
Ask HN: Single Person startup/company? - dhruvkar
Pinboard&#x27;s numbers* were just realeased, and that made me curious. How many of us currently run a single-person company? By company, I mean something that generates (or is intending to generate) revenues. Side projects count.<p>Three thing I&#x27;m most curious about - growth in user base, revenues &amp; profitability over the years.<p>If you can share numbers, that would be fantastic.<p>*https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=12059965
======
pieterhg
I'm a single founder, I'm nearing $400k/y revenue.

It started a side project on here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8107222)
and then grew over the last 2 years.

2014: ~$50k 2015: ~$200k 2016: ~$400k

Also traffic also doubled every year, so revenue is tied pretty closely too
that!

This also includes about $7k/m from my remote jobs site which is also tied to
Nomad List: [http://remoteok.io](http://remoteok.io).

It's now a cost of living and city database with 1,000+ cities, and monetized
with a 10,000+ people membership community of digital nomads, remote workers
and general travelers. They pay $75/year to be a member (not everyone is
recurring, I just started with that)

I haven't had a lot of costs as most of it I do myself. Although it's been
very hard work, especially in the beginning before I automated everything. I
do have to charge 21% sales tax, and Dutch tax is relatively high but I've
just opened a Ltd. so it'll be less now.

The hardest part? I think early on capturing a new market quickly, keeping it
while lots of competitors (including funded ones) keep coming in again and
again and try to copy everything you did but do it better. And then hopefully
don't get traction, haha. Also dealing with the hate you get when you charge
for an online service requires you to grow a thick skin.

It's mostly been an extremely fun experience though and I'm really happy and
proud of what I made ^_^

P.S. I've been lurking on HN since 2010, that made me learn to code seriously
and build stuff. I'd read patio11's posts and was super inspired. So I'm
really thankful that HN existed and helped me get here.

~~~
kevindeasis
Great job man!

You've mentioned something about automating. Can you tell me more about it and
which you've decided to not use?

As for competition, how do you specifically handle this?

~~~
pieterhg
Also one more answer: I think BECAUSE I work almost 100% alone, I work faster
than big teams (the mythical man month thing). The stuff I make isn't top-
notch, but it works just good enough for people to enjoy using it. It's not
super hip flashy designed, but it does what users want it to do. I see many
other (especially funded) startups build really flashy stuff with huge 20+
people teams. And it looks great but it's not simple to use for people.

~~~
justjimmy
What are some of your competitors? Haven't come across any other sites like
yours!

------
throwaway58182
Just hit $1 million/year in sales :)

About 20 years ago wrote a scratch-my-itch B2B desktop software for Windows.
Side project for 10 years which is how long it took to reach about $120K to
make the switch to full time. Added features and increased price accordingly.

Hired a few more people. Growth is slow but steady. Yearly renewable support
contracts are the secret.

Coding is easy, marketing is hard. Persistence, persistence, persistence. In a
very crowded niche. Desktop software is definitely not dead - you can charge a
whole lot more for it, and ongoing costs (other than people) is comparable to
trendy web apps.

Using throwaway so customers don't find this comment.

~~~
SoftwarePatent
> "Coding is easy, marketing is hard"

It took me over five years in this business to fully internalize this.
Programmers (me included) often complain about clueless entrepreneurs in this
business, but even more rare than a good programmer is a good entrepreneur,
who can sell/market and turn code into money.

~~~
kriro
I don't quite agree. With a small and somewhat trivial codebase sure I'd
agree. Once you get into more complicated things, programming is the harder
discipline.

Most importantly I don't know if you can even compare the two fairly. At scale
marketing is basically a subset of programming (or I suppose statistics). B2B
it's quite a different beast and mostly about understanding processes and
being good with people.

I would say that there are no inherent "hard problems" in marketing (other
than "people are complex"). In programming there are some problems that are
extremely tough to solve.

I mean sure it's not that hard to hack together a webapp that scales to a
reasonable number of daily users. Programming something more complex, keeping
it secure and keeping it up and running...that's pretty tough overall.

Don't get me wrong, selling stuff and turning code into money is not trivial
and also a very valuable skill, arguably a more valuable skill than raw
programming power for a startup. I do however think programming is ultimately
harder. If you start a company you need both. "Marketing" is more important
I'd say (as you can live with acceptable programming for most web-based
startups for example) but eventually the lack of programming power will haunt
you.

~~~
wtracy
Judging by the downvotes you're getting, I'm not alone in getting a "my job it
totally harder than their job!" vibe from your post. (If you spend more of
your professional time doing marketing than coding, saying so might have
helped.)

Why do you say that there are no inherently hard problems in marketing?
Winning market share against a competitor with a bigger ad spend than you
sounds like a hard problem. Achieving minimum customer acquisition cost and
optimum market segmentation sound like hard problems. Getting customers to
self-select early in the sales funnel so that your salespeople don't waste
their time on looky-loos without cutting into actual sales sounds like a hard
problem. (I don't know, because I'm not in marketing. Educate me!)

Also, saying that there are no hard problems in marketing other than "people
are complex" sounds a bit like saying that there are no hard problems in
computer science other than "math is complex".

~~~
kriro
FWIW I have worked in marketing (B2B) at a technology company. I left that out
of the post because I thought it was irrelevant (because it's basically an
appeal to authority). I'm also a programmer and have a dual CS/MBA-ish degree
(more focused on the CS side) so I'm comfortable in both worlds and think I
have a decent but by no means great understanding of both worlds.

Once you've ramped up to a certain skill level in marketing you're pretty much
set. I never get that feeling on programming related work. Maybe I'm just not
that great a programmer it's somewhat likely (but I'm also not great at
marketing, I've seen some true sales-beasts in action and it's pretty
beautiful to watch).

I merely meant to say that getting to a level where your marketing/sales are
at the 80% level that will get you really far is easier than getting to that
80% in programming (imo). I'm fairly confident that if you'd take someone with
0 experience in either field you could teach the 80% marketing a lot faster.

The initial post I replied to contained the line "coding is easy, marketing is
hard". I basically wanted to provide the counter perspective. I very much
disagree with the "coding is easy" part of that statement but I guess I
focused too much on the "marketing is hard" part. I fully admit to being
somewhat snarky with the "no hard problems in marketing" comment but I thought
the "other than people are complex" made that clear. Guess not, should have
stuck with "marketing is easy, coding is hard" ;)

------
stevesearer
I started [https://officesnapshots.com](https://officesnapshots.com) as a side
project 9 years ago and it has been my full-time work for the last ~4 years.

If you don't count the cost of me, it has always been profitable as the
business costs itself are pretty low. I had zero business goals at the
beginning and now it is probably the most popular site in its niche (office
design).

The thing most people are interested in here is that I moved from using
Adsense to selling and hosting 100% of my own advertising a couple years ago.
People seem to like how on-topic and relevant the ads are and that they are
static graphics.

~~~
stemuk
How was your overall experience for the swich to self-hosted ads in terms of
time and money you had to invest given that the main sellingpoint for Adsense
is its ease of use?

~~~
stevesearer
I had Adsense and self-hosted ads simultaneously for a while and had built a
decent base of advertisers and contacts over the years so there wasn't much
additional investment of time above what I was already doing.

Getting an advertiser on board with your program is the hard part, swapping
graphics in and out is the easy part.

~~~
soared
Very very interesting. How does revenue compare? Have you considered putting
adsense ads on during traffic spikes or any similair strategies? Do you share
any analytics besides impresssions/clicks/costs with advertisers?

