381–390 of 666 posts
I recently quit my (great) job to work on my online business which was once my side project. I'm not solo - I have a partner (@dmtintner). > Our business is a newsletter, blog & podcast called Hacking UI - http://HackingUI.com (for designers, developers and creative entrepreneurs like ourselves) > I wrote ALL about how we started, and also how we scaled it to the point where we could leave our jobs http://hackingui.c…
I built a network of agricultural communities. Making a decent living from Adsense revenue. There's a substantial secondary revenue stream in the form of paid classified ads in niche marketplaces. I could make more money by going after advertisers myself, but I don't like the sales aspect. I am currently developing a turnkey website platform for companies in my niches, fully integrated with my other platforms, Twitte…
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Thanks for sharing, looks awesome :) Do you use Shopify for any specific reason? Or it simply satisfies your needs? Last question (I promise!): Do you place the orders manually or do you have any sort of automated system integrated with your supplier?
No worries =), I'm happy to help if I can. So yes -- I use Shopify primarily because it's a relatively simple way to get up-and-running. You'll make less money on Shopify, overall, because they take part of the profits you make (~2% to 5%). And that turns some people off, but the payoff is this: You can make secure, good-looking and effective site in just a few days. With no coding or server management involved. Now,…
Do you use any other services? And how often do you need to reply to customer emails?
Back 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…
Hope the hockey stick goes up, and like a lot of people here, hope to be on those pages soon :)
I launched http://ipinfo.io a few years ago. The API gets over 250 million requests a day, and is profitable. I left my job at CTO of calm.com at the end of last year to focus on it fulltime. There's more of the backstory here: https://getputpost.co/from-side-project-to-250-million-daily...
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There are a few good ways, but it really helps if you know the products well. For me, my site sells guitar parts and DIY kits. And I've been playing guitar since I was about 10 years old, so that helps a ton . I had a few other stores before this that didn't sell well at all, and I have to say that's because I just didn't know the products, or what the end users really wanted/needed/cared about. Great ways to pick pr…
I see. Simple but efficient. Last question, you send directly from aliexpress to your clients right? Does it not bother you, your clients receiving packages coming from a different store than expected and with a Chinese address?
Oberlo (the drop shipping service) does have an email system that lets you track the package on its journey and see where it is shipping from, after an order is placed. So it's not unexpected that the address is Chinese.
Most of the vendors actually do a good job on the packaging/presentation, but it's advisable to try each vendor's products (even something cheap), so you know what kind of standards they have. Some are very good, others are poor. You can also leave the vendor an automated message when you order about how to package.
I built a network of agricultural communities. Making a decent living from Adsense revenue. There's a substantial secondary revenue stream in the form of paid classified ads in niche marketplaces. I could make more money by going after advertisers myself, but I don't like the sales aspect. I am currently developing a turnkey website platform for companies in my niches, fully integrated with my other platforms, Twitte…
How did you go about growing the communities?
I built a plugin to connect WordPress with MailChimp ( https://mc4wp.com ) while hospitalised in Vietnam a few years ago and it has been selling well enough to support me in my travels & now back home in The Netherlands from day 1 (right after I started offering a paid version, that is).
I'm also thinking about developing my first product and wanted to start with wordpress, I think a Saas would be too ambitious, how did you start promoting it?
That said, if your plugin does anything visual, be ready for a lot of beginner questions. Some of your non-paying users will be the hardest to please, especially in WordPress land where you as a (real) developer will be severely underappreciated.
I think it's getting harder, now the world is getting more developers and more fully funded startups.
A developer isn't a software company in the same sense that a kid good with numbers isn't a bookkeeping firm. Software companies don't compete with developers; they hire their services. Small software shops don't meaningfully compete with funded startups, because funded startups have to have some plausible path to growing massive, and the types of things small software shops ship just have to have a plausible path to…