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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#441

Post by lemming »

juskrey wrote: post #99
lemming wrote: post #60

I develop and sell Cursive ( https://cursive-ide.com ), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I'd be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I'm constantly amazed by how well Cursive does. The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent o…

I just wanted to ensure you about my total support as a paid user, and patience during that bad year. Thanks for your product!

Thanks for the kind words, I appreciate it!

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

#442

Post by edraferi »

khuknows wrote: post #22
agopaul wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice project! I keep onboarding screenshots for most Sass/web apps I use to get inspiration later for my own projects so I definitely find this very useful (bookmarked!). How do you monetize the project? I can't see any paid plans in the public website

I've commended to a response below with the business model, but yeah I've just started trialling a freemium model yesterday so need to update the rest of the site with clearer pricing plans etc. Until yesterday there was no freemium access, it was just paid up-front to access all the content. $39 per quarter or $99 per year. Your use case is kinda where the idea came from, most product people do something similar. Th…

Maybe allow & incentivize people to add their own videos? Eg you get a month free for every high-quality flow video.

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

#443

Post by lemming »

spv wrote: post #93
lemming wrote: post #60

I develop and sell Cursive ( https://cursive-ide.com ), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I'd be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I'm constantly amazed by how well Cursive does. The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent o…

I cannot believe that you make more from such a niche dev tool than your job at Google. I always thought people who use clojure/scheme would be using their custom setup in emacs or vim. I'm interested to learn more details, how things were when you first started out selling the app and the trend.

I wrote a little bit about this below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21337892), but I think that a lot of that perception is because lisps (with the exception of CL) have traditionally been things that people tinker with as a hobby. Once you get a significant number of people making a living working with a language, suddenly a lot of people want barriers to getting their work done removed. And Emacs, for all its benefits, can be a significant barrier to getting work done for a lot of people. Plus there are those of us who just think that life is too short :-)

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

#444

Post by wiseleo »

vfc1 wrote: post #327
tasuki wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps he genuinely enjoys his job? Why should he have to launch another business? He already started one and it's very successful! Let the man enjoy his freedom and have a regular job if he so pleases!

That is highly unlikely, such a mundane job as a sysadmin compared to having your own online business. If he liked it that much, then probably he wouldn't have started a whole side project that must have consumed evenings and weekends for years. If he would have found professional fulfillment in his job, he would not likely have started a side project in the first place. As he mentions in his own reply, he stays beca…

Not true for everyone. I genuinely love being a sysadmin, or more accurately business recovery specialist. Rebuilding systems after a disaster with no documentation is genuine fun for me. Otherwise I'd have gone insane. However, I have other projects that I work on.

I understand his position completely.

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

#445

Post by nathan_f77 »

nmfisher wrote: post #158
nathan_f77 wrote: post #131

I'm working on FormAPI [1], which helps developers fill out PDF documents. I started working on this around 2 years ago. I was mostly working on it part-time, and I took a few breaks while I was doing freelance work to pay the bills. This year I raised some money from Earnest Capital [2], which has allowed me to go full-time and hire some contractors. I used to think that I wanted to build a one-person company and st…

Interested to hear your experience with Earnest. Can you disclose how much you raised, what percentage earnings they take, and what the cap is?

Unfortunately I'm not able to disclose the exact details of the offer, but it was a fairly close to the default offer that you will find in their examples and spreadsheets. And so far my experience has been great! The money has been a huge help, but it's also been really great to have access to the mentor network and other founders.

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

#447

Post by imhoguy »

WA wrote: post #47

I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while. Please…

> People will pay for a product they use every day (and thus, derive value from every day). If your product is not used every day, but only once per month or so, expect way lower revenue.

This is my takeaway. Thank you so much for that!

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

#448

Post by cawlin »

Freeboots wrote: post #277
okramcivokram wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(not a designer) I would not start my 7-day free trial without beforehand having more information on what the product looks and feels like. In the "How FontPeek Helps" section there's "Show your fonts" sections, but it shows no fonts. I'd love to see some demo fonts/pages with embedded fonts at least, perhaps a list of links to the designer's websites showing the widget (I assume it's a widget, there's no info on it)…

Yeah, super weird. Surely they could just slap the font viewer thing right there above the fold and be like, "this is it, here it is."

If you are into typography you know what this thing looks like. This is super niche.

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

#449

Post by WA »

ryanhuff wrote: post #429
WA wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty well. Performance isn’t an issue anymore, although it’s still faster on iOS. My biggest issue with it is the lack of fine-grained control over input elements. Safari is the culprit here. For example, you can’t really make an input element that allows entering a time in this format "23:30" AND only show a specific keyboard with decimals and the colon. Textarea elements are also sometimes behaving weird when sel…

As a solo developer, I tried maintaining two native code bases for an app. It was first iOS native only. The Android version came later, and never reached feature parity. It was just too much work. If you were to start over, would you still choose Ionic and Cordova, or go with something else like Xamarin or React Native?

I'd still use Ionic + Cordova. Or to be a bit more specific: The Ionic team released Stencil a few months ago, which is a compiler for Web Components. They also released Capacitor, which is a replacement for Cordova.

I'm considering switching to these, because it gives me a bit more control over all of the code (and I'm not really a fan of Angular). But I'd use JS for apps again whenever I can. It's just so much more convenient and especially since I can release a PWA or web version without much effort.

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

#450

Post by WA »

technics256 wrote: post #423
WA wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am sole proprietor / Einzelunternehmer. A GmbH works too. Cons: - more work to set it up - more paper work - unnecessary in some cases Pros: - cash flow for you as a founder is more stable / taxes can be calculated and predicted more easily (only relevant if you expect a good year and then a bad year) Neutral: - Your personal liability is supposedly limited. This is only partially true. There's still the liability…

You hit the nail on the head, that's for sure. :) Hit me up and would be glad to buy you a beer if you're ever in Munich! Email is in the profile. Cheers.

Will do :)
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