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Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#311

Post by lotask »

brendonv wrote: post #277

I have spent the last 6 mos working on a music-creation app: http://doyt.io The idea for the app comes from growing up with garageband and missing the hours spent messing around and making silly songs with friends and family. Trying to bring that fun to mobile in a social way (think smashing garageband into snapchat). The hardest thing has got to be soliciting feedback and hearing criticism. I have the tendency of tu…

The idea looks great! The background on your website is not :D My eyes are bleeding, and I'm going color blind. Thnx

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#313

Post by cheez »

chatmasta wrote: post #288
cheez wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#314

Post by tjholowaychuk »

danielzarick wrote: post #234
tjholowaychuk wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Haha yeah, sounds familiar. That's actually one of the primary reasons to raise them! Unfortunately, your biggest support costs will be from unreasonable people on the cheapest plans. So by raising prices you often weed out the people who complain, but make up for it in the extra dollars from all the silent people who love the product. The "exclusive features" thing is awesome in theory, but unlikely to matter to mos…

Hahaha nope not annoying at all, I've always been on the backend sort of missing out on details regarding sales and marketing so it's interesting to get a better feel for this stuff.

I'll have to keep an eye on the analytics for free plans. I'm not tracking conversions very well right now, most seem to choose a paid plan right away (if ever).

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#318

Post by arisAlexis »

pieterhg wrote: post #293
arisAlexis wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you open a company in Estonia? Its super easy

Because I live in the Netherlands. And if I want to keep living here, I can't just offshore my company to somewhere and run it from here. Especially not since it's a 1-person company. It'll be judged by the Dutch IRS as a Dutch corp. not an Estonian corp. Then I'm double taxed. Depends if you're audited or not for this to happen. It's a myth you can just open a corp anywhere and benefit from low tax, a lot depends on…

You can but I don't want to make a case since you already feel strongly about not doing it.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#319

Post by [deleted] »

pieterhg wrote: post #293
arisAlexis wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you open a company in Estonia? Its super easy

Because I live in the Netherlands. And if I want to keep living here, I can't just offshore my company to somewhere and run it from here. Especially not since it's a 1-person company. It'll be judged by the Dutch IRS as a Dutch corp. not an Estonian corp. Then I'm double taxed. Depends if you're audited or not for this to happen. It's a myth you can just open a corp anywhere and benefit from low tax, a lot depends on…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#320

Post by xiaoma »

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…

>"Also dealing with the hate you get when you charge for an online service requires you to grow a thick skin."

Out of curiosity, was the fallout over the lack of security very bad? I was in Chiang Mai last fall and nomads at coworking spaces and meetups were all talking about it. Several downloaded the entire chat logs from Nomad List. I was horrified to be honest but hadn't really chatted about much of anything yet so I never complained.

I will say though that it was a bit grating to see you bragging on twitter about not bothering with frameworks or testing right after having seen discussions I'd thought were at least somewhat private downloaded and passed around online.

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