15 ms·

Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

• nocubicles 4y ago
  My business is consulting but it is 100% online and is providing the majority of my income. I got started by working in consulting companies, building a blog and connections online and then just went at it. I do Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Power Apps development and consulting. My companies site is https://integrated.ee https://integrated.ee
  • gabrielrdz 4y ago
    can you share how much you make a year?
• jarek83 4y ago
  I had few ideas now and then, but I kept always thinking about one step that held me back - how do I get the right T&C and Privacy policy? Need to mention I'm from Poland and I guess it must be way different by law standards than it's in the US - take the GDPR alone but then a lot of hassle with local tax office... It just seems quite costly to just try an idea. What should I do to get it right? Is it possible to get an US or other entity just to be able to have some kind of relaxed paperwork?
  • mildavw 4y ago
    Not sure if they support Poland, but https://www.avodocs.com/ https://www.avodocs.com/
• HermanMartinus 4y ago
  I run Bear Blog (https://bearblog.dev https://bearblog.dev) which is a privacy-centric, minimalist blogging platform. It's been running for over 4 years with about 10k active blogs. I'm the sole founder and maintainer. I write about it at https://herman.bearblog.dev https://herman.bearblog.dev It pays me an above average salary and is mostly unaffected by the recent financial trends. I have however been dealing with a lot more AI generated backlink spam since ChatGPT hit the internet.
  • milleniall 4y ago
    I dont use Bear Blog, but i love the blogs on that platform. It is what the old internet used to be. Example - https://tiramisu.bearblog.dev/2022-11-13/ https://tiramisu.bearblog.dev/2022-11-13/
  • yyyyddmm 4y ago
    Hi, first of all congratulations, it is a service I love and I follow some of the blogs hosted by you. I've always thought about wanting to start a mini blogging platform similar to yours but I've always been stopped by this: how do you moderate the content? if someone posts something illegal, how does it work? if illicit messages or photos are posted, of whatever form, isn't it a big deal to get out and let the police know it's not your fault? is a simple disclaimer of reponsibility enough? thank you very much!
    • user2147483647 4y ago
      They have a pretty efficient manual review process. https://docs.bearblog.dev/review-process/ https://docs.bearblog.dev/review-process/
  • rasmus1610 4y ago
    I really love bear blog, I've seen it several times now on HN. But how do you earn money from it? Donations? edit: nvm. I saw the paid upgrade feature :)
    • tomcam 4y ago
• edylemond 4y ago
  I run Traverse (https://traverse.link/ https://traverse.link/) - an app which helps students learn faster using mind maps, flashcards and notes. It's been running for over 2 years now and provides steady recurring income - I've prioritized continuity over exponential growth. Have reduced operational work to a minimum now so I can spend most of my time working on marketing strategies to make it big ;)
• XCSme 4y ago
  I have started UXWizz (https://www.uxwizz.com https://www.uxwizz.com) as a side-project in 2013. Since the end of 2020 I went full-time on it. It is successful (profitable), but definitely nowhere near the potential at the moment, as I struggle a lot with the marketing side. The revenue varies, but averages somewhere around $2k/month (which is good and mostly profit, but not enough to live from it alone in Amsterdam). > Have any recent trends affected your business? I thought the GDPR and privacy laws would make more businesses switch to self-hosted analytics platforms, but from what I can see, not that many really care about it enough to ditch sending data to 3rd party services. I am still hopeful about the future, almost all customers really love the product once they use it. It feels like I am always so close to "making it work", but this feeling has been there for a few years already now. I am also trying different things, like creating some more niche variations of the product which are easier to market, so I built https://wplytic.com https://wplytic.com, which is a trimmed-down version of UXWizz meant specifically for WordPress (fewer features but with less resource usage, better WP integrations, easier installation, cheaper pricing, improved privacy, etc.).
• ezekg 4y ago
  I run https://keygen.sh https://keygen.sh by myself. I built it about 7 years ago and started running it on the side. I went full-time on it in 2020 when it got too big to run on the side. As for trends -- the market is a bit slower these days due to the current economic environment. I've noticed smaller businesses have had a tougher time buying (and staying on), while enterprises have had an uptick.
