Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?
This question was asked 2 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13326535) by mdoliwa, 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.
684 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadThe creativity and freedom might still make it worthwhile, but the chances of being a breakout star are effectively zero.
If you're spending alot of time on your own, managing & building up your start up without alot of actual human engagement you need strong will power...& good ambient music on in the background ;-]
On the other hand driven people comment the same way on people "just" taking a job working 9 to 5 and appreciating being able to not work hard (well, procrastinate, not motivating one-self, etc.).
I guess this is an area where empathy is really hard.
https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-behi...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875
Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783 752 points - 6 months ago
It started out because a designer who sells fonts wanted to hire me to build a font previewer for their website so that customers could demo the fonts without being able to steal them. I quoted them the price and they said it was out of their price range. I said I would build it for free if they subscribed for a low monthly payment. They were ecstatic at the deal and invited their friends to sign up. Turned out it was an unsolved niche in the font design community. I posted it to a few websites where people were asking for a tool that does this. The rest is history.
In the "How FontPeek Helps" section there's "Show your fonts" sections, but it shows no fonts. I'd love to see some demo fonts/pages with embedded fonts at least, perhaps a list of links to the designer's websites showing the widget (I assume it's a widget, there's no info on it) if they consent.
Typically though people just email me or message me via Crisp asking for live examples.
In fact, it's quite easy to download some non-free font (let's say Helvetica) and to use it on your web page. Then
- either it's a personal page and very few people will see it (and even less notice that it's the "real" Helvetica and not a free simili-Helvetica)... so there's almost no risk to be sued for copyright/stealing. You wouldn't have bought it anyway.
- or it's a professional web page (or design or...) - high traffic - then you can be sure to be sued if you use it but didn't buy it.
Same for business card: nobody will really notice if you use a stolen font on your own business card but you can be sure that everybody will sue you if your business is to print business cards and you propose fonts without licences
I suspect that you'll pretty quickly triple your revenue.
I've considered doing this though, and the fact that you're validating it now makes me think it may be worth testing it out for a little while just to see what happens.
The origin story is somewhat organic.
- Started as a logo design company
- then kept getting requests to help with UI/UX Design so I did
- then realised the most fun projects to work on were B2B SaaS companies
- today we're still growing and can happily count Fortune 500 companies, an Elon Musk company alongside awesome startups to our client list.
//Advice: Start with something small. Anything. Don't worry too much about how to grow. Then.. Just keep your eyes & ears open. Your customers will point you in the right direction towards bigger pinpoints & thus better growth opportunities. You don't always need a ton of traffic. Just start with something small and go from there.
The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a junior developer in London, so it's not a huge amount of money, but it's enough.
It's a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some sort of micro saas, but it's I'm happy with how things have been so far. Happy to answer any questions you have.
It's $39 per quarter or $99 per year for access to all the content.
Quite a low priced product with decently high churn, so I've been trying to find ways to increase the value.
Check out how Matt Ragland from ConvertKit uses it here: https://www.bonjoro.com/uses
Disclaimer: I'm the CTO
(Then again I did buy a Klein bottle a few years back and it came with basically a photo commentary of it being shipped and that was absolutely awesome, so...)
- Discrete event (new signup, product purchased, new blog subscriber etc)
- Task is created in Bonjoro
- Bonjoro user records a video and it is sent to the person who caused the event
But as I said if professionals are willing to happy then no point in being shy on pricing
How do you monetize the project? I can't see any paid plans in the public website
Until yesterday there was no freemium access, it was just paid up-front to access all the content. $39 per quarter or $99 per year.
Your use case is kinda where the idea came from, most product people do something similar. The hard part is adding enough relevant content on Page Flows for enough people!
Do you know who are your top competitors?
I've recently started experimenting with ways to grow the traffic above the base level, but it's slow going tbh.
Here's a few things I do that made it "successful":
- Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing.
- Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere
- Having a good website that works, is well organized and easy to use.
- Friendly customer support, I like to talk to my customers as I would talk to a friend (to a certain extend).
- Fast shipping after receiving an order, or at least let the customer know when their order will be shipped.
- A good logo made by a designer, this has been super helpful for brand-awareness
- Good packaging that minimize most damage the plants, with printed plastic labels for each plants (with my logo on them)
- Active presence on social media, with good quality picture posts (with my logo on them)
- Always give more to the customer than what they expected to get. Even a small surprise when they open their package will make them feel good about their purchase.
- SEO optimisation so that people can find you on google. I struggle with this because google keeps autocorrecting my name.
Most of these points feel obvious to me, but I would say 95% of the other sellers fail at multiple of them. Mainly the customer support point, a lot of them feel like I'm talking to a robot.
