Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21908577

by robsun • 7 years ago

485 231 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

You can find a lot of articles about the most successful startups / companies in 2019 but these lack information of one-man companies, unless you started as a one person and now you have dozens of employees.

My candidate is my friend. He built mobile app that generates revenue around 30 - 50k $ per year.

majewsky• 7 years ago

Drew DeVault's SourceHut (https://sr.ht). It may not make as much revenue yet, but it provides value to the open-source community by developing a set of developer collaboration tools that actually improve on existing workflows and embody the Unix philosophy.

stanmancan12• 7 years ago

I’m a one man show. I made a SaaS targeted towards a specific company. I did all the work up front, got them to trial it, and when they loved it they singed a contract for just over $100k/year.

I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue.

I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m.

All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my time. It has freed up the rest of my time to keep building similar projects that can both boost and diversify my MRR.

I’m very grateful that I’m able to work on projects I enjoy now, but more importantly it’s given me time to spend with my family and be around for my kid.

akudha4• 7 years ago

Can you broadly talk about how you came up with the idea, how you contacted the company?

stanmancan12• 7 years ago

An acquaintance worked for the company and asked for help replacing an existing paper process with an excel document. I helped, but mentioned a web app would work much better. The company trialed the excel version but came back with some concerns. I talked it over with the friend and decided to spend my free time building it out. Once I had a beta ready they trailed it in their location and they loved it. We got it into 2 more locations (all free at this point) and everyone loved it. That raised interest and other stores in the district started asking for it. We launched it across the whole district and finally started to charge. After a year the company decided to launch it nationally. It was a risky move to do the work up front since it could have fizzled out, but it worked out in the end.

1010082• 7 years ago

Wow, those number sound so high for a third world country that I can't help thinking that if I were in your situation I would give half of that salary (5k monthly) to my brother and father so they wouldn't have to worry about money again. Congratulations for being in that situation!

arkitaip• 7 years ago

Parent didn't get where he is today by giving away half (!) of his salary.

spottybanana• 7 years ago

Coming from scandinavian welfare state, it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income. Especially if you earn it by working, and the reasoning being so that they don't have to worry about money = have less pressure to work.

I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here who would do similar things.

bitcoinmoney3• 7 years ago

Where in the post it says he is from 3rd world?

zakki• 7 years ago

Please write a blog post for us to learn from you.

HeyLaughingBoy• 7 years ago

Don't take this the wrong way.

What if you read what he did, do a lot of research on how to get similar results to him and blog about it so others can learn from you?

Don't wait for things to happen; go out and make them happen yourself.

aerovistae3• 7 years ago

The "site with ads" is the one that really interests me. Can you give some details on that? What kind of site it is, how you grew traffic, what you use for ads? (Just AdWords?)

stanmancan12• 7 years ago

I made an API for myself in 2011 that I could consume at work. I made a site that lets people query it from a web app and docs on the API. Didn’t think anyone would actually use it though. Tossed an ad on it and forgot about it.

The API has been rewritten a few times now, it gets over 300 million requests a month. All organic growth, I can’t take any credit for it because I honestly have done nothing to aid it. Only use Google AdWords and it runs on a $40/m VPS.

We introduced paid plans a year ago and had a few sign ups. I think the paid accounts are about $440MRR but I split it with a friend who did all the work around paid accounts. (I didn’t think it would be worthwhile, he did, so he did the work around paid subscriptions)

rhlsthrm4• 7 years ago

What type of hosting/maintenance are you doing for clients and how did you find these clients? Interesting you were able to find opportunities for hosting services when there are so many easy PaaS options out there now.

stanmancan12• 7 years ago

Most companies don't know what hosting options they have. They'll take the first recommendation from their "tech person" or whoever developed their site.

The problem is, that's a shit experience for your average company. They rarely touch their site since they don't know how. Someone will create an account, they'll write the username and password down for all the various hosting providers they need to know, and things will usually go smoothly until their credit card expires, their domain name expires (which they don't even know is possible) or some other problem that results in a bunch of downtime and panic from everyone involved.

I pitch it as a worry free solution. I manage their domains renewals, DNS, hosting, security updates, framework updates, all things they don't know they have to do. Their framework will remain current, so if they want something done in 5 years they'll have the latest version of the framework, not some archaic thing that requires PHP 5.1 and relies on a weird MySQL bug from whatever version their host is using.

On top of that, they get a couple hours of maintenance included every month, so if they need a few small changes made to the site it's all included, no extra invoices, no quoting, no needing to get budget approvals or sign offs. They just shoot me an email and I make the changes. (hours don't roll over)

Pete-Codes4• 7 years ago

Awesome numbers! Did you do CS at college?

stanmancan12• 7 years ago

Nope all self taught. Nothing I’ve done is very complex.

thepredestrian• 7 years ago

What kind of site do you run that generates $1.5k/month in ad revenue? High traffic niche blog?

stanmancan12• 7 years ago

One of many MAC address lookup services, https://macvendors.com

jonshariat• 7 years ago

This was posted a while back about their tech stack but lots of good comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875

Also very similar post as this one, some good comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167156

domlebo706• 7 years ago

Sorry to hijack slightly, but figured it's related: I am trying to build a "lifestyle" side project into something profitable, as a goal to replace my job. I think I have a good product and niche.

