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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
151–160 of 685 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#152Earlier 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…
Actually, there's completion, and excellent debugging tools for Clojure in Emacs, both step-by-step kind, and investigative. "I don't want to use Emacs" is a completely valid stance (de gustibus...), but it should not be misinformed.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your job is less than 10% of your income, why keep it?
Good question, my career is very important to me. It gives me an identity. I just can’t sit at home all day. I’m gonna die with boredom.
That's really smart. I hope I would've thought of that 5 years ago.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#154I run & operate a VPN company.
Found a niche that at least 600 people would pay me a monthly amount for, totalling nearly $3k a month. Costs are Everything is automated so it's probably less than an hour a week.
It was my learn how to code project that has become my basic income. All the money is funding my secondary project.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#155As someone who's been hacking away at his "boring", one-man company for a few months (after the 3 year old is in bed, so only about two hours a night, and only some nights) and has begun hitting those initial slumps, this is very inspiring
Thanks for posting, and thanks to all who have commented with their success stories.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good question, my career is very important to me. It gives me an identity. I just can’t sit at home all day. I’m gonna die with boredom.
Have you considered starting your own business out of an office? That’s more than enough money to support yourself and do what you want.
Business is not for all, believe me I have tried :) but I’m studying for my master’s degree.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#157I 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…
If your job is less than 10% of your income, why keep it?
Meeting other humans?
Enjoying the work?
A regular job with regular income looks good on paper if you want a bank to lend you money, for example.
Maybe less likely to appear on tax authority's radar for undisclosed income if people know you as Joe the IT guy who leaves for work at the same time every morning?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#158I'm working on FormAPI [1], which helps developers fill out PDF documents. I started working on this around 2 years ago. I was mostly working on it part-time, and I took a few breaks while I was doing freelance work to pay the bills. This year I raised some money from Earnest Capital [2], which has allowed me to go full-time and hire some contractors. I used to think that I wanted to build a one-person company and st…
Interested to hear your experience with Earnest. Can you disclose how much you raised, what percentage earnings they take, and what the cap is?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#159I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while. Please…
> release a prototype after 2-6 weeks I'm in the situation where my product overlaps significantly with others but brings (IMO) some missing features and a better overall experience. I would love to launch quickly but feel I need some feature parity with competitors first.
If people are looking to switch for a different offering, they will tell you.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#160Related: Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783 752 points - 6 months ago
Kind of nice to be able to verify which one person shops are still operating.