Thanks guys for sharing these wonderful stories. It makes me work through frustration and stress.
Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
141–150 of 156 posts
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#142I'm the sole founder, developer, marketer, and everything-else-guy for http://www.scribophile.com and http://writerfolio.com . They've funded my travels across the world for the past few years. Right now I'm living in Germany with my German girlfriend whom I met in Australia. Scribophile has since become one of the largest writers communities online, and we're about to have our 100,000th critique written (sometime in…
Scribophile sounded interesting, but I left when I found out that I need an account to actually see anything. You even have a free user tier, so WTF? You don't have to take my word for this either. Some basic (free) analytics can give you a ballpark estimate of how often this is happening. It's probably a non-negligible ratio of your incoming new viewers.
Turns out that most writers who post their work in public are horribly scared of it being stolen. There's also a myth about something called 'first publishing rights' that persists despite my best efforts to eradicate. Long story short, the site is completely hidden from the general public because the writers who use it prefer their work to be visible only to other members.
FWIW, it used to be visible to the public for a long time, and I would constantly get complaints from my members.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#143I'm the solo founder of an MMO guild hosting company (5 years and counting as of this past May), which was doing quite well years ago ($90k+/year), but is now much less busy. The site: http://www.dkpsystem.com . Honestly, I blame the fact that I've had almost the opposite mentality as the 37 Signals guys, where I've added most of the features my customers ask for, thus making the system more complicated than it shoul…
How have your cold calls been going? I'm curious about targeting some niche industries but feel I'd be wasting my time with cold calls.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#144I am the single founder of Electric Function, Inc. ( http://www.electricfunction.com ). We have a few software products: Hero ( http://www.heroframework.com - an open source PHP CMS and web app framework built on CodeIgniter), OpenGateway (PHP billing engine for many gateways), Membrr (subscription billing plugin for ExpressionEngine), and EE Donations (donation plugin for ExpressionEngine). I wrote the code, designe…
@brockf - I'm putting together a list of Startup Success stories, and your story sounds like one people might be interested in. Would you be willing to write a quick summary of your experiences? You can reply here or email me at bryan.parker24@gmail.com.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're living the dream man. Awesome.
Only thing not in the equation is children.
Traveling with babies isn't as hard as it seems.
My wife and now-two-year-old and I mostly live in the French countryside now, but travel together frequently to Malaysia, the US, UK, and around Europe (for various reasons, sometimes work, sometimes family, sometimes fun... though alas that's less often than we'd like).
We got the baby a passport before she could even sit up (the photo was tricky), and as long as we just plan a little better than we would with just adults, it's not hard.
A few things helped an awful lot, for anyone considering this.
Nurse instead of using formula/bottles/sterilizers/warming up/etc..
Buy a good carrying sling and learn to tie it; strollers are a PITA in so many places and ways.
Put time into associating peeing/etc. with a noise or word. Long before a baby is potty-trained, you can still save tons of diapers by holding them over toilets frequently and letting them go.
Let the baby sleep in your bed. It's hard for little ones to adjust to different sleeping environments -- in our case, changing to a new bed half-way around the world still looks almost the same, because her parents are still there just like always.
YMMV (all kids are different, I imagine; I've only parented one so far!) but this has worked great for us, and our daughter enjoys the new places and people. And she can already swear in at least 4 different languages....
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only thing not in the equation is children.
Don't let that be an excuse (I'm trying not to :-) ). There are plenty of travel bloggers out there with kids. They've all found ways to make it work. http://unstoppablefamily.com/ is one example
This is true -- on the other hand, some jobs simply require more dedicated time in front of a computer screen than blogging does.
Bloggers can do a lot with a little notebook -- even if a child is drawing on the right side of the page while the blogger writes on the left side -- in ways that aren't possible for someone doing software development, for example (my world).
Coding while interacting with a baby/toddler/child doesn't generally work well. We've navigated our way through to agreement on what my daughter can do safely while Daddy is working (and sometimes I take breaks from coding so she can do a bit of typing as well... she loves doing whatever I'm doing, of course). But I still do quite a lot of my work while she's asleep, or while my wife has her and I can disappear for a bit.
Trying to get serious work done in any kind of large blocks is significantly harder than before; possible, but harder. I'm still glad we have her -- it's well worth the trade-offs, for me, but the fact that it's possible doesn't mean it's not hard.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scribophile sounded interesting, but I left when I found out that I need an account to actually see anything. You even have a free user tier, so WTF? You don't have to take my word for this either. Some basic (free) analytics can give you a ballpark estimate of how often this is happening. It's probably a non-negligible ratio of your incoming new viewers.
Turns out that most writers who post their work in public are horribly scared of it being stolen. There's also a myth about something called 'first publishing rights' that persists despite my best efforts to eradicate. Long story short, the site is completely hidden from the general public because the writers who use it prefer their work to be visible only to other members. FWIW, it used to be visible to the public f…
I continually forget that customer service is 80% dealing with crazy people.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#148I'm the solo founder of PrintFriendly.com Two years ago I applied to YC, and was turned down in the interview process. They asked, "how is PrintFriendly going to make a billion dollars"? I'm still trying to answer that (or at least a more modest version of the question). Today PrintFriendly revenue is about $10k/mo, 1.2M visits/mo, and slow but steady growth. I'm happy with the results, delighted actually. However, I…
Cool idea and it looks really useful for printing out online tutorials/guides without all the ads/cruft - saw on your webpage that it's free so what's your revenue model?
If you poke around a bit more:
* The display is ad-free, but there are ads added at print time. (There are numerous competitors out there which will do this without the ads.)
* There's a $6/mo subscription for sites who want to do a "clean print" button with branding and no ads.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, Let me try to be a bit more specific :) In the start it was mostly SEO mini sites then its more PPC arbitrage and then when search marketing got tough i started creating sites that depend on word of mouth/viral traffic. At my peak i was making $400k per month! BTB, Most people with my kind of track record start to develop their personal brand and become a "Make money online Guru" and start sellimg systems and e…
Is mobile search a good platform to target now or would you stick to desktop pcs?
I don't have much experience with mobile, so i am not qualified to answer this
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#150I'd suggest keynotopia.com. I just re-read the article in the Hacker News Monthly magazine (Startup Stories, which is for free I think). According to the founder it makes him around $5000 - $10000 per month.