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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#41

Post by eappleby »

https://www.pubexchange.com

Started that company about 10 years ago. It's a social network for online publishers. Thankfully, sites join mostly through word of mouth and advertisers mostly set their campaigns to renew monthly, so I usually focus on product development.

I also recently launched https://www.forourschool.org

A free platform for schools that they can use to run their activity based fundraisers (e.g. Read-A-Thons). I build it for my kids' school but made it so any school can use it. Now that my kids' Read-A-Thon is over (increased their donations by almost 50% yoy!), I am working on updates to it and hopefully bringing it to more schools.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#42

Post by jarebear6expepj »

kljsclfdsklj wrote: post #37
HWR_14 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers. Well, not end users. They're getting ads. But I would assume that ad buyers and publishers have exclusive improvements. After all, it's not like the ad companies took a substantially smaller cut. It either lowers the cost to ad buyers or it increases the revenue to publishers. Since it's pretty much the same number, it doesn't seem both can be tru…

Lol what are you talking about? Any improvement in conversion rate is going to help the publisher, the network and the ad buyer. I’ll just ignore the part about what you said about end users other than to say it’s arguable.

When I say 'end user' I guess I am talking about the sheer amount of Javascript loading and computation they no longer had to put up with jumping through waterfalls. Header bidding fixed that which meant that javascript based ads loaded in a significantly more efficient and sane way. Privacy, etc is obviously a different issue.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#43

Post by selcuka »

HWR_14 wrote: post #33
jarebear6expepj wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads were the easy part once I stopped trying to run the ad containers and servers myself. When I started it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders which ended at Google typically. When header bidding came out it made the advertising world orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers.

> orders of magnitude better for end users, ad buyers, AND publishers. Well, not end users. They're getting ads. But I would assume that ad buyers and publishers have exclusive improvements. After all, it's not like the ad companies took a substantially smaller cut. It either lowers the cost to ad buyers or it increases the revenue to publishers. Since it's pretty much the same number, it doesn't seem both can be tru…

> it was long waterfall chains of terrible javascript loaders

> Well, not end users. They're getting ads.

Why not? Would you prefer ads, or ads with terrible javascript loaders?

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#44

Post by wcedmisten »

anyfactor wrote: post #36
jarebear6expepj wrote: post #5

I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live. I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe fra…

Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps? I built an MVP on a 5 dollar VPS. But I had to recently upgrade to a 12 dollar VPS as some of my analytics process were being stopped because of low memory. Aside from writing better code, I found out that using linux utils/app via system calls is the most effective solution as nothing I can write can ever be even remotely as performant as something like grep. I am fol…

Not OP, but I started up a project running Postgres, a Python backend (with FastAPI), and a NextJS frontend on the cheapest DigitalOcean droplet. Hosting+domain came to $7.68/mo

I can't say it's had very much production load testing, but using the site myself it seems to work fine.

https://wcedmisten.fyi/post/stateful-webapp-on-7-68-budget/

https://github.com/wcedmisten/python-nextjs-template

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#45

Post by RileyJames »

msbroadf wrote: post #8

I have run my one-man business for 13 years now. https://www.virtualhere.com . Back then I saw the market moving to the cloud and thought bringing device access there was needed. There was no one really doing this cheaply and easily. I posted a link to my software on the raspberrypi forum when that board came out and started getting my customers immediately that way. It took a year to write the initial software. Ive…

That’s awesome! Congrats.

Are there any feature requests / product directions that have been requested, that you’ve rejected / neglected? For better or worse.

Solo building is often about hard decisions on what NOT to do. And with a generic piece of software like this, I imagine there are plenty of niche operators asking for “just one thing to make it perfect for xxxxx”

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#47

Post by anyfactor »

jarebear6expepj wrote: post #40
anyfactor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps? I built an MVP on a 5 dollar VPS. But I had to recently upgrade to a 12 dollar VPS as some of my analytics process were being stopped because of low memory. Aside from writing better code, I found out that using linux utils/app via system calls is the most effective solution as nothing I can write can ever be even remotely as performant as something like grep. I am fol…

> Any tips on how to run a site on a 5 dollar vps? I don't know... from what I've used of Python it is pretty memory heavy and doesn't do well left alone unsupervised. I could be wrong but that was my experience trying various Py web frameworks. My app servers were all $5 VPS with only nginx, PHP/php-fpm, and Memcached. PHP was cached, nginx assets were cached, and data was cached in RAM with Memcached which was upda…

Thank you very much. The only thing I can think of while reading your comment was, "wow this is elegant."

Have you consideres productize/templatize this stack and selling some kind license/supporting deal? Although a more marketable solution will be a redis + node based stack.

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#48

Post by randombits0 »

jarebear6expepj wrote: post #5

I ran a collection of websites that I built (see bolted together) with PHP, MySQL, and nginx. Most of them were curated media sites which made income with advertising revenue. A few services, most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live. I mostly ran the websites in to the ground with my custom wannabe fra…

> most notably was a dating site I made for Mormons, which the church interestingly enough used a blind broker to buy and shut down within a year of going live.

That’s our Hitler!

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#49

Post by sahillavingia »

Gumroad has one FTE (me) and 21 part-time contractors.

I write more about it here: https://sahillavingia.com/work

It was a natural outgrowth of working remote and then async to lean on the hourly contractor model.

It’s a little tough to scale, so we built some custom software to do payroll, contracts, etc: https://flexile.com

Re: Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

#50

Post by oars »

beatthatflight wrote: post #39

https://beatthatflight.com.au/ Started 5 years ago next month. Flight/hotel/car rental search, plus deals that I find for Australians. Running it is actually fairly easy. It started as a deals site, then I added in some whitelabeled software, mailing list, fb page, and frankly it's a numbers game - more visitors = more ads/affiliate revenue. It's not huge, but it's been interesting at least, and very little in the wa…

Huge fan of your site. My wife is Australian, and moved here to be with her. I used your site when purchasing my one-way ticket!
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