HN Explorer

Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

298 points by gajus ↗ HN
> 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.

Also, for the curious ones, I asked the same question exactly a year ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072

116 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread
vangelis
The Polish bookmarking service.
VelNZ
I earn about 50% of my income from my business which currently includes https://LaTeXTemplates.com and https://LaTeXTypesetting.com. In the coming months I'll be releasing a product in this space I've been working on for years so I'm pretty excited about that!
mraza007
Pretty cool man!! Do you create all the templates yourself or it’s community driven
VelNZ
Thanks! Most of the templates are existing ones people have made in the past, although I usually clean up the code quite a bit and make some design improvements. The site has been around since 2012 so I end up fixing bugs and making design improvements every few years. The great thing about LaTeX is it's relatively stable with few breaking changes with new releases.
mraza007
Yup I totally agree. I did came across this site when I was looking for Latex Templates especially for my resume. I am glad I met the founder today
tartakovsky
Cool! I stumbled upon your sites during my search for children's book templates last week. Fortunately for you, the only other template gallery I've found is on Overleaf and it's quite limited, so I'd imagine it's probably great for your typesetting service.
VelNZ
The Overleaf gallery is a grab bag of basically all templates that exist, whereas I try to enforce a consistent commenting style and generally only add high quality templates (at least for recent ones). I launched the site in 2012 while I was at university and was surprised there was no single repository of templates online at all at that point!
xzel
Your typesetting website is absolutely gorgeous. I will totally keep it as a reference for beautifully simple websites.

On the template front: this is exactly the type of resource I wish I had in college while learning and using Latex. Thank you for your contributions! I'm forwarding on to a few academic friends.

VelNZ
Thank you very much! It's actually just an HTML5 template from a site called pixelarity.com. I have no affiliation with them and I can highly recommend their templates as simple, clean and fast. I'm using that same design for my new product so it's very good to hear you like it.
spondyl
While I understood absolutely none of the lower half of your about page, it's always great to see a fellow Aucklander here on HN!
VelNZ
Haha I'm a long time lurker and infrequent commenter, I've yet to see anyone with HN open irl though, even when I worked as a dev for a year.
marckohlbrugge
BetaList ( https://betalist.com ) turned 10 years old today. For the majority of time it was run by just me, generating $100k/year in revenue on average (earlier years less, later years more). I’ve now delegated all the daily operations to a contractor who spends a few hours a day to keep things going. So technically it’s two people right now, but less than half a FTE total.
mraza007
Hey I just wanted to say I have been subscribed to BetaList email newsletter for more than a year ago and it has been really inspiring for me to see the products people are building and you guys highlighting those in your platform
kevsim
BetaList is great! Along with ProductHunt it's how we got our initial user base at Kitemaker. So thanks!
inshadows
How does it make money? Can't see any pricing on the website. Ads?
fbelzile
I run Cold Turkey: https://getcoldturkey.com

It started as a fun side project in university. My friends needed something to block themselves from playing WoW so that they could study.

For three years after graduation, I've continued to work on it in my spare time. In 2015, I decided to see if people would buy the pro version with more features. As it turns out, yes! I was able to quit my job to work on it full time a few years ago.

Malcx
A happy user here, thanks for building it. It enforces discipline on future me.
soferio
Happy user here too. Well done! I wish you had an iOS version. Cheers.
hluska
"Meet your match, Zuckerberg" is one of the best headlines I've read in a long time. You're a very entertaining writer - I can see why you're having success. Great job and I look forward to trying your product!!!
fbelzile
Thank you! I was thinking of switching it to "Your future self will thank you" because a results from a quick poll I did. Now I'm not sure :)
wusel
Yea that one is better. A snarky one liner is funny, but doesn't communicate any value to your customers. "Your future self will thank you" is a good way of saying "invest in yourself" I like it much more.
hluska
Wow, I like that one even more! Great job!!
thunkshift1
Nice idea! You should plan an app version for this
wewake
Hi, another happy user here. I've been using it for about a year now and it has helped me to be more productive.

Not sure if you already know, it can be tricked by setting system clock to a future datetime :)

fbelzile
You can block time changes under Settings > Blocking in version 4 now :)
wewake
Oh! I must have overlooked that option in settings. Thanks.
JaDogg
Thank you for building this. Love it. And thank you again for making it one off purchase.
viridian
I love your work Felix. I've been using Cold Turkey for a couple of years now, and it's a pretty irreplaceable tool for people with focus issues.
rtkaratekid
I love Cold Turkey! The only issues I’ve had with it are when I find little back doors around the blocks and don’t know how to block those. But those are very few and far between.
c0nrad
I run https://csper.io. It's a web app that simplifies some web security stuff Content Security Policy (CSP).

