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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#161

Post by sshine »

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…

Interesting.

As a person in your target audience (except perhaps geography), here's what I'd like:

I'm really dumb when it comes to skin care, but recently convinced myself that it's important.

So I have zero clue where to start. Looking at your nicely stylized huge rectangles with jars, my eyes glaze over: They're all the same! Short jar, tall jar, short jar.

Why not write some blog posts to increase SEO ranking on subjects that your audience might want to read:

- What should my first skin care product be?

- How making skin care a part of your daily routine in only X minutes a day.

- How does one characterize skin (dryness, etc.), what's my skin type, and what product should I buy for it?

- How to cut costs making your own skin care products, and how buying your products is not much more expensive, but a lot more effortless than that.

- Something related to beards; like your front-page photo of a good looking muscular man with a nice looking beard, maybe interview-style for aspiration.

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

#162

Post by stephen »

fastbeef wrote: post #27
woutr_be wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame he hasn't updated the financials since 2017 tho. I always liked reading up on it.

Did you read the latest blog post? I has financials for 2019

Hey! Been using pinboard for years, so I love it/huge thanks... but please make the web UI a responsive layout so that it's usable on mobile. :-)

(I use the Android apps, and recently flipped from PinDroid to Pinkt, and both are usable but not enjoyable. The Pinkt UX looks great, it's just slow on all my bookmarks. If you don't like Android, maybe do a mini-partnership with the Pinkt guy to polish it into a great experience.)

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

#163

Post by esquire_900 »

throwaway21212 wrote: post #108

I have a one-person lifestyle business. I like it primarily because it gives me the flexibility to live anywhere in the world. I hated my old desk job and the idea of 2 weeks vacation every year. I run a SaaS product that integrates with ERPs. I pretend to my customers that I have a team (so much so that I have multiple email addresses to people that don't exist that actually just forward to me). One of our customers…

Don't you find that whole pretending part to be unethical? With those kind of revenues it shouldn't be hard to either hire 2 and make factual claims, or just drop the whole we're-a-team claim.

I can't imagine that building a foundation on these kind of lies towards your clients is going to be sustainable in the long run?

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

#165

Post by Crinus »

brokenkebab wrote: post #152
Crinus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know that Emacs has good support for Lisps in general, my comment was a joke towards what i consider basic features of an IDE (the whole 'modern' and 'advanced' thing when referring to stuff that were available in the late 80s should have made it obvious :-P). It comes mainly from my observation of the trend where a lot of developers like to jury rig "IDEs" out of text editors and a bunch of other unrelated tools that look as if they are made to be run in 70s terminals that look and feel considerably worse that MS-DOS applications which had 1/100000th of the available resources.

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

#166

Post by imglorp »

snt wrote: post #117

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.

Nice job, I've been thinking about this for a while, perhaps leverage...

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/f...

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

#167

Post by puranjay »

I worked with a client recently who ran a successful site comparing products in a very popular and lucrative industry. His affiliate income was in the high six figures annually. He runs the entire business by himself

Personally, it might not be completely successful yet, but I started a music blog a while back (don't want to share the URL) just to test some SEO strategies. It's pulling in low four figures every month with very little work on my part.

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

#168

Post by maxencecornet »

It doesn't exactly qualify as a one-man business, but I'm running a few side projects bringing around $500/month:

- https://batgrowth.com: A website monitoring the growth of The Brave browser / Basic Attention Token, in terms of publishers adoption (Fun fact: Wikipedia founder, Larry Sanger, tweeted about the site)

- https://ethereum-cours.com: A CMC clone built mainly for fun, bringing some decent referral revenue

- My tech blog

I've built many more side projects, most were earning $0/month after a few months, but I've also sold 2 side projects, so overall it's worth the effort

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

#169

Post by puranjay »

bekman wrote: post #147
jfoster wrote: post #133

Earlier 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.

You're a smart man. I wish I had done that.

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

#170

Post by mkl »

istjohn wrote: post #143
nickonline wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are there mail forwarding services that cater to people in your situation? Would you pay $10-$15 plus typical US-to-Australia shipping costs for this service? I guess I'm wondering if this is a business opportunity for someone to provide a US delivery address and then forward the mail abroad.

New Zealand Post runs a service like this: https://www.nzpost.co.nz/tools/youshop

Doesn't cater to Australians though!

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