I would say the part that I struggle the most with is staying on schedule and not forgetting about people who order via email/private message. Thankfully cold weather in the winter allow me to take a 6 months break each year. During that time I can relax and dive into other projets.
https://phito.be/frequently-asked-questions/
and a few blog articles here
https://phito.be/articles/
I would like to write more blog articles, but I am a very slow writer and I don't have a lot of time :/
EDIT: This also explains why you say "6 month winter" :D
I'm also trying to start up a small online plant shop but am finding it hard to a) get the growing space, and b) get the interesting stock - would love to hear about how you dealt with these issues when first starting up! :)
I ship in the EU and any other countries that have trade deals that allows plant transfer without requiring phytosanitary certificates (Switzerland for example)! Sadly after Brexit I don't know if I will still be able to ship over the UK :(
Finding the growing space is hard, especially if your plants are big. Thankfully I focus mostly on the Drosera genus, which are mostly small plants. I can fit multiple plants in a 7x7cm pot. I grow the winter-hardy ones in a greenhouse, the tropical ones are grown inside under LEDs.
Finding rare species is not too hard if you have good contacts in the community (I've been part of it for more than 10 years, so it was relatively easy for me). The hard part is propagation. Thankfully for me, a lot of Drosera are really easy to propagate by leaves cuttings but for the species that are not easily propagated, I work with an university that propagate them in tissue culture for me.
Good luck with your project, it requires a lot of work but if you're passionate about it, it won't feel like work!
I've had good luck growing a few Drosera from seed, never even thought about leaf cuttings, that's super interesting!
Hopefully depending on Brexit I'll be able to order from you next Spring! Do you have a mailing list or something?
Looking forward to send you plants, make sure to say you're from hacker news in the notes of your order ;) I don't have a mailing list yet, although that is a good idea and I will look into it for the next season!
- There's basically no competition, except maybe other hobbyists that trade or sell their excess plants (which is basically what I do, but with a website).
- UK residents represent less than 10% of my customers.
- I don't have a lot of stock. For some species I sometimes only have 1 of them available over the span of a few months.
- It would just cost too much to keep them alive in another country before selling them. Some of the plants I sell require very specific conditions and a lot of knowledge about them to keep them alive.
- It's totally out of the scale of what I'm doing, remember that this is a thread about one-person business. I do not want too many customers otherwise I will just run out of personal time (I'm doing all the packaging after work hours)
It's just really not worth it or even possible for me. If some UK resident really wants to buy a lot of plants from me, then I can request a phytosanitary certificate from the government (costs around 100€, and includes an inspection).
There's a lot of small businesses out there that just don't have enough market demand to be turned into something as large as what you're suggesting.
What would moving to a .com domain do? Help with SEO?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbQwEAvSMHM
My main goal is to cover my hobby's expenses, which are mostly the electricity bill and acquiring new species.
Actually that was what I was curious about reading the title of the question. If you are successful as a one person business, it makes sense to scale it past a one person business.
That's not necessarily true. A lot of businesses just don't have enough demand out there to justify scaling up. For instance, suppose you make a business selling a custom LED set for a particular mechanical keyboard (or come up with some other obscure niche product); just how many people out there do you think are willing to pay for that? Larger businesses need lots of customers to pay for all the overhead, which for a 1-person side gig is essentially free (they're working in their spare time): you need employees you have to pay by the hour, regardless of demand, year-round; you need a building/commercial space; etc. You can get away with a lot of things as a 1-person side gig that you can't when you take on employees, and those costs are significant.
For plants that are slower to grow or impossible to propagate via cuttings, I work with an university near me that propagate them in tissue culture.
He's very generous with sharing his financials on his blog: https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/
(I use the Android apps, and recently flipped from PinDroid to Pinkt, and both are usable but not enjoyable. The Pinkt UX looks great, it's just slow on all my bookmarks. If you don't like Android, maybe do a mini-partnership with the Pinkt guy to polish it into a great experience.)
Responsive 100% and better in every other aspect ;)
It’s a tool for app store seo, would be the first one on the market of it’s kind, if I launched it just 2 weeks earlier :,)
Upon launch I announced it on hacker news, and wrote to the TC journalist that covered my competition. Got to front pages on both sites, and it was rather smooth sailing after that - I appeared on a few app store conferences and podcasts, did a bit of marketing, and all in all earned around $250k over the span of the few years (which is a very decent salary in Poland).
Finance-wise, it was an extremely important thing in my life, since it was my first own project that allowed me to earn a decent living, after over 10 years of trying various things. Got me from “omg I can’t afford rent” to “omg, I can stop worrying about money for a while”.
