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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 #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Yes you're right - he seems to be using adsense to drive traffic. I guess if adsense didn't work for small businesses, google wouldn't be making the money they do :)

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

#262
post #239
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much advertising do you do? I notice you're buying ads on search for key terms. Do you do much display advertising. I'm sure you've figured out the lifetime value of your customers and you buy advertising based on that. If your margin's decent, you can probably get more aggressive with display ads to scale the business. I think the business has a ton of potential.

I've bought ads, but it would have been better not to. Total I've probably spent around $3000 over ~2 years for campaigns that only brought in around 30 conversions. It would have been better to just spend that time blogging instead. I tried Facebook (side banner, newsfeed and promoted posts), AdWords, web comics, stumbleupon, Reddit ads. Some of the campaigns were close to break-even, though. With this few conversio…

What about direct media buying? With a product as niche as yours, it may be worthwhile to identify specific sites (ie candy enthusiast forums/blogs) and work out a deal for a monthly banner ad. Start negotiating with an estimated price based on their traffic numbers and your LTV, and if after a month you're not profitable, go back and negotiate a more favorable price.

But aside from that, I don't think you should necessarily give up on advertising on the larger platforms you've been working with. As someone with extensive experience in online advertising, I will tell you that campaigns that are break even from the start or even lose a little money often have huge potential for becoming profitable. Just getting conversions is a positive sign. Consider the full path from advertisement to checkout. There's almost infinite room for improvement from the copy on your advertisements, to the images, to layout of your landing page, placement of buttons, size of form fields, background colors, etc etc. Then there's all the backend changes such as lifetime value and product costs that you can create additional margin. Combine all these things and you can swing a losing campaign to a hugely profitable one. Then with additional margin you create, you have the potential to focus on scaling. G'luck to you.

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

#263
post #3

I run a small one-man-show publishing house: http://minireference.com . I produce math/physics textbooks for adults. I'm the author, business person, marketing person, and strategic partnerships person. Revenues are not stellar, but they keep me off the streets... The value I provide is synthesis of a lot of educational material that exists out there into a coherent package (a book). In many ways, my work is similar…

Just bought your book, looks awesome and I'm sure it'll come in handy! =)

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

#264
I am running inBoundio - http://www.inboundio.com (I call it basecamp of marketing) and is the only guy so I do all the work.

I am really not that worried about slow growth or not making much money, I am enjoying what I am doing, works on average 6 hours a day and can spend rest of my time on learning new things and thinking about life and philosophy.

I started because I felt that market (and so do I) need such simplified software. Most of the options were too complicated and were very costly.

I will soon be touching 100 paying customers so will write a detailed post and share it on hackernews.

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

#265
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…

Nice.

How do you market this stuff? How are you getting customers?

If you don't mind, can you share some stuff on the revenue numbers and what your experience has been from conversations with customers?

Is there a way we could chat up?

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

#266
post #101

I am running premium Ghost Blog marketplace http://www.gtheme.io/ I solo doing design, develop, marketing, as well as writing contents around Ghost.

What kind of traffic are you getting? What is the source of traffic?

I was contemplating something like but thought themeforest may be a better channel to sell.

How do you market the site?

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

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is cool. I live in the Methow Valley and the MVSTA should use this!

Or they could use a service that doesn't charge the public for the information.

I don't charge the public. Ski areas pay me a yearly fee to publish their reports. I handle all the data processing, generating maps, keeping servers up and running, mobile device provisioning, equipment testing, warranty, tech support, etc, etc.

There are a couple of areas that have tried to DIY, with limited success, they usually simply don't have the technical knowledge on staff. I've been surprised myself at the breadth of technical turf I've had to cover to create something that works reliably and simply. For a reasonably technical software engineer with a bit of hardware experience, it's not a big deal, but for everyone else, it's too complex a problem.

One of the really interesting problems I had to solve was reliably figuring out which trail the grooming equipment was traversing. Unlike roadways, the GPS data for the trails is typically either non-existent, inaccurate or just plain wrong. Cleaning that up is a bit of effort for each ski area. In addition, ski trails are often in much closer proximity than roadways, which combined with GPS error margins, means that I had to do some fairly gnarly stuff to avoid jumping between nearby trails constantly. It looks simple enough on the surface, but it required some real hair-pulling to get working reliably.

Contract negotiations with cell-network providers weren't much fun either. Many ski areas are in pretty marginal cell-network coverage regions, so finding devices that behaved well in that environment was critical (in addition to handling very cold weather, i.e. -40F for 8 hour stretches). The grooming staff are typically completely non-technical, working weird shift hours, etc, so the system has to be completely hands-off after installation. Finding a device that would do that, handle the harsh environment and be properly certified to operate on the north american mobile networks was no easy task.

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

#268
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As someone who has no idea about the SSL certificate business, how does your business work? Are you a reseller or do you make money on affiliate commissions? Just genuinely curious.

I am a reseller. GetSSL.me processes customer's order, requests a certificate from certificate authority (e.g. Comodo) and then they send the certificates to the customer.

The point of GetSSL.me is simplicity, price and support. If you were buying directly from Comodo, you would overpay a great amount, because reseller prices are much cheaper.

A lot of clutter has been removed from ordering process and you can get certificate in just a few minutes. Our support is friendly and helps with basically anything. Also a lot of people want to buy stuff from small, approachable businesses not from large corporations (e.g. GoDaddy).

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

#269
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Sorry that you had to see that, we had a little SSL downtime today while we renewed our certificates. All systems are operational now.

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

#270
post #24

I created: http://skitrails.info/ I'm an avid cross-country skier, and traditionally daily trail reports are done by hand by the maintenance staff after they're out all night working on the trails. I had the bright idea of putting GPS tracking devices in grooming equipment and creating the "what's been groomed" report automatically, in real-time. It took about 4 seasons to really get it right, and there was no apprec…

This is cool. I live in the Methow Valley and the MVSTA should use this!

The MVSTA did contact me back in November, but I guess they decided against it for the time being. Feel free to lobby them :-)

A couple of areas are funding their subscription by getting a local ski shop to pay for the service. There's a huge range of budgets across the industry, it's been tricky figuring out pricing that works for everyone.

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