I am a founder of http://pipi818.com -- a real-time web picture digging engine -- an entertainment website to help people find out what's the current hottest or controversial pictures/topics within China's "big intranet world". (syn to Chinese twitter - weibo). Selling advertisement seems to be the only profit way(business model). Don't know if anyone has any experience about how to expand the income for this kind of web app
Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
71–80 of 156 posts
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#72I'm a solo founder, spend most of my time running http://www.w3counter.com and http://www.w3roi.com . I also have a number of other sites I don't routinely talk about because they're competition-sensitive, and some past products that have been successful and sold, like "WP Review Site", a WordPress plugin that earned me over a quarter million in the year and a half I sold it. I started building webapps/services for a…
WPReviewSite is responsible for about 1/2 my income in the first year I became a full-time affiliate. Thanks for making that :)
Really? That's great. A shame the new owner didn't maintain the affiliate program, he's throwing away money.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#73I'm a single founder (Haystack Software). I wrote/write Arq (online backup to S3). I consider it a success because it pays my bills. A huge side benefit is it gets me into conversations with folks who tell me their business pain. I'm working on products to solve those pains as well. I was (and still am) hugely inspired by DHH's presentation at Startup School 08 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
Great product that keeps getting better and better. Glad to hear that it's supporting you properly.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nice job with your success so far. How did you manage to grab and interview with thestartupfoundry?
I met a guy at a startup related meet up here in Chicago. I shared my story, and he liked it. It turned out that he was doing some writing for The Startup Foundry, and he said that he'd love to interview me (I had pitched TSF before and received no response). E-mail is great, but face to face interaction has always been way more effective for me.
Thanks a lot for the reply. Tips like this go a long way obviously. :)
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#75I'm a solo founder at Scribie.com. My first venture was a embedded startup which failed and we closed it down in 2008. I decided to go it solo and released a free Skype recording app called CallGraph. It was based on some of the work I had done in my failed startup. The idea was follow the Freemium model and make money off paid services. One of the services was audio transcription and that took off. In that process I…
Very nice idea! I have one technical question - do you also use some speech-to-text software, or is it 100% human labor? I believe the utilization of such software (even if it gives crude results) can be of great use to a service like yours.
Right now it's all done manually. I experimented with CMU Sphinx II when I started but results were poor. The main problem was actually the recording quality, eg. background noises, people talking over each other etc. I plan to revisit it once again and try. Maybe things have improved.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#76I'm the single founder of Bignoggins Productions. I do sports apps for mobile devices. My apps have been pretty successful, reaching as high as #32 overall paid on iPhone and #60 overall paid on iPad. Been full time for about 9 months now. Made 75K last year, and on track for 250K+ this year. Almost all profit as my overhead is insanely low. Currently traveling the world with my wife while working on apps (our travel…
Do you pay yahoo for access to their Fantasy/Sports API?
Yahoo Sports has a free API. They currently do not have a commercial license option. I use it myself and I hope other fantasy sites follow their lead.
Learn more here: http://developer.yahoo.com/fantasysports/
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#77I'm the single founder of Bignoggins Productions. I do sports apps for mobile devices. My apps have been pretty successful, reaching as high as #32 overall paid on iPhone and #60 overall paid on iPad. Been full time for about 9 months now. Made 75K last year, and on track for 250K+ this year. Almost all profit as my overhead is insanely low. Currently traveling the world with my wife while working on apps (our travel…
You're living the dream man. Awesome.
I was just going to write that when I read your comment... :D I guess we all look to do that. To create value while living your life.
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
WPReviewSite is responsible for about 1/2 my income in the first year I became a full-time affiliate. Thanks for making that :)
Really? That's great. A shame the new owner didn't maintain the affiliate program, he's throwing away money.
Yeah, but some people can just be dumb all they like. I used the software for my own sites for a while before making my own ruby/rack CMS but I wasn't an affiliate.
I ended up going that route to stop trying to frankenstein WordPress into doing things it wasn't meant to do. WPReviewSite did help me get started though :)
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#79I've been a successful duo-founder (my wife is my business partner) for 3.5 years now. We started in affiliate marketing and have slowly added agency services and now software (we founded a newer company for that with a few business partners).
I've been working for myself full-time ever since we started and income is great. The last two years have been well in to the six figures and growth is excellent, allowing us to live comfortably here in San Diego with a great house. However, there are a few pitfalls to the marketing business...
Primarily, we found that affiliate marketing, while high-margin in theory, is so extremely competitive and dirty that your entire livelihood hangs by a thread. Google can slap your site, search algorithm changes can sandbox you and unscrupulous affiliates can and will copy your entire site wholesale and use it to compete directly with you. Google, the affiliate networks they use and ISP's will do absolutely nothing (one of the reasons for my ire with all of them as far as SEO/PPC goes) which made us resort to retaining legal counsel to slam people as soon as it crops up.
Our entire growth on the affiliate side has been Facebook and Mobile where our margins are often 300-400% as opposed to the slimmer 60-100% margins on AdWords. However, being in such a competitive and bleeding-edge field has meant that our agency clients get the benefit of that experience. We can often muscle a new client into highly a competitive segment and get them profiting quickly; we live the mindset of "if it doesn't make money, don't do it".
We ended up making our newer software company with a few co-founders because our overall growth there is better, margins are great, security is better and we have assets. You can't easily sell an affiliate web site, but you can build a software company that is very appealing to sell.
It has been a hell of an experience and I'm considering writing a series about it once we release our new app. Hopefully can bring the benefit of our blood/sweat/tears-and-such to the rest of HN :)
Re: Ask HN: Small product, single founder success stories?
#80Vanity fair galore... a very interesting at that though :)