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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?

#191

Post by domlebo70 »

v1l wrote: post #134
domlebo70 wrote: post #7

Sorry to hijack slightly, but figured it's related: I am trying to build a "lifestyle" side project into something profitable, as a goal to replace my job. I think I have a good product and niche. What I want is some sort of mentor network. Someone who has already succeeded where I haven't, and that I can pester with questions, check I am on the right track, vent, etc, every now and then. Does such a thing (or someth…

where are you located?

Been in NYC for a year, but moving back to Australia in 2 weeks.

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

#192

Post by stef25 »

xs wrote: post #144

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…

Heard Sam Harris mention once that every Joe Rogan podcast has the same audience size as the Game of Thrones final. Too lazy to look up the numbers but it's very impressive if true.

I like his podcasts a lot, he's a great guy and deserves it all. He did mention once that he made "fuck you money" in his Fear Factor days. His income from that and his stand up tours probably contribute massively to his total net worth.

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

#194

Post by stef25 »

iloveitaly wrote: post #89

Sidekiq makes ~1M/year in gross revenue. I believe the only full-time employee is the founder, and it doesn't sound like there are any material recurring expenses: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side... It's the most profitable one-man show I know of, although there's many that I've run into that ~500k, albeit with a much higher operational burden.

After skimming through the podcast transcript it's still not clear to me how this works.

What's the difference with say the job queue system of Laravel / Horizon / Redis ? From what I can tell this has all the same features listen on the Sidekiq page except it's free.

What am I missing?

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

#195

Post by domlebo70 »

cyberferret wrote: post #150

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…

Awesome. What were the big mistakes you made along the way?

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

#196

Post by stef25 »

semireg wrote: post #136

I’d imagine that many users don’t comment because they feel their salary mix is too sensitive. I’m a mobile app dev consultant that also maintains a few node/docker appliances for industrial IOT clients. I make enough to dedicate 10 hours a week (sometimes nights and weekends) to build and maintain an electron app that I sell for $50 a license. My software is beginning to compete with other software that costs $500 a…

Wish I'd discovered this back when I needed it, all label printing software is garbage but this looks perfect.

Just one issue - can't easily find the price of your app.

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

#197

Post by everybodyknows »

ktaylor wrote: post #178

A friend of mine runs a 1 person business. Well, technically, he does have an assistant who does his office admin and books. My friend has steady gross revenues of $6M a year. When I first met him about 8 years ago he was 26 and living at home with his parents. He once remarked on how much he appreciated his mother still doing his laundry and cooking for him and his father. I forgot to mention, he has extremely high…

What sort of content is supplied by such web sites?

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

#198

Post by stef25 »

Way back when, Markus Frind was the first guy to make 1M / month off Adsense on the plenty of fish dating site. Which looked like absolute garbage but it was about the only free dating site at the time and it had grandpas, teenagers, crack whores and everything in between.

Eventually he employed his wife to do customer support and now it's been sold for millions and has hundreds of employees.

I used to do maintenance on a fairly popular dating site which was all horrible php spaghetti code, MD5 passwords ... the works. By the time I got to the office at 9AM they'd already received over 1000EUR in payments, every single day. They used really scummy techniques like fake profiles operated by off shore workers.

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

#199

Post by crikli »

throwaway_29575 wrote: post #141
crikli wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 impr…

I've got a business that my wife and I are launching, as well as a couple of other ventures queued up for 2020. All of them will rely on effective digital marketing. I'd love to visit with your wife, see if there is a fit. My email is chrisrikli at gmail.
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