Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

Thank you. It maybe a bug i told my dev. I am working on the v2 so should work out some of the kinks on the site.

> "500K users, that's quite an achievement as well, pretty solid!"

Not quite :) As, majority of them are from tier-2 countries. Purchasing digital goods is not part of their culture.

> "But again, just from my gut feeling: I wonder if there's a way for you to REDUCE the number of active users and turn free users into loyal paid users."

Thank you for your suggestion! What you have mentioned are valid.

Maybe at some point, I want to introduce "ads" + "subscription" model. However, this is a competitive landscape. Most of the similar apps are using ads model. At this moment, I want to offer a compelling reason, for user to use my app instead of others. Luckily, this landscape has high stickiness, because user generated personal data are stored within the app. If they use the app for long enough, the cost is high, when they want to switch to other apps.

So, my hypothesis is that, as long as the free users are using my app, there will always be an opportunity to monetize from them, one day.

Yes. You're right. Currently, there is stress to do marketing. I need to keep attracting new users especially from tier-1 countries, so that new users' one-time purchase can help to cover my monthly living expense. I try to control the CPI cost to USD0.10 for Germany, Japan, Korea. I didn't invest for US, because the high cost is not justifiable. I do notice higher cost is required, if the tier-1 countries are English speaking country. My guess is that, less language barrier, will encourage more players in the market, and drive up the advertising cost.

> Absolutely! I wrote probably over 200,000 words and invested a lot of time in improving my writing skills

I really wish I can build a long term traffic like what you have done. Can you recommend me a publishing platform to publish all writings?

Currently, I am already using google sites (Because I do not have website design skill), to build a landing page to introduce the app features, hosing FAQ, and showing video on how to use the app. But, I don't think that is the suitable platform to host long written article.

When you write your writing, do you need to hire some graphics designer, to help to decorate your writing with nice graphic assets, to attract more readers?

Thank you!

In this case, the job appears to be the hobby. Just because you get paid for something doesn't exclude it from being a hobby.

Your python book recommendations for 2019 are crap.

My former one-person online biz (2013) is now 10 people - we run Amazon end-to-end ops for a few large brands and manage ~100k SKUs -- basically the work is all operations research + grunt work. We do mid eight digits in revenue.

A friend of a friend was the COO of a brand, spent a couple mil to position themselves online strategically, but that team couldn't deliver results. As a grad student in ML I spent a disproportional time procrastinating on Craigslist and Slickdeals and flipping inventory between those venues, SUPost (school-centric CL basically), and eBay, so I ended up being rather saavy at ecommerce. I offered to help out their store, then took it over when I got some initial results.

Ironically I think from a pure EV standpoint I shoulda stayed with my ML degree - my friends in the same cohort are averaging a mil a year in combined salary + bigcorp options. There were a lot of heartache and sleepless nights associated with running a company, and looking back honestly I would've had a more peaceful life toeing the 9-5.

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I have a few one-person side projects right now concurrently that are providing five-digit revenue that are hard for me to scale, but are enjoyable for me to do:

1. Domain expert in a hobbyist niche with high gatekeeping (skill and/or money) - I create a couple high quality content a year and make residuals off affiliate fees.

2. I flip small businesses in a very specific niche of ecommerce when they don't layer into my big business.

Note: this seems mildly prolific but honestly I have between 2-5 ideas a year of which I try to execute on 1-2 of them. I think of them as cognitive surplus, "Art projects for Fun and Profit-TM". Most ideas end up not working out, so the payoff really has to be about the process, not the result.