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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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471–480 of 685 posts

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

#471
post #129

I 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…

1500% wow

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

#473
post #419

I develop Flowx [ https://www.flowx.io ], an Android weather app. It makes around $2,500 USD/month with about $500/month in costs excluding my time. It covers about 60% of my total costs including my time which is 40+ hours a week. I cover my remaining costs through contract work. This might not seem like a success but the business allowed us to move to the Rarotonga, Cook Islands from Auckland, New Zealand. Lifestyl…

Congrats - this is certainly a success, especially for monetizing in a heavily crowded space with many free alternatives available.

Can you share a few pointers on competing in a crowded market.

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

#474

Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. For the rest of the folks like me, I will share a small tidbit of wisdom: Starting a business is really hard and it's totally OK to just go work for Salesforce. You do you.

It's not just really hard. I think the hard part most people can get by. It's the luck part that a lot of us are missing. You have to be lucky enough to be that 1 person who catches the train at the right time.

Imagine the odds of that. That's what gets me. It's not necessarily how hard you work. It's the window of opportunity that most people miss.

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

#476
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the response. Are you GmbH or selbständig for this? Wondering which is better for a situation like a one man job. I'm in a similar situation.

I am sole proprietor / Einzelunternehmer. A GmbH works too. Cons: - more work to set it up - more paper work - unnecessary in some cases Pros: - cash flow for you as a founder is more stable / taxes can be calculated and predicted more easily (only relevant if you expect a good year and then a bad year) Neutral: - Your personal liability is supposedly limited. This is only partially true. There's still the liability…

German here. I am mulling over the type of business because I want to grow a B2B company where there is potential for loss of service for a big corporate customer, and my fear is getting hit with a justified (or frivolous) lawsuit that will wipe me out.

So, to come back to your comment: Is there ever a situation where you as a solo-founder/owner would consider a limited-liability corp (GmbH/UG) for reasons of liability or are the only good reasons for such a corp to be able to employ people, take in outside investments and set up something like a holding structure?

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

#477

I'm running http://remoteleaf.com - Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs that are made for you from about 20+ job boards & 100+ company pages. - Using filters based on your skill preferences & location, Remote leaf would be able to know that job that befits you and send you job postings daily or weekly to your inbox.

Wat. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332773

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

#478
post #361

Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. For the rest of the folks like me, I will share a small tidbit of wisdom: Starting a business is really hard and it's totally OK to just go work for Salesforce. You do you.

My #1 frustration is having ideas that are pretty good (I know this because I see them done by someone else within 1-5 years of me wanting to do it), but not yet knowing how to raise capital. I see all the crazy shit like WeWork and other companies where people have millions thrown at them while never making a profit (and even actively cheating their investors). I don't want to be one of those guys, but I would like…

If you are struggling with being overly invested in your day job I suggest you go contracting. Get payed a day rate for a fixed number of hours a day, either work a day or don't no inbetween. Bill for the number of days you did at the end of the month (or week). Sick days and holidays cost you hundreds of dollars per day. You will learn to value your time (even if it costs a small amount of your soul). As an added bonus you will have money and a business in place already.

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

#479

My 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…

Congrats on executing this idea. Question: Why is Facebook not shutting you down? Doesn't this break their terms and conditions?

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

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also want to focus on the developer market. How did you do marketing? I found it difficult. How do you handle sales tax? I found it very very complex.

I think that marketing is one of the main advantages of selling into a very niche market - I really do no explicit marketing at all. I've spoken at various Clojure conferences, appeared on Clojure-related podcasts etc but I've never run a single ad for Cursive. Just by being active in the community (which I would do anyway, it's just part of my job) people hear about it, and it doesn't take much SEO for Cursive's web…

Thank you very much for the reply.

I found marketing difficult, because I don't know many potential users from my direct network. I'm doing content marketing. But most people are interested in the content itself, other than the product. The conversion rate is a bit low.

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