Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

As do I! I remember sucking candy out of a plastic toilet from my first order.

Does DarwinMail[1] count?

I'm a one man[2] team and have been since the beginning. I built it with PHP, LESS, JS, and good old HTML. I love answering all support emails because DM's users are so helpful and often have tremendously kind things to say. I guess it's because I took on the task of replacing Google Inbox.

DarwinMail is not as successful as some other companies run by solo-founders making 10k+ MRR however I feel really happy with what we (the users and I) have accomplished so far.

It's been almost two years since I wrote the first line of code and I very much enjoy working on DarwinMail each and every day of the week (even during dinner sometimes).

[1] https://www.darwinmail.app [2] https://twitter.com/joeytawadrous

Teaching my girlfriend Japanese inadvertently lead to the creation of a whole new curriculum and style of language teaching which I have been embodying in https://japanesecomplete.com/

Originally the idea was to create a new textbook, but I found it easier to pair lessons with browser-based multiple choice quizzes that would hit the material home. Given the success of the first student, I thought it might be something people would be willing to pay for.

Since then, we have been adding a steady stream of helpful learning tools in addition to the textbook/curriculum that we are rolling out. There are dialogues with audio recordings so you can listen along. The entire curriculum is frequency based, so you are learning the most frequent terms first, which has proven invaluable with our students.

The recent shutdown has definitely affected our subscription rates, and I suspect the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics until 2021 did not do much for the enthusiasm for learning Japanese this year, but you never know. On the brightside, it gives people more time to prepare.

Learning a new language is an investment in yourself and your brain health for life. Language learning is building a bridge where there is a chasm.

Similar story over here. I started by offering shared hosting with supervision as added value, expanded into reselling VPS'es and eventually leased bare metal servers that I partitioned into VPS'es. I could have made a lot more money if I didn't treat every customer with utmost care and attention. Now I'm stuck with clients that can't afford to go elsewhere and clients with grossly outdated software that would be a nightmare to migrate. I kinda miss the passive income although there wasn't much. On average I had to fix something every few months and would get a major outage/bug once per year. I always hesitated that scaling up would result in more customer support work, more major outages and more everything that would take the "passive" out of passive income.

I run Nomad List and Remote OK by myself. Nomad List brings in ~$336,000/y with 972,480/mo pageviews and Remote OK ~$301,000/y with ~628,210/mo pageviews. I do everything myself from coding, designing, front end, back end, marketing, etc. I have one person on emergency call in case the server goes down when I sleep but that hasn't happened in years.

You can see live revenue/traffic here, as I share it all:

https://nomadlist.com/open

https://remoteok.io/open

I have no funding, no debt, no employees, just revenue and profit margins are somewhere in the 80%-90%.

Nomad List got started when I was traveling and working remotely ~2013/2014 and wanted to discover more cities that would fit the criteria of nice weather, affordable and fast internet. Since then I've added hundreds more criteria and it's become a giant database, and also a community. The community is how it makes money as people can pay to join the site and access a chat, a trip planner, a forum and many more features.

Remote OK is a much more simple business as it's just a job board. It got started because after building Nomad List a lot of people around me wanted to start working remotely and traveling but didn't have remote jobs. There was like one remote job specific job board back then and it was quite limited. I thought "why not aggregate remote jobs from traditional non-remote job boards". So I did that, and slowly started selling my own job posts on the site which is how it makes money now.

The Coronavirus has substantially affected my business:

Nomad List especially has been affected losing over 50% of its revenue. The site is made for people working remotely and actively traveling so that is to be expected during this crisis. You can even see the complete disruption the Coronavirus brought to traveling members of my site, scroll down to "Trips Taken by Users" on https://nomadlist.com/open.

Remote OK is less affected and might even get a positive effect out of this crisis since remote work becomes more popularized and mainstream during and after this. There is in fact a rise in jobs posted, scroll down to "Job Posts Sold" on https://remoteok.io/open.

Personally I'm less affected financially since I don't have employees and I've saved most of my revenue over the last few years, hardly spending anything. Most people have told me to repeatedly over the years to hire and spend more, but I did the opposite. That means I have a very solid cash buffer now so I can weather this storm quite well. I feel sad/scared about other businesses with high costs that might not be so lucky, especially the employees involved.