
Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses? - gajus
This question was asked 2 years ago (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13326535" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13326535</a>) by mdoliwa, 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.
======
bekman
I run a popular Quiz website. I make around $6,000 per month from Google
adsense. I work between 2-3 hours a week usually posting quiz links on my
Pinterest page. My only expense is hosting which is around $20 per month
(Digital Ocean). I have never advertised my website and it gets all the
traffic from Pinterest Organically. Compare to my salary, I'm an IT
Administrator in my day job and make $400 per month. I live in Ethiopia :) I
thought this inspires my fellow HN. Good day.

~~~
jfoster
If your job is less than 10% of your income, why keep it?

~~~
bekman
Good question, my career is very important to me. It gives me an identity. I
just can’t sit at home all day. I’m gonna die with boredom.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I don't think I'll ever quite understand this mentality that "not having a
job"=="sitting at home all day". Do people not have hobbies of any kind? They
really only find meaning in pursuit of money?

~~~
jm4
Not necessarily pursuit of money. Work. The world is built on work. If we stop
working we go back to living in wilderness - literally and figuratively.
Hobbies are fun, but they aren’t work. Work provides a different kind of
satisfaction.

~~~
kulahan
Maybe it provides satisfaction for _you_. My most satisfying projects have
always been the ones I was passionate enough about to do at home on my own or
with a small group of like-minded people. I'd have done a lot more if I
weren't balancing it with the necessary evil of a paying job.

------
WA
I have a consumer app with a subscription model. I'm a single developer with
no employees. I work between 10-30 hours per week. Last year, my EBIT was
close to 300,000€. This year, it's going to be around 370,000€ (and since I
live in Germany, my income is in the top 0,5% or so). In the first year, my
EBIT was merely 30,000€. It's been going up steadily since then and my product
has been around quite a while.

Please don't ask what my business is. I rather share true numbers, but don't
link to my product. I see no upside in being super transparent about the
financials in a non-anonymous way (although I enjoy transparency from others
;)).

What I think makes my product successful (and I keep this short, because luck
plays an important role. Most startup stories suffer from survivorship and
hindsight bias):

\- It serves a niche and does so very well, better than all others. I have
clearly defined my niche, although it took me years to exactly pinpoint it.
There's a tendency to want to grab a "bigger audience". Since I make more
money than I ever imagined, there is no need to grow bigger or reach a wider
audience. This would also make the product less focused on the specific niche.

\- Start working on something, release a prototype after 2-6 weeks. Don't
invest months or years in something without users.

\- For me, marketing = SEO. I never really got into social media. But I have
to admit that nowadays, my SEO rankings dropped a bit and people talk about my
product in Facebook groups.

\- If there are two books I'd recommend: "Rework" by Basecamp. It helps you to
focus on a minimal set of features and think about what's truly important.
Couple this with "This is Marketing" from Seth Godin, where he explains how
traditional marketing is dead and how it's important to find a niche. Don't
read more books, interviews or whatever. Get into a "starter mindset" by
reading and then do.

\- The subscription model helps you to stay afloat. People will pay for a
product they use every day (and thus, derive value from every day). If your
product is not used every day, but only once per month or so, expect way lower
revenue.

~~~
jamil7
> release a prototype after 2-6 weeks

I'm in the situation where my product overlaps significantly with others but
brings (IMO) some missing features and a better overall experience. I would
love to launch quickly but feel I need some feature parity with competitors
first.

~~~
brianwawok
You can't reach feature parity to an active product.

Say they have 10 developers and 200 features. You can go from 0 to 200
features in 2? years. How many new features have they added in 2 years, 100?
So the cycle repeats.

Do a subset of the competitor but do it really well.

------
lemming
I develop and sell Cursive ([https://cursive-ide.com](https://cursive-
ide.com)), which has paid my bills nicely for a couple of years now. Currently
I make more than I made in my last job at Google. I never thought I'd be able
to make a living selling developer tools, much less into a niche market, but
I'm constantly amazed by how well Cursive does.

The work is a mix of fun and boring slog, like most jobs I guess. A lot of my
time is spent on support, both technical and sales, so when I work less I
actually end up getting more frustrated because a higher percentage of the
work is not as fun as writing new features. I've also had a bad year of having
to work around IntelliJ bugs, but normally I like the actual development work
a lot. I have friendly enthusiastic users who constantly make my day. It's a
pretty sweet gig, and being able to decide how I spend my time, and which bits
of my time I spend working, is priceless.

I got started during a sabbatical from my last job, just building something
that I wanted myself. It turns out that lots of other people wanted it too.

~~~
spv
I cannot believe that you make more from such a niche dev tool than your job
at Google. I always thought people who use clojure/scheme would be using their
custom setup in emacs or vim.

I'm interested to learn more details, how things were when you first started
out selling the app and the trend.

~~~
Crinus
You say that but one thing that i always dislike when i consider taking a look
at Lisps is how everything seems to be either on Emacs or looks like it'd
really like to be Emacs.

Personally I want a full blown IDE that takes advantage of advanced modern
technologies such as displays that can draw individual pixels, have a model of
the codebase that allows advanced features such as word completion and
preferably fits nicely with the underlying OS. A debugger would also be nice,
but i understand that sometimes i ask too much.

I wouldn't mind paying for such a tool (though i do mind DRM schemes and
subscriptions - i want to be able to pay once and then be on my way). Cursive
looks something i'd pay for if i was really interested into Clojure and was
using macOS.

~~~
brokenkebab
Actually, there's completion, and excellent debugging tools for Clojure in
Emacs, both step-by-step kind, and investigative. "I don't want to use Emacs"
is a completely valid stance (de gustibus...), but it should not be
misinformed.

~~~
Crinus
I know that Emacs has good support for Lisps in general, my comment was a joke
towards what i consider basic features of an IDE (the whole 'modern' and
'advanced' thing when referring to stuff that were available in the late 80s
should have made it obvious :-P). It comes mainly from my observation of the
trend where a lot of developers like to jury rig "IDEs" out of text editors
and a bunch of other unrelated tools that look as if they are made to be run
in 70s terminals that look and feel considerably worse that MS-DOS
applications which had 1/100000th of the available resources.

------
phito
I sell carnivorous plants online. It's not my main job/revenue so it doesn't
fit your description of successful. It could certainly be my main income but I
like keeping it as a side job.

Here's a few things I do that made it "successful":

\- Obviously, selling good quality product is the most important thing.

\- Offering rare species that are hard to find elsewhere

\- Having a good website that works, is well organized and easy to use.

\- Friendly customer support, I like to talk to my customers as I would talk
to a friend (to a certain extend).

\- Fast shipping after receiving an order, or at least let the customer know
when their order will be shipped.

\- A good logo made by a designer, this has been super helpful for brand-
awareness

\- Good packaging that minimize most damage the plants, with printed plastic
labels for each plants (with my logo on them)

\- Active presence on social media, with good quality picture posts (with my
logo on them)

\- Always give more to the customer than what they expected to get. Even a
small surprise when they open their package will make them feel good about
their purchase.

\- SEO optimisation so that people can find you on google. I struggle with
this because google keeps autocorrecting my name.

Most of these points feel obvious to me, but I would say 95% of the other
sellers fail at multiple of them. Mainly the customer support point, a lot of
them feel like I'm talking to a robot.

I would say the part that I struggle the most with is staying on schedule and
not forgetting about people who order via email/private message. Thankfully
cold weather in the winter allow me to take a 6 months break each year. During
that time I can relax and dive into other projets.

~~~
Agentlien
My father-in-law also cultivates and sells carnivorous plants as well as water
lilies as a hobby. And he's also Belgian.

~~~
phito
That's awesome, maybe I know him!

~~~
Agentlien
I thought you might. His name is Guido Lurquin.

------
mittermayr
My business is in my bio, don't want to link it here. Pays about the same as
my previous job at Microsoft did, but with a lot less involvement — I haven't
touched the main code in about a year now. I probably spend about two or three
hours a week on customer support, that's it, really. No marketing spend, all
word-of-mouth and Google.

The idea came about when I wanted to post to Instagram, but the API didn't
allow it. So I spent about a week trying to automate the process using a
phone, with screenshot OCR and a state machine. After a lot of messing around
with it, I had a working prototype. Made a website, added a $5/month Stripe
plan to see if people were willing to pay for it, sent it to a few friends,
posted it on Twitter, and eventually, people signed up and tried it out. It
worked, then it didn't work, then I fixed it, then it worked again, this went
on and on for a few weeks until it became quite useable.

About two months in, local offices of Toyota and Samsung signed up, and they
loved it, money wasn't an issue. That was the moment I realized it may be
worth doing it properly.

It grew organically, and I bought lots and lots of Android phones, which are
simple workers getting jobs off a queue, and host them in two locations
roughly. Phones last for about two years, then I buy new ones (<$100 a phone).
Each phone pays for itself in less than a month, server costs are less than
$200 a month.

Facebook tried to sue me after I filed for a trademark, we figured it out (I
rebranded). Been going steady ever since, but I consider it to be shut down by
yet another Instagram move sooner or later. But I said that after 3 weeks of
running it, and it's been almost five years I think.

I made it a point to not use any private Instagram APIs, like all my
competitors did — instead, I don't emulate the Instagram app, I emulate the
person tapping the phone, and use only the official app for it. I think that
let me survive this long.

~~~
cpeterso
Very cool idea to use the real app. Do you have a rack of real devices or do
you use emulators, if you don't mind sharing?

How do you differentiate Busy from competitors like Buffer (with its 69
employees, according to Wikipedia)?

btw, there is a small typo on your "How it works" page: "secure and:
affordable" should just be "secure and affordable". :)

~~~
mittermayr
Real devices yes! I tried to use emulators a couple of times, but the first
few attempts failed due to Instagram detecting it (missing cameras, etc.), and
later attempts failed when I realized it's not going to save me a lot if I
went the emulator route, because they need quite a lot of resources too, and
you can't just run 10 emulators on a regular computer unless you optimise them
extremely well and know what you're doing (custom Android build as a minimum).
So it actually turned out to be easier with real devices. Plus, there's been
some IP/VPN/Proxy emergencies, where it was super handy to pop in a 3G/4G sim
card into the phone, and have it work 100% like a real person's phone. The
cost is considerably higher (~ 15-50 GB per phone a month), but I am still
looking into doing that, as it would allow the "phone agents" to become
completely independent from location.

Buffer: I haven't done much in terms of "battling" with competition, simply
because my users will tell me what they want, and that's an easier crowd to
serve than trying to follow a competitor who may be running down the wrong
path without knowing yet. If a bunch of users ask me for the same feature
multiple times, then I look into what it takes to make it happen, or I'll
explain why I can't offer that, and that's what's been driving it from day
one.

Thanks for your note about the typo, I am actually always a bit ashamed of my
landing pages, because they feel the least fun to make (to me at least), when
they drive most of the conversion of course.

~~~
tyzerdak
Is it something like buffer? If yes, what your prices?

------
throwaway21212
I have a one-person lifestyle business. I like it primarily because it gives
me the flexibility to live anywhere in the world. I hated my old desk job and
the idea of 2 weeks vacation every year.

I run a SaaS product that integrates with ERPs. I pretend to my customers that
I have a team (so much so that I have multiple email addresses to people that
don't exist that actually just forward to me). One of our customers thinks
they're paying for a team of 6, but it's actually just me.

My monthly billings last month was 73k USD. I am a tax resident of a tax haven
although I do live 3-6 months at a time in a different country.

The only advice I'd give anyone looking to build a lifestyle business is to
keep your ambitions and by extension- product feature set in check. I know
several other people who operate like me, and the common thread is we have
businesses that can easily take VC funds, hire, and expand. But for lifestyle
priorities, we chose not to.

A lot of people I've met (particularly in Chiang Mai, Thailand) copy popular,
common, and easy online businesses such as drop shipping, social media XYZ, or
coding. Unless you live in a really low cost area, it's not a good life. The
key is have a very specific niche that can be scaled upwards if you want, but
you always have the option not to. Those the ideas and businesses that seems
to provide the ideal balance in lifestyle.

