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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#181

Post by annamargot »

adrienjarthon wrote: post #146

I run https://updown.io since 2012, a website monitoring service I created. I'm working about 5-10 hours per week on it. It makes about $6,000 per month and is still growing linearly. I also keep a full-time job alongside for now as an engineering manager. The key for me is to take time, make something useful, delight your clients, and don't try to become uber or airbnb.

Awesome job. This type of service is critical for e-commerce businesses like mine.

Just curious, I see you accept payment in crypto. What percentage of customers pay with crypto, and how has that changed since 2012?

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

#182

Post by bekman »

non-entity wrote: post #172
bekman wrote: post #129

I run a popular Quiz website. I make around $6,000 per month from Google adsense. I work between 2-3 hours a week usually posting quiz links on my Pinterest page. My only expense is hosting which is around $20 per month (Digital Ocean). I have never advertised my website and it gets all the traffic from Pinterest Organically. Compare to my salary, I'm an IT Administrator in my day job and make $400 per month. I live…

How do you manage to kickstart something like this? You mentioned you get your traffic organically via Pinterest, but there had to be something you did initially that set off that growth.

My website started five years ago, It didn’t get any traffic the first three years before one of my quiz went viral. Now I have around 70k followers on Pinterest.

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

#183

Post by snt »

imglorp wrote: post #166
snt wrote: post #117

I run https://picojump.com which I started this year. It evolved to scratch my own itch: simplifying the access, management, and monitoring of a fleet of distributed Raspberry Pis (running Raspbian, on private networks) without requiring any proprietary client-side code. Though it meets the submitter's criteria, it's not [yet] providing enough to live off.

Nice job, I've been thinking about this for a while, perhaps leverage... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/f...

Thanks.

I did not know about Amazon GameLift. I guess I just used the word "fleet" to mean "a collection of similar things under unified control". (Unified control being the aim of the project.) In this case, as building block, I'm using robust, persistent reverse SSH tunnels.

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

#184

Post by siscia »

throwbusaway wrote: post #164

I've run a niche ecommerce website by myself for 10+ years as my primary income. It's down to about 5-15 hours of work per week. I'm looking to sell if anyone is interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21118095

What is the website? What do you sell?

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

#185

Post by codingdave »

t0ddbonzalez wrote: post #157
jfoster wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your job is less than 10% of your income, why keep it?

Meeting other humans? Enjoying the work? A regular job with regular income looks good on paper if you want a bank to lend you money, for example. Maybe less likely to appear on tax authority's radar for undisclosed income if people know you as Joe the IT guy who leaves for work at the same time every morning?

Banks are looking for stability in your income. A regular salaried job counts as stability. But proven bank deposits over multiple years also counts. I wouldn't shy away from self-employment just because of banks.

Source: I worked at a bank, and wrote algorithms for loan acceptance which evaluated such things.

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

#186

Post by Scrph »

WA wrote: post #47

I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while. Please…

I have some German specific questions since I’m currently also looking into registering a company.

Which kind of business form (UG, Gmbh, einzelgewerbe) do you use? Have you used something like a „Kleingewerbe“ when you were starting out?

And how do you handle all the legal stuff? And how much time do you spend on this?

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

#187

Post by seanwilson »

I run https://www.checkbot.io myself. :) It's a paid Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed and security best practices.

While working as a web developer, I found myself having to do a lot of manual checks or write scripts to test if new pages or changes to existing pages were following a long list of web best practices. I eventually wrapped up all this knowledge and automation into a finish product that others have found useful.

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

#188

Post by eb0la »

puranjay wrote: post #169
bekman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question, my career is very important to me. It gives me an identity. I just can’t sit at home all day. I’m gonna die with boredom.

You're a smart man. I wish I had done that.

I believe the smart part is he knows what he wants... and that's hard, btw.

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

#189

Post by trikko »

phito wrote: post #38
sellingwebsite wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you mind sharing the URL for your business ? I love discovering indie businesses outside of software realm

of course, it is https://phito.be/

Next feature for website: organize plant by trap's type or insect they eat :)

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

#190

Post by treyfitty »

sshine wrote: post #161
treyfitty wrote: post #71

I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago ( https://www.mendskin.co ) which isn’t “successful” yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time. It’s tough. There’s a reason a lot of companies spend $1MM from investors before launching a product, but I wanted to test the hypothesis that this need not be the case. “Beauty products” (for lack of a better term) defini…

Interesting. As a person in your target audience (except perhaps geography), here's what I'd like: I'm really dumb when it comes to skin care, but recently convinced myself that it's important. So I have zero clue where to start. Looking at your nicely stylized huge rectangles with jars, my eyes glaze over: They're all the same! Short jar, tall jar, short jar. Why not write some blog posts to increase SEO ranking on…

Thanks for the feedback. SEO is definitely a work in progress. To that end, I've created this to-be-published page (https://www.mendskin.co/pages/mend-skin-guide) which is meant to be a "crash course" on skincare.

The world of skincare is vast, and I intend on creating newsletters to better inform potential customers what they should be looking for. Very Soon.

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