I helped setup CSP at a company back when I was an intern (2013). I learned that CSP can be an unpleasant experience.

A year ago I decided I wanted to do something new with my life so I quit my job and Csper was born. Hopefully it makes CSP easier for other people.

It's not super profitable, but it almost pays my rent, no complaints.

gajus
Is CSP required by any security standard?
hsbauauvhabzb
Not many mention it, but I would imagine 5 years from now many will.
_wldu
Nice website and service. I hope you do very well!
mkrecny
The copy in the subtitle has an error "the most advance set of ..." should be "the most advanced ..."
Dragoman
Spelling mistake "Under the hood the extension injects ..." in 'How it works' section
mraza007
Hey you should check out indiehackers too It’s community of people running businesses as one man operation
kamphey
yes come check out IH. We're friendly!
kamphey
I make 100% of my income from Bettersheets.co and I'm one-person running it.

The majority of sales comes from the AppSumo deal I'm running now.

symplee
Looks cool, thanks for sharing.

Just a quick feedback note, under the "free tutorials" section, I scrolled passed the images thinking they were just gifs. Then got to the bottom of the page thinking, "Hmm, It really would have been helpful if he included an example video..." Then scrolled back to the top and through all the content again to see if I missed something. I tried hovering over the "gif" and then realized it was a link to YouTube.

Long story short, I think it would help the reader to have a "play button" or small icon overlayed on the image to indicate that it's a playable video, or (better?) embed the YouTube video directly in that space so the user doesn't have to leave the page.

Hope this helps, but open to feedback if I'm just an outlier. You can try the change in an A/B test, and see if the conversion rate goes up for people who visit the site AND watch an example video.

sideproject
I run SideProjectors and Newsy.

https://www.sideprojectors.com (a marketplace for people to buy and sell side projects)

https://www.newsy.co (a tool to turn your un-used domain into content-aggregator like Reddit)

I launched monetization for both of them early this year and things have been slow but steady - looking forward to developing them more in 2021!

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mattkevan
I've just had a look at Newsy and it seems great, really good work. Have put it on a domain I've had knocking around, and am seriously considering putting it on another.

One thing, the Monetize help link doesn't seem to be working. Going to 'https://help.newsy.co/monetize' results in 'A slightl problem, let us check.'

nikkwong
I Kickstarted Fractal Filters in 2014 and still derive ~90% of my income from it — www.getfractals.com. Amazon's widespread adoption in the US and foreign markets has terrible implications for several industries; but it has really been helpful for my business. This xmas I'm doing the biggest numbers I've ever done which has been fantastic.
wcarss
I almost bought this just now on impulse as a gift, but I couldn't see anything on your site's product, tutorial, or resource pages about whether I can attach them to an iPhone, which is what the person I'm buying for has.

If they work as made with phones, in my opinion you should say so, and if they don't ... well, I imagine there's money to be found in that market!

nikkwong
I'm working very hard on that, thank you so much for the kind feedback. Hearing stuff like this is really what encourages me to keep moving forward. Thank you!!
nikanj
" The filters are hand held with an ultra-clean, reflective aluminum handle allowing you to position the filter in front of your lens exactly as you'd like. "

I think this means any camera would work, because you just hold the thing in your hand. I almost impulse bought before I realized it doesn't attach to your camera at all.

ashkankiani
What I always wonder with selling physical goods is how the process of getting production lines going went. There have been times when I've wanted to sell a physical product, but the lack of experience in that area and relative risk (for financial buy in and mistakes) made me hesitate.
nikkwong
When I started this I was too dumb to know better. It was incredibly difficult and all of the money I raised on Kickstarter went down the drain due to bad suppliers and inexperience. Without the upfront investment of many people, I probably would have been put off; as getting production lines up and running, mold costs, etc. are in the 5 figures. Once you have a bit of a backing though, you can afford to make some investments that may or not pan out. For example the glass I prototype needs molds made just to see if the idea in my head will work, each of which is a few thousand bucks. A lot of times, they don't pan out and the mold is trashed. But when it does work out, it makes up for all of the failures. Happy to answer any specific questions if you want to reach out via email (in profile).
leobakerhytch
Even though the full-size filter would surely work with a phone camera, if you could scale it down to a form factor that clips onto the phone, I can see this selling like hot cakes. Might be one of the rare cases where influencer marketing is really effective too. Is it feasible to grind the glass at a physical scale to make that work?

