Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 145 posts

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

#61

Post by batmaniam »

jarebear6expepj wrote: post #40
anyfactor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 upda…

Did you use a dedicated database from the start of your project? Or did you use a simpler one like sqlite and then scaled up to your current architecture when you got more users/load to your site?

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

#62

Post by santah »

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?

Yeah, ads (for free users) and Premium membership which removes them and unlock features.

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

#63

Post by msbroadf »

RileyJames wrote: post #45
msbroadf wrote: post #8

I have run my one-man business for 13 years now. https://www.virtualhere.com . Back then I saw the market moving to the cloud and thought bringing device access there was needed. There was no one really doing this cheaply and easily. I posted a link to my software on the raspberrypi forum when that board came out and started getting my customers immediately that way. It took a year to write the initial software. Ive…

That’s awesome! Congrats. Are there any feature requests / product directions that have been requested, that you’ve rejected / neglected? For better or worse. Solo building is often about hard decisions on what NOT to do. And with a generic piece of software like this, I imagine there are plenty of niche operators asking for “just one thing to make it perfect for xxxxx”

Yes generally i reject any request if its customization just for one customer. I try to generalize the change by e.g adding an API call. Also i get requests to keep xp/win7 support which i reject often.

The biggest thing I learned is to basically do nothing on the product, unless its needed. I used to be tempted to change things/add features for fun and for a challenge but its a mistake. The reason is it might introduce bugs. Too many customers and big companies rely on virtualhere now day-to-day and the software is complex enough that its hard to tell if the bug was always there or just from the new addition. Im very relucatnt to even upgrade the compiler unless i have to for a new OS etc.

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

#64

Post by pcthrowaway »

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.

I've been using next-episode since I saw you mention it here a few months ago... it's great!

But (as a non-premium user) I noticed I can't see my entire movie watch list. Was that a recent change?

I would have liked better transparency about not being able to see all the movies I added before I added them, but I realize as a non-paid user I pretty much just get what I get.

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

#65

Post by kewball »

Wow, I asked this questions 9 years ago to find inspiration to build my own successful one-person business. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243

I am happy to report that I am now running a very successful one-person business and killing it!

Only joking... I'm still reading HN posts about successful one-person businesses for inspiration and working for the man. Time does fly though...

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

#66

Post by nicbou »

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 have a comical lack of focus and love to go on coding expeditions. I don't want to be productive; I want to enjoy what I do.

The core business makes enough. Not a lot, but enough. I treat this as permission to do things that don't help the bottom line.

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

#68

Post by santah »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #64
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.

I've been using next-episode since I saw you mention it here a few months ago... it's great! But (as a non-premium user) I noticed I can't see my entire movie watch list. Was that a recent change? I would have liked better transparency about not being able to see all the movies I added before I added them, but I realize as a non-paid user I pretty much just get what I get.

Please get in touch through the "contact us" link on the bottom of Next Episode so I can investigate what is happening.

There was no recent change affecting the movies list (other than some design tweaks which wouldn't limit the number of movies you see in your list).

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

#69

Post by conductr »

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…

It sounds like you’re either avoiding sales or just not interested in the product/space. Either way, the answer is force yourself to focus on sales. If it doesn’t invigorate your interest, let it coast while you work on something else entirely. View tinkering as an absolute waste of time. If you enjoy it, tinker on something else so you can perhaps point to net new growth for your efforts.

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

#70

Post by winrid »

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…

Sqlite is cool but you'll find Postgres will perform a lot better on average and not use much more resources (it only needs like 16mb of ram by default...).
Post reply on HN