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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#241

Post by emilioolivares »

dangrossman wrote: post #19

Hey there. /raises hand. https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com Five figures a month, just me, I've written about my solo business a couple times in other Ask HN threads. Ten years ago (almost to the day), in my college dorm, I was looking at the Webalizer web stats report my web host provided for my blog, and thought "I could do something much cooler than this". So I did. I had built a few education…

Awesome Dan, thanks for sharing. Very inspiring to see a one man show producing such fine products. Is there anything you outsource? You should write a book on the details of how you did it, I'd buy it in a heartbeat!

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

#242

Post by gk1 »

cpncrunch wrote: post #189
gk1 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "I think that is about the only feasible way to do it." It may be the only way to do it very quickly. Most companies don't just go viral on day 1, they work very hard to get customers. Some times advertising makes sense, other times it doesn't, but it's certainly not the only option.

I meant, it's the only feasible way to do it if you're a single founder with zero funding.

I still have to disagree. You don't have to look far (patio11's Bingo Card Creator) to find single-founder businesses that reached level of success without going viral. (I suppose this all depends on your definition of viral, too.)

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

#243

Post by medius »

fookyong wrote: post #29

http://beatrixapp.com Solo, self funded and profitable. I work on it while traveling around Asia. Agree with patio11 there's probably way more than would speak up here. I seldom contribute to HN or the bootstrapping forums mentioned in another reply. I browse a little, but 99% of my time spent in front of the computer is spent working on product or replying to customer emails. How I got started: I've built SaaS apps…

Can you please share how you marketed the app? What worked and what didn't?

Everyone: When sharing information about your app, I would request people to share marketing approaches as well. It would greatly help people who are just getting started.

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

#244

Post by emilioolivares »

bjoerns wrote: post #36

I run https://www.spreadgit.com , a hosted version control system for Excel. Doing this solo and full time. It's been a hell of a ride so far but I love it.

Wow this is an awesome idea. Every business has this problem with multiple people trying to modify the same excel file.

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

#245

Post by emilioolivares »

braindead_in wrote: post #152

I ran Scribie. http://scribie.com . I started it in August 2008 and was the only person working on it for 5 years. In 2013 we established our first QA center and now we are around 20.

Wow this is very cool. This you actually do the transcribing, I'd imagine you outsource this, correct?

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

#246

Post by mstump »

glazskunrukitis wrote: post #86
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…

Pato11's stories are always inspiring and interesting to read. They were a huge motivator to start my own business, which I eventually did. My first attempt in online business was GetSSL.me ( https://getssl.me ), which has been one-man shop most of the time. It was pretty simple to set up and run, but the biggest pain point was payments, because of my geographic location. Also marketing was a big issue, because I am…

Your cert for getssl.me has expired...

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

#247

Post by balladeer »

ch0wn wrote: post #113
balladeer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you planning to build sth on top of Glacier or include Glacier as an storage option (seeing it's on S3 anyway)? It will bring the cost down a great deal.

See http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-why-tarsnap-doesn...

Many of us have alternative backup solutions. Like I use CrashPlan to backup pretty much everything and the most important files are backed up also to my external hard drive and a friend's machine (all via CrashPlan). Having said that I still consider I've only one off-site backup that is CrashPlan servers and though they provide excellent service they have failed many times before and hence I need an insurance. My entire laptop (except OS and apps) glaciated by Tarsnap can be that insurance policy which I'll most probably never access anyway, until when My laptop and all those three backup destination fail at once and in that scenario I will be willing to pay that cost seeing I saved a lot during those years/months.

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

#248

Post by enigmabomb »

ohashi wrote: post #12

1 man startup - http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare I do web hosting reviews. Not the scummy pay-for-placement stuff you see, but an actual review site. It tracks what people are saying about hosting companies on Twitter and publishes the results. The story is told a bit here http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/25/web-hosting-reviews-are-a-c... I was just tired after 10 years of still relying exclusively on my exper…

I sent you a contact form email. =)

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

#249

Post by enigmabomb »

scottclark wrote: post #169

Great Thread.... I live entirely in the consulting space working on SEO/SEM and content marketing, and have done so alone since 1997. After a few pivots in web design, hosting and domaining, I've ended up in a place where I can be picky with clients and charge good fees. I hit the website development market on its first big wave, and moved into search before 99% of other SEOs even knew the discipline existed (and bef…

Cheers Scott, I consult in this space also, though recently I've been trying to productize my way out of it. I built http://killswit.ch to help folks like us who are one person agencies and have to deal with sending traffic to sites they don't control. It sucks when your KPI's suffer because of someone else. Let me know if you want to give it a whirl.

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

#250

Post by benackles »

dangrossman wrote: post #19

Hey there. /raises hand. https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com Five figures a month, just me, I've written about my solo business a couple times in other Ask HN threads. Ten years ago (almost to the day), in my college dorm, I was looking at the Webalizer web stats report my web host provided for my blog, and thought "I could do something much cooler than this". So I did. I had built a few education…

Hey Dan, Improvely looks like an awesome product. Incredible work for a one-person shop. Our company was talking about a click fraud monitoring system last week. I'm going to pitch this to the rest of our agency tomorrow.
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