All in all, very cool product, and congrats on making a living from it!

psalminen
Thanks for this! Just ordered it as a perfect christmas gift for my dad.
nikkwong
Thank you so much I really appreciate it. I just shipped out the order so I hope you get it soon and would love to hear what you think of it. Thank you!
elliotbnvl
Just ordered a set for a Christmas gift. Awesome product.
yread
Maybe I'm paranoid but even when you're a single person business it's always better to have some warm bodies around you on the About Us page. Especially if you're a B2B. Single person companies automatically require a lot more scrutiny as a supplier in a lot of procurement departments.
heliodor
I don't hide the fact that mine is a single person B2B SaaS. The scrutiny comes no matter what you put on the about-us page. Enterprise customers will schedule a call and dig from there. You'd have to be incompetent not to!

I'm currently testing the "made by <my_name>" banner in the bottom-right corner:

https://HostedMetrics.com

davidjade
I run TinyOctopus LLC. I create apps and software for niche markets. 100% a one person gig.

All of my products have started as something I wanted for myself, but also realizing that others would likely pay for them too. My first iOS app is now 9 years old but it existed on the Pocket PC and the Palm Pilot years before that.

https://TinyOctopus.net

edit: forgot to add, I do make the majority of my income from these apps. It is possible for small players to make real money on apps - 5 figures for me. A key for me has been to not undercharge. Despite my apps being priced much higher than others, I rarely get complaints about pricing.

seanwilson
I run https://www.checkbot.io/ :)

> Checkbot is a Chrome extension that tests 100s of pages at a time to find critical SEO, speed and security problems before your users do. Test unlimited sites as often as you want including local development sites to find and eliminate broken links, duplicate content, invalid HTML/CSS/JavaScript, insecure pages, redirect chains and 50+ other common website problems.

It grew from automating manual audits I was doing for client work. It was especially useful when I was making risky changes and big refactors to large websites where it was hard to predict which pages would break.

crb002
https://redocker.com profile guided recompilations of Linux containers, AWSLinux2 packages, macOS arm64 Homebrew packages, and maybe a PGO WSL2 5.x kernel.

Downloads for optimized binaries and profiler binaries will be requester pay S3 buckets that anyone is free to mirror. It will monetize from re-compilation as a service, and eventually compete with AWS Codebuild to generate faster builds at a fraction of the cost with an interface as simple as yum/apt.

Also some UNIX CLI tooling as a service behind Lambda/Batch where you provide a signed S3 URI to operate on.

Looking for a better payment/auth provider than RapidAPI.

agscala
I run an ecommerce business selling board games accessories. It's been way more successful than I thought it was going to end up being.

https://www.burgertokens.com

ryanchants
Love it! I looked into doing something similar years ago. I had also considered selling boxes/redesigned vacuum formed inserts since a lot of board games don't come with them, or they are minimally designed.
Lucent
Ptable.com provides most of my earned income. Spent quarantine doing a major redesign. No frameworks or libraries and the full payload, WebGL, property data and all in under 64K.
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thrower
Is your avoidance of frameworks/libraries based on principle or performance?
Lucent
Mostly being troubled the value added isn't proportionate to the payload increase. Double my LoC because I don't like typing out "getElementById" or want a throttle/debounce function or two or don't want to deal with hash changes? It seems unjustified if I'm targeting modern browsers.
thrower
That mostly makes sense. Would you recommend going towards this route for other developers?
awillen
I posted about my new company in this HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23438930 and got some good feedback and a bunch of orders about six months ago.

Now I've started getting some decent traction (nothing crazy, but numbers keep going the right direction steadily and I just introduced a new product for Black Friday that brought my average purchase up significantly). I've redesigned the site (in hindsight it looked pretty terrible when I first posted it) and am having professional photos taken of the products as we speak.

It's really exciting, and I'm thankful for the bit of early validation I got from HN.

The company is Cooper's Treats, a dog treat business: https://coopersdogtreats.com/

rmykhajliw
Me for the last 8 years. Sometimes it's difficult, but I'm trying to outsource tasks to some freelancers when it's possible.
mceachen
https://PhotoStructure.com is just me, and I'm delighted daily by great user feedback.

> Defining successful as a profitable business

Ooooh. _That_ kind of successful. Nope, not profitable yet.

jmathai
That looks really great. I've built quite a few photo services and the last 2 aimed to fill a similar niche and PhotoStructure looks really impressive.

Congrats - looks like a lot of work went into it and I hope you find a path to profitability.

timetrax
I started http://folkd.com a social bookmarking service back in 2006. At the time Mashable called it a decent digg clone ;) I almost moved to the valley in the web2.0 phase to seek funding, but decided to stay in my home country to finish university. For 14 years now the site is providing a solid passive income from ads and freemium accounts as I was doing all of the coding and hosting myself. I moved on to other things for quite a while now, but the site is still going with good traffic and minimal effort. I think it could be much more, but I lack the motivation to rewrite the old PHP base. If someone wants to take over, shoot me an email to bk@folkd.com
mpenn
Try contacting Tiny / Andrew Wilkinson; you may be able to sell it.
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