What I want is some sort of mentor network. Someone who has already succeeded where I haven't, and that I can pester with questions, check I am on the right track, vent, etc, every now and then.

Does such a thing (or something like it) exist?

inovica• 7 years ago

Drop me a message. I've started and run several ventures, a couple of which became more than lifestyle. Nothing is done alone though - there are always people who help you on your journey; employees, friends, mentors, family. Happy to point you in a direction

domlebo706• 7 years ago

Great, thank you. PM'ed via LinkedIn.

F_J_H• 7 years ago

Yes, they exist, but the ones I've seen are typically executive forums (ie a group of CEOs meet together). There also seem to be a lot of startup mentorship groups.

However, you might get the most mileage from finding a few people who have been successful where you would like to be, and reach out to them for mentorship. Such connections can make a huge difference.

quest88• 7 years ago

What is a lifestyle project?

domlebo706• 7 years ago

I don't know if there's a better term (I've just seen it used online). This is what I meant by it: https://thebusinessprofessor.com/knowledge-base/startup-vs-l...

arthurofbabylon• 7 years ago

Email me yo. Would love to connect.

v1l• 7 years ago

where are you located?

domlebo706• 7 years ago

Been in NYC for a year, but moving back to Australia in 2 weeks.

colinbartlett• 7 years ago

indiehackers.com is a great source for advice, though it’s not quite as personal as a “mentor”.

blaisio• 7 years ago

Pull Reminders. Launched in 2018, acquired by GitHub in June 2019. A very good product that does one specific task really really well. I assume it was acquired for at least a few hundred thousand, if not a few million.

kraavi• 7 years ago

Pinboard

mmmuhd• 7 years ago

I heard that the site builtwith is still being run by the single founder, maybe he has recruited help by now, but if he still run it all alone then it is most successful one person business I have heard of in 2019.

stanislavb5• 7 years ago

Yes, I've heart it's a one-man army project. His/their office is based on the other side of the bridge where I live. One of my small goals for SaaSHub is to be as successful as BuiltWith :)

stanislavb5• 7 years ago

I'm a one-man army, too. I've built SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com & LibHunt. I left my job a few months ago and since then have focussed on developing and growing SaaSHub.

It's been growing steadily for the last 2-3 months. My expectations are that it will generate ~$2,500+ in January and $100k+ in 2020 given the current growth.

I have a massive list of ideas that I will work on next. Yet, I'd like to be fully sustainable (in an expensive city like Sydney) before jumping to the next project/idea.

akudha4• 7 years ago

Saashub looks cool. How do you manage to get people to write reviews?

stanislavb5• 7 years ago

With proper incentives. Every day I'm featuring 4 projects (2 over the weekend) on the SaaS Tribune (homepage). These projects are usually selected 3 weeks in advance. During that period, product owners are reminded that their software will be higher in the list if they have more reviews.

stanislavb5• 7 years ago

p.s. another very successful one-person business should be levels.io. The person behind "Remote OK" & "Nomad List".

clktmr• 7 years ago

How does SaaSHub generate revenue? I have neither seen any ads nor any payment possibilities.

stanislavb5• 7 years ago

There are some ads on internal pages only. Not too many.

Also, companies can pay for a featured listing https://www.saashub.com/featured-products

codesternews5• 7 years ago

How are people finding your website? How did you get first customers to list their products?

officiallywise• 7 years ago

I built something similar to LibHunt without knowing about it. Someone on http://wip.chat pointed it out and I quickly shifted my focus to something else. It just doesn't seem like enough room in that space for two players and you already have the market cornered.

noodle• 7 years ago

Depends a lot on your definition of "successful" and "business".

Most very successful one person businesses I know of are specialty consulting businesses.

gnzoidberg• 7 years ago

This is a very good point. The definition I would use is not selling your time, where my income is not just a multiplier of the hours I put in, even if the multiplier is high.

leerob• 7 years ago

You could try looking up Solo Founders on Indie Hackers.

https://www.indiehackers.com

theyoungwolf• 7 years ago

i think coinmarketcap was solo or one person

johnking• 7 years ago

Solo = 1 person

wheelerwj• 7 years ago

it was, but i dont believe it is any longer.

csallen• 7 years ago

Ben Tossell of Makerpad. He made about $200k in the past year from a site that teaches others how to build interactive sites and apps without writing code.

Lynne Tye of Key Values. She made about $400k in 2019 from a site that connects software engineers with companies that that share their intangible values, e.g. diverse team, good for parents, fast or slow-paced, etc.

Robert James Gabriel of Helperbird. He struggled a lot with dyslexia growing up, and even had a teacher tell him he should give up and drop out of school. Luckily another teacher encouraged him to learn to code, and he's been quite prolific since. Helperbird is a browser extension that helps others with learning disabilities browse the web easier. Robert recently brought on a co-founder, but he'd grown the app to a "comfortable five figures a month" in revenue.

