Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
This question was asked 3 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243) by kweball, and I'm curious what it looks nowadays.
> How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?
> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.
665 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 554 ms ] threadHere is a good list of 1 or 2 people software SaaS/websites along with interviews
Also competition is good, stop being afraid of competition or people "stealing" ideas.
Knowing how well the product sells, you can copy it piece-by-piece by saving a lot of time trying different approaches. Author of original product already did all the hard work guessing what will work the best. You just come, copy and profit from his work.
The copy-cat may have more developers too.
You can try copying any one of those of ideas for money and see for yourself.
I think his point is that the ideas being shared are simple enough not to require that much passion to implement, and the goal being not doing something better, but something economically viable (good enough to generate income).
The obvious counter-question would be: why would people use the worse copy instead of just using the superior original? The answer is that it could be the case for a variety of reasons, one of which is cultural relevance, the original filters geographically, is not internationalized well, people do it differently in different regions, etc. After all, you find companies doing similar things in the same market, it only makes sense there's chance of finding other companies doing the same in different markets (given the conditions to implement the idea are already in place: not that easy pulling an Uber/Lyft in a country where mobile broadband and payment haven't matured).
A lot of the time, finding a good enough niche, a small enough niche, and understanding customer acquisition for that niche is all the "moat" you really need. Remember, your competitors likely don't know your market as well as you do and are probably fighting a harder battle than you initially fought since they have to compete against you.
Probably, revenues started to decline after bragging about them.
Hello, Earth 2 HNer. Back here on Earth 1 I ran a succession of small software businesses. They're anomalously well-documented; BCC more than any other. If you have access to the Earth 1 Internet you can read the first month'a report where I "bragged" about $24.95 and follow the curve from there. Please give my regards to fellow Earth 2 denizens who told me in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 that publishing numbers would bring a horde of competitors to kill me.
- 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.
You could copy a lot of ideas out there right now, but that is the smallest part (in my mind) in making a business out of it. The coding and 'making' of the product, is actually the smallest part.
Getting any consistent revenue, marketing, growing your user base, reducing churn - those are all much harder than actually building or copying something.
There are _many_ ideas on github right now with real working code & permissible licenses you could just grab and try to make a business with. So why aren't there profitable, sustainable businesses popping up all over because of this? (Hint: coding is not the hard part, idea is not the hard part)
* Building a personal brand - everyone loves to read about business adventures, and the more details the better. Financial details are great for drawing audiences. If you feel your brand could be worth more than the project you're discussing, it's worth it to share
* If your market is developers or software managers or small lifestyle businesses, they'll learn about you through your posts. They're not looking to copy you. You'll be more easily discoverable than those who copy you, so it might be worth encouraging imitators in exchange for increased exposure to your market.
* If your finances are solid (the only reason somebody would copy you) it might give customers who are worried about choosing a small, fragile business enough confidence to use your solution.
Also, income statements are public information, yet making both of these public information has not imploded the economy. Rather the opposite it seems. It is for example a huge benefit when you are looking for a job to be able to go to the interview and ask why the company never has made any profit the last five years, just as a simple example. Also very good for anyone in the B2B segment.
Because the revenue stream is mostly passive I still take some consultancy projects, but that's not quite necessary.
https://www.tractorfan.nl/ (mechanisation)
https://www.prikkebord.nl/ (dairy farming)
https://www.truckfan.nl/ (transportation)
https://www.vastgereden.nl/ (bloopers! good for the views)
https://www.boeren.nu (combination of the above)
http://quotum.nu/fosfaatrechten/ (niche market, covers the trade in phosphor quota licenses)
I see you have links to your other sites, but maybe Google rank for a parent site would be more prominent since the one parent address would have a lot of traffic.
Maybe have a parent site that lists/links out your 45 (or just the a group of related sites) and maintain the individual addresses. Then have a link back to your parent.
