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Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

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Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#121

Post by stevesearer »

dublinben wrote: post #116
stevesearer wrote: post #10

I started https://officesnapshots.com as a side project 9 years ago and it has been my full-time work for the last ~4 years. If you don't count the cost of me, it has always been profitable as the business costs itself are pretty low. I had zero business goals at the beginning and now it is probably the most popular site in its niche (office design). The thing most people are interested in here is that I moved from u…

Is your content all provided by the design firms responsible? How did you solicit your first submissions?

The first few posts were found on Flickr browsing for Creative Commons licensed imagery, but after getting onto the first few sites like digg submissions started rolling in.

I think a year after I started the site was when my first major office design of Google's office in Stockholm was sent in by the architect. Before then the site was mostly candid tours from random people and random companies.

Edit: I think I have ~60 projects on the calendar to be published right now.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#122

Post by DizzyDoo »

I do, I run a small video games company, making games that one person can make, like this one: http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900. I've posted about it here once before, but my 'thing' (if I have a thing) is that I do both the programming, but also the art side. Computer Science is my training, so I can do the software development, what is less common is that I also have some skill in painting, design, animation, so unlike many games developers it is actually quite sensible to be a one-man unit. The actual number of copies that I need to sell is very low even compared to the numbers of friends of mine who have a team or two or three. Even <10,000 copies can be successful for me. I do contract with a couple of audio people, who are just better at that side than I am.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#123

Post by igk »

shostack wrote: post #100
Frondo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, f…

Don't have a product right now, but are there any resources you can point to which have quality marketing wisdom? Or is this something you just have to learn as an apprentice to a good marketer?

I am always torn because while I can appreciate good marketing, a lot of the marketing and advertising Industry (which too me seem like different things) seems to be bullshit.

I really like it when there are marketing campaigns that try to understand me and help me. Well designed product descriptions for example. Or research to understand customer needs, actually useful newsletters not only about the company itself(there is a really good startup tracker whose newsletters i read for a while)that stuff I get. I also get advertising as a separate or subfield of marketing, when it is in the case of "hey, we exist, we do this, you might be interested". Helping me find stuff which is useful basically. And usually, the good products don't need to do more(at least it seems like this?). Like rsync.net had an advertisement on resist once, that they now supported ZFS and that of you did not know why that was cool, you should not click the link. That spoke to me, conveyed information clearly and made me aware of rsync.net

What I don't like is stuff like YouTube ads trying to sell me beauty products. That will get them nowhere. Or the bullshit newsletters to build "engagement" by automatically subscribing you when yiu make an account, then listing "10 freaky ways people use $product. Number 5 will surprise you!". That stuff will turn me off products, even if it is good.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#125

Post by gorm »

ryanSrich wrote: post #23
0XAFFE wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm visiting the site without javascript (using noscript) I get a blank page. Please add a error message that javascript is required.

How do you use the internet in 2016 without JavaScript?

Around 1% of users run without js. If you have a commercial site you will loose money and users if you don't think about this.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#128

Post by mck- »

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!

But TJ, you already have a platform, I would imagine that you'd get inundated with inbound request ;)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#129

Post by kriro »

SoftwarePatent wrote: post #77
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…

> "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.

I don't quite agree. With a small and somewhat trivial codebase sure I'd agree. Once you get into more complicated things, programming is the harder discipline.

Most importantly I don't know if you can even compare the two fairly. At scale marketing is basically a subset of programming (or I suppose statistics). B2B it's quite a different beast and mostly about understanding processes and being good with people.

I would say that there are no inherent "hard problems" in marketing (other than "people are complex"). In programming there are some problems that are extremely tough to solve.

I mean sure it's not that hard to hack together a webapp that scales to a reasonable number of daily users. Programming something more complex, keeping it secure and keeping it up and running...that's pretty tough overall.

Don't get me wrong, selling stuff and turning code into money is not trivial and also a very valuable skill, arguably a more valuable skill than raw programming power for a startup. I do however think programming is ultimately harder. If you start a company you need both. "Marketing" is more important I'd say (as you can live with acceptable programming for most web-based startups for example) but eventually the lack of programming power will haunt you.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#130

Post by tajen »

I'm single-running an Atlassian add-on, $4000 the first year, $40k the second year, $55k the 3rd. APIs are young and change often (=maintenance costs), market is not saturated yet, but the competition is competent. It's a real benefit (=3 month savings) to your startup if you don't have to build the sales engine: I've sold to very, very famous names, that I could never have had if it wasn't through Atlassian's appstore. If you're thinking about coming in:

- Build a real, big product, after doing some customer interviews,

- (but get revenue from month #1, obviously, as any competent startup),

- If you go for a Cloud add-on, maybe think of doing software that can be used independently,

- and there is the Codegeist competition currently running on, until something like October! It's designed to get newcomers. Think about it, winning is a great way to launch! (And it's every year)

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