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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#141

Post by amitmathew »

I run a small business called Cram Fighter (http://cramfighter.com) that is targeted at students (mostly medical) that are preparing for standardized exams. I got the idea after watching my wife preparing for her board exams and it seemed like a perfect little project to learn iOS programming. Initially my goal was to do earn maybe $5k annually, but now I'm on track to surpass my salary as senior developer by next year.

You'll find a lot of one-person businesses targeting tiny, but profitable, niches like mine. What's great about it is that often when you find a tiny opportunity, it opens up a lot of other problems that need solving that you would never find otherwise. It's also a great way to learn the skills of running a business in a relatively stress-free way (at least compared to running a startup).

The only downside is if you're anything like me, you'll get antsy working on small projects and yearn to tackle bigger, more ambitious problems. Sometimes 1-person companies have the potential for turning into a company with startup-like growth, sometimes not. I'm still trying to figure out how far I can take my company.

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

#142

Post by kyleblarson »

danpat wrote: post #24

I created: http://skitrails.info/ I'm an avid cross-country skier, and traditionally daily trail reports are done by hand by the maintenance staff after they're out all night working on the trails. I had the bright idea of putting GPS tracking devices in grooming equipment and creating the "what's been groomed" report automatically, in real-time. It took about 4 seasons to really get it right, and there was no apprec…

This is cool. I live in the Methow Valley and the MVSTA should use this!

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

#143

Post by [deleted] »

balladeer wrote: post #100
cperciva wrote: post #81

I run Tarsnap: http://www.tarsnap.com/ I got started because I wanted good backups and there were no solutions available which I was satisfied with.

Are you planning to build sth on top of Glacier or include Glacier as an storage option (seeing it's on S3 anyway)? It will bring the cost down a great deal.

[deleted]

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

#145

Post by itengelhardt »

davidw wrote: post #45
itengelhardt wrote: post #18

I don't know whether HN is the right place to ask this question. The crowd for this frequents either http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm or http://academy.micropreneur.com There's also a number of podcasts (notably "Startups for the Rest of Us" and "Bootstrapped With Kids")

Hi Christoph! I came here to post the bootstrapped.fm link too, but I think HN is a fine place to post this discussion too. I think the small, bootstrapped company is where it's at for many of us who don't want to or can't do the VC thing in SV. That's probably a large majority even on a site like this. Rob's book is an obbligatory reference in this space too: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launchi…

Hi David! Great to hear that you are doing well with LiberWriter. That definitely is a pain point for people.

I like that you kept the layout simple using only bootstrap. that's a lot faster & cheaper than doing a full blown design.

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

#146

Post by itengelhardt »

raphinou wrote: post #134
jasonkester wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To underscore Patrick's point about just how many of these businesses there really are, he's one of the few folks I remember from the old Business of Software forums over at joelonsoftware.com that seem to have migrated over here. That was a tiny little board where the owners of single player software businesses would get together to ask silly questions about how to update their shareware product's PAD files. There w…

I like the idea of the cheap bastard plan of s3stat. Very well done and well presented.

Excellent idea. :-)

I love the tone

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

#147

Post by cpncrunch »

paulhauggis wrote: post #59

You can have a successful online business with one-person, but there will always be a maximum to the amount of money you can make and it does not scale well. I ran a 1-person company for the past 3 years (B2B SAAS). I now have 2 other partners in the company to pick up the slack and we will be hiring a few employees next month. It's difficult to: maintain your current business (IE: new features, bug fixes, customer s…

Actually, vacation / time off shouldn't be an issue. I've been doing this for 15 years and now my product runs like clockwork. Generally unless I'm doing new dev work, I only have a few support emails per day. As long as I go on vacation somewhere where I can at least have wifi in the evenings and mobile data during the day to occasionally check my email, it's not a problem. Also I regularly take long breaks during the day, or take days off to go on trips somewhere. I think you need to do this otherwise you'll be in danger of burning out.

It also helps to plan for the worst. Right now my slight concern is lack of RAID on my server. However I back up every day to a separate disk on the server (plus offsite downloads every couple of weeks), so in the worst case it will probably just take me an hour or two to get most things up and running on a new server. Obviously not the best thing to happen on vacation though :)

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

#148

Post by jdeibele »

jasonkester wrote: post #97
patio11 wrote: post #11

Even if you were to scope it just to software/SaaS product companies, there's minimally hundreds of these in the world and dozens of them have HN accounts. Most don't post on threads like this, so I feel the need to pipe up and say "This is quite doable, and done, much more than you might expect." I run a small software company (two, technically). Products include Bingo Card Creator ( http://www.bingocardcreator.com…

To underscore Patrick's point about just how many of these businesses there really are, he's one of the few folks I remember from the old Business of Software forums over at joelonsoftware.com that seem to have migrated over here. That was a tiny little board where the owners of single player software businesses would get together to ask silly questions about how to update their shareware product's PAD files. There w…

I have two daughters, a niece and a nephew who might be moving from Spanish Immersion this fall to classes that are more rigorous in math, science, etc. Maybe I'm your target audience., maybe not. When I look at your website, the last blog post and tweet are from 2010. It makes things look dead. We're not homeschooling but http://homeschoolspanishacademy.com/ looks a lot more active. Also, "fair trade" often seems to translate as "expensive". Education seems more valuable than coffee (now that I'm on my second cup) but not having any sense of what pricing or structure is like is off-putting.

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

#149

Post by phantom_oracle »

I like reading about stories like this (from all the successful solo founders).

It proves that you don't need to get multi-million-dollar valuations to be successful and that the general entrepreneur is pretty content with the amount he/she is making (+1 to thousandaire).

These are stories entrepreneurs (who are realists) should read about and we'd probably all be better off avoiding those "billion dollar acquisitions" (for fear that it will consume us mentally, physically and emotionally).

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

#150

Post by cpncrunch »

nunodonato wrote: post #79

For those who have successfully started a one-man online business/app, how did you get it known? Adwords? Advertising?

My own product spread virally. I think that is about the only feasible way to do it. I've tried advertising a few times myself, but it never, ever pays for itself.
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