EDIT: The product came about at my last job where I built it to make my own
job easier. Essentially it did 95% of what job which at the time enabled me to
be the "best performer" while not actually working that hard.

~~~
esquire_900
Don't you find that whole pretending part to be unethical? With those kind of
revenues it shouldn't be hard to either hire 2 and make factual claims, or
just drop the whole we're-a-team claim.

I can't imagine that building a foundation on these kind of lies towards your
clients is going to be sustainable in the long run?

~~~
blunte
Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception
management. Whether justified or not, many potential customers will choose a
seemingly bigger company over a smaller one (especially a one-person company).

Now if they were billing based on number of people working for a client, and
they were charging for phantom people, that would be fraud.

This guy just has an optimized workflow that he presents as if it were a team
of people. If the customer feels that's unreasonable, they wouldn't pay.
There's nothing unethical about that.

~~~
mrunkel
> Pretending to be a bigger company than you are is not fraud, it's perception
> management.

That's some pretty fancy doublespeak right there.

No. I'm sorry, but this is flat out lying. You can rationalize it all you
like, but if you are lying and inventing people that don't exist, it's fraud.

This isn't even lying by omission, but actively working to deceive.

Sure, the customer may be getting full value for their money, but then why is
the lying necessary?

~~~
blunte
Now, wikipedia may not be right, but I imagine there's been plenty of effort
by legally knowledgeable people to define "Fraud" well.

First statement in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud) :

"In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or
to deprive a victim of a legal right."

And later, a clarification:

"the requisite elements of fraud as a tort generally are the intentional
misrepresentation or concealment of an important fact upon which the victim is
meant to rely, and in fact does rely, to the harm of the victim."

By your definitions, most businesses would be committing "fraud". Many, many,
many companies have multiple emails, multiple phone numbers, even multiple
mailing boxes that may all be handled by one person but which serve to filter
and separate incoming contacts and certainly also present a level of
professionalism that some customers find comforting.

And what about companies that have the same service but present it differently
(to look niche or specific) to different audiences via different websites? Are
they being fraudulent by making their potential customers feel uniquely
served?

There are so many more examples I could bring up related to marketing,
presentation, etc.

------
josephwegner
Everytime I see these threads I end up feeling inadequate. For the rest of the
folks like me, I will share a small tidbit of wisdom:

Starting a business is really hard and it's totally OK to just go work for
Salesforce. You do you.

~~~
huangc10
It's not just really hard. I think the hard part most people can get by. It's
the luck part that a lot of us are missing. You have to be lucky enough to be
that 1 person who catches the train at the right time.

Imagine the odds of that. That's what gets me. It's not necessarily how hard
you work. It's the window of opportunity that most people miss.

~~~
HatchedLake721
You need luck to become a unicorn startup. You don’t need luck to build a one-
person online business, only hard work.

~~~
MiSeRyDeee
Hard work itself means clearly nothing. You need to work hard into right
direction. And getting into right direction requires certain amount of luck.

~~~
Enginerrrd
If you're relying on luck, you're headed in the wrong direction. I was very
late in the game, at least 2 years past the big market boom in my area of
expertise, but I saw that the momentum was there to keep carrying on. I was
working during those two years to be ready to fully launch, and I'm now making
a modest but comfortable $200k/yr in a place with moderate cost of living.

If this hadn't come along, I had several backup plans I could turn into a
viable business. You have to learn to see the money and take the money, but
that's a learnable skillset.

I also had an uncle that just had a nose for what the next big thing was going
to be. He made more money than I do, but he knew what the next big thing was
going to be because he learned everything he could about small reaches from
his current operation and talked to everyone.

------
khuknows
I run [https://pageflows.com](https://pageflows.com) and have been living off
it full time for a little over a year.

The business makes a bit more than what I was earning a few years ago as a
junior developer in London, so it's not a huge amount of money, but it's
enough.

It's a fairly boring business to run and not as predictable or sexy as some
sort of micro saas, but it's I'm happy with how things have been so far. Happy
to answer any questions you have.

~~~
44Aman
This is great! I assume most of your customers will be businesses, so why not
offer a bulk "@domain" subscription for $999 (lifetime) so that anyone in the
business can use it without restriction. Restrict the other packages to
personal use and you should be able to drive up your income.

~~~
khuknows
Most customers are indeed businesses. Great shout on some sort of
team/business plan - it's on my to-do list!

------
aacook
I'm working on NanaGram ([https://nanagram.co](https://nanagram.co)). The
tagline: Text or email your photos and we'll send 4x6 prints to your loved
ones.

It doesn't provide the majority of my income (yet) but by far and away it
provides the majority of my life's meaning. I haven't crossed the mental
hurdle of sharing all my numbers publicly yet but let's just say it is turning
a profit and there are thousands of happy NanaGrammers.

I got started on it at my grandfather's 94th birthday party when by brother
1-uppped my gift of live lobsters with the gift of "InstaGrandpa." He
prototyped it the night before and asked me to help build it.

Working solo is a challenge for many reasons. One thing I did early was
automate the customer feedback loops. I set up an automated loop to collect
customer reviews ([https://nanagram.co/#happy](https://nanagram.co/#happy)).
Collecting feedback from grandparents is a bit tougher so I set up a phone
line for them to dial in and leave voicemails
([https://nanagram.co/#happynanas](https://nanagram.co/#happynanas)). I get a
couple voicemails and reviews each week and it's like maker fuel.

Another big challenge is fighting isolation. I like to practice deep work but
there's a fine line between deep work and isolation. I would've given up a
year ago if it weren't for the advisor-like support from my brother and my
friend Dan. I did YC Startup School last summer and that was huge as well; I
remember sharing with the group that I was on the edge of throwing in the
towel, then last December MRR grew by over 2X. The next big thing I plan to
change in my life is adding weekly volunteering.

~~~
svacko
This reminded me a story of this funny guy who was trying to sell famous
large-scale prints/canvas of random popular instagram posts
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytrZuE1JamY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytrZuE1JamY)
. Anyway, good luck!

~~~
aacook
Awesome, checking it out! Thanks for sharing.

------
adrienjarthon
I run [https://updown.io](https://updown.io) since 2012, a website monitoring
service I created. I'm working about 5-10 hours per week on it. It makes about
$6,000 per month and is still growing linearly. I also keep a full-time job
alongside for now as an engineering manager. The key for me is to take time,
make something useful, delight your clients, and don't try to become uber or
airbnb.

~~~
kingkongjaffa
Can you explain who you customers are and why they want to know the stats for
uptime and would be willing to pay for it?

~~~
MiSeRyDeee
I'm curious too. Tracking your own website makes sense but there're definitely
better ways if that's your own website. Why do people want to track other
website regularly?

~~~
tbyehl
I think you're giving too much weight to what's in their example image. I use
a competitor's free tier to monitor my own stuff. Using a SaaS is better for
several reasons:

    
    
      1. Don't have to install / maintain anything.
      2. Who monitors the monitoring?
      3. Monitoring from inside my network doesn't always fully approximate end-user availability.

~~~
adrienjarthon
That's pretty much it, my customers are people who have websites and want to
be the first to know when there's an issue on it so they can fix it, in which
case a SaaS solution is usually better than some internal tools because it
eliminates setup/maintenance, keeps working when all your infrastructure is
down and monitors everything (including internet link). Some other clients
monitor website they do not own when they depend on it, for example as a
vendor I could monitor Amazon if I sell products on it to be aware of any
issue, or if I'm a digital customer engagement platform (what my full-time job
does) I can monitor services I interact with like facebook API, twitter API,
etc.

------
warent
I run a business called FontPeek
([https://fontpeek.com](https://fontpeek.com)). It doesn't provide the
majority of my income, but it does provide a meaningful amount and it's
constantly growing (pretty linearly). It's a simple tool that allows font
designers to add a secure font previewer to their web store. Only needs like
an hour of technical support a week, and it's currently costing me nothing to
run because Firebase has incredibly generous pricing.

It started out because a designer who sells fonts wanted to hire me to build a
font previewer for their website so that customers could demo the fonts
without being able to steal them. I quoted them the price and they said it was
out of their price range. I said I would build it for free if they subscribed
for a low monthly payment. They were ecstatic at the deal and invited their
friends to sign up. Turned out it was an unsolved niche in the font design
community. I posted it to a few websites where people were asking for a tool
that does this. The rest is history.

~~~
okramcivokram
(not a designer) I would not start my 7-day free trial without beforehand
having more information on what the product looks and feels like.

In the "How FontPeek Helps" section there's "Show your fonts" sections, but it
shows no fonts. I'd love to see some demo fonts/pages with embedded fonts at
least, perhaps a list of links to the designer's websites showing the widget
(I assume it's a widget, there's no info on it) if they consent.

~~~
Freeboots
Yeah, super weird. Surely they could just slap the font viewer thing right
there above the fold and be like, "this is it, here it is."

~~~
cawlin
If you are into typography you know what this thing looks like. This is super
niche.

------
wakatime
Seven years ago I solo-started an automatic time tracker for programmers
called WakaTime [1] and launched here on HN [2]. Partly from listening to
developers too much, I waited way too long (almost a year) before adding a
paid plan, but now it generates more MRR than an SF developer salary not
including stock options. Technically I make more from RSUs and stock from past
startups as a regular employee, but if I wasn't lucky with those then it would
be my highest income stream.

1: [https://wakatime.com/about](https://wakatime.com/about)

2:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6046227)

For anyone thinking it's egregiously difficult to start a solo-project: You're
right, but if you stick with it your persistence will pay off. For solo-
products, I think grit is the deciding factor between success and failure.

~~~
ratsimihah
How does top 1 code for 13 hours per day? o_o

~~~
MrDresden
I've used Wakatime now for a few years (I highly recommend it), and have been
going through one of the toughest projects of my life in the last 8 months. At
one point I reached ~16 hours per day (for only a couple of days). This kind
of output is not sustainable for more than a few days without incurring
serious problems from it. I have now gone back down to a more normal 6-9 hours
per day.

~~~
wakatime
Tip: Turn up your timeout preference.

[https://wakatime.com/blog/37-when-is-time-tracking-too-
accur...](https://wakatime.com/blog/37-when-is-time-tracking-too-accurate)

The default 15 mins is very accurate, and only represents time typing not time
working.

~~~
MrDresden
Thanks for the tip, didn't know I could modify this.

------
holoduke
Started with apps in the early ios and Android days. Made quickly about 300k a
year with them. I quit my job as a developer and focused on apps only. They
still make roughly 0.5 million a year these days. I bought several real estate
in the years after and they give me about 15k monthly in rental income. I did
spend 2 years doing almost nothing except traveling and spending lots of time
with my kids. Then I co founded a more serious company where I act as the CTO.
We got quite some people working for us so I back in normal work life. Work 4
days a week from 10 to 6. I actually enjoy it more than before. Being somehow
free of constant thinking about money is a really nice thing though.

~~~
codesternews
Thanks for sharing.

Which category your apps have? Do you think the current situation of
appstores(google and apple) apps can earn money?

Any advice for app developer who want to make and sell apps?

~~~
holoduke
I am mainly in sports apps. I think it is still possible to have succes. It
requires a lot of patience. Don't focus on the revenue part. And don't try to
build a new hype. Very slim chance you build the next angry birds. Instead try
to build a product that is based on an already successful specific category/
product. Very important is that you understand your customer and genuinely try
to make a product that is better than the competition. You should love your
own product. The good thing is that bigger companies tend to destroy their own
product with too many ads, notifications, non relevant features etc.
Furthermore I believe it's important that your product contents can be
automated without too much manual work. After all you are the only person with
only so much time. I know a guy who created a fitness diet app. He cooked and
photographed more than a thousand meals. He wrote many articles. In the end he
gave up. It took him 80 hours per week to maintain and update all the content.
His app was making maybe 100 a month. I know another guy who created a
successful formula 1 live app. He is using paid data feeds and scrapes a lot
of additional data. Everything automated. Spends like 10 hours a week
maintaining things. Makes about 100k a month. Similar story for a guy who
created a popular weather app. In essence the only thing what they do is
aggregation of data and present it in a relatively simple app. Also don't
spend too much time on analytics, seo and other optimizations. It may take 2
years before you get traction anyway. First the product then after (if it's
worth) the optimization. One concrete product where I think you can still have
success is a baby monitor with 2 phones. Couple of good apps only. All premium
priced. Not too difficult technically. I don't have time for it, so go for it
:)

~~~
mellson
great advise, thanks for sharing!

