Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 145 posts

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

#131

Post by paulkon »

msbroadf wrote: post #8

I have run my one-man business for 13 years now. 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…

What skills are needed to make this kind of low level application? Nitty gritty driver and kernel knowledge? C, C#?

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

#132

Post by jarebear6expepj »

jasonm23 wrote: post #127
patja wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there anything preventing a continuous "rinse and repeat" cycle of creating Mormon dating sites for purchase and shutdown by the church?

I was inspired to do the same, however, there are now at least 2 dating apps that cater specifically to Mormons. I think the time when the church thought they could buy out that market segment, has passed.

There were other Mormon specific dating sites/apps while I started mine. I might have been the only one aggressively buying print ad space on BYU Provo campus with nice photography and taglines like "Meet Your Five Cow Wife Today On [...]" so I maybe added some visibility. And they saw my ad spends directly I would assume.

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

#133

Post by danberlyoung »

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. 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.

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

#134

Post by anyfactor »

lightning19 wrote: post #125
anyfactor wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is really awesome. > nuke the VM once a year and re-provision otherwise you have to maintain the OS, do cleanup etc That is really interesting. What are you using to re-setup your entire infrastructure after purging a VM? How do you manage the down time between one vm purge to setting up the next one. I would love to know, going beyond the VPS what is your total infrastructure + maintenance cost.

Thanks :) I set things up again on the new VM manually. I have a runbook for it, usually takes me 30 mins or less. To not have any downtime I keep the old VM up and attach a new public IP to the new VM. I then update the DNS records and after a while when the new IP is mapped to my domain I then stop the old VM. Costs: Managed Mongodb cluster: $9 but I share it between multiple side projects so let's say $3 API healt…

Truly incredible. Thank you very much sharing.

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

#135

Post by msbroadf »

paulkon wrote: post #131
msbroadf wrote: post #8

I have run my one-man business for 13 years now. 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…

What skills are needed to make this kind of low level application? Nitty gritty driver and kernel knowledge? C, C#?

Yes kernel knowledge and a lot of plain C. Surprisingly didnt have to read too much of the USB spec for the first few years.

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

#136

Post by jesterson »

anyfactor wrote: post #36
jarebear6expepj wrote: post #5

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 fra…

Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps? I built an MVP on a 5 dollar VPS. But I had to recently upgrade to a 12 dollar VPS as some of my analytics process were being stopped because of low memory. Aside from writing better code, I found out that using linux utils/app via system calls is the most effective solution as nothing I can write can ever be even remotely as performant as something like grep. I am fol…

It's very simple - avoid unnecessary and overcomplicated "cool" frameworks/technologies which modern development is infested as old house.

I run heavy traffic EC sites on $20-30 VPS and can't imagine why you would need more, unless you do data analysis on same node.

Fancy things like Vue/Nuxt are cool, but do you actually need it?

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

#137

Post by jesterson »

jehb wrote: post #20

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…

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?

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

#138

Post by tomcam »

rasmus1610 wrote: post #110
HermanMartinus wrote: post #80

I run Bear Blog ( 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 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 Cha…

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 :)

Where?

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

#139

Post by gabrielrdz »

nocubicles wrote: post #75

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

can you share how much you make a year?

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

#140

Post by mildavw »

jarek83 wrote: post #78

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…

Not sure if they support Poland, but https://www.avodocs.com/
Post reply on HN