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> How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?
> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.
Heard some friends do dropshipping on places like Amazon or Shopify, although I can't attest to the validity/how successful it actually is.
If you're spending alot of time on your own, managing & building up your start up without alot of actual human engagement you need strong will power...& good ambient music on in the background ;-]
Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783 752 points - 6 months ago
It started out because a designer who sells fonts wanted to hire me to build a font previewer for their website so that customers could demo the fonts without being able to steal them. I quoted them the price and they said it was out of their price range. I said I would build it for free if they subscribed for a low monthly payment. They were ecstatic at the deal and invited their friends to sign up. Turned out it was an unsolved niche in the font design community. I posted it to a few websites where people were asking for a tool that does this. The rest is history.
The origin story is somewhat organic.
- Started as a logo design company
- then kept getting requests to help with UI/UX Design so I did
- then realised the most fun projects to work on were B2B SaaS companies
- today we're still growing and can happily count Fortune 500 companies, an Elon Musk company alongside awesome startups to our client list.
//Advice: Start with something small. Anything. Don't worry too much about how to grow. Then.. Just keep your eyes & ears open. Your customers will point you in the right direction towards bigger pinpoints & thus better growth opportunities. You don't always need a ton of traffic. Just start with something small and go from there.
I read an interesting article somewhere about Listen notes ( https://www.listennotes.com/ ), which is owned and run by one person. Not sure how profitable it is, but you can get in touch with them to gain more info.
https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-behi...