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Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

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Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#111

Post by cutler »

esotericn wrote: post #90
spottybanana wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from scandinavian welfare state, it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income. Especially if you earn it by working, and the reasoning being so that they don't have to worry about money = have less pressure to work. I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here…

Brit here. We have a welfare state (just about...), though it's getting pretty grim lately. I've given a decent amount to family over the years. For the most part it's about a recognition of what people have done for me. My mother sacrificed significantly so that I could be the person I am today. Not every country rewards work equivalently. In Sweden I see people working in supermarkets and petrol stations that still…

Real income in the UK has plummeted in the last two decades. The government's employment figures are just smoke and mirrors masking a gig economy full of low pay and sofa-surfing. The government has now started harassing low-income in-work housing benefit claimants to make sure they are doing enough to increase their hours. This is new territory as the housing element in Universal Credit payments was previously exempt from sanctions.

Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#112

Post by MH15 »

quelsolaar wrote: post #73

I'm running MinistryOfFlat.com and I have made 7 figures this year. No investors or co workers. No marketing beyond my 2k twitter followers and a website. Solve a very specific and hard problem and the right people will find you.

This is easily the coolest thing I've seen on HN this month! I'm a computer graphics and animation student/hobbiest in conjunction with my CS studies so this is very interesting to me. Any plans to incorporate your software into the content creation tools themselves by means of an addon?

Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#113

Post by stanmancan »

newnewpdro wrote: post #57
stanmancan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An acquaintance worked for the company and asked for help replacing an existing paper process with an excel document. I helped, but mentioned a web app would work much better. The company trialed the excel version but came back with some concerns. I talked it over with the friend and decided to spend my free time building it out. Once I had a beta ready they trailed it in their location and they loved it. We got it i…

What did your acquaintance get for their part? I had a kindof similar situation long ago, where a friend worked for a high-frequency trading company and I had been developing a low-overhead high-precision resource and system monitoring framework. I would supply him development builds of the agents and a web login to monitor and tune their trading systems while I got some free production testing in return, it seemed f…

Acquaintance got the recognition at work for the tool implementation. They also got a vastly superior solution to a problem they had at work.

I had another opportunity to develop a similar tool for another company, but the person who pitched it wanted 50% despite having nothing to offer other than the idea, so I politely declined.

Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#115

Post by exolymph »

smithmayowa wrote: post #70
aerovistae wrote: post #60

I have so many ideas and the path to reaching customers just seems impossible. I am constantly saying to myself, who could be persuaded to PAY for this? And yet so many people here have successful products that I NEVER would have thought could work (a color gradient on text?!?!). I do not know how people reach actual revenue on their side projects.

I am the same here, I am so useless at sales that when I see the things some people manage to sell I get angry somewhat.

Don't hate the player, man. Don't hate the game either. Realize that reaching people, both literally and figuratively, is a prerequisite to improving their lives with your product.

Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#116

Post by mandeepj »

spectramax wrote: post #102
quelsolaar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a graphics nerd so that stuff is just fun for me, and most of it is part of existing toolkits I have already written for things like font rendering and UI. I used to think that quality was attention to detail and polishing everything, but now I think its a hump you have to get over. People stand in line for hours, in the rain and cold, and jump through a lot of hoops the stuff they really want. As a creator your…

I guess your product is B2B and perhaps that makes it different. Reminds me of Berkshire Hathaway's website: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/ Zero fucks given.

"If you have any comments about our WEB page, you can write us at the address shown above. However, due to the limited number of personnel in our corporate office, we are unable to provide a direct response."

:-)

Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#117

Post by iloveitaly »

digianarchist wrote: post #105
iloveitaly wrote: post #89

Sidekiq makes ~1M/year in gross revenue. I believe the only full-time employee is the founder, and it doesn't sound like there are any material recurring expenses: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side... It's the most profitable one-man show I know of, although there's many that I've run into that ~500k, albeit with a much higher operational burden.

Mike created a quality product that was much better than the alternatives at the time. I remember working in a Rails shop and struggling with Resque.

Agreed. Sidekiq solves a real problem much better than the alternatives. As soon as your app starts to make real money it's worth paying for enterprise for the support + added features. I feel like there's got to be other businesses to be built by creating 'premium' open-source packages for common pain points in application development.

Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#118

Post by Jack000 »

quelsolaar wrote: post #73

I'm running MinistryOfFlat.com and I have made 7 figures this year. No investors or co workers. No marketing beyond my 2k twitter followers and a website. Solve a very specific and hard problem and the right people will find you.

Just read through all your stuff, the UV unwrapper is very cool. Do most people use it with 3d paint tools? It seems the small disconnected bits would be hard to paint by hand.

some thoughts/questions:

- Do you use a library for packing? This alone is a lot of work. Since you write in C, are you using boost polygon or CGAL for the computational geometry algorithms?

- Have you thought about a data-driven approach? Unwrap and packing are geometric operations, but seam marking/segment classification may be amenable to an ML-based method (specifically the spectral graph CNN that came out recently). This seems like the largest hurdle to more "human-like" unwrapping but I'm only a hobbyist so this could be way off base.

I'm almost tempted to create a competing product, but alas I already have a startup in a different domain : ]

Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#119

Post by steve_taylor »

aerovistae wrote: post #60

I have so many ideas and the path to reaching customers just seems impossible. I am constantly saying to myself, who could be persuaded to PAY for this? And yet so many people here have successful products that I NEVER would have thought could work (a color gradient on text?!?!). I do not know how people reach actual revenue on their side projects.

I have a lot of ideas and the capability to build them all. I’m sure I’d be able to sell them as well. My problem is that I don’t have time, because I’m the sole income earner for a family of four. I’ve tried to get numerous projects off the ground, but it always required giving up sleep and putting my day job under threat. I don’t have runway because that money is earmarked (not by me) for a deposit on a house in one of the world’s most expensive markets.

Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

#120

Post by gnicholas »

aerovistae wrote: post #60

I have so many ideas and the path to reaching customers just seems impossible. I am constantly saying to myself, who could be persuaded to PAY for this? And yet so many people here have successful products that I NEVER would have thought could work (a color gradient on text?!?!). I do not know how people reach actual revenue on their side projects.

Color-gradient-on-text guy here. For context, I didn't quit my day job until after I'd won a couple startup competitions, including one at Stanford. It's been 5 years since I went full-time on BeeLine, and I've only been able to survive thanks to my savings (I used to be a corporate lawyer) and my wife (whose steady earnings as a professor cover our day-to-day). It is definitely stressful and hard to bootstrap a company, but if you can make it work it can offer great benefits in terms of flexibility/family life and social impact.
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