The only time I've seen this is on my school's newspaper, and they are wildly
unsuccessful.

~~~
stevesearer
At the time it was in my favor to switch, plus it looked weird and jarring to
me to have several ads for office furniture and then one for that thing you
bought on Amazon 3 months ago.

Re: traffic spikes, no. There are limited spots which can be purchased so
adding more spots whenever I want wouldn't seem right to my current
advertisers who bought based on the limit in place.

Edit: I also get contacted by ad networks from time to time saying I could
boost my revenue, but I always ask which advertisers they have who are
relevant to my audience. It is always none. So at this point, I'm relatively
confident that I don't need an ad network to service my particular niche.

------
tjholowaychuk
I started Apex a few months ago, first product is a little uptime monitor
built on AWS Lambda: [http://apex.sh/ping/](http://apex.sh/ping/).

Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free
plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone
were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that.

Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low
maintenance, as long as they're producing some form of positive income then
great!

~~~
danielzarick
Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help:

1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev
and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.)

2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to
expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly).

3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something
that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there
is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that
amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers.

Good luck!

~~~
gingerlime
I would generally agree about raising prices, but not in this case. At least
not until you get better traction and reputation. Pingdom is probably the
market leader in this space(?), and you will probably need to beat them on
pricing initially (even though there's so many things to do better than they
do...).

Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses.

I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS
or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with
webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough.

Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even
though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine
getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!

~~~
tjholowaychuk
Agreed, PagerDuty and SMS are on the list.

SMS is the only annoying one really since it's freakishly expensive for what
you get (~6$ / 1000 SMS or so), most people seem to have SMS credits that you
purchase which just seems annoying to me. I'm thinking about adding SMS to the
larger plans though without any weird credits.

Thanks!

~~~
gingerlime
Yes, pricing with SMS is tricky.

Just my 2 cents, but with Apex being dev-friendly and all, maybe you can just
ask for a twilio API key and just fire the message across?

~~~
tjholowaychuk
True true!

I've actually been using IFTTT for my PagerDuty replacement since I can't
afford it hahaha, unless I'm missing something they don't seem to charge for
phone calls etc

------
DizzyDoo
I do, I run a small video games company, making games that one person can
make, like this one:
[http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900](http://store.steampowered.com/app/386900).
I've posted about it here once before, but my 'thing' (if I have a thing) is
that I do both the programming, but also the art side. Computer Science is my
training, so I can do the software development, what is less common is that I
also have some skill in painting, design, animation, so unlike many games
developers it is actually quite sensible to be a one-man unit. The actual
number of copies that I need to sell is very low even compared to the numbers
of friends of mine who have a team or two or three. Even <10,000 copies can be
successful for me. I do contract with a couple of audio people, who are just
better at that side than I am.

~~~
desireco42
How do you make a game that can work on Mac and Win and Linux at the same
time? What is the easiest way?

~~~
DizzyDoo
The easy way is to write it at a higher level, and let the abstraction handle
the meat of it for you. The easiest way is just to use an engine, an existing
array of tools and frameworks that manages the abstraction in such a manner
that (for the most part) you just have to select the build target.

In this specific case, I used the Unity engine. I write in C#, and with
Mono/OpenGL, Unity can build executables to various platforms, on (mostly) the
same code.

~~~
desireco42
Thank you.

------
matchagaucho
Some numbers on my single-person company:

Market: Add-on tools/plugins/components for enterprise software platforms.
Customers: ~30 Growth rate: Adding about 1 new customer per month Revenue:
$550K ($300K product / $250K consulting) Gross profit margin: 80%

Costs are basically hosting, occasional marketing campaigns, some offshore
development, and various SaaS subscriptions to operate the business.

The product often requires consulting services to customize, which can be
lucrative. I bootstrapped the product development via consulting and am
transitioning to a full-time focus on product dev/support... recruiting SI
partners to do customizations.

Note: This is purely a lifestyle business. My _true_ goals are digital nomad
in nature.... traveling, writing code from a hammock in the Philippines,
spending Winters in Mexico, work 6-9 months per year, etc...

The income is nice, but freedom and mobility are far more valuable.

My wife increasingly spends more time on front/back-office tasks, so
technically this is a 1.5 person company :-)

~~~
aws_ls
_> My wife increasingly spends more time on front/back-office tasks, so
technically this is a 1.5 person company :-)_

It was nice to hear about this, as my wife also helps me out in running my
business. Its ultra important to have the _buy-in_ of your significant other
for these kind of operations.

In my case I have other developers as well. That's why can't claim to be a
single person company. Although, there have been phases in its journey, where
it has been just a 1.5 person company.

I am not as mobile (got some dependents) but cheers to the digital-
nomad/lifestyle-biz kind of company. Work hard, but at your own pace. See
movies in week day afternoons. Or spend entire days on HN/Reddit/twitter. Then
feel guilty about it, and spend some days coding, and making some progress,
has been my modus operandi.

Edit: Just to add one random but key point in single-person companies, is that
you end up doing automation, automation and then some more automation. Cron
jobs, alerts, actions, automated test scripts, backup scripts, data refresh
scripts and so on. So then even if you grow, its a positive to have in your
culture.

~~~
matchagaucho
Cannot underestimate SO support. My wife fortunately shares my entrepreneurial
spirit.

Automation is certainly crucial for one-person shops. Leave nothing to chance
or human error.

TDD for both front and back-end code, lint checks, version control, server-
less DevOps.... embrace as much as possible.

------
bsenftner
I created www.3D-Avatar-Store.com, a neural net driven, single photo to
realistic lip syncing 3D avatar web service. It's a WebApp and WebAPI aimed at
digital artists and game developers so they can put themselves, friends and
customers into games, VR/AR, educational sims, advertising or whatever. I'm
shutting down, as the revenues do not cover the extensive support requirements
of indie and pro game developers, plus the hardware requirements force me to
run a collocated server cluster that is moderately expensive to maintain -
about $700 a month. Game developers, operating in their eternal crunch time
panic, need a lot of support and they expect it to some with the API contract.
I tried for years to raise financing, but investors need a lot of education to
grasp 3D animation production, they have unrealistic expectations (always
comparing our output to VFX from major release films), and often predatory
terms that such investment never went through. If anybody wants to try taking
over, they can contact me.

------
braindead_in
I have been running [https://scribie.com](https://scribie.com) for over 8
years now. We have more than 11,000 freelancers and are closing in on 1.5
Million minutes of transcription. Growth has been fluctuating from 25% to 100%
depending on the year. We never did much marketing except regularly updating
the blog and some AdWords.

~~~
frankacter
Hey Rajiv, I just ran a 4 hour set of interviews through Scribie and have
nothing but great things to say about the platform, the staff and most
importantly the results. Great job and continued success.

------
hexsprite
I’ve been working on [http://focuster.com](http://focuster.com) for about 2
years now as a side project. It’s a productivity tool for entrepreneurs and
freelancers that turns your todo list into a schedule in your calendar, and
then gives you smart notifications to keep you focused on the highest
priorities. Basically solves the problem of getting distracted and not knowing
what to work on next.

Launched on Product Hunt in January 2016 and we were #2 for the day. It’s
generating revenue now, though not enough to give up my other gig yet. But I
have customers that are giving me some great feedback.

Initially I did everything myself (including UI/UX) but last year I hired a
designer to help with a redesign. Also even though I am a developer I hired
another developer to help when I had some other things to look after in my
consulting business.

LOOKING FOR COFOUNDER: Do you have the marketing and business development
chops that will complement my technical and product experience? Drop me a PM
or email to jordan @ my domain.

------
colinbartlett
My side project StatusGator, which monitors service status pages, has been
running profitably for the last year. It took about 3 months to become
profitable and it's only so because my time is "free". (But isn't that always
the case?)

