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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#71

Post by solumunus »

winrid wrote: post #70
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…

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...).

Nonsense. For read heavy content sites Sqlite will obviously perform better.

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

#72

Post by winrid »

solumunus wrote: post #71
winrid wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...).

Nonsense. For read heavy content sites Sqlite will obviously perform better.

That depends on the read patterns. Sqlite doesn't even support some features that will make very simple aggregations much faster on postgres, even with the same indexes.

For purely sequential reads of data from disk, sure.

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

#73

Post by anyfactor »

winrid wrote: post #70
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…

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...).

> it only needs like 16mb of ram by default

TIL. Thank you very much.

I always wanted to invest more time in postgres, but I just find the Windows environment to be clunky when working with it. Like psql isn't supported in a windows environment (last time I check few months ago), and setting up the postgres environment on WSL was quite annoying as you have to figure out port forwarding.

I know setting up a postgres on a local machine directly or even without docker may not be a mature decision, but that is the hacky reason, why I keep going back to sqlite, as it is the easiest solution to get started with a database.

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

#74

Post by mcsniff »

I've posted before and never share any specific details.

I run a small one-person business in a niche industry selling a 'widget'. Profitable from day 1, pays all the bills but is not the sole income.

Got started by seeing a need in an adjacent industry and building the product. I do everything myself: dev, qa, support, everything. It's not too bad at this size, and I can probably scale and continue on my own at 10x the demand.

Word of mouth keeps things rolling so far and recent trends haven't impacted me much.

Someone else posted and I second, spending (wasting?) time on the "stack" instead of the product offering or marketing is easy to do and rarely benefits things. It's hard to do things like advertising or product refinement which I don't find interesting.

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

#75

Post by nocubicles »

My business is consulting but it is 100% online and is providing the majority of my income. I got started by working in consulting companies, building a blog and connections online and then just went at it. I do Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Power Apps development and consulting. My companies site is https://integrated.ee

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

#76

Post by cinntaile »

kewball wrote: post #65

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...

Do you regret not trying to start one?

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

#77

Post by fdaslkjlkj23 »

HWR_14 wrote: post #57
kljsclfdsklj wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Any improvement in conversion rate is going to help the publisher, the network and the ad buyer. Since ad buyers pay per conversion, I don't actually think it helps them to increase the conversion rate.

Don't be dense. If you pay $5 per conversion, and earn $10 per conversion, you make $5 profit as an ad buyer. What happens if you have 2 conversions? 3? 20? You make more profit.

Alternatively think about the flipside, how in the world could you possibly think having a lower conversion rate is good for the ad buyer? A 0% rate?

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

#78

Post by jarek83 »

I had few ideas now and then, but I kept always thinking about one step that held me back - how do I get the right T&C and Privacy policy? Need to mention I'm from Poland and I guess it must be way different by law standards than it's in the US - take the GDPR alone but then a lot of hassle with local tax office... It just seems quite costly to just try an idea.

What should I do to get it right? Is it possible to get an US or other entity just to be able to have some kind of relaxed paperwork?

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

#79

Post by tyingq »

patja wrote: post #23
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…

is there anything preventing a continuous "rinse and repeat" cycle of creating Mormon dating sites for purchase and shutdown by the church?

Makes me wonder what other types of sites/apps the blind broker might have instructions to buy out.

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

#80

Post by HermanMartinus »

I run Bear Blog (https://bearblog.dev) which is a privacy-centric, minimalist blogging platform.

It's been running for over 4 years with about 10k active blogs. I'm the sole founder and maintainer. I write about it at https://herman.bearblog.dev

It pays me an above average salary and is mostly unaffected by the recent financial trends. I have however been dealing with a lot more AI generated backlink spam since ChatGPT hit the internet.

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