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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#111

Post by nickonline »

treyfitty wrote: post #71

I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago ( https://www.mendskin.co ) which isn’t “successful” yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these things take time. It’s tough. There’s a reason a lot of companies spend $1MM from investors before launching a product, but I wanted to test the hypothesis that this need not be the case. “Beauty products” (for lack of a better term) defini…

From the list of businesses in this thread this was the one that caught my eye. However, I am Australian and a lot of the time businesses don't ship here. Like you say, it's a physical business, you need to move physical products.

I opened your website and immediately looked for shipping, 'countries you ship to' is nowhere to be found until checkout, where there is a dropdown with no options other than the USA.

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

#112

Post by stanislavb »

lemming wrote: post #60

I develop and sell Cursive ( https://cursive-ide.com ), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I'd be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I'm constantly amazed by how well Cursive does. The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent o…

I just submitted Cursive to SaaSHub, but it doesn't seem to have any known alternatives. Are there? https://www.saashub.com/cursive-ide

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

#113

Post by nickswan »

I have been running https://www.sanitycheck.io - an SEO tool. I built it originally to help me with my own SEO consulting work, but it has grown from being a side project to my main source of income now. Literally just this month it has reached the point of being able to support me full time. It has taken 3 years to get to this point.

It's just me - I have made use of the odd contractor for website design and copy. Upon starting the side project I wanted to see how large I could grow a business as a single person. It has been fun, but I also miss the team mate side of things such as brainstorming solutions and talking through problems.

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

#114

Post by mihaifm »

abinaya_rl wrote: post #39

I'm running http://remoteleaf.com - Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs based on your individual skill preferences & location. We source best remote jobs from over 20+ job boards and tons of individual company hiring pages.

That's brilliant, thanks for sharing.

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

#115

Post by khuknows »

sagarpatil wrote: post #110
khuknows wrote: post #14

I run https://pageflows.com and have been living off it full time for a little over a year. The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a junior developer in London, so it's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough. It's a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some sort of micro saas, but it's I'm happy with how things have been so far. Happy to answer any que…

Sounds like a neat idea. How do you acquire customers?

Thanks! I started a related newsletter a few years ago that has good reach (https://uimovement.com) and that drives some traffic. SEO is also a decent source, plus some content marketing and word of mouth.

I've recently started experimenting with ways to grow the traffic above the base level, but it's slow going tbh.

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

#116

Post by jfoster »

phito wrote: post #49
callym wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whereabouts do you ship to (and if possible can you share a link or something)? I'm always looking for more Europe/UK plant suppliers! I'm also trying to start up a small online plant shop but am finding it hard to a) get the growing space, and b) get the interesting stock - would love to hear about how you dealt with these issues when first starting up! :)

My website is https://phito.be :) I ship in the EU and any other countries that have trade deals that allows plant transfer without requiring phytosanitary certificates (Switzerland for example)! Sadly after Brexit I don't know if I will still be able to ship over the UK :( Finding the growing space is hard, especially if your plants are big. Thankfully I focus mostly on the Drosera genus, which are mostly small plan…

Given that any competitors may also face the Brexit problem and it hasn't happened yet, why not start a subsidiary now and ship a bunch of product over before Brexit comes into effect?

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

#117

Post by snt »

I run https://picojump.com which I started this year.

It evolved to scratch my own itch: simplifying the access, management, and monitoring of a fleet of distributed Raspberry Pis (running Raspbian, on private networks) without requiring any proprietary client-side code. Though it meets the submitter's criteria, it's not [yet] providing enough to live off.

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

#118

Post by Crinus »

spv wrote: post #93
lemming wrote: post #60

I develop and sell Cursive ( https://cursive-ide.com ), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I'd be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I'm constantly amazed by how well Cursive does. The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent o…

I cannot believe that you make more from such a niche dev tool than your job at Google. I always thought people who use clojure/scheme would be using their custom setup in emacs or vim. I'm interested to learn more details, how things were when you first started out selling the app and the trend.

You say that but one thing that i always dislike when i consider taking a look at Lisps is how everything seems to be either on Emacs or looks like it'd really like to be Emacs.

Personally I want a full blown IDE that takes advantage of advanced modern technologies such as displays that can draw individual pixels, have a model of the codebase that allows advanced features such as word completion and preferably fits nicely with the underlying OS. A debugger would also be nice, but i understand that sometimes i ask too much.

I wouldn't mind paying for such a tool (though i do mind DRM schemes and subscriptions - i want to be able to pay once and then be on my way). Cursive looks something i'd pay for if i was really interested into Clojure and was using macOS.

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

#119

Post by graeme »

nickswan wrote: post #113

I have been running https://www.sanitycheck.io - an SEO tool. I built it originally to help me with my own SEO consulting work, but it has grown from being a side project to my main source of income now. Literally just this month it has reached the point of being able to support me full time. It has taken 3 years to get to this point. It's just me - I have made use of the odd contractor for website design and copy. U…

Had a look at your site, and requested access, as I think it would be useful.

That said, I'm not super clear on what it does. The landing pages could really benefit from listing a few specific features, and listing the business outcome that results from them.

I get that it does automated page speed testing (is this different from kingdom). Other than that, the main thing I'm aware that it does it "improved google search console reports".

But what does that do? Listing some specific report types and the resulting business outcomes would really help. (e.g. saved time on task X, increased ranking on page Y, more revenue from a higher CTR on product Z, I dunno)

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

#120

Post by nickswan »

graeme wrote: post #119
nickswan wrote: post #113

I have been running https://www.sanitycheck.io - an SEO tool. I built it originally to help me with my own SEO consulting work, but it has grown from being a side project to my main source of income now. Literally just this month it has reached the point of being able to support me full time. It has taken 3 years to get to this point. It's just me - I have made use of the odd contractor for website design and copy. U…

Had a look at your site, and requested access, as I think it would be useful. That said, I'm not super clear on what it does. The landing pages could really benefit from listing a few specific features, and listing the business outcome that results from them. I get that it does automated page speed testing (is this different from kingdom). Other than that, the main thing I'm aware that it does it "improved google sea…

Thanks - great feedback. Always trying to improve the home and feature pages and I do agree on your points. Have considered getting an explainer video created.
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