I've worked goffconcepts.com full time since 2003 entirely alone (the "we" is my wife). My new product FileSearchEX is highly pirated so I'll probably be moving on to other things. I only recommend SaaS, forget about fat client software. The search engines enable a very toxic landscape otherwise.
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
131–140 of 294 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#132Just launched Pinegrow Web Designer ( http://pinegrow.com ) two months ago. The company is actually run by my wife and me, but I do all the work with Pinegrow while she is taking care of our other projects. Pinegrow has been paying most of our bills since launch and I have a lot of expansions in the pipeline: full support for Foundation alongside Bootstrap, developer edition that'll work with templates, a similar app…
Gosh pinegrow is a cool project, but the massive deal breaker for me is a lack of a Linux client :( any chance of that at all? For distribution (cause packaging is a bitch, to be honest) you can use something like Ermine to compile twice (i386 and x64) and then convert to a single static binary.
For now, I'll continue playing with it on my Mac, but Linux support would be the best.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#133I build MVP's for people who have an idea for a web app. It's at http://builtFromIdeas.com
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#134Even if you were to scope it just to software/SaaS product companies, there's minimally hundreds of these in the world and dozens of them have HN accounts. Most don't post on threads like this, so I feel the need to pipe up and say "This is quite doable, and done, much more than you might expect." I run a small software company (two, technically). Products include Bingo Card Creator ( http://www.bingocardcreator.com…
To underscore Patrick's point about just how many of these businesses there really are, he's one of the few folks I remember from the old Business of Software forums over at joelonsoftware.com that seem to have migrated over here. That was a tiny little board where the owners of single player software businesses would get together to ask silly questions about how to update their shareware product's PAD files. There w…
I like the idea of the cheap bastard plan of s3stat. Very well done and well presented.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#135I am running a complete payment gateway that supports VISA and MasterCard and mobile payments by SMS. The name of the service is: https://www.bizify.me For an introduction to the service: https://www.bizify.me/hacker-news/
FYI HN is not indexed by google :)
Sorry for the long text. I had a pre-written text that I used for an earlier presentation, so I just copied the text and made some minor corrections. But hopefully, the text is a good introduction anyway. :)
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#136Just launched Pinegrow Web Designer ( http://pinegrow.com ) two months ago. The company is actually run by my wife and me, but I do all the work with Pinegrow while she is taking care of our other projects. Pinegrow has been paying most of our bills since launch and I have a lot of expansions in the pipeline: full support for Foundation alongside Bootstrap, developer edition that'll work with templates, a similar app…
Gosh pinegrow is a cool project, but the massive deal breaker for me is a lack of a Linux client :( any chance of that at all? For distribution (cause packaging is a bitch, to be honest) you can use something like Ermine to compile twice (i386 and x64) and then convert to a single static binary. For now, I'll continue playing with it on my Mac, but Linux support would be the best.
Actually, I have an experimental Linux build. Didn't really have a chance to test it. Here it is, if you would like to try it out:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gyzegb9sae3jlwh/Bv9NtDF96z (select ... and Download as zip).
Please let me know how it works out.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#137Just launched Pinegrow Web Designer ( http://pinegrow.com ) two months ago. The company is actually run by my wife and me, but I do all the work with Pinegrow while she is taking care of our other projects. Pinegrow has been paying most of our bills since launch and I have a lot of expansions in the pipeline: full support for Foundation alongside Bootstrap, developer edition that'll work with templates, a similar app…
This looks great! The upcoming developer edition that will work with templates sounds really useful as well. Any plans to support the SASS version of Bootstrap ?
Partial support for SASS will be out next week (together with Foundation). The way it works is that when CSS rules are saved Pinegrow saves .css, .less and .scss versions. Variables, expressions and most of the functions are supported.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#138Earlier 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…
I didn't mean appointment reminding in general - which is a good thing obviously. But I thought it was a long time solved problem by other means (and not necessary by office manager), be it some "enterprise" calendar or todo software which are integrated in most of the "enterprise"/business software products, etc...
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#139I develop and sell Smart Shooter.
Its a traditional desktop app (windows, mac), but only sold online via our own website or the mac app store. I created it about 4 years ago, and work on it solely in my spare time. In fact I'm employed full time at a major tech company but this I keep separate.
To claim its profitable is a bit misleading, because of cause the major cost in developing such software is my own time. I've incorporated as a limited company here in Finland but do not pay myself a salary, so the only costs to the business are web hosting and occasional hardware purchases (computers, cameras).
I started this as a project for personal interest; at the time I was working as a software engineer developing financial trading software. Smart Shooter was a good way to develop something that covered both my interests in graphics programming and digital photography, to alleviate the borebom from my day job.
So for me its been successful, its still an pleasureable hobby, allows me an excuse to play around with the latest cameras, and brings in some pocket money. It doesn't generate enough revenue that I could quit my main job, but the possibilities could be there if situations change.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#140I 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 o…
I just subscribed. You should add a meta description / opengraph description / image so I can share it on facebook and have the description of the website show up properly rather than just be blank.