I don't do anything to promote it so growth has been entirely organic. I get a
few free sign ups every day. Although they very infrequently convert to paid,
I keep expenses low so it doesn't take many paid users to be profitable. If I
had more knowledge of how to market such a thing, I believe it could be a
reliable revenue source. But I'm otherwise happy that its relative
profitability motivates me to maintain it, as I find it supremely useful for
my own personal use.

~~~
pm
I don't know if statuspage.io is similar to what you're doing, but their blog
documents much of how they got profitable. Makes for interesting reading.

~~~
colinbartlett
A little different: Services like statuspage.io, Runstatus, Cachet, Status.io,
etc. all offer status pages. StatusGator aggregates all the status pages you
care about into one status page for your own reference and also sends you
alerts to email, Slack, etc, when those pages change.

I love the idea of blogging about growth and profitability. Seems like that
could be a good marketing channel, in addition to being very educational.

------
xpose2000
I run a single person company
[https://www.fantasysp.com](https://www.fantasysp.com)

It is a fantasy sports company that helps you manage your team(s) by offering
player projections, waiver suggestions, optimal lineups, trade suggestions,
etc. We also help with fanduel/draft kings lineups.

Revenue has increased steadily over the past 4 years in the range of 20%-30%
year over year.

User base growth is different as I focus more on active users rather than
total new users. Active users increase around 15% year over year.

~~~
colinbartlett
Interesting, what metric do you use to consider "active"?

~~~
xpose2000
Signed in the past day or two.

------
mark-ruwt
I run Are You Watching This?!, a B-to-B sports excitement analytics company
that identifies exciting games in real time by analyzing live game data.
Sports, media, and cable companies license that data for use on sites, in
apps, and on cable boxes.

A clone popped up in 2010 (Thuuz), run by a VC, with a dozen or so employees
and 5M in funding.

We're profitable, growing, and customers continue to choose us over the clone.
It'll be 10 years this Fall, and we've been profitable since 2013.

~~~
hartator
Seems so unfair and unprofitable to me that a VC will spin up a competitor in
this niche. Good luck!

~~~
mark-ruwt
Watching a VC being interviewed pretending he invented something that will be
the second sentence in the first paragraph of your obituary, is stronger than
5 cups of coffee. It's a blessing.

~~~
soared
Beautiful.

------
nhorob67
I launched a suite of farm business software tools 3 weeks ago at
[http://harvestprofit.com](http://harvestprofit.com). 8 customers and approx
$8k ARR so far.

Price point is high enough where it's not likely a quick purchase but too low
for an inside sales team. I'm working hard on content marketing to build trust
in the market place to drive user growth while keeping my team small (just me
so far)

~~~
CoachRufus87
How'd you go about getting those 8 initial customers?

~~~
nhorob67
I've been collecting emails for 9 months, primarily by spending $3k on
Facebook ads to send traffic to blog posts. 1,500 emails so far.

My acquisition process right now is a "call me to sign up" after showing
prospects a demo video. Not ideal. I'm working on making the app (filled with
a model farm's data) live for users to test for a couple days (gated behind an
email opt-in) and then allow them to sign up online. We'll see!

------
bluecalm
I've started [http://www.piosolver.com](http://www.piosolver.com) and I run it
with a friend. It's a very small niche and getting less popular but we are
still doing very well.

It was my hobby project for more than a year before any commercial plans
appeared. It took very little money to start (basic Shopify plan, github,
Dropbox, a few hundred $ for sponsored thread on a popular forum) but it took
a lot of time. I am not a millionaire yet but well on the path to become one.
I've learnt a lot about product development, handling customers and had many
choices along the way I was completely confused about. I hope to put it all in
text one day but for now I am too busy adding features, developing new
products and optimizing the code :)

~~~
turbostyler
Looks like a very interesting tool, but I would reallllly recommend hiring
someone else to narrate your videos. That woman has a very "unique" voice that
made it hard for me to sit through.

~~~
bluecalm
That's a bit harsh. In case it wasn't clear from my posts or the website I am
not a native English speaker nor is my friend or the woman in question. She is
my sister and just wanted to help when we were starting. I didn't hire anyone
to do anything in the website :)

~~~
swivelmaster
Do you have bounce rate stats on the video? Those will tell you whether or not
you should re-record narration with a professional. (And as far as costs go,
that's not very expensive.)

------
jessegrosjean
I've run [http://www.hogbaysoftware.com](http://www.hogbaysoftware.com) as my
full time job since late 2003. Except for a few years (2010 to 2013) I've been
the only employee. Dates might be off by 1 or 2 years but here's an
abbreviated history:

\- 10k first two years.

\- Growing somewhat steadily to 250k around 2010

\- Revenue (this is period when I was working 3 others) grew to 350k) by 2013

\- Crashed to 40k in 2014, 2015 after cutting bunch of apps and going back to
being just me as only employee.

\- With luck foundation is back in place
([http://www.taskpaper.com](http://www.taskpaper.com)), hope to reach around
100k in 2016.

~~~
desireco42
Hey I really like your products. I was a big fan of WriteRoom, was always to
come up with great ideas using it. Thanks, hope you will continue to make
stuff.

~~~
jessegrosjean
Will try, thanks!

------
azeirah
I wrote a utility script for Twitch streamers to show in text what music
they're currently playing on Spotify or YouTube, and many other music players.

Has been a stable 1k per month for quite a while now. As a student, this is
really nice extra income :) Especially because I don't have any other expenses
besides my 5 eur/month webserver.

[https://martijnbrekelmans.com/SMG/](https://martijnbrekelmans.com/SMG/)

Any tips?

~~~
udkl
How did you arrive at the 4.99 price ? Streamers buy $40-60 games regularly
..... why do you think they won't pay more ?

Could you sell a yearly license if users want updates ?

~~~
azeirah
I don't want to increase the price because it's a tiny tool with a really
simple goal. I honestly don't expect anyone to pay over at best 10€ for this
tool. I certainly wouldn't.

Entitling people to one year of free updates wouldn't be a bad idea however.
Might look into a subscription based approach for continued updates.

~~~
udkl
Is that price point based off of your assumption or streamer feedback ?

Are you a streamer ? I would love to have a quick chat with you over slack or
skype or whatever to know more about the tool & your experience as a streamer.

You can reply here or to the alias email listed on my profile.

~~~
azeirah
I'm not a streamer myself, though I do stream occasionally, a week per year
kind of occasionally.

I'd love to talk to you, but am unable to do that right now. Is it ok to
contact you in ~2 weeks?

~~~
udkl
Sure ... whenever ...

I love to interact with like minded HN users/developers/entrepreneurs... and
these days have developed an interest in the Twitch eco-system and how it
works.

Signature

\-----------

I use [http://hnreplies.com](http://hnreplies.com) to monitor for replies to
my comments at HackerNews. How do you keep track ?

------
defied
I have been working on [https://testingbot.com](https://testingbot.com) for 4
years now. Providing browser testing through automation. It's a lot of work,
learned a lot in those years. Profitable after 1 year. Still growing year
after year, eventhough there's quite a lot of competition

------
Pephers
I too was very inspired by the Pinboard numbers, and this story and others
have inspired me to start my own business.

I'm running a booking system SaaS ([https://zapla.co](https://zapla.co)) which
basically allows embeddings a booking widget in any website. It's currently
generating $1100 MRR after ~18 months in business. It's a solo side-business
as of now, but I'm hoping for it to become my primary business.

~~~
udkl
Looks cool, how did you go about marketing it ?

~~~
Pephers
Thanks, I appreciate it!

I must admit that marketing is my absolute weak side, but I've had the most
success using organic SEO backed by some SEM campaigns. Since my product
requires customers to have a website, I've created landing pages targeted at
major WYSIWYG/DIY website builders. If they search for e.g. "booking system
for <platform>" they'll have a chance to find a Zapla landing page for that
platform :)

~~~
udkl
oh oh ... MS just came out with a similar booking software integrated into
Outlook.... don't think it will affect you much though ...

