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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#131

Post by pryelluw »

nickjj wrote: post #40

In 2016 I took content creation somewhat seriously and the end result was enough income to sustain living in NY. Not sure if it's worth blogging about yet. Are other developers interested to see how to potentially make software engineer-tier salaries without having to work for another company? (Note: I also started with nothing. No mentors, no following, no existing profile, no paid advertising, etc.). Edit : If you'…

Checkout simpleprogrammer.com Similar to what you are doing. Reverse engineer his marketing approach. Its pretty good.

PS. Asking for signups on HN is bad mojo. Inbound content marketing works best here, but will take multiple front page submissions for any considerable amount of subscribers. :)

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#133

Post by chrishacken »

equasar wrote: post #122
chrishacken wrote: post #109

I'm not sure if this qualifies as an "online business", but I started an ISP in November '15. It's also not entirely "one-person". I am the sole founder, but I do hire part-time help on occasion if I'm swamped. It started off as a WISP and has finally grown to the point where we are beginning to deploy fiber. The site is https://nepafiber.com I still work full-time as a systems engineer, but the business started brin…

This is a naive question, how can you provide Internet services? Do you use the line of other providers? And how profitable is?

> Do you use the line of other providers? And how profitable is?

Yes, we're peering with Zayo and will also have Level 3 (waiting on build) in April.

Don't really want to toss out numbers but the bandwidth itself is extremely profitable. The equipment and fiber needed to connect to end-users are 95% of the costs.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#134

Post by laurieg »

bemmu wrote: post #17

I've been running https://www.candyjapan.com for about five years. It has (just barely) made enough to support my life in Japan. I'm currently writing a "year in review", will probably post it next week.

What do you do about visas? Do you have a day job?

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#135

Post by dgranda »

xcubic wrote: post #118
dgranda wrote: post #79

I run https://www.fortsu.es (also https://www.fortsu.co.uk , https://www.fortsu.de and https://www.fortsu.com ) a price comparison website for running shoes. Original one is focused on spanish market while expanding into interesting ones. It started as side project some years ago when I wanted to buy running shoes online and it has been improved over the time. To-Do list never ends ;)

To get the prices, do you go and copy them manually or have you written some crawlers?

Price data is retrieved from datafeeds parsing, triggering requests against APIs like Amazon [1] and using custom crawling.

[1] https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#136

Post by pryelluw »

adpoe wrote: post #127

I run an ecommerce store from Shopify which fulfills the orders by drop-shipping through AliExpress. This is definitely doable for one person, and it isn't technically challenging for a software developer--but the hardest part (at least for me) is marketing, creating content, advertising, and so on. Actually running a Shopify store and fulfilling by drop-shipping is simple. I would definitely recommend that as a good…

Im exploring similar options. Mind if we email? Please check my profile. :)

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#137

Post by equalarrow »

chebum wrote: post #14
sairamkunala wrote: post #5

https://www.indiehackers.com/ Here is a good list of 1 or 2 people software SaaS/websites along with interviews

Why people share their revenues? Every product can be copied. If you know revenue, you know what product you should copy.

Because there is a massive difference between sharing revenues / idea and making a business profitable off a clone.

You could copy a lot of ideas out there right now, but that is the smallest part (in my mind) in making a business out of it. The coding and 'making' of the product, is actually the smallest part.

Getting any consistent revenue, marketing, growing your user base, reducing churn - those are all much harder than actually building or copying something.

There are _many_ ideas on github right now with real working code & permissible licenses you could just grab and try to make a business with. So why aren't there profitable, sustainable businesses popping up all over because of this? (Hint: coding is not the hard part, idea is not the hard part)

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#138

Post by xcubic »

cookkkie wrote: post #64

Hi, here's mine: http://mee6bot.com :) . You can read a short article I wrote recently about it: https://medium.com/@anis.blk/the-mvp-that-got-to-480k-unique... . Transcript: Last March, in my little darky flat somewhere in the middle of France, I had this idea to launch a little chat bot in a platform called Discord. I was coding all day long to deliver a functional and satisfying version of what I had in mind. Thes…

Have you thought about launching on other chat platforms?

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#139

Post by tonyedgecombe »

ssharp wrote: post #99
chebum wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why people share their revenues? Every product can be copied. If you know revenue, you know what product you should copy.

Patio11 was blogging about his old Bingo Card software for many, many years and became one of the most high-profile members of Hacker News because of it. I don't think a flood of competing Bingo Card software came in. A lot of the time, finding a good enough niche, a small enough niche, and understanding customer acquisition for that niche is all the "moat" you really need. Remember, your competitors likely don't kno…

There were some, I know of one personally but there were others as well. Not sure what the impact of that was as Patio11 seemed to be squeezing all the blood out of that stone.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#140

Post by [deleted] »

malux85 wrote: post #47

I'm running https://SignalBox.ai alone, I wrote all of the software and am working on partnering and sales right now. Previously I have 2 other startups, one was media monitoring and one was forex. The media monitoring is B2B only. The forex trading is automated and run from my home research cluster. Both are generating enough revenue to live off (media monitoring 120k forex, 60-80k) I guess they fit the definition o…

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