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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?

#211

Post by pkalinowski »

stef25 wrote: post #194
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?

Sidekiq is using Redis behind the scenes. It's a job queue system for Ruby and Ruby on Rails

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

#212

Post by sizzle »

quelsolaar wrote: post #95
spectramax wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think good design/presentation and solid approach towards attention to detail on everything you do - it only adds and it doesn't take away from the core functional aspects of the product or service. Uber-functionalism, which is what you seem to be obsessed with, has its drawbacks. Imagine if Apple didn't care about design or aesthetics or presentation of their products. At the sametime, I see some contradiction to…

I'm a graphics nerd so that stuff is just fun for me, and most of it is part of existing toolkits I have already written for things like font rendering and UI. I used to think that quality was attention to detail and polishing everything, but now I think its a hump you have to get over. People stand in line for hours, in the rain and cold, and jump through a lot of hoops the stuff they really want. As a creator your…

It sounds like confirmation bias to make a universal principle out of not needing a highly usable and accessible landing page/web site based off your success in a narrow B2B context, especially if you product is spreading word of mouth. Imagine how many inpatient people got frustrated with the video/landing page on mobile and closed the page? Are you running analytics? We could prove bounce rate against your theory of not needing a highly usable website UX.

It's just good for business to make the user interface as seamless and friction free as possible to get users the information they need at a glance to make a decision and covert faster = more conversions and more revenue $$$

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

#213

Post by zerr »

spottybanana wrote: post #19
101008 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, those number sound so high for a third world country that I can't help thinking that if I were in your situation I would give half of that salary (5k monthly) to my brother and father so they wouldn't have to worry about money again. Congratulations for being in that situation!

Coming from scandinavian welfare state, it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income. Especially if you earn it by working, and the reasoning being so that they don't have to worry about money = have less pressure to work. I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here…

Yup, there are many such hard to understand gaps from both sides. E.g. one such thing would be, in the "west" (I guess it's the same for Scandinavia) it is so common that parents are being put in old people's homes to spend their last moments of life among strange people, instead of their children taking care of them at home.

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

#214

Post by zerr »

Toss8675309 wrote: post #177
Remnant44 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fantastic! I have a one man software business but in creating and selling my own product, which has some strong pros and cons comparatively! I've been toying with the idea of taking on some consulting as well. The pivot to get into consulting seems much harder, however.

Yes, the pivot into consulting is hard. It's a lot more abstract than "I will build you widget X for $Y", which is a hard enough business in which to get initial traction. The first shift for me was making a mental shift from "I provide widgets for dollars" to "I solve problems, sometimes software is involved". This altered the way I price my services and how I communicate about them to current and prospective client…

Do you mostly work with non-technical clients/persons?

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

#215

Post by cyberferret »

domlebo70 wrote: post #195
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?

Thanks. I guess the biggest mistake in the early days was doing 'scattergun marketing' and not focusing on where our users actually were. Once we narrowed down and marketed to HR managers and business owners via LinkedIn and Capterra etc., we saw great results.

Another mistake was probably not sticking to a marketing avenue long enough. We would sometimes change our website completely a couple of times a month, so we never really knew what was working or not as we didn't have enough quantitative data. Nowadays we just rarely make sweeping changes, but instead make small tweaks to our marketing and watch analytics for patterns.

I do blog about some of these learnings over at https://devan.codes

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

#216

Post by stef25 »

pkalinowski wrote: post #211
stef25 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sidekiq is using Redis behind the scenes. It's a job queue system for Ruby and Ruby on Rails

Seems to have only a few extra features compared to Laravel's Horizon (from looking at screenshots, I could be totally wrong).

https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/horizon

Horizon is free, crazy something like this could be monetized so successfully.

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

#217

Post by namirez »

markdown wrote: post #142
namirez wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income. This is an interesting mindset. I don't want to judge you either, but I never understood the value of keeping my money and collecting wealth. If I were struggling, I wouldn't go out of my way to help my family. But if I had extra income, I would help my family if they were in need.

He is from a country with a strong socialist welfare system, so when one is in need, the government is there to assist them and they don't need to feel like they are a burden on their family and friends.

Agreed, but this reminds me of the old joke about a bruised scout who comes limping to his friends. "What happened?", they ask. "I helped an old lady cross the street", says the scout. "But why are you so hurt?" "She didn't want to cross the street".

Obviously, if my family doesn't need help, I wouldn't try to give them money. But if they were in need, I wouldn't say that it's not my responsibility to help either. I think this is a simple judgement call. The efficiency of the Scandinavian welfare system is besides the point.

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

#218

Post by lossolo »

aerovistae wrote: post #209
stanmancan wrote: post #98

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…

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 a…

I am serving around 3 billion requests a month (so around 10x more than OP) from one dedicated server that cost less than 100 euro a month.

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

#219

Post by stanmancan »

aerovistae wrote: post #209
stanmancan wrote: post #98

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…

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 a…

300 million a month only works out to around 115 a second. The API has been optimized a lot. We could probably handle 2x the traffic we are currently getting before needing to upgrade the server.

We do have paid accounts now but it doesn’t amount to a ton, around $440MRR.

I hesitated adding paid accounts for a long time because it cost so little to run but the ad revenue was alright.

Lots of niche markets out there, but my at revenue did take a long, slow path over 8 years to get to this point.

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

#220

Post by cylinder »

Toss8675309 wrote: post #181
cylinder wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

usually solo professionals like yourself will start a side business selling coaching, tools, lessons, guides etc to other practitioners. certainly have a huge base of developers out there who need help going out on their own and could use some coaching on the business and sales sides.

> certainly have a huge base of developers out there who need help going out on their own and could use some coaching on the business and sales sides. Yeah? I was really planning to make a move in this direction in 2020. Another investment opportunity combined with imposter syndrome has put this on hold. Mostly imposter syndrome if I'm honest. But...I should do this, work to help other devs move out of their employer…

you definitely should. there's a clear market gap. you can also build a community out of current/former clients and offer that support network as added value to clients. there's also a lot of hucksters out there who does this type of thing, and a good developer type would sniff them out quickly. stay genuine and real, and avoid the "You can build a life of FREEDOM and WEALTH from HOME !!" mumbo jumbo and you will do well.

It's also more scalable than churning out billable hours.

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