Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?
You can find a lot of articles about the most successful startups / companies in 2019 but these lack information of one-man companies, unless you started as a one person and now you have dozens of employees.
My candidate is my friend. He built mobile app that generates revenue around 30 - 50k $ per year.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadI have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue.
I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m.
All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my time. It has freed up the rest of my time to keep building similar projects that can both boost and diversify my MRR.
I’m very grateful that I’m able to work on projects I enjoy now, but more importantly it’s given me time to spend with my family and be around for my kid.
Thank you for responding.
The hard part is identifying them, and picking one where the value added by a web app is worth paying for.
As someone who doesn't have any contacts with companies (I'd assume this is true for most people here), any pointers on how to go about doing this? I tried the cold email route (even made a friend this way, we still keep in touch after two years, though we haven't met and probably never will), but I didn't succeed. I probably could have, but it made me so uncomfortable writing to total strangers :(
You need to develop contacts at companies! There are lots of different ways to build your network, but the bottom line is that to be successful with this line of work, which is essentially consulting (at least in the beginning stages), you need to meet people and earn their trust. If you are introverted this will likely feel awkward and uncomfortable (which is why it’s called getting out of your comfort zone).
It takes a fair bit of effort to get someone to the point where they are willing to walk you through their business processes. Showing genuine interest in their operations and asking lots of good questions is key.
Learning to listen is very important, and really understanding what people are saying. Lots of times they aren’t really complaining, they’re just talking about something and if you’re listening closely you can identify potential opportunities in their systems and processes. Often people don’t know what’s possible, so they don’t come at you directly with a problem.
At an old job it was someone’s job to run a “install history report”, it was all the installs that were done the previous week (thousands) and read through it copying and pasting installs from specific cities into an excel sheet. It took about 12 hours a week. He explained this process whole asking a completely different question. I ended up writing a little script that completed this same task in a few seconds. He didn’t even know that was possible, so he didn’t know to ask.
I had a kindof similar situation long ago, where a friend worked for a high-frequency trading company and I had been developing a low-overhead high-precision resource and system monitoring framework. I would supply him development builds of the agents and a web login to monitor and tune their trading systems while I got some free production testing in return, it seemed fair at the time.
As things matured and I started exploring paths for monetization, when I approached that trading company about a possible contract my "friend" demanded half ownership stake in the business in return for their becoming the first paying customer.
Nope.
I had another opportunity to develop a similar tool for another company, but the person who pitched it wanted 50% despite having nothing to offer other than the idea, so I politely declined.
I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here who would do similar things.
As parent said, he may have the first type, but not the second, so it's hard for him to answer on it without making it sound like a culture clash.
That said, there are a few deadbeats who try to take advantage by always being in need. But only to finance their life of leisure, not real need.
Geography is interesting, but not deterministic.
It's not an absolute rule for sure, especially over a short period, just look at Korea. However I've found that distance generally plays a very large role in culture, especially if given enough time. Of course it doesn't determine everything. You can find completely different cultures in different blocks in New York city. People don't always see eye-to-eye with their neighbor just some meters away.
In the case of Estonia & Scandinavia the history is rather long and entangled. There are the Vikings, who liked nearby islands - including islands of Estonia that aren't Scandinavia. There have been periods where Estonia was conquered and part of both the Swedish kingdom and the Danish kingdom. Even the Danish flag is attributed to a battle in Estonia. [1]
Would I say that Estonian culture is a copy of Swedish or Danish culture? Definitely not, there are significant differences. There are also big differences between rural and urban areas. There's probably more similarities between Estonian farmers and Swedish farmers than Estonian farmers & Estonian software developers.
At the end of the day, you can't deterministically say anything at all about a group of people, even if it's a small group. Saying something general about people in an area as large as Scandinavia is always going to be probabilistic.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lyndanisse
This is why socialism works in scandinavian countries (it's a need, not a luxury), but fails in the south of europe
If you can repay them somehow and make their lives easier, why not do so?
I've given a decent amount to family over the years. For the most part it's about a recognition of what people have done for me. My mother sacrificed significantly so that I could be the person I am today.
Not every country rewards work equivalently. In Sweden I see people working in supermarkets and petrol stations that still have decent lives. Norway is wealthier still.
That's not the case in Britain for the most part - we have much higher income inequality. Someone can work a full time job and still struggle, because the low end jobs pay biscuits.
