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Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

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Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#221

Post by desireco42 »

DizzyDoo wrote: post #166
desireco42 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you make a game that can work on Mac and Win and Linux at the same time? What is the easiest way?

The easy way is to write it at a higher level, and let the abstraction handle the meat of it for you. The easiest way is just to use an engine, an existing array of tools and frameworks that manages the abstraction in such a manner that (for the most part) you just have to select the build target. In this specific case, I used the Unity engine. I write in C#, and with Mono/OpenGL, Unity can build executables to vario…

Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#222

Post by madmadjo »

Hi there!

Even though I'm a full-stack developer, during the previous year I had to build several Bootstrap UI Kits. I think I became pretty good at it so a week ago I started http://www.bootstrapuikits.com (worked on it for a couple of months before launching). Currently I run it as a store where I sell my own Bootstrap UI Kits (OK, one kit for now, but two more nice ones are in the works!) but the idea is to expand into a marketplace so that others could sell their own quality UI Kits. Besides that, the idea is for each UI kit to cover at least 10 cases (in at least one version) through example pages (store, social network, portfolio...).

Of course, it's not profitable yet, but I plan to offer great support(!) and great Bootstrap UI Kits (each with 10+ themes) so we'll see. My analysis tells me that I could probably earn $600-800 per UI Kit (created by me) per month. I'm thinking about publishing the results in 3-4 months on Bootstrap UI Kits blog (soon to be created) so stay tuned.

Hopefully that would be enough for me to provide for my family so that, as some people mentioned, I could work on some other things I'm interested in like A LOT (like mathematics, physics, chemistry, electronics...).

Wish me luck! Nah, kidding... I don't believe in luck, just in hard work.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#223

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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…

I would say that there are no inherent "hard problems" in marketing (other than "people are complex")

I would say that there are no inherent "hard problems" in AI (other than computability).

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#224

Post by throwaway58182 »

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?

The customer gets year #1 for free. At the end of the year we approach them and ask if they want to renew. If they appreciate your software, they usually do.

And since my replies were being rate limited, I'll respond to your long-tail question above. We have tried a lot of long tail keywords, but they have such low frequency that Adwords penalizes you (low quality score) for using them, which means you pay more per click account-wide. That is why I say get to know Adwords - there are a lot of gotchas.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#225

Post by throwaway58182 »

arkitaip wrote: post #105
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)

Do you do rich content marketing? Like publishing books, useful infogrpahics, etc?

No, but it would be great if I was that creative or could come up with stuff like that.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#226

Post by neil_s »

eappleby wrote: post #60

I started https://www.pubexchange.com in 2013 and have been running it solo ever since. PubExchange is a platform that helps publishers establish traffic exchanges with other sites (similar to a social network) so that they can promote one another via widgets, social, and in-article links. It's been profitable since 2014 and I work with over 600 sites, including HuffPo, Refinery29, and POPSUGAR.

Wow, that sounds like a modern version of Tony Hsieh's LinkExchange, from the 90s. Glad that the model is still working. How did you go about signing up such impressive publishers? Was it organic, or did you hustle to make it happen?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#227

Post by throwaway58182 »

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 :)

Our competitors are 10 - 1000 times larger than us. Doesn't help us in any way for them to know our size.

And the couple of customers that know our size have indicated it's better to appear large. For example, you wouldn't switch a company from using Microsoft Exchange to something else if that something else was run by a couple of guys. Our company would be in very deep trouble if something happened to me. To balance that, customers get updates and fixes very fast because they work with such a small company.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#228

Post by throwaway58182 »

z3t4 wrote: post #142
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 disagree. Even if you make the best software ever, getting your first 100-1000 paid customers is hard. But if your software is good, and you have 1000+ paid users, paste that point, your product will market itself. Or you could just continue to sell to the customers you already have. And even the most clueless entrepreneur will make money.

I wish this was true. Our existing customer base is very pleased with the product. But they don't influence others to purchase. We're a gnat in the loud circus of the market place. The product doesn't market itself because not enough people find out about it.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#229

Post by zyxley »

desireco42 wrote: post #163
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…

How do you make a game that can work on Mac and Win and Linux at the same time? What is the easiest way?

If you want to work in HTML5, Electron or Cordova can both take you pretty far.

http://electron.atom.io https://cordova.apache.org

This won't work for all apps, but (for example) a lot of simple mobile apps use Cordova with faux-native UI frameworks, and there are a lot of graphics-lite games out there using NW.js or Electron on desktop.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#230

Post by Cian911 »

pieterhg wrote: post #204
applecore wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great stuff! How did you build the community around NomadList early on?

I built the site, but then I thought, omg I'm going to lose all these users once they leave. So I added a MailChimp email box, then a chat group, a forum and kept making more for them. That's how people kept coming back and finally paying money.

Been following your blog for a while now Peter, since I first came across the article Wired did about you. I'd love it if you wrote a post about this, and your success in generalup until this point!
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