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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
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Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#22I run https://next-episode.net for about 18 years now.
It's a website + mobile apps that help users track what they're watching (TV shows and movies).
I wouldn't say trends over the years affected the business much, but I'm playing with the ChatGPT API currently to try and improve some aspects of the functionality and maybe add some new cool AI powered features - so there's that.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#23I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live. I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe fra…
is there anything preventing a continuous "rinse and repeat" cycle of creating Mormon dating sites for purchase and shutdown by the church?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#24Not me, but Photopea.com is such a success story (and really awesome software):
https://www.lunadio.com/blog/the-story-of-a-unicorn-solo-fou...
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i8j5te/i_made_a_free_...
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#25I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live. I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe fra…
is there anything preventing a continuous "rinse and repeat" cycle of creating Mormon dating sites for purchase and shutdown by the church?
Heck just populate it with LLMs.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#26For anyone who's interested in answering, I'd be curious to hear your thinking on how you keep focused and avoid rabbit holes, particularly with build vs. buy decisions. I've had an intentionally-small business that I've been working on for a few years now, but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering. I've done a very good job of replacing Shopify with…
> but I keep getting distracted by my desire to work on the stack itself instead of the core business offering
The answer should be obvious. You are selling the end product, not your tech stack. For an early stage company there is zero benefit to wasting time on pointless engineering purism. You should use as much SaaS and other pre-built software as you possibly can and spend 100% of your effort on your core offering.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#27Would you count a hybrid conference [0]? It's 100% indie and self-hosted in the sense that I wrote my own ticketmaster for it. Ticket registration flows are more complicated than meets the eye, and it was an interesting problem to solve.
I personally consume payment notifications from Stripe or PayPal, and the rest is processed in-house: updating sales records, generating QR code tickets, sending invites to a private conferencing server, and so on.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#28I run https://next-episode.net for about 18 years now. It's a website + mobile apps that help users track what they're watching (TV shows and movies). I wouldn't say trends over the years affected the business much, but I'm playing with the ChatGPT API currently to try and improve some aspects of the functionality and maybe add some new cool AI powered features - so there's that.
How does this make money?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#29I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live. I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe fra…
is there anything preventing a continuous "rinse and repeat" cycle of creating Mormon dating sites for purchase and shutdown by the church?
To the point, I offered them the .org of the .com they were buying, and they were not interested. I never did it, but wondered what would happen if I just... booted it up. Maybe I'll try it some day.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#30I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live. I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe fra…
How did you sell? What was your multiple? Did you use a broker?
I was approached directly in both sales. I personally never used a broker-- just kept a lawyer and my accountant handy. The last sale was roughly 3x multiple.