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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#161

Post by juliangoldsmith »

chrishacken wrote: post #109

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 brin…

What sort of investment did it take to get started? Have you written anything about starting off, and your transition from a WISP to fiber?

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

#162

Post by DonnyV »

jasonkester wrote: post #67

I'm running two of the same ones from that list 3 years ago ( http://www.twiddla.com/ and https://www.s3stat.com/ ), and have just launched another one ( https://unwaffle.com/ ). Every year that passes makes it easier to get something like this off the ground, as the infrastructure becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and the knowledge you need for the business side get better packaged into step-by-step guides. It's…

Which one is your most profitable? On average how long did it take to become profitable? Were you able to live off the first sites profits or did it take all 3 to do it? Do you have a family? I ask this because I do and if you do whats your method for time management and is it enough to support one. Great businesses by the way!!

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

#163

Post by apineda »

malux85 wrote: post #47

I'm running https://SignalBox.ai alone, I wrote all of the software and am working on partnering and sales right now. Previously I have 2 other startups, one was media monitoring and one was forex. The media monitoring is B2B only. The forex trading is automated and run from my home research cluster. Both are generating enough revenue to live off (media monitoring 120k forex, 60-80k) I guess they fit the definition o…

Please add me to the slack :) alex at alexpineda dot ca

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

#164

Post by drvdevd »

chrishacken wrote: post #109

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 brin…

Very inspiring.

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

#165

Post by spiderfarmer »

fiatjaf wrote: post #12
spiderfarmer wrote: post #6

I built a network of agricultural communities. Making a decent living from Adsense revenue. There's a substantial secondary revenue stream in the form of paid classified ads in niche marketplaces. I could make more money by going after advertisers myself, but I don't like the sales aspect. I am currently developing a turnkey website platform for companies in my niches, fully integrated with my other platforms, Twitte…

Please, share a link.

There are 45 in total, my biggest communities are Dutch. Hope it's not against HN guidelines to post these links:

https://www.tractorfan.nl/ (mechanisation)

https://www.prikkebord.nl/ (dairy farming)

https://www.truckfan.nl/ (transportation)

https://www.vastgereden.nl/ (bloopers! good for the views)

https://www.boeren.nu (combination of the above)

http://quotum.nu/fosfaatrechten/ (niche market, covers the trade in phosphor quota licenses)

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

#166

Post by dgranda »

zlagen wrote: post #157
dgranda wrote: post #79

I run https://www.fortsu.es (also https://www.fortsu.co.uk , https://www.fortsu.de and https://www.fortsu.com ) a price comparison website for running shoes. Original one is focused on spanish market while expanding into interesting ones. It started as side project some years ago when I wanted to buy running shoes online and it has been improved over the time. To-Do list never ends ;)

I'm interested in this kind of projects I have a lot of experience working with scrapers. How do you earn money from them? via affiliate sales?

Yes, affiliate marketing is the main source of income.

I am slightly introducing kind of business inteligence in order to sell reporting to merchants willing to know more.

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

#167

Post by swalsh »

adamqureshi wrote: post #117
patio11 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

small software shop too. Damn straight. I have a TINY software shop in NYC. It pays the bills and food for me and my nuclear family. I can't complain. I have friends who make 2X as me , who work in a box within a bigger box on a grid. They have NO time todo JACK and SHIT. Wealth is discretionary time. You can ALWAYS make anotha dolla, but you'll NEVA make anotha min.

Curious, how do you acquire customers? I've been thinking about doing something similar.

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

#168

Post by novaleaf »

I run https://PhantomJsCloud.com

I started it as a free MVP about 2 years ago while in Thailand, and given that I was attracting a slow but steady stream of users I decided to build out a commercial v1 from it.

The freemium SaaS went live in March and it's growing monthly. If I still lived in Thailand I would consider it very successful, but I am in the Seattle area now so it's ramen profitable.

The biggest surprise I got was how slow organic growth takes. Every month I gain more users + MRR but discovery seems to be the biggest problem. I tried Google Adwords in June but Google decided to cost me upwards of $5/click for basic keyword targeting so gave that up. I tried Adwords again in November and now google thinks I'm more relevant, so I pay starting at $0.20/click for the same keywords that cost $5/click 6 months previous. I am currently doing experiments to see if the acquisition cost justifies that spend.

From a effort perspective, the SaaS api+backend itself was about 50% of the effort. The subscription service + user dashboard was another 50%.

From a skills perspective, I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets: Business management, UX, full-stack webdev, devops, sales, marketing, support. Thankfully I have some experience in all those (except sales) so I was able to either do or fake everything required. If you don't have all those skills, you are going to be increasingly reliant on luck, which isn't a winning strategy.

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

#169

Post by fencepost »

jventura wrote: post #65
nicky0 wrote: post #18

Developer of Mac apps, selling via the Mac App Store. Started several years ago as a "let's see if I can make this work" project.

I am always curious about people having succesful businesses with desktop apps. There is even a thread that I started some months ago asking if there's anyone making a living out of desktop apps [0]. Can I ask you what kind of apps are you doing, and what are your prospects about the future of Mac development? I'm asking this mostly because I would really like to get back to desktop application development, but now I…

There's a lot to be said for being an early entry to an app store that you expect to stick around even if early adoption is slow. I'd throw the Windows Store into that category, and while I've never used it I think the Mac store may be similar.

Even if your initial product isn't great, if store adoption is slow then your good-enough MVP has a chance to gain traction just by being better than limited alternatives. That gives you time to improve it if viable, and by the time better competition shows up you're well ranked because the early competition was bad.

As a possible example of this, was Instapaper so highly ranked and successful because it was quantifiably better than the alternatives (once they arrived)? How much of an advantage was its status as one of the first available apps?

For a different example that perhaps shows the advantage better, consider the Android "Exchange by TouchDown" which was one of the early way for Android users to connect to Exchange accounts, still available for the low low price of $19.99. Last time I looked a year or two back, it really hadn't kept up with the competition and in fact is often not needed at all on more modern phones, but it's still there with between 1 and 5 million downloads and a cumulative rating of 4+ on the older app. On the newer version that runs Android 3+ the same app has effectively cratered, but they've still probably sold a few million dollars worth of it because of its history.

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

#170

Post by jimbokun »

novaleaf wrote: post #168

I run https://PhantomJsCloud.com I started it as a free MVP about 2 years ago while in Thailand, and given that I was attracting a slow but steady stream of users I decided to build out a commercial v1 from it. The freemium SaaS went live in March and it's growing monthly. If I still lived in Thailand I would consider it very successful, but I am in the Seattle area now so it's ramen profitable. The biggest surprise…

"From a skills perspective, I think doing a SaaS as a solo founder is only practical if you have extremely broad skillsets: Business management, UX, full-stack webdev, devops, sales, marketing."

Thanks, that is a very important insight.

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