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Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#51

Post by dangrossman »

shubhamjain wrote: post #39
dangrossman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit over $38K MRR right now.

It fascinates me how quickly your one man shop is growing. I remember reading a few months back that your MRR was $30K. Kudos Dan! Have you ever thought of hiring someone to offload some task or take it to another level or you prefer to keep it as it is right now?

There's really not much to offload. Sysadmin is 99% automated, from making (and testing) backups to scaling capacity ("the cloud!"). I've never done outbound sales, so there's no sales machine to grow with staff. Support consists of a half dozen e-mails most weekdays, which isn't enough to keep even a virtual assistant busy for more than an hour. All that leaves is occasionally seeking out new marketing opportunities, and working on the product, which are the parts I like, and can do as much or as little of as I care to any given day. Slow and steady growth will work for me.

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#52

Post by dangrossman »

thenomad wrote: post #47
dangrossman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to say I did something clever, but the first customers just came from a little bit of advertising. I'm talking $100-200/month in AdWords clicks the first few months, and a $79/month banner ad on a web stats site I bought through BuySellAds.com. I'm no novice to advertising, so I had the right keywords and the right ads to make sure I only paid for people looking for what Improvely offers. I then spent my aft…

"I'd like to say I did something clever" ... "I then spent my afternoons all summer with a live chat widget on the site that automatically prompted a conversation to anyone who kept the page open for 10 seconds" Given that's the first time I've ever heard of that particular approach, I'm not exactly a novice to marketing either, and it's sufficiently smart that I'm going to test it out myself on a project in the near…

I was using SnapEngage, which was $19/month at the time. They've raised their prices since.

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#53

Post by pieterhg »

wuschel wrote: post #24
pieterhg wrote: post #15

I made Nomad List ( https://nomadlist.com ), which lets you find the best places to live and work. It's a mix between a cost of living index and a community for digital nomads, remote workers and general (modern) travelers.

Very nice. What was your motiviation to give it a go? The lack of options from AirBnB in this segment? I like the idea of your challenge: 12 Startups in 12 Months. (-: Would love to hear how it works out in the long run.

Airbnb? Umm... how do you mean?

My motivation was that I wanted to find places that would be suitable for me to travel to and work, but I didn't want to browse countless of blogs to figure out.

I thought approachign it from a data perspective would be easier. The data will always be subjective and never completely accurate, but it can give people an idea.

It now seems like the sites inspires people too to start traveling, when they see all the options. That I never expected.

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#54

Post by pieterhg »

tomw1808 wrote: post #23
pieterhg wrote: post #15

I made Nomad List ( https://nomadlist.com ), which lets you find the best places to live and work. It's a mix between a cost of living index and a community for digital nomads, remote workers and general (modern) travelers.

Very cool project. What is you tech-stack, if I may ask?

It's raw html, css, js and php. No frameworks. Just me hand coding everything :)

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#55

Post by pieterhg »

scorpioxy wrote: post #21
pieterhg wrote: post #15

I made Nomad List ( https://nomadlist.com ), which lets you find the best places to live and work. It's a mix between a cost of living index and a community for digital nomads, remote workers and general (modern) travelers.

Very cool. How is the data curated and validated?

It's crowdsourced and validated by data moderators. But it'll never be 100% accurate.

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#56

Post by pieterhg »

pieterhg wrote: post #15

I made Nomad List ( https://nomadlist.com ), which lets you find the best places to live and work. It's a mix between a cost of living index and a community for digital nomads, remote workers and general (modern) travelers.

Re: the question of this thread.

I've built it by myself and I think it gives me a big advantage. I see a lot of people partnering with co-founders, and then they have to discuss every little new feature. And ego gets involved. And meetings.

I just have a meeting in my head before I sleep every night with what I'm going to make the next day. It means I ship faster.

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#57

Post by tmaly »

I am working solo on a web app for food. I hope to launch a bare bones mvp in the next two weeks.

I tried working on two other startups with two different co-founders, but they had other priorities and could not commit enough time to make it happen.

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#58

Post by romanr »

mozumder wrote: post #31

My startup is a fashion magazine. If you look at a monthly fashion magazine's masthead, you'll see a list of 100 people. But I've done everything myself- from sleeping on the floor of the print shop for a week during printing, to photographing runway looks during fashion weeks, to casting, to selling ads, to creating web back ends & JQuery plugins, to art directing & designing fonts, to finding things (clothes/movies…

I created and manage hiTask, https:// hiTask.com the Team task and project management tool. Started as pure web application 7 years ago it is now platform with multiple components, google and outlook sync, apps for iOS and android. Competing with companies like Asana and Basecamp that employ tens, hundreds of people.

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#59

Post by thenomad »

dangrossman wrote: post #52
thenomad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'd like to say I did something clever" ... "I then spent my afternoons all summer with a live chat widget on the site that automatically prompted a conversation to anyone who kept the page open for 10 seconds" Given that's the first time I've ever heard of that particular approach, I'm not exactly a novice to marketing either, and it's sufficiently smart that I'm going to test it out myself on a project in the near…

I was using SnapEngage, which was $19/month at the time. They've raised their prices since.

Ah, that's a pity. Looking at their website they seem to have moved into the "if you have to ask you can't afford it" range :)

Re: Ask HN: What's your 1-man startup?

#60

Post by chad_strategic »

hornbill wrote: post #44
chad_strategic wrote: post #18

Been working on this for a while... http://www.strategic-options.com/trade But people keep paying to build there lame websites... I got to stop doing that.

Link to wiki on that page ( http://trade.strategic-options.com/index.php/open/wiki ) seems to be broken.

Thanks for the catch, I think I fixed. But if not this works. http://www.strategic-options.com/trade/open/wiki
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