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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#91

Post by khuknows »

44Aman wrote: post #85
khuknows wrote: post #14

I run https://pageflows.com and have been living off it full time for a little over a year. The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a junior developer in London, so it's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough. It's a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some sort of micro saas, but it's I'm happy with how things have been so far. Happy to answer any que…

This is great! I assume most of your customers will be businesses, so why not offer a bulk "@domain" subscription for $999 (lifetime) so that anyone in the business can use it without restriction. Restrict the other packages to personal use and you should be able to drive up your income.

Most customers are indeed businesses. Great shout on some sort of team/business plan - it's on my to-do list!

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

#92

Post by dharma1 »

WA wrote: post #81
BerislavLopac wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. I'm curious -- how much time do you spend on marketing? How do your customers find your app?

Nowadays, I spend zero time on marketing. I have a whole bunch of well-written articles on my subject. They still rank okay on Google and are evergreen. Marketing these days is word of mouth + SEO. But for someone starting out: Write articles that teach people something (in a niche). Articles get read for many years. Social media posts go down after minutes.

Good idea. Are the articles teaching how to use your software to solve an issue people have, or do you just mention/link to the the software in the end of the article?

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

#93

Post by spv »

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.

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

#94

Post by WA »

dharma1 wrote: post #92
WA wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays, I spend zero time on marketing. I have a whole bunch of well-written articles on my subject. They still rank okay on Google and are evergreen. Marketing these days is word of mouth + SEO. But for someone starting out: Write articles that teach people something (in a niche). Articles get read for many years. Social media posts go down after minutes.

Good idea. Are the articles teaching how to use your software to solve an issue people have, or do you just mention/link to the the software in the end of the article?

The latter. The articles teach people about the niche domain/subject. The app is merely mentioned as an option to make life a bit easier.

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

#95

Post by davej »

I launched ToDesktop back in April, I'm ramen profitable and I'm working on it full-time.

I don't know if I would call it a success yet. I want my revenue to reach six figures annually before I call it a success but I'm seeing good growth. Most of my growth now is coming from organic search engine traffic. I've posted some high-leverage page speed + SEO tips on Indie Hackers here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/marketing-tools-are-damagi...

I'm a product/tech person with some graphic design experience but I was really weak on sales/marketing before I started working on ToDesktop. If you're like me (strong on tech/product, weak on sales/marketing) then I would highly recommend Julian Shapiro's guide on growth marketing. It's zero-fluff and written by someone with a technical mindset: https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro

A one-person business is tough, it's lonely at times. It can also be tough to work on the things you should be working on (as opposed to the things you want to work on). This is enjoyable sometimes though, for example, I made my test suite dance to Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk. Totally unnecessary but it renewed my enthusiasm and made for a fun tweet. https://twitter.com/DaveJ/status/1167386564240056321

Self-promo for those interested: ToDesktop automatically creates a desktop app from any web app. It's like Electron-as-a-Service with code signing, installer, auto-updates, app notarization taken care of. https://www.todesktop.com/

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

#96

Post by mutatio »

mkl wrote: post #87
mutatio wrote: post #52

I run https://encycolorpedia.com/ - its origins are from a "JavaScript as CSS" library I was developing - there were/are superior projects available, so ultimately I used the colour manipulation code to produce the site. The idea was to take a seed colour and render the page uniquely, additional on-page information grew from that. From feedback I guess the primary use of the site is paint searching and comparison. It…

If you also own encycolourpedia.com, you should probably set up a redirect. If it was someone else that grabbed it (registrar is different...), well that's unfortunate! I have a domain I got for a future project where there's a UK/US difference, so I made sure I got both.

Thanks, I do own it, laziness on my part not to correctly forward.

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

#98

Post by jwr »

sellingwebsite wrote: post #67
jwr wrote: post #63

I created PartsBox ( https://partsbox.io/ ) and I'm quite happy running it. It's a tool for companies building electronics (also available for free for hobbyists/makers). The business was (and is) a "freedom project" for me: I wanted to be independent of everyone, so no investors, no partners, and no employees. So far it has worked out pretty well. The nice thing about running a business in a niche is that you get to…

how did you find your first customers if you dont mind sharing that ?

They found me. I created the app, and people searching for certain phrases started finding it. There was some word-of-mount from hobbyists and makers, but not that much.

To this day I mostly rely on search engines for customer acquisition (before you ask: yes, I tried, and measured carefully: every attempt at advertising had a net zero effect, e.g. I was putting money on fire for no good reason).

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

#99

Post by juskrey »

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!

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

#100

Post by jklepatch »

treyfitty wrote: post #71

I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago ( https://www.mendskin.co ) which isn’t “successful” yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time. It’s tough. There’s a reason a lot of companies spend $1MM from investors before launching a product, but I wanted to test the hypothesis that this need not be the case. “Beauty products” (for lack of a better term) defini…

Cool! I used to run an ecommerce website a few years ago, 50K usd/month revenue.

We used to get our customers from seo only.

If I had to do it now I will probably try Facebook ads + email list.

How do you acquire your customers?

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