------
nathan_f77
I'm working on FormAPI [1], which helps developers fill out PDF documents. I
started working on this around 2 years ago. I was mostly working on it part-
time, and I took a few breaks while I was doing freelance work to pay the
bills. This year I raised some money from Earnest Capital [2], which has
allowed me to go full-time and hire some contractors.

I used to think that I wanted to build a one-person company and stay very
small, but I wasn't able to pull that off. I picked a niche that was too
small, and I also didn't have the skills to execute very well (especially in
marketing, sales, etc.), so growth has been quite slow. So I've exploring some
new features that could increase the number of potential customers, and the
new scope is going to be way too much work for one person, so I'm looking
forward to building a small team of 5-10 people.

Earnest Capital has been really awesome, and I still think the SEAL is a good
deal [3]. My experience has been similar to an accelerator program, but with a
bit less pressure. I've had some really helpful calls with mentors, and the
weekly update calls are also great for accountability. So I would recommend
Earnest if you want to raise some money while building a sustainable company.

[1] [http://formapi.io](http://formapi.io)

[2] [http://earnestcapital.com](http://earnestcapital.com)

[3] [https://earnestcapital.com/shared-earnings-
agreement/](https://earnestcapital.com/shared-earnings-agreement/)

~~~
nmfisher
Interested to hear your experience with Earnest. Can you disclose how much you
raised, what percentage earnings they take, and what the cap is?

~~~
nathan_f77
Unfortunately I'm not able to disclose the exact details of the offer, but it
was a fairly close to the default offer that you will find in their examples
and spreadsheets. And so far my experience has been great! The money has been
a huge help, but it's also been really great to have access to the mentor
network and other founders.

~~~
nmfisher
Thanks - the whole thing really intrigues me, I'll spend some time digging
through the material today.

Can you say what your monthly revenue was when you applied?

------
adamqureshi
I run [https://onlyusedtesla.com/](https://onlyusedtesla.com/) its an online
marketplace to buy / sell a Used Tesla.

I have been living off the income this whole year. This is my bread and
butter. I do not have a 9-5.

I launched the business with 4 listings in 2016. I live in New York. My main
goal is building brand equity.

Business Model.

Private Seller

$199 to list

$299 to list with a social boost

Dealer: $99-list

I do not use cookies. No Tracking. No google adsense.

~~~
jndsn402
What's involved in building a site like this? I am subscribed to an industry
forum in the beverage space where people buy and sell equipment using forum
posts - t's really inefficient and I often think they could use a simple
marketplace site.

~~~
adamqureshi
You should build a landing page for your idea and start testing. Spend your
money to find a legit copywriter, have him write out the copy to communicate
your business value prop ( clearly). You need a logo. Design, Dev, CMS (
wordpress) for payment processor use STRIPE. Make sure your site is stupid
fast and keep it simple with a focus on clarity. Next, you need to start
testing, testing , testing and then iterating weekly or monthly until you
start making money. Try to make money from the jump.

------
fastbeef
I always hold up [https://pinboard.in/](https://pinboard.in/) as a poster
child for a successful one-man shop. It's so successful he takes several
months off at a time, right now he's in HK reporting on the demonstrations.

He's very generous with sharing his financials on his blog:
[https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/)

~~~
woutr_be
It's a shame he hasn't updated the financials since 2017 tho. I always liked
reading up on it.

~~~
fastbeef
Did you read the latest blog post? I has financials for 2019

~~~
stephen
Hey! Been using pinboard for years, so I love it/huge thanks... but please
make the web UI a responsive layout so that it's usable on mobile. :-)

(I use the Android apps, and recently flipped from PinDroid to Pinkt, and both
are usable but not enjoyable. The Pinkt UX looks great, it's just slow on all
my bookmarks. If you don't like Android, maybe do a mini-partnership with the
Pinkt guy to polish it into a great experience.)

~~~
idlewords
Hey there. I'm working on this, at my usual agonizingly slow pace. But it's a
project!

------
0898
I run a series of events for people who run agencies. (By agency, I mean
creative, marketing, or technology agencies.)

Events are a good business to get into as a solo founder. You can book a
venue, and you don't have to pay until a few weeks before the event. If you
haven't sold any tickets you can just cancel the venue and walk away.

I started Agency Hackers in 2017 and I'm almost ready to quit my job and focus
on it full time.

It took me two years to figure out that instead of selling individual tickets
to events, I should offer a "membership" option where people can subscribe and
just come to every event.

Since I started offering membership last month I've signed up 30 agencies –
for a MRR of £4,500. Once I hit 50 I will quit my job.

To market the events, I don't run adverts or have much of a social presence.
The only way I promote the events is via cold email - and an opt-in email list
to customers. The cold email platform I use (Reply.io) did a case study on me
if you're curious: [[https://reply.io/case-study/agency-
hackers/](https://reply.io/case-study/agency-hackers/)]

~~~
boothead
I read that case study - really cool stuff!

------
gitgud
[1] Mike Carson is an interesting character, he runs a few websites single-
handedly [2] park.io being one of the bigger ones. His [1] indie hacker
interview is very interesting, as he resists growth and hiring people

[1] [https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-automating-
tasks-...](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-automating-tasks-helped-
me-grow-revenue-to-over-125k-mo-73da9c0b51)

[2] [https://park.io](https://park.io)

~~~
johnmorrison
Thank you so much for linking park.io, you might have just given me a miracle.

~~~
stephen82
I see what you did there...well played even if it were unintentionally ^_^
haha!

~~~
johnmorrison
I don't see what I did, mind explaining the joke?

~~~
allannienhuis
possibly: [https://www.linkinpark.com/](https://www.linkinpark.com/)

~~~
stephen82
Bingo! :)

------
temp_throw
I have a UK based e-business, I've turned over between £750,000 and now
£950,000 over the past four years (ex VAT). (~76% net profit margin)

Its just me, I'm a developer, which meant I could bootstrap the whole thing
for zero cost (time not included) but I've always felt I knew I had what it
takes to make a small business successful. Its an online service, we have a
web site and apps in the app stores. I'd rather not say exactly what we do as
this way I can be transparent on numbers. (Also, I am slightly paranoid of
copy-cats) We have a paid for service, costs less than £50, its not a
subscription, just a one off purchase. As has been said previously, luck plays
a big part in success and I'm not going to pretend this is not true for me
too.

-The competition are £MM businesses, and this is probably why I am able to be so successful as I can move faster, adapt, and resolve issues. Over time, people notice this. They tend to buy the customer via adwords.

-Word of mouth is a huge part of how the product has grown, people like the product and tell their friends/family, I spend less than £1500 p/m on advertising through the traditional online mediums.

\- I always try new ideas out, and find out if people like them. Its low risk,
low cost, high reward. Big fan of XP, agile, etc

\- I'd recommend - Getting real (Basecamp) -
[https://basecamp.com/books/getting-real](https://basecamp.com/books/getting-
real), its got some solid advice

\- A mentality of always wanting to make the product better, without bloating
it, is key.

\- People always worry about support. It's really not a big deal, I've had
hundreds of thousands of customers over the years, support contact is low.

Happy to answer any questions if people find it useful.

~~~
kohanz
As someone running a business with some similar characteristics (solo, not a
subscription, B2C branching into B2B), but at a much earlier stage, I would
love to learn more from you, if you're willing. Feel free to reach out to me
(e-mail in profile).

~~~
temp_throw
Hi, is the app you are building in your bio? Vidhug?

~~~
kohanz
Thanks for responding. Yes and sorry, I didn't realize my e-mail wasn't
visible. You can reach me at hello at that company domain.

------
duanem
I develop Flowx [[https://www.flowx.io](https://www.flowx.io)], an Android
weather app. It makes around $2,500 USD/month with about $500/month in costs
excluding my time. It covers about 60% of my total costs including my time
which is 40+ hours a week. I cover my remaining costs through contract work.
This might not seem like a success but the business allowed us to move to the
Rarotonga, Cook Islands from Auckland, New Zealand. Lifestyle-wise and
building-a-business-wise, I think it's a success.

~~~
zenlibs
Congrats - this is certainly a success, especially for monetizing in a heavily
crowded space with many free alternatives available.

Can you share a few pointers on competing in a crowded market.

~~~
duanem
The app space in general might be crowded but the weather market for the Flowx
type of app is not so crowded. Windy (and Ventusky) is our closest competitor.
Windy initially targeted extreme sports but now seems to target the larger
extreme weather (hurricanes) notification and warning market, i.e., high-
volume. I believe there is enough room for Flowx alongside Windy, etc... by
targeting a niche market that require more in-depth and technical weather
data, e.g. farmers.

Technically, Windy is based on the code from
[https://earth.nullschool.net](https://earth.nullschool.net) which limits them
to that code-base. Flowx is written from scratch and is different by design.
This means I can do different things, e.g., the smooth swiping. So I think I
can compete with different techniques.

As an engineer, I am guilty of focusing on features and the product over
marketing. So my marketing is lacking. Though, I'm looking into writing about
my experiences with the weather app.

In summary, I think there is enough room in the advanced weather data market
and can compete through niche markets and technical features.

------
fbelzile
I sell freemium software that blocks distractions on your computer so that you
can focus on doing work. Unlike my competitors, it's a one-time payment
business model.

The idea for my product first came to me when a friend in university had
trouble staying focused on writing papers. He was constantly playing World of
Warcraft and needed a way to temporarily block himself from playing the game.
So I quickly made a little VB.NET app and service that would watch for the
game executable and kill the process if it starts. It did the job well enough
and he ended up graduating :)

At that point, some other students approached me and asked for my little app
to help them study. That's when, half-way through university (2010), I made a
website for my app and had it available for free. I continued to maintain it
and over 4 years, added more features including: blocking websites, adding
breaks, scheduling, and passwords.

In 2014, I split the product into a free and paid tier. It wasn't an easy
decision, but I was spending a lot of time on it by this point and customer
support was also starting to take a serious hit on my personal time. In about
two years (2016), I was making more money from the paid product than my well
paying government day job. So, I decided to quit my job and work on my
business full time.

Although I felt it was risky, the alternative was passing up an opportunity
many people dreamed of having. I never planned to start a business in the
first place and I kind of felt/still feel imposter syndrome. For now, I'm just
enjoying my new found freedom and continue to be thankful for my new job. I'm
going to keep it a lifestyle business for now, but I wouldn't be opposed to
selling it as my exit plan.

I've spent (effectively) $0 in advertising since developing it and I'd say my
customers come from organic search, external links, and word-of-mouth.

~~~
shadowfax92
Can you share numbers airing how much you Male yearly from this?

~~~
cityzen
great autocorrect!

~~~
shadowfax92
damn, typed on my iPhone :(

------
uri_merhav
I own Product Pix
([https://www.proproductpix.org](https://www.proproductpix.org)). It removes
the background from product photos, with the intended audience being mostly
people who sell stuff online and need to set their background against a white
background.

It makes $1300/month right now, up from $0 6 months ago. Living in the Bay
Area, that would put me well below the poverty line if it were my sole source
of income, so I'm not gonna call it "successful" just yet.

How I got started: I do machine learning, and I methodically searched for
places where people buy a service transactionally on platforms like Fiverr and
that I think can be automated away (or greatly automated with human reviewers
in the loop) with state of the art machine learning models. There are hundreds
or thousands of such opportunities that individuals can solve on their own.

I'll be more comfortable giving sage advice once I've crossed the $10K/month
threshold, but still I'd say a willingness to try a lot of shit out and get
digging on stuff you have 0 familiarity with is mandatory. In this project
I've had to learn javascript, frontend, photography, google ads campaign
management etc.

Another tip I wish someone had told me is, build a pricing page from day one.
The temptation to get _some_ signal you're useful to people will drive you to
offer stuff for free, but that will end up getting you a lot of unwanted
attention from people who will never ever pay.