------
wpietri
One other question for the the solo entrepreneurs: how do you keep momentum?

I have a bucketful of ideas, and I'm endlessly energetic in a team context,
but trying to do solo projects wears me down quickly.

Maybe this is just a character difference, but if solo entrepreneurs have
tricks or methods for keeping going and keeping focused, I'd love to hear
them.

~~~
csallen
Spend time meeting with and talking to other entrepreneurs every week.

Internalize the idea that you don't have to be motivated to get stuff done.
It's okay to admit, "I'm not motivated right now", and then get to work
regardless!

Get into a routine for starting work, and try to never skip it, even when it
feels unnecessary.

Find blog posts, videos, and articles that motivate you. Revisit them often,
or work them into your routine. I like DHH's talk from Startup School '08
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY)),
for example.

------
wsgolfer
Previous relevant discussion from a few weeks ago.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11937132)

------
joeyspn
I've been bootstrapping my last project basically all by myself (UX/UI,
microservices, devops, mobile apps, etc) for the last 15 months. I'm saying
_basically_ because one of my former (failed) startup cofounders is helping me
every now and then with some development tasks.

It's a market data app with a custom technical indicator for a specific
commodity. I've found an external commercial team specialised in this industry
niche and they're going to start sales in the coming weeks (after the
remaining regulatory hurdles are cleared). This is a top-notch sales team
working for Fortune100 companies, so I'm doubling down on them for 15 to 50%
of the revenue (depending on sales)....

We tested the tool internally for some customers and was an incredible
success. People is literally waiting in line to get it... so I'm also
arranging external accounting + support teams.

I hope ( _knocks on wood_ ) it'll generate me x5 to x10 times the salary I was
offered in management positions at 2 of the biggest spanish startups (tuenti
and social point).

In the coming months I hope to automate everything for all the teams via Slack
ChatOps so I can have more free time and start new projects before
Christmas...

------
arc_of_descent
I'm running [http://lickcreator.com](http://lickcreator.com) which is a web
based music notation software. Still in Beta, so no revenue.

Been at it for six months now, kinda slow, but I had some new stuff to learn
like SVG and Web Audio API. Experimented a lot with AngularJS and React. Went
back to Backbone.js and lost some time there. But good experience.

My hopes are high for this product.

~~~
joshontheweb
Im curious why you switched from react to backbone. Ive been considering doing
the opposite. Mostly because I want to be able to use redux for undo/redo
functionality and also for user action replays I can use for debugging. Redux
doesnt play well with the backbone.js paradigm.

~~~
arc_of_descent
I really liked React and the idea of components with two way data binding.
Unfortunately I found it just doesn't work well with SVG. If you have some
HTML divs to manipulate, great.

Also if you have good experience in JavaScript overall, Backbone.js is
fantastic. Combine this with Underscore/Lodash and Babel for ES6 and you have
a good build system.

~~~
martin_drapeau
Its a great app idea. Will you release it for iOS using CocoonJS or PhoneGap?
I haven't found a good one yet.

I'm also with you on Backbone there. Good job and keep on going.

------
joshontheweb
I'm running [https://zencastr.com](https://zencastr.com) as a solo founder. It
isn't profitable because I haven't moved to paid plans yet. I haven't had any
time to focus on marketing yet really but I get a steady stream of signups
each day. So far around 10,000 hours have been recorded using the service.

~~~
grx
I know people dislike when I comment on this, but your page is empty when
visited with disabled Javascript. So please, if you ever consider putting some
more work into it deliver a static info page when JS is disabled!

And btw, when I enabled it (Noscript) the page loaded forever and again did
not show anything - but I guess you may get some more visits now that you've
linked it here.

~~~
wahnfrieden
The reason people dislike it is it's a simple question of ROI - how much would
it really help his funnel to work on support for users who intentionally break
the web vs other aspects of his product?

~~~
grx
The only thing that breaks the web is developers who do not care about
compatibility and performance. If I would not be harrassed and slowed down on
every second hipster page with 1000s of external resources I would consider
going back to default-on javascript.

The fact that simple HTML delivery can be remarketed as "AMP" is a joke.

Additionally, from a designing perspective it's a good thing to render the
first page statically so it does not need to talk to a backend when the
visitor is most likely going to close the page after looking at the landing
page.

~~~
jwatte
You may have that opinion, but 9,999 other users don't. Who counts more to a
creator trying to generate a paycheck?

If you really want to make it as an entrepreneur, dogma has to go out the
window, and data based decisions have to be front and center, especially when
weighted for cost/benefit.

If data shows that search engines don't link to your site and don't index your
content, that would be action actionable data.

------
55555
I run [http://choosejarvis.com](http://choosejarvis.com) with a friend. It's
not profitable yet but is getting there. We've just iterated on the product
and feel that we're finally making a good enough value proposition to ramp up
marketing.

I previously ran [http://amzshark.com](http://amzshark.com) with a friend,
which was very profitable within a year (~360k ARR) and ramen profitable
within 3 months.

~~~
udkl
Good job on amzshark ..... I would be interested to understand how you scrape
data from Amazon ... I assume crawling would be a significant portion of your
operating cost.... and how you do it without violating their ToS....

choosejarvis, why did you think there was a market need for such a product ?
How is it different from buffer.io ?

------
bert2002
I work on [https://www.blabladns.co](https://www.blabladns.co) \- a free
dynamic dns service with an easy api and many integrations (e.g. Slack,
PagerDuty, Messenger, etc.).

Working Solo on it and its not profitably, because there is no paid plan yet.
More premium features will cost and will be integrated soon.

Growth? Very slowly with one to two user per week. Probably because I dont do
marketing at all (only the blog).

~~~
udkl
Wait, what are some use cases for this service ?

~~~
bert2002
E.g. you want to access some server or services at your home, but your ISP is
changing your ip address every 24 hours. With a DDNS service you can always
use the same dns name, only the a/aaaa records of these will be updated when
you get a new ip address from your isp.

~~~
udkl
Interesting ... any enterprise oriented use-cases ?

~~~
bert2002
There are some uses cases, e.g. you have many external devices that are not
having reliable internet connections and are not smart. The real enterprise
use case is rather a full dns service for domains with some additional
services (that will be available soon on BlaBlaDNS ;)

------
jventura
I'm running a single person company at
[http://flatangle.com/](http://flatangle.com/), where I provide traditional
astrology software and services.

Last week I've made available my latest web app
([http://elements.flatangle.com/](http://elements.flatangle.com/)) but I also
sell traditional astrology reports at
[http://flatangle.com/products/reports/](http://flatangle.com/products/reports/).

The business costs are pretty low, but since I'm not very good at marketing,
my revenue is also still quite low. I'm doing this fulltime, along with
freelancing to have some cashflow..

~~~
udkl
Have you looked at the designs of other astrology related sites ? They do not
have a clean, blog/article like look.

When I first landed on the site, I was confused about what it offered. If you
put up the charts app screenshot on the main page instead, that would have
helped understand it immediately.

Take this comment with a grain of salt though. I'm not big on astrology, so I
could be way off.

Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc ? or am I wrong about
the customer profile you are looking to target ?

Nice name, Btw.

~~~
jventura
> Have you looked at the designs of other astrology related sites?

Other astrology sites are ugly as hell, and I had to make a break from that
style. Look at this site from the largest software maker in the area, straight
from the 90s:
[https://alabe.com/solargold.html](https://alabe.com/solargold.html)

But yes, my site is very confusing because I'm still on the process of trying
to find what works. I create all my applications as subdomains of
flatangle.com, that is why my main site is still confusing on its offer.

> Have you thought of integrating this into facebook etc?

I have an application which says the temperament of a person based on their
birth data (think more extrovert or more introvert kind-of analysis). I though
on creating a facebook app for this, but as a marketing tool for my other
reports, so first I have to build them.

