
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? - committed
This question was asked last year (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21332072" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21332072</a>) by gajus, and I&#x27;m curious what it looks nowadays.<p>&gt; How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?<p>&gt; Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.<p>&gt; Has recent shutdown of economy affected your business?
======
andygcook
Plugging my brother's one-person business because he'll be too humble to post
himself: [https://nanagram.co](https://nanagram.co)

The product allows you to send pictures in the mail to your loved ones via
SMS. It works great for getting fresh photos to your grandparents who might
not be super savvy with a computer.

My brother started it a few years ago and makes enough now to keep it going.
Probably is the classic definition of a lifestyle business, but I think that's
a success even if it's unlikely to be a unicorn.

Also and more importantly, the product helps to bring hundreds of families
closer together, which is especially important right now given our elders are
cut off from contact.

~~~
droobles
Tell your brother he's got a new customer coming up!

~~~
aacook
Right on! Shoot me an email if you have any questions: alex@nanagram.co.

------
sahillavingia
Does Gumroad count? We raised VC but most of that was bought back or written
off. I run it by myself now.

Gumroad helps creators sell digital products directly to their audiences.
We're expanding to Memberships this year.

I wrote about most of the story here: [https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-
on-my-failure-to-build-...](https://marker.medium.com/reflecting-on-my-
failure-to-build-a-billion-dollar-company-b0c31d7db0e7)

And COVID-19 has been a boon, as we help folks earn a living from home. We'll
see if it sticks!

~~~
patricklouys
Thanks for creating it. I sold the ebook variation of my book through Gumroad
and it was a very good experience.

Looking forward to the membership part, might use it for another project of
mine.

------
bemmu
I’m still making almost all of my income from Candy Japan, which is a Japanese
candy subscription service that I launched many years ago as a HN post.

The shutdown halted international shipping from Japan to over 100 countries,
so I’ve had to pause subscriptions for the time being:
[https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/on-pause-due-
to...](https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/on-pause-due-to-covid19)

I’m taking this as a much-needed break from running the site!

~~~
tasogare
As a resident in Japan, I was thinking about putting online a small website to
sell some items (not candies) to Europe and US residents, however a friend
warns me it would not be as easy as I think.

Could you give me some info about how you started? Especially about the legal
and taxes aspect. More precisely, can I start without a company? If a company
is needed, 個人事業主 or 合同会社? Is this even compatible with student visa? The tech
aspect in not a problem, but starting the _business_ side seems super tricky.

~~~
wolco
Figuring out that stuff is the business.

------
dvko
I've been selling a couple of WordPress plugins since 2013, mostly piggy-
backing on other popular services that were experiencing crazy growth and
taking care of their WordPress integration for them (unofficially, some
already had one that sucked).

Yearly (subscription) revenue is at about $500K USD now. It has been growing
by less than 10% for the last few years as I haven't been that interested in
growing it - I want to work less, not more.

So far I haven't seen any negative effects because of COVID-19 in terms of
revenue. If anything there seems to be a slight uptick in new subscriptions
and slightly fewer support emails per week.

\- MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress: [https://mc4wp.com/](https://mc4wp.com/)

\- Boxzilla Plugin: [https://boxzillaplugin.com/](https://boxzillaplugin.com/)

\- HTML Forms: [https://htmlforms.io/](https://htmlforms.io/)

~~~
winrid
Nice! Html forms brings in revenue?

~~~
dvko
Not as much as the other two by a long shot, but a tiny bit, yes. I've hidden
the purchase flow on the website a while ago so I can retire the paid version
sometime soon.

------
DizzyDoo
I write (program, paint, animate, market, and so on) computer games like this
one[1]. The recent economic troubles haven't effected me negatively that much,
instead it's been a positive thing as more people are home and playing more
games. I don't necessarily want to 'profit' from all the hardship around, but
I'm glad to provide products that entertain and hopefully make the current
situation a bit more bearable - that feels good.

I got started over 10 years ago now, making Flash-based games and licensing
them to various web portal and publishers, which was good money for a student
back then! A little indie game developer golden age where you'd get a lot of
players and also a few thousand dollars per game without too much trouble. I
went on from there doing self-published games that anyone can buy on Steam or
the Mac Store, both of which provide about 90% of my revenue, and the
remaining 10% are from smaller stores and game distributors.

[1]
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zooke...](https://store.steampowered.com/app/654960/The_Eldritch_Zookeeper/)
<\- My current project.

------
AlchemistCamp
I'm running Alchemist Camp, where I teach Elixir and the Phoenix Framework,
primarily through screencasts. It was a labor of love for the first year but
now it (mostly) pays the bills.
[https://alchemist.camp](https://alchemist.camp)

In 2 days, I'll be launching a second product for a similar audience.
[https://phoenixigniter.com](https://phoenixigniter.com)

Elixir is a _tiny_ market compared to something like Ruby or even Rust, but
it's my stack of choice and I love helping grow the ecosystem.

