Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by jdwyah » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

jdwyah wrote: post #307

https://forcerank.it has been going for about two years now and is a steady producer of beer-money. (Well wine actually, but I digress) It's been a great project and was unbelievably useful to go through the challenge of really getting how marketing works. It's astonishing how you can build software for companies for years, but making that first $5/month subscription revenue feels so awesome. Almost all my traffic is…

Forgot to add that I am super pumped about my next project here. Feature flags and rate limits. Would love to hear from anybody interested in spending less money on something like MixPanel by clever rate limiting.

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

#312

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

jdwyah wrote: post #307

https://forcerank.it has been going for about two years now and is a steady producer of beer-money. (Well wine actually, but I digress) It's been a great project and was unbelievably useful to go through the challenge of really getting how marketing works. It's astonishing how you can build software for companies for years, but making that first $5/month subscription revenue feels so awesome. Almost all my traffic is…

[deleted]

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

#313

Post by novaleaf » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

mars4rp wrote: post #219

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…

very interesting, I will defiantly will be a customer, I have a question, how fast is requestSingle page? is there any guaranteed response time? Edit: adding a suggestion, if in your pricing you include a dedicated worker it would be very cool. you could price it hourly (8 hours a day, or monthly) this way I don't worry about number of request that I am sending, you don't worry about page size and amount of JS in the…

The request time is pretty much what you would expect running PhantomJs on a Amazon/Google/Msft VM, which is roughly 2x longer than running the same request in your desktop browser.

Regarding your suggestion on dedicated workers, the main benefit (USP) of PhantomJsCloud is the scaleability to hundreds/thousands of requests, so I think dedicated workers is a bit counter to that. However if I can figure out a nice way to securely let people run PhantomJs directly (remote code execution), dedicated workers would undoubtedly open up a lot more interesting use cases.

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

#314

Post by toisanji » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:48 PM UTC

I started http://somatic.io by myself, it has been growing steadily and now have a small team. I think of it as an image processing research company and it is my passion so I plan to work on it as long as a I can.

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

#315

Post by novaleaf » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:48 PM UTC

nbrempel wrote: post #235

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…

Side note: try Bing ads as an alternative to Adwords for cheaper clicks. Might be the wrong audience given that you're advertising a dev tool but I found it pretty useful. If you search around, Bing has a $100 coupon right now that you can use to play with the service.

Thank you for the suggestion, I think I will give it a try :)

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

#316

Post by chrishacken » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:48 PM UTC

edw wrote: post #284

chrishacken wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you use the line of other providers? And how profitable is? Yes, we're peering with Zayo and will also have Level 3 (waiting on build) in April. Don't really want to toss out numbers but the bandwidth itself is extremely profitable. The equipment and fiber needed to connect to end-users are 95% of the costs.

Have you considered getting into colo or other services that might reduce the capital expenses per dollar of revenue? Seems like there may be an opportunity there. I once had a 2U FreeBSD box at a local dial-up ISP, and it was basically found money for them.

https://nepafiber.com/colocation

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

#317

Post by theobon » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:49 PM UTC

udev wrote: post #261

I run a Canadian price comparison site: http://pricefu.com

As a Canadian that hates that all my all my online shopping is dominated by US ads, reviews and prices I really want to like this. It has some great features, especially the price history tracker, but lacks usability.

I have no idea what the fu number is. Your FAQ says "which indicates how good is a particular price offer" but what is good, how is it measured?

A much harder problem is the issue of the same device given different names at different resellers to avoid price matching. For the few laptops and TVs I tested there were multiple listings on your site for the same model and for all but one the manufacture website had a lower price than the lowest you listed.

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

#318

Post by emodendroket » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

beachstartup wrote: post #151

dbancajas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on this? How do you compete with AT&T/Google? Are you pretty much on business because AT&T/Goog/TWC are not serving in your area? Can you do summary of how you grow the business if it's not too much? Really curious about all the logistics. Best of luck!!

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 mean surely the biggest thing is that if my ATT service goes out I can probably get someone on the phone (especially if I'm a business customer).

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

#319

Post by gthtjtkt » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:50 PM UTC

jblok wrote: post #296

gthtjtkt wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with the insane delivery times? Do you tell customers up front that it might be weeks until they receive the product? Most sellers I've seen on AliExpress estimate 15-30+ days for delivery. In the age of ubiquitous 1 and 2-day shipping, I just can't see customers going for that. Seems like there'd be tons of people who change their mind after a week or two and then start demanding a refund or pesterin…

How many sellers have delivery times like that? Do any have 1-3 day shipping? Is it because all products are coming from the far east? I'm looking into making a dropshipping app, but for my niche anything more than 1-3 days would be a non-starter.

I don't think I've seen anything less than 7-12 days, and that's only if the seller has a U.S. warehouse. AliExpress is definitely not the place for fast shipping.

Most sellers on there only have China warehouses, and the free shipping option is 2-4 weeks+.

You can check whatever you're interested in on AliExpress though. It's the consumer version of AliBaba, which means the price and shipping info are always included in the listing. AliBaba is the one where you need to negotiate all the terms: Price, shipping, minimum order quantity, etc.

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

#320

Post by YPCrumble » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 5:52 PM UTC

coderholic wrote: post #281

I launched http://ipinfo.io a few years ago. The API gets over 250 million requests a day, and is profitable. I left my job at CTO of calm.com at the end of last year to focus on it fulltime. There's more of the backstory here: https://getputpost.co/from-side-project-to-250-million-daily...

Funny, I signed up for your $10/month plan just yesterday. I found out about you from a StackOverflow answer you posted and thought to tell you that you should answer other questions like "get location from IP address {{ language }}". In particular there was one for Python I didn't see your service listed for, and it took me quite a while to find your service which I'm very pleased with so far.