

Ask HN: Solo startups? What have you built all on your own? - cup

	I've been thinking about websites and start ups and the limits or bottlenecks that are associated with them. I'm wondering if there are many people who have worked alone and succesfully built up a website or a company.<p>Is there a limit to how far you can go alone?
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limedaring
I built my company solo for about 1.25 years, got a cofounder for half a year
(who then quit for a company who could pay more), so I'm back to being solo
again on my company WeddingLovely. <http://WeddingLovely.com> was built
entirely by myself and there are also five other vendor directories
(<http://WeddingPhotoLove.com> and others). There's also a wedding blog at
<http://WeddingLovely.com/blog/> that I maintain and post 2-3x daily.

Being that I continue to build, market, and grow my company while solo
(revenues going up every month), I'd say I both came very far as one person
and still have much more to go before I hit the end. Don't let imaginary
limits discourage you. :)

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nanijoe
It seems to me like you should not offer a free trial (a money back guarantee
might be better)..Not too sure a monthly plan makes too much sense for
planning a wedding either, since it is a one time event. I would also increase
the price. I believe I paid $50 for some crappy seat arrangement software that
I ended up never using a few years ago. Feel free to disregard my advice of
course, since you definitely have more data than I do. All in all, I think you
are onto something here

~~~
limedaring
Thanks! All of your suggestions are things I'm testing. ;)

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lscott3
Not sure if you've seen any of the stuff by patio11 but he's pretty much
bootstrapping his companies (Bingo Card Creator & Appointment Reminder),
consulting and info products and he seems to be doing pretty well for himself.
He's pretty transparent about his numbers on BCC and has plenty tips for
microISV's.

He blogs here: <http://www.kalzumeus.com/>

__*

I've just started to ramp up on doing a SaaS/blogging about the process. It
can be pretty overwhelming if its your first go 'round.

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dangrossman
<http://www.improvely.com>, <http://www.w3counter.com>, and two dozen other
sites over the years. Revenue in the millions over the past 8 years I've been
self-employed, and I'm not taking a pay cut versus what I'd earn in industry
if I had gone that route instead.

I've run into many limitations that have prevented me from offering products,
service plans and sales strategies that would've been profitable but required
more employees. I could hire, but I enjoy what I do, and switching from what I
do to hiring and managing sales/support/ops teams is a totally different job I
wouldn't enjoy so much.

~~~
iends
Not to be all creepy, but I first encountered you on sitepoint probably close
to eight years ago and continue to be impressed with your products.

Keep up the good work!

~~~
dangrossman
That was the place to be back then :)

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rex_gsd
(Australian here) I built <http://www.trackmyride.com.au> from scratch by
myself. The system took about 10 months to build working on it daily after I
saved up the initial capital. It has been tough work but recently with a
change of marketing we've been gaining some good traction in both the private
and business industries now. All our customers love the software itself so
that's a big positive but I think I need to redesign the landing page again.
I'll do that after the project below is completed.

Since June 2012 I've been working on a new project, solo again putting in a
few hours here and there as I can which should be ready to launch hopefully in
another week. That project is still in stealth mode until it's unveiled
though. I was hoping it could have been completed much quicker but you know
how these things turn out. Though the TMR business' hardware and software can
work anywhere in the world the marketing for it has been aimed at Australians
so hence all our customers are aussies. The new project will be aimed
primarily at Americans so that should be an interesting learning curve.

As for bottlenecks, by far the biggest hurdle with Track My Ride has been the
marketing. As a programmer by trade when I first started out I had no idea how
to market the system and mostly it's been a case of throw a lot of $ and see
what sticks. Having a co-founder with marketing know how would have helped a
lot. That being said though revenues and sales are still increasing each month
so as a solo venture it's turned out pretty well so far.

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navneetaron
I've built several companies as a solo founder- MobiQpons Inc., ZipTrips.in
and most recently Plumreef.com

I've usually brought in early employees for large equity, contractors to help
me with specific things that I'm not good at.

All my companies have generated revenues and have become operationally cash
flow positive. However, my companies haven't scaled for two reasons: a. When
the going gets tough- I'm alone and its depressing b. There's not as much
cross fertilization/validation/push back on ideas as there should be.

Next t

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ronyeh
I built a company that develops iOS apps. My most successful app so far is
<http://www.tinypiano.com/> with 6 million (free) downloads (launched Feb
2012). The app is monetizing via ads and in-app purchases.

I do this full time. My goal was to make an app that achieves 10 million
downloads. It looks like it should hit that mark sometime this year. Another
goal was to make enough money to buy a house. Assuming all goes well, that
should be possible in a couple of years.

