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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#81

Post by b20000 »

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…

how were you able to get that type of traffic and revenue without spending serious money on ads?

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

#82

Post by edylemond »

I run Traverse (https://traverse.link/) - an app which helps students learn faster using mind maps, flashcards and notes.

It's been running for over 2 years now and provides steady recurring income - I've prioritized continuity over exponential growth. Have reduced operational work to a minimum now so I can spend most of my time working on marketing strategies to make it big ;)

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

#83

Post by XCSme »

I have started UXWizz (https://www.uxwizz.com) as a side-project in 2013. Since the end of 2020 I went full-time on it. It is successful (profitable), but definitely nowhere near the potential at the moment, as I struggle a lot with the marketing side.

The revenue varies, but averages somewhere around $2k/month (which is good and mostly profit, but not enough to live from it alone in Amsterdam).

> Have any recent trends affected your business?

I thought the GDPR and privacy laws would make more businesses switch to self-hosted analytics platforms, but from what I can see, not that many really care about it enough to ditch sending data to 3rd party services.

I am still hopeful about the future, almost all customers really love the product once they use it. It feels like I am always so close to "making it work", but this feeling has been there for a few years already now.

I am also trying different things, like creating some more niche variations of the product which are easier to market, so I built https://wplytic.com, which is a trimmed-down version of UXWizz meant specifically for WordPress (fewer features but with less resource usage, better WP integrations, easier installation, cheaper pricing, improved privacy, etc.).

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

#84

Post by XCSme »

paxys wrote: post #26
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…

> 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 offerin…

> You are selling the end product, not your tech stack.

I think the mentality is that by having a better tech stack the product will be better and also more "future-proof". Personally, I always spend (waste) time upgrading all the libraries to the latest versions and maintain the code up to the current standards. Maybe it doesn't really improve the product, but it gives me confidence that I am always ready to implement whatever features or most recent improvements in technology I could take advantage of.

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

#85

Post by XCSme »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #27

Would 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…

> Ticket registration flows are more complicated than meets the eye, and it was an interesting problem to solve.

Could you share what some of the biggest challenges were? Something like handling concurrent purchases/carts, or?

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

#86

Post by milleniall »

HermanMartinus wrote: post #80

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 Cha…

I dont use Bear Blog, but i love the blogs on that platform. It is what the old internet used to be.

Example - https://tiramisu.bearblog.dev/2022-11-13/

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

#87

Post by HWR_14 »

fdaslkjlkj23 wrote: post #77
HWR_14 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If you pay $5 per conversion, it doesn't matter if you have 100 impressions per conversion or 10 impressions per conversion. You are pretty conversion rate insensitive.

I mean, obviously it's different at the extremes like 0% vs 100%, but I doubt header-bidding produces that great an effect.

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

#88

Post by HWR_14 »

selcuka wrote: post #60
HWR_14 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer ads with terrible javascript loaders, as they are easier to more completely and reliably block.

The ads still use javascript; they are just not as "terrible" (a.k.a. waterfall).

The waterfall ones were easier to detect and block, IIRC.

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

#89

Post by winrid »

anyfactor wrote: post #73
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...).

> 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 o…

If you're using an IDE, many have DB browsers built right in (all jetbrains IDEs for ex).

But hey, nothing wrong with easy, usually. :)

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

#90

Post by replwoacause »

kamphey wrote: post #53

For the past 3 years I've been running https://bettersheets.co/ Originally as a side project while I tried to start and run SaaS. But people kept buying memberships (lifetime deals) and I just kept adding content to it. In the past year I've hired a ruby on rails developer to help me scale, on a part-time basis. And I've been making products within the Better Sheets umbrella myself in sheets. The developer is helping…

Thanks for sharing your revenue, I didn't see anybody else do that here.
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