I also made a few important decisions over it’s lifespan:
- not taking vc-funding, and keeping it a one-person operation. the downside was that I had much fewer resources, the upside was that I didn’t need to build a unicorn, and could focus on a small niche (indie app developers)
- no free version, with good tutorials, good demo, and a good refund policy instead. twofold rationale: it takes some time to understand the tool, and I doubt free users would be so willing to take that time; getting free->paid funnel right can be challenging, and pushes the site into serving bigger clients really, not indie devs
- decided to not go for corporate clients, as those require sales teams and much more support. perhaps I lost a few clients (a few significant publicly traded companies used it for at least a while) and a lot of money, but this was more in line with my personality
- decided to move on to other things, again - more in line with my personality, where I like exploring new subjects, and don’t like staying in one place for too long :)
- decided to not sell it - I prefer the site to stay as it is, than to earn a few bucks by passing all customer data to someone else, who would most likely scrap the site altogether and forward the domain to them
- keep user privacy as the core principle - there’s a ton of cool stuff that could be built based on the data within that site, but it’s against the principles
All in all, it was an amazing ride, that really got me off the ground as an antrepereneur, and I really hope provided a lot of value to the few thousands of paid users that passed through it over the years
(written on mobile, sorry for formatting)
I also find this aspect of selling a company worrisome, but then doesn't everyone dream of an exit?
It's an equal mix of rewarding and frustrating. It's a lot more work than you'd expect and now I've a deep understanding of why support tools are as obtuse as they are.
It's generating enough income that's livable and freeing me up to focus on other related projects. I'm going to be launching a SAAS version of the plugin later this year.
Just a small handful of my favorites:
- Simple Analytics by Adriaan van Rossum, making $2900/month (http://bit.ly/35QXFhY). Competing with Google Analytics and tons of well-funded competitors isn't easy, but Adriaan's focus on privacy and simplicity has a strong appeal.
- Maker Mind by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, making $800/month (http://bit.ly/31FYK97). She's a neuroscience student and ex-Googler who writes fascinating articles about the intersection of neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and productivity.
- Makerpad by Ben Tossell, making $24000/month (http://bit.ly/2JeIEg9). Makerpad helps non-developers build complex apps where you'd typically expect developers to be required. My favorite thing about Ben is that he basically refuses to run a business that's not 100% enjoyable. He's shut down a working company or two just because the business model wasn't shaping up to be something he was excited about in the long run.
- Key Values by Lynne Tye, making $25000/month (https://www.keyvalues.com). Lynne helps developers find roles at companies that share their values, and she shares a ton of helpful tips for job-seekers in her newsletter. Her business model involves charging companies to put together the super in-depth profiles on her site.
- Carrd by @ajlkn, making over $30000/month (https://carrd.co). Card is a one-page site builder. AJ's an amazing developer/designer combo with over a decade of experience building one-page website templates and builders. I can't name any web apps I've found easier to use and more polished than Carrd, so it's not surprising AJ has many thousands of paying customers.
- Starter Story by Pat Walls, making $7100/month (http://bit.ly/35XdALQ). Pat interviews e-commerce founders about how they started their businesses. He was inspired by Indie Hackers itself and monetizes via sponsorships. Some people think you can't get an advertising model to work as a solo founder, but it's actually quite great if you're not afraid to do a little sales. Not only do you get to know your advertisers personally, but you can also hand-code your ads into your site instead of installing third-party JS that will track your visitors all over the web.
It's late so I'll stop here, but there are many thousands more.
The Internet obviously makes it easy to connect to millions of people across the world, which enables all sorts of niche businesses to exist that previously wouldn't have worked, because you couldn't have found critical mass in just your local environment. Plus it's cheaper and easier than ever to build and host your own apps.
I think this is the future, and 10 years from now we'll see a staggering number of people (mostly devs) running their own one-person businesses instead of working jobs.
Indie Hackers is an amazing community, I'm always inspired when I go to the site and see companies at different stages helping each other out.
Your products page is great, I often check it out to see how revenues are going watch products grow. I find the "stripe-verified" feature to invaluable, as most self-reported numbers seem to be a little inflated.
Hopefully I can launch my own product one day, I've done a lot of open-source projects and toys, but making something people want and want to pay for is my ultimate goal.
Also, great work with the podcast, I really like your interview style, you always ask interesting questions and truly listen to your guests.
[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-automating-tasks-...
[2] https://park.io
When I started it was because freelancing was terrible for me and also I wanted to have flexibility with time and location. But now I'm getting tired of working on my own, hoping to have a team soon. Currently there are too many ideas I am unable to implement due to time constraint and also sales/marketing isn't my expertise (I'm a tech/product dude).
