Ask HN: Single Person startup/company?
Pinboard's numbers* were just realeased, and that made me curious. How many of us currently run a single-person company? By company, I mean something that generates (or is intending to generate) revenues. Side projects count.
Three thing I'm most curious about - growth in user base, revenues & profitability over the years.
If you can share numbers, that would be fantastic.
*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12059965
398 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadAlso, from this: "By company, I mean something that generates (or is intending to generate) revenues"
Nowhere it says "only startups" or "with a product", so I'm just asking if it's a question specifically for one person startups or for one person companies.
I think freelancers fall into a grey area because while there are freelancers that treat their work as a business with the intent of scaling/automation/removing themselves as much as possible from admin tasks, there are also others that treat it very much like a high-paying job, without commitments.
Share if it feels it applies to you.
I don't do anything to promote it so growth has been entirely organic. I get a few free sign ups every day. Although they very infrequently convert to paid, I keep expenses low so it doesn't take many paid users to be profitable. If I had more knowledge of how to market such a thing, I believe it could be a reliable revenue source. But I'm otherwise happy that its relative profitability motivates me to maintain it, as I find it supremely useful for my own personal use.
I love the idea of blogging about growth and profitability. Seems like that could be a good marketing channel, in addition to being very educational.
1. Identify leads (comapnies + the email of the person who would be in charge of server status)
2. Create alerts for their services
3. Your system sends an alert when their service goes down. They instantly recognize the value of your service.
Once you've talked to all your customers you should have a lot more info you can use to market to new customers.
It is a fantasy sports company that helps you manage your team(s) by offering player projections, waiver suggestions, optimal lineups, trade suggestions, etc. We also help with fanduel/draft kings lineups.
Revenue has increased steadily over the past 4 years in the range of 20%-30% year over year.
User base growth is different as I focus more on active users rather than total new users. Active users increase around 15% year over year.
two startups, both profitable
I built, support and run them all myself (though everything is automated)
If you don't count the cost of me, it has always been profitable as the business costs itself are pretty low. I had zero business goals at the beginning and now it is probably the most popular site in its niche (office design).
The thing most people are interested in here is that I moved from using Adsense to selling and hosting 100% of my own advertising a couple years ago. People seem to like how on-topic and relevant the ads are and that they are static graphics.
Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping graphics in and out is the easy part.
The site is on Wordpress so I just use plugins to handle that stuff. I'm basically a publisher so Wordpress is perfect for almost anything I could need to do.
The only time I've seen this is on my school's newspaper, and they are wildly unsuccessful.
Re: traffic spikes, no. There are limited spots which can be purchased so adding more spots whenever I want wouldn't seem right to my current advertisers who bought based on the limit in place.
Edit: I also get contacted by ad networks from time to time saying I could boost my revenue, but I always ask which advertisers they have who are relevant to my audience. It is always none. So at this point, I'm relatively confident that I don't need an ad network to service my particular niche.
OS has changed a lot in its look and features and the audience I target, but it is essentially the same concept.
I think a year after I started the site was when my first major office design of Google's office in Stockholm was sent in by the architect. Before then the site was mostly candid tours from random people and random companies.
Edit: I think I have ~60 projects on the calendar to be published right now.
I have some questions. Who puts content in your site? Who placed content in the site at the beginning, just yourself?
How did you learn how to host your own ads?
Btw, which office design do you like the most?
My favorite office is mine because it is well-suited to my needs :)
A common and, IMO not-unreasonable view is that all content on the web should be viewable on the web with just HTML and CSS (sometimes even without the latter) and thus JS should never be required save for specific tasks such as in-browser computation and the like. That's a bit extreme for me, so I just white-list scripts as needed.
Now consider the ROI. I'm a full time linux user myself, and still I understand when someone says 'sorry but such a small market share is not worth bothering with.'
And btw, when I enabled it (Noscript) the page loaded forever and again did not show anything - but I guess you may get some more visits now that you've linked it here.
The fact that simple HTML delivery can be remarketed as "AMP" is a joke.
Additionally, from a designing perspective it's a good thing to render the first page statically so it does not need to talk to a backend when the visitor is most likely going to close the page after looking at the landing page.
If you really want to make it as an entrepreneur, dogma has to go out the window, and data based decisions have to be front and center, especially when weighted for cost/benefit.
If data shows that search engines don't link to your site and don't index your content, that would be action actionable data.
Ohhh I so hear you. Thanks for voicing reason in a sea of hipsterity.
Also I do agree with the sentiment, that data decisions should lead an entrepreneur. Non the less everyone should be able to at least grasp an idea of any site.
