@robsun what kind of app your friend built?
It's medical app. I don't want to provide more details as he is not aware I mentioned him ;).
Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
161–170 of 243 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#162I'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.
I'm a solid full stack developer and I feel like I have the time flexibility and ability to start a side consulting business. Do you have any tips to get started? How would you go from 0 to your first client?
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#163Not a success story, but I've been building my venture for some time now and recently started making revenue.
We answer all legal questions in 42 minutes (http://www.helplicit.com), and are now expanding that to other domains (http://www.fortyq.com)
The reason I'm writing here is because I'm constantly surprised by the relative ease with which one 'lands' a 100k per year contract, or accidentally makes an API that forks its way to glory. I'm fortunate to know some amazing founders, some of whom are raising millions in VC. Been in and out of accelerators myself. Yet no story I know starts or has ever been like that.
Imho, it is excruciatingly hard work to provide people value and get them to pay for it. Takes time, constant follow-ups, a strong value proposition..none of which gets built jlt.
I wouldn't be fooled by the end result of $ x M ARR. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, which rarely gets spoken of because it sounds just sounds rad to say that I had an idea and somebody just signed me a cheque. No matter the entity at the paying end, people are fundamentally programmed to be uneasy letting go of large sums of money. Takes a lot of convincing to get there.
Having said that, building is an addictive hellride and I wouldn't trade it for anything else :)
Happy to share more of the limited experience I have, feel free to PM. Cheers to building!
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#164I worked with an entrepreneur who runs an affiliate site that pulls in about $100k/month, has zero employees, and no office.
What kind of site is it? If it is a review site, does he use the products he reviews?
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#165I know a guy from our local industry who has a free cybercafe software. He's making about $500k/year for the past 20 years or so. It's a one man business.
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#166I'm running MinistryOfFlat.com and I have made 7 figures this year. No investors or co workers. No marketing beyond my 2k twitter followers and a website. Solve a very specific and hard problem and the right people will find you.
Just read through all your stuff, the UV unwrapper is very cool. Do most people use it with 3d paint tools? It seems the small disconnected bits would be hard to paint by hand. some thoughts/questions: - Do you use a library for packing? This alone is a lot of work. Since you write in C, are you using boost polygon or CGAL for the computational geometry algorithms? - Have you thought about a data-driven approach? Unw…
I don't use libs for anything. I write everything from scratch. Not having any dependencies is a huge win for many of my customers. You can find some of my source at gamepipeline.org
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#167All these nummers and still, my dad is a vet and earned 300k € in his best month ( without much sleep).
Most of the even more successful ones don't even take that in per year.
And yes, he is a one man show, no tech involved. It was very eye opening to me, since my dad can't even boot a PC.
Competition is local though, it's 6-9 other local veterinarians. He seems to be the most successful one (= he is the one everyone sees passing by day and night in the car)
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#168All these nummers and still, my dad is a vet and earned 300k € in his best month ( without much sleep). Most of the even more successful ones don't even take that in per year. And yes, he is a one man show, no tech involved. It was very eye opening to me, since my dad can't even boot a PC. Competition is local though, it's 6-9 other local veterinarians. He seems to be the most successful one (= he is the one everyone…
Yes that is impressive but the difference is your dad has to work for that money whereas with software once you achieve success in you do very little work relative for the amount of money you bring in.
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#169First 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…
Pretty sure he was a celebrity before though, that kinda makes things easier than for the avg joe blow.
While true, not sure it's a material point in a discussion about who's the biggest outlier you can think of. Outliers get to be outliers because of non-standard factors.
Re: Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
#170I'm running MinistryOfFlat.com and I have made 7 figures this year. No investors or co workers. No marketing beyond my 2k twitter followers and a website. Solve a very specific and hard problem and the right people will find you.
What kind of license (one time fee/monthly subscription/???) and how much does it cost?