Plenty more on https://www.IndieHackers.com sharing their stories via interviews and on the podcast, and also posting about hitting revenue goals and other milestones here: https://www.indiehackers.com/milestones

gnicholas8• 7 years ago

+1 on Robert of Helperbird. He's done a great job scaling that company up, although as you note he does have a cofounder now. Also a really helpful guy — I reached out to him and he was down for a chat about accessibility and assistive technology.

batt4good2• 7 years ago

I'm still blown away that Key Values (as cool an idea as it is) manages to pull that kind of revenue. One thing I'd be curious to see is if the site actually can maintain revenue past year one?

dannyw• 7 years ago

Recruiting really, really pays.

st1ck• 7 years ago

Idea is really nice, but with such unpolished execution, I'm surprised there is so much revenue.

RE the execution:

- filters work unintuitively: selecting more filters often increases number of matches

- some filters are very fuzzy, and don't even have detailed description: "Creative + Innovative", "Committed to Personal Growth" or "Bonded by Love for Product"

- you can't negate the filters: e.g. you can select "EQ > IQ", but you can't choose "IQ > EQ", or any value which goes against progressive viewpoint.

nosettones• 7 years ago

I found out about Lynne and Key Values last year. At the time, I was feeling particularly unsure about my path. I sent Lynne a brief email on a total whim after reading the story behind how she came to create Key Values, and feeling inspired. Lynne actually took the time to respond and offer me advice in an email, and that made a strong impression on me. Wish her continued success in 2020 and many years to come !

Pete-Codes4• 7 years ago

I quit my job around the same time as I discovered that podcast. I was walking around in a daze listening to this episode pondering what I had done and it made me feel ok.

gnicholas8• 7 years ago

I run a one-person company [1] whose tech makes reading on screen easier/faster/more accessible. The B2C tools (iOS app and browser plugin) bring in 5 figures, but in 2019 the IP licensing took off.

We have large educational clients that are integrating the tech because of its benefit for students (especially those with ADHD and dyslexia). IP licensing is great because it means I don't need to spend time building the integrations myself, and I don't have any costs attached to the licensing deals, so it's pretty much all profit. In 2020 the IP licensing will greatly exceed the B2C revenue, and we may even make the B2C tools free at that point.

1: www.beelinereader.com

undefined_user6• 7 years ago

That's awesome. Just FYI the link to the Firefox extension at the above URL is a dead end.

gnicholas8• 7 years ago

Ah, yeah thanks I need to fix that, thanks!

rodolphoarruda3• 7 years ago

Do you think it makes sense to sell instructional content under IP licensing for basic education institution? I have produced a lot of basic infosec awareness materials this year I could be revamping to make suitable for teachers and school administration. Payment would be done once a year, more or less aligned with a new pack release which would contain updates/new content.

gnicholas8• 7 years ago

Just to clarify, would you be selling to K12 or higher ed? This could wrap into a "media literacy" package, which is taught in K12.

My gut reaction is you would not want to position this as IP licensing if selling to schools. We do IP licensing to edtech/education companies, but our school offerings are all software/SaaS. I think schools would find the notion of IP licensing to be a mismatch, which would create friction even if the offering itself is a good fit.

codesternews5• 7 years ago

Your ios app have very less reviews 20 and very low. Could you please explain how many downloads you re getting and how you are generating 5 figure.

Congrats!!

gnicholas8• 7 years ago

Most of our revenue is from our Chrome extension. And most of the negative reviews are people complaining about us not offering features that Apple prevents us from offering (like system-wide support).

therealdrag0• 7 years ago

I would love to have this in as part of `getpocket.com`. Maybe you could reach out to them about licensing it.

codesternews5• 7 years ago

@robsun what kind of app your friend built?

robsun• 7 years ago

It's medical app. I don't want to provide more details as he is not aware I mentioned him ;).

sideproject2• 7 years ago

I run SideProjectors, which generates some profit. But my reason for posting is for anyone who wants to take-over someone's side project, then have a look at some of the projects posted - https://www.sideprojectors.com - You don't need to start from zero. :)

Clex• 7 years ago

Signing up to SideProjectors using Twitter requires permissions to follow, unfollow, tweet, update account info, read direct messages, etc. That's extremely scary.

sideproject2• 7 years ago

Apologies - we only need to get user account info (to get the twitter username). Will go and remove those permissions now - we had this Twitter integration set up ~3 years ago and didn't review it - No excuses! :) Sorry for scaring you (and other users of course).

eps• 7 years ago

Not the "most successful", but notable nonetheless - http://www.tinytouchtales.com/end-of-year-2019/

That's the person behind Miracle Merchant and Card Crawl games.

thrw202001• 7 years ago

I run a small MOOC helping country side municipalities/rural communities in Scandinavia with teaching their youth and young adults about IT, networking and cloud technologies. It started as a pilot project in a small municipality north of the arctic circle and I sold my first license in February. It then quickly gained attraction in similar types of municipalities when the results came in.

It was a lot of work in the beginning, but now I usually have a very nice schedule. Every week I spend around 4 hours researching different topics, 8 hours on updating or creating videos for the platform and 4-8 hours in video meetings with customers or regarding new business opportunities.

