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

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

#441

Post by jimbokun » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

novaleaf wrote: post #177

jimbokun wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 :)

Yes! Support is also the part most potentially terrifying to me, considering starting something while still employed at a full time job. Seems like it could quickly become a massive time sink and source of stress.

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

#442

Post by csallen » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

dgrigg wrote: post #416

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.

Hey Derrick! Glad to have Pageproofer on the site :D

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

#443

Post by malux85 » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

devgutt wrote: post #264

malux85 wrote: 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…

Sales are a big struggle to me. Where did you find this partnerships?

Network. Go to the meetups.

Don't rely on serendipity, we can do better than that. Use your programming skills.

Pull the meetup list, get all of their twitter profiles, search everyones last 1000 tweets for topics you are interested in. Pull all of their code on github. Push it through the profiler and find the talent.

Mirror github if you have to. Pull the whole darn thing, it's only a couple of hundred gigs (if you dont pull the code) Profile everyone based on their stars, contributions, watchers and pull requests.

How many other meetups do they go to? What's their history like on other forums?

Put the pics of these people on your phone, and then go and find them at the meetup. Pull their customer lists / testimonials and any other publicly available data.

Look at their company DNS records. Pull their company filings if they're available. Know their revenue, know their customers. Who's making the decisions at this company? Who is signing the cheques?

Scientia potentia est

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

#444

Post by csallen » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:16 PM UTC

tomek_zemla wrote: post #351

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…

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!

1. Been thinking about doing book reviews on the blog actually. Any tips/ideas for crowdsourcing it and getting the community involved? Maybe I'll try using the forum for that.

2. Will try to do updates every few months or so in the future, don't want the interviews to get stale!

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

#445

Post by ericcholis » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

adpoe wrote: post #185

ericcholis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you have any longtime hobbies? I've played guitar my whole life, so I sell guitar parts. It's easiest if you can leverage knowledge you already have. I also tried stores selling items I knew very little about, and it was much harder. =) There are many tools for finding what's selling though. The best ones are paid, like Terapeak ( http://www.terapeak.com/ ), but you can also search eBay completed listings and get…

https://www.junglescout.com/ is a good example for Amazon too. But, I think you nailed it, enthusiasm for a niche is key

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

#446

Post by alinalex » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:18 PM UTC

rednivs wrote: post #368

Unlike the majority here I have zero coding skills. Currently monetizing www.hashtaginvesting.com, a Slack chat for stock traders and investors to discuss in real-time.

Do you consider learning how to code?

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

#447

Post by jrnichols » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:22 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...

Ahhhh... Geo IP stuff. That's the reason that I can't get a lot of the local channels on streaming apps. :-P

I'm actually n hour north of Dallas, but pretty much all of the Geo IP products show me as being out in east Texas, usually Mount Pleasant or Longview. That's 150 miles from where I am.

As a result, I get streams coming from Shreveport, LA instead of Dallas, TX.

Not sure if there's a way to fix this.

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

#448

Post by donmatito » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

I always found indieHackers interesting, but I had not realized you had a blog. Kudos to you for the transparency, honesty, and opportunity for all of us to learn!

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

#449

Post by tajen » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

LauraAtlas wrote: post #413

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 eac…

> 15+ developers who generated $1m each

Ahem. Are they one-man companies? Are they newcomers? Or is it a very misleading number in that context?

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

#450

Post by j2bax » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

dmalvarado wrote: post #156

nickjj wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is, change your pitch. Your wording leads to thoughts like the two commenters had above. Shouldn't be too hard if you have real substance to sell.

I can only guess that he's not incredibly familiar with this community and its aversion to BS/fluff... I'm sure he finds great success in his verbiage "testing" on other less savvy forums.