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

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201–210 of 243 posts

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

#201
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made an API for myself in 2011 that I could consume at work. I made a site that lets people query it from a web app and docs on the API. Didn’t think anyone would actually use it though. Tossed an ad on it and forgot about it. The API has been rewritten a few times now, it gets over 300 million requests a month. All organic growth, I can’t take any credit for it because I honestly have done nothing to aid it. Only…

Adwords, as in you pay to advertise the site on Google? I found your project since you previously posted it on HN and linked to it in an answer below (hope you don't mind, I'll remove it if you want).

Sorry, Adsense

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

#202
post #45
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking here, unable to reply to the comment below. The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for. As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? I tried the cold email route (even made a friend this way, we still keep in touch after two years, though we haven…

> As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? You need to develop contacts at companies! There are lots of different ways to build your network, but the bottom line is that to be successful with this line of work, which is essentially consulting (at least in the beginning stages), you need to meet people and earn t…

Yup this pretty much hits the nail on the head.

Learning to listen is very important, and really understanding what people are saying. Lots of times they aren’t really complaining, they’re just talking about something and if you’re listening closely you can identify potential opportunities in their systems and processes. Often people don’t know what’s possible, so they don’t come at you directly with a problem.

At an old job it was someone’s job to run a “install history report”, it was all the installs that were done the previous week (thousands) and read through it copying and pasting installs from specific cities into an excel sheet. It took about 12 hours a week. He explained this process whole asking a completely different question. I ended up writing a little script that completed this same task in a few seconds. He didn’t even know that was possible, so he didn’t know to ask.

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

#203

I’m a one man show. I made a SaaS targeted towards a specific company. I did all the work up front, got them to trial it, and when they loved it they singed a contract for just over $100k/year. I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue. I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m. All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my ti…

Awesome numbers! Did you do CS at college?

Nope all self taught. Nothing I’ve done is very complex.

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

#205

I’m a one man show. I made a SaaS targeted towards a specific company. I did all the work up front, got them to trial it, and when they loved it they singed a contract for just over $100k/year. I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue. I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m. All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my ti…

What type of hosting/maintenance are you doing for clients and how did you find these clients? Interesting you were able to find opportunities for hosting services when there are so many easy PaaS options out there now.

Most companies don't know what hosting options they have. They'll take the first recommendation from their "tech person" or whoever developed their site.

The problem is, that's a shit experience for your average company. They rarely touch their site since they don't know how. Someone will create an account, they'll write the username and password down for all the various hosting providers they need to know, and things will usually go smoothly until their credit card expires, their domain name expires (which they don't even know is possible) or some other problem that results in a bunch of downtime and panic from everyone involved.

I pitch it as a worry free solution. I manage their domains renewals, DNS, hosting, security updates, framework updates, all things they don't know they have to do. Their framework will remain current, so if they want something done in 5 years they'll have the latest version of the framework, not some archaic thing that requires PHP 5.1 and relies on a weird MySQL bug from whatever version their host is using.

On top of that, they get a couple hours of maintenance included every month, so if they need a few small changes made to the site it's all included, no extra invoices, no quoting, no needing to get budget approvals or sign offs. They just shoot me an email and I make the changes. (hours don't roll over)

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

#206

I run a one-person company [1] whose tech makes reading on screen easier/faster/more accessible. The B2C tools (iOS app and browser plugin) bring in 5 figures, but in 2019 the IP licensing took off. We have large educational clients that are integrating the tech because of its benefit for students (especially those with ADHD and dyslexia). IP licensing is great because it means I don't need to spend time building the…

I would love to have this in as part of `getpocket.com`. Maybe you could reach out to them about licensing it.

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

#207
post #10

I’m a one man show. I made a SaaS targeted towards a specific company. I did all the work up front, got them to trial it, and when they loved it they singed a contract for just over $100k/year. I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue. I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m. All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my ti…

Please write a blog post for us to learn from you.

Don't take this the wrong way.

What if you read what he did, do a lot of research on how to get similar results to him and blog about it so others can learn from you?

Don't wait for things to happen; go out and make them happen yourself.

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

#208

I run a one-person company [1] whose tech makes reading on screen easier/faster/more accessible. The B2C tools (iOS app and browser plugin) bring in 5 figures, but in 2019 the IP licensing took off. We have large educational clients that are integrating the tech because of its benefit for students (especially those with ADHD and dyslexia). IP licensing is great because it means I don't need to spend time building the…

Your ios app have very less reviews 20 and very low. Could you please explain how many downloads you re getting and how you are generating 5 figure. Congrats!!

Most of our revenue is from our Chrome extension. And most of the negative reviews are people complaining about us not offering features that Apple prevents us from offering (like system-wide support).

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "site with ads" is the one that really interests me. Can you give some details on that? What kind of site it is, how you grew traffic, what you use for ads? (Just AdWords?)

I made an API for myself in 2011 that I could consume at work. I made a site that lets people query it from a web app and docs on the API. Didn’t think anyone would actually use it though. Tossed an ad on it and forgot about it. The API has been rewritten a few times now, it gets over 300 million requests a month. All organic growth, I can’t take any credit for it because I honestly have done nothing to aid it. Only…

This is super interesting to me. I have a couple questions! Although, by the way, found a typo on your /api page-- "The power behind MAC Vendors API is it's simplicity. Get started instantly, no registration required." That should be `its`, not `it's`.

Anyway, this whole thing confuses the hell out of me. You're receiving 3.6 billion requests per year and you've been serving it all for free with a single adsense ad and only making a couple grand a month off of it? I feel like I don't really understand. Shouldn't the hosting costs for multiple billions of requests be huge? Shouldn't you be charging for that? I'm speaking as someone who's never built anything like this, so I don't really know.

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

#210

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…

Most forms of landlording doesn't add value to the society. This is especially bad in the case of domain names. What is the point of one person owning 1000s of domain names, with the single goal of selling them at an inflated price? The internet would be a much better place without people like these.
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