~~~
ifoundthetao
Man, I remember thinking that Elixir was going to take the world by storm
about 5 years ago. I was so excited for it. I hope it does though, it has a
lot of great things going for it, and I'd love to see it adopted.

------
Axsuul
I run Trunk[1][2] which is a SaaS that helps businesses manage and sync their
inventory in real-time between everywhere they sell (e.g. Amazon, eBay,
Shopify, Etsy, Squarespace, Square, Faire). It's my main source of income.

Starting out, I got my first 10 customers for Trunk by talking to users on
e-commerce forums and focusing only on features that would help solve their
problem. I didn't have any account management features (forgot password,
change password, etc) or even obvious features that would make their lives
easier (filtering, proper search, etc) for an embarrassingly long time. I
still don't have a lot of these things! And the pricing page still... the
horror. Instead, I dedicated all my energy to making sure inventory syncing
covered all edge cases and worked reliably.

COVID-19 has actually contributed to an uptick in business, especially with
brick & mortar businesses that are now looking to also go online.

1\. [https://trunkinventory.com](https://trunkinventory.com)

2\. [http://apps.shopify.com/trunk](http://apps.shopify.com/trunk)

~~~
julee04
This type of tool is really interesting. I have a couple of questions related
to this:

1\. What are the alternatives if they don't use a service like Trunk? 2\. What
have you seen as the "source of truth" for inventory? Is it Trunk or one of
the services that Trunk connects to?

~~~
Axsuul
Hey appreciate the interest!

1\. The alternative is manually adjusting stock levels on your other sales
channels as things sell. For small shops, this is not too bad. It's usually
the owner or some assistant who handles this but it can be a huge timesink.
For high volume stores, this is a sisyphean task. Or you can just set stock
high enough and not worry about it while emailing customers if you're actually
out of stock and can't fulfill. Not a good idea though since you can get
banned on marketplaces for overselling + it's a bad customer experience.
Sometimes the sales channels themselves have their own integrations (e.g.
Shopify integrates with eBay) but they have lots of issues

2\. The "source of truth" _before_ using Trunk is typically either
Shopify/Squarespace or Square POS (for brick & mortar). So initially, Trunk
can sync your most accurate sales channel to others that are out of sync. Once
using Trunk, the inventory within Trunk essentially becomes the source of
truth but it doesn't necessarily need to be managed there. For example, you
are free to adjust stock levels within Etsy and Trunk will pick up on those
changes automatically and sync them to Shopify, just as you'd expect. So it's
flexible in that sense and gets out of your way/adapts to your workflow

I hope that info helped :)

------
DarwinMailApp
Does DarwinMail[1] count?

I'm a one man[2] team and have been since the beginning. I built it with PHP,
LESS, JS, and good old HTML. I love answering all support emails because DM's
users are so helpful and often have tremendously kind things to say. I guess
it's because I took on the task of replacing Google Inbox.

DarwinMail is not as successful as some other companies run by solo-founders
making 10k+ MRR however I feel really happy with what we (the users and I)
have accomplished so far.

It's been almost two years since I wrote the first line of code and I very
much enjoy working on DarwinMail each and every day of the week (even during
dinner sometimes).

[1] [https://www.darwinmail.app](https://www.darwinmail.app) [2]
[https://twitter.com/joeytawadrous](https://twitter.com/joeytawadrous)

------
lcall
Late to this, but this is our son-in-law, Benjamin. Seems he is an effective
teacher of 2D game development (godot, gamemaker, pixel art), with good
pacing, honest/golden rule type treatment toward customers (and pleasant to be
around). Some examples of his work, which supports his wife & children:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about](https://www.youtube.com/user/uheartbeast/about)

[https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course-
youtube?r_do...](https://www.heartgamedev.com/1-bit-godot-course-
youtube?r_done=1)

------
madisvain
Hoping to start something free today that can add paid features in the future:
[https://www.upcount.app/](https://www.upcount.app/)

~~~
Nelkins
Just a heads up, there appears to be a typo on the front page. I think
"Invocing" should be "Invoicing."