~~~
coryl
You mean buy a house in cash? Or afford a mortgage on your own?

~~~
ronyeh
Good question. I guess I meant that I'd be able to pay off enough of the
mortgage such that my monthly payment would be close to my current rent. :) If
it turns out that I do better than expected, then I'll pay for it in cash. If
not, then I can work longer. In any case, the app is doing well enough that
it's now my full time job.

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TallboyOne
I built <http://pineapple.io> all on my own in a matter of months (I also
learned rails just so I could build it).

I am definitely seeing the 'end' of the cap where I simply can't put more time
into it. So far I have held up really well though, and I implement most of if
not all the changes that people want to see (if I feel they are a good fit,
that is).

But yes, my traffic is growing every day with more and more users, and adding
new features is starting to get somewhat daunting as my code base grows.

As far as marketing, accounting, programming, etc I do it all, with the
occasional help from a friend when it is too much.

Highly recommended though :) My site is my baby, and the goal when I made it
wasnt to make lots of cash... it was to make a LARGE site that everyone uses.
ever since I was a kid I wanted to create a massive site with thousands of
users, and so far my dream has become a reality. it is a very good feeling.

~~~
hackerboos
Can I ask how are you processing website screenshots on that page?

~~~
TallboyOne
<http://url2png.com>

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AlexanderZ
<http://feetlot.com> \- because buying shoes online is hard. The straw that
broke the camel's back was when I ordered 2 different pairs of shoes in size
12. One fit like 11.5, the other like 12.5. Ha. That's when I decided to
create a place where people can help each other with shoes' sizes.

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Ecio78
Rob Walling is a solo entrepreneur that hires Virtual Assistants, coders,
designers etc.. in order to create/manage his own products (i.e.
<http://hittail.com> <http://www.dotnetinvoice.com/> and others). You can get
more info about how he is doing by reading his blog
<http://www.softwarebyrob.com> or better listening to the podcast
<http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/> he co-host with Mike Tabber (another
solo entrepeneur, his site <http://www.singlefounder.com/> )

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askar
www.IslamicEventFinder.com - For the past few months I've spent my nights and
a portion of my weekends to build what I think is a decent website that tries
to unify all Islamic events into one central website and make it easy for the
Muslims to make use of them. There is a small charge to publish events (there
are few features that justifies the price) but it's completely free to use.
It' s relatively new so there is nothing much I can tout about revenue. It's
getting decent traction but what I've learnt is that the Islamic world is
something really hard to reach out to for these online, tech stuff; many of
the organizers don't get it. Would appreciate your feedback.

To your question, absolutely there are many bottlenecks and limitations. If
you are married and have kids then intensify these 2 factors by a magnitude of
10 maybe, at least in my case, especially if you have a day job that consumes
most of your time. Also, you might get stuck some simple stuff that would
drain your energy and offset the timelines. Some of the mundane tasks would
make you go crazy (imagine coming up with 26 different email templates for the
emails that go out...that's mundane). A few ideas where I wasn't 100% sure and
felt a cofounder would be someone who would have came in handy on those
instances.

On top of all these hurdles, after you launch, you have to do product support
along with marketing and getting the word out about your product. Mailchimp
campaigns, analyzing Analytic points, testing to make sure things are not
broken and a whole lot would keep you on your toes. I feel I can only for that
far along but I'm determined to make it to the pole.

I believe the reward is after we sort through all of these hurdles...I can
proudly say that "this is me, this is what I've built, all by myself" (Seth
Godin's quote except the "all by myself" part).

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victorNicollet
A website is not a start-up, and there's vastly more to a start-up than
building the software.

I built the software for RunOrg (<http://runorg.com>) on my own --- private
social networks for non-profits as a service --- but my co-founder's business
development skills have been invaluable in getting our current 60k members.

As a side-effect, I also built and open-sourced a web framework for OCaml
(<http://ohm-framework.com>).

I'm definitely feeling the stretch on my resources, though : there are so many
feature requests and so little time to build everything I'd like to build.

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whichdan
<http://easyendorse.com> \- solo developed, launched recently. Looking through
my commit history, I definitely have a few "quiet" months that would have
benefited from someone giving me a kick in the ass.

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BobWarfield
CNCCookbook is my solo startup:

[http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo-
bootstrapp...](http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/a-solo-
bootstrapping-odyssey-2012-was-the-year-i-quit-my-day-job/)

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splatcollision
Being a "solo founder" is great for the bootstrapped approach. Of course there
are limits as to what you can do, but if you work hard that limit is pretty
high.

My own solo project / side business is <http://www.edit-room.com/> I've done
all the design and development, and the business setup to be able to accept
credit cards as well. I've learned so much in the past 2 years, and I wouldn't
change doing it for anything.

Even if you can just do a little bit every day, just start doing research or
sketching out things on paper.

Only way to do it is to get started.

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stevejalim
This is a great thread, but rather than it get buried after a while, I've just
set up a quick tumblr where everyone is welcome to showcase their stuff:
<http://solostartups.tumblr.com/submit>

(I won't be sticking ads on it or anything lame like that - just thought it'd
be a nice thing to exist).

Note: as of 8pm GMT, it's empty because I didn't want to harvest links from
this thread without goodwill - but submissions are open, so please do get
stuck in.

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8bitliving
<http://Sweetsoundtrack.com> \- I often hear music I like in movies and want
to add them to my personal collection. This website allows users to look up a
movie, and quickly find information about the songs and artists featured in
the soundtrack. I started to make a little revenue - enough to cover my
hosting costs. I'd love to hear any feedback.