This year I made north of €150k (~$167604) and will double that before Q3. Seeing how things are going, most likely I will not be a one man show by the summer due to a need for account management and/or content creation, but it's doable.

lucasverra• 7 years ago

Hey there, congrats! How to reach you ? I run a digital product consultancy in Paris and we help SMB’s to increase performance on internal processes

aerovistae3• 7 years ago

I have so many ideas and the path to reaching customers just seems impossible. I am constantly saying to myself, who could be persuaded to PAY for this? And yet so many people here have successful products that I NEVER would have thought could work (a color gradient on text?!?!). I do not know how people reach actual revenue on their side projects.

smithmayowa• 7 years ago

I am the same here, I am so useless at sales that when I see the things some people manage to sell I get angry somewhat.

exolymph• 7 years ago

Don't hate the player, man. Don't hate the game either. Realize that reaching people, both literally and figuratively, is a prerequisite to improving their lives with your product.

buboard2• 7 years ago

what kind of ideas about what audience? perhaps talk to other makers with overlapping audiences, and help each other. sadly, the main online media have become hostile to boostrapped sites.

steve_taylor• 7 years ago

I have a lot of ideas and the capability to build them all. I’m sure I’d be able to sell them as well. My problem is that I don’t have time, because I’m the sole income earner for a family of four. I’ve tried to get numerous projects off the ground, but it always required giving up sleep and putting my day job under threat. I don’t have runway because that money is earmarked (not by me) for a deposit on a house in one of the world’s most expensive markets.

tmaly• 7 years ago

I am in the same situation. I had to stop burning the midnight oil on side projects. I just work on one now but over a much longer time horizon.

herval2• 7 years ago

Get a slower-paced job? I'm assuming you're in the Bay Area by the mention to world's most expensive market - there's plenty of very high paying jobs here where you don't exactly have to worry much, and it isn't particularly hard to get them.

You can also go a very long way by using a small portion of your income to pay someone in a cheaper location to code for you. You can literally pay a full time engineer somewhere else if you stop eating lunch + one starbucks out every day, for instance!

gnicholas8• 7 years ago

Color-gradient-on-text guy here. For context, I didn't quit my day job until after I'd won a couple startup competitions, including one at Stanford. It's been 5 years since I went full-time on BeeLine, and I've only been able to survive thanks to my savings (I used to be a corporate lawyer) and my wife (whose steady earnings as a professor cover our day-to-day). It is definitely stressful and hard to bootstrap a company, but if you can make it work it can offer great benefits in terms of flexibility/family life and social impact.

kak9• 7 years ago

Can't reveal product without their permission.

But know of 1 person company that generates $500k revenue per year and gets its customers via SEO.

gnicholas8• 7 years ago

That's a lot of revenue! What's the cost structure? That can make all the difference in the world.

ingend882• 7 years ago

I run a one person company and made about 50K last year. This year, plan is to bring the courses online and generate about $100K in total.

ingend882• 7 years ago

I built a Product Management Interview training platform and earned about 50K total with 100K in the lifetime. Next step is to transition to online course and expected to make about $200k/year.

swyx• 7 years ago

2 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072

8 months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783

quelsolaar7• 7 years ago

I'm running MinistryOfFlat.com and I have made 7 figures this year. No investors or co workers. No marketing beyond my 2k twitter followers and a website. Solve a very specific and hard problem and the right people will find you.

spectramax4• 7 years ago

This has to be one of the most astonishing and remarkable work I've ever seen in recent times. Holyshit.

UV mapping is a royal pain in the ass and I can't believe it can just be automated away. Many big studios tried - from Houdini to Maxon to large open source projects like Blender. You deserve huge returns, kudos! All the best!

Nit: you need a SSL cert on your website :)

quelsolaar7• 7 years ago

Thank you very much! Its pretty good but its not even close to as good as the version I have in R&D.... SSL is coming, thanks for reminding me.

ivalm• 7 years ago

That'a pretty cool work; I've worked with UV mapping a bit and if this works this is beast. Side note, the top/hero video crashed mid animation for me (chrome/win10/modern hardware); everything else works fine.

quelsolaar7• 7 years ago

Thanks! There are a lot of things that I could improve on my website but I don't think any of it matters that much. There are a lot of people in the startup community talking about metrics, marketing and having the right color on the download button, but its all kind of BS. It matters on the margin, but what really matters is delivering for your customers. Spend your time making the core offering good and if you do it right people will come no matter how ugly your webpage is. Its like a restaurant with amazing food doesn't need a good location of fancy interior design, it will always be full.

rodolphoarruda3• 7 years ago

What is UV? It's everywhere in the website.

quelsolaar7• 7 years ago

When you do 3D graphics you first build a 3D shape and then you wrap an image around it to give it surface properties like color, reflectance, and transparency. In order to do this you need to "unwrap" the 3D shape so that it every XYZ point also exist in a 2D UV image space. This unwrapping step us usually done more or less by hand and is both tedious and time consuming.

errantspark• 7 years ago

I haven't really done any serious 3D work in a few years but my impression was that there are already a few popular UV auto-unwrappers and techniques like Ptex that avoid UVs entirely. I was looking at the maps produced in the demos on your page and they're definitely not like anything I'd produce or want to paint by hand. I assume that's not the point, but rather to use tools like Substance Painter or Mari right?