~~~
udkl
> Other astrology sites are ugly as hell,

Users of astrology sites are used to these ugly designs. This is the case with
arcade gaming sites too ... which is why you see modern arcade sites are ugly.

You aren't designing the site for you. You are designing for the customer and
the customer is used to and sometimes subconsciously prefers the ugly design.
[http://therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/the-reality-of-
uglines...](http://therodinhoods.com/forum/topics/the-reality-of-ugliness)

Because there is reasonable doubt of the newer cleaner design, I urge you to
at-least A/B test an ugly looking design that your target users would be
familiar with.

\------------------

Signature : I use [http://www.hnreplies.com/](http://www.hnreplies.com/) to
track replies to my HN comments. Do you ?

------
santhosh_81
I have been working on [http://www.guesto.io](http://www.guesto.io) for about
six months. I am very close to finishing it and hoping to launch in August.

~~~
code777777
Nice! Agreed that this is an area that could use some tech.

Looking forward to a Show HN or something similar for this one.

How does one feed in the list of attendees? Will it work with Avery-labels and
multiple printers?

------
malux85
Yes, forex trading using deep learning, media monitoring

two startups, both profitable

I built, support and run them all myself (though everything is automated)

~~~
beagle3
Which venue do you trade forex in? I have either personal or 2nd hand horror
stories from every platform I've heard of so far - once you get profitable,
they start penalizing or just throw you out -- though my experience is 6 years
old and may no longer be relevant.

~~~
JohnnyConatus
Also curious.

------
20years
I have been a single founder company for going on 10 years. Running multiple
SaaS services over those years. Some have come and gone and a couple stuck
around for 8+ years. Revenue has fluctuated anywhere from $800k+ yearly at its
height (before 2008 crash) to as low as $250k yearly.

~~~
Lordarminius
>> single founder company...running multiple SaaS services

This is the model I am biased towards. Mind giving out more information? What
sectors do you operate? Do you currently have any employees? Any tips for a
newbie?

~~~
20years
All pretty niche services mostly in the real estate and home improvement type
sectors. None have/had the potential to really be unicorns but all have/had
the potential to be million dollar+ businesses.

I didn't start off hiring employees. In the beginning I did everything myself
(programming, marketing, customer support, accounting, etc.). A year in I
hired my first customer support employee and throughout the years employee
count fluctuated from just a couple to 13 at most. Many of which were part-
time and worked remote. I have also had offices throughout the years but now
focus totally on remote. I don't like the burden of an office.

I think my #1 tip for a newbie would be to look for something niche that
solves a pain point or allows your customer to make or save money. For
example: if your customer can spend $10/mo on your software and make or save
$30/mo from that, you will have no problem getting & keeping customers.

#2. Don't focus on becoming a unicorn. You can make some serious money and
build a very comfortable life running a $300k to $1m dollar business, and your
chances of succeeding at that are much greater.

#3. Look for things outside of tech. There are so many problems to solve in
small businesses. Many will say there is no money to make with small
businesses. My response to that is re-read #2.

#4. Learn everything you can about advertising. Get really good at it and be
willing to spend money on advertising.

#5. Be willing to kill something off quickly if it doesn't make money. Test
your market early to make sure people will pay for it. I have made the mistake
of not doing this and I have lost a lot of money because of it. Now, I need to
be able to see a positive ROI on my spend within 3 to 4 months. So if I spent
$100 to acquire a customer, I want to be able to get that back + more within 3
to 4 months. I know this timeline is probably really short for a VC funded
company, but I have always been bootstrapped so don't have the luxury of
risking a longer time-frame for return.

~~~
20years
I would also like to add one more.

#6. It is not easy! Prepare to put in long hours especially in the beginning.
Prepare for it to take a mental toll at times. You will second guess yourself,
feel insecure, be consumed oftentimes with your business.

You will now have thousands of bosses rather than just 1 or 2. Your customers
are now your bosses and many of them will be requesting different things. You
will have to learn how to filter through all of that noise and decide which to
listen to and what to implement into your software. That is harder than you
think.

I think a lot of people have un-realistic expectations on being your own boss.
I am not saying the 4 hour work-week hasn't worked for some but it has never
been a reality for me. Maybe someday ;)

I don't want to make it sound bad because it is not. It is just not as easy as
many make it out to be either.

------
itengelhardt
I run SaaS products ([https://www.linksspy.com](https://www.linksspy.com) and
[http://www.terminretter.de](http://www.terminretter.de)) as profitable side
projects.

I'm also working on a book on email marketing for SaaS products that details
what I've learned from marketing my own products:
[http://saasemailmarketing.net](http://saasemailmarketing.net)

------
eappleby
I started [https://www.pubexchange.com](https://www.pubexchange.com) in 2013
and have been running it solo ever since. PubExchange is a platform that helps
publishers establish traffic exchanges with other sites (similar to a social
network) so that they can promote one another via widgets, social, and in-
article links. It's been profitable since 2014 and I work with over 600 sites,
including HuffPo, Refinery29, and POPSUGAR.

~~~
neil_s
Wow, that sounds like a modern version of Tony Hsieh's LinkExchange, from the
90s. Glad that the model is still working. How did you go about signing up
such impressive publishers? Was it organic, or did you hustle to make it
happen?

~~~
eappleby
Thanks! The LinkExchange model is actually pretty different, but I hear that a
lot. LinkExchange, and other webrings, automatically connected sites and had
them all link to one another. The main benefit of those exchanges
(particularly in the 90s) was the SEO lift (which is now frowned upon by
Google). In the past 4-5 years, most major publishers have begun establishing
direct partnerships with other sites, so that they can promote one another on
social and through other direct links. The main benefit of that type of
partnership is the traffic, but also the editorial control, and brand
association. The challenge is that it is a very time consuming process to put
those deals together, manage the partnerships, and track the traffic. I used
to lead business development at Rolling Stone and Us Weekly, and MTV before
that, so I am familiar with all that goes into it, and I created PubExchange
to address that. It did require hustle to get the first sites to use the
platform, but since the platform works like a social network, most sites that
join now, hear about it through word of mouth.

------
wnm
I started [https://presskithero.com](https://presskithero.com) as a Shopify
App ~8 months ago, and it is doing around 1k MRR. A few weeks ago I launched a
standalone version, which was well received on ProductHunt
([https://www.producthunt.com/tech/presskithero](https://www.producthunt.com/tech/presskithero)).

The Shopify App is growing about ~100$ each month without me doing much.

------
zkhalique
YCombinator told us that we are essentially a single-founder company, based on
our equity split. You can see our growth straight on our website:
[http://qbix.com/groups](http://qbix.com/groups) and
[http://qbix.com/calendar](http://qbix.com/calendar)

Revenues per user are increasing slightly with each product version, but we
haven't released a big game-changer yet.

~~~
hnjake
Quick tip add the controls (volume control ect) to your youtube videos. It's a
pain not being able to control volume.

------
BinaryIdiot
I'm _attempting_ to run a side project / business. I'm launching it this month
(it's been slowly gaining in sign-ups prior to release which is a good sign in
my opinion). It's [https://www.simex.io/](https://www.simex.io/), a personal
assistant you can give tasks to over email, sms and other protocols in the
future.

So no growth (unless you account my 50 sign-ups in the past 2 weeks, much
higher than my sign-ups at the beginning of June when I added the form) or
revenue yet. I'm hoping to launch in a couple of weeks and then immediately
begin testing different monetization ideas (I have 3 and I don't think I
should do all of them; would like to focus on one maybe two at the most so I
need to do some testing).

The A.I. / assistant space is becoming quickly crowded but I think I have a
bit of a unique niche in that it'll handle tasks asynchronously (starting with
meeting organization and overall asking a group of people a question and
aggregating the results much like a map reduce over people (okay that sounds
hyperbolic but I like the symbolism)).