Further, 'Free' should be immediately visible above the fold on the landing page.
btw, launchkit redirects to : communautic. com ... looks like they were hacked.
Quick Tip : The 'Free' part should be highlighted above the fold. The screenshots way down the page should also be above the fold. (storeshots.net get's this correct)
Revenues per user are increasing slightly with each product version, but we haven't released a big game-changer yet.
Solo or 2-founder is fun. You can not go bankrupt
Looking for a co-founder.
So the user checks out online and presents the QR code to the merchant ?
Sorry if that is obvious, I haven't used this flow before, nor do I use an iPhone.
Looking forward to a Show HN or something similar for this one.
How does one feed in the list of attendees? Will it work with Avery-labels and multiple printers?
Been at it for six months now, kinda slow, but I had some new stuff to learn like SVG and Web Audio API. Experimented a lot with AngularJS and React. Went back to Backbone.js and lost some time there. But good experience.
My hopes are high for this product.
Also if you have good experience in JavaScript overall, Backbone.js is fantastic. Combine this with Underscore/Lodash and Babel for ES6 and you have a good build system.
I'm also with you on Backbone there. Good job and keep on going.
Have you done any testing with real users ?
What exactly are your hopes for it ?
My aim is to first provide a complete web based music notation app. And ultimately a library of licks and phrases which users can utilize to aid in their compositions. Basically I've loads of ideas with this product. Build practice routines, i.e practice scales, maintain a practice schedule, etc. So yeah, lots of stuff I can build into this.
Other ways on the top of my head would be writing guest posts on other music related blogs or paying them to send it to their newsletters ....
You could also cheaply? target specific YouTube videos with your ad ...
Further, if you are new to copy writing for ads, cashvertising is a great book.
Last week I've made available my latest web app (http://elements.flatangle.com/) but I also sell traditional astrology reports at http://flatangle.com/products/reports/.
The business costs are pretty low, but since I'm not very good at marketing, my revenue is also still quite low. I'm doing this fulltime, along with freelancing to have some cashflow..
When I first landed on the site, I was confused about what it offered. If you put up the charts app screenshot on the main page instead, that would have helped understand it immediately.
Take this comment with a grain of salt though. I'm not big on astrology, so I could be way off.
Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc ? or am I wrong about the customer profile you are looking to target ?
Nice name, Btw.
Other astrology sites are ugly as hell, and I had to make a break from that style. Look at this site from the largest software maker in the area, straight from the 90s: https://alabe.com/solargold.html
But yes, my site is very confusing because I'm still on the process of trying to find what works. I create all my applications as subdomains of flatangle.com, that is why my main site is still confusing on its offer.
> Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc?
I have an application which says the temperament of a person based on their birth data (think more extrovert or more introvert kind-of analysis). I though on creating a facebook app for this, but as a marketing tool for my other reports, so first I have to build them.
Users of astrology sites are used to these ugly designs. This is the case with arcade gaming sites too ... which is why you see modern arcade sites are ugly.
You aren't designing the site for you. You are designing for the customer and the customer is used to and sometimes subconsciously prefers the ugly design. http://therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/the-reality-of-uglines...
Because there is reasonable doubt of the newer cleaner design, I urge you to at-least A/B test an ugly looking design that your target users would be familiar with.
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Some years ago I took a course and began practicing a very practical subset of the field called Horary. With an horary chart, you can theoretically infer yes/no kind-of answers to questions and I got interesting results to say the least. From that I've leaped into Traditional Natal Astrology (the one that tries to describe you personally), but always with a very practical mindset. I've also got very interesting results from that.
One day I decided to pursue doing serious research in it (I've created a library for it: https://github.com/flatangle/flatlib), and I've written a paper which was published in a publication in the field. Currently, I now have one or two preliminary results for other researches, but since there are no grants available for this and people in this area are usually not taken serious by academics, I've decided that I have to build one or two products to sustain me financially before I can pursue with my researches..
So, why I, a engineer/researches/entrepreneur with a PhD, am heavily bought-in to astrology? There's lots of low-hanging fruits in terms of pure research, the potential to make a difference in people's lives is enormous (the desire for men to understand themselves is as old as man himself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself), and I couldn't bear my own existence trying to be "disruptive" with the next social app.
That above, or maybe I'm a fool! :)
Price point is high enough where it's not likely a quick purchase but too low for an inside sales team. I'm working hard on content marketing to build trust in the market place to drive user growth while keeping my team small (just me so far)
My acquisition process right now is a "call me to sign up" after showing prospects a demo video. Not ideal. I'm working on making the app (filled with a model farm's data) live for users to test for a couple days (gated behind an email opt-in) and then allow them to sign up online. We'll see!