I guess I'm just surprised that this niche is worth 7 figures. That's awesome.

ricardobeat• 7 years ago

That is amazing!

Love was so ahead of it's time, and has been an inspiration since I first found it maybe a decade ago. Happy to see you make a comfortable living in a related space. Cheers!

MH15• 7 years ago

This is easily the coolest thing I've seen on HN this month! I'm a computer graphics and animation student/hobbiest in conjunction with my CS studies so this is very interesting to me. Any plans to incorporate your software into the content creation tools themselves by means of an addon?

Jack000• 7 years ago

Just read through all your stuff, the UV unwrapper is very cool. Do most people use it with 3d paint tools? It seems the small disconnected bits would be hard to paint by hand.

some thoughts/questions:

- Do you use a library for packing? This alone is a lot of work. Since you write in C, are you using boost polygon or CGAL for the computational geometry algorithms?

- Have you thought about a data-driven approach? Unwrap and packing are geometric operations, but seam marking/segment classification may be amenable to an ML-based method (specifically the spectral graph CNN that came out recently). This seems like the largest hurdle to more "human-like" unwrapping but I'm only a hobbyist so this could be way off base.

I'm almost tempted to create a competing product, but alas I already have a startup in a different domain : ]

quelsolaar7• 7 years ago

I don't use libs for anything. I write everything from scratch. Not having any dependencies is a huge win for many of my customers. You can find some of my source at gamepipeline.org

quikoa• 7 years ago

What kind of license (one time fee/monthly subscription/???) and how much does it cost?

Scott_Sanderson• 7 years ago

If successful means total benefit delivered to shareholders, then I consider my one-man company to be very successful.

Used to be a corporate attorney grinding high billable hours at big firm. Quit to start a solo law practice serving clients working with my favorite thing, cryptocurrencies.

I made $100k working about 30 hours per week from home. Drop off and pick up kids from local school on cargo bike. Take them to the park after school a few days a week (babysitter gets them other days). Client list is kept short to manage stress and avoid need to hire employees.

chapium• 7 years ago

I'm happy for your success, that sounds like a dream come true.

iloveitaly2• 7 years ago

Sidekiq makes ~1M/year in gross revenue. I believe the only full-time employee is the founder, and it doesn't sound like there are any material recurring expenses:

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side...

It's the most profitable one-man show I know of, although there's many that I've run into that ~500k, albeit with a much higher operational burden.

digianarchist• 7 years ago

Mike created a quality product that was much better than the alternatives at the time. I remember working in a Rails shop and struggling with Resque.

iloveitaly2• 7 years ago

Agreed. Sidekiq solves a real problem much better than the alternatives. As soon as your app starts to make real money it's worth paying for enterprise for the support + added features. I feel like there's got to be other businesses to be built by creating 'premium' open-source packages for common pain points in application development.

stef258• 7 years ago

After skimming through the podcast transcript it's still not clear to me how this works.

What's the difference with say the job queue system of Laravel / Horizon / Redis ? From what I can tell this has all the same features listen on the Sidekiq page except it's free.

What am I missing?

pkalinowski2• 7 years ago

Sidekiq is using Redis behind the scenes. It's a job queue system for Ruby and Ruby on Rails

mperham• 7 years ago

I'm at ~$2m now. Still no employees.

kesor• 7 years ago

Evan You is making Vue.js financed by Patreon donations. Looks like about 19k/mo, which is 230k/y. Although there are most probably people who help him, he is doing it mostly on his own. And I suspect that Patreon is just one of his income sources. https://www.patreon.com/evanyou

lpolovets• 7 years ago

Jeff Meyerson at the SW Engineering Daily podcast. I'm not sure if he has any employees (maybe one part-time?), but the podcast pulls in $60k+/mo.

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-so...

nojvek• 7 years ago

Browserless.io - wonderful profitable niche running headless browsers in the cloud. Not sure if still one person anymore.

throwaway_295754• 7 years ago

My wife.

She runs her own web/digital marketing company and is the only full-time employee (which includes time for school pick-up/drop-off). She has a few freelancers for graphic design and content writing and I help out as I can while working a full-time corporate job.

Her company revenue is over 300k/year.

crikli2• 7 years ago

That is awesome. When did she start the company? What has her growth strategy been and how has she acquired new clients?

throwaway_295754• 7 years ago

She's been running it for about 12 years, basically not long after the kids started at school. Growth has been organic, probably around 20% year on year at a guess.

For a long time new clients were mostly Google Ads/Remarketing, word-of-mouth and customer referrals and a few ongoing relationships with sales executives in traditional media like TV, radio, etc. Over time organic SEO has come into it as her ranking improved.

There's been minimal networking which is always a concern if online stops working. There's just not the time to be out at business chambers, BNIs, etc, look after kids and get work done. It's also a long term commitment.

Toss867530912• 7 years ago

I'm a one man development and consulting shop and have been so for almost 12 years.

My 2018 gross revenue was $600K and 2019 gross revenue will be about $780K.

I'm an extremely efficient developer, a very good salesperson, and I'm an absolute fanatic about delivering high quality work on time.

I don't presume to have any special knowledge but would love to find a way to help other devs/tech people do what I've done.

throwaway_295754• 7 years ago

Nice year on year growth.