Since starting work on the course in May, I’ve been through 3 iterations and made about $40k.
The ‘final’ version of the course will open for sale in early November, and I expect it to continue to be my main source of income for the next year or so at least.
If you’re thinking about running a course (I was very sceptical at first) or want to hear more, you can check out my recent interview on the IndieHackers.com podcast.
It covers all my basic living costs. But I kind of got bored (again) of being happily unemployed (for the second time), and started a small consulting business on the side. A four-day workweek in addition to the Radio Silence stuff keeps me quite content.
Please don't ask what my business is. I rather share true numbers, but don't link to my product. I see no upside in being super transparent about the financials in a non-anonymous way (although I enjoy transparency from others ;)).
What I think makes my product successful (and I keep this short, because luck plays an important role. Most startup stories suffer from survivorship and hindsight bias):
- It serves a niche and does so very well, better than all others. I have clearly defined my niche, although it took me years to exactly pinpoint it. There's a tendency to want to grab a "bigger audience". Since I make more money than I ever imagined, there is no need to grow bigger or reach a wider audience. This would also make the product less focused on the specific niche.
- Start working on something, release a prototype after 2-6 weeks. Don't invest months or years in something without users.
- For me, marketing = SEO. I never really got into social media. But I have to admit that nowadays, my SEO rankings dropped a bit and people talk about my product in Facebook groups.
- If there are two books I'd recommend: "Rework" by Basecamp. It helps you to focus on a minimal set of features and think about what's truly important. Couple this with "This is Marketing" from Seth Godin, where he explains how traditional marketing is dead and how it's important to find a niche. Don't read more books, interviews or whatever. Get into a "starter mindset" by reading and then do.
- The subscription model helps you to stay afloat. People will pay for a product they use every day (and thus, derive value from every day). If your product is not used every day, but only once per month or so, expect way lower revenue.
Is your business focused on the German market or the US market? Or is it multi-lingual / international? What percentage of time is spent answering support requests?
> The subscription model helps you to stay afloat. People will pay for a product they use every day (and thus, derive value from every day).
Have you experimented with different pricing models? Is Duolingo / Tinder model (1 month / 6 months / 12 months) the best choice for B2C subscriptions without Spotify / Netflix-like licensing costs?
> "Have you experimented with different pricing models?"
No, I kept the pricing model very simple. The price increased a bit throughout the years. I charge what feels fair.
There's a trial period and if you like the product, you pay for it. If not, then not. There is no freemium, I never give discounts, I don't sell ads or data or make money in any other way. It's a simple thing :)
Some people claim that it's easy to test prices. But this is not true.
If you serve a niche, people talk. If one person pays more than another for the same product (and signed up for the same version at a similar time), you'd lose trust.
The nice thing about making more money than you need is that it frees you from thinking about "making even more money". Yeah, I like making more money, because all of this could be over one day, but there is no need to stress myself about it.
Another thing probably is, that a subscription price of a niche product can be considerably higher than of a mainstream one?
For a single person, it must be much easier to support 1,000 users paying something like $25 / month than 5,000 users paying $5 / month.
I have over 10,000 paying customers. I receive maybe 5 emails per day. There was never a time when I received much more than 10. I have three explanations for this:
1. I have a really good FAQ that answers almost any question. On my contact form, I urge people to read the damn FAQ. If they still send me an email, I usually reply with a specific link to the FAQ item. If a question comes up a couple times, I add it to the FAQ.
2. Since my product isn't free (and not cheap compared to a 0.99 one-time-fee app), there's a lot of self-selection. I don't have to support freeloaders with their stupid questions. If people pay for something, it seems to help to reduce the support burden.
3. I wonder if this is a mentality thing and Germans are more likely to help themselves through reading FAQ than others who rather send an email like "yo, shit is broken, fix asap". Most emails I receive read a lot more like a letter and not this one-line blurp bullshit some have to deal with.
In essence: Build a product with a somewhat sophisticated target group. They are more likely to pay, more likely to help themselves by reading FAQ and more likely to send no stupid emails.
As a B2C SaaS product it actually seems to be relatively cheap: 10,000+ paying users and 370,000€ in yearly revenue points to around 2.99€ / month and 29.99€ / year subscription fees – similar to Instapaper Premium[1].
[1] https://www.instapaper.com/premium
Also the fact that you don't sell at discount likely filters out the bulk of self-entitled users that tend to stress support with trivia.
And your summary is 100% spot on - catering to a more savvy audience and aggressively culling other users is a good way to keep support manageable (and even pleasant!)
Is this a web application or a smartphone one?