~~~
The_Amp_Walrus
This is very cool. I want to do something similar, with a particular focus on
enhancing audio quality. How many ideas did you try and discard before
deciding to do your "background remover" service? What were they, if you don't
mind sharing?

~~~
uri_merhav
Previous ideas: 1\. Automated proffers io always profile pic selector and
optimizer. Like scam your Facebook with permissions and pick out the best
photo for LinkedIn, potentially enchanting and cropping Ali g the way.
Terrible idea because consumers generally never pay and getting people’s
attention to this is going to be far more expensive than the value I can give
you.

2\. Automated tests for “broken” front end based on how the side renders on
various devices. Pretty sure a machine learning model can recognize broken
design. I still think it’s a good idea but potentially a pretty complicated
sell!

3\. The rest I’ll redact because I’m still toying with doing them.

~~~
aptwebapps
> 2\. Automated tests for “broken” front end based on how the side renders on
> various devices. Pretty sure a machine learning model can recognize broken
> design. I still think it’s a good idea but potentially a pretty complicated
> sell!

Now that's a pretty neat idea. I don't know about recognizing subjectively
broken design, but recognizing discrepancies between screenshots seems quite
doable. Could be a good thing to integrate into a test suite.

------
treyfitty
I launched a men’s skincare line about 3 months ago
([https://www.mendskin.co](https://www.mendskin.co)) which isn’t “successful”
yet, but it’s my first experience selling physical goods and I think these
things take time.

It’s tough. There’s a reason a lot of companies spend $1MM from investors
before launching a product, but I wanted to test the hypothesis that this need
not be the case. “Beauty products” (for lack of a better term) definitely
require heavy capital, and it’s becoming hard to do everything by myself. All
the individual things that need to be done aren’t hard- it’s just that there’s
so much to do in order to deliver successful physical products.

But I enjoy it.

~~~
sshine
Interesting.

As a person in your target audience (except perhaps geography), here's what
I'd like:

I'm really dumb when it comes to skin care, but recently convinced myself that
it's important.

So I have zero clue where to start. Looking at your nicely stylized huge
rectangles with jars, my eyes glaze over: They're all the same! Short jar,
tall jar, short jar.

Why not write some blog posts to increase SEO ranking on subjects that your
audience might want to read:

\- What should my first skin care product be?

\- How making skin care a part of your daily routine in only X minutes a day.

\- How does one characterize skin (dryness, etc.), what's my skin type, and
what product should I buy for it?

\- How to cut costs making your own skin care products, and how buying your
products is not much more expensive, but a lot more effortless than that.

\- Something related to beards; like your front-page photo of a good looking
muscular man with a nice looking beard, maybe interview-style for aspiration.

~~~
treyfitty
Thanks for the feedback. SEO is definitely a work in progress. To that end,
I've created this to-be-published page ([https://www.mendskin.co/pages/mend-
skin-guide](https://www.mendskin.co/pages/mend-skin-guide)) which is meant to
be a "crash course" on skincare.

The world of skincare is vast, and I intend on creating newsletters to better
inform potential customers what they should be looking for. Very Soon.

------
louisswiss
I run Sales for Founders
([https://salesforfounders.com](https://salesforfounders.com)) - a course
where I teach (mainly technical) founders just enough about sales to find
their first customers and grow to $10k MRR.

Since starting work on the course in May, I’ve been through 3 iterations and
made about $40k.

The ‘final’ version of the course will open for sale in early November, and I
expect it to continue to be my main source of income for the next year or so
at least.

If you’re thinking about running a course (I was very sceptical at first) or
want to hear more, you can check out my recent interview on the
IndieHackers.com podcast.

------
mrskitch
I run a headless browser service called browserless.io. Got started due to
lack of a comparable service, and all others seemed more geared for testing.

It’s been around two years now, and makes more than any prior engineering job
I’ve ever had. You do have a lot of other stresses you might not otherwise
have, but you’ll also work a lot less than at a traditional job!

I’m working on a few interviews for some sites, which go more into the
details, and will post here when they’re done.

EDIT: feel free to comment here on anything or email me at joel at browserless
dot io

~~~
andy800
Not too excited that you just doubled the prices, but the service is very good
and I've found it to be much more effective than running locally. And you've
also been very very good with personal replies to support requests. Congrats
on your success.

~~~
mrskitch
Thanks for that, appreciate the honest feedback. I tried putting off the price
change as long as possible, and it was time unfortunately.

In any case, the support won’t change anytime soon, and if there’s stuff that
can be better I’m definitely all ears

------
WillPontificate
I bootstrapped a digital publishing business to over $200K per year.

Started 8 years ago, developed and published our first website for under $250
(I code, which helps). Learned SEO via trial & error, benefiting from the
post-Penguin and Panda implosions that kicked a bunch of spam sites out of our
target searches. Started putting together a predictive analytics package for
investing in digital content, so we have an idea of how content will pull
before we create it.

After that it was scaling and project management. Which has been a real
learning experience, since a lot of publishing basically sucks... many people
cranking out the same stuff. Very hard to keep "that special spark" in content
at scale.

Still have the day job. Digital publishing is an 11 on the hot / crazy scale
in terms of revenue stability (50% swings in monthly revenue on established
sites aren't uncommon), so have a reliable pay check & health insurance
reduces stress substantially. Plus I enjoy the work, most of the time.

One other benefit of having a "cover" day job: it allows you to "stay off the
radar" as a small business owner and fairly affluent member of your local
society. You've got a socially acceptable answer ("I punch a clock at company
X") and don't stand out. Most people have no clue about the true scope and
intensity of my side business, which simplifies things...

------
thomasht
I run & operate a VPN company.

Found a niche that at least 600 people would pay me a monthly amount for,
totalling nearly $3k a month. Costs are < $70 a month.

Everything is automated so it's probably less than an hour a week.

It was my _learn how to code_ project that has become my basic income. All the
money is funding my secondary project.

~~~
awayitthrows
I was considering doing this recently, to help people in my home country get
around censorship blocks. I was wondering, however, have you run into issues
where you've had to turn over log/account data to law enforcement due to
terrorism/child pornography/etc?

~~~
thomasht
It's a single purpose VPN, so I've only whitelisted 5 sites.

------
vanni
Related:

 _Ask HN: One-person SaaS apps that are profitable?_
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783)
752 points - 6 months ago

~~~
autotune
Kind of nice to be able to verify which one person shops are still operating.

------
chrischen
I've been running Instapainting.com as a 1-person business since 2014. I
started out with a single page with a Stripe checkout button on it. I've been
living off of the income since inception, even though the first few years were
poverty levels of income ;). Many have tried, but I'd say most just gave up
when they realized they could make more money just getting a job.

~~~
LoSboccacc
just a curiosity: did style transfer services had an impact on your traffic?

~~~
chrischen
A lot of the initial style transfer users were users from Russia, who had
little interest (possibly understanding?) of our main service which is
matching with artists. Though this probably had more to do with the fact that
they didn't speak English.

------
odomojuli
I ran a Shopify site selling meme shirts for 3 years.

You might recognize classics such as "Legalize 4Loko 2020" and "BREAD" as
featured in Elle magazine.

All on-demand printing. Order goes through Shopify's API to the supply center,
order gets fulfilled, shipped. No inventory. Kinda pricey, but zero
maintenance. Set and forget.

Find the most extremely dank and niche memes possible so you hit the little
nugget inside of someone's brain that makes them want to spend $15-30 on a
t-shirt.

A good print would net me somewhere like 300 orders a month. A sweatshirt
could go for $50-60. You have options.

~~~
notfromhere
What kind of monthly revenue were you seeing?

------
msbroadf
I started [https://www.virtualhere.com](https://www.virtualhere.com) about 10
years ago, it provides a good income. I developed/sell/support everything
myself. I felt there was a need for this type of product 10 years ago and with
cloud computing/gaming its become very useful for a lot of use-cases now.

~~~
julianwachholz
I've used VirtualHere a couple years ago when the Steam Link was brand new and
used my racing wheel with it, worked like a charm!

------
zrail
Six and a half years ago I launched
[https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/](https://www.masteringmodernpayments.com/),
a book to teach people how to integrate Stripe with their Rails app. It
generated almost $80k of revenue, mostly front loaded but with a really long
tail.

Recently I turned off sales because I was feeling more and more guilty about
not having time to update it, and now that I work for Stripe updating it
involves a layer of approval.

Of course, now I work for Stripe so I'd say it was a success :)

~~~
pknerd
How did Stripe hire you?

~~~
zrail
I attended a remote coffee chat[1] and then applied at the jobs page[2] :) I
did already know a handful of people that already work there as well.

[1]: [https://stripe.events/remote-coffee](https://stripe.events/remote-
coffee) [2]: [https://stripe.com/jobs](https://stripe.com/jobs)

------
krm01
When I started [http://fairpixels.pro](http://fairpixels.pro) (UX/UI Design
for B2B Saas Companies) I grew it pretty quickly to a very profitable one-
person business. (Not 1 person anymore)

The origin story is somewhat organic.

\- Started as a logo design company

\- then kept getting requests to help with UI/UX Design so I did

\- then realised the most fun projects to work on were B2B SaaS companies

\- today we're still growing and can happily count Fortune 500 companies, an
Elon Musk company alongside awesome startups to our client list.

//Advice: Start with something small. Anything. Don't worry too much about how
to grow. Then.. Just keep your eyes & ears open. Your customers will point you
in the right direction towards bigger pinpoints & thus better growth
opportunities. You don't always need a ton of traffic. Just start with
something small and go from there.

~~~
iDemonix
Just FYI, do you know that your site is missing a <title> tag?

~~~
krm01
Yeah I know. The website hasn't been updated in a few years. We've been
talking about a redesign for over a year (just didn't get to it because it was
so busy) Finally added some extra hands to get it done. Should be live in 2
weeks or so. Despite the handful of technical issues we have today.. the
conversion rate is still very healthy.

------
blhack
I have a CRM/business intelligence product that targets a very specific niche
of an industry. I'm the only employee, although I am currently looking to
expand by hiring a sales person and a support person.

Here's a startup idea I want, by the way. If this exists somebody please tell
me:

I'm good at creating products. I'm a good programmer, I can do design well, I
understand marketing well, I can sell things, etc. However, the things I am
TERRIBLE at are basically anything involving paperwork. I hate these tasks,
and I am terrible at them. I want a company that I can hire that will take
care of all of my backoffice/HR tasks. So:

-An accountant.

-A lawyer.

-An HR person who can deal with compliance around hiring and firing staff.

Many of the aspects of software businesses can be looked at services, and fit
well into an engineering mindset. Hosting is from digital ocean, costs $f00,
and gets mentally compartmentalized. I don't care very much about how DA deals
with routing, provisioning their own resources, etc. I tell them in abstract
terms the things I want, and they provide them in a package for me to consume.
Twilio does similar things for me for telephony. Coworking spaces do this for
physical offices.

I want more of that for more traditional parts of business. Essentially I want
to hire a controller in the cloud (or at least the way that controllers have
been used at various companies I have worked at in the past). IF this exists,
please reply with the name of the company! Maybe this means this is something
I should start myself.

~~~
sah2ed
> _I want a company that I can hire that will take care of all of my
> backoffice /HR tasks._

Hopefully one of these companies should offer something that meets your HR
needs (in reverse alphabetical order):

\- [https://www.trinet.com/](https://www.trinet.com/)

\- [https://www.safeguardglobal.com/](https://www.safeguardglobal.com/)

\- [https://www.rippling.com/](https://www.rippling.com/)

\- [https://gusto.com/](https://gusto.com/)

\- [https://www.adp.com/](https://www.adp.com/)

------
3minus1
"I sell onions on the internet" was posted 6 months back:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132)

~~~
ZoomStop
Would you be willing to talk about what affect the exposure on HN had on your
business?

~~~
3minus1
not my site :)

------
davej
I launched ToDesktop back in April, I'm ramen profitable and I'm working on it
full-time.