• fm2606 4y ago
  Thanks for asking and posting the old link. I for one never get tired of these types of questions. I don't have an online biz, successful or not. I find these inspiring and depressing. Depressing because I feel like I never have any ideas. Everyone always say look at your pain points or scratch your own itch. I don't seem to have an itch and as for pain points I just seem to go the flow and don't think of anything as a pain point.
  • illegalsmile 4y ago
    Hey I feel your sentiment. I have lots of ideas but feel too lazy to actually follow through. I've had a number of half-assed attempts at online businesses and if I persevered they might not amount to much but I'd at least be able to say I tried. > Everyone always say look at your pain points or scratch your own itch. I don't seem to have an itch and as for pain points I just seem to go the flow and don't think of anything as a pain point. Same. Maybe we should start a business to help people and businesses find pain points and help them scratch it.
• rpgbr 4y ago
  I run a good and old tech blog[0] in Brazil for almost a decade. It's been my main income source since 2020, and I'm making more than I did in my last job in a traditional newsroom. I actively avoid programmatic/invasive ads. My three income sources are: subscriptions (without paywalling anything), direct advertising deals, and content deals with other, bigger publications (they get priority to publish my stuff first, I publish later). Last year I started an English-written blog[1], translating the best from my original, pt_BR one, in an attempt to reach a bigger, international audience. Slow start, but I'm fine with it — none of my business was an overnight success. [0] https://manualdousuario.net/ https://manualdousuario.net/ [1] https://notes.ghed.in/ https://notes.ghed.in/
• Aulig 4y ago
  I develop https://webtoapp.design https://webtoapp.design on my own and have a handful of freelancers for translation & some repetitive tasks. Basically I turn websites into hybrid apps (some native components + WebView). I started in December 2019 and I'm now closing in on making a regular european junior developer salary (3.5k/month). I use Flutter which has saved me a ton of time - which is very limited in a solo business of course :) I'm experiencing good growth currently, so I can't say recent trends have negatively affected me. I did notice a sharp ~20% reduction in Google traffic about 10 days ago, but that could be related to all kinds of things. It will be interesting to see how the recently improved (push notifications) iOS PWA support will affect my business. On the one hand I'm stressing about it, on the other hand PWAs have existed for 10 years or something and barely any regular consumer has one "installed" on their smartphone. But who knows, maybe the improved iOS support will lead to more usage & customer education by businesses.
  • tbran 4y ago
    It's due to the March 2023 Google core update. Basically, they do these updates periodically, which can cause swings in organic search traffic. Not a great article, but explains a core update: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-rolls-out-march-2023-core-algorithm-update/482389/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-rolls-out-march-2...
    • Aulig 4y ago
      Thanks - totally forgot about those since I'm no longer active in the internet marketing forums where these were a huge deal! My rankings haven't changed much interestingly, just impressions. But might just be some quirkiness related to the update indeed.
• danberlyoung 4y ago
  I have a small one-man business handing registrations for juryed art shows (think white pop-up tents in the park full of artists selling things) that's called The Online Jurying System at http://ojs.biz http://ojs.biz. I built it on CakePHP, PHP, MySQL and VestaCP hosted on a Digital Ocean droplet. It's currently using PayPal to handle the credit card payments but I'm in the process of adding an option to use Stripe. The accounting is pretty simple, I keep a portion of the artists registration fee and the art show gets the rest effectively making it 'free' to the art show itself.
• andrewmutz 4y ago
  While this doesn't directly answer your questions, its worth mentioning that people interested in this topic may also be interested in the Microconf community: https://microconf.com/ https://microconf.com/ Microconf is dedicated to mostly bootstrapped SaaS founders and has a lot of members and content who fit the description above
  • hsuduebc2 4y ago
    Usefull. Thank you.