I guess this is more of a branding idea. Google Parent Alphabet, with Google Mail, Google Drive. Also, honda.com
(You obviously know what you are doing, so take this is just a question, not a suggestion)
Also, while I certainly think of Google when I build things, I think of my visitors quite a bit longer. I always look at Google as the company that tried to replace me with their silly Google+ communities, as well as the company that sends me 40% of my traffic.
This is an absolutely fantastic idea! (Now that _some_ form of internet has made it most places.)
Success is defined uniquely for every individual. For some success is finding a way to "earn enough", others success is defined by "having some noticeable change in the world", and then some it is "making a million dollars".
Success is accomplishing a long term goal you've defined for yourself.
In the early days micro isv's were fairly common, and well known. I don't hear much about them anymore.
There's also a ton of new niches opening up, but you need to be aware of them and they don't happen in a vacuum. You can't just sit in your home office that imagine a new niche, you need to surround yourself with people doing other stuff.
It's not enough to do full-time yet, but there are distinct advantages I have that VC-funded startups don't. For example, I can serve SMBs/smaller companies, but for a VC-backed company these organizations aren't worth their time.
Clearly they have advantages I don't have either (time, headcount, etc), but the presence of a market is a great thing, because I don't have to guess if companies are willing to pay for it.
Small software shops don't meaningfully compete with funded startups, because funded startups have to have some plausible path to growing massive, and the types of things small software shops ship just have to have a plausible path to generating $1k to $25k MRR. "A spreadsheet software better than MS Excel" is a fundable startup; a single program better than a single Excel spreadsheet is, very plausibly, a piece of software that can be sold in a manner successful for a small shop.
I'm personally and professionally involved in the small-software-shop community, and my anecdotal impression is that it's the best time ever. The same sources of leverage which make starting a startup attractive help out small shops, too. You can achieve global distribution on the App Store, Google, Facebook, etc. You can charge businesses tens of thousands of dollars on the SaaS model for software which is plausibly within the reach of a single developer. You can take advantage of infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, etc to get your product to market at a fraction of the complexity and expense of doing a print run of 1,000 CDs. You can take advantage of frameworks which make producing business value far, far easier than it was with more archaic tools. Your customers are disproportionately likely to consume software already (a plus!), including software which you can integrate with or expand, giving you a built-in market with levered upside to your own coding efforts.
I used remember a large community that has now disappeared. There used to be a lot of mISV conferences, I only know a few now. I know people who used to be mISVs, and they aren't anymore.
Even hacker news's favourite patio11 isn't anymore.
Thanks!
[0] https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes
>Try unique sweets even if you are in United Kingdom
I also don't like the golden text-shadow, but that's just personal taste.
Thanks for the great work you do!
Would you say it's harder or easier to sell on the Mac app store than on the iOs/Android app stores?
I don't develop for iOS/Android, but from reading about others' experiences with phone apps, I think it's easier to find a small but steady market on the Mac. People will pay for useful Mac apps. And the Mac user market is more passionate and engaged with 3rd party software than phone users are.
But conversely, you are never going to strike it rich on the Mac with an "Angry Birds" type megasuccess. Mac app aren't sexy like that. (It's good, because the more developers are attracted to the glitz of iOS, the more they leave the Mac market for people like me...)
Numbers-wise, consider that there are are 1.9million apps in the iPhone App Store and 31,000 on the Mac App Store.
Can I ask you what kind of apps are you doing, and what are your prospects about the future of Mac development? I'm asking this mostly because I would really like to get back to desktop application development, but now I'm not really sure that I should target Mac natively, mostly because of all the buzz with Apple's bad decisions, etc..
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11658873
I've no idea about the prospects for the future, but I'm not seeing any significant changes in the market at the moment. However, I am concerned with Apple's current actions (or lack of) regarding the Mac.
Even if your initial product isn't great, if store adoption is slow then your good-enough MVP has a chance to gain traction just by being better than limited alternatives. That gives you time to improve it if viable, and by the time better competition shows up you're well ranked because the early competition was bad.
As a possible example of this, was Instapaper so highly ranked and successful because it was quantifiably better than the alternatives (once they arrived)? How much of an advantage was its status as one of the first available apps?
