a speech cadence that work well in instructional videos. Other things that have helped him stay in business are that he and his wife both wanted and agreed early on to take Dave Ramsey's advice (which somewhat they also got from their parents' example), that it is worth being very frugal to prioritize debt avoidance, having some savings, and paying off a house, over many other kinds of expenses, so when there are ups and downs, they can ride them out. Edit: They drove that old car for a long time even though the A/C didn't work right and the windows wouldn't all roll down properly etc. Then they saved up for a while, watched for good buys, and replaced it with a reliable used van for cash. Edits: They also pray and pay tithing, and there are blessings promised in Malachi 3 (Bible) and elsewhere to those who do that (properly?), which I have also experienced, not in identical ways. And they are family, so my wife and I pray for them all, often. Plus he sets objectives and works regularly on weekdays, and takes breaks on evenings/weekends to enjoy the family. And they read business books and discuss them.
- ahaucnx 6y agoI came up with the idea of a hardware startup called AirGradient [1] focusing on indoor air quality monitoring due to annual recurring wildfires in my region and the wish to help my local school here in managing this better. Very soon I realized, I lack the experience on the hardware side and a partner joined in (so strictly not solo anymore). Yes hardware is hard! AirGradient focuses on monitoring indoor air quality in schools and offices and operates with a hardware as a service model, i.e. you do not have upfront costs for buying expensive sensor but you get the sensors provided for the duration of the service. I am also running a blog on AirQuality. I created detailed build instructions to build your own powerful air quality monitor (PM, CO2, Temperature and Humidity) which is fully open source and open hardware and I am more than happy to send you PCBs if you want to build it [2]. [1] https://www.airgradient.com/schools/ https://www.airgradient.com/schools/ [2] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/2020/08/25/the-airgradient-diy-sensor/ https://www.airgradient.com/blog/2020/08/25/the-airgradient-...
- wrentopher 6y agoDepends what you’d call successful. My marketing consulting service earned me a tolerable living and then helped me land a really good full time job.
- renniehaylock 6y agoI created https://huntr.co https://huntr.co back in 2017, just reached $15k mrr last month. Looking to hire someone to help with sales in the next few months. It's been fun to work on such a variety of things in the past 3 years (design, development, sales, etc), but I'm ready to grow the team :)
- TenJack 6y agoLooks cool! How are you getting customers?
- renniehaylock 6y agoThanks! About half of revenue comes from job seekers upgrading to a paid plan (freemium model). The other half from an Enterprise version for organizations that help large groups of job seekers get placed.
- giarc 6y agoWow! That looks incredible! I won't be a customer right now but just wanted to say you have created a great looking product! Are the jobs within your search tool pretty US centric, or if I told my Canadian friends about this, would they get value as well?
- renniehaylock 6y agoThanks! Not so much US centric, more tech focused. Jobs are sourced from career sites of hundreds of employers, most of them in the tech industry. There are quite a few jobs in the big Canadian hubs like Toronto and Vancouver.
- oliv__ 6y agoI started Niceboard (https://niceboard.co https://niceboard.co) last summer and while the recurring revenue is not enough to entirely live on yet, I've been running a lifetime deal on Appsumo which has consistently brought in >$5k / month over the past few months and live off of that (for how long is the million dollar question). Now I have to fully transition from fixed revenue to recurring! (I was thinking of writing a quick note about all of this but idk if anyone cares/is interested)
- soheilpro 6y agoI'm running two businesses: 1: https://postsheet.com https://postsheet.com for sending personalized emails and text messages using Google Sheets and Airtable 2: https://pikaso.me https://pikaso.me for taking beautiful clutter-free Twitter screenshots for sharing on Instagram
- ninja_nate92 6y agoWhat kind of revenue do you make between these two?