    • strobe 4y ago
      also indiehackers.com has few success cases examples and some relevant info too
  • richardw 4y ago
    The conferences are fantastic. Go to one. Rob also runs this podcast: https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/microconf https://www.youtube.com/microconf
• Glench 4y ago
  Yep! I run ExtensionPay, a service to allow browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions: https://extensionpay.com https://extensionpay.com I made it after Google shut down their Chrome Web Store Payments system and I realized how annoying it was to take payments in extensions. So I made it for my own extensions and also for anyone who wanted to try monetizing their extensions with payments. The included library is open source if anyone is curious: https://github.com/glench/ExtPay https://github.com/glench/ExtPay So far it's made extension developers around $175k. Pretty cool!
  • RexM 4y ago
    I bought an HN extension w/ extensionpay recently. Cool that it's a one-man shop.
• jarebear6expepj 4y ago
  I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live. I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe frameworks on $5 dollar VPS's and lost interest. 2021 I sold the remaining three income generating websites for just shy of 1mill US. I started the projects with a second person but ended up buying out their interest and running solo. I consider it success because I managed to last over a decade making on avg $400,000/year gross with that business "umbrella". Advertising and publishing changed and continues to change by leaps and bounds on a yearly schedule. A lot good a lot bad, but its the same business over the years.
  • b20000 4y ago
    how were you able to get that type of traffic and revenue without spending serious money on ads?
  • schwifty1 4y ago
    I'm really interested in what you did, because it sounds like what I'm trying to do! Are you able to help me with these questions? 1. How did you decide which services to start? Did you have any criteria on what types of services you did and didn't want to start? 2. Was all of the income from those services advertising? Or were you charging users directly for some? 3. After it was built, how did you market a service and attract users?
  • djbusby 4y ago
    Lot of work to keep the ad money coming in or was that just a Google AdWords?
    • jarebear6expepj 4y ago
      Ads were the easy part once I stopped trying to run the ad containers and servers myself. When I started it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders which ended at Google typically. When header bidding came out it made the advertising world orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.
• eachro 4y ago
  Coderpad was a one man show for a while I believe.
  • rugyoga 4y ago
    Yup. https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-an-interviewing-platform-for-programmers-to-170k-mo-c95d5d0dd9 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/growing-an-interviewi...
• msbroadf 4y ago
  I have run my one-man business for 13 years now. https://www.virtualhere.com https://www.virtualhere.com . Back then I saw the market moving to the cloud and thought bringing device access there was needed. There was no one really doing this cheaply and easily. I posted a link to my software on the raspberrypi forum when that board came out and started getting my customers immediately that way. It took a year to write the initial software. Ive been adding updates and features ever since. I have made several million dollars in profit since then and its still going strong. I dont really have any competition at my price point .
  • LoganDark 4y ago
    Oh, the VirtualHere website does a really good job of hiding the fact that it's paid - I did all the research and was really excited about a convenient solution until I found out that it's $50. Whoops. Though I guess I should've expected that on a comment thread about businesses, heh~
    • msz-g-w 4y ago
      But... there's literally a "Purchase" link in the top menu bar. Should it have a big blinking box saying "IT AIN'T FREE"?
      • LoganDark 4y ago
        > there's literally a "Purchase" link in the top menu bar Yeah, that's... how I found out? It actually took me around a minute to find that once I started looking for some sort of download. Maybe I just scan websites differently than you do, but it was somehow difficult.
  • paulkon 4y ago
    What skills are needed to make this kind of low level application? Nitty gritty driver and kernel knowledge? C, C#?
    • msbroadf 4y ago
• kjksf 4y ago
  I've collected 53 stories from past HN discussions: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/wjRD/solo-founders-with-profitable-businesses-collected-stories.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/wjRD/solo-founders-with-... And another batch: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/81714acf995e4968bb220684d95c9495/small-business-stories.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/81714acf995e4968bb220684... There's also @levelsio who's killing it with multi-million / year solo business: https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/de943f80c7924745abf9405f8c7a2c67/levelsio-and-survivorship-bias.html https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/de943f80c7924745abf9405f...
