Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

You can do that without being paid for it, and then you can control your own schedule completely.

> It's also a form of security should the online income suddenly dry up.

That's fair, but chances are if you managed to build something that generates enough passive income to live off of then you probably won't have much difficulty finding a job if you needed to.

> It can also be a source of healthy social connections.

I personally thing relying on work for social interaction is a terrible idea.

> If someone's life works, changing some piece of it could cause it to come apart rapidly. Why risk that?

Fair enough, but all I'm saying is I don't really understand how it works for them. To me, my job is just how I put food on the table, and my pursuit of money is purely so that one day I can do that without having to sell my time to someone else.

You'd be surprised.

They already share the passwords with their marketing agencies, where interns basically type them in on their personal phones (in sometimes quite large companies!). My service lets all of those people use the Instagram account, but only their admin knows/sees the password. If we can keep it as secure as their own internal processes, then this is a fair-enough trade off for many companies.

Different people relate to work differently. Some people have some of their best relationships through their work.

Your experience isn't invalid, but it also doesn't invalidate how other people experience life.

I replied because I started out as a homemaker, then I got divorced after about two decades. I got to have an extreme experience of doing useful things for reasons other than money, and when I got divorced it was financially and socially devastating.

My so-called friends didn't stick around. All the life enhancing, useful work I had done was not readily translated into paid work.

I've spent recent years figuring out how to have a healthy relationship to paid work. It's overall been a better experience for me than the years I did useful things for others without being paid for it.

I actually have a decent track record of being able to put my volunteer work on a resume to help me get a job and I had a corporate job for a while. But it was an entry level job that didn't pay enough and corporate life wasn't really a good fit for me.

I mean, wherever you go, there you are. I'm no less guilty of tunnel vision (so to speak) than you are. I'm just looking at the world through a different tunnel.

But I desperately want to have enough paid work and to relate to the world through that lens. I don't feel valued for the things I've done and I've literally lived in dire poverty for years, including several years of homelessness. No, people don't really care and I feel I've been badly burned for doing good things for other people and not getting compensated for it.

All those people that I did wonderful things for who got serious careers out of it have not helped me create a real career with sufficient income. It hasn't opened doors for me in terms of being taken seriously and adequately compensated.

It's been enormously frustrating, baffling and enraging. It's proven to be a stubbornly intractable problem.

I never want to be 100% financially dependent on just one thing again.

The guy in this discussion making $6000 a month for two or three hours of work each week may have no ability to replicate that success if this stops working. Lots of businesses have been harmed by the rise of ad blockers, losing as much as 80% of their income over night.

One slam dunk success doesn't guarantee you can readily create another. For many people, that kind of success is short-term and will never happen again.

It's why the NFL requires financial education for their players. They are all college educated, but they are also very young and most NFL careers are short-lived. For many of them, the two or three years they play pro football will be the most money they will make in their life.

If they spend it like they think this is their starting salary and it only gets better from here, then they basically party their asses off for a few short years followed by an injury, the sudden end of their career and no means whatsoever to make anywhere near that much ever again. If they didn't save and invest, it's gone and never coming back.

That's an all too common story for a rather wide variety of wildly successful experiences. That kind of extreme success is frequently described as luck because it's so hard to replicate.