Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

I've commended to a response below with the business model, but yeah I've just started trialling a freemium model yesterday so need to update the rest of the site with clearer pricing plans etc.

Until yesterday there was no freemium access, it was just paid up-front to access all the content. $39 per quarter or $99 per year.

Your use case is kinda where the idea came from, most product people do something similar. The hard part is adding enough relevant content on Page Flows for enough people!

I recently sunsetted it (as in - no longer accepting payments for it), but over 7 years I was running AppCodes.com.

It’s a tool for app store seo, would be the first one on the market of it’s kind, if I launched it just 2 weeks earlier :,)

Upon launch I announced it on hacker news, and wrote to the TC journalist that covered my competition. Got to front pages on both sites, and it was rather smooth sailing after that - I appeared on a few app store conferences and podcasts, did a bit of marketing, and all in all earned around $250k over the span of the few years (which is a very decent salary in Poland).

Finance-wise, it was an extremely important thing in my life, since it was my first own project that allowed me to earn a decent living, after over 10 years of trying various things. Got me from “omg I can’t afford rent” to “omg, I can stop worrying about money for a while”.

I also made a few important decisions over it’s lifespan:

- not taking vc-funding, and keeping it a one-person operation. the downside was that I had much fewer resources, the upside was that I didn’t need to build a unicorn, and could focus on a small niche (indie app developers)

- no free version, with good tutorials, good demo, and a good refund policy instead. twofold rationale: it takes some time to understand the tool, and I doubt free users would be so willing to take that time; getting free->paid funnel right can be challenging, and pushes the site into serving bigger clients really, not indie devs

- decided to not go for corporate clients, as those require sales teams and much more support. perhaps I lost a few clients (a few significant publicly traded companies used it for at least a while) and a lot of money, but this was more in line with my personality

- decided to move on to other things, again - more in line with my personality, where I like exploring new subjects, and don’t like staying in one place for too long :)

- decided to not sell it - I prefer the site to stay as it is, than to earn a few bucks by passing all customer data to someone else, who would most likely scrap the site altogether and forward the domain to them

- keep user privacy as the core principle - there’s a ton of cool stuff that could be built based on the data within that site, but it’s against the principles

All in all, it was an amazing ride, that really got me off the ground as an antrepereneur, and I really hope provided a lot of value to the few thousands of paid users that passed through it over the years

(written on mobile, sorry for formatting)

It's a shame he hasn't updated the financials since 2017 tho. I always liked reading up on it.

I'm doing pretty well selling a WordPress plugin, https://mediacloud.press/

It's an equal mix of rewarding and frustrating. It's a lot more work than you'd expect and now I've a deep understanding of why support tools are as obtuse as they are.

It's generating enough income that's livable and freeing me up to focus on other related projects. I'm going to be launching a SAAS version of the plugin later this year.

Honest question, doesn't this creep people out? I mean, I'm obviously not the target market but I find it awkward enough when sites pop up those "Hi I'm , how can I help you?" chat windows even though I know they're just a script. I can't imagine how I'd feel if I'd bought something a while back from a site and I got a personalized video from the person running it.

(Then again I did buy a Klein bottle a few years back and it came with basically a photo commentary of it being shipped and that was absolutely awesome, so...)