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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?

#221

Post by officiallywise »

stanislavb wrote: post #23

I'm a one-man army, too. I've built SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com & LibHunt. I left my job a few months ago and since then have focussed on developing and growing SaaSHub. It's been growing steadily for the last 2-3 months. My expectations are that it will generate ~$2,500+ in January and $100k+ in 2020 given the current growth. I have a massive list of ideas that I will work on next. Yet, I'd like to be fully sust…

I built something similar to LibHunt without knowing about it. Someone on http://wip.chat pointed it out and I quickly shifted my focus to something else. It just doesn't seem like enough room in that space for two players and you already have the market cornered.

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

#222

Post by ktaylor »

everybodyknows wrote: post #197
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?

My understanding is he looks for phrases people are increasingly searching for such as "BHP Free Sippy Cup" and then buys a domain such as bhp-free-sippy-cups.com. On the site, he just displays affiliate links to various vendor product pages for that product, e.g. Amazon, etc.

The trick is understanding the trends and having the SEO skills to efficiently build the traffic. He can't put too much individual time into any one property because it will on average only generate a few hundred dollars a month in revenue.

If the trend becomes popular enough someone comes in and buys the domain for their real sippy cup business.

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

#223

Post by pkalinowski »

stef25 wrote: post #216
pkalinowski wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never used Sidekiq myself, but I believe its value is mainly speed and reliability. It suits systems with hundreds of thousands of jobs to process. At least that's what I read on website :)

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

#224

Post by thepredestrian »

stanmancan wrote: post #3

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 kind of site do you run that generates $1.5k/month in ad revenue? High traffic niche blog?

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

#225

Post by crobertsbmw »

stef25 wrote: post #186
rhlsthrm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the API do if you don't mind sharing?

In his submissions on HN there's a link to macvendors.com Pretty cool simple idea.

I visited the site, and turned off my adblocker, but am not seeing any ads. Are the ads hidden somewhere? What does one have to do to see ads these days? Edit - Nevermind, I thought I had my ad blocker off, but apparently incognito mode didn't turn it off like I expected it would.

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

#226

Post by jlevers »

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…

If you made something like this, I would absolutely pay for it :)

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

#227

Post by NicoJuicy »

tempsy wrote: post #168
NicoJuicy wrote: post #167

All these nummers and still, my dad is a vet and earned 300k € in his best month ( without much sleep). Most of the even more successful ones don't even take that in per year. And yes, he is a one man show, no tech involved. It was very eye opening to me, since my dad can't even boot a PC. Competition is local though, it's 6-9 other local veterinarians. He seems to be the most successful one (= he is the one everyone…

Yes that is impressive but the difference is your dad has to work for that money whereas with software once you achieve success in you do very little work relative for the amount of money you bring in.

And everyone is forgetting their unpaid hours they did for getting it off the ground.

You still need support for all of your users and actual sales. Which is also work.

Users can ask for a refund if your cloud goes down.

I would also rephrase "once you reach success" to "if you reach success"

The statement is also not valid for consultants, only for business owners with SAAS products/licenses.

TLDR; you're statement is largely false. Success != Luck

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

#228

Post by mperham »

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.

I'm at ~$2m now. Still no employees.

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

#229

Post by _-___________-_ »

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…

It really doesn't need to be expensive to serve hundreds-to-thousands of requests per second. Despite what some people will tell you, that's not actually very significant load.

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

#230

Post by Toss8675309 »

jlevers wrote: post #226
Toss8675309 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you made something like this, I would absolutely pay for it :)

Thanks for sharing this. Your comment and the sibling comment have me thinking through how I'd launch something like this.
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