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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
351–360 of 685 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#352I 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.
My team is mixed. We have two devs using Cursive, one using Atom, one using vim and then two using emacs. The two devs using Cursive love IntelliJ and being able to work in IntelliJ and do Clojure development is a big win for them
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#353Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#354Seven years ago I solo-started an automatic time tracker for programmers called WakaTime [1] and launched here on HN [2]. Partly from listening to developers too much, I waited way too long (almost a year) before adding a paid plan, but now it generates more MRR than an SF developer salary not including stock options. Technically I make more from RSUs and stock from past startups as a regular employee, but if I wasn'…
How does top 1 code for 13 hours per day? o_o
Not sustainably... I've done that myself: it's hella fun but towards the end of the week the code stopped making sense and had to sleep for a whole day. WakaTime is very accurate so my daily average is only 4 hours of actual typing per day:
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#355Seven years ago I solo-started an automatic time tracker for programmers called WakaTime [1] and launched here on HN [2]. Partly from listening to developers too much, I waited way too long (almost a year) before adding a paid plan, but now it generates more MRR than an SF developer salary not including stock options. Technically I make more from RSUs and stock from past startups as a regular employee, but if I wasn'…
Thank you for sharing.
How much time it took you to build first version and whole product? Any advice for starters?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#356Not sure it qualifies as a solo business but I run a tech blog that not only helped me to get my current job but also side gigs and contracts. Besides that I was contacted by tech companies to write paid guest posts for them. Recently a few companies offers me percentage of amount prompting their products via posts. One of them helping me to earn good referral amount. So far gave them 30+ customers in 2-3 months. They are web scraping service. I am thinking to contact a few companies myself in a near future.
My blog URL is: http://blog.adnansiddiqi.me
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#357My business is in my bio, don't want to link it here. Pays about the same as my previous job at Microsoft did, but with a lot less involvement — I haven't touched the main code in about a year now. I probably spend about two or three hours a week on customer support, that's it, really. No marketing spend, all word-of-mouth and Google.
The idea came about when I wanted to post to Instagram, but the API didn't allow it. So I spent about a week trying to automate the process using a phone, with screenshot OCR and a state machine. After a lot of messing around with it, I had a working prototype. Made a website, added a $5/month Stripe plan to see if people were willing to pay for it, sent it to a few friends, posted it on Twitter, and eventually, people signed up and tried it out. It worked, then it didn't work, then I fixed it, then it worked again, this went on and on for a few weeks until it became quite useable.
About two months in, local offices of Toyota and Samsung signed up, and they loved it, money wasn't an issue. That was the moment I realized it may be worth doing it properly.
It grew organically, and I bought lots and lots of Android phones, which are simple workers getting jobs off a queue, and host them in two locations roughly. Phones last for about two years, then I buy new ones (Facebook tried to sue me after I filed for a trademark, we figured it out (I rebranded). Been going steady ever since, but I consider it to be shut down by yet another Instagram move sooner or later. But I said that after 3 weeks of running it, and it's been almost five years I think.
I made it a point to not use any private Instagram APIs, like all my competitors did — instead, I don't emulate the Instagram app, I emulate the person tapping the phone, and use only the official app for it. I think that let me survive this long.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#358I always hold up https://pinboard.in/ as a poster child for a successful one-man shop. It's so successful he takes several months off at a time, right now he's in HK reporting on the demonstrations. He's very generous with sharing his financials on his blog: https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
It's a shame he hasn't updated the financials since 2017 tho. I always liked reading up on it.
They're up there. https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 exp…
Hey there. I'm working on this, at my usual agonizingly slow pace. But it's a project!
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#360I 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…
Wow! Nice to see fellow Habesha doing so well!