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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#31

Post by jarebear6expepj »

djbusby wrote: post #10
jarebear6expepj wrote: post #5

I 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…

Lot of work to keep the ad money coming in or was that just a Google AdWords?

Ads were the easy part once I stopped trying to run the ad containers and servers myself. When I started it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders which ended at Google typically. When header bidding came out it made the advertising world orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.

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

#33

Post by HWR_14 »

jarebear6expepj wrote: post #31
djbusby wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lot of work to keep the ad money coming in or was that just a Google AdWords?

Ads were the easy part once I stopped trying to run the ad containers and servers myself. When I started it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders which ended at Google typically. When header bidding came out it made the advertising world orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.

> orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.

Well, not end users. They're getting ads.

But I would assume that ad buyers and publishers have exclusive improvements. After all, it's not like the ad companies took a substantially smaller cut. It either lowers the cost to ad buyers or it increases the revenue to publishers. Since it's pretty much the same number, it doesn't seem both can be true.

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

#34

Post by abdullahkhalids »

nu11ptr wrote: post #28
santah wrote: post #22

I 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?

There is premium offering, though it does not say what those extra features are https://next-episode.net/premium

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

#35

Post by jarebear6expepj »

HWR_14 wrote: post #33
jarebear6expepj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads were the easy part once I stopped trying to run the ad containers and servers myself. When I started it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders which ended at Google typically. When header bidding came out it made the advertising world orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.

> orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers. Well, not end users. They're getting ads. But I would assume that ad buyers and publishers have exclusive improvements. After all, it's not like the ad companies took a substantially smaller cut. It either lowers the cost to ad buyers or it increases the revenue to publishers. Since it's pretty much the same number, it doesn't seem both can be tru…

>Well, not end users. They're getting ads.

I think advertising is a powerful way to support 'free'ish content and there are ways to use advertising tastefully. People who don't want to participate have options to opt out and are obviously welcome to not make server requests.

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

#36

Post by anyfactor »

jarebear6expepj wrote: post #5

I 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…

Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps?

I built an MVP on a 5 dollar VPS. But I had to recently upgrade to a 12 dollar VPS as some of my analytics process were being stopped because of low memory. Aside from writing better code, I found out that using linux utils/app via system calls is the most effective solution as nothing I can write can ever be even remotely as performant as something like grep.

I am following a similiar path to yours but my stack is a bit complicated.

Python + SQLite on VPS

Vue/Nuxt + Auth on Firebase

The process is extremely hacky and experimental, so it might change. I am not planning to use a proper backend as the Python scripts communicates to the Firebase via its SDK. That is working for me at this moment and eliminates writing boilerplate API code.

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

#37

Post by kljsclfdsklj »

HWR_14 wrote: post #33
jarebear6expepj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads were the easy part once I stopped trying to run the ad containers and servers myself. When I started it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders which ended at Google typically. When header bidding came out it made the advertising world orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.

> orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers. Well, not end users. They're getting ads. But I would assume that ad buyers and publishers have exclusive improvements. After all, it's not like the ad companies took a substantially smaller cut. It either lowers the cost to ad buyers or it increases the revenue to publishers. Since it's pretty much the same number, it doesn't seem both can be tru…

Lol what are you talking about? Any improvement in conversion rate is going to help the publisher, the network and the ad buyer.

I’ll just ignore the part about what you said about end users other than to say it’s arguable.

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

#38

Post by ToJans »

jehb wrote: post #20

For 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…

I think you already know the answer, but here it is: when running a SaaS, you should be either closing deals or shipping code that is being paid by these deals, especially in the early days...

Please note that you have to get an actual deal (i.e. contract/payment) before you start coding. I've fallen way too much in the trap where I didn't get a written commitment to "if you have this I will buy". This has never worked for me.

Edit: some additional clarification

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

#39

Post by beatthatflight »

https://beatthatflight.com.au/

Started 5 years ago next month.

Flight/hotel/car rental search, plus deals that I find for Australians.

Running it is actually fairly easy. It started as a deals site, then I added in some whitelabeled software, mailing list, fb page, and frankly it's a numbers game - more visitors = more ads/affiliate revenue.

It's not huge, but it's been interesting at least, and very little in the way of expenses.

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

#40

Post by jarebear6expepj »

anyfactor wrote: post #36
jarebear6expepj wrote: post #5

I 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…

Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps? I built an MVP on a 5 dollar VPS. But I had to recently upgrade to a 12 dollar VPS as some of my analytics process were being stopped because of low memory. Aside from writing better code, I found out that using linux utils/app via system calls is the most effective solution as nothing I can write can ever be even remotely as performant as something like grep. I am fol…

> Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps?

I don't know... from what I've used of Python it is pretty memory heavy and doesn't do well left alone unsupervised. I could be wrong but that was my experience trying various Py web frameworks.

My app servers were all $5 VPS with only nginx, PHP/php-fpm, and Memcached. PHP was cached, nginx assets were cached, and data was cached in RAM with Memcached which was updated from remote DB server on cache expire.

I would then stack as many of those behind a load balancer as needed (nginx as reverse proxy basically) and scaled up to serving 100's of terabytes of data monthly and billions of page views.

So while it was "$5 VPS" it was really a small cloud of them behind another $5 vps as a load balancer with a $25 database server supporting the data. Still cheaper than Amazon for equivalent loads.

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