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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#71

Post by fabianlindfors »

dvko wrote: post #32

I've been selling a couple of WordPress plugins since 2013, mostly piggy-backing on other popular services that were experiencing crazy growth and taking care of their WordPress integration for them (unofficially, some already had one that sucked). Yearly (subscription) revenue is at about $500K USD now. It has been growing by less than 10% for the last few years as I haven't been that interested in growing it - I wa…

Nice to see somebody else in the WP plugin business here on HN!

I'm developing Advanced Forms (https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-forms/), not nearly as popular as your plugins but makes for a nice side income.

If you have the time I'd love to hear how you've been promoting and growing your plugins over the years. I find that aspect of the business challenging and have mostly been relying on outside help.

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

#72

Post by Endlessly »

justaguyhere wrote: post #67
kpennell wrote: post #28

I think this has been asked before?

Yes, multiple times. No harm in asking again though - newer businesses launch all the time, people who didn't want to share before might want to share now etc. Everyone learns and benefits.

Agree, not only that, but per the HN FAQs it is official okay to do:

“Are reposts ok? — When a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we bury reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok. — Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.”

Basically, even though the topic is being reused, unless the responses are significantly similar, there’s no harm and if the community is not curious, it won’t get upvotes.

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

#73

Post by Axsuul »

julee04 wrote: post #69
Axsuul wrote: post #48

I run Trunk[1][2] which is a SaaS that helps businesses manage and sync their inventory in real-time between everywhere they sell (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Etsy, Squarespace, Square, Faire). It's my main source of income. Starting out, I got my first 10 customers for Trunk by talking to users on e-commerce forums and focusing only on features that would help solve their problem. I didn't have any account managemen…

This type of tool is really interesting. I have a couple of questions related to this: 1. What are the alternatives if they don't use a service like Trunk? 2. What have you seen as the "source of truth" for inventory? Is it Trunk or one of the services that Trunk connects to?

Hey appreciate the interest!

1. The alternative is manually adjusting stock levels on your other sales channels as things sell. For small shops, this is not too bad. It's usually the owner or some assistant who handles this but it can be a huge timesink. For high volume stores, this is a sisyphean task. Or you can just set stock high enough and not worry about it while emailing customers if you're actually out of stock and can't fulfill. Not a good idea though since you can get banned on marketplaces for overselling + it's a bad customer experience. Sometimes the sales channels themselves have their own integrations (e.g. Shopify integrates with eBay) but they have lots of issues

2. The "source of truth" before using Trunk is typically either Shopify/Squarespace or Square POS (for brick & mortar). So initially, Trunk can sync your most accurate sales channel to others that are out of sync. Once using Trunk, the inventory within Trunk essentially becomes the source of truth but it doesn't necessarily need to be managed there. For example, you are free to adjust stock levels within Etsy and Trunk will pick up on those changes automatically and sync them to Shopify, just as you'd expect. So it's flexible in that sense and gets out of your way/adapts to your workflow

I hope that info helped :)

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

#74

Post by aacook »

Method5440 wrote: post #70
aacook wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing, brother! I would like to take this moment to give a big shout-out to the USPS. NanaGram wouldn't exist without the postal service, in the US and abroad. Apparently, the USPS is struggling financially right now. You can help the USPS by buying stamps, which you can order online [1]. If you're new to the old-school hobby of letter-writing, I wrote some guides [2] to help you figure out how much post…

Absolutely love the idea of this service. Trying to sign up now, site is returning a blank page near the end of account creation. Hopefully this is a good sign and you’re seeing the HN spike. Either way, thank you for making this a thing.

Thank you! You should be good to go now.

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

#75

Post by moltar »

zapstar wrote: post #47

Define "success"... I make a few bucks a day from https://unitprice.org and it doesn't require any effort from me on a day-to-day basis. (I calculate the best price per unit on Amazon for a variety of different products, so the money I make from the affiliate links is typically enough to cover the cost of hosting plus an extra Lego set or two for my son.) Sadly, I have seen an uptick in revenue as a result of COVID-1…

Do you compile this info manually or do you scrape Amazon? If you scrape, how do you get around the blocking restrictions?

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

#76

Post by guinness74 »

pieterhg wrote: post #29

I run Nomad List and Remote OK by myself. Nomad List brings in ~$336,000/y with 972,480/mo pageviews and Remote OK ~$301,000/y with ~628,210/mo pageviews. I do everything myself from coding, designing, front end, back end, marketing, etc. I have one person on emergency call in case the server goes down when I sleep but that hasn't happened in years. You can see live revenue/traffic here, as I share it all: https://no…

Thanks for the insight. How did you aggregate for Remote OK — manual or did you scrape existing sites?

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

#77

Post by haltingproblem »

aacook wrote: post #56
haltingproblem wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks super awesome and the testimonials about the founder made my day - nice guys do win! No Nanas to send this to :( but will keep it in mind for other uses. I find the online print services super clunky to print - but I could use this to send myself picture prints to frame? Just a thought!

Thank you. When I initially launched on Reddit, lots of folks asked for an "adopt a grandparent" mode. I talked with some nursing homes last week and we're exploring the possibility now. I've always been hesitant to do this, primarily out of concern for abuse (e.g. elderly financial abuse) but a partnership with nursing homes plus background checks could be the answer.

You gave me an idea. I can use this to send prints to anyone who would enjoy physical prints. My friend's mom whom I dearly adore loves pictures of flowering plants :) Thank you!

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

#78

Post by nojvek »

Just putting this out there. Indiehackers.com is a community of people building solo-small team profitable businesses.

Check out the top products.

https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenu...

There’s also a massive longtail of people making no money too.

Making something that people want and will pay for that sustains a business is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort to get the first few paying customers.

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

#80

Post by patricklouys »

sahillavingia wrote: post #11

Does Gumroad count? We raised VC but most of that was bought back or written off. I run it by myself now. Gumroad helps creators sell digital products directly to their audiences. We're expanding to Memberships this year. I wrote about most of the story here: https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-failure-to-build-... And COVID-19 has been a boon, as we help folks earn a living from home. We'll see if it sticks!

Thanks for creating it. I sold the ebook variation of my book through Gumroad and it was a very good experience.

Looking forward to the membership part, might use it for another project of mine.

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