
Solo founders with profitable businesses, collected stories - imartin2k
https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/wjRD/solo-founders-with-profitable-businesses-collected-stories.html
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spiderfarmer
I sold my marketing company 2 years ago to start my own single person company.
I create niche websites / communities. Comfortable living all from Adsense.

Best decision I ever made was selling the company. I don’t miss it at all.

Sometimes I do a consultancy job (online marketing) on the side, just because
I enjoy doing that. Not doing it for the money makes me better at it, because
this way I can be “blunt” and it makes me immune to office politics.

I still work 40 hours a week effectively, but I can decide what to work on
every day and take time off when I want to. My wife also has a fulltime job so
I take the kids to school and pick them up every day. I love doing that.

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dchuk
Are you producing all the content for yourself on the niche sites? Or
outsourcing that?

Ever dabble with affiliate stuff?

I'm interested in setting up a few niche/affiliate sites on the side as
supplementary income, and have always liked the idea of building and running
communities to do so.

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spiderfarmer
Content is mostly produced by the community, but sometimes, if I want a page
to rank as high as possible in Google for example, I’ll write a page myself.

I haven’t dabbled with affiliate stuff yet, but will do so next year.

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dchuk
Nice, good strategy.

How'd you solve the problem of cold starting the communities if you don't mind
me asking?

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spiderfarmer
I started my main community pre-facebook and pre-myspace.

If I had to start over I would try to form a small offline community first,
hear them out and develop it from there.

When you have a great content and your website solves a real problem for
people - try to get exposure in magazines and other media related to that
niche. People will come.

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desktopapp
Surprised to see the random comment I made surface on this. Dug back out the
anon account if anyone has questions or needs encouragement to strike out on
their own.

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i_don_t_know
Congratulations on your success!

1\. If you're not using electron, what do you use? Are you happy with your
choice (can you do what you want to do with reasonably effort)?

2\. How did you get started? Did your app start as a side project, or did you
go all out from the beginning? Was is spun-off as part of a consulting gig?

3\. How did you find your niche? Did you scratch your own itch? Did you look
for opportunities? Did you come across an opportunity by chance or through
some previous experience/employment?

4\. How did you decide that this was an opportunity worth pursuing? That is,
how did you decide that your niche might be big enough to support you, and/or
that you could compete?

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desktopapp
1\. Electron but obviously not a decade ago

2\. All out. A couple contract jobs until ramen profitable.

3\. Scratched own itch

4\. Growth kept happening.

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ythn
Reminds me of [https://www.indiehackers.com/](https://www.indiehackers.com/)

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csallen
If there's anyone in particular from this list that you'd like to see on Indie
Hackers, let me know and I'll try to reach out!

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mswen
A few months ago I wrote a custom web app with data visualization that can run
on-top of the old Microsoft Retail Management System. It bypasses the
application itself and just taps directly into the SQL Server database.

As I was writing it I tried to make it pretty general/generic so that there
was not too much code that was specific to this particular small retail chain.

I wonder how many retail chains will still be using this POS system after end
of life?

I wonder if that might be the kind of niche thing that could end up being
profitable? Or, would it trap me in a barely profitable situation with just
enough customers that I feel like I need to keep it going but not enough to
really make a comfortable living?

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sw1205
It always amazes me [wrongly] how much money niche sites/services can make.

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tyingq
If anyone is looking for a good niche, Quickbooks utilities is one. Things
like import/export, mass update, Sql access, synchronizing, Paypal
integration, etc.

Tools do exist, but they are very clunky and expensive. It's also easy to read
user forums and see what's needed, where existing tools fall short, etc. And
then market your solutions in the same forums.

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joshontheweb
I’m pleasantly surprised to have my company included but he spelled Zencastr
incorrectly.

Ah well. I guess thats the risk I took going with a weird spelling :P