Looking for people to participate in a pilot project now
This is the model I am biased towards. Mind giving out more information? What sectors do you operate? Do you currently have any employees? Any tips for a newbie?
I didn't start off hiring employees. In the beginning I did everything myself (programming, marketing, customer support, accounting, etc.). A year in I hired my first customer support employee and throughout the years employee count fluctuated from just a couple to 13 at most. Many of which were part-time and worked remote. I have also had offices throughout the years but now focus totally on remote. I don't like the burden of an office.
I think my #1 tip for a newbie would be to look for something niche that solves a pain point or allows your customer to make or save money. For example: if your customer can spend $10/mo on your software and make or save $30/mo from that, you will have no problem getting & keeping customers.
#2. Don't focus on becoming a unicorn. You can make some serious money and build a very comfortable life running a $300k to $1m dollar business, and your chances of succeeding at that are much greater.
#3. Look for things outside of tech. There are so many problems to solve in small businesses. Many will say there is no money to make with small businesses. My response to that is re-read #2.
#4. Learn everything you can about advertising. Get really good at it and be willing to spend money on advertising.
#5. Be willing to kill something off quickly if it doesn't make money. Test your market early to make sure people will pay for it. I have made the mistake of not doing this and I have lost a lot of money because of it. Now, I need to be able to see a positive ROI on my spend within 3 to 4 months. So if I spent $100 to acquire a customer, I want to be able to get that back + more within 3 to 4 months. I know this timeline is probably really short for a VC funded company, but I have always been bootstrapped so don't have the luxury of risking a longer time-frame for return.
This is gold. This is an end result I can see a path to, which gives me clear goals to work towards.
#6. It is not easy! Prepare to put in long hours especially in the beginning. Prepare for it to take a mental toll at times. You will second guess yourself, feel insecure, be consumed oftentimes with your business.
You will now have thousands of bosses rather than just 1 or 2. Your customers are now your bosses and many of them will be requesting different things. You will have to learn how to filter through all of that noise and decide which to listen to and what to implement into your software. That is harder than you think.
I think a lot of people have un-realistic expectations on being your own boss. I am not saying the 4 hour work-week hasn't worked for some but it has never been a reality for me. Maybe someday ;)
I don't want to make it sound bad because it is not. It is just not as easy as many make it out to be either.
So no growth (unless you account my 50 sign-ups in the past 2 weeks, much higher than my sign-ups at the beginning of June when I added the form) or revenue yet. I'm hoping to launch in a couple of weeks and then immediately begin testing different monetization ideas (I have 3 and I don't think I should do all of them; would like to focus on one maybe two at the most so I need to do some testing).
The A.I. / assistant space is becoming quickly crowded but I think I have a bit of a unique niche in that it'll handle tasks asynchronously (starting with meeting organization and overall asking a group of people a question and aggregating the results much like a map reduce over people (okay that sounds hyperbolic but I like the symbolism)).
The site design needs to be professional.
> I would concentrate on a specific niche, instead of a general AI
Yeah boiling the ocean would be amazing but at least initially I want to concentrate on a similar use case to that of x.ai where you're essentially using it as you would a personal assistant to schedule and gather information, likely in a corporate environment.
I'd like to keep to a niche of asynchronous task handling but that's way too big to be considered a "niche" but more of a philosophy with how it should work. Hoping I can phone it in initially with scheduling and information gathering then others can use the SDK to do whatever they want with it.
> The site design needs to be professional.
Yeah it could use some more love; trying to balance working on the website and working on the actual product. Though currently I think it's decent enough.
Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that.
Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're producing some form of positive income then great!
- Incorporating the company
- Terms of Service
- Some weird stuff to transfer the existing product "into" the company
That's about it, but at ~400/hr it adds up quick haha.
Edit to add: I guess it really isn't that high at that rate. It made me curious as to what we paid for similar services at the same rate so I had to go check. Ours came in at just about $4000. The TOS/EULA/privacy policy are what ate into ours.
I have never used it, but many friends have, and the owner is my buddy Aaron, who is an all-around great guy.
I wonder if there are existing freely available legal policies that would work for any SaaS startup? Sort of like how I can just slap a standard GPL license on my software, and then come back later and offer commercial licenses?
[0] http://github.com/garnaat/kappa
1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.)
2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly).
3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers.
Good luck!
Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses.
I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough.
Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!
SMS is the only annoying one really since it's freakishly expensive for what you get (~6$ / 1000 SMS or so), most people seem to have SMS credits that you purchase which just seems annoying to me. I'm thinking about adding SMS to the larger plans though without any weird credits.
