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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#411

Post by gottebp »

My grandfather has Parkinson's disease and the hand tremors that go with. This makes using a mouse nearly impossible because the cursor flies all over the place.

I created free software called SteadyMouse[1] back in 2005 to remove this tremor while letting normal mouse motion through. It eventually moved up near the top of Google's search results. At the same time, the free version began to show its age with compatibility issues. I spent the last two years on a massive rewrite for a commercial version and formed a single member LLC to carry it back in July 2016.

Revenue is not enough to quit my day job writing automotive firmware, however it's still a nice bit of allowance on the side. I enjoy the stories from users mostly as well as trying to automate the repetitive tasks so I can focus on coding.

[1] https://www.steadymouse.com

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

#413

Post by LauraAtlas »

tajen wrote: post #44

I, alone, publish an add-on on the Atlassian Marketplace. I have several add-ons for diversification, but 1-2 of them is 99% of my income. Server sales are one-off (but 80% of my income) and Cloud sales are recurrent (better if you hope to hire). Define successful: I 100% live off it ($50k/yr before taxes). Biggest new add-ons are often agencies who can afford to sponsor their development because it's a customer funn…

Hi Tajen! Thanks so much for your input. The Atlassian Ecosystem was built by developers like you who saw the power of extending our platform and have built profitable businesses by selling add-ons on our Marketplace. We now have over 10,000 developers in our community and have paid out over $150M to developers selling on our Marketplace. In fact, 15+ developers have generated more than $1 million in direct sales each!

We recently revamped our developer site (developer.atlassian.com) to help folks find the right resources and start building with ease and scale. We're always open to feedback on how we can improve the development process and ways to help developers like you grow their business. Give us a shout on our new service desk and let us know what we can do better (https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/...)

Keep up the great work and a big thanks from our team!

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

#414

Post by Swizec »

csallen wrote: post #250

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…

How can you afford to be full-time on $2239/month? O.o

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

#415

Post by ericabiz »

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.

You can get AliExpress suppliers to ship DHL or UPS Express, which takes 3-5 days. It varies a bit due to customs. The problem is that it's massively expensive, and doesn't make sense for a single small item.

We have established suppliers now, many of which we originally found through Alibaba/Aliexpress, and we order hundreds or thousands of items at a time (I run a small chain of cell phone repair shops), but even then shipping on a couple medium-sized boxes can run $80 and up.

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

#416

Post by dgrigg »

csallen wrote: post #250

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…

IndieHackers is a brilliant idea. Being able to learn from other people's successes and failures and seeing that most startups are not unicorns is a great help.

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

#417

Post by Kluny »

HoboHammocks wrote: post #101

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.…

Hi, I could use more technical information about these. The description area on product pages has a lot of info about feeding homeless people, not so much about the total weight of the package (hammock+biners+pouch_strap), how much space it takes up when packed, what kind of fabric you used (parachute nylon isn't specific enough for me), and what the deal is with this sleeping pad pouch (it's implied that there is one, but it's not listed in the technical description). Cheers, hope this is useful feedback!

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

#418

Post by napoleond »

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…

How are you promoting your products? I am part marketer and part developer, but I am finding it difficult to market to developers :)

I recently launched http://www.smsinbox.net for Twilio devs, and am slowly gaining some users, but finding it very difficult to reach the target audience, and/or get visitor/user feedback.

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

#419

Post by chrishacken »

emodendroket wrote: post #318
beachstartup wrote: post #151

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…

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).

But that person on the phone is almost certainly reading from a scripted prompter and could care less about your issue. It would probably take 2-3 days to get someone on-site if there was a physical issue with your connection. I've gotten calls before at 2am and was on-premise by 2:30am, does ATT do that?

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

#420

Post by gthtjtkt »

wastedhours wrote: post #409
gthtjtkt wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Standard" shipping in the U.S. is considered 5-7 days, especially for small items. 10 days is generous. 20 days is certainly pushing the limits of what customers will tolerate without advanced notice. Many people would probably be calling for refunds after 2 weeks if they weren't told "This will take 2-4 weeks to ship" (which his site does NOT do). 30 days would be absolutely unacceptable to most people.

But unless there's some kind of information to mislead you into thinking that it should be 5-7 days, it's not the fault of (or even a dark pattern) by the company. I could understand calling it out if it were a bait and switch, but think it's an entitlement issue to assume any kind of shipping time.

Don't be ridiculous. It's misleading to not warn people that you have exceptionally long shipping times, far beyond any standard and several times longer than what 96% of customers expect (5-7 days).

If you ordered a cheeseburger at a takeout place and they said "Thanks for your order!" then took 3 hours to make it, would you say "Oops, it was my fault for assuming it would be ready in a reasonable amount of time!"

No, you'd be frustrated and asking where your food was, especially since you'd paid for it 2 hours ago and they never warned you about how long it would take.

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