Breach Insider is a one person bootstrapped company: https://breachinsider.com
Been live for a few months now and enjoyed finding the balance between sales and producing new features.
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
81–90 of 277 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Random, electronics/toys/health/office supplies 2. Not much advertising, just checked and YTD spend is $600, most on a single product. Most traffic is organic 3. Mostly sell existing items that already have a lot of sales and we just get a share of those. That's what I'm paying Amazon enormous commissions for - to bring the eyeballs
How do you figure out what items have a lot of sales?
Rank, reviews, guessing, other tricks
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, this guy is truly an inspiration. If you're a one person business, you will find this tweet very useful: https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/93870716650815488... (aka stop running after shiny new things and just do it!)
No offense but Pieter Levels seems like a bit of a bastard, and you can see it in that thread. I don't pay much attention to him, but when I do come across his social media posts they're pretty off-putting. He's pretty successful yes, but €50k/mo is not exactly f-you money.
When it's $50k/mo revenue from business you built and do not need to needle with day in and day out, it absolutely is. Can you sit back and live off dividends from that? No of course not. You don't have Hollywood money or VC money but you sure as shit don't need to spend an afternoon polishing your resume for a day job.
If unemployed and broke is at one end of the spectrum and living off investment dividends is the other, this is 95% of the way there.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not many expenses, though.
Then why not just list the profit? Typically when I see revenues posted it means the profit must only be a fraction of that amount.
Let's use a car as an example. Say Peter's biz buys a car and he uses it. Is that an expense? Does the biz make less profit because of that car payment? Or is he just spending profit on it since it's mainly/entirely personal use? Not trying to get into a tax discussion but my point is profit can be massaged and is entirely subjective. Revenue is not. The money came in, or it didn't. Even in the US for single-job W2 employees, tax rates vary even by locality for folks at the same pay rate in the same company. So with identical pay, benefits, retirement savings, state and federal taxes, my personal take home pay is different than the guy next to me because we live in different townships. Same with business. Revenue is the easy number, profit is pretty subjective.
And by definition profit is a fraction of revenue. It can't exactly be more than 100% can it?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense but Pieter Levels seems like a bit of a bastard, and you can see it in that thread. I don't pay much attention to him, but when I do come across his social media posts they're pretty off-putting. He's pretty successful yes, but €50k/mo is not exactly f-you money.
Not sure where I’m being a “bastard”? I answer most replies, many of them odd questions about tech stack when the whole point of the original tweet is that tech stack is irrelevant here.
You weren't being a bastard at all. That tweet shows several people telling you that you're doing it "wrong", and your responses were concise and kind. If anything, I think some of those people were being a little rude.
Can't argue with results. I don't personally care if you have one file with 4500 lines or 100 files with 45 lines. You have a successful and helpful business. Good job!
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#86I've only made about $5.00 on it so far (certainly not enough to retire on), but my latest endeavor is looking quite promising: http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's already his own boss, the whole point of f-you money is being able to tell your boss, "f you!" That means you can either go for the lump sum or the annuity, either one gets you out from under The Man.
Yes exactly. Also why would anyone need more than $50k/m? Even if you have a family?
is that revenue or take-home profit?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense but Pieter Levels seems like a bit of a bastard, and you can see it in that thread. I don't pay much attention to him, but when I do come across his social media posts they're pretty off-putting. He's pretty successful yes, but €50k/mo is not exactly f-you money.
Not sure where I’m being a “bastard”? I answer most replies, many of them odd questions about tech stack when the whole point of the original tweet is that tech stack is irrelevant here.
After re-reading that thread I can see why you were frustrated with the people arguing over minutiae. So I apologize for that.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#89I've only made about $5.00 on it so far (certainly not enough to retire on), but my latest endeavor is looking quite promising: http://fastcashmoneyplus.biz
Legit
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offense but Pieter Levels seems like a bit of a bastard, and you can see it in that thread. I don't pay much attention to him, but when I do come across his social media posts they're pretty off-putting. He's pretty successful yes, but €50k/mo is not exactly f-you money.
He's already his own boss, the whole point of f-you money is being able to tell your boss, "f you!" That means you can either go for the lump sum or the annuity, either one gets you out from under The Man.
Not to mention he could probably have f-you money if he accepted an acquisition. So I would say that he is double smart for not doing that and continuing to build.