Thanks!
Just my 2 cents, but with Apex being dev-friendly and all, maybe you can just ask for a twilio API key and just fire the message across?
I've actually been using IFTTT for my PagerDuty replacement since I can't afford it hahaha, unless I'm missing something they don't seem to charge for phone calls etc
They're definitely a bit on the low side, it still seems hard since most programmers despite making crazy sums of money often complain about spending even $10/m on something haha.
I'll think about raising the prices a bit once I have some exclusive features. I thought having a free plan would be good on the marketing front, and maybe it will be, but I definitely need some features to differentiate the plans
The "exclusive features" thing is awesome in theory, but unlikely to matter to most customers. Having a simple, well-designed, straight-forward product can be worth a few extra bucks. Extra features will be gravy in the future (or more stuff for the higher plans).
Free plans are tough, because adding one without a good strategy usually ends up being a distraction and more server/support/etc cost than good for upgrades. Most people will just sign up for a paid plan or a free plan and stay there, unless you have a really great strategy for getting them to upgrade. With that said, I worked at Twilio and we made sure to give a bunch of free credit because we knew getting devs to try it for fun or personal projects would often translate to them convincing their employer to use us for something that made us a lot of money. The difference here is that the true customer was businesses that paid a lot of money.
(If you can't tell, I really enjoy this stuff haha. Hope it's not annoying.)
I'll have to keep an eye on the analytics for free plans. I'm not tracking conversions very well right now, most seem to choose a paid plan right away (if ever).
2) Hey you're TJ Holowaychuk. I know you've since (mostly) moved on from doing a ton of Node contributing, but as someone who uses projects you've started and maintained for a long time, just wanted to say a big thank you for all your work in the open source community.
I'm also going to link your photography site (a) for those who haven't seen it. I know this it's slightly off topic, but everyone should see it.
(a) http://tjholowaychuk.com
Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ?
P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort.
P.P.S. Here's a list of services that do performance / uptime monitoring in various forms. Some might be incorrect / irrelevant, but just to convey an idea of the crowded space :
[1] pingdom , site24x7, statuscake, statuspage.io, status.io , runscope, opsgenie , newrelic , datadog, Librato, Scout , Skylight , Server Density , Stackify, OpsDash , Boundary, Netuitive, Keymetrics, Appsignal, Appdynamics, copperegg , stackdriver, xmatters, uptimerobot, AWS route53 health check , nagios, t1mr.com, Visualping, diff.io, Obvious.io, Stashboard, Cachet, updown.io, Pingometer , stillalive, alertbot, vigil, AWS Cloudwatch, Cloudability, StatusGator, CloudCheckr,
As far as why use my tool? When you have so many to choose from, I'd say choose the one you enjoy. That's my goal really, to create things that I, and hopefully other people enjoy using. I'm trying to surface more information as well, so I think it's definitely a bit on the dev-centric side of things.
I also take it as a challenge when the space is already saturated, if you can enter the market late and still have a "hit" then that's pretty cool, and gives you a better idea of you can (or cannot) do the same with larger products.
I think almost every space is pretty crowded now to be honest. If you can name some that aren't crowded let me know :p. I would say the same of so many tools: oh another PaaS, another analytics tool, another email marketing tool.. blah blah haha. Doing something truly unique, AND by yourself is unlikely these days. I'm new to this stuff, I could be totally wrong, but I think picking a big market is key, and lots of people have sites/apps/apis.
It's a market data app with a custom technical indicator for a specific commodity. I've found an external commercial team specialised in this industry niche and they're going to start sales in the coming weeks (after the remaining regulatory hurdles are cleared). This is a top-notch sales team working for Fortune100 companies, so I'm doubling down on them for 15 to 50% of the revenue (depending on sales)....
We tested the tool internally for some customers and was an incredible success. People is literally waiting in line to get it... so I'm also arranging external accounting + support teams.
I hope (knocks on wood) it'll generate me x5 to x10 times the salary I was offered in management positions at 2 of the biggest spanish startups (tuenti and social point).
In the coming months I hope to automate everything for all the teams via Slack ChatOps so I can have more free time and start new projects before Christmas...
- 10k first two years.
- Growing somewhat steadily to 250k around 2010
- Revenue (this is period when I was working 3 others) grew to 350k) by 2013
- Crashed to 40k in 2014, 2015 after cutting bunch of apps and going back to being just me as only employee.
- With luck foundation is back in place (http://www.taskpaper.com), hope to reach around 100k in 2016.