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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?

#171
post #151

I started Niceboard ( https://niceboard.co ) last summer and while the recurring revenue is not enough to entirely live on yet, I've been running a lifetime deal on Appsumo which has consistently brought in >$5k / month over the past few months and live off of that (for how long is the million dollar question). Now I have to fully transition from fixed revenue to recurring! (I was thinking of writing a quick note abo…

Can you please share your notes? I know I’m definitely interested in learning more.

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

#173
I'm running https://develytica.com by myself. Its a tool for teams to generate team member skill matrixes by using Github issues and labels.

Its one single Golang monorepo and is quite cheap to run because of that. Altough is not providing majority of my income then I hope the % of income its creating will only increase this year:)

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

#174
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 just wanted to say that I really appreciate the decision to have the first steps of the project customization process not require registration let alone payment. It makes for a better sales pitch than a hundred landing pages.

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

#175
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 just wanted to say that I really appreciate the decision to have the first steps of the project customization process not require registration let alone payment. It makes for a better sales pitch than a hundred landing pages.

Thanks, that's great to hear! I'm not a fan of having to signup/pay to see how an app works either. Figured a tech audience would appreciate that.

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

#176
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…

> There are a lot of employed software engineers who have disposable income and who are happy to pay for a dev tool if it means they can actually build and launch an idea in a weekend.

This is absolutely true, but companies also, or even devs working in companies will buy out of their own pocket to improve their productivity without having to ask the Accounts department, I know I have!

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

#177

A great many people [including myself] have a successful online business flipping which is buying and selling of goods (more used than new). Buying is from local thrift shops, auctions, garage sales, Craiglist, Facebook Marketplace, etc and selling is at Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace, etc. If interested follow the Reddit sub-reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flipping/

The juice doesn’t seem worth the squeeze.

I can’t even be bothered to sell my own used junk.

But it is a low tech way to do e-commerce.

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

#178
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

eSnipe.com

Thanks, I used your service to buy a guitar I really didn't want to miss out on. You should update the copyright notice from 2015, though.

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

#179
post #151

I started Niceboard ( https://niceboard.co ) last summer and while the recurring revenue is not enough to entirely live on yet, I've been running a lifetime deal on Appsumo which has consistently brought in >$5k / month over the past few months and live off of that (for how long is the million dollar question). Now I have to fully transition from fixed revenue to recurring! (I was thinking of writing a quick note abo…

Can you please share your notes? I know I’m definitely interested in learning more.

I concur.

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

#180
https://next-episode.net is a service I run for more than 15 years now.

It's a TV / Movies tracking website/community that helps people organize what they watch and find new shows to watch.

I started it for myself (because I couldn't find such tool back in the day) while I was working as a front end developer in an outsourcing company and it slowly grew and became my (only) day job.

There is a lot to do in terms of user support and constant maintenance and development (considering also the iOS and Android apps), but I've made the conscious decision to stay a sole developer and not try and hire people to help. For me - I feel this works great even though I realize I may be missing a lot by not trying to scale up by hiring.

Hope that makes sense.

I'm around if anyone has any questions.

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