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> How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?
> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.
Also: 9 months ago [0] and a few weeks ago [1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22858035 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442652
Previous programming experience was useful, I could hack together some WooCommerce plugins that help me take care of the customers (generating invoices, communication with the Czech Post, pairing bank payments to orders and informing me about payments that could not be paired reliably). That saved me a lot of repetitive work.
I don't think I could trivially reproduce the results, but I'm happy to get paid for offering free advice. I hope it lasts.
I sell my own books. I started in 2018. As of 2020, that made about 80 % of my total income. Previous programming experience was useful, I could hack together some WooCommerce plugins that help me take care of the customers (generating invoices, communication with the Czech Post, pairing bank payments to orders and informing me about payments that could not be paired reliably). That saved me a lot of repetitive work.
> Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find critical SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to find and eliminate broken links, duplicate content, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and 50+ other common website problems.
I created it to scratch my own itch while working freelance on other websites. There was one website in particular where minor changes on one page was breaking unrelated pages so a localhost web crawler that checked for issues was invaluable when doing small and large refactors.
The guide I wrote that explains all the page factors Checkbot tests for (https://www.checkbot.io/guide/) also helped me brush up on current web best practices. People treat SEO like a scammy word but the general recommendations are good for humans too!