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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

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Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#211

Post by giarc »

jealousgelatin wrote: post #203

I built a react-native app https://skintheory.app to help people get rid of their acne in a manegable way. Currently working on an iteration to add affiliate marketing links to skincare products. The amount of money I'm making is comparable to losing my wallet (multiple times).

I love your analogy! I'm also running a unprofitable business that costs me money each month (G Suite, hosting, domain registration, SES, Wordpress plugin one time cost etc). I have 2 customers (one is a friend, another is a true customer). The true customer signed up knowing the cost and has told me I'm charging too little but with only a single customer, I can't bring myself to charge them. I feel like if I go that route it becomes a bit more of a business and I open myself up to other issues. I also don't have time to work on gaining more customers now (I work in COVID response, so it's been a busy 11 months). So I'm stuck just paying out of pocket.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#212

Post by karakanb »

Not much of a success in terms of providing a large part of my income, but I have launched the SaaS Starter Kit (https://saasstarterkit.app/) 2 weeks ago for early access and I have managed to get 5 sales already. If I can keep up the traction and improve the product, it will be possible to have it make up a large portion of my current income.

So far, I have found the IndieHackers community to be very helpful, they are willing to provide feedback and the first two purchases have already come from there. In addition to that, I joined a conversation on Twitter under a thread Adam Wathan, the creator of TailwindCSS, started and it has generated quite a lot of initial traffic to the project.

I haven't launched it fully yet, I am still looking to collect feedback from the early users, so I am offering a large discount, but it feels great to be able to make some money with a side project after a long time working on it.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#213

Post by giarc »

renniehaylock wrote: post #144

I created https://huntr.co back in 2017, just reached $15k mrr last month. Looking to hire someone to help with sales in the next few months. It's been fun to work on such a variety of things in the past 3 years (design, development, sales, etc), but I'm ready to grow the team :)

Wow! That looks incredible! I won't be a customer right now but just wanted to say you have created a great looking product! Are the jobs within your search tool pretty US centric, or if I told my Canadian friends about this, would they get value as well?

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#214

Post by giarc »

moconnor wrote: post #90
mg wrote: post #6

I run https://www.gnod.com

Tip: for each artist or author you recommend, put their top books under the name with the picture from amazon and link there with an affiliate account. An unfamiliar author’s name means nothing to me, but I might have heard of some of their books. And I’ll open tabs to check them out later. For artists I’d love to SEE their pictures. I don’t know many artist’s names!

Agree with the artist comment. I input 3 of my favourite artists and got some recommendations. I selected "I don't know" because I didn't know who they were. Could just show the top 5 results from a Google image search for their name, or an image from their wiki page.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#215

Post by noahjk »

sideproject wrote: post #50

I had many un-used domains I've purchased over the years (>40) and I wanted to make use of them without having to spend time, so I built Newsy - launched 9 months ago. https://www.newsy.co It turns your un-used domain into a Reddit-like content aggregator with all sorts of features - membership, voting, comments, newsletters and monetization. The best thing for me is that it is completely automated and all of my doma…

The dataloco example website is broken for me

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#216

Post by giarc »

aantix wrote: post #16

https://hauling.market/ Andrew is killing it. Already over one million in bids on his platform.

This is interesting. The copy on the page is pretty broad (beyond this single spot about horses and all small animals), suggesting they accept any type of shipment. However, when you look at the request they are almost 100% horses or other small animals. I wonder if the founder should niche down and focus on the animal market, seems like there is demand.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#217

Post by giarc »

masa331 wrote: post #15

I run a paid addon for local e-commerce platform(with 25k shops build on it). It all started about 15 month ago when i was still working in a web development company. The platform owners came to us and offered us a partnership. We would develop some new addons for them, run them, and split the profits(80% for us, 20% for them). As i was the one most interested in this i got the first project and developed and support…

Did you have to buy out the web dev company you were working for? Did they not want their cut?

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#218

Post by giarc »

stephen_greet wrote: post #51

Close Tools [1] is run by one person and they're currently at $40k MRR. [1] https://jdnoc.com/open/

I was listening to My First Million podcast the other day and they mentioned a product that was specific to Poshmark, I wonder if this was it. They went on to talk about getting in early to platforms and making a killing (ex. when FB opened their API, Shopify marketplace, Google Ad words). Poshmark seems like a giant service that likely has a lot of area ripe for development.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#219

Post by herbi »

During the pandemic I started a side project to support Scrum Teams with their Scrum Retrospective Sessions: https://www.fraankly.com

I am really proud of the amount of monthly active users, but most of them use the free version and hardly any people are willing to pay for it. I am not sure why this is the case, but I think this has potential and I am going to add more features. Feedback welcome!

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#220

Post by santah »

loosetypes wrote: post #190
santah wrote: post #180

https://next-episode.net is a service I run for more than 15 years now. It's a TV / Movies tracking website/community that helps people organize what they watch and find new shows to watch. I started it for myself (because I couldn't find such tool back in the day) while I was working as a front end developer in an outsourcing company and it slowly grew and became my (only) day job. There is a lot to do in terms of u…

Are you able to do this full time to support yourself? Do you feel like you’re competing with the many other app options out there with larger teams? I’m currently building something in a similar space. I’d like to be able to devote myself to it but am worried about viability (both overall and as a solo developer). That is to say, inspired to see your post!

Yes - this business supports me and my family and I don't have or need another job. I'm lucky to have found something I'm passionate about and that I can be helpful to others with.

That said - I haven't had a day without working on it (for at least 30minutes to handle support email) in more than 15 years. Also - I plan all vacations around it (well, those are really vacations for my wife, I try and keep working as much as I can on them) by making sure we always have good internet connection and we're never somewhere where we won't have internet for more than a day. Thankfully, that's fairly easy to accomplish nowdays, but I can't, for example, do a multi day camping or hiking trips.

What I'm trying to say it it comes at a price and it's not all great even when it's successful.

And yes, of course I feel I'm competing with the other options - some with huge teams and VC money, but at the same time I regularly check them out and I'm confident my product brings enough value to stand its ground - it doesn't have tens of millions of active users monthly - and it doesn't have to. I'll be happy if I can keep the current scale and the level of satisfaction of my users forever.

Now, I wish I had some advice for someone with a new product in this space. The truth is I have no idea how viable or hard for someone to start something new may be.

If you want - let me know specifically what you're working on and I'll give you some feedback (either in here or through the contact form on Next Episode). (it's fine if you prefer to keep it under wraps too)

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