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Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

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Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#231

Post by sixQuarks »

cheez wrote: post #179
sixQuarks wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't usually toot my own horn, but I'm really good at marketing and wish I could just find a good local designer/developer combo to do a startup with. I'm really tired of working with remote freelancers that don't do exceptional work, or they start off doing good work, then drift off into mediocre work. Admittedly, I'm not good at managing people, I just want to find people that work well on their own.

Example? Ways to reach you?

I don't want to give out URLs and names in a public forum, but I've started several 6-figure online businesses in different segments over the years. The one I'm focusing on now does about $400k/year in profit and I only have to put in about 5 hours per week, I'm basically retired at this point.

I'm brimming with ideas - really good ideas, but I don't want to pursue them without dedicated partners. I want to build great products foremost, the money follows naturally.

We can talk privately if you think there's an opportunity here.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#233

Post by bluecalm »

seanwilson wrote: post #184
bluecalm wrote: post #97

I've started http://www.piosolver.com and I run it with a friend. It's a very small niche and getting less popular but we are still doing very well. It was my hobby project for more than a year before any commercial plans appeared. It took very little money to start (basic Shopify plan, github, Dropbox, a few hundred $ for sponsored thread on a popular forum) but it took a lot of time. I am not a millionaire yet but…

I was having a browse of the website and think it would be really beneficial to have a comparison of all the products on a single page (e.g. a feature matrix). It's too much hard work clicking into each individual product to see why you'd want to spend more. Good luck with your project!

Yeah I agree it's a good idea. The thing is though that as we are selling to a very targeted market most people already know what they want when they come to the website. Other than that I don't know anything about html/javascript. I used free Shopify template for a winery, removed the bottles and that's how the website came to be. Adding a nice comparison table to that website would take a lot of hours which I prefer spending doing something more fun.

I just don't like doing marketing and I don't like convincing people what they should or shouldn't buy. I realize that maybe we are leaving some money on the table but on the other hand we get great reputation, a lot of word of mouth referrals and very small refund rate (below 1%) so that's good for mental health :)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#234

Post by danielzarick »

tjholowaychuk wrote: post #177
danielzarick wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help: 1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.) 2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly). 3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or…

Thanks! They're definitely a bit on the low side, it still seems hard since most programmers despite making crazy sums of money often complain about spending even $10/m on something haha. I'll think about raising the prices a bit once I have some exclusive features. I thought having a free plan would be good on the marketing front, and maybe it will be, but I definitely need some features to differentiate the plans

Haha yeah, sounds familiar. That's actually one of the primary reasons to raise them! Unfortunately, your biggest support costs will be from unreasonable people on the cheapest plans. So by raising prices you often weed out the people who complain, but make up for it in the extra dollars from all the silent people who love the product.

The "exclusive features" thing is awesome in theory, but unlikely to matter to most customers. Having a simple, well-designed, straight-forward product can be worth a few extra bucks. Extra features will be gravy in the future (or more stuff for the higher plans).

Free plans are tough, because adding one without a good strategy usually ends up being a distraction and more server/support/etc cost than good for upgrades. Most people will just sign up for a paid plan or a free plan and stay there, unless you have a really great strategy for getting them to upgrade. With that said, I worked at Twilio and we made sure to give a bunch of free credit because we knew getting devs to try it for fun or personal projects would often translate to them convincing their employer to use us for something that made us a lot of money. The difference here is that the true customer was businesses that paid a lot of money.

(If you can't tell, I really enjoy this stuff haha. Hope it's not annoying.)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#235

Post by 0x54MUR41 »

pieterhg wrote: post #171

I'm a single founder, I'm nearing $400k/y revenue. It started a side project on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 and then grew over the last 2 years. 2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too that! This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to Nomad List: http://remoteok.io . It's now a cost of li…

patio11's posts? Could you share the link of the post?

Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#236

Post by bluecalm »

turbostyler wrote: post #174
bluecalm wrote: post #97

I've started http://www.piosolver.com and I run it with a friend. It's a very small niche and getting less popular but we are still doing very well. It was my hobby project for more than a year before any commercial plans appeared. It took very little money to start (basic Shopify plan, github, Dropbox, a few hundred $ for sponsored thread on a popular forum) but it took a lot of time. I am not a millionaire yet but…

Looks like a very interesting tool, but I would reallllly recommend hiring someone else to narrate your videos. That woman has a very "unique" voice that made it hard for me to sit through.

That's a bit harsh. In case it wasn't clear from my posts or the website I am not a native English speaker nor is my friend or the woman in question. She is my sister and just wanted to help when we were starting. I didn't hire anyone to do anything in the website :)

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#237

Post by yuhong »

throwaway58182 wrote: post #227
zerr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using throwaway so customers don't find this comment. Not sure about your customers, but if I was a customer of some product I'd be happy to know they're are doing well :)

Our competitors are 10 - 1000 times larger than us. Doesn't help us in any way for them to know our size. And the couple of customers that know our size have indicated it's better to appear large. For example, you wouldn't switch a company from using Microsoft Exchange to something else if that something else was run by a couple of guys. Our company would be in very deep trouble if something happened to me. To balanc…

I guess there are probably several issues involved, including the "no one got fired for buying IBM" problem.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#238

Post by ryanSrich »

raarts wrote: post #186
stenius wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You disable it in your browser or most likely run something like noscript to maintain a white list.

I think parent meant: how is the Internet usable with javascript turned off? How can you bear it?

^ as evident by the replies I wasn't as obvious as I could have been.

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#239

Post by aaronbrethorst »

0x54MUR41 wrote: post #235
pieterhg wrote: post #171

I'm a single founder, I'm nearing $400k/y revenue. It started a side project on here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222 and then grew over the last 2 years. 2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too that! This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to Nomad List: http://remoteok.io . It's now a cost of li…

patio11's posts? Could you share the link of the post? Thank you.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

Re: Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?

#240

Post by rrecuero »

Thanks everyone for sharing the stories. I have been working on a startup for several months, pivoted and I'll release the new concept in the next weeks.

I think the biggest hurdle of doing something alone is keeping yourself emotionally stable. If there are more people, when you are down the others can balance it out.

Has anyone experienced this?

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