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Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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

#661

Post by dbancajas »

jamesash wrote: post #249

I run a site that teaches organic chemistry online. Started in 2010. 7 million visits last year. Most content is free, but has some "cheat sheets" and other study guides that are for sale. I have some contractors for various tasks but am the only employee. http://www.masterorganicchemistry.com/blog

Hi, I am really curious about doing this for a separate space? Like computer science? How did you get your initial customers? Just hanging out in forums? I guess I want to know how you determined that there is a market for it? What's the business model? I see you are basically doing freemium model of free-content then selling study guides for 18$ each. Is that it? Are you worried about piracy?

Congrats on the 7Million visits. Also, I see your tech stack as WP? Really really cool.

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

#662

Post by AnnaAx »

sagish wrote: post #379

I recently quit my (great) job to work on my online business which was once my side project. I'm not solo - I have a partner (@dmtintner). > Our business is a newsletter, blog & podcast called Hacking UI - http://HackingUI.com (for designers, developers and creative entrepreneurs like ourselves) > I wrote ALL about how we started, and also how we scaled it to the point where we could leave our jobs http://hackingui.c…

Wow! Thank you for sharing all this information. I love it how people here are so transparent about their process and revenue.

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

#665

Post by holic »

chris1993 wrote: post #526

I launched http://gardenate.com back in 2007 initially just for Australia/New Zealand and mainly for my own use (Perl with Amazon SES for sending out about 70,000 subscriber emails/month). Since then I've grown it to include UK/USA/CAN/ZA, and I wrote some related mobile apps for iOS (Objective-C) and Android. Brings in several hundred $$ per month in adwords and app sales. It used to bring in a lot more app revenue…

This is awesome! Would love it if I could punch in my address/zip and get an idea of what to plant (I don't know what my climate qualifies as).

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

#666

Post by ezekg »

iopuy wrote: post #531
thecatspaw wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah its chrome Version 54.0.2840.98 (64-bit) on osx Im sorry but setting up a cronjob to download maxmind + include jars into project seems easier and faster than incorporating a third party web service. edit: about speed, since you call such a database yourself most likely, you are not gonna be faster than local lookup

This comment reminds me of the response Dropbox received when being introduced to ycombinator. "...you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Reading that thread was great. Thanks for the link.
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