I don't know if I would call it a success yet. I want my revenue to reach six
figures annually before I call it a success but I'm seeing good growth. Most
of my growth now is coming from organic search engine traffic. I've posted
some high-leverage page speed + SEO tips on Indie Hackers here:
[https://www.indiehackers.com/post/marketing-tools-are-
damagi...](https://www.indiehackers.com/post/marketing-tools-are-damaging-
your-seo-and-how-to-fix-it-ed6d6d7bb4?commentId=-LnHh1mMxpDTsMUkhf2J)

I'm a product/tech person with some graphic design experience but I was really
weak on sales/marketing before I started working on ToDesktop. If you're like
me (strong on tech/product, weak on sales/marketing) then I would highly
recommend Julian Shapiro's guide on growth marketing. It's zero-fluff and
written by someone with a technical mindset:
[https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro](https://www.julian.com/guide/growth/intro)

A one-person business is tough, it's lonely at times. It can also be tough to
work on the things you _should_ be working on (as opposed to the things you
_want_ to work on). This is enjoyable sometimes though, for example, I made my
test suite dance to Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk. Totally
unnecessary but it renewed my enthusiasm and made for a fun tweet.
[https://twitter.com/DaveJ/status/1167386564240056321](https://twitter.com/DaveJ/status/1167386564240056321)

Self-promo for those interested: ToDesktop automatically creates a desktop app
from any web app. It's like Electron-as-a-Service with code signing,
installer, auto-updates, app notarization taken care of.
[https://www.todesktop.com/](https://www.todesktop.com/)

------
falco925
I run an edtech platform that helps users improve their analytical skills and
prepare them for technical interviews. It's somewhat niche in that it's a
platform focused on beginner marketing analytics and data science.

I launched it 2 years ago, mainly to help me teach a university class more
effectively (I wanted something easy for non-technical beginners to learn). I
spend about 5-10 hrs a week bouncing around developing and marketing. I make
enough to hire a part-time developer that helps me with engineering.
Otherwise, I do everything else myself.

The toughest part for me is marketing. Currently, I do a lot of writing on
Medium to talk about the industry and will include a short call out to my
platform at the end. I've tried other marketing channels like Youtube and
Google ads but haven't found anything that beats writing articles.

While the platform is only 2 years old, I make almost 6 figures in revenue and
it keeps growing linearly. My ultimate goal is to passively have this income
take over my professional salary so that I can have financial freedom. I plan
to continue to work, teach, and run this side business because I love all the
different aspects that each venture provides me.

------
fecak
I'm a resume writer that also provides career consultation and job search
strategy sessions, LinkedIn and cover letter writing, executive bios, etc. I
work from home, am able to set my own schedule and spend time with my kids,
and do quite well financially with very little overhead.

I've worked with a number of HN readers over the years.

------
insaider
I made [https://www.golfforecast.co.uk](https://www.golfforecast.co.uk) \- an
ML algorithm to predict golf.

After 5 years it's making enough from subscriptions for me to live off (3K
gbp/mo). The algorithm is always a work in progress but it's seeing consistent
returns now so I'm making money from that too :) plus it makes golf a lot more
entertaining.

~~~
dbancajas
if you have an edge why not keep it to yourself and bet the farm as they say?

~~~
mac01021
This is lower risk

~~~
insaider
Yea I don't have a farm to bet just yet. This means two income streams. Plus I
love working on the website

------
XG6
I created a SaaS website builder for a small niche market. I've been running
it for about 8 years. I gross a bit over $14,000 per month with about $500 in
expenses for servers and third-party APIs. I work 1-2 hours per week answering
customer support emails. Basically, I automated away my old job as a web
designer :)

The smartest decision I made was targeting a small niche market that larger
businesses wouldn't bother with. I often get kind emails from customers
thanking me for helping their industry. I kept things simple, didn't add
features unless I really believed customers needed them, and didn't try to
generalize the solution. I think those are the main reasons why the product
worked.

By far the hardest part was/is marketing. I'm still bad at it. I've tried may
things. Most failed or were too hard to sustain. Some succeeded, like Facebook
ads, but those successes were often hard to recreate. At this point it's
mostly word of mouth.

Working alone can be psychologically challenging. When I have a problem,
there's no one to help because no one else knows how the platform works. With
no one to bounce ideas off of, it's easy to get stuck in a rut going round and
round the same set of possible solutions. And I really have to monitor myself
to ensure that I don't get too isolated. This was an issue in the early years,
but now I have a routine that gets me up and out and into the world every day.
I would strongly advise anyone considering the solo route to carefully
consider the social and mental health aspects of working alone.

I feel very grateful to my former self for doing the hard work that pays my
bills today. And I'm tremendously grateful for open source tools and resources
like Stack Overflow without which I would never have made it this far alone.

~~~
kossTKR
Cool! How have you avoided being overshadowed by generalised tools like
Squarespace or Wix though?

Personally i have had a few projects where "large competitors" suddenly
overtook the market.

I guess you have some plugins that are very niche specific, or an interface
geared towards creating designs for that sector?

------
nickswan
I have been running [https://www.sanitycheck.io](https://www.sanitycheck.io)
\- an SEO tool. I built it originally to help me with my own SEO consulting
work, but it has grown from being a side project to my main source of income
now. Literally just this month it has reached the point of being able to
support me full time. It has taken 3 years to get to this point.

It's just me - I have made use of the odd contractor for website design and
copy. Upon starting the side project I wanted to see how large I could grow a
business as a single person. It has been fun, but I also miss the team mate
side of things such as brainstorming solutions and talking through problems.

~~~
graeme
Had a look at your site, and requested access, as I think it would be useful.

That said, I'm not super clear on what it does. The landing pages could really
benefit from listing a few specific features, and listing the business outcome
that results from them.

I get that it does automated page speed testing (is this different from
kingdom). Other than that, the main thing I'm aware that it does it "improved
google search console reports".

But what does that _do_? Listing some specific report types and the resulting
business outcomes would really help. (e.g. saved time on task X, increased
ranking on page Y, more revenue from a higher CTR on product Z, I dunno)

~~~
nickswan
Thanks - great feedback. Always trying to improve the home and feature pages
and I do agree on your points. Have considered getting an explainer video
created.

------
csallen
I run [https://IndieHackers.com](https://IndieHackers.com), which was inspired
by threads like this one on HN. I've interviewed hundreds of people running
successful one-person SaaS businesses, and many thousands more have created
pages for their products here:
[https://www.indiehackers.com/products](https://www.indiehackers.com/products)

Just a small handful of my favorites:

\- Simple Analytics by Adriaan van Rossum, making $2900/month
([http://bit.ly/35QXFhY](http://bit.ly/35QXFhY)). Competing with Google
Analytics and tons of well-funded competitors isn't easy, but Adriaan's focus
on privacy and simplicity has a strong appeal.

\- Maker Mind by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, making $800/month
([http://bit.ly/31FYK97](http://bit.ly/31FYK97)). She's a neuroscience student
and ex-Googler who writes fascinating articles about the intersection of
neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and productivity.

\- Makerpad by Ben Tossell, making $24000/month
([http://bit.ly/2JeIEg9](http://bit.ly/2JeIEg9)). Makerpad helps non-
developers build complex apps where you'd typically expect developers to be
required. My favorite thing about Ben is that he basically refuses to run a
business that's not 100% enjoyable. He's shut down a working company or two
just because the business model wasn't shaping up to be something he was
excited about in the long run.

\- Key Values by Lynne Tye, making $25000/month
([https://www.keyvalues.com](https://www.keyvalues.com)). Lynne helps
developers find roles at companies that share their values, and she shares a
ton of helpful tips for job-seekers in her newsletter. Her business model
involves charging companies to put together the super in-depth profiles on her
site.

\- Carrd by @ajlkn, making over $30000/month
([https://carrd.co](https://carrd.co)). Card is a one-page site builder. AJ's
an amazing developer/designer combo with over a decade of experience building
one-page website templates and builders. I can't name any web apps I've found
easier to use and more polished than Carrd, so it's not surprising AJ has many
thousands of paying customers.

\- Starter Story by Pat Walls, making $7100/month
([http://bit.ly/35XdALQ](http://bit.ly/35XdALQ)). Pat interviews e-commerce
founders about how they started their businesses. He was inspired by Indie
Hackers itself and monetizes via sponsorships. Some people think you can't get
an advertising model to work as a solo founder, but it's actually quite great
if you're not afraid to do a little sales. Not only do you get to know your
advertisers personally, but you can also hand-code your ads into your site
instead of installing third-party JS that will track your visitors all over
the web.

It's late so I'll stop here, but there are many thousands more.

The Internet obviously makes it easy to connect to millions of people across
the world, which enables all sorts of niche businesses to exist that
previously wouldn't have worked, because you couldn't have found critical mass
in just your local environment. Plus it's cheaper and easier than ever to
build and host your own apps.

I think this is the future, and 10 years from now we'll see a staggering
number of people (mostly devs) running their own one-person businesses instead
of working jobs.

~~~
gitgud
Wow! Hi Courtland!

Indie Hackers is an amazing community, I'm always inspired when I go to the
site and see companies at different stages helping each other out.

Your products page is great, I often check it out to see how revenues are
going watch products grow. I find the "stripe-verified" feature to invaluable,
as most self-reported numbers seem to be a little inflated.

Hopefully I can launch my own product one day, I've done a lot of open-source
projects and toys, but making something people want _and_ want to pay for is
my ultimate goal.

Also, great work with the podcast, I really like your interview style, you
always ask interesting questions and truly listen to your guests.

------
mutatio
I run [https://encycolorpedia.com/](https://encycolorpedia.com/) \- its
origins are from a "JavaScript as CSS" library I was developing - there
were/are superior projects available, so ultimately I used the colour
manipulation code to produce the site. The idea was to take a seed colour and
render the page uniquely, additional on-page information grew from that. From
feedback I guess the primary use of the site is paint searching and
comparison.

It's not massively profitable (it's a side gig), I've restricted monetisation
to AdSense in an attempt to not ruin the experience for users. I suspect other
avenues of revenue are hard to come by in the niche; I did reach out to paint
suppliers in the UK in an attempt to re-sell / possibly rebrand paints, but
had zero responses.

~~~
mkl
If you also own encycolourpedia.com, you should probably set up a redirect. If
it was someone else that grabbed it (registrar is different...), well that's
unfortunate!

I have a domain I got for a future project where there's a UK/US difference,
so I made sure I got both.

~~~
mutatio
Thanks, I do own it, laziness on my part not to correctly forward.

------
jwr
I created PartsBox ([https://partsbox.io/](https://partsbox.io/)) and I'm
quite happy running it. It's a tool for companies building electronics (also
available for free for hobbyists/makers). The business was (and is) a "freedom
project" for me: I wanted to be independent of everyone, so no investors, no
partners, and no employees. So far it has worked out pretty well.

The nice thing about running a business in a niche is that you get to interact
with nice people. My customers are engineers, I practically never get those
mythical "toxic customers".

The bad thing about running a solo-founder business is the stress and anxiety.
These are difficult to deal with.

~~~
sellingwebsite
how did you find your first customers if you dont mind sharing that ?

~~~
jwr
They found me. I created the app, and people searching for certain phrases
started finding it. There was some word-of-mount from hobbyists and makers,
but not that much.

To this day I mostly rely on search engines for customer acquisition (before
you ask: yes, I tried, and measured carefully: every attempt at advertising
had a net zero effect, e.g. I was putting money on fire for no good reason).

------
truebosko
As someone who's been hacking away at his "boring", one-man company for a few
months (after the 3 year old is in bed, so only about two hours a night, and
only some nights) and has begun hitting those initial slumps, this is very
inspiring

Thanks for posting, and thanks to all who have commented with their success
stories.

