21–30 of 294 posts
I'm doing http://justaddcontent.com solo and self-funded. It turned into a bigger project that I anticipated, especially for my first product. I started working on it full-time in October. It started as a hobby project about two years ago. It took particularly long because I have a non-technical, military background and had to teach myself to code, design, write copy, marketing, etc. It's been a fun challenge. I stil…
I'm doing http://justaddcontent.com solo and self-funded. It turned into a bigger project that I anticipated, especially for my first product. I started working on it full-time in October. It started as a hobby project about two years ago. It took particularly long because I have a non-technical, military background and had to teach myself to code, design, write copy, marketing, etc. It's been a fun challenge. I stil…
Sounds like an amazing journey. Congrats on all the hard work.
It totally was, and it continues to be. I built the beta in my free time when I came off missions on my last 12-month deployment to Afghanistan (returned April 2013). When I deployed in April 2012 I didn't know anything about tech. I listened to podcasts (I downloaded hundreds before deploying, mostly Mixergy) when I worked out (still do) and read a lot of business books.
I feel like I still have a lot to learn, but I've come a long way in the last two years. It's been one hell of a ride, I'm just happy I'm still enjoying it. Don't tell my customers, but I'd do this for free I love it so much haha.
I'm doing http://justaddcontent.com solo and self-funded. It turned into a bigger project that I anticipated, especially for my first product. I started working on it full-time in October. It started as a hobby project about two years ago. It took particularly long because I have a non-technical, military background and had to teach myself to code, design, write copy, marketing, etc. It's been a fun challenge. I stil…
Well done! I don't need a business website, but I felt a slight urge to give you my money after reading the value proposition. I especially liked the "what we do vs what you do" part.
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 appreciable income for that period. Lots of lessons learned about equipment (antennas, good wiring practices in vehicles, power cleanliness in big equipment, etc), good ways to present the data, map projections, how to deal with messy data, dealing with non-technical users, cross-border shipping tarrifs, mobile-network provisioning rules, the list goes on. I did it alongside my full-time job for the first 4 years.
It's a tiny niche, and one I never expect to get all that big, but it looks like I'll be able to make it my sole income source next season.
Which is great, because it'll let me go skiing more.
Not my business, but www.DuckDuckGo.com (Gabriel Weinberg) is a good example.
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…
Hey there. /raises hand. https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com Five figures a month, just me, I've written about my solo business a couple times in other Ask HN threads. Ten years ago (almost to the day), in my college dorm, I was looking at the Webalizer web stats report my web host provided for my blog, and thought "I could do something much cooler than this". So I did. I had built a few education…
Hey there. /raises hand. https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com Five figures a month, just me, I've written about my solo business a couple times in other Ask HN threads. Ten years ago (almost to the day), in my college dorm, I was looking at the Webalizer web stats report my web host provided for my blog, and thought "I could do something much cooler than this". So I did. I had built a few education…
Ghostery blocks w3counter so it blocked pretty much everything on the actual site, maybe use a static domain that isn't blocked by ghostery. :O
Solo, self funded and profitable. I work on it while traveling around Asia.
Agree with patio11 there's probably way more than would speak up here. I seldom contribute to HN or the bootstrapping forums mentioned in another reply. I browse a little, but 99% of my time spent in front of the computer is spent working on product or replying to customer emails.
How I got started:
I've built SaaS apps before but they were the dreaded "solution looking for a problem" type.
Then I decided to do things strictly the Lean way. Got out of the building. Talked to customers about an idea I had. Pretty soon I discovered an adjacent problem that everyone had, that sounded fun to solve, and that I had specific domain knowledge in. I built and launched my MVP in one month, from a beach in Koh Samui. I've been traveling ever since then, spending each month in a different country.
Charged from day 1. Had paying customers from day 1.
I find changing my environment enables me to compartmentalize my work better - like I try to get major new features rolled out before I head to my next destination.
Not planning on doing this solo forever. Not ruling out hiring some help down the line and maybe a permanent office somewhere.
But for now it's pretty fun the way it is!
Just launched Pinegrow Web Designer ( http://pinegrow.com ) two months ago. The company is actually run by my wife and me, but I do all the work with Pinegrow while she is taking care of our other projects. Pinegrow has been paying most of our bills since launch and I have a lot of expansions in the pipeline: full support for Foundation alongside Bootstrap, developer edition that'll work with templates, a similar app…