I started www.facebook.com/kokonautweathersensors
Looking for people to participate in a pilot project now
Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
41–50 of 399 posts
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#42I'm running http://lickcreator.com which is a web based music notation software. Still in Beta, so no revenue. Been at it for six months now, kinda slow, but I had some new stuff to learn like SVG and Web Audio API. Experimented a lot with AngularJS and React. Went back to Backbone.js and lost some time there. But good experience. My hopes are high for this product.
Im curious why you switched from react to backbone. Ive been considering doing the opposite. Mostly because I want to be able to use redux for undo/redo functionality and also for user action replays I can use for debugging. Redux doesnt play well with the backbone.js paradigm.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#43I started https://officesnapshots.com as a side project 9 years ago and it has been my full-time work for the last ~4 years. If you don't count the cost of me, it has always been profitable as the business costs itself are pretty low. I had zero business goals at the beginning and now it is probably the most popular site in its niche (office design). The thing most people are interested in here is that I moved from u…
How was your overall experience for the swich to self-hosted ads in terms of time and money you had to invest given that the main sellingpoint for Adsense is its ease of use?
I had Adsense and self-hosted ads simultaneously for a while and had built a decent base of advertisers and contacts over the years so there wasn't much additional investment of time above what I was already doing.
Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping graphics in and out is the easy part.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#44I'm running http://lickcreator.com which is a web based music notation software. Still in Beta, so no revenue. Been at it for six months now, kinda slow, but I had some new stuff to learn like SVG and Web Audio API. Experimented a lot with AngularJS and React. Went back to Backbone.js and lost some time there. But good experience. My hopes are high for this product.
Im curious why you switched from react to backbone. Ive been considering doing the opposite. Mostly because I want to be able to use redux for undo/redo functionality and also for user action replays I can use for debugging. Redux doesnt play well with the backbone.js paradigm.
I really liked React and the idea of components with two way data binding. Unfortunately I found it just doesn't work well with SVG. If you have some HTML divs to manipulate, great.
Also if you have good experience in JavaScript overall, Backbone.js is fantastic. Combine this with Underscore/Lodash and Babel for ES6 and you have a good build system.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
A word of advice from an internet stranger: start charging as soon as you can. This will determine whether you are a running a business or a fun side project.
Thanks for your advice. There are couple competitors on a market right now ( launchkit.com, storeshots.net etc. ) and they have richer functionality than my service. So i'm not sure why people would pay for my app rather than for theirs.
Busy devs aren't going to do a competitive services search... they're going to use the first tool they find / hear about. Focus on SEO, SEM, offer a free demo mode with watermarks, then charge around $5-10/mo recurring for unlimited usage for solo dev (maybe $20-30 for team use), and you'll be golden.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#46My side project StatusGator, which monitors service status pages, has been running profitably for the last year. It took about 3 months to become profitable and it's only so because my time is "free". (But isn't that always the case?) I don't do anything to promote it so growth has been entirely organic. I get a few free sign ups every day. Although they very infrequently convert to paid, I keep expenses low so it do…
I don't know if statuspage.io is similar to what you're doing, but their blog documents much of how they got profitable. Makes for interesting reading.
A little different: Services like statuspage.io, Runstatus, Cachet, Status.io, etc. all offer status pages. StatusGator aggregates all the status pages you care about into one status page for your own reference and also sends you alerts to email, Slack, etc, when those pages change.
I love the idea of blogging about growth and profitability. Seems like that could be a good marketing channel, in addition to being very educational.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#47I run a single person company https://www.fantasysp.com It is a fantasy sports company that helps you manage your team(s) by offering player projections, waiver suggestions, optimal lineups, trade suggestions, etc. We also help with fanduel/draft kings lineups. Revenue has increased steadily over the past 4 years in the range of 20%-30% year over year. User base growth is different as I focus more on active users rat…
Interesting, what metric do you use to consider "active"?
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#48I have been a single founder company for going on 10 years. Running multiple SaaS services over those years. Some have come and gone and a couple stuck around for 8+ years. Revenue has fluctuated anywhere from $800k+ yearly at its height (before 2008 crash) to as low as $250k yearly.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#49I'm attempting to run a side project / business. I'm launching it this month (it's been slowly gaining in sign-ups prior to release which is a good sign in my opinion). It's https://www.simex.io/, a personal assistant you can give tasks to over email, sms and other protocols in the future.
So no growth (unless you account my 50 sign-ups in the past 2 weeks, much higher than my sign-ups at the beginning of June when I added the form) or revenue yet. I'm hoping to launch in a couple of weeks and then immediately begin testing different monetization ideas (I have 3 and I don't think I should do all of them; would like to focus on one maybe two at the most so I need to do some testing).
The A.I. / assistant space is becoming quickly crowded but I think I have a bit of a unique niche in that it'll handle tasks asynchronously (starting with meeting organization and overall asking a group of people a question and aggregating the results much like a map reduce over people (okay that sounds hyperbolic but I like the symbolism)).
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm visiting the site without javascript (using noscript) I get a blank page. Please add a error message that javascript is required.
How do you use the internet in 2016 without JavaScript?
You disable it in your browser or most likely run something like noscript to maintain a white list.