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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
631–640 of 685 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#632I own Product Pix ( https://www.proproductpix.org ). It removes the background from product photos, with the intended audience being mostly people who sell stuff online and need to set their background against a white background. It makes $1300/month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source of income, so I'm not gonna call it "…
This is very cool. I want to do something similar, with a particular focus on enhancing audio quality. How many ideas did you try and discard before deciding to do your "background remover" service? What were they, if you don't mind sharing?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#633I own Product Pix ( https://www.proproductpix.org ). It removes the background from product photos, with the intended audience being mostly people who sell stuff online and need to set their background against a white background. It makes $1300/month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source of income, so I'm not gonna call it "…
This is very cool. I want to do something similar, with a particular focus on enhancing audio quality. How many ideas did you try and discard before deciding to do your "background remover" service? What were they, if you don't mind sharing?
Previous ideas:
1. Automated proffers io always profile pic selector and optimizer. Like scam your Facebook with permissions and pick out the best photo for LinkedIn, potentially enchanting and cropping Ali g the way. Terrible idea because consumers generally never pay and getting people’s attention to this is going to be far more expensive than the value I can give you.
2. Automated tests for “broken” front end based on how the side renders on various devices. Pretty sure a machine learning model can recognize broken design. I still think it’s a good idea but potentially a pretty complicated sell!
3. The rest I’ll redact because I’m still toying with doing them.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#634I own Product Pix ( https://www.proproductpix.org ). It removes the background from product photos, with the intended audience being mostly people who sell stuff online and need to set their background against a white background. It makes $1300/month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source of income, so I'm not gonna call it "…
Very cool and super inspiring, well done! Can you give any detail on how you're getting customers... you mention learning google campaign management, is all your traffic via google or have you found any other distribution channels that work (e.g. posting on Fiverr forums yourself kind of thing?)
Post on refit and all the Facebook groups. Unfortunately people’s patience with you runs out pretty much immediately doing this.
I’m also pushing people to give out referrals with limited success.
My SEO game is non existent. I tried a blog post or two with nothing to show for it. I should reach out to sales gurus and such that reach Etsy/amazon sellers how to sell. I’ve only made halfhearted efforts there.
I think that now that I have a pretty decent api going and some users for that, I should probably make a medium blog post about my journey. Might land some more api customers.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#635I 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…
Do you make up the questions yourself or do you have sources for them?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#636I think my first million podcast has a lot of them who created 6-7 figure businesses mostly on their own
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#637I run a headless browser service called browserless.io. Got started due to lack of a comparable service, and all others seemed more geared for testing. It’s been around two years now, and makes more than any prior engineering job I’ve ever had. You do have a lot of other stresses you might not otherwise have, but you’ll also work a lot less than at a traditional job! I’m working on a few interviews for some sites, wh…
I tried it out with a HTTPS website that requires a client certificate and could not get it to work on your online demo debugger thing. Is this supported? This would be a really useful feature for complex web scraping that I am sometimes required to do at my job.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#638I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while. Please…
How many users do you have on your platform? If there are many, how do you provide "customer services"?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#639Seven 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'…
Grit is definitely the deciding factor for success. It's practically the main trait selected for by evolution in humans.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#640Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very cool. I want to do something similar, with a particular focus on enhancing audio quality. How many ideas did you try and discard before deciding to do your "background remover" service? What were they, if you don't mind sharing?
Previous ideas: 1. Automated proffers io always profile pic selector and optimizer. Like scam your Facebook with permissions and pick out the best photo for LinkedIn, potentially enchanting and cropping Ali g the way. Terrible idea because consumers generally never pay and getting people’s attention to this is going to be far more expensive than the value I can give you. 2. Automated tests for “broken” front end base…
> 2. Automated tests for “broken” front end based on how the side renders on various devices. Pretty sure a machine learning model can recognize broken design. I still think it’s a good idea but potentially a pretty complicated sell!
Now that's a pretty neat idea. I don't know about recognizing subjectively broken design, but recognizing discrepancies between screenshots seems quite doable. Could be a good thing to integrate into a test suite.