For a different example that perhaps shows the advantage better, consider the Android "Exchange by TouchDown" which was one of the early way for Android users to connect to Exchange accounts, still available for the low low price of $19.99. Last time I looked a year or two back, it really hadn't kept up with the competition and in fact is often not needed at all on more modern phones, but it's still there with between 1 and 5 million downloads and a cumulative rating of 4+ on the older app. On the newer version that runs Android 3+ the same app has effectively cratered, but they've still probably sold a few million dollars worth of it because of its history.
He is also mentioned on IndieHackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/nomad-list
Local small advert pages for parking spots and garages in the cities of Austria. More or less a online portal for parking, similar to traditional online rental websites.
Not sure if it's worth blogging about yet. Are other developers interested to see how to potentially make software engineer-tier salaries without having to work for another company?
(Note: I also started with nothing. No mentors, no following, no existing profile, no paid advertising, etc.).
Edit: If you're interested, my site is https://nickjanetakis.com.
If you sign up anywhere on the site, you'll get notified when I release content related to starting your own business / building up your brand as a software developer.
I recommend filling out the form at https://nickjanetakis.com/learn-in/2017, because you can include what you want to learn most about which helps me figure out what I should start writing about first.
But still ... yes, definitely interested.
If you asked me, "hey I just downloaded Sublime Text, what are some good packages for a Rails developer?". Why wouldn't I link you to a blog post that lays it all out so you can consume it quickly?
"Let me tell you a secret" is a line I used twice. As a software developer I like testing things and analyzing the results. So when I reply to people, I tend to make note of the wording and phrases I use, and then see how it does.
Nothing wrong with that IMO.
You could choose to ignore the link too, but I'll leave you with this. None of my paid training material has anything to do with "selling the dream". It's all tech courses related to web frameworks and how to deploy them to production. In other words, concrete knowledge that has guaranteed results.
A few people mentioned this in the Udemy comments on your course, and you retorted with snarky replies.
Not a fan of your marketing or your attitude towards customers who were offering legitimate criticism.
Sorry you didn't like the course. I don't recall any snarky replies, but you're right. There were a few people who would have preferred a "code everything from a blank page" approach.
The problem is, how do you code up a 4,000+ line Python application with dozens of files and thousands of lines of HTML/CSS/JS together 1 character at a time?
It would take 100+ hours of video and you would want to punch me in the face after hearing me say "ok now type D I V close bracket" for the 400th time in a row.
A vast majority of people (as seen by the reviews) really enjoy the way it's presented and like seeing it get built up in 12+ stages. It's impossible to make everyone on the internet happy. The best I can do is listen to the feedback of everyone and continue tinkering with future content.
The course does mention you should have a basic understanding of HTML and Python before starting it. It's meant to teach you about Flask.
There's about 60 HTML templates in total. Rather than put the burden of copy/pasting each one onto the student, I decided to break the entire project up into 20 stages (separated by folders and git commits).
You get to see the application at 20 stages of development (to see how it gets built up). It starts with a single app.py file and finishes with the end result.
Basically I go over each line of code, and explain why it's written and what it does.
This style of teaching was a choice I made based on the direct feedback of hundreds of students in previous courses.
Most of them like the fast paced style where I talk over the code. There's also many hours of code challenges built into the course to get your hands dirty. The refund rate is currently less than 1%.
How did you build your following? How did you monetize? Are you an ad publisher or are you selling something? What kind of content did you create?
I'll tell you a secret, I haven't even e-mailed my list once. Why? Because I'm still figuring this stuff out as I go. I don't have years of content to create marketing auto-responders and dozens of products to push to people.
Just yesterday I was thinking about the problem of "you have all these people on your list, if you don't message them, they are going to forget about you", so I thought maybe I should be spinning off newsletters based on the weekly blog posts I create -- and at worst send maybe something out every 2 weeks.
That's why when I stumbled on this ASK HN thread I thought I'd ask if people wanted to hear this stuff, and then figured by publicly posting something like this, I'll have accountability to actually start messaging my list.
