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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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351–360 of 666 posts

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

#351

Back in August I launched https://IndieHackers.com , a site where the founders of profitable online businesses share their stories and revenue transparently. I actually got the idea after reading lots of threads like this one on HN :D Indie Hackers is my full-time job now. Is it "successful"? I think so! I've done over 90 interviews, and they've been read over one million times in the past 5 months, largely by you gu…

Indie Hackers is great. Two comments/requests. It would be great to have some business and entrepreneurship books reviewed by the community. Some are worth reading, but many are not and Amazon type reviews are not reliable indicator or hype vs. value. Another great feature would be to have a small follow up with some of the showcased businesses. Especially the ones that just got started.

Great work and good luck!

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

#352
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 - vbaodpv56@gmail.com

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at your kickstarter and you rate your sleeping bag at 20 degrees. 20 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit? If Celsius I am interested.

Do you mean Fahrenheit? 20 degrees Celsius (68F) wouldn't even qualify as insulation in a sleeping bag, may as well use a garbage bag and newspapers. 20 degrees Fahrenheit would make for a good 3 season bag though.

I bet you could get 4 seasons out of it in the south, don't you think? I don't know much about sleeping bags, though.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at your kickstarter and you rate your sleeping bag at 20 degrees. 20 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit? If Celsius I am interested.

Do you mean Fahrenheit? 20 degrees Celsius (68F) wouldn't even qualify as insulation in a sleeping bag, may as well use a garbage bag and newspapers. 20 degrees Fahrenheit would make for a good 3 season bag though.

lol, this comment.

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

#356
I started https://netin.co about 9 months ago and now we have several customers including a government client. I live in SF so that's to say I need additional sources of income. I have another website which is pretty much an archive of a radio program that has been going for 10 years and that is a pretty good compliment to my income.

The growth curve for NetIn is rather smooth, I did the usual marketing for it, including creating a Chrome Ext, posting to LinkedIn, FB, Twitter, etc. I'd say the biggest difference came when I manually submitted a sitemap to Google with near 30 million URLs. Also after getting a lot of angry emails from people decided to remove all public info until a time when I can address the privacy concerns in a better way.

It's Stripe with monthly subscriptions, I tried calling prospects but soon realized I'm not a sales person, so now it's fully automated, it's free trial and then you pay if still interested in using it, no sales calls, no sales emails.

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

#358

Back in August I launched https://IndieHackers.com , a site where the founders of profitable online businesses share their stories and revenue transparently. I actually got the idea after reading lots of threads like this one on HN :D Indie Hackers is my full-time job now. Is it "successful"? I think so! I've done over 90 interviews, and they've been read over one million times in the past 5 months, largely by you gu…

I look forward to a podcast like this to fill the void that the old "startup" episodes filled.

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

#359
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share the store URL? Please check my profile. I wonder, how do you deal with customs issues? I've had issues in the past while shipping outside EU and customers always expected me to solve the issues for them

Yes, here's my URL, feel free to share =) http://modshop.guitars/ For customer issues, you just need to be responsive and as helpful as you can be. I've also had issues shipping outside the US, but Shopify (the platform that I use) lets you disable shipping outside of certain countries. I've had some issues shipping to Canada, (never had an EU customer), so I only ship within the USA now. And changing that was only a…

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

#360
post #212
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you pick the products to sell? Can you share the store you're working on?

There are a few good ways, but it really helps if you know the products well. For me, my site sells guitar parts and DIY kits. And I've been playing guitar since I was about 10 years old, so that helps a ton . I had a few other stores before this that didn't sell well at all, and I have to say that's because I just didn't know the products, or what the end users really wanted/needed/cared about. Great ways to pick pr…

I see. Simple but efficient.

Last question, you send directly from aliexpress to your clients right? Does it not bother you, your clients receiving packages coming from a different store than expected and with a Chinese address?

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