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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#221

Post by davidw »

itengelhardt wrote: post #145
davidw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Christoph! I came here to post the bootstrapped.fm link too, but I think HN is a fine place to post this discussion too. I think the small, bootstrapped company is where it's at for many of us who don't want to or can't do the VC thing in SV. That's probably a large majority even on a site like this. Rob's book is an obbligatory reference in this space too: http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launchi…

Hi David! Great to hear that you are doing well with LiberWriter. That definitely is a pain point for people. I like that you kept the layout simple using only bootstrap. that's a lot faster & cheaper than doing a full blown design.

Our customers could not care less about the design stuff as long as it looks decent, so it is not something I have bothered with even now that I have some money I could spend on it.

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

#222

Post by sixQuarks »

eropple wrote: post #195
sixQuarks wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP asked for businesses that provide a majority of your income. With a site that has an alexa ranking of over 3 million, there is no way this is your primary source of income.

> it looks like I'll be able to make it my sole income source next season Chill, man.

Sorry, but if everyone replies with their side project, this page will be full of non-relevant sites. Like the OP, I'm interested in seeing fully self-sufficient one-man startups.

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

#223

Post by gmays »

vram22 wrote: post #220
gmays wrote: post #5

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…

Checked out the site a bit, looks good. Also good domain name :)

Thanks! I picked up the domain name for around $150, which I actually thought was expensive at the time. The .org and .net versions were available, thankfully.

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

#224

Post by gmays »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #214
gmays wrote: post #5

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…

Really love how you layout the "What We Do" vs. "What You Do" - Strong selling point, visually appealing, and pretty unique.

Thanks, I really appreciate that. I'm actually pretty self-conscious about the design because I don't have a design background and I'm color blind. Every time I use new colors (which isn't often) I have to send them to my wife to let me know if they look ok. It's a real pain in the ass, but whatever, I love the work.

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

#225

Post by cauterize »

stevesearer wrote: post #212
cauterize wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is meant by a "gin side project"?

Yeah, I meant fun :) Basically I saw images of Google's offices and wondered if there were any sites that showed only office photos. There weren't any that I could find so I bought a domain and started posting photos I came across. It was a collection of candid photos that weren't very good at first, but it is mainly architectural photography submitted by design firms now.

gin side project. noun. :: A fun side project that turns into successful venture worthy of posting to Hacker News (with or without having been conceived while drinking gin).

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

#226

Post by davidw »

zerr wrote: post #63
patio11 wrote: post #11

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…

It really requires a different mindset. For instance, while BCC makes sense, I can't imagine someone willing to pay for something like Appointment Reminder.

This is a pretty good comment in that it highlights the thought processes a lot of us go through. "I can't believe ..." or "I can't imagine ...". Believe it - there are tons of people out there willing to pay for various niche things that make their lives/businesses better. I've heard the same thing about one of my own projects, LiberWriter. There's open source software that kinda/sorta does what we do, but a lot of people just want to pay someone and make the problem go away. They don't want to know HTML or how NCX files work.

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

#227

Post by rs »

I run https://xp-dev.com and more recently http://deployer.vc and https://zoned.io - all as a solo. I am hiring now, have used freelancers for help over time, but generally it has been a solo effort.

Do tell if you have any specific questions, and I'll be more than happy to help out!

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

#228

Post by patio11 »

zerr wrote: post #138
patio11 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose you run a professional services business where you have appointments. If people don't come to an appointment, you don't get money. You might pay an office manager to call people the morning of their appointment to remind them, so that they come into their appointment, so you get paid, right? Appointment Reminder is like an office manager who costs $200 a month, not $4,000 a month, is vastly more likely to suc…

I didn't mean appointment reminding in general - which is a good thing obviously. But I thought it was a long time solved problem by other means (and not necessary by office manager), be it some "enterprise" calendar or todo software which are integrated in most of the "enterprise"/business software products, etc...

Substantially all problems were solved by someone else first. That doesn't meaningfully inhibit you from solving them, too. Reasons why this could redound to your advantage include superior marketing, positioning, ability to attack different niches, lower cost structure, or the ability to survive off the crumbs the big guys don't care about.

It's totally worth it for me to have the CEO and head of product development talk to your office manager for 30 minutes then custom code an import script, to get you onboarded at $200 to $500 a month. The 800 LB Gorilla basically doesn't care about you below $1k a month.

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

#229

Post by AlexMuir »

daniel-levin wrote: post #192
bemmu wrote: post #107

I run http://www.candyjapan.com It just crossed 500 paying members. I started it with my wife, but recently the shipping part is no longer done by us two manually, but by a local supermarket. In the beginning it was just an email to some previous customers asking if they might be interested in a club like this. Then a landing page and a HN post. From there it grew through blog mentions and now there is a trickle of o…

I love this. I clicked on the link, and being South African, I've been conditioned into thinking that all sorts of cool services/products from overseas either aren't available here or are prohibitively expensive to import. So, I was delighted when your page said, "Free shipping from Japan, even to South Africa". Thank you.

It generates that text from geolocation and is a brilliant move.

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

#230

Post by cpncrunch »

SyneRyder wrote: post #213
cpncrunch wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, vacation / time off shouldn't be an issue. I've been doing this for 15 years and now my product runs like clockwork. Generally unless I'm doing new dev work, I only have a few support emails per day. As long as I go on vacation somewhere where I can at least have wifi in the evenings and mobile data during the day to occasionally check my email, it's not a problem. Also I regularly take long breaks during t…

I was going to post something similar - I was able to take 3 months to travel overseas as a 1-person business, and the business didn't collapse or run into any calamities. I always had my laptop and answered customer emails every couple of days. Maybe it's an issue if you're running a SAAS business. Instead my stuff is consumer downloadable software, so if there was a problem it was usually just a single customer, no…

Well my business has SAAS and downloadable software versions. However I've been refining it for 15 years, so it generally runs very smoothly unless I screw something up. I usually don't touch ANYTHING in the 1-week before I go on vacation, just in case I break something.
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