- nlh 6y agoNice! Pikaso is something that's super useful (just started a newsletter, and was looking for exactly this). Nicely done.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- abinaya_rl 6y agoI started Remote Leaf a year back and it's not yet sustainable yet. It's making $1.5k MRR at this point. One of my goals in 2021 is to grew it to $10k MRR. - Planning to focus more on SEO - Appsumo deal might work
- nocubicles 6y agoI'm running https://develytica.com https://develytica.com by myself. Its a tool for teams to generate team member skill matrixes by using Github issues and labels. Its one single Golang monorepo and is quite cheap to run because of that. Altough is not providing majority of my income then I hope the % of income its creating will only increase this year:)
- santah 6y agohttps://next-episode.net https://next-episode.net is a service I run for more than 15 years now. It's a TV / Movies tracking website/community that helps people organize what they watch and find new shows to watch. I started it for myself (because I couldn't find such tool back in the day) while I was working as a front end developer in an outsourcing company and it slowly grew and became my (only) day job. There is a lot to do in terms of user support and constant maintenance and development (considering also the iOS and Android apps), but I've made the conscious decision to stay a sole developer and not try and hire people to help. For me - I feel this works great even though I realize I may be missing a lot by not trying to scale up by hiring. Hope that makes sense. I'm around if anyone has any questions.
- zarfius 6y agoAwesome to see you here. I've been using the paid app for years and I'm more than happy to support you forever.
- santah 6y agoThanks!
- smsm42 6y agoLove this service! Glad it pays the bills (I have a paid membership). I'd use this opportunity to make a suggestion - how hard would it be to make more detailed map of which season is available on which service? I am especially interested in latest season usually, of course. When you have a show with 15 seasons and you want the latest one, the list shows all the services whether they have new the stuff or just very old stuff. I'll keep using it anyway, because it's great :)
- loosetypes 6y agoAre you able to do this full time to support yourself? Do you feel like you’re competing with the many other app options out there with larger teams? I’m currently building something in a similar space. I’d like to be able to devote myself to it but am worried about viability (both overall and as a solo developer). That is to say, inspired to see your post!
- kureikain 6y agoI'm building a custom email forwarding services for your domain. Only have 2 customers right now though. https://hanami.run/ https://hanami.run/ Every time I bought a new domain and need to setup DNS or verify email, all I want is to receive email from that domains. But setting up postfix or configuring lambda/ses is a pain. So I build this service. All you have to do is point MX records to my servers and you will be able to receive incoming email. This is the first time I have a side project that almost finished :-) after 10 years wanting to build a SaaS. To me that is a success.
- fdw 6y agoQuick heads-up: There are some grammar problems on your landing page (e.g. "it can be send out to multiple email address like mail group." should be "it can be sent out to multiple email addresses like a mail group."), and there's "superful", which I'm not sure I understand ;) Good luck!
- kureikain 6y agoOh. Thanks you so much. I was meant to type `superhelpful`. Thanks so much. If you need an account, please reach out. I can give you a free account for life.
- icefrakker 6y agoNot to be a nit but would suggest super helpful.
- fdw 6y agoThanks, that's a very kind offer :) Consider it just some basic help on your journey.
- listenallyall 6y agoYour pricing is high for this service. Exceptionally high, given the limits and no sending ability. I'd suggest taking a good look at competitive services.
- asicsp 6y agoI sell ebooks [0] and currently they are my only source of income (if you don't count savings interest). I started writing books as a last-ditch effort in late 2018. Had left my job in 2014, was living on savings and the occasional workshops I conducted in colleges. I had plenty of material prepared for workshops, so I started converting them to books. First book didn't sell much but initial sales of the second one got me enough to cover about 2 months of expenses. Combined with workshops, books helped me through 2019 and early 2020. (Note that I live alone, in outskirts of a city in India - my monthly living expenses is around $150, which includes rent and domestic help) Pandemic meant I didn't get workshops anymore, but fortunately, my ebooks sale picked up enough to more than cover that loss. I even spent about 5 months to just update my earlier books. Currently working on 9th book that I hope to publish by end of this month. [0] https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/ https://learnbyexample.github.io/books/
- koonsolo 6y agoVery cool that you are doing this! May I give you advice as someone who buys a lot of e-books? A book is judged by its cover. Your covers look really cheap, and so everyone will judge the quality of your book in that fraction of time. It's like a funnel, and a lot of people will already drop off by looking at your covers. Bad graphics, bad fonts, bad colors. Hire a really good designer and let them make the cover. It doesn't have to be expensive. I'm 99% sure it will make a ton of difference for your sales. Maybe try it with your best book first and see what it does to your conversion rate.