~~~
nlh
Keep it up! I have a bunch of friends who wish they had the motivation to put
a few hours in every night post kid-bedtime, but don’t have the stamina. It
can be tough but keep the momentum going and we’re all psyched to see what you
put out the next time one of these threads rolls around :)

------
abinaya_rl
I'm running [http://remoteleaf.com](http://remoteleaf.com) \- Remote Leaf
sends you hand picked remote jobs based on your individual skill preferences &
location. We source best remote jobs from over 20+ job boards and tons of
individual company hiring pages.

~~~
mihaifm
That's brilliant, thanks for sharing.

------
Jaruzel
For the period of 2008 to 2014 I built and ran an online webshop[1] selling
Bath bombs and soaps - the product was specifically picked because in 2008
there wasn't that many online shops selling low cost bath products in the UK.

What I did differently was I wrote everything from scratch, built the product
databases, designed the graphics, wrote the front and back ends etc. I did it
mainly as a learning exercise.

It never made enough money for _me_ to live on, but for someone with modest
outgoings it could have replaced their income. Sales started to drop off as
the site design started looking dated and due to no mobile device support. I
was busy with my better paying day-job at the time, and had no impetus to fix
the problems.

I'm about to do the same again, but this time using dropshipping for stock and
delivery, and I also intend to blog my journey (mainly as a record of what
I've done) as I create each element of it, once again as a learning exercise
using more modern tools/platforms.

\--

[1]
[http://www.jaruzel.com/files/fuzzybuttons-2012.jpg](http://www.jaruzel.com/files/fuzzybuttons-2012.jpg)

~~~
sellingwebsite
what were your marketing strategies at the time ?

~~~
Jaruzel
A little bit of social media (twitter posts, product page on FB), and a big
push via Google AdWords at Easter and Christmas. Sales tended to be fairly
seasonal so we focused on those periods.

Also, spent a lot of time getting the meta tags on every product page exactly
right - which I felt (at the time) was the benefit of rolling my own shop
front-end instead of using one of the pre-made big name shop engines.

------
binarysolo
My former one-person online biz (2013) is now 10 people - we run Amazon end-
to-end ops for a few large brands and manage ~100k SKUs -- basically the work
is all operations research + grunt work. We do mid eight digits in revenue.

A friend of a friend was the COO of a brand, spent a couple mil to position
themselves online strategically, but that team couldn't deliver results. As a
grad student in ML I spent a disproportional time procrastinating on
Craigslist and Slickdeals and flipping inventory between those venues, SUPost
(school-centric CL basically), and eBay, so I ended up being rather saavy at
ecommerce. I offered to help out their store, then took it over when I got
some initial results.

Ironically I think from a pure EV standpoint I shoulda stayed with my ML
degree - my friends in the same cohort are averaging a mil a year in combined
salary + bigcorp options. There were a lot of heartache and sleepless nights
associated with running a company, and looking back honestly I would've had a
more peaceful life toeing the 9-5.

=====

I have a few one-person side projects right now concurrently that are
providing five-digit revenue that are hard for me to scale, but are enjoyable
for me to do:

1\. Domain expert in a hobbyist niche with high gatekeeping (skill and/or
money) - I create a couple high quality content a year and make residuals off
affiliate fees.

2\. I flip small businesses in a very specific niche of ecommerce when they
don't layer into my big business.

Note: this seems mildly prolific but honestly I have between 2-5 ideas a year
of which I try to execute on 1-2 of them. I think of them as cognitive
surplus, "Art projects for Fun and Profit-TM". Most ideas end up not working
out, so the payoff really has to be about the process, not the result.

~~~
noobly
>I spent a disproportional time procrastinating on Craigslist and Slickdeals
and flipping inventory between those venues Did you do this manually, or did
you have some automation to help you out (finding deals, relisting, etc)? If
so, what did that look like?

And, out of curiosity, what's the hobbyist niche?

~~~
binarysolo
Semi-automated -- with CL you have (had?) RSS feeds that post search queries
to you, now I think there are email options as well? I wrote my own reader for
fun and it would basically ping me when a certain combination of items hit the
site - say "lot Aeron" or something to that effect.

The hobbyist niche is a pricey and time-consuming athletic activity. :)

------
jawngee
I'm doing pretty well selling a WordPress plugin,
[https://mediacloud.press/](https://mediacloud.press/)

It's an equal mix of rewarding and frustrating. It's a lot more work than
you'd expect and now I've a deep understanding of why support tools are as
obtuse as they are.

It's generating enough income that's livable and freeing me up to focus on
other related projects. I'm going to be launching a SAAS version of the plugin
later this year.

~~~
WA
I can relate. Everything is always a lot more work than the usual "I can build
this on a weekend". If it's a good product, there are so many details and edge
cases the software considers, which aren't obvious if you simply build a
clone. Only a true customer feedback and improvement cycle can make a product
better.

------
braindead_in
I am the solo founder of a crowdsourcing business. We are into audio/video
transcription. I've been at it since 2008, fully bootstrapped. I tried very
hard to convert it into a high growth startup. I even got called for an YC
interview in 2016, but didn't make it. I have lost a lot of money over the
years on experiments which didn't work. I didn't get rich but I make enough to
beat the market rate salary.

Last year, I finally decided to treat it as a lifestyle business and just
focus on a niche market. We are never gonna be a unicorn, but I think we'll
still be in business 10 years from now. Looking forward to the 2029 thread!

Here's my post on the 2014 thread.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7368727](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7368727)

~~~
codesushi42
Nothing to be ashamed of, congrats. But ML is likely to automate this away in
less than 10 years.

------
gkontos
This thread is pure magic. I love the grit and creativity of these stories.
There's been some talk of survivorship bias. I can relate to both sides of
that. About 15 years ago I ran an online shop selling auto accessories. I did
that for about 5 years and made a decent living with about 10 hours of work
per week (more during the holiday season). The business folded as shipping
expenses and competition rose around 2008. (In my downfall story, I like to
ignore the fact that I worked 10 hours per week rather than expand the
business). My successful business started due to a combination of ability and
luck. I 'lucked' into a situation where I had a B2B sales position (commission
only) and I was able to sell products to my own website. In that case, I took
a bad job and had the ability to develop it into an online business. Since
then I have launched a number of largely unsuccessful online businesses. I've
done paper mache for hire, crawl space 'clamps', an online game, a video
aggregation service, several blogs, an android todo list app, and a few
machinery based things that never rose to the level of 'fail' (those ended in
the "didn't really try" phase). Currently, I have a new project that I am
trying to focus into a market at
[https://gasket.appspot.com](https://gasket.appspot.com). The reason I bring
up survivorship bias here is to point out that the bias doesn't really matter.
In aggregate the solo businesses which succeed are creative applications of an
uncommon skill. Based on this thread those skills are currently ML and data
aggregation. In 2002 those skills were web development and online ad
purchasing. Businesses fail because either the idea is meh (ie paper mache for
hire) or the creator doesn't bake in the feedback mechanisms they need to keep
going (ie, requiring payment for an online game). Other people's failure does
not shed any useful light on what you should try yourself (unless you want to
start an online business creating customer paper mache; don't do that, it's a
dumb idea [unless it works]).

------
puranjay
I worked with a client recently who ran a successful site comparing products
in a very popular and lucrative industry. His affiliate income was in the high
six figures annually. He runs the entire business by himself

Personally, it might not be completely successful yet, but I started a music
blog a while back (don't want to share the URL) just to test some SEO
strategies. It's pulling in low four figures every month with very little work
on my part.

~~~
listenallyall
Mattresses?

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-
blogg...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-
lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars)

------
ThomPete
Ghostnote is a contextual notes and todo app.
[https://www.ghostnoteapp.com](https://www.ghostnoteapp.com) It is profitable
but not enough to live of when you have a wife and too kids and live in new
york. I build it because i needed it myself.

~~~
kossTKR
This is an awesome simple idea. Might buy this. Brainstorming a bit and the
concept of "notes" in relations to static hashes/urls/paths can probably be
expanded or to other domains.

~~~
ThomPete
Thank you so much. I have had people who used it for emac and you can with
some proper configuration use it for things like Sublime. There is also a code
editor so you can write your own scripts for apps we don't support as long as
they allow for Applescript.

------
snt
I run [https://picojump.com](https://picojump.com) which I started this year.

It evolved to scratch my own itch: simplifying the access, management, and
monitoring of a fleet of distributed Raspberry Pis (running Raspbian, on
private networks) without requiring any proprietary client-side code. Though
it meets the submitter's criteria, it's not [yet] providing enough to live
off.

~~~
imglorp
Nice job, I've been thinking about this for a while, perhaps leverage...

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/f...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/gamelift/latest/developerguide/fleets-
remote-access.html)

~~~
snt
Thanks.

I did not know about Amazon GameLift. I guess I just used the word "fleet" to
mean "a collection of similar things under unified control". ( _Unified
control_ being the aim of the project.) In this case, as building block, I'm
using robust, persistent reverse SSH tunnels.

------
mpurham
I developed Semester Planner
([https://semesterplanner.com](https://semesterplanner.com)) which is what
helped me pay for college. It is a online student planner for college students
that helps them keep tracks of their classes, notes, assignments, and
documents.

I am currently working on Enqode ([https://enqode.io/](https://enqode.io/))
which is platform that takes a hand-drawn wireframe and converts it into a
design file or code.

I would say that for any successful business requires a great deal of work to
be done. On the surface it will appear that it is easy running such businesses
but, in reality it is very difficult especially at scale.

------
maxencecornet
It doesn't exactly qualify as a one-man business, but I'm running a few side
projects bringing around $500/month:

\- [https://batgrowth.com](https://batgrowth.com): A website monitoring the
growth of The Brave browser / Basic Attention Token, in terms of publishers
adoption (Fun fact: Wikipedia founder, Larry Sanger, tweeted about the site)

\- [https://ethereum-cours.com](https://ethereum-cours.com): A CMC clone built
mainly for fun, bringing some decent referral revenue

\- My tech blog

I've built many more side projects, most were earning $0/month after a few
months, but I've also sold 2 side projects, so overall it's worth the effort

~~~
kleinishere
Can you elaborate on how you ended up selling the 2 businesses? Was it via in-
bounds or using a marketplace for similar kinds of businesses?

~~~
maxencecornet
Sure!

\- The first one was a trivia game made with javascript (Vue.js), it was a hit
on Reddit around a month after launch and became the top post on a 900k subs
subreddit, I was contacted soon after through reddit mail

\- The other one was sold on flippa, so they took a large cut of the sale

------
techtor
I turned a software development blog into a profit-generating asset in 2
years.

I then used it to market my skills as a Software developer and it helped me
gained employment.

I highly recommend any developer to start a blog, and just see where it takes
you.

My blog is [https://zeroequalsfalse.com](https://zeroequalsfalse.com)

~~~
igeligel_dev
How many views per month do you have and what are your income streams?
Partnerships or ads?

------
timed0
I run a blog to book service ([https://pixxibook.com](https://pixxibook.com))
that while physical product, non-SaaS and firmly B2C has proved to be both low
in support and reasonably profitable.

Sold our first book about a year ago and has grown steadily to the point where
it could replace my day job. I've done blissfully little marketing beyond
buying ads. Currently spend less than 1 day per week on it and during summer
holidays I was able to keep it running from my phone with irregular
connectivity.

------
pavish
I read an interesting article somewhere about Listen notes
([https://www.listennotes.com/](https://www.listennotes.com/)), which is owned
and run by one person. Not sure how profitable it is, but you can get in touch
with them to gain more info.

~~~
delta1
"The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company"

[https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-
behi...](https://broadcast.listennotes.com/the-boring-technology-behind-
listen-notes-56697c2e347b)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875)

------
kolinko
I recently sunsetted it (as in - no longer accepting payments for it), but
over 7 years I was running AppCodes.com.

It’s a tool for app store seo, would be the first one on the market of it’s
kind, if I launched it just 2 weeks earlier :,)

Upon launch I announced it on hacker news, and wrote to the TC journalist that
covered my competition. Got to front pages on both sites, and it was rather
smooth sailing after that - I appeared on a few app store conferences and
podcasts, did a bit of marketing, and all in all earned around $250k over the
span of the few years (which is a very decent salary in Poland).

Finance-wise, it was an extremely important thing in my life, since it was my
first own project that allowed me to earn a decent living, after over 10 years
of trying various things. Got me from “omg I can’t afford rent” to “omg, I can
stop worrying about money for a while”.

