I am running premium Ghost Blog marketplace http://www.gtheme.io/
I solo doing design, develop, marketing, as well as writing contents around Ghost.
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
101–110 of 294 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
A little bit off-topic, but I find it really interesting how some American webpages have a look and feel that is recognizable in a fraction of second. The website https://www.appointmentreminder.org/ is one of these, the second you enter, the second you know it is a US American page.
What a bizarre comment, I expected to see American flags and red and blue text but the site looks like any website, American or otherwise.
I thought that until I visited the page, the graphics and content both feel American to me.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#103http://beatrixapp.com Solo, self funded and profitable. I work on it while traveling around Asia. Agree with patio11 there's probably way more than would speak up here. I seldom contribute to HN or the bootstrapping forums mentioned in another reply. I browse a little, but 99% of my time spent in front of the computer is spent working on product or replying to customer emails. How I got started: I've built SaaS apps…
I remember that you had other apps before like GoodGecko and Peashoot, what happened to them?
Goodgecko just never made any meaningful amount of money plus it was a competitive space (surveys) so it was shut down.
Peashoot did ok but in the end there were too many free competitors (twitter analytics).
I think if the same thing happened now, I'm a more experienced entrepreneur so I'd be able to deal with free competitors better - figure out what customers are still willing to pay for, aim for the enterprise market etc.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant you should use a different domain for static content on your marketing page, and I'm not lamenting anything. Just giving you some advice. Ghostery has been installed over 1 million times just in Chrome. Any one has ghostery installed and is going to your site will see a completely broken webpage.
Why was leobelle being downvoted? I can understand disagreeing with what they were saying. It's an opinion after all. But, what they were saying wasn't that far off base..
Probably because the adverts that are blocked pay for the site. Kind of like asking musicians for zippy share links to their music.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#105I live in a draconian tax country. How can I open a online international business and receive money from anywhere in the world? Do I need to move to a tax heaven?
You might not have to move, just have your company operating from an appropriate tax haven. You typically need to pay lawyers, accountants, etc to achieve what you are thinking about and they end up costing more than the tax you would have to pay. Do your numbers first before you get too preoccupied with the tax. As a very general comment, in some low tax countries you need to spend a lot of money to have what you get more or less for free in other higher tax countries.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#106Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#107I run http://www.candyjapan.com
It just crossed 500 paying members. I started it with my wife, but recently the shipping part is no longer done by us two manually, but by a local supermarket. In the beginning it was just an email to some previous customers asking if they might be interested in a club like this. Then a landing page and a HN post. From there it grew through blog mentions and now there is a trickle of organic traffic coming in.
Before this I had some small apps on social networks that made more money, but were much more unstable. While Candy Japan could wither away, I expect the death would be more gradual. I still have some of the older sites / apps which together are still making around $500 / month, which is a nice bonus.
Probably anyone working as a salaried programmer in the US is making a more money than I am currently, but I enjoy the freedom and the thought that there really is no upper limit. If we ever do hit 1000 members I'm planning to have a celebration :-)
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really requires a different mindset. For instance, while BCC makes sense, I can't imagine someone willing to pay for something like Appointment Reminder.
Suppose you run a professional services business where you have appointments. If people don't come to an appointment, you don't get money. You might pay an office manager to call people the morning of their appointment to remind them, so that they come into their appointment, so you get paid, right? Appointment Reminder is like an office manager who costs $200 a month, not $4,000 a month, is vastly more likely to suc…
tl;dr: Helps businesses not lose money. So they pay for it.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#109You should check out the SideProject Book[1]. It's specifically about bootstraped, successful, single owner projects. It features some of the projects that appeared here, actually, like BCC.
As of myself, I am currently trying to educate myself into dividing my time better between my "day job" and my product. Hard to do, though, when your day job absolutely rocks... It's very easy to work all day long without realizing you should have stopped in the middle of the afternoon. Not a bad problem to have, mind you.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#110I run http://officesnapshots.com which publishes photos of office design projects from around the world. I started it in 2007 as a gin side project to teaching history. I'm no longer teaching and it is the majority of my income.
That's great to hear. I love the site and was always wondering if it was just a small side project or something bigger now.