What are your sales channels? Is it mostly online (seo, ads, remarketing etc), b2b networking or word-of-mouth referrals?

Toss867530912• 7 years ago

Hey, thanks!

I work in a niche of sorts, so the sales channel is 100% word-of-mouth referrals.

My champions are executives that tend to move from one company to another every few years and usually bring me in when they've got a new gig. Also, each new company provides the opportunity to build new relationships with new people who themselves move on to new companies, and the cycle continues. :)

throw872579• 7 years ago

Congrats. I run something similar, all referrals. Would love to trade notes, is there a way to reach you?

Toss867530912• 7 years ago

You bet: batmaniac@gmail.com

cylinder2• 7 years ago

usually solo professionals like yourself will start a side business selling coaching, tools, lessons, guides etc to other practitioners. certainly have a huge base of developers out there who need help going out on their own and could use some coaching on the business and sales sides.

Toss867530912• 7 years ago

certainly have a huge base of developers out there who need help going out on their own and could use some coaching on the business and sales sides.

Yeah? I was really planning to make a move in this direction in 2020. Another investment opportunity combined with imposter syndrome has put this on hold. Mostly imposter syndrome if I'm honest.

But...I should do this, work to help other devs move out of their employer's house and out on their own. It's as rough and shocking as those first few years outside of mom and dad's but man...if you can make it through the initial bits it's worth it.

Remnant44• 7 years ago

That's fantastic!

I have a one man software business but in creating and selling my own product, which has some strong pros and cons comparatively! I've been toying with the idea of taking on some consulting as well. The pivot to get into consulting seems much harder, however.

Toss867530912• 7 years ago

Yes, the pivot into consulting is hard. It's a lot more abstract than "I will build you widget X for $Y", which is a hard enough business in which to get initial traction.

The first shift for me was making a mental shift from "I provide widgets for dollars" to "I solve problems, sometimes software is involved". This altered the way I price my services and how I communicate about them to current and prospective clients.

bitcoinmoney3• 7 years ago

What kind of software do you do?

Toss867530912• 7 years ago

well, it's not the sexy stuff that creates "Show HN" posts! :)

Complex public facing sites for mid-size to large corporations. "Complex" meaning custom-written 3rd party integrations, highly interdependent content structures, and often tricky data migrations from incumbent platforms.

Internal process management tools. But! These tools are just the digital manifestation of a consultation where we do a deep dive into the client's existing processes to optimize and streamline them before we set them in concrete with code. I refuse to wrap software around rubbish processes.

rhlsthrm4• 7 years ago

I'm a solid full stack developer and I feel like I have the time flexibility and ability to start a side consulting business. Do you have any tips to get started? How would you go from 0 to your first client?

Toss867530912• 7 years ago

Absolutely

0. Make sure your house is in financial order. If you are a habitual user of credit cards, have high monthly debt obligations, and no saving, before you even think about going out on your own, change that.

1. Audit your ability to estimate time and hit deadlines. Most developers are rubbish at knowing how long a project will take, even a small one. Make sure you can hit a deadline. This is more important at the outset than your ability to estimate.

2. Start thinking about yourself as a provider of solutions rather than as a developer. You happen to have the superpower of being able to create software, but that's just a tool. Real value is delivered by providing solutions to problems within a business.

I could write pages on each of these points, if you have further questions I'm happy to answer.

Getting your first client, a couple ideas: - Talk to small marketing / ad agencies in your town that won't have internal developers, offering to put some technical muscle behind what they're doing for their clients. - Look for people in your personal network that could benefit from your superpower. Offer to build tools to solve the issues they're dealing with.

These are super generic ideas, I can offer better and more targeted advice if I know a little more about you and your skillset. Hit me up at batmaniac@gmail.com.

codesternews5• 7 years ago

How you get your clients?

Toss867530912• 7 years ago

At this point, almost 12 years in, I've got what salespeople call "time in territory". I'm known to a small but always growing group of executives who change jobs every few years. Fortunately they see value in having me come in to their new company on a basic consult, and often these basic consults turn into more extensive projects.

In the beginning I worked my ass off, frequently for next to nothing, just to make connections, deliver quality work, and build experience. When I was getting started in 2003 this meant writing an ecommerce site for my girlfriend's employer, taking gigs on Rent-a-Coder, and doing small jobs for the employers of friends.

The biggest thing has been maintaining relationships with contacts. Stuff like the occasional email to say "hey, what's new with you" or "I'm going to be in your town, let's grab a beer." It's fun to stay in touch with people and be someone that takes an interest in them and their growth. Sometimes this leads to business, but that's just a by-product. The objective is to build good relationships, as cheesy as that sounds.

cmod• 7 years ago

Surely Ben Thompson (Stratechery[0]) must be one of the most profitable single person businesses / publishers around. One person, email distribution, multiple millions in revenue per year.

[0] https://stratechery.com

conductr2• 7 years ago

I’ve always respected his work. But I don’t subscribe to blogs, just see it pop up on HN frequently. I didn’t realize he was monetizing it. I’m surprised he’s doing so well with tbh but good for him.

anonu• 7 years ago

The guy from builtwith.com

semireg• 7 years ago

I’d imagine that many users don’t comment because they feel their salary mix is too sensitive.