• nvr219 4y ago
  That guy Maciej
  • O__________O 4y ago
    Related links: https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/ https://idlewords.com/about.htm https://idlewords.com/about.htm https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Cegłowski https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Cegłowski
• gnicholas 4y ago
  I run BeeLine Reader, which has B2C tools (browser plugin, iOS extension) and B2B licensing. Our core technology, which powers both sides of the business, makes reading on screen easier, more engaging, and more efficient. I handle the customer service and outsource the upkeep of the B2C tools. Most of my time is spent on bizdev for the B2B licensing, which is where most of the revenue comes from. We have seen some slowdown in new conversations with B2B partners. Companies that are laying people off have a hard time justifying new outside partnerships/costs, even when those partnerships are structured to increase revenue and profits. But we've still done some important deals in the last couple months, and we're still moving forward in talks with companies large and small. Some larger companies have even said that it may be easier to structure a deal now, since they otherwise would have been pressured to hire new employees to achieve a certain goal. Now they aren't allowed to hire, so the door is more open to a partnership with a company like BeeLine Reader. I imagine pricing conversations will be more constrained, however. 1: http://www.beelinereader.com http://www.beelinereader.com
• jehb 4y ago
  For anyone who's interested in answering, I'd be curious to hear your thinking on how you keep focused and avoid rabbit holes, particularly with build vs. buy decisions. I've had an intentionally-small business that I've been working on for a few years now, but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering. I've done a very good job of replacing Shopify with WooCommerce, Google Analytics with Plausible, exploring about every static site generator as a replacement for my slow CMS, automating my social media content, etc. I've done an absolutely shitty job of growing the actual core business. Particularly for those of you coming from jobs in a corporate environment, how do you keep your focus on your core offering instead of spending all of your time "fixing" your tech stack?
  • LoganDark 4y ago
    That sounds like something I would do (and I have ADHD). It's a sign of boredom. If you're not interested in the actual "core offering" (regardless of how excited you are about it, or etc.) then distractions will be harder to ignore. Only thing that worked for me was stimulants.
  • Aulig 4y ago
    I've recently started thinking about new features in terms of: - Increasing revenue (by bringing in new customers or reducing churn) - Reducing my support load That's basically all I care about now as a one-person business. Too much support load means I get burnt out and can't work on the stuff I enjoy (coding). Too little revenue means I can't continue operating the business. By thinking about the features in these terms it has helped me be clear about which features are really important to me right now. So if my support load is too high, I work on features that will reduce it.
  • jesterson 4y ago
    I suggest to perhaps change perspective. If you enjoy tinkering with stack maybe it's yours? And it's better to sell something you like instead of forcing yourself to do something you don't?
  • paxys 4y ago
    > but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering The answer should be obvious. You are selling the end product, not your tech stack. For an early stage company there is zero benefit to wasting time on pointless engineering purism. You should use as much SaaS and other pre-built software as you possibly can and spend 100% of your effort on your core offering.
• mychael 4y ago
  Onlyfans
  • ProllyInfamous 4y ago
    ... as long as she "cuts me in @ 25%+," I'm down. I've actually had this conversation with a SWer friend before, and she wouldn't budge over sharing 0% ["I have an EXPENSIVE lifestyle" she twits]! LOL. Never spent a dollar on such stupidity, and would only do it for profit-sharing with some hard-working debutante =P
    • mathverse 4y ago
      SWer is sexworker for anyone interested. But it could also be SoftWare Engineer. Funny how that works.
• santah 4y ago
  I run https://next-episode.net https://next-episode.net for about 18 years now. It's a website + mobile apps that help users track what they're watching (TV shows and movies). I wouldn't say trends over the years affected the business much, but I'm playing with the ChatGPT API currently to try and improve some aspects of the functionality and maybe add some new cool AI powered features - so there's that.
  • ProllyInfamous 4y ago
    I'm loving all the individual GPT-like creations, of this past quarter 2023... myself, been playing with image and text transformers since Holidays 2022, and am extremely interested in individual use-cases [from my premise and IMHO that entry-level computer jobs are effectively DONE by end of 2023, including multimodal document and image transformations and commoner customer service -type jobs]. Definitely an exceptionally-diminishing amount of users will be able to create increasingly-complex content which will demand higher wages for an even smaller subset of users/creators of GPT/image -type "creation." How are you individually using it to increasing television/movie suggestions... beyond (hey GPT "What would you recommend if user A & B liked X but A & B did not agree on show Y nor Z?")?
