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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?

#131

Post by XCSme »

I am building a feature-rich and highly performant self-hosted analytics platform: https://www.usertrack.net

It is profitable as the running costs are very low, but currently my income is only around $1k-$2k/month. It started as a side-project but I have been working full-time on it since last year when the gaming company I was working for went bankrupt.

Being a dev I am too focused on product and I always want to "fix one more thing" before marketing it. As my savings got lower the product got better, I think I am now at that point when I can start finding customers without having to worry that "maybe my product is not good enough".

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

#132

Post by level09 »

I created "Mixed CRM" https://www.mixedcrm.com/

to solve my client's problem: collaborative sales of apartments in realtime. later on, added automation features got generating sales offers/contracts/agreements, then a payment plan editor, and later on added activity tracking and more advanced user management etc ..

Pretty successful start, and getting many real estate businesses who would like to give it a try, a few more clients and might become my full time project of 2021.

Hit me up if you would like to try a demo.

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

#133

Post by snowwrestler »

meowster wrote: post #123
node-bayarea wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can initiate a connection with the mail server, and then query it. I read about it years ago, never done it myself though.

Worth pointing out that it’s possible to configure an email server to not respond to these types of queries and many high-value targets (large corporate email systems) do.

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

#134

Post by lcall »

It's not me personally doing it, but a relative is an effective teacher of 2D game development (godot, gamemaker, pixel art), with good pacing, helpful to customers &c (and pleasant to be around). Some examples of his work, which supports their family:

https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about

https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course-youtube?r_do...

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

#135

Post by ahaucnx »

I came up with the idea of a hardware startup called AirGradient [1] focusing on indoor air quality monitoring due to annual recurring wildfires in my region and the wish to help my local school here in managing this better.

Very soon I realized, I lack the experience on the hardware side and a partner joined in (so strictly not solo anymore). Yes hardware is hard!

AirGradient focuses on monitoring indoor air quality in schools and offices and operates with a hardware as a service model, i.e. you do not have upfront costs for buying expensive sensor but you get the sensors provided for the duration of the service.

I am also running a blog on AirQuality. I created detailed build instructions to build your own powerful air quality monitor (PM, CO2, Temperature and Humidity) which is fully open source and open hardware and I am more than happy to send you PCBs if you want to build it [2].

[1] https://www.airgradient.com/schools/

[2] https://www.airgradient.com/blog/2020/08/25/the-airgradient-...

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

#136

Post by quelsolaar »

launderthis wrote: post #91
electriclove wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

dude is obviously a fing genius and probably has calculated that its more worth his time playing in the stock market than tracking down legal cases. glad to see a software guy use all the modern day tools to get out of the rat race. cheers

Thanks!

Its also much better for your health to focus on helping people who support you then, to worry about what a few bad apples might do without you ever noticing.

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

#137

Post by bluehatbrit »

damechen wrote: post #106

I solely started https://testimonial.to 2 weeks ago, and it generated over $5k revenue for me since its launch. I wouldn't say success, but at least it's my best launch ever. Well, the website is an app to help collect video testimonials for your businesses. I offered a lifetime deal, all my revenue is from the lifetime deal. Now the deal is gone. In 2021, I will be only focus on recurring revenue. Start all over aga…

May I ask what you did to promote it adn get that initial traffic?

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

#138

Post by rajacombinator »

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 looks really cool. Will be considering for some future projects. One thing that immediately occurs to me is that I’d be concerned about vendor lock in. I wonder if you could offer a fixed fee “eject” option if I want the ability to go off and do my own development on top of what you give me.

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

#139

Post by vmception »

LittlePeter wrote: post #129
vmception wrote: post #53

Yes, Decentralized Finance (DeFi) has been very lucrative Basically its great because everything is client side so all you have to is make frontend websites for people to interact with, and even that isn't really necessary. You just need people, with wallets, to be able to interact with your smart contract easily. The smart contract you deploy has to address a pain point for existing users, typically by consolidating…

So what's your business exactly? Can you be a bit more concrete what your smart contracts are, what problem they solve?

My specific business? Hard to say because it changes every week as there is really just that much to build

If people find getting into interest bearing products to be complicated, then you would create a contract to make it less complicated.

Pooltogether.com is an example of something people like, I didnt write that. It just gives people a chance of earning more interest than they could alone, at the expense of earning no interest in the mean time. They bill it as a “no-loss lottery”, while it is really just helping people deposit into other onchain financial services. It is analogous to many people depositing into a single savings account to earn more interest than they could as an individual, and only one person getting paid all of the interest. So some people like doing that because their alternatives are non-existent.

You can make a competitor to that or something slightly different and get people using it.

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

#140

Post by mandeepj »

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…

so, I can blame your service whenever I can't buy something via a bid at ebay for lower price
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