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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#101

Post by HoboHammocks »

I started Hobo Hammocks a year and a half ago (www.hobohammocks.com)

I got the idea when a buddy of mine and myself decided to live out of our cars and sleep in hammocks on the backstop of an abandoned softball field. Doing so made me more aware of the homeless and what they are going through, and I wanted to do something to help them.

I started the company and donate a meal to the homeless with every hammock I sell. Profits have been amazing, and I've been able to donate over 5500 meals to the homeless.

I'm actually working on a new project now. It's part of the same company, but it's a kickstarter campaign launched yesterday for a sleeping bag called the Yak Sak. It's got a couple cool design tweaks which you can read about here:

http://kck.st/2iEBiEf

With every sleeping bag I sell, I donate one to the homeless as well so I can keep giving back.

It's kind of like the TOMS business model. I'm still out to make a profit, but I want to do some good along the way. I hope this answers your question without being too spammy of a post!

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#102

Post by devoply »

mrweasel wrote: post #92
UK-AL wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simply because all the niche's for software are getting filled. Leaving only opportunities with huge hurdles to get over, which is hard for one man companies. In the early days micro isv's were fairly common, and well known. I don't hear much about them anymore.

>Simply because all the niche's for software are getting filled There's also a ton of new niches opening up, but you need to be aware of them and they don't happen in a vacuum. You can't just sit in your home office that imagine a new niche, you need to surround yourself with people doing other stuff.

Even if you surround yourself don't expect to actually understand. Lots of niches, probably most of them, require expert knowledge of the domain that's not easily acquired unless you are actually working in the niche and dealing with that stuff hands-on. The alternative is if someone with expert tells you their problems and then actually help you understand their domain, because they are willing to do that for you. But it's often not easy finding people that will actually help you acquire enough domain knowledge to be able to implement the solution to a problem.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#103

Post by UK-AL »

patio11 wrote: post #66
UK-AL wrote: post #8

I think it's getting harder, now the world is getting more developers and more fully funded startups.

A developer isn't a software company in the same sense that a kid good with numbers isn't a bookkeeping firm. Software companies don't compete with developers; they hire their services. Small software shops don't meaningfully compete with funded startups, because funded startups have to have some plausible path to growing massive, and the types of things small software shops ship just have to have a plausible path to…

More developers = more people looking small mISV opportunities. Starting a mISV is a dream for most developers.

I used remember a large community that has now disappeared. There used to be a lot of mISV conferences, I only know a few now. I know people who used to be mISVs, and they aren't anymore.

Even hacker news's favourite patio11 isn't anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#104

Post by rsoto »

GordonS wrote: post #90
rsoto wrote: post #86

I'm running my invoice reception service ( https://www.boxfactura.com/ ) officially since July 2015. One year after that it became ramen sustainable and since it has grown at an acceptable pace for the last few months. I don't think I'll ever quit my day job as it is my own marketing agency in CDMX, but I'm quite pleased with it.

I don't understand what an 'invoice reception service' is - could you explain a bit please?

Sure thing!

Here in Mexico, the tax law requires you to receive and store your digital invoices. These are in XML format. Theoretically you would receive them in your email and you're good to go, right? I thought so to, I was wrong.

The XML has information, which as you understand, it can be (and will be) tampered, so you have to go to one government site and literally type the IDs you got from the invoice (I found one video, it's not as clear, but it gives the idea: https://youtu.be/pmafqaTcE5w?t=36) to check if it is genuine. If you receive 10 or so each month, you can do it no problem (although it's a repetitive chore), but if you receive 100+ you waste a lot of time.

That's where Box Factura shines, it is an email service that validates your invoices automatically, and not only that, stores the information in a database so you can search and filter (something that you can't do with the XML file from an email), and download it in a zip file including an Excel sheet (the accountants love that) so you can file your taxes easily.

It's not easy to explain for an outsider—even being from Mexico, it's confusing. And that's a big opportunity for business of all sizes.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#105

Post by robinwarren »

agotterer wrote: post #94
robinwarren wrote: post #69

I started work on https://getcorrello.com (a dashboard for Scrum and Kanban teams using Trello) 2 years ago. It has covered household costs since the middle of last year. I am still a solo founder, looking to grow the business to do more than just cover costs and probably make a hire or two this year. I've read these posts for a while on HN, it's nice to be able to reply to one finally :)

congrats in your success! The project management space is incredibly crowded. I'm curious to hear how you marketed and differentiated yourself?