- naeemnur 6y agoYou are absolutely right, I closed the page as soon as I saw the book covers.
- asicsp 6y agoThanks a lot for the feedback :) I was going to say no, but you know what, I'll give it a honest try for the 9th book. I can probably afford it now. I've gotten plenty of similar feedback before too. Grammar issues (English isn't my native and I'm not good at natural languages in general). Bland covers, like you mentioned. Marketing strategies, many which I do not wish to try (for ex: buy a domain for my blog and ebooks). There's just too many things to follow/maintain. Researching, writing the book, reviewing and editing it, revising for later editions, etc are painful enough. I love the feeling of completing a book and seeing sales coming in, which so far has kept me going. All I wanted since leaving my job was sustainable income and if I can maintain current sales, I'm more than satisfied. All my ebooks can be read for free online. I get most of my sales when I post about a new book on social media for free download. Both leanpub and gumroad allow paying more than the specified price and readers are willing to do so.
- jealousgelatin 6y agoI built a react-native app https://skintheory.app https://skintheory.app to help people get rid of their acne in a manegable way. Currently working on an iteration to add affiliate marketing links to skincare products. The amount of money I'm making is comparable to losing my wallet (multiple times).
- giarc 6y agoI love your analogy! I'm also running a unprofitable business that costs me money each month (G Suite, hosting, domain registration, SES, Wordpress plugin one time cost etc). I have 2 customers (one is a friend, another is a true customer). The true customer signed up knowing the cost and has told me I'm charging too little but with only a single customer, I can't bring myself to charge them. I feel like if I go that route it becomes a bit more of a business and I open myself up to other issues. I also don't have time to work on gaining more customers now (I work in COVID response, so it's been a busy 11 months). So I'm stuck just paying out of pocket.
- fileeditview 6y agoI run my side project https://namesmith.io https://namesmith.io for about 5 years now. It is a domain name generator which can also check the domain availability. It is covering the server cost plus a bit extra. About $200 per month. I didn't work on it for about 3 years but I recently decided to give it some love. I still think it has potential.
- pythonbase 6y agoEarnings come solely from domain registration commissions? If yes, then $200/mo is not bad at all.
- fileeditview 6y agoSome small earnings come from domain registration commissions themselves. Most of it comes from commissions for hosting packages. In the past the site made more money because I got commission from domain sales/auctions. Because of API changes and what not this changed but I plan to bring this back. In my experience this is the most lucrative part of this site even if sales are very sporadic.
- akfaew 6y agoI'm able to support myself from my online business now, but it took three years of learning and struggle to get here. This was not time wasted, as I grew a lot. I get a compliment from time to time from my users asking if I'm really running my product solo. The tool is https://syften.com https://syften.com and it's a keyword notification service for Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Slack communities, Facebook groups etc. I think that the biggest help was the Indie Hackers community. Interestingly, after reading all of Paul Grahams essays and going through startup school I saw no spike in my MRR. On the other hand, reading a handful of James Clear articles had a profound effect. It's important to keep in mind that if what you read doesn't change your behaviour then it's just entertainment.
- rosspackard 6y agoWhich James Clear articles did you like the best? There are a lot to choose from.
- karakanb 6y agoNot much of a success in terms of providing a large part of my income, but I have launched the SaaS Starter Kit (https://saasstarterkit.app/ https://saasstarterkit.app/) 2 weeks ago for early access and I have managed to get 5 sales already. If I can keep up the traction and improve the product, it will be possible to have it make up a large portion of my current income. So far, I have found the IndieHackers community to be very helpful, they are willing to provide feedback and the first two purchases have already come from there. In addition to that, I joined a conversation on Twitter under a thread Adam Wathan, the creator of TailwindCSS, started and it has generated quite a lot of initial traffic to the project. I haven't launched it fully yet, I am still looking to collect feedback from the early users, so I am offering a large discount, but it feels great to be able to make some money with a side project after a long time working on it.
- herbi 6y agoDuring the pandemic I started a side project to support Scrum Teams with their Scrum Retrospective Sessions: https://www.fraankly.com https://www.fraankly.com I am really proud of the amount of monthly active users, but most of them use the free version and hardly any people are willing to pay for it. I am not sure why this is the case, but I think this has potential and I am going to add more features. Feedback welcome!