What did you have to learn, tech-wise, to be able to build it?
How long did it take you, from your first line of code until you released the first prototype?
How did you get your first user(s)?
How did you get the business idea (without details)? Was it a personal pain point, or did you work in that field before?
And congrats BTW, it looks like you did an amazing job.
- Both web and smartphone apps can create this kind of revenue. - The tech stack is 99% irrelevant unless the end customer depends on it, which in 99% of the times, isn't the case.
It used to be a web app, but nowadays, most people use it as an app.
> "What did you have to learn, tech-wise, to be able to build it?"
At first, PHP. Then JS. I've been coding for 15-20 years now. The app is made in Ionic + Cordova. As I wrote often here on HN: End users give zero fucks about the technology. Most people (unless they're designers or coders) don't even see the difference between a native app and a hybrid one.
As a single developer, Ionic is great, because you have truly one code base for all platforms. If the apps were native, I probably couldn't do all of this by myself.
> "How long did it take you, from your first line of code until you released the first prototype?"
2-3 weeks, and then I iterated a lot with actual feedback. But: I didn't introduce a pricing model for the first couple years. It was a hobby back then. It also was a different internet. So take this with a grain of salt. I don't have experience on how to start a niche product and get paying customers from day 1.
> How did you get your first user(s)?
Through forums.
> How did you get the business idea (without details)?
A friend of mine said: "It'd be great if there was a software that could do X". It wasn't directly my own pain point, but of a friend. I didn't work in that field before, but read a lot over the years to acquire the domain knowledge.
Thanks :)
Textarea elements are also sometimes behaving weird when selecting text, just like your regular iOS Safari.
And of course, all input elements and animations don’t respect your OS accessibility settings. Neglectable in some apps, not in others.
I probably wouldn’t write a diary app or an app for writers in Ionic, but for most other things it’s good enough.
Keep in mind that all development comes with trade offs. Native iOS development gives you maximal control over the platform, but your code isn’t really re-usable. As a solo developer, having a single code base is gold and customers don’t really care.
If you were to start over, would you still choose Ionic and Cordova, or go with something else like Xamarin or React Native?
I'm considering switching to these, because it gives me a bit more control over all of the code (and I'm not really a fan of Angular). But I'd use JS for apps again whenever I can. It's just so much more convenient and especially since I can release a PWA or web version without much effort.
You make a ton of concessions (imo) by locking yourself in a webview.
I'm curious -- how much time do you spend on marketing? How do your customers find your app?
But for someone starting out: Write articles that teach people something (in a niche). Articles get read for many years. Social media posts go down after minutes.
I'm in the situation where my product overlaps significantly with others but brings (IMO) some missing features and a better overall experience. I would love to launch quickly but feel I need some feature parity with competitors first.
Say they have 10 developers and 200 features. You can go from 0 to 200 features in 2? years. How many new features have they added in 2 years, 100? So the cycle repeats.
Do a subset of the competitor but do it really well.
Which kind of business form (UG, Gmbh, einzelgewerbe) do you use? Have you used something like a „Kleingewerbe“ when you were starting out?
And how do you handle all the legal stuff? And how much time do you spend on this?
is it a mobile app or a desktop or SAAS? just curious.
Good for you though, living the dream.
Currently, I'm selling a consumer productivity app (Android only) in Google Play store.
The characteristics of this category are large consumer demand, and low barrier to entry. Because of this, there are a lot of players in this category.
My pricing model is pretty simple - $20 one time payment to unlock everything. I know I can earn significant more by having subscription / in-app advertising. Since I can make a living with current income, I will leave it that way. I want to sacrifice short-term good profit, in exchange for long term growth.
Initially, I get the first 10k users, by promoting the app, via forum self-post. Later, we notice this is not something scale-able. As, you can only get that much of users from forums.
Right now, I have around 500k users. That mostly attributes to Google Play store organic/search traffic. Because of this, I spend a lot of time in optimizing Google Play store page listing - provide proper localization on product description, performing A/B testing on different product screenshots.
However, that is pretty much risky. What if Google stops sending traffic to my Google Play store page?
I spend some advertising dollar each day in Google Ads, with the hope able to keep our app ranking afloat.
Do you have any suggestion, how I can have a better marketing strategy?
From your post, I will start by purchasing
- "Rework" by Basecamp
- "This is Marketing" from Seth Godin
I also like your suggestion "Write articles that teach people something". Do you have suggestion which publishing platform I should use? Since I don't have a good writing skill, should I hire a freelancer to help me do so? How can I get an idea what to write about?
Thank you, and BIG congratulation on your achievement.