~~~
madisvain
Thank you very much for the heads up. I have updated the title to fix the
spelling mistake.

Thank you!

------
hartem_
I found this Twitter thread
([https://mobile.twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1249348452095373...](https://mobile.twitter.com/zenorocha/status/1249348452095373312))
that explains the origin of
[https://draculatheme.com/pro](https://draculatheme.com/pro).

It's a single person selling a terminal and IDE color scheme for developers.

~~~
altmind
hmm. is it dracula or is it darcula theme? intellij idea is pretty persistent
calling it darcula

------
agscala
I run an aftermarket board game accessory business.

[https://burgertokens.com/](https://burgertokens.com/)

Last year, I shipped nearly 4000 packages. My customers love our products, and
most of our growth comes from word of mouth.

~~~
cacois
That's an awesome idea, great work! I'm curious, any legal/copyright issues
with making replacement products for existing IP?

------
pieterhg
I run Nomad List and Remote OK by myself. Nomad List brings in ~$336,000/y
with 972,480/mo pageviews and Remote OK ~$301,000/y with ~628,210/mo
pageviews. I do everything myself from coding, designing, front end, back end,
marketing, etc. I have one person on emergency call in case the server goes
down when I sleep but that hasn't happened in years.

You can see live revenue/traffic here, as I share it all:

[https://nomadlist.com/open](https://nomadlist.com/open)

[https://remoteok.io/open](https://remoteok.io/open)

I have no funding, no debt, no employees, just revenue and profit margins are
somewhere in the 80%-90%.

Nomad List got started when I was traveling and working remotely ~2013/2014
and wanted to discover more cities that would fit the criteria of nice
weather, affordable and fast internet. Since then I've added hundreds more
criteria and it's become a giant database, and also a community. The community
is how it makes money as people can pay to join the site and access a chat, a
trip planner, a forum and many more features.

Remote OK is a much more simple business as it's just a job board. It got
started because after building Nomad List a lot of people around me wanted to
start working remotely and traveling but didn't have remote jobs. There was
like one remote job specific job board back then and it was quite limited. I
thought "why not aggregate remote jobs from traditional non-remote job
boards". So I did that, and slowly started selling my own job posts on the
site which is how it makes money now.

The Coronavirus has substantially affected my business:

Nomad List especially has been affected losing over 50% of its revenue. The
site is made for people working remotely and actively traveling so that is to
be expected during this crisis. You can even see the complete disruption the
Coronavirus brought to traveling members of my site, scroll down to "Trips
Taken by Users" on [https://nomadlist.com/open](https://nomadlist.com/open).

Remote OK is less affected and might even get a positive effect out of this
crisis since remote work becomes more popularized and mainstream during and
after this. There is in fact a rise in jobs posted, scroll down to "Job Posts
Sold" on [https://remoteok.io/open](https://remoteok.io/open).

Personally I'm less affected financially since I don't have employees and I've
saved most of my revenue over the last few years, hardly spending anything.
Most people have told me to repeatedly over the years to hire and spend more,
but I did the opposite. That means I have a very solid cash buffer now so I
can weather this storm quite well. I feel sad/scared about other businesses
with high costs that might not be so lucky, especially the employees involved.

~~~
nickls
Solid work. Nomad List has really improved over the last few years.

Is most of your NL revenue from user subscriptions or ads or ...?

~~~
pieterhg
Thanks! Yes, 17% is from ads, and 83% from memberships.

It's mostly non-recurring memberships because I don't really like
subscriptions as a customer myself either, and most people go nomad and
actively need the site only for the first few months and then go off on their
own, and a subset of those stick around. Which is fine with me. I don't like
to create a very addictive product. I think I have a healthy balance of new
people and long time members right now.

Ad deals are really hard to predict, usually a VC-funded company (ironically)
asks to promote their remote work or nomad related product and they'll pay
anywhere from $5k-$30k/mo to promote it on my sites. But those deals can last
just a month, to 6 months for example. But ads are not stable income like
memberships are for me, so I try not to rely too much on them.