I also made a few important decisions over it’s lifespan:

\- not taking vc-funding, and keeping it a one-person operation. the downside
was that I had much fewer resources, the upside was that I didn’t need to
build a unicorn, and could focus on a small niche (indie app developers)

\- no free version, with good tutorials, good demo, and a good refund policy
instead. twofold rationale: it takes some time to understand the tool, and I
doubt free users would be so willing to take that time; getting free->paid
funnel right can be challenging, and pushes the site into serving bigger
clients really, not indie devs

\- decided to not go for corporate clients, as those require sales teams and
much more support. perhaps I lost a few clients (a few significant publicly
traded companies used it for at least a while) and a lot of money, but this
was more in line with my personality

\- decided to move on to other things, again - more in line with my
personality, where I like exploring new subjects, and don’t like staying in
one place for too long :)

\- decided to not sell it - I prefer the site to stay as it is, than to earn a
few bucks by passing all customer data to someone else, who would most likely
scrap the site altogether and forward the domain to them

\- keep user privacy as the core principle - there’s a ton of cool stuff that
could be built based on the data within that site, but it’s against the
principles

All in all, it was an amazing ride, that really got me off the ground as an
antrepereneur, and I really hope provided a lot of value to the few thousands
of paid users that passed through it over the years

(written on mobile, sorry for formatting)

~~~
agota
Do you question your decision not to sell in order to protect customer data?

I also find this aspect of selling a company worrisome, but then doesn't
everyone dream of an exit?

------
rglover
Howdy! I run a business teaching people how to build their own software
business using JavaScript:
[https://cleverbeagle.com](https://cleverbeagle.com).

I got started doing it as a fluke of writing tutorials and then realizing a
pattern around people using the OSS tools I made to help me write the
tutorials (people were using the tools to build their apps and then coming to
me for help and I realized "oh hey, this is a business!").

------
hedi0058
I have a couple of website I monetize through Adsense. It all started in 2009
(10 years ago) when my PhD candidate salary was not enough to make a living. I
started earning around 300€ after six months. I was extremely happy with that
as it gave me a breath of fresh air. I managed to make around 1500€ after a
year and a half. I quit my job once it reached 2000€ and reached 3000€ after a
year. All traffic was coming from google search and was organic. I was
focusing on ideas requiring very little update to the websites content.

That said, it is very difficult to run a one-person business working from
home. You don't have colleagues, people to discucss with, people to ask when
you have questions, or to learn from.

I was living in France by then and I decided to go back to my home country as
I would live much better there with that income. I started working as an
assistant professor (30% of my time) and hired 2 developers to grow the
business. That didn't scale well as the success came from my ability of being
fast developer, good in SEO while always trying new website ideas.

I ended up again with a one-person business. But revenues are dropping and I
find it harder and harder to be motivated to continue working on my websites.
So now I work nearly 0 hour a week on my website and I am fully dedicated to a
corporate job (not in academia anymore) even though I make equal money from
both jobs.

If I can have an advice : try not to quit your day job. Work is not only about
money. It is also about having social life, a career and a common goal to
achieve with you co-workers. Working in a good company keeps you up with new
technologies and trends. Running a one-person online business can be
psychologically challenging. And once you earn enough money, the work to do
can be become boring as no new challenges are there.

------
ezekg
I've been running [https://keygen.sh](https://keygen.sh) by myself for a
little over 3 years. It currently makes $5.3k MRR. Still a side gig, but it's
getting there.

~~~
zenlibs
Your IH interview [1] is one of my favorites! Highly recommend any
bootstrapper to read it.

Wishing you continued success!

[1]:
[https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/2fa6c5e1eb](https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/2fa6c5e1eb)

~~~
ezekg
Thank you for sharing those kind words! I wonder from time to time if anybody
found that interview valuable. :)

------
cleverfoo
For the last 9+ years I've worked on [https://scanii.com](https://scanii.com),
a content identification service (think of it as the unix file command on
steroids wrapped around an easy to use API). Started with a real MVP hacked on
a weekend
([https://web.archive.org/web/20101209005314/http://scanii.com...](https://web.archive.org/web/20101209005314/http://scanii.com/))
after identifying the need on a day job I had a long time ago. With 0
marketing and sales it took a while to start gaining traction but I always
knew that we were solving a real problem with a good and fair-priced product.
Nowadays it’s big enough to be classified as a lifestyle business and that’s
all right by me.

------
tempsy
Does anyone know where someone can buy a business? I've seen some spammy posts
when googling for how-tos but curious if anyone has bought one and whether it
worked out?

~~~
newusertoday
[https://feinternational.com/](https://feinternational.com/)

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

~~~
caspar
patio11's post over at
[https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...](https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_software_business)
provides a bit more color too.

Also, a friend of mine used FE International to sell a moderate side project
of theirs and they were very happy with using FE as the brokers.

------
inkeddev
I make websites for a niche market where I found that they often use
freelancers and the bar was set pretty low for customer service and
expectations. I've been doing this since mid 2016. Over the past 18 months I
got so busy that I've started hiring people to do specific jobs. So I'm in
this transition from one man band to 'real' agency. The majority of the money
comes from providing ongoing service agreements after we finish the website.
For 2019 I'll close around $800,000 which is about a 90% revenue growth over
2018. I'll draw a salary of $200,000. I've got some good prospects lined up
for 2020 and believe I'll get up to $1.1m

------
pknerd
Not sure it qualifies as a solo business but I run a tech blog that not only
helped me to get my current job but also side gigs and contracts. Besides that
I was contacted by tech companies to write paid guest posts for them. Recently
a few companies offers me percentage of amount prompting their products via
posts. One of them helping me to earn good referral amount. So far gave them
30+ customers in 2-3 months. They are web scraping service. I am thinking to
contact a few companies myself in a near future.

My blog URL is: [http://blog.adnansiddiqi.me](http://blog.adnansiddiqi.me)

~~~
wayoverthecloud
Very interesting and congratulations. Do you promote your posts via social
media? I mean how do you get traffic? SEO?

~~~
pknerd
Sorry for the late reply. Yes, I do promote occasionally via Social Media but
78% of my traffic is organic that is, people find me via Google.

------
1hakr
Last year i have launched [https://visalist.io](https://visalist.io) which
helps people find where they can travel with your passport tension free. Im
currently making $2500 per month and it's going to cross $4000 hopefully. My
revenue is from adsense, pro subscription, iVisa affiliate and Skyscanner
affiliate. Most of traffic is organic. I stared visa list as i found
contradicting, confusing and outdated information about visas. So i tried to
solve my own problem and it turns out there more than 300k users with similar
problem every month.

~~~
hedi0058
Well done ! If I may ask, what ratio of your revenue comes from adsense /
subscription / and affiliate ?

------
fidla
I teach mandolin and violin lessons online, and sell related products
[https://sweetmusicstudio.net](https://sweetmusicstudio.net). I make a modest
income and profit.

~~~
agota
Do you mind me asking how you got your first clients?

P.S. I clicked on the link, the website doesn't load, at least for me.

------
INTPenis
I know a successful two-person online cloud provider. One person is hard
unless it's a very specific niche market. With two people you can have one
with the gift of gab and one with the gift of code.

~~~
ghaff
It's also just a matter of being able to take time off. If it's just you,
you're still going to have to respond to emails, fix problems, deal with
clients, etc. which is at best a distraction and at worst makes it very hard
to really get out of good connectivity range.

------
sleepyhead
I'm running [https://makeplans.net](https://makeplans.net). SaaS online
appointment booking. Bootstrapped and profitable.

When I started it was because freelancing was terrible for me and also I
wanted to have flexibility with time and location. But now I'm getting tired
of working on my own, hoping to have a team soon. Currently there are too many
ideas I am unable to implement due to time constraint and also sales/marketing
isn't my expertise (I'm a tech/product dude).

------
m4tthumphrey
My friend recently sold his lead generation business for around 5m GBP. It was
making around 140k a month. I built the website and did some maintenance but
was basically just him.

~~~
xeornet
Lead generation for local business? Or sales orgs?

------
ikeboy
I ran a business buying products wholesale and selling on Amazon. Did about 2
million in sales last year at around 20% margins.

We were then attacked by competition and shut down, leading us to sue in
federal court. See Thimes Solutions Inc v Tp-link et al

[https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15690011/thimes-
solutio...](https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/15690011/thimes-solutions-
inc-v-tp-link-usa-corporation/)

------
brddg
You could say I run an import business. I import mainly Chinese cellphones and
gagdets that are not officially distributed in my country and even after taxes
I can sell them at an attractive price via Facebook marketplace and a local
equivalent to Craigslist. I make twice what I make in my day job as an
engineer. I'm aware that one day I might not be able to continue (regulations,
taxing, etc) so I'm not going too crazy about it.

------
pruthvishetty
I ran an online consultancy in 2014 - 2015 for grad school applications,
between the time I applied and started school (for almost a year). Zero
operational expenses, as I ran the whole thing as a Facebook page with a Gmail
id. This was in India, and I made about 800-1000 USD a month. Only reason to
close it was I couldn't give it time once grad school started.

------
Famara7
To be successful as an one person online business maker you need loads of self
motivation & some self control over procrastination.

If you're spending alot of time on your own, managing & building up your start
up without alot of actual human engagement you need strong will power...& good
ambient music on in the background ;-]

~~~
tluyben2
I had to look up what ambient music was and I found out that listening to it
agitates and annoys me beyond belief. So that is rather a big assumption about
music taste you have there.

~~~
Jaruzel
I found I needed music to keep me motivated, and after trying out Rock/Metal
(my normally preferred genre), I cycled through baroque and classical, and
eventually ended up settling on Trance/EDM. It ended up just being all about
the BPM matching my typing speed (about 124bpm).

------
caviv
I ran many different websites. I just enjoy development and new ideas. My best
profitable website is a Gematria Calculator
[https://www.germatrix.org](https://www.germatrix.org) which I also have in
Hebrew [https://www.gimatria.co.il/](https://www.gimatria.co.il/). But the
main idea is combining many many different ideas and website, like
[https://www.understandmydreams.com](https://www.understandmydreams.com) (also
in Hebrew
[https://he.understandmydreams.com](https://he.understandmydreams.com)) and
more... you can see here [https://www.c2kb.com](https://www.c2kb.com)

------
sideproject
I run SideProjectors
([https://www.sideprojectors.com](https://www.sideprojectors.com)) - a market
place for indie entrepreneurs to buy and sell their online businesses,
projects etc.

I created it in 2014, neglected it for awhile, and it was running on its own.
It started to form a little community around it, so I finally got myself
motivated to re-design this year.

It never made any money up until quite recently through some affiliate
marketing channels, so it's not huge, but it covers the operating cost, which
is very small.

For those who are looking to get into running your own little projects, come
and have a look around. If you want to sell your projects and move on, then
well, I'm happy to host your project for sale! :)

------
albogdano
I develop and sell a Q&A platform since 2017
([https://scoold.com](https://scoold.com)). It started off as Stack Overflow
clone but now it has features which are quite niche and missing from SO like
geolocation and spaces for teams. The project is open source but has a Pro
version which generates around 4000€ per month. I spend around 30% of my work
day on support and emails. The rest of the day I fix issues and develop new
features. I'm a solo developer and work full time on the project. Accounting &
legal is handled by an external company. I operate as a limited company within
the EU.

------
mraza007
I am loving this threading as I am currently a student whos looking into new
ideas to venture into. Instead of working corporate jobs I rather works as A
contractor or build a saas business to remain sustain.

Any Ideas or help would be highly appreciated

------
pawurb
I've recently described my road to $10k profit from a bootstraped side project
[https://pawelurbanek.com/side-project-profit](https://pawelurbanek.com/side-
project-profit)

------
trikko
Waiting for a post entitled "unsuccesful one-person online businesses"

------
ronyfadel
I've recently moved to somewhere where it's much cheaper to live (Europe ->
Latin America) and I'm creating products that scratch my own itch.

In a couple of months it's already paying for my expenses.

For now I'm fixing things that frustrate me while I work on my Mac (managing
windows, tracking all my devices).

I have a long list of things I'd like to see fixed in products I use and
products I'd like to see come to life, so I'm planning to spend this year
working on that.

Site: [https://fadel.io/](https://fadel.io/)

------
seanwilson
I run [https://www.checkbot.io](https://www.checkbot.io) myself. :) It's a
paid Chrome extension that checks websites for SEO, speed and security best
practices.

While working as a web developer, I found myself having to do a lot of manual
checks or write scripts to test if new pages or changes to existing pages were
following a long list of web best practices. I eventually wrapped up all this
knowledge and automation into a finish product that others have found useful.

------
docsapp_io
I've been running docsapp.io, a SaaS for documentation hub. It is growing and
profitable but not a lot. I work between 1-8 hours per month, mostly
development and little support.

------
thomaspark
I run Codepip ([https://codepip.com](https://codepip.com)), coding games for
learning web dev.

Started out making a single game as a weekend project, it got a good
reception, so there was obvious demand for learning to code in this
interactive way. Have since branched out to more games covering different
HTML, CSS, and JS topics with more coming. It's continued as a one-person
operation, for the time being.

