I would be very interested to hear also stories about when/why people decided to drop their single founder company/side project
Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
281–290 of 399 posts
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#282Does anyone with single-person company have sold it and can share experience?
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Will you though? What's the cost of the extra development and maintenance you'll need to do to cater for such a tiny sliver of the population, many of whom will just whitelist your site if they're interested in your content?
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#284I started https://omnimemory.com nearly 1 year ago. It's a spaced repetition flashcard system with a minimalist UI designed for both desktop and mobile. It has a freemium model. It only has 35 signed-up users and nobody is paying. I only did some "marketing" for a couple of weekends (this is a side project), posting about it in some blogs, forums, Hacker News... I quickly got tired of this marketing work and moved on…
What is your bounce rate? Did you do anything like SEO? If you have a high bounce rate, you might want to show the user a demo of how the product works.
Bounce rate for past June was 18.75%.
As for SEO, I just got a couple of backlinks by posting about Omnimemory on some websites. I considered content marketing but I haven't actually written anything yet.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's too bad you don't give URLs though. "Several 6-figure online businesses" / "$400k/year and 5h per week" --> this is the kind of posts that make it look so easy to build this kind of businesses. And honestly, it seems unrealistic and almost bullshit. Why commenting if you don't give out your URLs?
Why would he post the URL and invite a bunch of new competitors to clone his software?
I seriously don't understand this trend of people blabbing their revenue numbers and showing their exact website... there is no better way to create a competitor than that. And for what, an ego boost?
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's too bad you don't give URLs though. "Several 6-figure online businesses" / "$400k/year and 5h per week" --> this is the kind of posts that make it look so easy to build this kind of businesses. And honestly, it seems unrealistic and almost bullshit. Why commenting if you don't give out your URLs?
Why would he post the URL and invite a bunch of new competitors to clone his software? I seriously don't understand this trend of people blabbing their revenue numbers and showing their exact website... there is no better way to create a competitor than that. And for what, an ego boost?
No one here is in some secret market that no one knows about. If you have no competitors, you're either a government sanctioned monopoly or in the wrong market.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#287I'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.
Thanks for the feedback! I love feedback but it's so hard to get it from outsiders without looking like I'm just trying to spam people :)
> I would concentrate on a specific niche, instead of a general AI
Yeah boiling the ocean would be amazing but at least initially I want to concentrate on a similar use case to that of x.ai where you're essentially using it as you would a personal assistant to schedule and gather information, likely in a corporate environment.
I'd like to keep to a niche of asynchronous task handling but that's way too big to be considered a "niche" but more of a philosophy with how it should work. Hoping I can phone it in initially with scheduling and information gathering then others can use the SDK to do whatever they want with it.
> The site design needs to be professional.
Yeah it could use some more love; trying to balance working on the website and working on the actual product. Though currently I think it's decent enough.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would he post the URL and invite a bunch of new competitors to clone his software? I seriously don't understand this trend of people blabbing their revenue numbers and showing their exact website... there is no better way to create a competitor than that. And for what, an ego boost?
No one here is in some secret market that no one knows about. If you have no competitors, you're either a government sanctioned monopoly or in the wrong market.
That's definitely false.... there are thousands of niche markets with 1-5 competitors where each can make 5 figures per month. Why invite more competition?
Also, it's not like you email your competitors and exchange revenue numbers.
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#289I'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…
Sincere congrats on your success. Found this the other day: nomads: people who have larger collections of coffee shop wifi passwords than clothes - @jongold
Haha, that's probably true!
Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
#290I'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…
Love your work with remoteok. Tried to emulate it with a solar-focused job board. What all did you do to start generating revenues from it? I liked the fact you gave credit to the original job boards, and focused on up selling existing listings.
It's about $2k in job ads, but another $3k+ in normal ads, partly from BuySellAds, which has a text-based native ad API they're letting me try out.