Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

You can probably also use an Android emulator

I started a SaaS business with 2 friends maybe 5 years ago, it generates $150,000/mo in profit. Initially we worked on it almost full time for a year but now we spend together maybe 2 hours a month on it now.

We charge SMBs less than $10/mo and have over 80k paying customers. We kind of hit the equilibrium between churn and new users so it may grow a little more but we have likely peaked.

AMA

Care to share the URL?

I created a SaaS website builder for a small niche market. I've been running it for about 8 years. I gross a bit over $14,000 per month with about $500 in expenses for servers and third-party APIs. I work 1-2 hours per week answering customer support emails. Basically, I automated away my old job as a web designer :)

The smartest decision I made was targeting a small niche market that larger businesses wouldn't bother with. I often get kind emails from customers thanking me for helping their industry. I kept things simple, didn't add features unless I really believed customers needed them, and didn't try to generalize the solution. I think those are the main reasons why the product worked.

By far the hardest part was/is marketing. I'm still bad at it. I've tried may things. Most failed or were too hard to sustain. Some succeeded, like Facebook ads, but those successes were often hard to recreate. At this point it's mostly word of mouth.

Working alone can be psychologically challenging. When I have a problem, there's no one to help because no one else knows how the platform works. With no one to bounce ideas off of, it's easy to get stuck in a rut going round and round the same set of possible solutions. And I really have to monitor myself to ensure that I don't get too isolated. This was an issue in the early years, but now I have a routine that gets me up and out and into the world every day. I would strongly advise anyone considering the solo route to carefully consider the social and mental health aspects of working alone.

I feel very grateful to my former self for doing the hard work that pays my bills today. And I'm tremendously grateful for open source tools and resources like Stack Overflow without which I would never have made it this far alone.

I own Product Pix (https://www.proproductpix.org). It removes the background from product photos, with the intended audience being mostly people who sell stuff online and need to set their background against a white background.

It makes $1300/month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source of income, so I'm not gonna call it "successful" just yet.

How I got started: I do machine learning, and I methodically searched for places where people buy a service transactionally on platforms like Fiverr and that I think can be automated away (or greatly automated with human reviewers in the loop) with state of the art machine learning models. There are hundreds or thousands of such opportunities that individuals can solve on their own.

I'll be more comfortable giving sage advice once I've crossed the $10K/month threshold, but still I'd say a willingness to try a lot of shit out and get digging on stuff you have 0 familiarity with is mandatory. In this project I've had to learn javascript, frontend, photography, google ads campaign management etc.

Another tip I wish someone had told me is, build a pricing page from day one. The temptation to get _some_ signal you're useful to people will drive you to offer stuff for free, but that will end up getting you a lot of unwanted attention from people who will never ever pay.