Thanks :)

Luckily when I started out the plugins-for-trello space was very uncluttered. It was mostly abandonware and github projects created by developers over a weekend. So since Corrello is exclusively aimed at Trello teams and was one of the only tools being built fulltime just for that I have been able to piggy back on their success without a lot of serious competition. There is some competition and I expect more will come as others realise the Trello platform is a viable place to build a business but I think that can only be a good thing really.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#106

Post by [deleted] »

nickjj wrote: post #100
xiaoma wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... most (or at least many) people here are building businesses now and have little interest in being on yet another marketing-heavy email list. A forum like this is a great place to connect and share stories! In the long run that will pay off far more than just strafing by and telling people to sign up for your email. How did you build your following? How did you monetize? Are you an ad publisher or are you selli…

I'm in the process of building a business right now too, which for me encompasses "how to be a self reliant software developer who can choose to work whenever and wherever". I'll tell you a secret, I haven't even e-mailed my list once. Why? Because I'm still figuring this stuff out as I go. I don't have years of content to create marketing auto-responders and dozens of products to push to people. Just yesterday I was…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#107

Post by nickjj »

adamqureshi wrote: post #56
nickjj wrote: post #40

In 2016 I took content creation somewhat seriously and the end result was enough income to sustain living in NY. Not sure if it's worth blogging about yet. Are other developers interested to see how to potentially make software engineer-tier salaries without having to work for another company? (Note: I also started with nothing. No mentors, no following, no existing profile, no paid advertising, etc.). Edit : If you'…

NY really? Do you live on Long Island? Manhattan is so expensive. I'd be interested. I'm in LI.

Long Island (you're right, Manhattan is way too expensive to live in).

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#108

Post by downandout »

It can be done. Probably the most interesting story I know of is that of a friend of mine that now makes ~$200k/mo from viral content websites in specific verticals. Back in 2007, before I knew him, he was desperate for money and became a minor cog in what turned out to be a large real estate straw buyer conspiracy. He claims to not have not known it was illegal. Regardless, in 2013, as the statute of limitations on the case began running out and most of the people that actually ran and profited from the scheme were serving federal prison sentences, his name came up, and one of the states involved decided to press charges. He was arrested and posted bail.

He was eventually offered a plea agreement for a prison sentence of three years and more than $600,000 in restitution that he had no way of paying. Facing financial and personal ruin, he ran while on bail, hoping to buy some time to make enough money to offer restitution in leiu of prison time. This article [1] about the success of viral content websites inspired him to give the concept a shot himself, figuring he had nothing to lose. He launched a series of websites with viral content for highly specific verticals.

He now has a handful of virtual assistants in low-wage countries that rewrite/locate content and post it, but was making more than $100k/mo before he brought in a single other person. The business has generated a Facebook fan page network with more than 10 million likes, monthly income exceeding $200k, and he has turned down multi-million dollar offers to buy his company. He was also able to able to resolve his criminal case by simply handing the court a $700k cashier's check for restitution/fines and a accepting few years of informal probation without spending a day in jail - even though he ran while on bail, which courts frown upon. As Eric Schmidt likes to say, "revenue solves all known problems" [2].

So yes, it is certainly possible to run a highly successful online business by yourself, and you don't even have to be all that technically proficient. I can program circles around my friend, but he makes more than most of the brightest engineers at world class companies do - where he could never get an interview, much less a job. He did all of this starting with nothing more than PHP for Dummies, the inspration from the ViperChill article, and a serious disincentive for failure (prison, in this case).

[1] http://www.viperchill.com/100k-one-week/

[2] https://mobile.twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/50721935824690...

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#109

Post by chrishacken »

I'm not sure if this qualifies as an "online business", but I started an ISP in November '15. It's also not entirely "one-person". I am the sole founder, but I do hire part-time help on occasion if I'm swamped. It started off as a WISP and has finally grown to the point where we are beginning to deploy fiber.

The site is https://nepafiber.com

I still work full-time as a systems engineer, but the business started bringing in more money than my job does around 3 months ago. I'm only still at my job so that I can expand more rapidly; running fiber isn't cheap.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#110

Post by Guyag »

tempw wrote: post #97
nickjj wrote: post #40

In 2016 I took content creation somewhat seriously and the end result was enough income to sustain living in NY. Not sure if it's worth blogging about yet. Are other developers interested to see how to potentially make software engineer-tier salaries without having to work for another company? (Note: I also started with nothing. No mentors, no following, no existing profile, no paid advertising, etc.). Edit : If you'…

this was cool until it got a little clickbait-y plug

The style of having checkboxes next to very obviously positive statements feels really disingenuous. "Urge for the freedom to travel and work anywhere" - of course that would be nice. Maybe I'm too cynical.
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