I found this Twitter thread (https://mobile.twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1249348452095373...) that explains the origin of https://draculatheme.com/pro.
It's a single person selling a terminal and IDE color scheme for developers.
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#42I run Textbelt, a simple SMS API (https://textbelt.com/) and Quickchart, a chart image and QR rendering API (https://quickchart.io/). Combined they cover my living expenses.
Both started from open source projects of mine. I love building open tools and stumbled upon the fact that I could sell services around these projects after people started reaching out for support and extra features. I improve the products incrementally every week and eventually it adds up.
The virus shutdowns have affected Textbelt a bit because many of my users are small businesses doing appointment reminders and such.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#43Mine's not paying the bills yet, but I'm getting a couple new customers a week which is surprising.
As is, unless I am missing something painfully obvious, after looking at you HN profile and HN submissions - my guess is “Mike” is a typo for “Mine” — if so, suggest you edit your comment with a direct link to the one-person business you’re referring to with a quick pitch on its intended value/use too.
If I had to guess, the business is the “FastComments” SaaS mentioned a few times in your recent HN submissions:
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#44I 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://no…
Pretty useful websites.
Also impressive what you've accomplished with them as a solo dev.
Congrats, Pietz!
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#45I've been selling a couple of WordPress plugins since 2013, mostly piggy-backing on other popular services that were experiencing crazy growth and taking care of their WordPress integration for them (unofficially, some already had one that sucked). Yearly (subscription) revenue is at about $500K USD now. It has been growing by less than 10% for the last few years as I haven't been that interested in growing it - I wa…
Nice! Html forms brings in revenue?
Not as much as the other two by a long shot, but a tiny bit, yes. I've hidden the purchase flow on the website a while ago so I can retire the paid version sometime soon.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#46I’m doing around $2k/month with https://divjoy.com, a tool for a React developers. Not wildly successful, but it pays the bills and I’m optimistic I can grow that to $10k+.
If anything I’ve seen a slight bump from COVID. Lots of people with time on their hands who want to launch an MVP.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#47Define "success"... I make a few bucks a day from https://unitprice.org and it doesn't require any effort from me on a day-to-day basis. (I calculate the best price per unit on Amazon for a variety of different products, so the money I make from the affiliate links is typically enough to cover the cost of hosting plus an extra Lego set or two for my son.)
Sadly, I have seen an uptick in revenue as a result of COVID-19, because my website is showing up a lot in search results for toilet paper.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#48I run Trunk[1][2] which is a SaaS that helps businesses manage and sync their inventory in real-time between everywhere they sell (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Etsy, Squarespace, Square, Faire). It's my main source of income.
Starting out, I got my first 10 customers for Trunk by talking to users on e-commerce forums and focusing only on features that would help solve their problem. I didn't have any account management features (forgot password, change password, etc) or even obvious features that would make their lives easier (filtering, proper search, etc) for an embarrassingly long time. I still don't have a lot of these things! And the pricing page still... the horror. Instead, I dedicated all my energy to making sure inventory syncing covered all edge cases and worked reliably.
COVID-19 has actually contributed to an uptick in business, especially with brick & mortar businesses that are now looking to also go online.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#49Plugging my brother's one-person business because he'll be too humble to post himself: https://nanagram.co The product allows you to send pictures in the mail to your loved ones via SMS. It works great for getting fresh photos to your grandparents who might not be super savvy with a computer. My brother started it a few years ago and makes enough now to keep it going. Probably is the classic definition of a lifestyle…
This looks super awesome and the testimonials about the founder made my day - nice guys do win!
No Nanas to send this to :( but will keep it in mind for other uses.
I find the online print services super clunky to print - but I could use this to send myself picture prints to frame? Just a thought!
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#50Plugging my brother's one-person business because he'll be too humble to post himself: https://nanagram.co The product allows you to send pictures in the mail to your loved ones via SMS. It works great for getting fresh photos to your grandparents who might not be super savvy with a computer. My brother started it a few years ago and makes enough now to keep it going. Probably is the classic definition of a lifestyle…
Not a customer (yet), but I worked at a startup where we had chatted with NanaGram. From our interactions, Alex seems like one of the kindest people we've ever come across, and I'd highly recommend anyone to give this a try if they're interested. I have a lot of faith in it being a good service with Alex at the helm; if you're reading this, Alex, kudos to you! :)
Thank you very much for the kind words. :)