It's hard to say anything about your pricing model. If it works for you, there's probably no need to optimize. However, 500K users with a $20 IAP – I wonder if you could introduce subscriptions for something like $1-2 per month. Maybe make it cheaper per year, but more expensive on the long run. But this depends heavily on how often your app is used. If it's used daily, it provides daily value and this makes people appreciate it more. If you use it only occasionally, a one-time fee is alright. Just from my gut feeling: a single unlock-all $20 fee is quite high for an IAP and I wonder if there's a way to price it better.
> "What if Google stops sending traffic to my Google Play store page?"
Yeah, that is a very good question for all indie developers. My app is somewhat detached from Google's hand, because a) it used to be a webapp, b) there's also an iOS version, c) I could make it a progressive web app in no time. But still, it'd reduce convenience and discoverability. This is a complex question. On the one hand, I don't think many legitimate apps are kicked out of the Play Store for no reason. There are horror stories, but well, they are rare. Maybe you could find a way to make it more distributed. Offer an iOS app. Offer a web app. Or do make sure to keep Google happy at all times.
> "I spend some advertising dollar each day in Google Ads, with the hope able to keep our app ranking afloat."
It's similar with SEO. If SEO is the only strategy, you get dependend on it. So diversification is the key here. Paid apps + SEO + occasionally forum promotions + maybe a good website with good content for a loyal fan base (but it depends on what kind of app this is).
> "Do you have any suggestion, how I can have a better marketing strategy?"
Not really, depends on the kind of app. Read indiehackers.com for inspiration and the books I recommend. I don't do paid ads, because the CPC is way too high / the conversion rate too low.
> "Do you have suggestion which publishing platform I should use? Since I don't have a good writing skill, should I hire a freelancer to help me do so? How can I get an idea what to write about?"
Absolutely! I wrote probably over 200,000 words and invested a lot of time in improving my writing skills. Good content is easy to read. If your app is in English and English is not your native language, get someone to write for you or someone to correct your rough English. This is about brand perception and if you want to teach someone something, it helps if your written voice doesn't sound off. On a forum/comment site like HN, this is less important ;)
But again, just from my gut feeling: I wonder if there's a way for you to REDUCE the number of active users and turn free users into loyal paid users. This makes for more stable income and lets you focus on improving the app and stressing less about marketing.
Not quite :) As, majority of them are from tier-2 countries. Purchasing digital goods is not part of their culture.
> "But again, just from my gut feeling: I wonder if there's a way for you to REDUCE the number of active users and turn free users into loyal paid users."
Thank you for your suggestion! What you have mentioned are valid.
Maybe at some point, I want to introduce "ads" + "subscription" model. However, this is a competitive landscape. Most of the similar apps are using ads model. At this moment, I want to offer a compelling reason, for user to use my app instead of others. Luckily, this landscape has high stickiness, because user generated personal data are stored within the app. If they use the app for long enough, the cost is high, when they want to switch to other apps.
So, my hypothesis is that, as long as the free users are using my app, there will always be an opportunity to monetize from them, one day.
Yes. You're right. Currently, there is stress to do marketing. I need to keep attracting new users especially from tier-1 countries, so that new users' one-time purchase can help to cover my monthly living expense. I try to control the CPI cost to USD0.10 for Germany, Japan, Korea. I didn't invest for US, because the high cost is not justifiable. I do notice higher cost is required, if the tier-1 countries are English speaking country. My guess is that, less language barrier, will encourage more players in the market, and drive up the advertising cost.
> Absolutely! I wrote probably over 200,000 words and invested a lot of time in improving my writing skills
I really wish I can build a long term traffic like what you have done. Can you recommend me a publishing platform to publish all writings?
Currently, I am already using google sites (Because I do not have website design skill), to build a landing page to introduce the app features, hosing FAQ, and showing video on how to use the app. But, I don't think that is the suitable platform to host long written article.
When you write your writing, do you need to hire some graphics designer, to help to decorate your writing with nice graphic assets, to attract more readers?
Thank you!
> "Can you recommend me a publishing platform to publish all writings?"
Whatever works best for you. Wordpress, Ghost, whatever. It doesn't matter. I have mostly static files.
I think you need a somewhat okay design. Doesn't have to be fancy, but it should be clean and professionally-looking. I do design myself. I'm self-taught. If you can't do it, get someone who does it. You don't need a lot of images, but yeah, it should look clean and good. There are millions of themes, which are alright if you just start. Don't stress too much over the design. The message is more important.
Also: This is a bit out of scope of this discussion. There's probably a lot of discussion on the internet for designing articles or blogs :)
Yeah, but each day those users are churning out and you will have missed the opportunity to monetize them forever - that lost revenue will never come back.