~~~
potentural
Love these games, use them with my web dev students all the time! What topics
are you thinking about for future games?

------
BilalBudhani
I have been building
[https://www.flowboardpro.com](https://www.flowboardpro.com) \- It is an
artist management software for agencies. I went full-time on it in April of
this year & have been working solo on it since. I have 3 agencies using it
which is right now enough to pay off my bills. This month I'm wrapping up all
the feature development to focus on the marketing side of it.

------
aparadja
Still the same answer, I develop the firewall app Radio Silence
([https://radiosilenceapp.com](https://radiosilenceapp.com)) for macOS.

It covers all my basic living costs. But I kind of got bored (again) of being
happily unemployed (for the second time), and started a small consulting
business on the side. A four-day workweek in addition to the Radio Silence
stuff keeps me quite content.

------
latest-release
Am running a website [https://www.nmmapper.com/](https://www.nmmapper.com/)
that offers Pentesting tools Most of this pentesting tools are being moved
from Kali linux to used online without installing Kali linux. This is an
interesting project in less than a year I had over 160+ active years. this is
a one man work. And drive the traffic from organic search.

------
abhikarthick
I'm running [http://remoteleaf.com](http://remoteleaf.com)

\- Remote Leaf sends you hand picked remote jobs that are made for you from
about 20+ job boards & 100+ company pages.

\- Using filters based on your skill preferences & location, Remote leaf would
be able to know that job that befits you and send you job postings daily or
weekly to your inbox.

~~~
SamReidHughes
Wat.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332773)

------
0x0100
I created Mascot Gaming Logo Maker
([https://mascotlogomaker.com/](https://mascotlogomaker.com/)). It's a tool
that allows you to create a gaming logo for your esports team. As of now I
have private beta testers using it and while it's not enough to live on its
awesome to help a community I care for gg.

------
b00tstrapp3r
I started a SaaS business with 2 friends maybe 5 years ago, it generates
$150,000/mo in profit. Initially we worked on it almost full time for a year
but now we spend together maybe 2 hours a month on it now.

We charge SMBs less than $10/mo and have over 80k paying customers. We kind of
hit the equilibrium between churn and new users so it may grow a little more
but we have likely peaked.

AMA

~~~
wayoverthecloud
Care to share the URL?

~~~
b00tstrapp3r
I prefer to keep the actual link private, we've never shared revenue numbers
and I prefer to keep it that way.

As long as I keep it anonymous I'm glad to share details on everything.

~~~
sah2ed
1\. Do you have employees (or virtual assistants) to handle support requests?

2\. What is your competition like?

------
throwbusaway
I've run a niche ecommerce website by myself for 10+ years as my primary
income. It's down to about 5-15 hours of work per week. I'm looking to sell if
anyone is interested.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21118095](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21118095)

~~~
siscia
What is the website? What do you sell?

~~~
throwbusaway
The website is in the jewelry/gemstone space. The traffic is all organic and
nets a few thousand dollars per month with no marketing, though could grow
significantly with marketing and/or social media. Email is in my profile if
you are interested.

------
person_of_color
How are people starting and maintaining these side projects and still finding
the time to satisfy human needs? I'm mid to late 20s, single, and there's no
way I could spend the time whilst also having a robust social life.

I would like to know a sampling of age or status. Are people with the
successful side projects fairly settled down?

~~~
thrower123
I can't imagine. With a fiance and two dogs and a house, I barely have time to
steal an hour or two before bed to play with my side projects. My weekends are
spoken for.

If we had kids, I can't imagine I'd have a moment to myself.

------
wenbin
1\. The first two years of Pocket (getpocket.com) was a one-person business.

2\. The first four years of Plenty Of Fish (POF.com) was a one-person
business. [https://codecondo.com/plenty-of-fish-adsense-
earnings/](https://codecondo.com/plenty-of-fish-adsense-earnings/)

3\. Overcast (overcast.fm)

4\. stratechery.com

------
udayrddy
My definition of "Success" at this point (launched 4 apps earlier never tried
to generate revenue) is generating revenue. Launched couple of months back -
[https://extracttable.com](https://extracttable.com) adding paid clients at an
average of 3-4 per week.

------
tardis_thad
I run [https://tardis.dev](https://tardis.dev) \- tick-level cryptocurrency
market data API. It's profitable and I'm working full time on it for almost a
year now. Released it in August, so there's nothing statistically significant
regarding profits.

------
fjordan
[https://www.indiehackers.com/](https://www.indiehackers.com/) is a great
source for this sort of question. They provide various filtering mechanisms as
well such as revenue, number of employees, business model, location, etc.

------
dglass
While it's not proving the majority of my income, I've been growing BannerJS
for a couple of months from a side project for some of my own sites into some
nice income on the side.

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

------
topicseed
I have a niche blog yielding £10,000+ per month in affiliate marketing, ads,
and own info products. Mostly SEO-based and paying experts to write for it.

Working on two other projects — one's a hobby, and one's a SaaS that's
scratching my own itch.

------
michaelmanley
I run [https://hypley.com](https://hypley.com) /
[http://hypley.com.au/](http://hypley.com.au/) by myself. Was with a co-
founder.

------
gogoyubari
I run a data analysis bot that looks for patterns which occur prior to a price
breaktrough on Telegram.

[https://t.me/BitAssist](https://t.me/BitAssist)

I monetize via a subscription-based model.

------
camping-monitor
I am running [http://mysalesteam.landen.co](http://mysalesteam.landen.co),
where startups can simply outsource their sales team or outbound calling
process.

------
notadoc
These are always fun threads, thanks to those who share their experiences.

------
commandersaki
I would've thought the poster child for this would be tarsnap.com. In any case
it isn't really a one person business anymore, I see Colin's brother provide
support from time to time.

~~~
cperciva
Indeed; Tarsnap was a one-person company for almost a decade, but now it's a
two-person company (which is why I didn't post about it here).

------
efader
I run a network of newsletters the first one is
[https://trendslates.substack.com](https://trendslates.substack.com)

------
sdan
Heard some friends do dropshipping on places like Amazon or Shopify, although
I can't attest to the validity/how successful it actually is.

~~~
gajus
I didn't know what dropshipping is. for others like me:
[https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/dropshipping/#5-hard-
trut...](https://www.bigcommerce.co.uk/blog/dropshipping/#5-hard-truths-about-
dropshipping-no-one-talks-about)

------
johnmorrison
I heard levels.io (twitter.com/levelsio) makes like $50,000 per month off of
Nomad List, and I'm pretty sure it's a one-person thing.

~~~
xcubic
Not anymore. I think he has at least a dev by now.

------
daneyh
Thought i'd flag that threads like these with insightful comments is what
makes HN my favourite online community

------
bochoh
I run a Shopify store selling customized holiday gift wrap. So far it's been
fairly lucrative. Makegiftwrap.com

------
jordigh
Not me, but Sourcehut seems to be doing okay so far.

[https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-21-sourcehut-q3-2019-fina...](https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-21-sourcehut-q3-2019-financial-
report/)

Drew did some Q&A on Lobsters about it:

[https://lobste.rs/s/r41yfm/sourcehut_q3_2019_financial_repor...](https://lobste.rs/s/r41yfm/sourcehut_q3_2019_financial_report)

Drew wants to run a business completely on free software and for free
software, and he seems to be doing it.

------
avb333
I think my first million podcast has a lot of them who created 6-7 figure
businesses mostly on their own

------
19216834203
I run [https://dailytweetalerts.com](https://dailytweetalerts.com) , no
subscribers and I have no idea how to monetize it. I made it basically to
scratch my itch.

------
jerojasro
how come nobody has mentioned pinboard.in ?

------
daniel-dev
what is the name of the website ?

------
daniel-dev
what is the name of the website?

------
christiangenco
I've been working on [https://fileinbox.com](https://fileinbox.com) full time
for about the last five years. It's been pretty consistently making about
$4k/month (I haven't been spending much money, so don't need a lot to go full
time), and recently focusing more on marketing has bumped it up to $6.5k MRR
and growing. It's amazing. I get to work on whatever I want, I get to take as
much time off as I want whenever I want, and I've never felt like I wasn't
doing meaningful work.

This business has been a huge source of security in my life that's freed up a
bunch of time for me to focus on more meaningful life improvements, like
diving into hobbies (outdoor climbing, improv and standup comedy, musical
theatre, travel, and other more fleeting passions) and optimizing wellness
(sleep, exercise, meditation, relationships). I think it's the best possible
way to make money.

I got started by stumbling on patio11's side-project-turned-full-time-business
Bingo Card Creator. I remember reading about how he was able to quit his
shitty job and just work on his Rails app that generated bingo cards and
thinking "well shoot, I could do that."

I saw that Patrick was in a community of people doing a similar thing that all
go to the same conference: Microconf. Tickets were pricy for me right out of
college (I think they were around $800 at the time), but I promised myself I'd
buy a ticket with my first $800 in profit so I could fly out and thank him in
person.

I had a high level game plan for how I was going to be working on a side
project like Bingo Card Creator while I was working as a software developer.
Part of that plan was needing to figure out how to accept credit card payments
online. I found Stripe and thought it was the coolest API ever, so I picked up
one of the side projects I'd made in college that had a bunch of people
bugging me with emails asking for new features. I implemented the features,
but added some extra code that put them behind a paywall. They'd have to pay
me to use features I'd already coded, the fools! Bwahaha.

I was pretty surprised when—the same week I was finalizing my very first Real
Job out of college—that side project started making $300/day. I thought it was
a fluke, but it kept rolling in. I didn't do any marketing or have a business
plan or know who my customers were. I'd built a thing for myself and other
people apparently wanted it too.

I bought my microconf ticket three weeks later. Patrick and I have been
friends since :)

My path is totally not the route I'd recommend. I think I got pretty lucky
with stumbling on product market fit. If you're reading this and are
interested in doing something similar, I've learned a lot more about what I
did accidentally right from taking notes on all the Microconf talks[1] and
chatting with more people in the Microconf community that have made similar
businesses. I'd love to help coach you through how to build one of these
puppies for yourself! The classic mistake I see people making is obsessing
over an idea instead of a group of people with a problem you can help solve.
Your idea almost doesn't matter at all and it's probably not even a good idea.
Focus on who you're helping and the things they complain about instead.

PS: I go into a little more detail about how I got started on Episode 23 of
the OK Productive Podcast[2].

1\. [https://microconf.gen.co](https://microconf.gen.co) 2\.
[https://okproductive.com/episodes/023-3-hat-productivity-
wit...](https://okproductive.com/episodes/023-3-hat-productivity-with-
christian-genco)

------
lugg
For those interested in the topic Paul Jarvis has a quickish read on the topic
of "Company of one".

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FQ2PFNN/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07FQ2PFNN/)

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

I take it's probably a roundup of his newsletter but I found the book half way
decent with mostly fresh insights that is, it wasn't heavily recycled compared
to most books on this sort of thing.

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Wh1skey
Start-up and entrepreneurial related questions like these don’t get asked
enough here. Thank you

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ecofreemanly
I need enlightenment

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erumnaz
Good

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kgc
I'm guessing many Youtubers / Instagrammers would qualify.

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onion2k
I doubt that. The success rate for running a profitable social media powered
business is very, very low. Of the hundreds of thousands of people who try
maybe 5% of them make _any_ money, and 0.05% make enough to quit their jobs.
The number of people who qualify as what most people would call financially
_successful_ (eg a stable mid 6 figures income) is even lower still.

The creativity and freedom might still make it worthwhile, but the chances of
being a breakout star are _effectively_ zero.

~~~
Jaruzel
Not to mention, that the burnout rate is VERY high. People should not
underestimate the pressure of producing interesting content every couple of
days for years without being able to take a break.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Which I think has only accelerated for things like Twitch streaming, where
it's every single day for hours at a time.

