Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? • Hacker News Board

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

#621

Post by fernyellow » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

xtracto wrote: post #488

partyboat1586 wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are struggling with being overly invested in your day job I suggest you go contracting. Get payed a day rate for a fixed number of hours a day, either work a day or don't no inbetween. Bill for the number of days you did at the end of the month (or week). Sick days and holidays cost you hundreds of dollars per day. You will learn to value your time (even if it costs a small amount of your soul). As an added bo…

The problem with contracting is that you have to learn to sell. Which is also one of the main skills of raising money, something that the GP post struggles with. I myself would love to have a more independent job but I suck terribly at selling myself.

You have to sell yourself as an employee as well. For example I am able to sell my self to clients but can't get a real company to give me the time of day.

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

#622

Post by svacko » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

aacook wrote: post #460

I'm working on NanaGram ( https://nanagram.co ). The tagline: Text or email your photos and we'll send 4x6 prints to your loved ones. It doesn't provide the majority of my income (yet) but by far and away it provides the majority of my life's meaning. I haven't crossed the mental hurdle of sharing all my numbers publicly yet but let's just say it is turning a profit and there are thousands of happy NanaGrammers. I go…

This reminded me a story of this funny guy who was trying to sell famous large-scale prints/canvas of random popular instagram posts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytrZuE1JamY . Anyway, good luck!

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

#623

Post by AdamGibbins » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:07 PM UTC

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #384

adrienjarthon wrote: post #146

I run https://updown.io since 2012, a website monitoring service I created. I'm working about 5-10 hours per week on it. It makes about $6,000 per month and is still growing linearly. I also keep a full-time job alongside for now as an engineering manager. The key for me is to take time, make something useful, delight your clients, and don't try to become uber or airbnb.

Can you explain who you customers are and why they want to know the stats for uptime and would be willing to pay for it?

I am a customer, I run a bunch of personal sites and hobby projects. updown.io is wonderfully cheap, the pay as you go model is perfect for my monitoring needs. I have no need for the stats, just the monitoring which it does well.

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

#624

Post by takinola » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 8:33 PM UTC

unlinked_dll wrote: post #257

throwaway21212 wrote: post #108

I have a one-person lifestyle business. I like it primarily because it gives me the flexibility to live anywhere in the world. I hated my old desk job and the idea of 2 weeks vacation every year. I run a SaaS product that integrates with ERPs. I pretend to my customers that I have a team (so much so that I have multiple email addresses to people that don't exist that actually just forward to me). One of our customers…

>One of our customers thinks they're paying for a team of 6, but it's actually just me. Isn't that fraud?

It is lying but not fraud. Fraud is you pay me to do X but I take your money with no intention of actually doing X. If I take your money and tell you my 6 partner and I are going to do X for you (for values of X that do not depend on the number of people actually involved eg send out invoices to your clients or post to your social media) but do all the work myself then it most certainly is not fraud.

I get the temptation to misrepresent yourself this way, but I would not do it. My experience is customers really don't care how many people are in your company as long as you deliver something valuable and are professional in your execution. That said, I would not, in the slightest, look down on anyone that employed this tactic

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

#625

Post by spurdoman77 » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #368

bekman wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question, my career is very important to me. It gives me an identity. I just can’t sit at home all day. I’m gonna die with boredom.

I don't think I'll ever quite understand this mentality that "not having a job"=="sitting at home all day". Do people not have hobbies of any kind? They really only find meaning in pursuit of money?

Other way to put it: he likes his job, so he hasnt thought too much about doing something else with his time. If he would quit, he probably wouldnt be sitting at home all day but would end up doing something - however he hasnt thought much about it since he is content with the current situation, therefore "sitting at home all day" is just easy way to put it.

I dont think there is nothing wrong in staying at a job if you like it, even if you dont need it financially.

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

#626

Post by Agentlien » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

phito wrote: post #573

Agentlien wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father-in-law also cultivates and sells carnivorous plants as well as water lilies as a hobby. And he's also Belgian.

That's awesome, maybe I know him!

I thought you might. His name is Guido Lurquin.

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

#627

Post by 5kyn3t » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 10:21 PM UTC

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…

Did you implement the payment process on your own, or does it come within a CMS that you are using? what kind of technology are you using to enable subscriptions after payments arrives?

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

#628

Post by blunte » Thu, Oct 24, 2019, 10:39 PM UTC

mrunkel wrote: post #580

blunte wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management. Whether justified or not, many potential customers will choose a seemingly bigger company over a smaller one (especially a one-person company). Now if they were billing based on number of people working for a client, and they were charging for phantom people, that would be fraud. This guy just has an optimized workflow that he pr…

> Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception management. That's some pretty fancy doublespeak right there. No. I'm sorry, but this is flat out lying. You can rationalize it all you like, but if you are lying and inventing people that don't exist, it's fraud. This isn't even lying by omission, but actively working to deceive. Sure, the customer may be getting full value for their mone…

Now, wikipedia may not be right, but I imagine there's been plenty of effort by legally knowledgeable people to define "Fraud" well.

First statement in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud :

"In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right."

And later, a clarification:

"the requisite elements of fraud as a tort generally are the intentional misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the harm of the victim."

By your definitions, most businesses would be committing "fraud". Many, many, many companies have multiple emails, multiple phone numbers, even multiple mailing boxes that may all be handled by one person but which serve to filter and separate incoming contacts and certainly also present a level of professionalism that some customers find comforting.

And what about companies that have the same service but present it differently (to look niche or specific) to different audiences via different websites? Are they being fraudulent by making their potential customers feel uniquely served?

There are so many more examples I could bring up related to marketing, presentation, etc.

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

#629

Post by potentural » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 2:54 AM UTC

thomaspark wrote: post #213

I run Codepip ( https://codepip.com ), coding games for learning web dev. Started out making a single game as a weekend project, it got a good reception, so there was obvious demand for learning to code in this interactive way. Have since branched out to more games covering different HTML, CSS, and JS topics with more coming. It's continued as a one-person operation, for the time being.

Love these games, use them with my web dev students all the time! What topics are you thinking about for future games?

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

#630

Post by MikeWheelerMed » Fri, Oct 25, 2019, 4:06 AM UTC

jbawgs wrote: post #394

MikeWheelerMed wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My one-person business is teaching Salesforce online. A decade ago, I made a living selling Snuggies online via affiliate marketing. My career has had more pivots than Kobe Bryant.

Mike Wheeler! Love your content, you helped me get where I am today as a successful salesforce dev, much love.

That's awesome. Congratulations and thanks for your kind words.