Danke sehr!
- more work to set it up
- more paper work
- unnecessary in some cases
Pros:
- cash flow for you as a founder is more stable / taxes can be calculated and predicted more easily (only relevant if you expect a good year and then a bad year)
Neutral:
- Your personal liability is supposedly limited. This is only partially true. There's still the liability of the owner of the company (Geschäftsführerhaftung) and if you do illegal stuff, they can still hold you liable.
- Also for a GmbH, it is more important to manage risks by getting the required insurances and NOT rely on "limited liability". For apps, this would be "IT-Betriebshaftpflicht", possibly something about data protection with regards to GDPR violations. Maybe add insurance that covers personal liability so that you don't lose your personal cash if something goes wrong. That's about it. Optionally add domain-specific insurance if your domain is complex.
This is, btw. a typical German question. Mulling about the type of business is secondary. Get paying customers first, you can still incorporate a GmbH later. On the other hand: If nobody pays you money, you don't need a GmbH or be a sole proprietor.
Hit me up and would be glad to buy you a beer if you're ever in Munich! Email is in the profile. Cheers.
So, to come back to your comment: Is there ever a situation where you as a solo-founder/owner would consider a limited-liability corp (GmbH/UG) for reasons of liability or are the only good reasons for such a corp to be able to employ people, take in outside investments and set up something like a holding structure?
I just want to add to this discussion: Think about risks and insurance first and then about limited liability. If you think about it: what actually happens to your company if a scenario happens that triggers the limited liability aspect? It goes bust, if I’m not entirely mistaken. Every asset will be seized, except for your personal assets. But the company is basically gone afterwards. This scenario should be avoided in any case I think. It’s probably not fun.
I can only say that in my case with many independent customers paying a small amount of money, I managed my risk with insurance as far as possible. But maybe an accountant would be the better person to discuss your individual case.
is it possible to sell the product first and then register as Einzelunternehmer later (within the same fiscal year)? Or you have to register before?
After registering as Einzelunternehmer, if the business stops existing, does one have to "close activity" as Einzelunternehmer somehow?
You can check, if you can start as a Freiberufler. It is a bit more lightweight than going with Einzelunternehmen. For example, I am a Freiberufler now working as a consultant / contractor in data engineering and management. I can also potentially sell my product, but I did not check the limitations.
You do not have to close you Einzelunternehmen afaik, if you do not make money, but you are still responsible for sending regular declarations to the Finanzamt.
There are some competitors, but they target a broader audience (and have to because of VC money) and thus, their product is less focused on sophisticated users. What would you rather buy, a general purpose app that does many things half-assed or the specialized version that is exactly what you need? I can say that my app is simply the best in its category and there are way too many small details so that a copy-cat can't get everything right. Furthermore, in that niche, most people know my app, which helps.
Future technology changes: Not really. They will probably take a long time to replace the domain I'm in. However, there could be a black swan kind of thing, something nobody expects ;) But I don't really stress myself about this.
I have no daily anxiety, but there's one thing on my mind: The app space will get more regulated in the near future. GDPR was one thing. ePrivacy is coming. More privacy laws, upload filters and whatnot. The entire health and fitness market WILL get more regulated. So far, you can claim whatever health benefits you want with your app. Expect that you might need some kind of light FDA-approval (or the European equivalent) in the coming years if your app claims things. On the one hand, this is a big annoyance, on the other hand, I am in a good position and make already enough money to build up cash reserves to handle regulatory affairs if they happen to affect my app.
My app doesn't target people who just browse the app store and look for new stuff. It requires people with domain knowledge to actively seek a solution (I offer). So, before people get to know my app, they usually find themselves to get to know about the domain.
As an example: Before you download an app for vegans, you read about veganism first. There is no point in downloading an app for vegans otherwise. It's similar with my app (different domain though). But once your vegan app is somewhat popular in vegan communities, you depend less on rankings and more on SEO and word of mouth.
Of course, being featured by a vegan magazine would do a lot for you, probably more than being #1 in the app store or being featured by Apple (in terms of customer loyalty).
But you need something to get some kind of validation. If you fail to attract users for a free product, nobody will pay for it either. It's a small test if anyone wants to have it – and for yourself: whether or not you want to keep investing time and energy into this project.
This is my takeaway. Thank you so much for that!
I have a couple of questions too if you don't mind.
1. Is your business salable? If you got bored of it, would it be easy for someone to take over? Sometimes I wonder about small businesses and many seem to rely a lot on the expertise of the founder. Or if you don't want to scale, then having someone manage the day-to-day operations while starting a second product might be liberating.
