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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#261

Post by Jack000 »

csallen wrote: post #255
WA wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my doubts about this. The interviews made IH take off when the forums had maybe one Post per day or less. I bet the interviews get way more traffic than the forums. For lurkers, it’s the interviews for sure.

The forum and the discussions there get 3x the pageviews the interviews do, and that gap is widening every day.

I sure hope so, it's literally the front page :]

I think you're doing a great job growing the community, it has a different vibe from HN and r/startups and I personally do get a lot of value from it, although I'm still mostly interested in the interviews.

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

#262

Post by coaxial »

cperciva wrote: post #115

Tarsnap. I have an employee now, but I ran the company myself for the first ten years and from ~2011 onwards Tarsnap has been the vast majority of my income. I got started by... well, sitting down and scratching my itch. I wanted good backups, and it turned out that other people wanted them too.

I love tarsnap as well. Does its thing very well without getting in the way. It's a pleasure every time I use it.

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

#263

Post by owenwil »

I built a daily technology briefing + community because I got pretty tired of the way technology sites work (just a vomit of news stories) and make about $2,200/month at this point, so I recently gave up my job to work on it. It's growing fairly steadily, because people really value not being advertised to, and that's been fantastic.

I'm also pulling together a bunch of disparate services to make it a great experience, including SSO to the community, paywalled content and a custom emailer that integrates deeply with the CMS. So far, so good, and I basically slammed it all together until it worked over the space of a year -- but the real work was three years of sending a weekly newsletter as well to build up an audience before I even launched this thing.

At some point I'm planning to sell the application I wrote that powers it, because there's a distinct lack of 'community in a box' platforms that can solve this problem. First I have to finish it, but that's kinda the end goal.

https://char.gd/recharged if you'd like to try it! The code best-friends gives 25% off for three months.

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

#264

Post by sixfoot3 »

owenwil wrote: post #263

I built a daily technology briefing + community because I got pretty tired of the way technology sites work (just a vomit of news stories) and make about $2,200/month at this point, so I recently gave up my job to work on it. It's growing fairly steadily, because people really value not being advertised to, and that's been fantastic. I'm also pulling together a bunch of disparate services to make it a great experienc…

What are some of the key things you've learned along the way? E.g. More community interaction helped grow the newsletter, etc.

I would be curious to know what your roadmap for the "additional features." What are the advantages you've found "slamming together" the system vs. having a custom system built?

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

#265

Post by zweicoder »

niko001 wrote: post #59

I run IdeaCheck, which validates startup ideas by running a survey within the idea's target audience. Started in early 2017 and it can now sustain me full-time. https://ideacheck.io

This is interesting. How did you actually find people to respond to the surveys?

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

#266

Post by owenwil »

sixfoot3 wrote: post #264
owenwil wrote: post #263

I built a daily technology briefing + community because I got pretty tired of the way technology sites work (just a vomit of news stories) and make about $2,200/month at this point, so I recently gave up my job to work on it. It's growing fairly steadily, because people really value not being advertised to, and that's been fantastic. I'm also pulling together a bunch of disparate services to make it a great experienc…

What are some of the key things you've learned along the way? E.g. More community interaction helped grow the newsletter, etc. I would be curious to know what your roadmap for the "additional features." What are the advantages you've found "slamming together" the system vs. having a custom system built?

Hey! Great questions, thanks! Well, so far:

1) Focus on the community, then the content. I thought the content would be some sort of mish-mash of opinion and really more long form stuff, but people prefer compact, quick takes, in 3-4 paragraphs. Makes sense, but hard to see as a maker!

2) Additional features is a great question! I plan a few different things:

- Community integration with the newsletter

- Integration with 'real-time chat services' like Discord, as I do think they serve a purpose

- Web push for notifying of "big" news outside of the band of the slow newsletters for those that want it

- Alternate delivery mechanisms for the newsletters (perhaps as simple, short FB Messenger pieces)

- Calendar subscription for events in the industry

- A bunch more I've forgotten already :).

3) Technically the system is custom built, I guess I'm referring to how it feels to have done that myself. I tried to hack it all together via existing stuff at first, but it was clearly not going to work, so I built a deep Craft CMS integration with my app to get where we are now. It's a great way to work because it's all built on top of relational content!

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

#267

Post by newusertoday »

mrskitch wrote: post #137

I've started one after listening to a lot of indiehackers podcast's. Mine is https://browserless.io , which is IaaS, and I just hist ~$1k/mo at about the 3 month mark. Still not providing the majority of my income, however it's growing to the point where it will in a year or so, depending how things go. If anything else it's been a wickedly fun ride, and I've learned quite a bit in doing it.

you already provide docker image in github, how do you make money ? by running the customer's script in your infrastructure?

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

#268

Post by vram22 »

acabal wrote: post #104

I run Scribophile, one of the largest writing communities online, as a one-person business, though I have a ton of help from our volunteer forums moderators. The story is pretty unimpressive... I had the idea back in the days when web 2.0 was the new hotness, so I decided to make it happen and use it as an excuse to learn web 2.0 technologies. It was a freemium model from day 1, though I didn't expect many people to…

Just checked out standardebooks.org a bit. Seems like a great idea. Will check it out more and share it with others via my social media channels.

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

#269

Post by vram22 »

vram22 wrote: post #268
acabal wrote: post #104

I run Scribophile, one of the largest writing communities online, as a one-person business, though I have a ton of help from our volunteer forums moderators. The story is pretty unimpressive... I had the idea back in the days when web 2.0 was the new hotness, so I decided to make it happen and use it as an excuse to learn web 2.0 technologies. It was a freemium model from day 1, though I didn't expect many people to…

Just checked out standardebooks.org a bit. Seems like a great idea. Will check it out more and share it with others via my social media channels.

I checked out a couple of books there. Neither had PDF as an available format. Why is this? Is PDF not considered an ebook format?
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