------
saddington
a simple business is doing a paid newsletter. i see a lot of these going up...
and it can be profitable fairly quickly.

also, doing anything in the education space is worth checking out... in other
words, charging people for what you know is a well-worn strategy! an ecourse
or online course isn't hard to put together... i did one literally with
gumroad and notion docs!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22548620)

~~~
desertedisland
I once worked for a very successful small firm whose primary product was a
weekly email / newsletter: subscriptions start at around £20,000 / year.

Their product was analysis (energy markets), their customers were the banks /
hedge funds, etc.

The analysis was provided by, um, analysts. These guys (and women) were Phd's,
they were extremely well qualified and experienced.

Anyway you don't have to be a phd: the point is that if you have knowledge /
expertise there may well be people who are willing to pay for it - the medium
doesn't really matter.

------
nihil75
A friend of mine runs a web hosting company. Using Parallels he is able to
partition his bare-metal machines and offer them as VPCs all on his own like
it's 2006. Apperantly many website builders / small businesses still use
those.

~~~
blakesterz
I did that from 2002 until now, though I'm shutting down. It was a decent
source of income, I could've made WAY more and probably made a good living,
but I never charged people enough because many of them couldn't afford to go
anywhere else. It was a great hobby and it got me my current day job. It was
interesting work, but the internet has become too dangerous, it's impossible
for one person to keep up with all the attacks.

~~~
artiscode
Similar story over here. I started by offering shared hosting with supervision
as added value, expanded into reselling VPS'es and eventually leased bare
metal servers that I partitioned into VPS'es. I could have made a lot more
money if I didn't treat every customer with utmost care and attention. Now I'm
stuck with clients that can't afford to go elsewhere and clients with grossly
outdated software that would be a nightmare to migrate. I kinda miss the
passive income although there wasn't much. On average I had to fix something
every few months and would get a major outage/bug once per year. I always
hesitated that scaling up would result in more customer support work, more
major outages and more everything that would take the "passive" out of passive
income.

~~~
blakesterz
Sounds familiar! I really did enjoy the work and helping people, but I could
never find anyone to help me, and it's a 24/7 thing. I have basically never
been offline since 2002. There's been a few exceptions, but I'm always on
call. It's been a good ride, and I know I'll be sad when I cancel that last
server next month. Let me know if you need help, I'm available now :-)

------
zapstar
Define "success"... I make a few bucks a day from
[https://unitprice.org](https://unitprice.org) and it doesn't require any
effort from me on a day-to-day basis. (I calculate the best price per unit on
Amazon for a variety of different products, so the money I make from the
affiliate links is typically enough to cover the cost of hosting plus an extra
Lego set or two for my son.)

Sadly, I have seen an uptick in revenue as a result of COVID-19, because my
website is showing up a lot in search results for toilet paper.

~~~
Endlessly
I mean, if you’re really concerned about people buying more than they need,
just so say on your site - obviously a valid concern and don’t think any
reasonable person would be offended by a reminder that everyone can make a
difference by individually making an effort to do what’s right for them AND
everyone else too.

~~~
zapstar
Oh no, sorry if there was a misunderstanding. I said "sadly" because it is so
unfortunate that we are all in this current situation -- a pandemic. And it
feels "sad" in this specific context because I am seeing an uptick in searches
for toilet paper, a result of people being unable to find it anywhere else.
It's a sad state of affairs all around. I have no judgement on people buying
extra toilet paper.

------
nojvek
Just putting this out there. Indiehackers.com is a community of people
building solo-small team profitable businesses.

Check out the top products.

[https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-
revenu...](https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenue)

There’s also a massive longtail of people making no money too.

Making something that people want and will pay for that sustains a business is
hard. It takes a lot of time and effort to get the first few paying customers.

------
sova
Teaching my girlfriend Japanese inadvertently lead to the creation of a whole
new curriculum and style of language teaching which I have been embodying in
[https://japanesecomplete.com/](https://japanesecomplete.com/)

Originally the idea was to create a new textbook, but I found it easier to
pair lessons with browser-based multiple choice quizzes that would hit the
material home. Given the success of the first student, I thought it might be
something people would be willing to pay for.

Since then, we have been adding a steady stream of helpful learning tools in
addition to the textbook/curriculum that we are rolling out. There are
dialogues with audio recordings so you can listen along. The entire curriculum
is frequency based, so you are learning the most frequent terms first, which
has proven invaluable with our students.

