Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 285 posts

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

#71

Post by makeee »

codesternews wrote: post #64
makeee wrote: post #42

Divjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :) It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance. The conventional wisdom is that dev…

Its amazing! thanks for sharing. Can you please tell from where you are getting the users? How you got your first users and what you are doing for marketing? Thanks a lot.

My first batch of alpha testers came from a single Twitter reply [0] that got retweeted by a prominent person in the React community. It certainly helped that I had an okay Twitter following at the time (I think around 1k), but it doesn't need to be huge. You just need the right person to retweet you.

That was enough to iterate on until I had an MVP.

Then my Show HN [1] sent like 15k visitors in a day and that led to a ton of usage. I think something like 4k projects were created that day. I wasn't yet charging at the point, but probably for the best, since high usage meant a lot of feedback.

A few months later I launched on Product Hunt and that went well [2]. Beyond that, just improving the product every day, sharing my progress on Twitter, and trying really hard to turn every new feature into an exciting launch event.

I also started a React hooks blog [3] that sends me a handful of customers every month. I could probably do a better job of promoting Divjoy on there.

Haven't delved into SEO (barely rank for anything), content marketing, paid advertising, etc, so it's still very much a learning process for me.

[0] https://twitter.com/gabe_ragland/status/1108875975494795265

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20688044

[2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/divjoy-4

[3] https://usehooks.com

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

#72

Post by dividuum »

I'm running https://info-beamer.com, a digital signage hosted service using the Raspberry Pi. It started as a for-fun project 8 years ago when I decided to do the digital info system for a local hacker conference and didn't find anything that allows quick prototyping and rapid iteration/live coding of content. I then switch from "desktop Linux" to Raspberries and added a web based service around the fairly low-level command line tool. It's my main source of income for 4 years now.

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

#73

Post by quelsolaar »

leetrout wrote: post #58
quelsolaar wrote: post #34

I license a fully automated UV unwrapping tool at MinistryOfFlat.com . UV mapping is the task of unwrapping a 3D model to a flat surface in order to put textures on it. Ive been at it for about 3 years, and last year I made 7 figures. I do sell directly to 3D artists. You probably know some VFX companies and game companies that have licensed my tool. I make a good amount from people coming to the web site, but the ma…

That’s really cool. Do you worry about licensees keeping the code and using it without you knowing if they cancel? Or an employee at a licensee walking off with the code / binary etc? We’ve talked about some of these risks at my current job which ships code as our product so curious how other people navigate this. Congrats on the success!

Thanks!

First of all I sell perpetual licenses. For everything else I rely entirely on the honor system. I wont spend my time chasing some student who pirates a copy. The real money comes from the larger companies and they are terrified of getting in legal trouble for breaking any kind of license agreement, so they have no reason to screw me over.

I worry a lot more about making things complicated for licensees then I do about them taking advantage of me.

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

#75

Post by jonplackett »

makeee wrote: post #42

Divjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :) It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance. The conventional wisdom is that dev…

Would be cool if you could add Plausible Analytics!

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

#76

Post by electriclove »

quelsolaar wrote: post #73
leetrout wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s really cool. Do you worry about licensees keeping the code and using it without you knowing if they cancel? Or an employee at a licensee walking off with the code / binary etc? We’ve talked about some of these risks at my current job which ships code as our product so curious how other people navigate this. Congrats on the success!

Thanks! First of all I sell perpetual licenses. For everything else I rely entirely on the honor system. I wont spend my time chasing some student who pirates a copy. The real money comes from the larger companies and they are terrified of getting in legal trouble for breaking any kind of license agreement, so they have no reason to screw me over. I worry a lot more about making things complicated for licensees then…

Love this! I wish more would share your take on this.

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

#77

Post by makeee »

jonplackett wrote: post #75
makeee wrote: post #42

Divjoy [0] is now profitable and my full-time thing. It did $50k in year one and my goal is to break $100k this year. It all started with a Show HN [1], so thank you HN :) It was rough going at first, but I won the $15k YC Startup School grant [2], which let me jump into it full-time and give it my full focus. I managed to hit ramen profitable before having to go back to freelance. The conventional wisdom is that dev…

Would be cool if you could add Plausible Analytics!

I've been meaning to look into that. At the moment I'm using this library as the analytics abstraction: https://getanalytics.io. I'll see if the Plausible team wants to create a plugin or do that myself when I have time.

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

#78

Post by cambalache »

huhtenberg wrote: post #30

Beware of the selection bias before making any conclusions. For every person who currently does X successfully, there will be a multiple of those who failed at the (nearly) same and aren't chiming in.

Well, but that is the idea, the selection bias is in the question not in the answers. He is not asking what % of one-person online business are successful.

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

#79

Post by electriclove »

sideproject wrote: post #50

I had many un-used domains I've purchased over the years (>40) and I wanted to make use of them without having to spend time, so I built Newsy - launched 9 months ago. https://www.newsy.co It turns your un-used domain into a Reddit-like content aggregator with all sorts of features - membership, voting, comments, newsletters and monetization. The best thing for me is that it is completely automated and all of my doma…

Great idea! How much does a typical unused domain make using this?

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

#80

Post by putin_sodomit »

olegakbarov wrote: post #74

https://profunctor.io/ Job board for developers with cross post to popular Telegram channel. Might come in handy if you hire devs and don't mind to work with people in EU Timezone. Job posting is free of charge. I made some money with ads last year, tho.

Моя кошка нашла тут работу, спасибо
Post reply on HN