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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
121–130 of 685 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#122I 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.
As a Clojure (and Java) dev, I started with Cursive and eventually moved to emacs w/CIDER as I became more comfortable with it. Cursive is great for people new to the language who may not know emacs - learning a new language is challenging enough without also having to constantly refer to an emacs cheat sheet :).
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#123I heard levels.io (twitter.com/levelsio) makes like $50,000 per month off of Nomad List, and I'm pretty sure it's a one-person thing.
Not anymore. I think he has at least a dev by now.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good idea. Are the articles teaching how to use your software to solve an issue people have, or do you just mention/link to the the software in the end of the article?
The latter. The articles teach people about the niche domain/subject. The app is merely mentioned as an option to make life a bit easier.
Having the graphs in the app is much easier than doing yourself.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
> Cursive looks something i'd pay for if i was really interested into Clojure and was using macOS.
um... it runs on Linux and Windows as well.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#126I recently sunsetted it (as in - no longer accepting payments for it), but over 7 years I was running AppCodes.com. It’s a tool for app store seo, would be the first one on the market of it’s kind, if I launched it just 2 weeks earlier :,) Upon launch I announced it on hacker news, and wrote to the TC journalist that covered my competition. Got to front pages on both sites, and it was rather smooth sailing after that…
So why the sunset?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#127I 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.
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, shipping outside of the US is pretty much all we can do at this point, I’m sorry to say.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#128I sell carnivorous plants online. It's not my main job/revenue so it doesn't fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job. Here's a few things I do that made it "successful": - Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing. - Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere - Having a good website that works, is well organized…
Don't feed the plants!!!
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#129I run a popular Quiz website. I make around $6,000 per month from Google adsense. I work between 2-3 hours a week usually posting quiz links on my Pinterest page. My only expense is hosting which is around $20 per month (Digital Ocean). I have never advertised my website and it gets all the traffic from Pinterest Organically. Compare to my salary, I'm an IT Administrator in my day job and make $400 per month. I live in Ethiopia :) I thought this inspires my fellow HN. Good day.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#130I 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…
Cool! I used to run an ecommerce website a few years ago, 50K usd/month revenue. We used to get our customers from seo only. If I had to do it now I will probably try Facebook ads + email list. How do you acquire your customers?
That’s interesting. We too run ads on Instagram and Facebook and Google, but we’ve only found customers via Google Ads.
I’ve tried campaigns for gathering email addresses, but that didn’t lead anywhere.
Right now we’re testing affiliates