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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#571

Post by gitgud »

csallen wrote: post #31

I run https://IndieHackers.com , which was inspired by threads like this one on HN. I've interviewed hundreds of people running successful one-person SaaS businesses, and many thousands more have created pages for their products here: https://www.indiehackers.com/products Just a small handful of my favorites: - Simple Analytics by Adriaan van Rossum, making $2900/month ( http://bit.ly/35QXFhY ). Competing with Google…

Wow! Hi Courtland!

Indie Hackers is an amazing community, I'm always inspired when I go to the site and see companies at different stages helping each other out.

Your products page is great, I often check it out to see how revenues are going watch products grow. I find the "stripe-verified" feature to invaluable, as most self-reported numbers seem to be a little inflated.

Hopefully I can launch my own product one day, I've done a lot of open-source projects and toys, but making something people want and want to pay for is my ultimate goal.

Also, great work with the podcast, I really like your interview style, you always ask interesting questions and truly listen to your guests.

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

#572

Post by codesushi42 »

braindead_in wrote: post #399

I am the solo founder of a crowdsourcing business. We are into audio/video transcription. I've been at it since 2008, fully bootstrapped. I tried very hard to convert it into a high growth startup. I even got called for an YC interview in 2016, but didn't make it. I have lost a lot of money over the years on experiments which didn't work. I didn't get rich but I make enough to beat the market rate salary. Last year,…

Nothing to be ashamed of, congrats. But ML is likely to automate this away in less than 10 years.

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

#573

Post by phito »

Agentlien wrote: post #495
phito wrote: post #15

I sell carnivorous plants online. It's not my main job/revenue so it doesn't fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job. Here's a few things I do that made it "successful": - Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing. - Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere - Having a good website that works, is well organized…

My father-in-law also cultivates and sells carnivorous plants as well as water lilies as a hobby. And he's also Belgian.

That's awesome, maybe I know him!

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

#574

Post by phito »

DangerousYams wrote: post #436
phito wrote: post #15

I sell carnivorous plants online. It's not my main job/revenue so it doesn't fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job. Here's a few things I do that made it "successful": - Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing. - Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere - Having a good website that works, is well organized…

best idea in this list!

Thanks :)

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

#575

Post by phito »

babycake wrote: post #286
phito wrote: post #15

I sell carnivorous plants online. It's not my main job/revenue so it doesn't fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job. Here's a few things I do that made it "successful": - Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing. - Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere - Having a good website that works, is well organized…

Can I ask how much profit you make off the plants?

This year I made around 6000€ in profit. I could make more but the limiting factor here is mostly time.

My main goal is to cover my hobby's expenses, which are mostly the electricity bill and acquiring new species.

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

#576

Post by icebraining »

Havoc wrote: post #57
khuknows wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally just switched to a very limited freemium model yesterday (just trialling it for now), but before then it was just pay to access. It's $39 per quarter or $99 per year for access to all the content. Quite a low priced product with decently high churn, so I've been trying to find ways to increase the value.

Higher pricing than i would have guessed. But I guess it solves a professional pain point so worth it

Seems cheap for a business case. Even when I worked in a low-wage EU country, that would easily fit into my training budget.

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

#577

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

phito wrote: post #15

I sell carnivorous plants online. It's not my main job/revenue so it doesn't fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I like keeping it as a side job. Here's a few things I do that made it "successful": - Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing. - Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere - Having a good website that works, is well organized…

I appreciate your advice. It may seem obvious but obvious is easy to miss sometimes. Anyhow, question, how do you maintain your supply? I would think those plants are hard to cultivate?

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

#578

Post by icebraining »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #506
adamqureshi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent. Food. Utilities. $3,500-month Server $150-month Facebook $35/month

I had to read your comment 3 times before pressing “reply” asking you how do you spend $3.5k a month on a server, then realising it’s for rent, food and utilities. May the commas be with you

Same here, my heart skipped a beat when reading that.

Even $1800/y seems high, but I can't argue with success.

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

#579

Post by vfc1 »

imhoguy wrote: post #426
vfc1 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is not a lot of sense of community in most companies these days, its often each person for itself. Especially in IT, people stay for a couple of years and then leave or get laid off, there is no employment for life anymore. You can run the business from a shared workspace, it's not an issue. And even hire a couple of people to help you out since the salaries there are relatively affordable, and build your own c…

I don't agree with your generalization. When you keep in touch with people you used to work with then some relationships usually expand beyond companies and employment duration. In the future they can become your business partners, employers, referees, spouse or just friends.

Sure, but you can also build relationships while owning a business, via conferences, shared workspaces, or what not.

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

#580

Post by mrunkel »

blunte wrote: post #505
esquire_900 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management. Whether justified or not, many potential customers will choose a seemingly bigger company over a smaller one (especially a one-person company). Now if they were billing based on number of people working for a client, and they were charging for phantom people, that would be fraud. This guy just has an optimized workflow that he pr…

> Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management.

That's some pretty fancy doublespeak right there.

No. I'm sorry, but this is flat out lying. You can rationalize it all you like, but if you are lying and inventing people that don't exist, it's fraud.

This isn't even lying by omission, but actively working to deceive.

Sure, the customer may be getting full value for their money, but then why is the lying necessary?

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