~~~
kfrz
Just signed up. Can't wait to start talking to HAL

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Ha thanks :)

------
vital101
I started [https://kernl.us](https://kernl.us) last May and brought it out of
beta in January. I've been growing at the rate of around 5 new paying
customers a month.

After the closed beta I started out with about $140 / month in profits, which
has grown to $330 / month over time. The growth rate has been pretty steady,
but nothing so large that I could go full time on it.

~~~
udkl
Clever.

Do you market it on the WP plugin market ? What is a common user profile of
your average user ?

------
throwaway29464
I'm a single founder of a B2B SAAS - took 3 years to get to 10K MRR. From Jan
1 of this year MRR has grown from 10K MRR to 27K MRR. Likely due to a
combination of better product market fit, getting some very marquee name
clients and price increases. Finally quit my full time gig in April - never
looking back I hope!

~~~
dhruvkar
Awesome! What worked in order to get from 0 MRR to 10K MRR?

~~~
throwaway29464
thanks! talking to customers and grinding away almost every night and weekend
(started as a part time project).

------
sblawrie
A friend and I have been running WeScreenplay
([https://www.wescreenplay.com](https://www.wescreenplay.com)), a very niche
service for screenwriters, for about 2.5 years now. I recently separated the
backend platform that manages and coordinates everything and spun it off into
Coverfly ([https://www.coverfly.io](https://www.coverfly.io)), which we sell
to film festivals to manage their screenplay contests.

Between the 2 products (which use the same codebase), we've tripled in size
every year. $27k in 2014, $80k in 2015, and we're projecting to do $250k+ in
revenue this year. Hoping to do $1m in 2017.

For marketing: affiliate programs, paid SEO, organic SEO, Facebook, Twitter,
cold calling, sponsoring events with writers

~~~
udkl
Which marketing channel worked the best for you ?

How can you create a 5 page, detailed report for just $65 ?

How are you different from a brick-mortar service with a website ?

~~~
sblawrie
Of those, Paid SEO's worked the best, but I forgot to mention we also pay for
email blasts to subscribers of other screenwriting related blogs and services,
and that's really been the most effective.

5 pages of notes takes a reader roughly 3 hours, and there are plenty of
people in Hollywood happy to make $15/hr working from home during their
downtime.

I'm not sure I follow your last question - it wouldn't make a lot of sense for
a script coverage company to have a brick and mortar store.

------
asavinov
A couple of years ago I started DataCommandr which was supposed to be an Excel
for big data - an easy to use self-service tool for data transformation and
analysis: [http://conceptoriented.com](http://conceptoriented.com) . Yet, I
had to split between several quite different activities: development,
marketing, prototyping (it is an innovative product). Eventually, I decided
that the process is too slow and with this speed I will never reach the goal.
So I decided to re-position the technology: instead of developing a classical
WPF desktop application targeted at Excel-like users, I started developing a
Java cloud service for in-stream analytics (for IoT). The main goal is to
decrease marketing so that the product can sell itself.

~~~
udkl
"Transform data into the desired custom format by taking into account semantic
relationships and relying on a novel concept-oriented model of data"

Way too complex for an introductory line. I had to read it multiple times to
get a faint idea of what you _might_ be doing.

Screenshots and illustrations might work even better.

The design does not look professional. You might want to look at other SaaS
sites and themes from themeforest or somewhere to get ideas on the page
design.

The tools is interesting. What is your target market ? Who are your users ?
What are some use cases ? How do you plan on marketing the application ?

~~~
asavinov
Thanks for your comments and suggestions. Your observations actually confirm
that it is not the best idea to do everything yourself. In fact, I pivoted
three times during the last several years:

1\. Windows (WPF) application targeting approximately the same users as Excel,
PowerBI, Tableau, Qlikview but providing self-service data wrangling
functionatliy (rather than visual analytics). Problem: after finishing 90% of
work I understood that I have to do the next 90% - UI development ate all my
time.

2\. Java framework for complex analytical data transformations targeted as the
same users and tasks as, for example, Apache Spark, but providing higher
performance at run time and development time (in-memory column-oriented
approach). Problem: again, difficulty to attract attention which is necessary
to get critical mass of users. Probably the market of classical big data
technologies is too tough nowdays.

3\. StreamCommandr. Same as previous but focused on in-stream analytics
(instead of batch analytics) and IoT. This market seems to be empty (very rare
event) and I want to provde the technology as a cloud service (PaaS), say, in
IBM Bluemix, GE Predix or AWS. The users of the in-stream analytics service
are supposed to be solution/application developers who want to analyze their
data (e.g., from devices) in real time. So I am working on this third
hypothesis by taking into account my previous mistakes and collected
experience. In particular, I am going to maximally simplify everthing even if
I sacrify significant pieces of functionality. Time is more important than
quality.

~~~
udkl
I know of a Business Analyst/manager who use databricks.com spark setup to
understand/query & generate visualization from their data.

I remember them saying that the various integrations to data sources that
databricks provides was convenient.

With Azure BI ([https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-
us/](https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/)) & Amazon QuickSight
([https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/](https://aws.amazon.com/quicksight/)) the
market or such tools is getting competitive. I think your tool might be useful
for small and medium businesses.

I would love to chat with you just to understand what you are up to. If you
want, you can contact me using the alias email from my HN profile.

------
Brandwagon
I launched ClosingBell
([http://closingbell.co/download](http://closingbell.co/download)) 2 years ago
to help retail stock traders collaborate and share investing ideas. Never
raised. Never got press. Never had a team to help. But I managed to grow it to
14,600 members, and over 1,170 have connected their Robinhood brokerage
account via a partnership with them earlier this year. I launched a freemium
model in May that now does ~500/mo. I never marketed it as I am still
experimenting with the business model. I have tried growth hacking tactics in
the past. I recently made a Slack app to raise awareness:
[http://closingbell.co/slack](http://closingbell.co/slack)

~~~
udkl
Stock traders can be a passionate bunch.

What would be interesting is to understand how many of them are active each
week/day.

Installed it btw :)

------
kiril-me
I started [https://lookify.co](https://lookify.co) one year ago. Now I have
one more co-founder and we still in private beta. We have the small number of
customers. The company is not profitable yet. But as I can see we have big
potential.

------
emanueld
I run [https://qrready.com](https://qrready.com) as a solo founder. We had a
soft launch late last month. I'd love to say we're profitable but it's a
little early. I'm still learning how to market it properly.

------
atlet
I'm running SaaS for B2B and it's successful now for 2 years. I started in
2008 and till 2014 was only covering the expenses. I changed my thinking from
"If You Build It, They Will Come" to marketing and this really changed
acquisition of new users.

In 2013 I also started another SaaS - monitoring service (Piltek -
[http://www.piltek.com/](http://www.piltek.com/)), but it doesn't have a lot
of customers as the only thing I did was developing it an put it online. I
didn't do any marketing (only 1 week at the beginning) as I focus on my first
SaaS. It takes a lot of time to build and grow a company (if you are alone and
bootstrapped).

~~~
dhruvkar
>I changed my thinking from "If You Build It, They Will Come" to marketing and
this really changed acquisition of new users.

