Ask HN: Examples of sucessful one person startups?

[siquick]

Any spring to mind?

[pieterhg]

I make Nomad List (http://nomadlist.com). Not sure if it's succesful, that's up to you to decide. But it has revenue, profit, 3,000+ paying members, premium advertisers, was #1 on here and Product Hunt, been on Reddit's frontpage and has a decent reach in the remote work community.

One person, no funding.

[eecks → pieterhg]

Looks cool, good job. What do members pay for?

[pieterhg → eecks]

Thanks! Everything is free except community features like asking questions on the forum (https://nomadforum.io), although reading is free.

[craigm26 → pieterhg]

in my opinion - successful - nice work!

[atmosx]

Pinboard[1] is the most prominent example that comes to my mind, along with tarsnap[2]. These 'startups'[3] have in common some things:

* Both 'entrepreneurs' have strong personality, although they are quite different.

* Both have a simple, traditional pricing model: You pay for the service. End of the story. Tarsnap in particular uses 'picodollars'.

* Both have a very simple web UI.

* Both are pretty stable. You don't see "coming back soon" pages and 404 errors.

[1] https://www.pinboard.in/

[2] https://www.tarsnap.com/

[3] I don't know if these two businesses can be considered startups. To me startup is something defined. Not very specifically, but not very loosely either. The feeling I'm getting reading HN is that any (self-perceived) modern or pseudo-modern tech-company that doesn't have reason to market itself as a structured corporation poses as a startup.

[atarian]

BuiltWith: http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-one...

[rabidonrails]

Dan Grossman is the sole guy behind both Improvely and W3Counter.

[d2xdy2]

Pretty sure Plenty Of Fish is a single guy.

[paulcole → d2xdy2]

That would be ironic.

[shoo → d2xdy2]

was. he did fairly well out of selling it : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9884417

[bopf]

There is a really good book out there on one person startups called the $100 startup by Chris Guillebeau - it gives loads of examples of startups around the world, which were started by one person (http://amzn.to/1Kb63VH)

[sudoherethere → bopf]

I have read that book; Its definition of a startup was affiliate marketing or selling courses on selling. There was few examples of real businesses like Coffeeshops or a Photographer but I don't think we consider those startups.

[pavornyoh]

This should help -http://www.softwaresmitten.com/blog/2013/01/09/10-successful...

[MattBearman]

When you say one person, do you mean didn't have a co-founder/team when they started? Or still only one person to this day? If the former, then Balsamiq was started by one guy.

[doug1001]

i believe i heard that PlentyOfFish was started by a single dev and run that way for some time.

[webmaven]

Craigslist.

[meir_yanovich]

minecraft <- The start

[jimsojim]

Oculus

[csomar]

Dropbox?

[ankitml → csomar]

First you dont know what a startup is. Second you dont know what a one man startup is.

[csomar → ankitml]

There is little detail in the question itself. Dropbox was a startup at some time (I guess it still is). And it had only one founder when it started.