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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#531

Post by iopuy »

thecatspaw wrote: post #495
coderholic wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reporting the back button issue. I've also seen this occasionally, but haven't seriously looked into it. Is this Chrome, or another browser? > 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? There are 2 parts to that. 1) What's the advantage of using an geolocation API over a local database? It's simpler.…

yeah its chrome Version 54.0.2840.98 (64-bit) on osx Im sorry but setting up a cronjob to download maxmind + include jars into project seems easier and faster than incorporating a third party web service. edit: about speed, since you call such a database yourself most likely, you are not gonna be faster than local lookup

This comment reminds me of the response Dropbox received when being introduced to ycombinator.

    "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

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

#532

Post by nickjj »

biot wrote: post #425
nickjj wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Sorry you didn't like the course. I don't recall any snarky replies, but you're right. There were a few people who would have preferred a "code everything from a blank page" approach. The problem is, how do you code up a 4,000+ line Python application with dozens of files and thousands of lines of HTML/CSS/JS together 1 character at a time? It would take 100+ hours of video and you would want to punch me in the f…

You're being highly disingenuous with your reply, to the point that I agree with the other comment that it is snarky. Assuming your audience already knows HTML and Python is perfectly acceptable if the focus is on building the application, not on teaching how to type HTML and Python from scratch one character at a time. A video could then say "Now we enter in this page of HTML [cut from blank editor to already typed…

Hey,

The course does mention you should have a basic understanding of HTML and Python before starting it. It's meant to teach you about Flask.

There's about 60 HTML templates in total. Rather than put the burden of copy/pasting each one onto the student, I decided to break the entire project up into 20 stages (separated by folders and git commits).

You get to see the application at 20 stages of development (to see how it gets built up). It starts with a single app.py file and finishes with the end result.

Basically I go over each line of code, and explain why it's written and what it does.

This style of teaching was a choice I made based on the direct feedback of hundreds of students in previous courses.

Most of them like the fast paced style where I talk over the code. There's also many hours of code challenges built into the course to get your hands dirty. The refund rate is currently less than 1%.

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

#533

Post by nickjj »

guntars wrote: post #374
nickjj wrote: post #40

In 2016 I took content creation somewhat seriously and the end result was enough income to sustain living in NY. Not sure if it's worth blogging about yet. Are other developers interested to see how to potentially make software engineer-tier salaries without having to work for another company? (Note: I also started with nothing. No mentors, no following, no existing profile, no paid advertising, etc.). Edit : If you'…

I can't take any of this "how to work for yourself and make money" seriously, if the main way that you make money is by charging for these lessons. It's like a pyramid scheme where the real money is in getting people to learn from you and pay for the privilege. It would be a lot more credible if you made the ideas freely available, but, alas, that will not pay for your rent in NYC.

I don't charge any money to read the blog.

While I do have a few paid courses, they are all based around learning specific programming / developer related technologies, not marketing or pyramid scheme tactics.

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

#534

Post by burrokeet »

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…

+1 for the slack add - christopher [at] tunecrew [dot] com

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

#535

Post by confiscate »

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…

Add me to slack please! confiscate (at gmail). P.S. I upvoted your comment :)

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

#536

Post by coderholic »

thecatspaw wrote: post #495
coderholic wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for reporting the back button issue. I've also seen this occasionally, but haven't seriously looked into it. Is this Chrome, or another browser? > 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? There are 2 parts to that. 1) What's the advantage of using an geolocation API over a local database? It's simpler.…

yeah its chrome Version 54.0.2840.98 (64-bit) on osx Im sorry but setting up a cronjob to download maxmind + include jars into project seems easier and faster than incorporating a third party web service. edit: about speed, since you call such a database yourself most likely, you are not gonna be faster than local lookup

JSON on back button issue fixed

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

#537

Post by coderholic »

rudolf0 wrote: post #452
thecatspaw wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>edit: also, when I press the back button from this page: http://ipinfo.io/AS6830 all I get is a json Funny you mention that, because I've had the same issue with regular IPs. I use ipinfo.io a lot for my job and have noticed this intermittently.

Just deployed a fix for this.

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

#538

Post by akiselev »

beachstartup wrote: post #397
emodendroket wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> offering a superior alternative to larger, better funded incumbent institutions. I don't know that that is necessarily an accurate way of describing the role of a private school.

so how would you describe it?

Well, considering that the biggest period of growth private schools experienced was during desegregation, I would wager that most private schools exist as an escape hatch for parents who find their school district undesirable for one reason or another. Also, most private school students in the US go to a religiously-affiliated institution so there is a strong element of religious indoctrination there.

Stereotypically, charter schools are the ones that are supposed to be better than public schools at a cheaper cost to the government (charter schools can be private or quasi-public).

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

#539

Post by idlewords »

nthState wrote: post #456
idlewords wrote: post #246

I run Pinboard, $257K in gross revenue for 2016. A ton of money for one person, not quite enough for two people.

Hi, I'm guesstimating 25'000 paying users? - Do you have a writeup on your marketing?

My marketing is, I spend all my time talking smack on Twitter.

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

#540

Post by knite »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #335
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…

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…

What sort of bulk work is this? If margins are this good, it sounds like a real market opportunity!
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