(This is probably a significant contributor to the sticker shock I have when shopping in Scandinavia - the staff actually get paid...)
I wish her pension would cover her real living expenses.
This is an interesting mindset. I don't want to judge you either, but I never understood the value of keeping my money and collecting wealth. If I were struggling, I wouldn't go out of my way to help my family. But if I had extra income, I would help my family if they were in need.
Obviously, if my family doesn't need help, I wouldn't try to give them money. But if they were in need, I wouldn't say that it's not my responsibility to help either. I think this is a simple judgement call. The efficiency of the Scandinavian welfare system is besides the point.
I feel like you are being intentionally daft, almost as a way of showing off how good you have it with your welfare state.
What if you read what he did, do a lot of research on how to get similar results to him and blog about it so others can learn from you?
Don't wait for things to happen; go out and make them happen yourself.
The API has been rewritten a few times now, it gets over 300 million requests a month. All organic growth, I can’t take any credit for it because I honestly have done nothing to aid it. Only use Google AdWords and it runs on a $40/m VPS.
We introduced paid plans a year ago and had a few sign ups. I think the paid accounts are about $440MRR but I split it with a friend who did all the work around paid accounts. (I didn’t think it would be worthwhile, he did, so he did the work around paid subscriptions)
Pretty cool simple idea.
I found your project since you previously posted it on HN and linked to it in an answer below (hope you don't mind, I'll remove it if you want).
Anyway, this whole thing confuses the hell out of me. You're receiving 3.6 billion requests per year and you've been serving it all for free with a single adsense ad and only making a couple grand a month off of it? I feel like I don't really understand. Shouldn't the hosting costs for multiple billions of requests be huge? Shouldn't you be charging for that? I'm speaking as someone who's never built anything like this, so I don't really know.
We do have paid accounts now but it doesn’t amount to a ton, around $440MRR.
I hesitated adding paid accounts for a long time because it cost so little to run but the ad revenue was alright.
Lots of niche markets out there, but my at revenue did take a long, slow path over 8 years to get to this point.
The problem is, that's a shit experience for your average company. They rarely touch their site since they don't know how. Someone will create an account, they'll write the username and password down for all the various hosting providers they need to know, and things will usually go smoothly until their credit card expires, their domain name expires (which they don't even know is possible) or some other problem that results in a bunch of downtime and panic from everyone involved.
I pitch it as a worry free solution. I manage their domains renewals, DNS, hosting, security updates, framework updates, all things they don't know they have to do. Their framework will remain current, so if they want something done in 5 years they'll have the latest version of the framework, not some archaic thing that requires PHP 5.1 and relies on a weird MySQL bug from whatever version their host is using.
On top of that, they get a couple hours of maintenance included every month, so if they need a few small changes made to the site it's all included, no extra invoices, no quoting, no needing to get budget approvals or sign offs. They just shoot me an email and I make the changes. (hours don't roll over)
Also very similar post as this one, some good comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167156
What I want is some sort of mentor network. Someone who has already succeeded where I haven't, and that I can pester with questions, check I am on the right track, vent, etc, every now and then.
Does such a thing (or something like it) exist?
However, you might get the most mileage from finding a few people who have been successful where you would like to be, and reach out to them for mentorship. Such connections can make a huge difference.
It's been growing steadily for the last 2-3 months. My expectations are that it will generate ~$2,500+ in January and $100k+ in 2020 given the current growth.
I have a massive list of ideas that I will work on next. Yet, I'd like to be fully sustainable (in an expensive city like Sydney) before jumping to the next project/idea.
Also, companies can pay for a featured listing https://www.saashub.com/featured-products
Most very successful one person businesses I know of are specialty consulting businesses.
https://www.indiehackers.com
Lynne Tye of Key Values. She made about $400k in 2019 from a site that connects software engineers with companies that that share their intangible values, e.g. diverse team, good for parents, fast or slow-paced, etc.
Robert James Gabriel of Helperbird. He struggled a lot with dyslexia growing up, and even had a teacher tell him he should give up and drop out of school. Luckily another teacher encouraged him to learn to code, and he's been quite prolific since. Helperbird is a browser extension that helps others with learning disabilities browse the web easier. Robert recently brought on a co-founder, but he'd grown the app to a "comfortable five figures a month" in revenue.
