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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#121

Post by anyfactor »

jarebear6expepj wrote: post #52
anyfactor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you very much. The only thing I can think of while reading your comment was, "wow this is elegant." Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind license/supporting deal? Although a more marketable solution will be a redis + node based stack.

> "wow this is elegant." > Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind > license/supporting deal uhhh it's really just a basic install of freebsd and a bunch of shell scripts! As far as I'm concerned anyone with a bit of time could google fu themselves in to production. I am always happy to, and have, contracted to build similar setups for other people for CDN delivery, etc, but that wa…

Thank you very much for the inspiration. I appreciate your insights.

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

#122

Post by santah »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #99
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'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 excepti…

I'm still experimenting different things with it so I can't tell you how exactly I'll end up using it, but yeah, ideally it should go beyond what you mentioned ...

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

#123

Post by abnercoimbre »

XCSme wrote: post #85
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?

> Concurrent purchases

This is definitely one of the challenges, since the majority of ticket sales happen in bursts.

Another big one is Stripe or PayPal making mistakes: duplicate events might be sent to my server but that doesn't mean someone bought two tickets. Perhaps an event failed to be sent at all. Or the payment event is fake (rare, but must be managed.)

A final example is that somewhere in the registration flow there's a network glitch: perhaps a confirmation email wasn't sent because the email API was down. How do you patch up these "holes" in a customer's record ASAP? All of these problems might influence and amplify each other too.

Anyway it's definitely solvable but requires programmer effort to scale and fail / recover gracefully.

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

#124

Post by ryan-allen »

sahillavingia wrote: post #49

Gumroad has one FTE (me) and 21 part-time contractors. I write more about it here: https://sahillavingia.com/work It was a natural outgrowth of working remote and then async to lean on the hourly contractor model. It’s a little tough to scale, so we built some custom software to do payroll, contracts, etc: https://flexile.com

That is incredible! What hours on average do the contractors put in per week? That's such an interesting story, I'll have to read your book!

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

#125

Post by lightning19 »

anyfactor wrote: post #120
lightning19 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a SaaS that makes between $1000-$2000/yr on a $5 VM. My operations are as follows: On the VM: - Nodejs + React SSR - Nginx - Certbot to manage my SSL cert - Integrated with Grafana's cloud service (free tier) Outside of the VM: - Managed MongoDB cluster - API health check's every 3 min with email alerts (I use multiple uptime services to check from different regions) - DB backup cron jobs, backups are stored in…

That is really awesome. > nuke the VM once a year and re-provision otherwise you have to maintain the OS, do cleanup etc That is really interesting. What are you using to re-setup your entire infrastructure after purging a VM? How do you manage the down time between one vm purge to setting up the next one. I would love to know, going beyond the VPS what is your total infrastructure + maintenance cost.

Thanks :)

I set things up again on the new VM manually. I have a runbook for it, usually takes me 30 mins or less.

To not have any downtime I keep the old VM up and attach a new public IP to the new VM. I then update the DNS records and after a while when the new IP is mapped to my domain I then stop the old VM.

Costs:

Managed Mongodb cluster: $9 but I share it between multiple side projects so let's say $3

API health checks - free! I use digital ocean and fresh ping

Service Desk - free! I use Jira

DNS: Usually $0.3

DB backups: within the free tier on both cloud providers. I have it set to only keep the last x backups so this should always be free

Cron job to run the backup: I have a serverless function for this, still within the free tier

SSL cert - free because I use let's encrypt

Docker image storage costs: Total ~$9.5

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

#126

Post by umen »

sahillavingia wrote: post #49

Gumroad has one FTE (me) and 21 part-time contractors. I write more about it here: https://sahillavingia.com/work It was a natural outgrowth of working remote and then async to lean on the hourly contractor model. It’s a little tough to scale, so we built some custom software to do payroll, contracts, etc: https://flexile.com

not gumroad user , but reading your stuff . question do you use your own payment/billing processor or are you using somtihng like stripe / paypall ?

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

#127

Post by jasonm23 »

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?

I was inspired to do the same, however, there are now at least 2 dating apps that cater specifically to Mormons.

I think the time when the church thought they could buy out that market segment, has passed.

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

#128

Post by zhte415 »

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…

Measure how long a response takes, shave that.

Count how many responses you're providing for a single request. Reduce them.

See what can be done in parallel or out of order, do that.

Check requests through time of day. Eliminate overload.

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

#129

Post by schwifty1 »

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…

I'm really interested in what you did, because it sounds like what I'm trying to do!

Are you able to help me with these questions?

1. How did you decide which services to start? Did you have any criteria on what types of services you did and didn't want to start?

2. Was all of the income from those services advertising? Or were you charging users directly for some?

3. After it was built, how did you market a service and attract users?

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

#130

Post by user2147483647 »

yyyyddmm wrote: post #93
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…

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 poli…

They have a pretty efficient manual review process. https://docs.bearblog.dev/review-process/
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