Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

Post by esquire_900 » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 1:01 PM UTC

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…

Post by aacook » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

svacko wrote: post #622

aacook wrote: post #460

I'm working on NanaGram ( https://nanagram.co ). The tagline: Text or email your photos and we'll send 4x6 prints to your loved ones. It doesn't provide the majority of my income (yet) but by far and away it provides the majority of my life's meaning. I haven't crossed the mental hurdle of sharing all my numbers publicly yet but let's just say it is turning a profit and there are thousands of happy NanaGrammers. I go…

This reminded me a story of this funny guy who was trying to sell famous large-scale prints/canvas of random popular instagram posts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytrZuE1JamY . Anyway, good luck!

Post by ymal » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 6:24 PM UTC

temp_throw wrote: post #106

I have a UK based e-business, I've turned over between £750,000 and now £950,000 over the past four years (ex VAT). (~76% net profit margin) Its just me, I'm a developer, which meant I could bootstrap the whole thing for zero cost (time not included) but I've always felt I knew I had what it takes to make a small business successful. Its an online service, we have a web site and apps in the app stores. I'd rather not…

Post by mrskitch » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 2:50 AM UTC

top_kekeroni_m8 wrote: post #637

mrskitch wrote: post #227

I 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.

Post by kossTKR » Sat, Oct 26, 2019, 10:56 AM UTC

XG6 wrote: post #557

I created a SaaS website builder for a small niche market. I've been running it for about 8 years. I gross a bit over $14,000 per month with about $500 in expenses for servers and third-party APIs. I work 1-2 hours per week answering customer support emails. Basically, I automated away my old job as a web designer :) The smartest decision I made was targeting a small niche market that larger businesses wouldn't bothe…