P.S,
I'm just a dude who cannot accept wasting his life away to make another company rich so I can "retire" when I'm nearly dead. I want to live life right now on my own terms and have the self reliance and freedom to work anywhere in the world, and never have to worry about money again.
My income comes from a few streams. Course sales (related to tech), affiliate sales, book sales and consulting. I don't have ads on my blog and never will.
All of the content can be found on my site at https://nickjanetakis.com/. I recommend reading the home page because it better describes what I just wrote here.
I agree 100% with your statement about living live on one's own terms.
Usually I write out a bunch of headlines, and then eliminate the ones that are horrible.
My goal is to condense the essence of the entire post in as little characters as possible. I often ignore any type of SEO tactics, and optimize it for humans.
There's definitely way more I could write on this (there's a whole process, tons of things to research, etc.), I'll add it to a Google Keep note for a future post (if you read some posts you know what I mean!).
For most of 2016 I didn't really try to build an audience. I just posted on topics that interested me while not paying attention to anything.
Then I stopped blogging for a few months and really started to think about what I want to do (this happened about mid-year).
During that time I re-did my site and completely changed my mindset from "I want to make money" to "I want to create the best content I can on a specific subject".
I don't really use twitter or other platforms. I just post content on my site, and try to reply to comments on relevant sites (like HN and other tech sites) when it makes sense.
PS. Asking for signups on HN is bad mojo. Inbound content marketing works best here, but will take multiple front page submissions for any considerable amount of subscribers. :)
We already have enough of "I get rich by telling others how to get rich, when in fact I'm totally poor and never did anything in my life and have no experience at all."
While I do have a few paid courses, they are all based around learning specific programming / developer related technologies, not marketing or pyramid scheme tactics.
Define successful: I 100% live off it ($50k/yr before taxes). Biggest new add-ons are often agencies who can afford to sponsor their development because it's a customer funnel for them; I'm one of the rare new who built a business from scratch and lives off it.
The Atlassian APIs could be difficult[1], but the reward is great: Being a vendor introduces you to the biggest corporates without having to be referenced or pass the Purchase Order process, so you can very easily sell to companies similar to Samsung, HSBC, Defense actors or Ubisoft.
My advice: Build a real product with your add-on, not just a tweak to Atlassian's products. Tweaks = SQL reader, theme, formatting of mathematical expressions, ... Products = Balsamiq, Gliffy, time management solutions, architecture/CAD solutions, requirement management, accounting, aeronautical check-lists, etc. Be a bit ambitious and you'll be the reason why people switch to Atlassian and money will pour onto you.
[1] Difficult = They're scattered between Server and Cloud apis, and architecture is widely different bw JIRA and BitBucket, but it's still possible to start quite fast with https://connect.atlassian.com .
We recently revamped our developer site (developer.atlassian.com) to help folks find the right resources and start building with ease and scale. We're always open to feedback on how we can improve the development process and ways to help developers like you grow their business. Give us a shout on our new service desk and let us know what we can do better (https://ecosystem.atlassian.net/servicedesk/customer/portal/...)
Keep up the great work and a big thanks from our team!
Ahem. Are they one-man companies? Are they newcomers? Or is it a very misleading number in that context?
Previously I have 2 other startups, one was media monitoring and one was forex.
The media monitoring is B2B only. The forex trading is automated and run from my home research cluster.
Both are generating enough revenue to live off (media monitoring 120k forex, 60-80k)
I guess they fit the definition of solo founder and online, but they have no public facing websites (except SignalBox)
EDIT: I also run a slack group for Solo Founders, If you would like an invite, please email me
Velkur (at) gmail
Don't rely on serendipity, we can do better than that. Use your programming skills.
Pull the meetup list, get all of their twitter profiles, search everyones last 1000 tweets for topics you are interested in. Pull all of their code on github. Push it through the profiler and find the talent.
Mirror github if you have to. Pull the whole darn thing, it's only a couple of hundred gigs (if you dont pull the code) Profile everyone based on their stars, contributions, watchers and pull requests.
