Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses in 2021? • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by giarc » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 9:59 PM UTC

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.

Correct - I run two Saas apps. One collects COVID symptoms from kids attending childcare centres and the other allows users to send SMS from Google sheets. I've made a total of $5 from both (first customer for SMS tool last month).

I had a lot of interest in the symptom screening tool, but then my provincial government changed the rules so child care centres didn't need to collect symptoms. I have 2 centres using it and I just cover the bills. I've told them they can use it for free. Probably more of a hassle to collect the $10/month from them.

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

#112

Post by gnicholas » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:01 PM UTC

amaurymartiny wrote: post #101

During the pandemic, I launched [link redacted], an open-source tool to check if an email exists, without sending any email. Not sure what "successful" means here, but I have a couple dozens of customers, which for me is a success.

I'll definitely check this out. This would make it easier to move things from LinkedIn messaging (super annoying and low-frequency for many people) to email. There used to be a Chrome extension that made this possible (Rapportive?), but I think they got acquired by LI. Are there other efficient ways of doing this? I'm not looking to spam strangers — just to migrate conversations with actual connections off the LI platform.

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

#113

Post by tomcam » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

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.

Selection bias, it turns out, is built right into the title of the post. Also, a hard-won concept I have learned in business is that it’s much better to learn from people who were successful than from people who weren’t (not trying to be arch or facetious here).

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

#114

Post by giarc » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

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…

This is pretty cool. I just logged into my namecheap account to see if I have any random names that might work. Unfortunately all my names are fairly specific and probably don't get any organic traffic nor are they well suited for aggregators I'd say. Just followed your Twitter account, I'd really love to see success stories.

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

#115

Post by node-bayarea » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

amaurymartiny wrote: post #101

During the pandemic, I launched [link redacted], an open-source tool to check if an email exists, without sending any email. Not sure what "successful" means here, but I have a couple dozens of customers, which for me is a success.

Very cool! How does this actually check without sending any email?

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

#116

Post by daemon001 » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

makeee wrote: post #71

codesternews wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you get visitors to the React Hook blog when you're not investing in SEO. Really curious.

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

#117

Post by downandout » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #110

I am in my 21st year of running a service that places bids the last few seconds on eBay. I am the sole employee and I outsource all of the heavy lifting. I have been doing the four hour work week since Tim Ferriss was in middle school. My house and farm in the Seattle area are both fully paid for. It allowed me to enjoy my children as they grew up and to afford serious medical bills (two of them are handicapped). It…

That sounds awesome. What is the name of the service?

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

#118

Post by xchaotic » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

I hope it’s not off topic but it seems to show that one person businesses are probably not the way to go for most people- you will have a much more predictable income in a larger organisation and on average you will be better off financially too. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably a VC trying to make you work for them (or fail competing against them)

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

#119

Post by ratsimihah » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

kjakm wrote: post #28

ratsimihah wrote: post #11

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

Could you share the business you’ve bootstrapped?

This will be a new business from scratch, built with the community. I'm thinking about using a sleep diary app I've already mostly built

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

#120

Post by hamza__nouali » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

oceanghost wrote: post #68

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…

I've been looking for something like this for ages. I have a small project I need to do and I'm not really a web developer. Muddling through setting all this stuff up for the first time would be far more work than the actual website. How hard would it be for me to integrate with Authorize.net?

I also suggest using frontendor.com, it'll help you build a beautiful HTML interface for your website by copy-paste.