    • santah 4y ago
      I'm still experimenting different things with it so I can't tell you how exactly I'll end up using it, but yeah, ideally it should go beyond what you mentioned ...
  • nu11ptr 4y ago
    How does this make money?
    • santah 4y ago
      Yeah, ads (for free users) and Premium membership which removes them and unlock features.
      • 4y ago
• tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  Not me, but Photopea.com is such a success story (and really awesome software): https://www.lunadio.com/blog/the-story-of-a-unicorn-solo-founder-making-dollar500000-arr/ https://www.lunadio.com/blog/the-story-of-a-unicorn-solo-fou... https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i8j5te/i_made_a_free_alternative_to_photoshop_that_is/g18ush0/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i8j5te/i_made_a_free_...
• abnercoimbre 4y ago
  Would you count a hybrid conference [0]? It's 100% indie and self-hosted in the sense that I wrote my own ticketmaster for it. Ticket registration flows are more complicated than meets the eye, and it was an interesting problem to solve. I personally consume payment notifications from Stripe or PayPal, and the rest is processed in-house: updating sales records, generating QR code tickets, sending invites to a private conferencing server, and so on. [0] https://handmadecities.com https://handmadecities.com
  • XCSme 4y ago
    > Ticket registration flows are more complicated than meets the eye, and it was an interesting problem to solve. Could you share what some of the biggest challenges were? Something like handling concurrent purchases/carts, or?
    • abnercoimbre 4y ago
      > Concurrent purchases This is definitely one of the challenges, since the majority of ticket sales happen in bursts. Another big one is Stripe or PayPal making mistakes: duplicate events might be sent to my server but that doesn't mean someone bought two tickets. Perhaps an event failed to be sent at all. Or the payment event is fake (rare, but must be managed.) A final example is that somewhere in the registration flow there's a network glitch: perhaps a confirmation email wasn't sent because the email API was down. How do you patch up these "holes" in a customer's record ASAP? All of these problems might influence and amplify each other too. Anyway it's definitely solvable but requires programmer effort to scale and fail / recover gracefully.
• adjwilli 4y ago
  I’ve been running https://pollylingu.al https://pollylingu.al as a single person company for a few years now.
  • fargas 4y ago
    beautiful UI!
• beatthatflight 4y ago
  https://beatthatflight.com.au/ https://beatthatflight.com.au/ Started 5 years ago next month. Flight/hotel/car rental search, plus deals that I find for Australians. Running it is actually fairly easy. It started as a deals site, then I added in some whitelabeled software, mailing list, fb page, and frankly it's a numbers game - more visitors = more ads/affiliate revenue. It's not huge, but it's been interesting at least, and very little in the way of expenses.
  • oars 4y ago
    Huge fan of your site. My wife is Australian, and moved here to be with her. I used your site when purchasing my one-way ticket!
    • beatthatflight 4y ago
      You're very kind, thank you! Glad it was of help!
• eappleby 4y ago
  https://www.pubexchange.com https://www.pubexchange.com Started that company about 10 years ago. It's a social network for online publishers. Thankfully, sites join mostly through word of mouth and advertisers mostly set their campaigns to renew monthly, so I usually focus on product development. I also recently launched https://www.forourschool.org https://www.forourschool.org A free platform for schools that they can use to run their activity based fundraisers (e.g. Read-A-Thons). I build it for my kids' school but made it so any school can use it. Now that my kids' Read-A-Thon is over (increased their donations by almost 50% yoy!), I am working on updates to it and hopefully bringing it to more schools.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• sahillavingia 4y ago
  Gumroad has one FTE (me) and 21 part-time contractors. I write more about it here: https://sahillavingia.com/work https://sahillavingia.com/work It was a natural outgrowth of working remote and then async to lean on the hourly contractor model. It’s a little tough to scale, so we built some custom software to do payroll, contracts, etc: https://flexile.com https://flexile.com
  • smarri 4y ago
    I read your book not long ago, thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the best business books I've read in a long time.
  • ryan-allen 4y ago
    That is incredible! What hours on average do the contractors put in per week? That's such an interesting story, I'll have to read your book!