~~~
anywherenotes
I often search for songs (in google) by some of their lyrics. Maybe you can
add that ability.

Also searching for a movie based on actor would help.

When I searched for Scarface, I got 3 hits. Mousing-over I was able to see the
year of movie, but maybe a picture next to the hits would help.

Looking at the list: <http://sweetsoundtrack.com/Movies/scarface-1983> Maybe
you could add a link to lyrics?

And finally, it might be good to have a little song-preview next to each song,
so that if user isn't sure by the name, they can listen to a part of it. (not
sure if there are legal issues with this)

~~~
8bitliving
Thank you for the feedback anywherenotes. Adding the lyrics is a great idea if
I can find a public API. I planned to do a song preview using Itunes/Amazon
clips on the Movie page but I was having some performance issues. Currently,
you can get to #rd party previews via individual "song pages" though I realize
this is less convenient.

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namigop
I started <http://www.wcfstorm.com> about 3 years ago. Been working on it on
weekdays and weeknights and am now up to my 3rd product WcfStorm.Rest (a
desktop-based REST test client)

It's been pretty good so far. WCFStorm (the WCF client) is fairly well known
and WcfStorm.Rest is now starting to get some sales.

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nathanhoad
<http://athletable.com> \- I built it myself as a side project and, while it's
still early days, things are going pretty well so far. The only real
bottleneck for me was redoing the entire UI about 30 times. In the end I just
told myself that I could always just change it after launch if people didn't
like it.

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mmackh
I've built InstaPDF (<http://instapdf.me>) on my own. It consists of a web
backend, written from scratch in PHP and a mobile client for iOS (native). A
mac app is coming soon. Did the design too. I never worked in a team with more
than one coder though, it would be great do to experience that sometime too.

~~~
fomojola
Site looks good. Small copy correction: "Amazon's Elastic Cloud 2" should be
"Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud".

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will_brown
Applied to YC solo with this:

<http://www.solitaireinfosys.com/demo/will_brown/index.php>

A social network combining YouTube and Google Earth. I plan to launch within
30 days. So you can get as far as launch.

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egomaksab
Breeze - <http://letsbreeze.com>, it's Basecamp and Trello mashup.

Originally it was developed for a final thesis about agile project management.
Launched in September last year, totally bootstrapped and already have paying
customers.

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ses
<http://www.meetingshed.com> \- bootstrapped, some interest and a few users,
not enough to start a business. I keep it running because I use the VPS I set
up for it for other stuff.

~~~
e-dard
I'm getting warnings on Chrome regarding your SSL cert expiring.

~~~
ses
Unfortunately the SSL cert expired and I just couldn't justify renewing it. I
know they're not expensive but I have other priorities. It is still secured
over https and I mainly keep it running to demo to anyone interested now and
then.

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tmilard
Back in 2005 I built a web site for workers who wanted an urgent WIFI/WLAN
hotspot in Paris's cafes. I made it alone for myself. Bang ! People loved it.
www.cafes-wifi.com

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niftylettuce
<http://teelaunch.com/>