What all did you change? What worked?

~~~
atlet
I started spending money on advertising, before that I only used to do free
advertising (mostly SEO) and not a lot: \- Adwords \- advertising in magazines
(it was not worth) \- sending letters and cold calling \- Facebook ads \-
Linkedin ads

------
adjwilli
I've been running Pangaea Learning
([https://www.pangaealearning.com](https://www.pangaealearning.com)) solo for
about 6 years now. I recently found a guy who helps me manage the community
around Polly Lingual ([https://pollylingu.al](https://pollylingu.al)), but
it's mainly me and a small cadre of freelancers. All of our projects have been
bootstrapped. Since you're curious about profitability, I'll be honest and say
that the golden years of the App Store are probably behind us (or at least me)
and I'm starting to seriously entertain other work possibilities.

------
brendonv
I have spent the last 6 mos working on a music-creation app:
[http://doyt.io](http://doyt.io)

The idea for the app comes from growing up with garageband and missing the
hours spent messing around and making silly songs with friends and family.
Trying to bring that fun to mobile in a social way (think smashing garageband
into snapchat).

The hardest thing has got to be soliciting feedback and hearing criticism. I
have the tendency of turtle response- stay safe, stay inside. Actively working
on getting out of my safe zone :)

If anyone is interested feel free to email me at brendon at doyt dot io.

~~~
lotask
The idea looks great! The background on your website is not :D My eyes are
bleeding, and I'm going color blind. Thnx

------
madmadjo
Hi there!

Even though I'm a full-stack developer, during the previous year I had to
build several Bootstrap UI Kits. I think I became pretty good at it so a week
ago I started [http://www.bootstrapuikits.com](http://www.bootstrapuikits.com)
(worked on it for a couple of months before launching). Currently I run it as
a store where I sell my own Bootstrap UI Kits (OK, one kit for now, but two
more nice ones are in the works!) but the idea is to expand into a marketplace
so that others could sell their own quality UI Kits. Besides that, the idea is
for each UI kit to cover at least 10 cases (in at least one version) through
example pages (store, social network, portfolio...).

Of course, it's not profitable yet, but I plan to offer great support(!) and
great Bootstrap UI Kits (each with 10+ themes) so we'll see. My analysis tells
me that I could probably earn $600-800 per UI Kit (created by me) per month.
I'm thinking about publishing the results in 3-4 months on Bootstrap UI Kits
blog (soon to be created) so stay tuned.

Hopefully that would be enough for me to provide for my family so that, as
some people mentioned, I could work on some other things I'm interested in
like A LOT (like mathematics, physics, chemistry, electronics...).

Wish me luck! Nah, kidding... I don't believe in luck, just in hard work.

~~~
udkl
Why don't you list them on sites like themeforest ? That should get you more
customers for the minimum effort.

Your site design needs to be improved. It's confusing right now and some of
the menu items do not work.

~~~
madmadjo
Hi udkl! Thanks for your comment.

I am thinking about publishing something on themeforest BUT: 1\. I don't think
there is a section with UI Kits. I think that there is a section with HTML
themes and I might (but just might) test that eventually; 2\. it is very hard
to differentiate yourself in a place where you have a lot of people doing
something similar; 3\. there isn't a lot of places on Internet where you could
sell a UI Kit so I might try to create one by myself;

What is the thing (or things) that you think should be changed? It's true that
I've left some links unset (I've fixed that, like an hour ago, to a certain
level - but it will be much better soon). The thing I noticed is that people
didn't get that the image (on the card with premium Kit) is a part of a
carousel, so I set that to autoplay, for now. The part where you have a card
with a premium UI Kit and the card with the free UI Kit should be
straightforward, and all buttons work as they are supposed to. Is there
something you think should be changed, or if something is unclear...and if
there is - what exactly?

Once again, thanks for the feedback. It means a world to me, especially now
when I'm still at the beginning of this business!

Mladen

p.s. Sorry if there is a lot of grammatical errors. I'm too tired currently
and English is not my first language.

~~~
udkl
Hey, not a problem.

1) The fundamental question is, why do you think there is a market for non-
free bootstrap ui kits ?

When I search for "bootstrap ui kit", I get links to many free kits & see no
advertisements related to ui kits (no one selling them).

So why do you think there is a market for premium bootstrap UI kits ?

2) I don't mind having a quick chat with you on slack or skype to go over the
site as a user. I'm not a UI expert but you will atleast get a third person
review.

~~~
madmadjo
Hi udkl!

1\. I Googled "bootstrap ui kit" and, indeed, have found a lot of free
Bootstrap UI Kits BUT it seems that a lot of these kits (maybe not most of
them - I don't know because I didn't check all of the kits I have found) are
free versions of premium kits. As I already mentioned, I do plan to add enough
elements so that my customers could use each Kit for most of their needs.
Besides creating UI elements, I also plan on creating example pages, so that
customers could just modify those if they want. I'm thinking about offering PS
or Sketch versions (I'll see about this) besides HTML version. One more reason
for which I believe that there is a market for non-free Bootstrap UI Kits is
that I see a couple of companies in this space that are doing well, so that's
always a good thing/indicator :)

2\. Hey, thanks! I'd love to hear your opinion. I'm going to contact you soon
on your email address from your profile page. OK?

Once again, thanks very much for your constructive comments and your offer!

Mladen

~~~
udkl
Yes, you can send me an email .... I love to interact with like minded HN
users/developers/entrepreneurs.

Signature

\-----------

I use [http://hnreplies.com](http://hnreplies.com) to monitor for replies to
my comments at HackerNews. How do you keep track ?

~~~
madmadjo
I see that that's your signature, but I'll definitely start using hnreplies
too.

Talk to you soon!

------
boraturan
I am running Alvin5.com, automated video marketing app for local merchants on
FB,Instagram,Messenger. Pre-revenue.

Solo or 2-founder is fun. You can not go bankrupt

Looking for a co-founder.

~~~
udkl
cool, I still have questions.

So the user checks out online and presents the QR code to the merchant ?

Sorry if that is obvious, I haven't used this flow before, nor do I use an
iPhone.

~~~
boraturan
this is one of the options. Customer clicks on a video ad for a local offer on
Instagram, purchases the offer (via Stripe/ApplePay web payment), get the QR
code(or Apple Pay NFC pass), presents it to the cashier.

------
miraclepanda
Half a year ago i've started
[http://www.appstoreoptimization.io/](http://www.appstoreoptimization.io/) \-
screenshot generator for app/play stores. For now there are no paid plans as i
want to deliver as much useful functionality as possible before charging
people

~~~
mooreds
A word of advice from an internet stranger: start charging as soon as you can.
This will determine whether you are a running a business or a fun side
project.

~~~
miraclepanda
Thanks for your advice. There are couple competitors on a market right now (
launchkit.com, storeshots.net etc. ) and they have richer functionality than
my service. So i'm not sure why people would pay for my app rather than for
theirs.

~~~
hornbaker
Busy devs aren't going to do a competitive services search... they're going to
use the first tool they find / hear about. Focus on SEO, SEM, offer a free
demo mode with watermarks, then charge around $5-10/mo recurring for unlimited
usage for solo dev (maybe $20-30 for team use), and you'll be golden.

------
franciscop
Do you inlclude freelancers/contractors? I got started recently

~~~
blowski
To count as a startup you need a product. If you're freelancing or contracting
or consulting, you are the means of production but the product belongs to
whoever hires you.

~~~
franciscop
I know, I'm not claiming to be a startup. I am asking if the "/" in the title
means AND or if it means OR.

Also, from this: "By company, I mean something that generates (or is intending
to generate) revenues"

Nowhere it says "only startups" or "with a product", so I'm just asking if
it's a question specifically for one person startups or for one person
companies.

~~~
dhruvkar
I'd be interested to hear from you.

