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Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

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Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#371

Post by pieterhg »

xiaoma wrote: post #369
pieterhg wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What. No, there was never a security breach. We uploaded the logs because people asked for them. Lots of people asked for the chat logs (of public channels only) to be public and searchable. Like the forum. So I made them. Then lots of people didn't like that and wanted them to be private. It was never a security leak, I uploaded the logs myself. That was the whole point. I've never had any security breaches. It was…

Woah... everyone was saying there was. I hadn't been engaged enough on the site after arriving to realize. Thanks for clearing that up! (I guess misunderstandings are also difficult to catch as a solo team, too)

Haha yes. I think at a certain scale you get rumors. I was never aware people thought it was a breach btw! Pretty crazy.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#372

Post by Lalabadie »

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…

Estonia will grant you a form of partial citizenship so you can do exactly this.

https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#373

Post by azeirah »

udkl wrote: post #245
azeirah wrote: post #158

I wrote a utility script for Twitch streamers to show in text what music they're currently playing on Spotify or YouTube, and many other music players. Has been a stable 1k per month for quite a while now. As a student, this is really nice extra income :) Especially because I don't have any other expenses besides my 5 eur/month webserver. https://martijnbrekelmans.com/SMG/ Any tips?

How did you arrive at the 4.99 price ? Streamers buy $40-60 games regularly ..... why do you think they won't pay more ? Could you sell a yearly license if users want updates ?

I don't want to increase the price because it's a tiny tool with a really simple goal. I honestly don't expect anyone to pay over at best 10€ for this tool. I certainly wouldn't.

Entitling people to one year of free updates wouldn't be a bad idea however. Might look into a subscription based approach for continued updates.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#374

Post by udkl »

azeirah wrote: post #373
udkl wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you arrive at the 4.99 price ? Streamers buy $40-60 games regularly ..... why do you think they won't pay more ? Could you sell a yearly license if users want updates ?

I don't want to increase the price because it's a tiny tool with a really simple goal. I honestly don't expect anyone to pay over at best 10€ for this tool. I certainly wouldn't. Entitling people to one year of free updates wouldn't be a bad idea however. Might look into a subscription based approach for continued updates.

Is that price point based off of your assumption or streamer feedback ?

Are you a streamer ? I would love to have a quick chat with you over slack or skype or whatever to know more about the tool & your experience as a streamer.

You can reply here or to the alias email listed on my profile.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#375

Post by tjholowaychuk »

chdir wrote: post #257
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…

I know you are a very talented developer so I'm curious : Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ? P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort. P.P.S. Here's…

I wanted something small that I could get off the ground without spending a year or two on development. It's also a fantastic fit for Lambda, and I had already built the apex(1) tool so it seemed like a decent place to start.

As far as why use my tool? When you have so many to choose from, I'd say choose the one you enjoy. That's my goal really, to create things that I, and hopefully other people enjoy using. I'm trying to surface more information as well, so I think it's definitely a bit on the dev-centric side of things.

I also take it as a challenge when the space is already saturated, if you can enter the market late and still have a "hit" then that's pretty cool, and gives you a better idea of you can (or cannot) do the same with larger products.

I think almost every space is pretty crowded now to be honest. If you can name some that aren't crowded let me know :p. I would say the same of so many tools: oh another PaaS, another analytics tool, another email marketing tool.. blah blah haha. Doing something truly unique, AND by yourself is unlikely these days. I'm new to this stuff, I could be totally wrong, but I think picking a big market is key, and lots of people have sites/apps/apis.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#376

Post by xpose2000 »

colinbartlett wrote: post #47
xpose2000 wrote: post #7

I run a single person company https://www.fantasysp.com It is a fantasy sports company that helps you manage your team(s) by offering player projections, waiver suggestions, optimal lineups, trade suggestions, etc. We also help with fanduel/draft kings lineups. Revenue has increased steadily over the past 4 years in the range of 20%-30% year over year. User base growth is different as I focus more on active users rat…

Interesting, what metric do you use to consider "active"?

