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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?

#141

Post by throwaway_29575 »

crikli wrote: post #137
throwaway_29575 wrote: post #124

My wife. She runs her own web/digital marketing company and is the only full-time employee (which includes time for school pick-up/drop-off). She has a few freelancers for graphic design and content writing and I help out as I can while working a full-time corporate job. Her company revenue is over 300k/year.

That is awesome. When did she start the company? What has her growth strategy been and how has she acquired new clients?

She's been running it for about 12 years, basically not long after the kids started at school. Growth has been organic, probably around 20% year on year at a guess.

For a long time new clients were mostly Google Ads/Remarketing, word-of-mouth and customer referrals and a few ongoing relationships with sales executives in traditional media like TV, radio, etc. Over time organic SEO has come into it as her ranking improved.

There's been minimal networking which is always a concern if online stops working. There's just not the time to be out at business chambers, BNIs, etc, look after kids and get work done. It's also a long term commitment.

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

#142

Post by markdown »

namirez wrote: post #110
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…

> it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income. This is an interesting mindset. I don't want to judge you either, but I never understood the value of keeping my money and collecting wealth. If I were struggling, I wouldn't go out of my way to help my family. But if I had extra income, I would help my family if they were in need.

He is from a country with a strong socialist welfare system, so when one is in need, the government is there to assist them and they don't need to feel like they are a burden on their family and friends.

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

#143

Post by throw872579 »

Toss8675309 wrote: post #127

I'm a one man development and consulting shop and have been so for almost 12 years. My 2018 gross revenue was $600K and 2019 gross revenue will be about $780K. I'm an extremely efficient developer, a very good salesperson, and I'm an absolute fanatic about delivering high quality work on time . I don't presume to have any special knowledge but would love to find a way to help other devs/tech people do what I've done.

Congrats. I run something similar, all referrals. Would love to trade notes, is there a way to reach you?

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

#144

Post by xs »

First that comes to mind is Joe Rogan. He started a podcast in 2009.

His SocialBlade profile says he makes between $16,500 - $264,000 a month from his youtube videos alone.

But the bulk of his downloads are going to be from his rss feed, where he has between 2m-20 million downloads per episode with about 4 ads baked into each episode. If he charged a (low) standard of $20 per 1,000 downloads for those ads, this means he makes at least $160,000 per episode. He does like 20 episodes a month. Some believe Joe may be the first podcaster to make a billion dollars. If he hasn't earned that already he will in the next few years.

Let me reiterate. Joe started his podcast himself. By himself. Like as in, he set up his Libsyn account, bought his own mic. Booked his own guests. Then published it all himself. Now he has very minimal help, like 1 or 2 people to help him. It's so insane.

Now you might say "that's not a one-person business". But in this gig economy, not many people are. There's always someone hiring a lawyer, or graphic designer, or podcast producer, to work freelancing gig by gig. So the single person business is usually getting help from others. But there are other podcasters who have also done it all themselves, and are raking it in too.

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

#145

Post by spectramax »

quelsolaar wrote: post #92
codesternews wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you tell us more about yourself and project. How would you able to do without any coworkers when many big companies tried.

I kind of did it by accident. It was a side project that people started getting in touch over. I think I'm very suited to solve this problem for a few reasons. I used to be a 3D artist so I know what artists want. I'm a C programmers so I can make complex things go fast, and I have done a lot of procedural 3D stuff so I know a lot of mesh processing tricks. The complexity of this is substantial. its currently around…

For some reason, I was pondering over the problem (with really no background in mesh/geometry algorithms) - it feels very NP-complete-like problem. It just feels hard. Could you expand on some of the details of the algorithm in terms of how these 30 algos scale? Do they scale in polynomial time or do these algos scale in non-polynomial ways but the problem space is small enough for it to compute the solution quickly. Perhaps some epoch threshold has reached and the algos bail out?

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

#150

Post by cyberferret »

I singlehandedly built a small business HR SaaS - https://www.hrpartner.io - over the past few years and grown it to a stage that I can now take a salary from it after 3 years of living on savings. I DO have a co-founder now who joined in May of this year, so strictly speaking I am no longer a one person business, but I created all the 50,000+ lines of code (and 200+ database tables) of my system myself.

EDIT: It has actually been a bit of a family project, with my wife helping out with voice overs and my son helping out with video production etc.

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