I’m a mobile app dev consultant that also maintains a few node/docker appliances for industrial IOT clients.

I make enough to dedicate 10 hours a week (sometimes nights and weekends) to build and maintain an electron app that I sell for $50 a license. My software is beginning to compete with other software that costs $500 a license. I have a lot of room to grow, and it’s super unsexy: label printers. I basically created the label design app I wish I had. You can check it out at https://label.live.

stef258• 7 years ago

Wish I'd discovered this back when I needed it, all label printing software is garbage but this looks perfect.

Just one issue - can't easily find the price of your app.

xs• 7 years ago

First that comes to mind is Joe Rogan. He started a podcast in 2009.

His SocialBlade profile says he makes between $16,500 - $264,000 a month from his youtube videos alone.

But the bulk of his downloads are going to be from his rss feed, where he has between 2m-20 million downloads per episode with about 4 ads baked into each episode. If he charged a (low) standard of $20 per 1,000 downloads for those ads, this means he makes at least $160,000 per episode. He does like 20 episodes a month. Some believe Joe may be the first podcaster to make a billion dollars. If he hasn't earned that already he will in the next few years.

Let me reiterate. Joe started his podcast himself. By himself. Like as in, he set up his Libsyn account, bought his own mic. Booked his own guests. Then published it all himself. Now he has very minimal help, like 1 or 2 people to help him. It's so insane.

Now you might say "that's not a one-person business". But in this gig economy, not many people are. There's always someone hiring a lawyer, or graphic designer, or podcast producer, to work freelancing gig by gig. So the single person business is usually getting help from others. But there are other podcasters who have also done it all themselves, and are raking it in too.

gremlinsinc• 7 years ago

Pretty sure he was a celebrity before though, that kinda makes things easier than for the avg joe blow.

Fordec• 7 years ago

While true, not sure it's a material point in a discussion about who's the biggest outlier you can think of. Outliers get to be outliers because of non-standard factors.

stef258• 7 years ago

Heard Sam Harris mention once that every Joe Rogan podcast has the same audience size as the Game of Thrones final. Too lazy to look up the numbers but it's very impressive if true.

I like his podcasts a lot, he's a great guy and deserves it all. He did mention once that he made "fuck you money" in his Fear Factor days. His income from that and his stand up tours probably contribute massively to his total net worth.

abinaya_rl• 7 years ago

I'm working on https://remoteleaf.com, at this point it's not a successful business. I'm in the process of appearing and talking about it in the 2020 version of this thread :)

dmlittle• 7 years ago

I'm not sure how it's doing today but back in 2017 park.io was making over $1M/yr [1]. If I had to guess it's probably bigger today.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park...

ca98am79• 7 years ago

Hi - I added a partner in 2019 and we are doing even better now, thanks!

puranjay2• 7 years ago

I worked with an entrepreneur who runs an affiliate site that pulls in about $100k/month, has zero employees, and no office.

tuesday20• 7 years ago

What kind of site is it? If it is a review site, does he use the products he reviews?

puranjay2• 7 years ago

It's a software review site and yes, he does use the products he reviews.

cyberferret2• 7 years ago

I singlehandedly built a small business HR SaaS - https://www.hrpartner.io - over the past few years and grown it to a stage that I can now take a salary from it after 3 years of living on savings. I DO have a co-founder now who joined in May of this year, so strictly speaking I am no longer a one person business, but I created all the 50,000+ lines of code (and 200+ database tables) of my system myself.

EDIT: It has actually been a bit of a family project, with my wife helping out with voice overs and my son helping out with video production etc.

domlebo706• 7 years ago

Awesome. What were the big mistakes you made along the way?

cyberferret2• 7 years ago

Thanks. I guess the biggest mistake in the early days was doing 'scattergun marketing' and not focusing on where our users actually were. Once we narrowed down and marketed to HR managers and business owners via LinkedIn and Capterra etc., we saw great results.

Another mistake was probably not sticking to a marketing avenue long enough. We would sometimes change our website completely a couple of times a month, so we never really knew what was working or not as we didn't have enough quantitative data. Nowadays we just rarely make sweeping changes, but instead make small tweaks to our marketing and watch analytics for patterns.

I do blog about some of these learnings over at https://devan.codes

judlaw• 7 years ago

Not a success story, but I've been building my venture for some time now and recently started making revenue.

We answer all legal questions in 42 minutes (http://www.helplicit.com), and are now expanding that to other domains (http://www.fortyq.com)

The reason I'm writing here is because I'm constantly surprised by the relative ease with which one 'lands' a 100k per year contract, or accidentally makes an API that forks its way to glory. I'm fortunate to know some amazing founders, some of whom are raising millions in VC. Been in and out of accelerators myself. Yet no story I know starts or has ever been like that.

Imho, it is excruciatingly hard work to provide people value and get them to pay for it. Takes time, constant follow-ups, a strong value proposition..none of which gets built jlt.