  • umen 4y ago
    not gumroad user , but reading your stuff . question do you use your own payment/billing processor or are you using somtihng like stripe / paypall ?
• kamphey 4y ago
  For the past 3 years I've been running https://bettersheets.co/ https://bettersheets.co/ Originally as a side project while I tried to start and run SaaS. But people kept buying memberships (lifetime deals) and I just kept adding content to it. In the past year I've hired a ruby on rails developer to help me scale, on a part-time basis. And I've been making products within the Better Sheets umbrella myself in sheets. The developer is helping to add features to the site, but if/when they leave I can continue running completely solo. It's been my full time income for the past 1 year, and I expect to continue running it for a decade or more, at this rate. I'm continually learning more ruby on rails to keep building tools baked into the site. And will ultimately combine Google Sheet integrated tools into Better Sheets instead of keeping them separate as it is now. Better Sheets started as a purely content site. I started with with a carrd page and gumroad payment. Now it's all types of contents, courses, blogs, and tools. As well as a library of tutorials. The recent trend of AI has made my extremely excited to keep building. I built a Google Sheets AI assistant: https://asa.bettersheets.co/ https://asa.bettersheets.co/ and will continue to work on it until Google releases their own and probably keep working on my even with a Google Sheets AI from Google. As I imagine I can take it in a iterated/pivoted direction once I see what they do release. The total revenue each year, with roughly 40% going into my pocket each year. 1st Year: $34,000 2nd Year: $67,000 3rd Year: $95,000
  • replwoacause 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing your revenue, I didn't see anybody else do that here.
    • kamphey 4y ago
      Happy to share. Its a rough journey for everyone.
  • maxilevi 4y ago
    What is the % of SaaS vs Lifetime deals now?
    • kamphey 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• kewball 4y ago
  Wow, I asked this questions 9 years ago to find inspiration to build my own successful one-person business. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243 I am happy to report that I am now running a very successful one-person business and killing it! Only joking... I'm still reading HN posts about successful one-person businesses for inspiration and working for the man. Time does fly though...
  • cinntaile 4y ago
    Do you regret not trying to start one?
  • victorabarros 4y ago
    hahahaha Never give up
• abinaya_rl 4y ago
  I'm building a highly curated remote job board called Remote Leaf[1] for remote job seekers. I've been doing this last few years as a side project, I'm planning to go full-time on this very soon and focus on it fully. [1] - https://remoteleaf.com https://remoteleaf.com
• mcsniff 4y ago
  I've posted before and never share any specific details. I run a small one-person business in a niche industry selling a 'widget'. Profitable from day 1, pays all the bills but is not the sole income. Got started by seeing a need in an adjacent industry and building the product. I do everything myself: dev, qa, support, everything. It's not too bad at this size, and I can probably scale and continue on my own at 10x the demand. Word of mouth keeps things rolling so far and recent trends haven't impacted me much. Someone else posted and I second, spending (wasting?) time on the "stack" instead of the product offering or marketing is easy to do and rarely benefits things. It's hard to do things like advertising or product refinement which I don't find interesting.
  • ProllyInfamous 4y ago
    >Word of mouth keeps things rolling In my own blue-collar version of this [i.e. starting my own residential electric service after an IBEW apprenticeship, licensed] W-o-Mouth was gold. I never advertised, not even from day one. The second I walked into local builders'/realtors' offices, my services were in demand and kept busy by turning out good work. I will warn anybody thinking that running ANY kind of business is some kind of "luxurious relaxed mocha bong latté," I just want to warn you that you will work very difficult situations, with increasingly-difficult customers, the higher your hourly / contract rate becomes — there is a "sweet spot" that I would recommend not surpassing, and you'll know this when awakening to dread, daily for months. Re: your last paragraph: definitely "feature creep" is not a user generator nor retainer [i.e. do not bloatware your simpleware!].
  • fargas 4y ago
    I've started as a developer and now "CTO" at one of the leading companies in its' niche. I've created several widgets (except chat ) which I'm itching to reassemble as SaaS. Is your widget self service or requires you to implement for customers?