Ask HN: Single Person startup/company? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#91

Post by throwaway58182 » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 4:58 PM UTC

hemancuso wrote: post #81

throwaway58182 wrote: post #70

Just hit $1 million/year in sales :) About 20 years ago wrote a scratch-my-itch B2B desktop software for Windows. Side project for 10 years which is how long it took to reach about $120K to make the switch to full time. Added features and increased price accordingly. Hired a few more people. Growth is slow but steady. Yearly renewable support contracts are the secret. Coding is easy, marketing is hard. Persistence, p…

Curious what your average sale price is?

Somewhere around $500 - $600. Per year support contracts are around 20% so the life time value of a customer is probably around $1000.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#92

Post by hemancuso » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 4:59 PM UTC

throwaway58182 wrote: post #89

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice congrats! I often hear the same thing, it doesn't matter what your product is, it's how you market it. I still want to make a nice product of course haha but marketing is new to me. Any generic software marketing tips? I promised myself I wouldn't be one of those annoying startups that emails you ever day or two

We've tried everything, and the only two techniques that have paid off are: website SEO (including having a blog) and Adwords. Adwords is hard - we've thrown away many thousands of dollars on garbage traffic. And some keywords are in the $15-$30 per click range! (our competitors have deep pockets)

How long of a tail do you target for SEO? Especially with the blog.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#93

Post by hemancuso » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 4:59 PM UTC

throwaway58182 wrote: post #91

hemancuso wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious what your average sale price is?

Somewhere around $500 - $600. Per year support contracts are around 20% so the life time value of a customer is probably around $1000.

Is the support contract opt in as part of the initial check out?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#94

Post by throwaway58182 » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 5:00 PM UTC

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #90

throwaway58182 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've tried everything, and the only two techniques that have paid off are: website SEO (including having a blog) and Adwords. Adwords is hard - we've thrown away many thousands of dollars on garbage traffic. And some keywords are in the $15-$30 per click range! (our competitors have deep pockets)

Interesting, I was pretty much ignoring SEO since it's such a saturated market (for my stuff at least), good to know!

Also in a very saturated market. Getting to the first page of Google is everything. It takes time work, editing each page, good content, and (though they seem to want to downplay it) good incoming links.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#95

Post by Brandwagon » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 5:04 PM UTC

I launched ClosingBell (http://closingbell.co/download) 2 years ago to help retail stock traders collaborate and share investing ideas. Never raised. Never got press. Never had a team to help. But I managed to grow it to 14,600 members, and over 1,170 have connected their Robinhood brokerage account via a partnership with them earlier this year. I launched a freemium model in May that now does ~500/mo. I never marketed it as I am still experimenting with the business model. I have tried growth hacking tactics in the past. I recently made a Slack app to raise awareness: http://closingbell.co/slack

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#96

Post by csallen » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #69

One other question for the the solo entrepreneurs: how do you keep momentum? I have a bucketful of ideas, and I'm endlessly energetic in a team context, but trying to do solo projects wears me down quickly. Maybe this is just a character difference, but if solo entrepreneurs have tricks or methods for keeping going and keeping focused, I'd love to hear them.

Spend time meeting with and talking to other entrepreneurs every week.

Internalize the idea that you don't have to be motivated to get stuff done. It's okay to admit, "I'm not motivated right now", and then get to work regardless!

Get into a routine for starting work, and try to never skip it, even when it feels unnecessary.

Find blog posts, videos, and articles that motivate you. Revisit them often, or work them into your routine. I like DHH's talk from Startup School '08 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY), for example.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#97

Post by bluecalm » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

I've started http://www.piosolver.com and I run it with a friend. It's a very small niche and getting less popular but we are still doing very well.

It was my hobby project for more than a year before any commercial plans appeared. It took very little money to start (basic Shopify plan, github, Dropbox, a few hundred $ for sponsored thread on a popular forum) but it took a lot of time. I am not a millionaire yet but well on the path to become one. I've learnt a lot about product development, handling customers and had many choices along the way I was completely confused about. I hope to put it all in text one day but for now I am too busy adding features, developing new products and optimizing the code :)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#98

Post by SwellJoe » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 5:17 PM UTC

ilamont wrote: post #74

Is there a Y Combinator for single founders?

Y Combinator has funded lot of single founder compnies. So, Y Combinator seems like it might be the Y Combinator for single founder companies.

pg has said it's a negative, and it really is. The likelihood of a single founder company growing huge is smaller than if there's small team at the start, for all sorts of reasons (which pg and others have written about). But, if you've built something awesome, YC isn't going to say no just because you're a solo founder.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#99

Post by jwatte » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

grx wrote: post #29

wahnfrieden wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason people dislike it is it's a simple question of ROI - how much would it really help his funnel to work on support for users who intentionally break the web vs other aspects of his product?

The only thing that breaks the web is developers who do not care about compatibility and performance. If I would not be harrassed and slowed down on every second hipster page with 1000s of external resources I would consider going back to default-on javascript. The fact that simple HTML delivery can be remarketed as "AMP" is a joke. Additionally, from a designing perspective it's a good thing to render the first page…

You may have that opinion, but 9,999 other users don't. Who counts more to a creator trying to generate a paycheck?

If you really want to make it as an entrepreneur, dogma has to go out the window, and data based decisions have to be front and center, especially when weighted for cost/benefit.

If data shows that search engines don't link to your site and don't index your content, that would be action actionable data.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#100

Post by shostack » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #80

SoftwarePatent wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Coding is easy, marketing is hard" It took me over five years in this business to fully internalize this. Programmers (me included) often complain about clueless entrepreneurs in this business, but even more rare than a good programmer is a good entrepreneur, who can sell/market and turn code into money.

Yep, this times a ten thousand. It took me years to unlearn all of the "marketing is all bullshit" attitudes I grew up with. Whole different set of skills to learn, and not like, say, imperative->FP. Much harder.

As a senior marketer who has to combat this myth frequently, thank you.

Modern day marketing is a complex orchestration of many parts that are often highly technical. Further, the discipline as a whole has some incredibly hard unsolved problems when it comes to measurement and analytics (attribution and viewability I'm looking at you).

If anyone has a product with initial traction but is unsure of where to go next, feel free to ask, happy to answer questions.