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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

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Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#12

I'll be starting a Youtube channel shortly about solo bootstrapping a tech business around a mobile app and everything that's involved, from idea validation to implementation, launch and marketing. Let me know if that's everything you're interested in

I'd be interested!

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#13
post #10

Lunch Money ( https://lunchmoney.app/ ) is run by one person. It is a personal budgeting app that is very well-designed and easy to use. The founder's journey is also quite interesting as she has been traveling as a digital nomad while building Lunch Money.

I wish they also pulled in brokerage account transactions

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#14
post #8

I sell my own books. I started in 2018. As of 2020, that made about 80 % of my total income. Previous programming experience was useful, I could hack together some WooCommerce plugins that help me take care of the customers (generating invoices, communication with the Czech Post, pairing bank payments to orders and informing me about payments that could not be paired reliably). That saved me a lot of repetitive work.

What subjects do you write about? Any place we can look at your books?

Mostly popular history.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli...

Everything so far has only been published in Czech, though.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#15
I run a paid addon for local e-commerce platform(with 25k shops build on it). It all started about 15 month ago when i was still working in a web development company. The platform owners came to us and offered us a partnership. We would develop some new addons for them, run them, and split the profits(80% for us, 20% for them). As i was the one most interested in this i got the first project and developed and supported it for about 9 month. I saw it could have a nice future and bought it from the web development company and quit the job. Now i run it by myself and i love it.

The addon provides an easy way to print paper labels for products and other things listed in the shops.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#17
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What subjects do you write about? Any place we can look at your books?

Mostly popular history. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli... Everything so far has only been published in Czech, though.

I’m surprised that you can live off of history books! Very cool.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#18
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly popular history. https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli... Everything so far has only been published in Czech, though.

I’m surprised that you can live off of history books! Very cool.

Believe me, I was surprised too. Very surprised. The stereotype of a famished author is pretty strong here :)

Thing is, without middle-men (distributors, bookshops), most of the revenue accrues to you directly. Long live e-commerce.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021?

#20
I feel like the question is wrong.

I used to run a profitable one-person online business. And I felt miserable every time I had to get up at night to fix server issues, or when I had to do customer support from my laptop while I was supposed to be on vacation instead.

Now that we're a team, I feel so much better about the whole thing, even though profit margins are slightly lower than before.

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