How many other meetups do they go to? What's their history like on other forums?
Put the pics of these people on your phone, and then go and find them at the meetup. Pull their customer lists / testimonials and any other publicly available data.
Look at their company DNS records. Pull their company filings if they're available. Know their revenue, know their customers. Who's making the decisions at this company? Who is signing the cheques?
Scientia potentia est
Can you elaborate on the forex gig? I've always wanted to do it. Are you doing only TA? it seems you scrap media sites for sentiment analysis too?
Where do you get your forex data tick feed? do you pay for that? What timeline you trade? Hourly/4H? Which broker you use? Metatrader to make your trades or using FIX protocol? EUR/USD only for low spreads?
not asking for your algorithm, just wanna get a background what someone successful is doing.
Not to be confused with: http://gabeweinberg.com/
I built the entire thing myself, handled partnerships, support, sales, etc. All while still running three of these stores.
While I did all of the development, I do have a full-time executive assistant who helps me with a ton of things (email, scheduling, errands, etc).
Now I am building a team because there is no way I would be able to maximize this opportunity by myself.
https://motionarray.com
Transcript:
Last March, in my little darky flat somewhere in the middle of France, I had this idea to launch a little chat bot in a platform called Discord. I was coding all day long to deliver a functional and satisfying version of what I had in mind. These were the most profitable 3 days of my life…
Discord is a slack-like application. The main difference between slack and discord is that discord is made for gamers. It’s free, easy to use and has gamers oriented features like a great and reliable voice communication feature. The platform was crowed with a lot of chat bots. But those were very rigide, and kind of complex to setup. They were generally made from a programmer perspective. The user experience was meh…
My goal was to make the ultimate bot. I wanted to bundle all the popular functionalities that people use. Instead of using 10 bots in your team, you’ll just have to use mine. But for that to work, I also had to make the bot fully customizable. So that you could enable/disable any feature easily.
And the coding started… After 3 days of hard work, It was time for me to find users. The first thing I did to gain some traction was to go to some big Teams and convince the owners to use the bot. I spammed a dozen of big team owners. The kick worked, the engine started and never stopped since.
I've been thinking of launching a bot service too, but focused on order deliveries through FB messenger.
Do you still think the chat bots market is a good niche to explore?
Every year that passes makes it easier to get something like this off the ground, as the infrastructure becomes cheaper and more ubiquitous, and the knowledge you need for the business side get better packaged into step-by-step guides.
It's definitely work, but once you're up and running, it's a lot nicer than having a day job.
Neither one grew particularly fast (aided by my only charging $2/month for S3stat when it launched). It was probably 4 years before it was enough to scrape by on, then 2 more after that before it looked like I'd be able to live off it for real while raising kids.
The big upside is in free time. I can ramp the two established products down to close to zero hours/week for months on end to focus on building the next thing (and playing with the aforementioned kids). Every time I tried that with a normal Software Engineering day job, they stopped sending me money. SaaS just keeps ticking away in the background, and is happy to pay me whether I'm in the office or not.
Looks great, though!
I recently launched http://www.smsinbox.net for Twilio devs, and am slowly gaining some users, but finding it very difficult to reach the target audience, and/or get visitor/user feedback.
Take a look at s3stat.com above for a good example, it's much more polished without much more content.
[1] I send a few thousand SMS a month via Twilio for thesimplepostcard.com
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.)
https://github.com/Automattic/legalmattic
Of course I'm not a lawyer and it's probably a good idea to get a lawyer to review yours, blah blah blah.
I've read these posts for a while on HN, it's nice to be able to reply to one finally :)
Luckily when I started out the plugins-for-trello space was very uncluttered. It was mostly abandonware and github projects created by developers over a weekend. So since Corrello is exclusively aimed at Trello teams and was one of the only tools being built fulltime just for that I have been able to piggy back on their success without a lot of serious competition. There is some competition and I expect more will come as others realise the Trello platform is a viable place to build a business but I think that can only be a good thing really.