Signed in the past day or two.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#377

Post by jventura »

neil_s wrote: post #341
jventura wrote: post #33

I'm running a single person company at http://flatangle.com/ , where I provide traditional astrology software and services. Last week I've made available my latest web app ( http://elements.flatangle.com/ ) but I also sell traditional astrology reports at http://flatangle.com/products/reports/ . The business costs are pretty low, but since I'm not very good at marketing, my revenue is also still quite low. I'm doing…

You have a PhD in Computer Science, and are heavily bought-in to astrology? May I ask what attracted you to it?

Ah, long story short, I've always been interested in the stories around it.

Some years ago I took a course and began practicing a very practical subset of the field called Horary. With an horary chart, you can theoretically infer yes/no kind-of answers to questions and I got interesting results to say the least. From that I've leaped into Traditional Natal Astrology (the one that tries to describe you personally), but always with a very practical mindset. I've also got very interesting results from that.

One day I decided to pursue doing serious research in it (I've created a library for it: https://github.com/flatangle/flatlib), and I've written a paper which was published in a publication in the field. Currently, I now have one or two preliminary results for other researches, but since there are no grants available for this and people in this area are usually not taken serious by academics, I've decided that I have to build one or two products to sustain me financially before I can pursue with my researches..

So, why I, a engineer/researches/entrepreneur with a PhD, am heavily bought-in to astrology? There's lots of low-hanging fruits in terms of pure research, the potential to make a difference in people's lives is enormous (the desire for men to understand themselves is as old as man himself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself), and I couldn't bear my own existence trying to be "disruptive" with the next social app.

That above, or maybe I'm a fool! :)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#378

Post by jventura »

udkl wrote: post #250
jventura wrote: post #33

I'm running a single person company at http://flatangle.com/ , where I provide traditional astrology software and services. Last week I've made available my latest web app ( http://elements.flatangle.com/ ) but I also sell traditional astrology reports at http://flatangle.com/products/reports/ . The business costs are pretty low, but since I'm not very good at marketing, my revenue is also still quite low. I'm doing…

Have you looked at the designs of other astrology related sites ? They do not have a clean, blog/article like look. When I first landed on the site, I was confused about what it offered. If you put up the charts app screenshot on the main page instead, that would have helped understand it immediately. Take this comment with a grain of salt though. I'm not big on astrology, so I could be way off. Have you thought of i…

> Have you looked at the designs of other astrology related sites?

Other astrology sites are ugly as hell, and I had to make a break from that style. Look at this site from the largest software maker in the area, straight from the 90s: https://alabe.com/solargold.html

But yes, my site is very confusing because I'm still on the process of trying to find what works. I create all my applications as subdomains of flatangle.com, that is why my main site is still confusing on its offer.

> Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc?

I have an application which says the temperament of a person based on their birth data (think more extrovert or more introvert kind-of analysis). I though on creating a facebook app for this, but as a marketing tool for my other reports, so first I have to build them.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#379

Post by udkl »

jventura wrote: post #378
udkl wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you looked at the designs of other astrology related sites ? They do not have a clean, blog/article like look. When I first landed on the site, I was confused about what it offered. If you put up the charts app screenshot on the main page instead, that would have helped understand it immediately. Take this comment with a grain of salt though. I'm not big on astrology, so I could be way off. Have you thought of i…

> Have you looked at the designs of other astrology related sites? Other astrology sites are ugly as hell, and I had to make a break from that style. Look at this site from the largest software maker in the area, straight from the 90s: https://alabe.com/solargold.html But yes, my site is very confusing because I'm still on the process of trying to find what works. I create all my applications as subdomains of flatang…

> Other astrology sites are ugly as hell,

Users of astrology sites are used to these ugly designs. This is the case with arcade gaming sites too ... which is why you see modern arcade sites are ugly.

You aren't designing the site for you. You are designing for the customer and the customer is used to and sometimes subconsciously prefers the ugly design. http://therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/the-reality-of-uglines...

Because there is reasonable doubt of the newer cleaner design, I urge you to at-least A/B test an ugly looking design that your target users would be familiar with.

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Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#380

Post by sixQuarks »

rajacombinator wrote: post #368
sixQuarks wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be interested in having a chat. Recently decided to pause / shut down my startup where I did a pretty good job with the developing/designing, but marketing was definitely a weakness. So we could be a good combo. Email me at hnusername[0:4] at uchicago dot edu, or let me know how to get in touch with you.

send me an email and please provide examples of your work, including your latest startup: sixquarks@forward.cat
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