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Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

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261–270 of 399 posts

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#261

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.

The tech wouldn't be the edge here.

Contacts with these high flyer publishers would make or break the business.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#262

I'm attempting to run a side project / business. I'm launching it this month (it's been slowly gaining in sign-ups prior to release which is a good sign in my opinion). It's https://www.simex.io/ , a personal assistant you can give tasks to over email, sms and other protocols in the future. So no growth (unless you account my 50 sign-ups in the past 2 weeks, much higher than my sign-ups at the beginning of June when…

I would concentrate on a specific niche, instead of a general AI ... eg : Assistant for lawyers Answers questions like "When is the date for the next lawsuit ?"

The site design needs to be professional.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#263

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 mark…

Stock traders can be a passionate bunch.

What would be interesting is to understand how many of them are active each week/day.

Installed it btw :)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#264
post #48

I have been a single founder company for going on 10 years. Running multiple SaaS services over those years. Some have come and gone and a couple stuck around for 8+ years. Revenue has fluctuated anywhere from $800k+ yearly at its height (before 2008 crash) to as low as $250k yearly.

Do you have example services your businesses provided ?

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping technical debt low... does that mean you are regularly refactoring or changing your technology stack? Just less debt due to a simple desktop design? Good unit tests from the beginning for easy refactoring? Any pointers on how you kept tech debt low and what that means to you?

Your question deserves a whole thread for itself, but I hope I can clear some fog around it. Low technical debt mostly revolves around: (1) Keeping your code maintainable. Example: the framework you're using (like one for making a website, or JSON API, or accepting emails and triggering actions, etc.) gets a new version. You stop what you're doing and you go and upgrade . Why? Because the older version of a framework…

Thank you for this detailed and informative reply. I have bookmarked it and next time I see a discussion about technical debt on HN I will link to it. If my question needed its own thread, your answer needs its own stackoverflow page. Cheers.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#266
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really recommend http://snapterms.com/

What did it cost you?

The prices start at $300. http://snapterms.com/order/

I have never used it, but many friends have, and the owner is my buddy Aaron, who is an all-around great guy.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great and I really appreciate your thoughtful feedback. Another question - looking to pick your marketing brain. We built a bit of a swiss army knife into our products. I'll try to break it down as simply as possible: - a user can use one Puck as a remote sensor for their Nest - a user can use one Puck + Multiple Vents for an Ecobee (like Nest but with remote sensors) - a user can use Multiple Pucks and Multi…

Glad you found the info valuable. Multiple landing pages may be the way to go, and can have value from an SEO standpoint as long as they are not too repetitive. Beyond that though, consider entry into those pages. Odds are you want to give a different message to different people, so think about how you might incorporate some sort of self-selection mechanism when people arrive at your site. Maybe asking them in a litt…

Thanks shostack - very much appreciated. Will be making these changes over the next couple weeks, should be fascinating once its all wired up (I'm an engineer dabbling in all this for the first time).

Thanks Again!

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#268
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example? Ways to reach you?

I don't want to give out URLs and names in a public forum, but I've started several 6-figure online businesses in different segments over the years. The one I'm focusing on now does about $400k/year in profit and I only have to put in about 5 hours per week, I'm basically retired at this point. I'm brimming with ideas - really good ideas, but I don't want to pursue them without dedicated partners. I want to build gre…

Sure, email me at spencer dot malone dot ca at gmail dot com.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#269
post #175
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW I have worked in marketing (B2B) at a technology company. I left that out of the post because I thought it was irrelevant (because it's basically an appeal to authority). I'm also a programmer and have a dual CS/MBA-ish degree (more focused on the CS side) so I'm comfortable in both worlds and think I have a decent but by no means great understanding of both worlds.

Once you've ramped up to a certain skill level in marketing you're pretty much set. I never get that feeling on programming related work. Maybe I'm just not that great a programmer it's somewhat likely (but I'm also not great at marketing, I've seen some true sales-beasts in action and it's pretty beautiful to watch).

I merely meant to say that getting to a level where your marketing/sales are at the 80% level that will get you really far is easier than getting to that 80% in programming (imo). I'm fairly confident that if you'd take someone with 0 experience in either field you could teach the 80% marketing a lot faster.

The initial post I replied to contained the line "coding is easy, marketing is hard". I basically wanted to provide the counter perspective. I very much disagree with the "coding is easy" part of that statement but I guess I focused too much on the "marketing is hard" part. I fully admit to being somewhat snarky with the "no hard problems in marketing" comment but I thought the "other than people are complex" made that clear. Guess not, should have stuck with "marketing is easy, coding is hard" ;)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#270
post #260

A friend and I have been running WeScreenplay ( https://www.wescreenplay.com ), a very niche service for screenwriters, for about 2.5 years now. I recently separated the backend platform that manages and coordinates everything and spun it off into Coverfly ( https://www.coverfly.io ), which we sell to film festivals to manage their screenplay contests. Between the 2 products (which use the same codebase), we've tripl…

Which marketing channel worked the best for you ? How can you create a 5 page, detailed report for just $65 ? How are you different from a brick-mortar service with a website ?

Of those, Paid SEO's worked the best, but I forgot to mention we also pay for email blasts to subscribers of other screenwriting related blogs and services, and that's really been the most effective.

5 pages of notes takes a reader roughly 3 hours, and there are plenty of people in Hollywood happy to make $15/hr working from home during their downtime.

I'm not sure I follow your last question - it wouldn't make a lot of sense for a script coverage company to have a brick and mortar store.

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