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Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

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Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#171

Post by pieterhg »

I'm a single founder, I'm nearing $400k/y revenue.

It started a side project on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 and then grew over the last 2 years.

2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k

Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too that!

This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to Nomad List: http://remoteok.io.

It's now a cost of living and city database with 1,000+ cities, and monetized with a 10,000+ people membership community of digital nomads, remote workers and general travelers. They pay $75/year to be a member (not everyone is recurring, I just started with that)

I haven't had a lot of costs as most of it I do myself. Although it's been very hard work, especially in the beginning before I automated everything. I do have to charge 21% sales tax, and Dutch tax is relatively high but I've just opened a Ltd. so it'll be less now.

The hardest part? I think early on capturing a new market quickly, keeping it while lots of competitors (including funded ones) keep coming in again and again and try to copy everything you did but do it better. And then hopefully don't get traction, haha. Also dealing with the hate you get when you charge for an online service requires you to grow a thick skin.

It's mostly been an extremely fun experience though and I'm really happy and proud of what I made ^_^

P.S. I've been lurking on HN since 2010, that made me learn to code seriously and build stuff. I'd read patio11's posts and was super inspired. So I'm really thankful that HN existed and helped me get here.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#172

Post by __a__ »

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."

Question - Why would you care if they did?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#173

Post by Bromskloss »

pieterhg wrote: post #171

I'm a single founder, I'm nearing $400k/y revenue. It started a side project on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 and then grew over the last 2 years. 2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too that! This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to Nomad List: http://remoteok.io . It's now a cost of li…

I didn't even know that that site had a source of revenue. Where does it come from?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#174

Post by turbostyler »

bluecalm wrote: post #97

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…

Looks like a very interesting tool, but I would reallllly recommend hiring someone else to narrate your videos. That woman has a very "unique" voice that made it hard for me to sit through.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#175

Post by wtracy »

kriro wrote: post #129
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.

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 wo…

Judging by the downvotes you're getting, I'm not alone in getting a "my job it totally harder than their job!" vibe from your post. (If you spend more of your professional time doing marketing than coding, saying so might have helped.)

Why do you say that there are no inherently hard problems in marketing? Winning market share against a competitor with a bigger ad spend than you sounds like a hard problem. Achieving minimum customer acquisition cost and optimum market segmentation sound like hard problems. Getting customers to self-select early in the sales funnel so that your salespeople don't waste their time on looky-loos without cutting into actual sales sounds like a hard problem. (I don't know, because I'm not in marketing. Educate me!)

Also, saying that there are no hard problems in marketing other than "people are complex" sounds a bit like saying that there are no hard problems in computer science other than "math is complex".

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#176

Post by gingerlime »

danielzarick wrote: post #135
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #51

I started Apex a few months ago, first product is a little uptime monitor built on AWS Lambda: http://apex.sh/ping/ . Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that. Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're…

Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help: 1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.) 2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly). 3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or…

I would generally agree about raising prices, but not in this case. At least not until you get better traction and reputation. Pingdom is probably the market leader in this space(?), and you will probably need to beat them on pricing initially (even though there's so many things to do better than they do...).

Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses.

I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough.

Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#177

Post by tjholowaychuk »

danielzarick wrote: post #135
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #51

I started Apex a few months ago, first product is a little uptime monitor built on AWS Lambda: http://apex.sh/ping/ . Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that. Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're…

Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help: 1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.) 2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly). 3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or…

Thanks!

They're definitely a bit on the low side, it still seems hard since most programmers despite making crazy sums of money often complain about spending even $10/m on something haha.

I'll think about raising the prices a bit once I have some exclusive features. I thought having a free plan would be good on the marketing front, and maybe it will be, but I definitely need some features to differentiate the plans

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#178

Post by tjholowaychuk »

gingerlime wrote: post #176
danielzarick wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help: 1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.) 2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly). 3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or…

I would generally agree about raising prices, but not in this case. At least not until you get better traction and reputation. Pingdom is probably the market leader in this space(?), and you will probably need to beat them on pricing initially (even though there's so many things to do better than they do...). Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses. I know it's usually not about features, but…

Agreed, PagerDuty and SMS are on the list.

SMS is the only annoying one really since it's freakishly expensive for what you get (~6$ / 1000 SMS or so), most people seem to have SMS credits that you purchase which just seems annoying to me. I'm thinking about adding SMS to the larger plans though without any weird credits.

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#179

Post by cheez »

sixQuarks wrote: post #164
20years wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes 1000x. Marketing & sales are way harder than coding and I feel it is not focused on enough in discussions about starting a business.

I don't usually toot my own horn, but I'm really good at marketing and wish I could just find a good local designer/developer combo to do a startup with. I'm really tired of working with remote freelancers that don't do exceptional work, or they start off doing good work, then drift off into mediocre work. Admittedly, I'm not good at managing people, I just want to find people that work well on their own.

Example? Ways to reach you?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#180

Post by kevindeasis »

pieterhg wrote: post #171

I'm a single founder, I'm nearing $400k/y revenue. It started a side project on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 and then grew over the last 2 years. 2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too that! This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to Nomad List: http://remoteok.io . It's now a cost of li…

Great job man!

You've mentioned something about automating. Can you tell me more about it and which you've decided to not use?

As for competition, how do you specifically handle this?

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