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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#51

Post by Jaruzel »

tluyben2 wrote: post #44
Famara7 wrote: post #5

To be successful as an one person online business maker you need loads of self motivation & some self control over procrastination. If you're spending alot of time on your own, managing & building up your start up without alot of actual human engagement you need strong will power...& good ambient music on in the background ;-]

I had to look up what ambient music was and I found out that listening to it agitates and annoys me beyond belief. So that is rather a big assumption about music taste you have there.

I found I needed music to keep me motivated, and after trying out Rock/Metal (my normally preferred genre), I cycled through baroque and classical, and eventually ended up settling on Trance/EDM. It ended up just being all about the BPM matching my typing speed (about 124bpm).

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

#52

Post by mutatio »

I run https://encycolorpedia.com/ - its origins are from a "JavaScript as CSS" library I was developing - there were/are superior projects available, so ultimately I used the colour manipulation code to produce the site. The idea was to take a seed colour and render the page uniquely, additional on-page information grew from that. From feedback I guess the primary use of the site is paint searching and comparison.

It's not massively profitable (it's a side gig), I've restricted monetisation to AdSense in an attempt to not ruin the experience for users. I suspect other avenues of revenue are hard to come by in the niche; I did reach out to paint suppliers in the UK in an attempt to re-sell / possibly rebrand paints, but had zero responses.

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

#53

Post by phito »

sellingwebsite wrote: post #46
phito wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course, it is https://phito.be/

I wish you had a blog where you share "behind the scenes" stories running this business

There's a few pictures here about how I pack my plants (warning: large sized images will load with this page, still have to fix this...)

https://phito.be/frequently-asked-questions/

and a few blog articles here

https://phito.be/articles/

I would like to write more blog articles, but I am a very slow writer and I don't have a lot of time :/

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

#54

Post by wgx »

WA wrote: post #47

I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product has been around quite a while. Please…

I don't think I'm alone here in desperately wanting to know what business this is. :)

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

#55

Post by leowoo91 »

khuknows wrote: post #14

I run https://pageflows.com and have been living off it full time for a little over a year. The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a junior developer in London, so it's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough. It's a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some sort of micro saas, but it's I'm happy with how things have been so far. Happy to answer any que…

Very interesting idea, I didn't notice kind of need for designers until now. When I code for a game, I also check for other games, it might be too opinionated but they also have some common experience at their navigation and I find it quite helpful.

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

#56

Post by woutr_be »

fastbeef wrote: post #27
woutr_be wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did you read the latest blog post? I has financials for 2019

That's weird, when I click on "Pinboard blog", it redirects me to https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/, which stops at 2017. Just https://blog.pinboard.in/ does show the 2019 one.

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

#57

Post by Havoc »

khuknows wrote: post #21
sejtnjir wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neat! What's your business model?

I literally just switched to a very limited freemium model yesterday (just trialling it for now), but before then it was just pay to access. It's $39 per quarter or $99 per year for access to all the content. Quite a low priced product with decently high churn, so I've been trying to find ways to increase the value.

Higher pricing than i would have guessed. But I guess it solves a professional pain point so worth it

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

#58

Post by khuknows »

leowoo91 wrote: post #55
khuknows wrote: post #14

I run https://pageflows.com and have been living off it full time for a little over a year. The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a junior developer in London, so it's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough. It's a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some sort of micro saas, but it's I'm happy with how things have been so far. Happy to answer any que…

Very interesting idea, I didn't notice kind of need for designers until now. When I code for a game, I also check for other games, it might be too opinionated but they also have some common experience at their navigation and I find it quite helpful.

Yeah I certainly think there's room for something similar for the gaming world, especially as some gaming categories are so competitive.

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

#59

Post by khuknows »

Havoc wrote: post #57
khuknows wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally just switched to a very limited freemium model yesterday (just trialling it for now), but before then it was just pay to access. It's $39 per quarter or $99 per year for access to all the content. Quite a low priced product with decently high churn, so I've been trying to find ways to increase the value.

Higher pricing than i would have guessed. But I guess it solves a professional pain point so worth it

What would your guess have been?

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

#60

Post by lemming »

I develop and sell Cursive (https://cursive-ide.com), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I'd be able to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but I'm constantly amazed by how well Cursive does.

The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent on support, both technical and sales, so when I work less I actually end up getting more frustrated because a higher percentage of the work is not as fun as writing new features. I've also had a bad year of having to work around IntelliJ bugs, but normally I like the actual development work a lot. I have friendly enthusiastic users who constantly make my day. It's a pretty sweet gig, and being able to decide how I spend my time, and which bits of my time I spend working, is priceless.

I got started during a sabbatical from my last job, just building something that I wanted myself. It turns out that lots of other people wanted it too.

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