Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

news.ycombinator.com

331–340 of 666 posts

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

#331
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing so much information about your business, your work is very cool and this is a fabulous post. I'm just getting into game development as a hobby. I'm really interested in indie stuff, simpler games that can be made by one person.

Thanks! Yeah, it's easier than ever to get started, and easier than ever to sell your work online, so now's a great time to get involved.

Thanks for the encouragement. Money isn't the end-goal, I'm genuinely interested in the work, but it's at the back of my mind - I know there are a lot of opportunities out there. My problem is that I'm er, multi-talented and easily distracted...

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

#332
I have a small Node.js hosting platform that gives you an SQLite DB for free (enough to run a ghost blog on). It's currently in private beta but a company is already paying me for the service and it gets me some beer money.

I'm working on polishing it up and eventually releasing it. Built on AWS and autoscales as demand requires, free tier and some paid upsells - Basically, all the standard PaaS stuff.

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

#333

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.…

I'd love to hear your story from how you figured out how to produce all the way to bringing it to market.

It's amazing when people have a mission, they truly can do anything.

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

#334

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…

I've used Twiddla countless times throughout undergrad. Thanks! :)

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

#335

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…

This is true outside of tech as well. Work at a midcorp with about 50-100 offices worldwide, we have 21 year old juniors who don't know shit (like me) follow templates and flowcharts to do bulk legal or accounting work, slightly more complex than data-entry, we charge clients $250 an hour. Most of the kids do have plenty of critical thinking competencies, but knowledge wise it's a few days of on the job training, it virtually doesn't matter if you majored in erotic dance or tax law, pretty much anyone can do the work... each of these kids generates close to half a million in revenue per year. And the costs are essentially salaries (averaging $25 including benefits and all) and an office (a fraction of that), profit margins are about 75%.

Those rates are utterly ridiculous because the work can be done from any location, a lot of these companies are in 2nd tier cities where the cost of living is very reasonable.

I won't even go into the opportunities of automating this stuff, but it's ridiculous...

But the hard part is selling it. I could easily run a team of 10 of these juniors who produce the same work (volume and quality) that generates $5m in revenue a year at the bigcorp, on a budget of 0.5m. Business wise it's almost free money, but without the big corp brand name, it's really hard to sell, even prices were cut by 50% or more and you put sales agents are ridiculous commissions. It's just crazy how important it is to clients to interface with a big brand name corp, despite the fact the actual people doing much of the work are on the level of interns. This is true for lots of finance/legal/consulting companies I find.

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

#336

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...

if I understand this correctly, ipinfo is basically a lookup in a db?

What is the advantage of this over a local lookup, say with maxmind or similar?

edit: also, when I press the back button from this page: http://ipinfo.io/AS6830 all I get is a json

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

#337
Last year I went full time on my side project https://dropevent.com, a group photo sharing site. I've doubled revenue but it is still far from matching my previous software developer salary.

Growth has all been pretty organic with just a few forays into adwords and facebook marketing. Growth is really the keyword for 2017 and what I will be focusing on.

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

#338

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…

Your Pages/Day should probably be Pages/Month. You are solving a very very time consuming problem to fix.

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

#339

Earlier 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…

This is true outside of tech as well. Work at a midcorp with about 50-100 offices worldwide, we have 21 year old juniors who don't know shit (like me) follow templates and flowcharts to do bulk legal or accounting work, slightly more complex than data-entry, we charge clients $250 an hour. Most of the kids do have plenty of critical thinking competencies, but knowledge wise it's a few days of on the job training, it…

The reason is "exposure". Big companies want someone whom they believe has experience, and whom they can hold liable if there are problems. It's not the company spending the money - it is a collection of corporate people spending a budget allotted to them, who want a promotion.

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

#340

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…

I signed up to Unwaffle a few days ago and hadn't had the time to figure it out, yet.

Looks great, though!

Post reply on HN