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

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#151

Post by tajen » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:26 PM UTC

farkas wrote: post #145

tajen wrote: post #130

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 appsto…

Thanks for the testimonial! For others reading - we have hundreds of examples like this - single person companies that have grown inside the Atlassian ecosystem. From people like Bob Swift, who grew his company and was then acquired, to companies like Gliffy and Balsamiq Mockups who built multi-dozen person companies on the back of the Atlassian ecosystem. Get started here: https://developer.atlassian.com/index.html

They're not exactly relevant examples because they were introduced a dozen years ago when the landscape was completely different. Among those introduced in 2014, I haven't found people who live off their sales. I'd love to know whether there are such recent successes.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#152

Post by yuhong » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:27 PM UTC

zerr wrote: post #102

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…

> Using throwaway so customers don't find this comment. Not sure about your customers, but if I was a customer of some product I'd be happy to know they're are doing well :)

Yea, I'd really like to know why too. Notice the majority of comments on this thread don't do this.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#153

Post by stevesearer » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:32 PM UTC

soared wrote: post #138

stevesearer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had Adsense and self-hosted ads simultaneously for a while and had built a decent base of advertisers and contacts over the years so there wasn't much additional investment of time above what I was already doing. Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping graphics in and out is the easy part.

Very very interesting. How does revenue compare? Have you considered putting adsense ads on during traffic spikes or any similair strategies? Do you share any analytics besides impresssions/clicks/costs with advertisers? The only time I've seen this is on my school's newspaper, and they are wildly unsuccessful.

At the time it was in my favor to switch, plus it looked weird and jarring to me to have several ads for office furniture and then one for that thing you bought on Amazon 3 months ago.

Re: traffic spikes, no. There are limited spots which can be purchased so adding more spots whenever I want wouldn't seem right to my current advertisers who bought based on the limit in place.

Edit: I also get contacted by ad networks from time to time saying I could boost my revenue, but I always ask which advertisers they have who are relevant to my audience. It is always none. So at this point, I'm relatively confident that I don't need an ad network to service my particular niche.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#154

Post by throwaway7312 » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:40 PM UTC

I'm a single founder. We do ~$150K / year in revenue right now.

We did $15,000 in 2011 (our first year in business). $55,000 in 2012. $96,000 in 2013. $157,000 in 2014. Dropped to $133,000 in 2015, our first year of negative growth.

From 2011 to mid-2014, I worked constantly to improve our basic product. But in 2014 I realized we'd never compete with the big guys in our industry, who do $10MM to $30MM / year. So I started attending summits with those guys to pick their brains, and hired a marketing coach. And I stopped working on improving our core product, just maintaining it.

Spent ~$35,000 on marketing training since late 2014, and I've spent $20,000 (and about 8 hours a day, 7 days a week) on new product development this year. But in about 2 months we should have a product that can put us up there with the big guys and get us out of the middle-of-the-pack revenues we've been stuck in for a few years.

The hardest part of being a single founder, at least in my business, is the need to maintain your current business to keep the income flowing and the customers around while you build the product that the business needs to leap forward. At that point, you're basically running two companies, the old one and the new one. And you can't just throw money at it because you're bootstrapped and only have revenues + credit to play with (assuming you haven't taken funding).

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#155

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:47 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#156

Post by happyslobro » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:47 PM UTC

jeffmould wrote: post #71

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me a few things: - Incorporating the company - Terms of Service - Some weird stuff to transfer the existing product "into" the company That's about it, but at ~400/hr it adds up quick haha.

Ouch! That is really high for just that. Must have been some really one-off stuff for the transfer. Edit to add: I guess it really isn't that high at that rate. It made me curious as to what we paid for similar services at the same rate so I had to go check. Ours came in at just about $4000. The TOS/EULA/privacy policy are what ate into ours.

> The TOS/EULA/privacy policy

I wonder if there are existing freely available legal policies that would work for any SaaS startup? Sort of like how I can just slap a standard GPL license on my software, and then come back later and offer commercial licenses?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#157

Post by toqueteos » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

DizzyDoo wrote: post #122

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, animati…

That's a cute little game, very nice work on the design! It feels super polished (both gameplay and aesthetically). If only I could be half that skilled with the art side...

Have you considered translating it to other languages?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#158

Post by azeirah » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:53 PM UTC

I wrote a utility script for Twitch streamers to show in text what music they're currently playing on Spotify or YouTube, and many other music players.

Has been a stable 1k per month for quite a while now. As a student, this is really nice extra income :) Especially because I don't have any other expenses besides my 5 eur/month webserver.

https://martijnbrekelmans.com/SMG/

Any tips?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#159

Post by matchagaucho » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

Some numbers on my single-person company:

Market: Add-on tools/plugins/components for enterprise software platforms. Customers: ~30 Growth rate: Adding about 1 new customer per month Revenue: $550K ($300K product / $250K consulting) Gross profit margin: 80%

Costs are basically hosting, occasional marketing campaigns, some offshore development, and various SaaS subscriptions to operate the business.

The product often requires consulting services to customize, which can be lucrative. I bootstrapped the product development via consulting and am transitioning to a full-time focus on product dev/support... recruiting SI partners to do customizations.

Note: This is purely a lifestyle business. My true goals are digital nomad in nature.... traveling, writing code from a hammock in the Philippines, spending Winters in Mexico, work 6-9 months per year, etc...

The income is nice, but freedom and mobility are far more valuable.

My wife increasingly spends more time on front/back-office tasks, so technically this is a 1.5 person company :-)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#160

Post by eps » Sun, Jul 10, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC

hemancuso wrote: post #93

throwaway58182 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It sounds like they are selling to the enterprise customers, in which case you'd typically have first year of support included in the price (perhaps itemized separately to allow for creative tax accounting on customer's end) and the renewal will be in a year from the original sale. Again, typically, not automatic, but through persistent nagging.