The recent shutdown has definitely affected our subscription rates, and I
suspect the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics until 2021 did not do much for
the enthusiasm for learning Japanese this year, but you never know. On the
brightside, it gives people more time to prepare.

Learning a new language is an investment in yourself and your brain health for
life. Language learning is building a bridge where there is a chasm.

------
slivanes
I've been running a World of Warcraft TCG loot website for over 13 years. I
started it because my wife needed me off the game because I played too much
(she was right), but I still wanted to do something with the game.

[https://www.wowtcgloot.com](https://www.wowtcgloot.com)

The recent shutdown has increased interest organically.

------
marvindanig
I run a web book publishing company in Washington D.C:
[https://bubblin.io](https://bubblin.io)

Covid19 has been a blessing to us since all our books are online and both
writers and readers get to chat with each other alongside the story they are
on.

------
typpo
I run Textbelt, a simple SMS API
([https://textbelt.com/](https://textbelt.com/)) and Quickchart, a chart image
and QR rendering API ([https://quickchart.io/](https://quickchart.io/)).
Combined they cover my living expenses.

Both started from open source projects of mine. I love building open tools and
stumbled upon the fact that I could sell services around these projects after
people started reaching out for support and extra features. I improve the
products incrementally every week and eventually it adds up.

The virus shutdowns have affected Textbelt a bit because many of my users are
small businesses doing appointment reminders and such.

------
arkadiyt
Not mine but Pinboard and Stratechery are both 1 person shops which are wildly
successful.

~~~
exolymph
I'm not positive, but I think Stratechery might have an employee now? I
vaguely recall Ben mentioning something along those lines in his yearly "how
things are going" report.

------
dustball15
Running Raccoon as a one one show:

[https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/](https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/)

It's a privacy solution that allows you to download apps from Google Play
without having Big G claw into your smartphone.

The tech stack is quite extensive: Java for the application itself (Eclipse
toolchain), LAMP for hosting the billing system (build on php, bootstrap and
fatfree) and the website (build with Hugo using bootstrap).

COVID-19 hit hard. Even though I see more downloads, people seem to have
become cautious with spending money.

------
seanwilson
I run [https://www.checkbot.io/](https://www.checkbot.io/) myself. It's a
Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed and security problems. I
wrote it to help with my own contract work then packaged it up for others.
Sales are slightly up after the shutdown.

------
makeee
I’m doing around $2k/month with [https://divjoy.com](https://divjoy.com), a
tool for a React developers. Not wildly successful, but it pays the bills and
I’m optimistic I can grow that to $10k+.

If anything I’ve seen a slight bump from COVID. Lots of people with time on
their hands who want to launch an MVP.

------
winrid
Mine's not paying the bills yet, but I'm getting a couple new customers a week
which is surprising.

~~~
Endlessly
As is, unless I am missing something painfully obvious, after looking at you
HN profile and HN submissions - my guess is “Mike” is a typo for “Mine” — if
so, suggest you edit your comment with a direct link to the one-person
business you’re referring to with a quick pitch on its intended value/use too.

If I had to guess, the business is the “FastComments” SaaS mentioned a few
times in your recent HN submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=winrid](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=winrid)

[https://fastcomments.com/](https://fastcomments.com/)

~~~
winrid
Right! Edited. Thanks for posting the link for me. I didn't since I want to
seem more like a person than an ad ;)

------
niccolop
Isn't there a whole community dedicated to this: indiehackers.com

~~~
Endlessly
IndieHackers was inspired by posts on HN just like this, got a lot of traction
marketing it here, and was acquired by a YC startup too; basically,
IndieHackers is an unofficial YC spin-off.

------
kpennell
I think this has been asked before?

~~~
justaguyhere
Yes, multiple times. No harm in asking again though - newer businesses launch
all the time, people who didn't want to share before might want to share now
etc. Everyone learns and benefits.

~~~
Endlessly
Agree, not only that, but per the HN FAQs it is official okay to do:

“Are reposts ok? — When a story has had significant attention in the last year
or so, we bury reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.
— Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion is for things that
shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.”

Basically, even though the topic is being reused, unless the responses are
significantly similar, there’s no harm and if the community is not curious, it
won’t get upvotes.