I think freelancers fall into a grey area because while there are freelancers
that treat their work as a business with the intent of
scaling/automation/removing themselves as much as possible from admin tasks,
there are also others that treat it very much like a high-paying job, without
commitments.

Share if it feels it applies to you.

------
rrecuero
Thanks everyone for sharing the stories. I have been working on a startup for
several months, pivoted and I'll release the new concept in the next weeks.

I think the biggest hurdle of doing something alone is keeping yourself
emotionally stable. If there are more people, when you are down the others can
balance it out.

Has anyone experienced this?

------
jayarcanum
So funny to read some of the marketing folks in this thread writing their
stories and tooting their horns. Oh wow, I actually read "marketing is way
harder than coding" I learn new things every day.

------
richardknop
Here is my project: [https://pingli.st/](https://pingli.st/)

Started only couple of months ago. Small number of users so far.

I work as a single man company at the moment :)

~~~
udkl
Interesting service.

* How did you get your first users ?

* What is your marketing plan ?

* How do you do sales ?

------
xavi
I started [https://omnimemory.com](https://omnimemory.com) nearly 1 year ago.
It's a spaced repetition flashcard system with a minimalist UI designed for
both desktop and mobile.

It has a freemium model. It only has 35 signed-up users and nobody is paying.
I only did some "marketing" for a couple of weekends (this is a side project),
posting about it in some blogs, forums, Hacker News... I quickly got tired of
this marketing work and moved on to other projects.

~~~
yranadive
What is your bounce rate? Did you do anything like SEO?

If you have a high bounce rate, you might want to show the user a demo of how
the product works.

~~~
xavi
Bounce rate for past June was 18.75%.

As for SEO, I just got a couple of backlinks by posting about Omnimemory on
some websites. I considered content marketing but I haven't actually written
anything yet.

------
stonedge
I run [https://www.vinyl-deals.com](https://www.vinyl-deals.com) . It started
out as just a thing that I wanted for myself, to keep track of vinyl price
drops without having to know what was out there.

It's been running for a little over a year, growing every month, but still
very small.

------
reppic
2 weeks ago I launched a platform for reading and writing interactive stories
as a single founder. It's called Yarn (see:
[https://www.useyarn.com](https://www.useyarn.com)). None of my numbers are
very large (yet) but the response from users has been great.

~~~
udkl
I've seen yarn before. Good looking site.

It's hard to get users hooked into a consumer app.

Have you tried advertising on Amazon ? in the kindle category ?

------
antoniuschan99
I started www.facebook.com/kokonautweathersensors

Looking for people to participate in a pilot project now

~~~
Tyler-Durden
You started a Facebook group?

~~~
bbcbasic
MVP my son

------
rakeshmukundan
I started a side project unifispot.com almost an year back. Its profitable
from day 1 since hardly have any cost except for the blog/forum hosting.Doing
everything alone in my spare time so far. Revenue varies from 2k$ to 0$
monthly.

------
cheez
I run something that has been going for about 8 years. I can't seem to break
the 6 figure level but I haven't done any marketing yet. I'm currently trying
to get better at this.

~~~
udkl
Can you give us some more details ?

------
soamv
I run [https://glimmer.cc](https://glimmer.cc). It pays for its own hosting
costs. It's not very profitable but it's steadily growing.

------
patleeman
How do you founders find an idea?

I want to work on projects but I can't find any ideas that could potentially
become a business. Where do you look? Who do you talk to?

~~~
aseoconnor
Solve a problem. Find out what pisses people off, and do something to fix
that.

------
arisAlexis
I would be very interested to hear also stories about when/why people decided
to drop their single founder company/side project

------
ilamont
Is there a Y Combinator for single founders?

~~~
SwellJoe
Y Combinator has funded lot of single founder compnies. So, Y Combinator seems
like it might be the Y Combinator for single founder companies.

pg has said it's a negative, and it really is. The likelihood of a single
founder company growing huge is smaller than if there's small team at the
start, for all sorts of reasons (which pg and others have written about). But,
if you've built something awesome, YC isn't going to say no just because
you're a solo founder.

~~~
kevindeasis
Really? Dropbox is the only company that I know of and when Dropbox started in
Ycombinator they were already a two-man team? I'm really interested in knowing
the other companies that were only funded as a single founder company

~~~
SwellJoe
There have been quite a few of them.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=single+founder+y+combinator+compan...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=single+founder+y+combinator+companies)

Again, it's definitely a strike against you in the selection process (as it
probably should be...I've started a company solo and I've started a company
with a co-founder...the latter is clearly better), but it's not a deal-
breaker.

------
michaeloblak
Does anyone with single-person company have sold it and can share experience?

~~~
outdooricon
this would be a good separate Ask HN

~~~
michaeloblak
Here you go
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12071129](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12071129)

------
gonzo
Bill Joy says the number of smart people in your company..

------
throwaway7312
I'm a single founder. We do ~$150K / year in revenue right now.

We did $15,000 in 2011 (our first year in business). $55,000 in 2012. $96,000
in 2013. $157,000 in 2014. Dropped to $133,000 in 2015, our first year of
negative growth.

From 2011 to mid-2014, I worked constantly to improve our basic product. But
in 2014 I realized we'd never compete with the big guys in our industry, who
do $10MM to $30MM / year. So I started attending summits with those guys to
pick their brains, and hired a marketing coach. And I stopped working on
improving our core product, just maintaining it.

Spent ~$35,000 on marketing training since late 2014, and I've spent $20,000
(and about 8 hours a day, 7 days a week) on new product development this year.
But in about 2 months we should have a product that can put us up there with
the big guys and get us out of the middle-of-the-pack revenues we've been
stuck in for a few years.

The hardest part of being a single founder, at least in my business, is the
need to maintain your current business to keep the income flowing and the
customers around while you build the product that the business needs to leap
forward. At that point, you're basically running two companies, the old one
and the new one. And you can't just throw money at it because you're
bootstrapped and only have revenues + credit to play with (assuming you
haven't taken funding).

~~~
csallen
Thanks for sharing! Would you mind if I pick your brain a little bit? You can
email me (csallen at alum.mit.edu), or I'm happy to chat here anonymously if
that's better for you!

------
tajen
I'm single-running an Atlassian add-on, $4000 the first year, $40k the second
year, $55k the 3rd. APIs are young and change often (=maintenance costs),
market is not saturated yet, but the competition is competent. It's a real
benefit (=3 month savings) to your startup if you don't have to build the
sales engine: I've sold to very, very famous names, that I could never have
had if it wasn't through Atlassian's appstore. If you're thinking about coming
in:

\- Build a real, big product, after doing some customer interviews,

\- (but get revenue from month #1, obviously, as any competent startup),

\- If you go for a Cloud add-on, maybe think of doing software that can be
used independently,

\- and _there is the Codegeist competition_ currently running on, until
something like October! It's designed to get newcomers. Think about it,
winning is a great way to launch! (And it's every year)

~~~
farkas
Thanks for the testimonial!

For others reading - we have hundreds of examples like this - single person
companies that have grown inside the Atlassian ecosystem.

From people like Bob Swift, who grew his company and was then acquired, to
companies like Gliffy and Balsamiq Mockups who built multi-dozen person
companies on the back of the Atlassian ecosystem.

Get started here:
[https://developer.atlassian.com/index.html](https://developer.atlassian.com/index.html)

~~~
tajen
They're not exactly relevant examples because they were introduced a dozen
years ago when the landscape was completely different. Among those introduced
in 2014, I haven't found people who live off their sales. I'd love to know
whether there are such recent successes.

------
pramit
My run at it: Running a news site (Bighow.com), selling an all-in-one skills
guide (thesuccessmanual.in), and an educational quizzing tool
(basicversity.com)

