Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

- BCC was profitable enough for Patrick to quit his job as a salaryman and maintain a similar lifestyle. Most folks would be shocked at how little money he had to make to do that. The revenues and profits went up quite consistently for the first few years -- that is, until he had bigger fish to fry.

- BCC was profitable enough for Patrick to do lucrative consulting as well as build a second business (I can't recall the order of those at the moment).

- Patrick acknowledges that he spent very little time on BCC after he got the processes down. While he was "making money while he slept", he did quite a bit of stuff in that free time that he needed/wanted to do (e.g., iirc, health, dating/marriage, etc.).

- BCC had declining revenues due to neglect that Patrick acknowledges himself (e.g., not updating marketing). As with many folks who scale businesses, it was not a valuable use of his time (e.g., working on AR had higher expected value).

- AR scaled to a higher level than BCC, and it supported an even better lifestyle while still giving him free time for family and building other things like Starfighter. Sadly, Patrick found AR to be not a terribly interesting problem space and did not build it out aggressively. This is not a problem unique to Patrick (i.e., more interested in working on interesting problems than optimizing income with boring/repetitive work).

- Starfigher turned out to be a bust. Patrick incurred some debt while taking a bigger shot. This is remarkably common, and the number is not a terribly big one for a bust. My understanding is that the debt was paid off (or could have been paid off) when he sold AR.

- I don't want to speak for Patrick, but I imagine that there are a number of reasons he went to work for Stripe -- interesting problem space was probably one of them. Debt issue may have been another, but that was effectively solved with the sale of AR.

I'm not sure why so many HNers denigrate Patrick's achievements. He certainly hasn't optimized for maximum income, but I think that the amount of lifestyle freedom that his businesses gave him is somehow grossly underrated and underappreciated. I can only think that there are a fair number of HNers who are envious.

Don't get me wrong, there are many things that I think that I or others would do differently if we were in Patrick's shoes, but we aren't, and we don't know everything that is going on in his life.

That said, if folks are going to criticize him, at least get the facts right. Patrick is fairly open about his business experiences, and the annual reviews on his blog at kalmuzeus.com are a good start.

Edit: oops, Patrick replied while I was typing.

If help desk isn't the answer, then maybe another type of platform. Generally, I think you need to ride the coat tails of larger platforms.

(Note: I do realize this is developer focused today, but it didn't necessarily need to be.)

I got started because I got tired of everyone else I worked with not having a clue. So I picked businesses which I could run single-handedly.

Almost all of my work/income comes from Craigslist posting, saving me the need to run any sort of online site, all I need is e-mail and phone. Loads of people need experienced network installers, lighting installers/designers, and in SoCal, loads of people like pretty pretty rocks wrapped up in nice copper, silver, or gold wire.