I've been running https://www.candyjapan.com for about five years. It has (just barely) made enough to support my life in Japan. I'm currently writing a "year in review", will probably post it next week.
Ha! I ran into you online before : )
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
171–180 of 666 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#172I run BugMuncher (https://www.bugmuncher.com), it started as a side-project 5 years ago, then in September 2015 I packed in freelancing to focus on BugMuncher full time.
As of November 2016 BugMuncher reached profitability - ie: it's my sole source of income, and covers all of my living expenses.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah my BS meter has tripped. Most of his submissions are links to his own site and his comments here are "would anyone be interested in ____" and "let me tell you a secret" self promotional spam.
I only post comments like that when it makes sense. If you asked me, "hey I just downloaded Sublime Text, what are some good packages for a Rails developer?". Why wouldn't I link you to a blog post that lays it all out so you can consume it quickly? "Let me tell you a secret" is a line I used twice. As a software developer I like testing things and analyzing the results. So when I reply to people, I tend to make note…
After inspecting your website, I realized that I had purchased your Build a SaaS App course once, on Udemy. I ended up asking for my money back after discovering that you don't actually build anything, the code is already written and the video lectures quickly breeze through explaining it.
A few people mentioned this in the Udemy comments on your course, and you retorted with snarky replies.
Not a fan of your marketing or your attitude towards customers who were offering legitimate criticism.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#174I run an ecommerce store from Shopify which fulfills the orders by drop-shipping through AliExpress. This is definitely doable for one person, and it isn't technically challenging for a software developer--but the hardest part (at least for me) is marketing, creating content, advertising, and so on. Actually running a Shopify store and fulfilling by drop-shipping is simple. I would definitely recommend that as a good…
This is defiantly an area I'm interested in. However, I find that the barrier for entry is pretty challenging. IE, finding the right product. The other aspects are well within my skill set.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#175I'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…
Hey Chris,
Hello Neighbor! Thought about this idea in the Lewisburg (Central Susquehanna Valley) region and was wondering how the pole access stuff works? Also, what kind of densities do you need to get the WISP profitable to be able to make a move to fiber? Would love to email with you - its in my bio.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#176I'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…
add me? robinson.colan (at) gmail
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#177I 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.
fyi, I did a small edit: I forgot to mention "support" which is arguably the most important role once you have an actual product.
I solicit users to email whenever they have a question/comment/issue and reply to everything. Overall I think I have provided email support to aprox 50% of my paying customers, and maybe half of the support was provided before they decided to pay, so it is very important :)
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
i run a small tech company, though not an ISP. i hear this question a lot. "how do you compete with xyz megacorp?" delivering a better/faster product for less money, is the easy part. nearly everything is overpriced from megacorps. believe me, it's easy. even the accounting is harder. the hard part is selling it. people will complain all day about megacorp sucking, but when it comes right down to it, they won't go wi…
I'm working on a deal with a local private school and that was the first question I got. "How can you offer faster speeds and better pricing than Frontier, Verizon, etc?". They were previously paying $2,000/m for 100 Mbps. It's not that hard to compete with that. haha
i've considered the psychology of our position.
the difficult part is getting someone to understand that they have been vastly overpaying -- that means they must call into question their own (past) judgment, which for some people is easy, but for most people, is extremely hard (mild cognitive dissonance).
i find it especially interesting that the question is coming from a small private school, who's business model is basically the same thing. i.e. offering a superior alternative to larger, better funded incumbent institutions.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#179I run two SaaS analytics services on my own, https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com. Improvely is 4 years old, W3Counter is 12 years old, and together they earn $45-50K/month.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#180I 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…
This is a cool project. I'm mostly a designer, but am familiar with PhantomJS.
I don't see a blog on your site. Have you considered writing about the technology? I'd think search would be a great growth mechanism for something like this. Certainly there are a ton of people searching for questions related to Phantom. I'd look around Stack Overflow and possibly Quora for topic ideas and then write posts answering those questions.