I run a Canadian price comparison site: http://pricefu.com
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
261–270 of 666 posts
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#262I've been running Bowtiful Ties ( http://www.bowtifulties.com ) as a side project for the last 4 or so years. Everything is vertically integrated and hand made by myself, from the bow ties, to the packaging, to the website and all processes. Bootstrapped from the start, it's pretty low volume, but nicely profitable.
On http://bowtifulties.com/behind-the-bow/ a picture is not showing.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#263I started Cold Turkey about 5 years ago and it's just recently started to generate enough income that I can work on it full time. Cold Turkey temporarily blocks websites and applications to help you focus on your work: https://getcoldturkey.com
How do you make money? I didn't find any pricing page or premium plan.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#264I'm running https://SignalBox.ai alone, I wrote all of the software and am working on partnering and sales right now. Previously I have 2 other startups, one was media monitoring and one was forex. The media monitoring is B2B only. The forex trading is automated and run from my home research cluster. Both are generating enough revenue to live off (media monitoring 120k forex, 60-80k) I guess they fit the definition o…
Sales are a big struggle to me. Where did you find this partnerships?
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#265This barely counts, but I started a small premium handmade custom leather goods brand about 6 months ago: http://vulcancrafting.com . cash/card wallets, notebook/journal wallets, belts, etc... I didn't want to spend all my time after work sitting at a computer. I'm not in the positive yet; there's an equipment investment cost, I intentionally don't keep a huge order backlog, and I don't charge as much as I could for…
Really beautiful work
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'd recommend adding sitewide hreflang across all your ccTLDs to the list ;)
hreflang attributes are in place, aren't they? It took some time to get them properly in Google Webmaster Tools 0:)
At a glance, I can only see them in place on your respective homepages, where it only has limited value.
It should ideally be across all pages of all sites, so as to declare all 'sibling' pages, e.g.
https://www.fortsu.co.uk/running-shoes/all/trail
https://www.fortsu.de/laufschuhe/alle/trail
https://www.fortsu.com/running-shoes/all/trail
you can also use XML sitemaps to implement it, which tends to be preferable, especially if you don't want the extra bloat in the HTML of your pages.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, affiliate marketing is the main source of income. I am slightly introducing kind of business inteligence in order to sell reporting to merchants willing to know more.
I am interested in building something like this for Android phone comparison. Can you give some indication of stats: visitors, income etc?
Regarding Android mobile phones, check https://www.kimovil.com
Numbers change much from country to country but average conversion rate is around 2,3%
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a cool project. I'm mostly a designer, but am familiar with PhantomJS. I don't see a blog on your site. Have you considered writing about the technology? I'd think search would be a great growth mechanism for something like this. Certainly there are a ton of people searching for questions related to Phantom. I'd look around Stack Overflow and possibly Quora for topic ideas and then write posts answering those…
Yes, "inbound marketing" (a blog) is probably the biggest accelerator to growth I can (and should) do. I'm holding off for now though, as I need to make the product more friendly to business users first. Right now PhantomJsCloud is focused on developers, so I need to make some non-dev friendly tooling first. That's my excuse at least. Regarding StackOverflow, yes, that's actually how I validated the free MVP (answeri…
I don't want to second guess your strategy—but here I go. If your tool is appealing to developers _and_ you have identified a way to reach developers, then I think you should seriously consider focusing on that.
Consider for a moment Dropbox: For a very long time they and their competitors catered to the needs of designers and other freelancers who had to share large files with clients. Was Dropbox anathema to IT departments? Yes, totally. But building a product that appeals to corporate IT departments has been a huge undertaking.
If your goal is to build a successful business, the easiest way to do that may be reaching critical mass with developers and then maybe finding ways to offer more value to your exiting (developer) customers and charging accordingly.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#269Back in August I launched https://IndieHackers.com , a site where the founders of profitable online businesses share their stories and revenue transparently. I actually got the idea after reading lots of threads like this one on HN :D Indie Hackers is my full-time job now. Is it "successful"? I think so! I've done over 90 interviews, and they've been read over one million times in the past 5 months, largely by you gu…
IndieHackers is one of my favorite platforms! I've read most stories and do business with some of the founders there successfully after reading about them on your platform.
THANK YOU! You are not making only yourself wealthy, but many more so. I really appreciate your site.
Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! > How do you host your site? TL;DR: entry level Virtual Private Server (VPS) per country. Based on some SEO articles, I decided to go for Top Level Domains depending on target market (.es for Spain, .de for Germany, etc.) so I needed properly geolocated IP addresses for each country. Each server is around 10 USD/month making this approach affordable. I do all operations. > How do you compare the similar produ…
This is good advice. I'm going to be building a site and replicating across TLD and IPs like this across countries. My only question is, if you are using the same content (ie, you write content on the blog for SEO) across each site do you run into trouble with Google for copying existing content?
I am sorry I can't provide a reliable answer to this because my english based sites need more traction, but Google (GWT) does not complain as long as hreflang attributes are properly set.