Plenty more on https://www.IndieHackers.com sharing their stories via interviews and on the podcast, and also posting about hitting revenue goals and other milestones here: https://www.indiehackers.com/milestones
Imagine if you run a company and have to pay $30k to a recruiter to find someone. And then imagine paying a fraction of that to post all your jobs on Key Values.
RE the execution:
- filters work unintuitively: selecting more filters often increases number of matches
- some filters are very fuzzy, and don't even have detailed description: "Creative + Innovative", "Committed to Personal Growth" or "Bonded by Love for Product"
- you can't negate the filters: e.g. you can select "EQ > IQ", but you can't choose "IQ > EQ", or any value which goes against progressive viewpoint.
We have large educational clients that are integrating the tech because of its benefit for students (especially those with ADHD and dyslexia). IP licensing is great because it means I don't need to spend time building the integrations myself, and I don't have any costs attached to the licensing deals, so it's pretty much all profit. In 2020 the IP licensing will greatly exceed the B2C revenue, and we may even make the B2C tools free at that point.
1: www.beelinereader.com
My gut reaction is you would not want to position this as IP licensing if selling to schools. We do IP licensing to edtech/education companies, but our school offerings are all software/SaaS. I think schools would find the notion of IP licensing to be a mismatch, which would create friction even if the offering itself is a good fit.
I'm struggling to find the right way to position this as a service in which the client/user can work, edit, deliver the content or part of it without having commercial ownership over it, e.g. cannot resell my content to 3rd parties.
If I were you, I'd find other companies that are already in the space, see what they offer and how they price/sell, and either mimic them or consider joining forces in some way.
Congrats!!
That's the person behind Miracle Merchant and Card Crawl games.
It was a lot of work in the beginning, but now I usually have a very nice schedule. Every week I spend around 4 hours researching different topics, 8 hours on updating or creating videos for the platform and 4-8 hours in video meetings with customers or regarding new business opportunities.
This year I made north of €150k (~$167604) and will double that before Q3. Seeing how things are going, most likely I will not be a one man show by the summer due to a need for account management and/or content creation, but it's doable.
You can also go a very long way by using a small portion of your income to pay someone in a cheaper location to code for you. You can literally pay a full time engineer somewhere else if you stop eating lunch + one starbucks out every day, for instance!
But know of 1 person company that generates $500k revenue per year and gets its customers via SEO.
8 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783
UV mapping is a royal pain in the ass and I can't believe it can just be automated away. Many big studios tried - from Houdini to Maxon to large open source projects like Blender. You deserve huge returns, kudos! All the best!
Nit: you need a SSL cert on your website :)
I think I'm very suited to solve this problem for a few reasons. I used to be a 3D artist so I know what artists want. I'm a C programmers so I can make complex things go fast, and I have done a lot of procedural 3D stuff so I know a lot of mesh processing tricks. The complexity of this is substantial. its currently around 1.5 megs of source code, not counting UIs loaders and savers or any of that. So I would say many long hours and being very focused is key. You can find more of my work at www.quelsolaar.com and @quelsolaar on twitter
At the sametime, I see some contradiction to your philosophy - there is just so much pizzaz in the product you've built. It goes against the grain of what you just said - all those animations, futuristic aesthetic of your product, giant clock with Tron-like fonts, etc...all those things are unnecessary. You could just sell the command line tool, you know :)
I used to think that quality was attention to detail and polishing everything, but now I think its a hump you have to get over. People stand in line for hours, in the rain and cold, and jump through a lot of hoops the stuff they really want. As a creator your goal is to make them want it that much, rather then worrying about the rough edges.
Zero fucks given.
:-)
It's just good for business to make the user interface as seamless and friction free as possible to get users the information they need at a glance to make a decision and covert faster = more conversions and more revenue $$$
I guess I'm just surprised that this niche is worth 7 figures. That's awesome.
Love was so ahead of it's time, and has been an inspiration since I first found it maybe a decade ago. Happy to see you make a comfortable living in a related space. Cheers!
some thoughts/questions:
- Do you use a library for packing? This alone is a lot of work. Since you write in C, are you using boost polygon or CGAL for the computational geometry algorithms?
- Have you thought about a data-driven approach? Unwrap and packing are geometric operations, but seam marking/segment classification may be amenable to an ML-based method (specifically the spectral graph CNN that came out recently). This seems like the largest hurdle to more "human-like" unwrapping but I'm only a hobbyist so this could be way off base.
I'm almost tempted to create a competing product, but alas I already have a startup in a different domain : ]