2. You mention SEO. Is this the nuts and bolts "use the right keywords, in the right tags, the right number of times" type of SEO or do you focus more on writing long lived compelling content with simple language? It sounds like you'd be doing this in German, so I wonder if that changes things a lot due to the competitive landscape (and/or Google's capability to parse various languages).
It's not massively profitable (it's a side gig), I've restricted monetisation to AdSense in an attempt to not ruin the experience for users. I suspect other avenues of revenue are hard to come by in the niche; I did reach out to paint suppliers in the UK in an attempt to re-sell / possibly rebrand paints, but had zero responses.
I've also submitted Encycolorpedia to SaaSHub. You should verify it there https://www.saashub.com/encycolorpedia
I have a domain I got for a future project where there's a UK/US difference, so I made sure I got both.
The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my time is spent on support, both technical and sales, so when I work less I actually end up getting more frustrated because a higher percentage of the work is not as fun as writing new features. I've also had a bad year of having to work around IntelliJ bugs, but normally I like the actual development work a lot. I have friendly enthusiastic users who constantly make my day. It's a pretty sweet gig, and being able to decide how I spend my time, and which bits of my time I spend working, is priceless.
I got started during a sabbatical from my last job, just building something that I wanted myself. It turns out that lots of other people wanted it too.
I'm interested to learn more details, how things were when you first started out selling the app and the trend.
It's important to note, that there are markets where Google pays 70-90k / year[1].
[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Berlin-Salaries-EI_I...
Thinking about it, I'm not sure Cursive pays more than my total comp at Google, but certainly more than salary + bonus.
Personally I want a full blown IDE that takes advantage of advanced modern technologies such as displays that can draw individual pixels, have a model of the codebase that allows advanced features such as word completion and preferably fits nicely with the underlying OS. A debugger would also be nice, but i understand that sometimes i ask too much.
I wouldn't mind paying for such a tool (though i do mind DRM schemes and subscriptions - i want to be able to pay once and then be on my way). Cursive looks something i'd pay for if i was really interested into Clojure and was using macOS.
um... it runs on Linux and Windows as well.
Somebody else could probably speak more to it than me, since I do primarily use Emacs, but I definitely don't introduce my friends to Clojure with it.
One representative comment that someone made to me at a conference was along the lines of "Since my boss encouraged us to move to Emacs, I've never spent so long fiddling with and arguing about my editor config. After a while most of us moved to Cursive and all that just went away".
I think Emacs is generally easier to get along with these days, but it'll never be as easy to use as a "normal" app where things just work out of the box. Some people like that, and others don't, but it's not as simple as a division between newbies and experienced users. They're roughly equivalent in power these days, some things Emacs does better and others Cursive does better - fortunately there's plenty of room for both, even in a userbase as small as Clojure's.
The main alternative to Cursive in terms of user-friendliness is probably Calva[1], but it's not a standalone IDE.
[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=betterth...
How do you handle sales tax? I found it very very complex.
Re: sales tax, it is indeed mind-bogglingly complex these days, and really requires using a provider who handles it for you. This is Stripe's biggest limitation and the single reason I'm not using them. I use Paddle, who I've mostly been very happy with. If I were really dead set on using Stripe I'd have to use it in conjunction with something like Taxamo, but that looks like a hassle I don't need and would be more expensive than what I'm paying Paddle now anyway.
I found marketing difficult, because I don't know many potential users from my direct network. I'm doing content marketing. But most people are interested in the content itself, other than the product. The conversion rate is a bit low.
The nice thing about running a business in a niche is that you get to interact with nice people. My customers are engineers, I practically never get those mythical "toxic customers".
The bad thing about running a solo-founder business is the stress and anxiety. These are difficult to deal with.
To this day I mostly rely on search engines for customer acquisition (before you ask: yes, I tried, and measured carefully: every attempt at advertising had a net zero effect, e.g. I was putting money on fire for no good reason).
Events are a good business to get into as a solo founder. You can book a venue, and you don't have to pay until a few weeks before the event. If you haven't sold any tickets you can just cancel the venue and walk away.
I started Agency Hackers in 2017 and I'm almost ready to quit my job and focus on it full time.
It took me two years to figure out that instead of selling individual tickets to events, I should offer a "membership" option where people can subscribe and just come to every event.
Since I started offering membership last month I've signed up 30 agencies – for a MRR of £4,500. Once I hit 50 I will quit my job.
To market the events, I don't run adverts or have much of a social presence. The only way I promote the events is via cold email - and an opt-in email list to customers. The cold email platform I use (Reply.io) did a case study on me if you're curious: [https://reply.io/case-study/agency-hackers/]