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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?

#161
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

eSnipe.com

I loved your story and that's the kind of business I am trying to build with my wife.

One quick question.

There exists many other sites offering the same service at even cheaper price points (e.g. EZ sniper, Myibidder, BidSlammer, GIXEN, JBidWatcher, esniper, AuctionStealer, Goofbit, etc.)

How do you survive in such a commoditized market?

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

#162

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…

do traditional exchanges work through smart contracts too?

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

#164
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 earni…

How do you audit the security of your contracts?

Unit tests like normal software development.

I don’t post or advertise audits, third party smart contract audits are expensive and purely a marketing racket.

A) users dont care

B) Vulnerabilities come from closed source pricing oracles.

C) users that do care understand that vulnerabilities are not really coming from the code and more so from pricing oracles

D) Users can buy smart contract insurance.

E) They can also buy their own smart contract audit, I at least make sure the block explorer has the code and ABI available

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

#165

I created https://huntr.co back in 2017, just reached $15k mrr last month. Looking to hire someone to help with sales in the next few months. It's been fun to work on such a variety of things in the past 3 years (design, development, sales, etc), but I'm ready to grow the team :)

Looks cool! How are you getting customers?

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

#166

I've run my own one-man[1] software business selling desktop software for Windows and Mac since 2005. Products with launch date: https://www.perfecttableplan.com (2005) https://www.hyperplan.com (2015) https://www.easydatatransform.com (2019) 2020 wasn't a great year due to the effect of COVID on PerfectTablePlan sales. But I've been profitable every year. [1] With a bit of help from my wife on the accounts and freel…

I used to read your blog back when I was into shareware. What a trip down the memory lane. Glad to see you are still in the biz!

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

#167
post #162

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…

do traditional exchanges work through smart contracts too?

No they don’t

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

#168

https://pageflows.com has been paying my bills for a couple of years now To give you an idea of revenue, it’s about as much as I’d be getting paid as a junior-mid developer in London and requires a day or two of work a week unless I’m adding a new feature, redesigning etc. https://screenjar.com is also making a small amount of revenue, but nothing meaningful yet.

My former employer's support department uses TeamViewer with customers. A web-based equivalent would be a game changer for them, if you can go real-time.

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but this renders most of the answers useless. Interesting, entertaining, curious, but useless.

Not at all. That's how people have learned to do stuff for thousand of years, you copy the successful cases.

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

#170
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.

Founder Jen is such an inspirational and helpful woman! Worth to follow her journey on twitter
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