I wouldn't be fooled by the end result of $ x M ARR. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, which rarely gets spoken of because it sounds just sounds rad to say that I had an idea and somebody just signed me a cheque. No matter the entity at the paying end, people are fundamentally programmed to be uneasy letting go of large sums of money. Takes a lot of convincing to get there.

Having said that, building is an addictive hellride and I wouldn't trade it for anything else :)

Happy to share more of the limited experience I have, feel free to PM. Cheers to building!

inancgumus• 7 years ago

I know a guy from our local industry who has a free cybercafe software. He's making about $500k/year for the past 20 years or so. It's a one man business.

http://handycafe.com

domlebo706• 7 years ago

How does it generate revenue?

NicoJuicy2• 7 years ago

All these nummers and still, my dad is a vet and earned 300k € in his best month ( without much sleep).

Most of the even more successful ones don't even take that in per year.

And yes, he is a one man show, no tech involved. It was very eye opening to me, since my dad can't even boot a PC.

Competition is local though, it's 6-9 other local veterinarians. He seems to be the most successful one (= he is the one everyone sees passing by day and night in the car)

tempsy• 7 years ago

Yes that is impressive but the difference is your dad has to work for that money whereas with software once you achieve success in you do very little work relative for the amount of money you bring in.

NicoJuicy2• 7 years ago

And everyone is forgetting their unpaid hours they did for getting it off the ground.

You still need support for all of your users and actual sales. Which is also work.

Users can ask for a refund if your cloud goes down.

I would also rephrase "once you reach success" to "if you reach success"

The statement is also not valid for consultants, only for business owners with SAAS products/licenses.

TLDR; you're statement is largely false. Success != Luck

ja27• 7 years ago

Pierre Abel of L’Escapadou - educational iPad apps for pre-K to early elementary. I don't know his 2019 numbers but I suspect he did at least $350k this year, down from $600k+ a couple years ago. (Note that the revenue charts in his post don't included educational bulk sales which he says are 45% of his revenue.)

https://medium.com/@PierreAbel/9-years-on-the-app-stores-b58...

Pete-Codes4• 7 years ago

I believe Pieter Levels makes about $500k a year from Nomad List and Remote OK combined.

As Courtland said, Ben Tossell and Lynne Tye are going great!

I recently interviewed Belle who makes Exist app for iOS with her partner Josh. They make 10k a month and are ones to watch: https://www.nocsdegree.com/self-taught-developer-talks-learn...

ktaylor2• 7 years ago

A friend of mine runs a 1 person business. Well, technically, he does have an assistant who does his office admin and books.

My friend has steady gross revenues of $6M a year. When I first met him about 8 years ago he was 26 and living at home with his parents. He once remarked on how much he appreciated his mother still doing his laundry and cooking for him and his father.

I forgot to mention, he has extremely high gross margins and EBITDA. He does all the work himself other then that admin I mentioned already.

What is his business, you are probably wondering?

He owns internet domains. He flips them like real estate. He looks at Google trends, buys undervalued properties, develops their traffic via SEO, generates affiliate sales revenue, and if given the opportunity, then sells them at a much inflated value. He owns 1000s of domains and has built highly automated systems to efficiently manage them.

stef258• 7 years ago

Money is money but this kind of business really feels dirty.

It's kind of like parking cars in every $1 spot you can find and then charging people $500 to take that spot.

Also, developing traffic via SEO for 1000s of (parked?) domains most likely involves even dirtier techniques.

Kudos to him, he's achieved more than I ever will but if that was me I couldn't look people in the eye when telling them how I made my millions.

everybodyknows• 7 years ago

What sort of content is supplied by such web sites?

ktaylor2• 7 years ago

My understanding is he looks for phrases people are increasingly searching for such as "BHP Free Sippy Cup" and then buys a domain such as bhp-free-sippy-cups.com. On the site, he just displays affiliate links to various vendor product pages for that product, e.g. Amazon, etc.

The trick is understanding the trends and having the SEO skills to efficiently build the traffic. He can't put too much individual time into any one property because it will on average only generate a few hundred dollars a month in revenue.

If the trend becomes popular enough someone comes in and buys the domain for their real sippy cup business.

justaguyhere• 7 years ago

Most forms of landlording doesn't add value to the society. This is especially bad in the case of domain names. What is the point of one person owning 1000s of domain names, with the single goal of selling them at an inflated price? The internet would be a much better place without people like these.

stef258• 7 years ago

Way back when, Markus Frind was the first guy to make 1M / month off Adsense on the plenty of fish dating site. Which looked like absolute garbage but it was about the only free dating site at the time and it had grandpas, teenagers, crack whores and everything in between.

Eventually he employed his wife to do customer support and now it's been sold for millions and has hundreds of employees.

I used to do maintenance on a fairly popular dating site which was all horrible php spaghetti code, MD5 passwords ... the works. By the time I got to the office at 9AM they'd already received over 1000EUR in payments, every single day. They used really scummy techniques like fake profiles operated by off shore workers.

lukaszkups• 7 years ago

https://carrd.co/ by https://twitter.com/ajlkn - great for building small/simple websites/landing pages - seems still growing since its premiere.

1hakr• 7 years ago

I'm a one-man army and my latest microstartup is https://visalist.io

Last month I earned around $7K and my estimate is I will cross $100K this year.

Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?

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