I run https://keygen.sh by myself. I built it about 7 years ago and started running it on the side. I went full-time on it in 2020 when it got too big to run on the side. As for trends -- the market is a bit slower these days due to the current economic environment. I've noticed smaller businesses have had a tougher time buying (and staying on), while enterprises have had an uptick.
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
91–100 of 145 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#92Yep! I run ExtensionPay, a service to allow browser extension developers to take payments in their extensions: https://extensionpay.com I made it after Google shut down their Chrome Web Store Payments system and I realized how annoying it was to take payments in extensions. So I made it for my own extensions and also for anyone who wanted to try monetizing their extensions with payments. The included library is open…
I bought an HN extension w/ extensionpay recently. Cool that it's a one-man shop.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#93I 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…
Hi,
first of all congratulations, it is a service I love and I follow some of the blogs hosted by you.
I've always thought about wanting to start a mini blogging platform similar to yours but I've always been stopped by this: how do you moderate the content? if someone posts something illegal, how does it work? if illicit messages or photos are posted, of whatever form, isn't it a big deal to get out and let the police know it's not your fault? is a simple disclaimer of reponsibility enough?
thank you very much!
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#94For 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…
That sounds like something I would do (and I have ADHD). It's a sign of boredom. If you're not interested in the actual "core offering" (regardless of how excited you are about it, or etc.) then distractions will be harder to ignore.
Only thing that worked for me was stimulants.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'm supposed to accurately predict whether a website will serve me ads or not, before I've ever connected to it?
Right, not sure why we didn't think of that sooner.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#96Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#97Thanks for asking and posting the old link. I for one never get tired of these types of questions.
I don't have an online biz, successful or not. I find these inspiring and depressing. Depressing because I feel like I never have any ideas.
Everyone always say look at your pain points or scratch your own itch. I don't seem to have an itch and as for pain points I just seem to go the flow and don't think of anything as a pain point.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#98Thanks for asking and posting the old link. I for one never get tired of these types of questions. I don't have an online biz, successful or not. I find these inspiring and depressing. Depressing because I feel like I never have any ideas. Everyone always say look at your pain points or scratch your own itch. I don't seem to have an itch and as for pain points I just seem to go the flow and don't think of anything as…
Hey I feel your sentiment. I have lots of ideas but feel too lazy to actually follow through. I've had a number of half-assed attempts at online businesses and if I persevered they might not amount to much but I'd at least be able to say I tried.
> Everyone always say look at your pain points or scratch your own itch. I don't seem to have an itch and as for pain points I just seem to go the flow and don't think of anything as a pain point.
Same. Maybe we should start a business to help people and businesses find pain points and help them scratch it.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#99I 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'm loving all the individual GPT-like creations, of this past quarter 2023... myself, been playing with image and text transformers since Holidays 2022, and am extremely interested in individual use-cases [from my premise and IMHO that entry-level computer jobs are effectively DONE by end of 2023, including multimodal document and image transformations and commoner customer service -type jobs].
Definitely an exceptionally-diminishing amount of users will be able to create increasingly-complex content which will demand higher wages for an even smaller subset of users/creators of GPT/image -type "creation."
How are you individually using it to increasing television/movie suggestions... beyond (hey GPT "What would you recommend if user A & B liked X but A & B did not agree on show Y nor Z?")?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#100I'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…
>Word of mouth keeps things rolling
In my own blue-collar version of this [i.e. starting my own residential electric service after an IBEW apprenticeship, licensed] W-o-Mouth was gold. I never advertised, not even from day one. The second I walked into local builders'/realtors' offices, my services were in demand and kept busy by turning out good work.
I will warn anybody thinking that running ANY kind of business is some kind of "luxurious relaxed mocha bong latté," I just want to warn you that you will work very difficult situations, with increasingly-difficult customers, the higher your hourly / contract rate becomes — there is a "sweet spot" that I would recommend not surpassing, and you'll know this when awakening to dread, daily for months.
Re: your last paragraph: definitely "feature creep" is not a user generator nor retainer [i.e. do not bloatware your simpleware!].