Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243

by kewball • 12 years ago

351 286 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?

Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.

dm2• 12 years ago

I do consulting and software development and am technically a small business.

I'm down to a single client (much easier to manage than multiple clients) so I can pretty much pick my projects, work at my own pace, and get paid fairly decently.

I don't make millions, but I make enough and am happy.

Below isn't really business but was a brilliant idea by someone. It isn't my site but maybe it'll inspire someone to do something similar: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

IndieDevClub• 12 years ago

I remember that website. In college my friend and I called it the Pet Rock of the internet. Still can't believe that idea made $1 million.

btw - I'm making a club for people to discuss/show their side projects and startups with other devs, check my profile for the link.

paul_f• 12 years ago

Isn't working for a single client called a "job"?

collyw• 12 years ago

I remember the million dollar homepage when it appeared. I thought it was a terrible idea, but it got enough attention on the tech sites that it worked.

Then came a whole load of copycat sites. As far as I know most of those failed.

ivan_ah3• 12 years ago

I run a small one-man-show publishing house: http://minireference.com. I produce math/physics textbooks for adults. I'm the author, business person, marketing person, and strategic partnerships person. Revenues are not stellar, but they keep me off the streets...

The value I provide is synthesis of a lot of educational material that exists out there into a coherent package (a book). In many ways, my work is similar to what linux distro package managers do: ensuing prerequisites are covered before the main package is installed.

I remember hearing one of the early Internet/www inventors saying the Internet will allow people to "live from the fruits of their intellectual labour." Does anyone know who this was??? With eBooks and print-on-demand this is finally possible now. I would encourage everyone with deep domain knowledge about a subject to start writing about it and publish a small book. I think "information distillation" is of great value for readers. Feel free to email me if you need help/advice with the publishing stuff.

tictac232434• 12 years ago

I read the preview to your book and it looks fantastic. Just what has been missing in school. I'm an engineering student and like many other will greatly benefit from this text. Have you considered writing more on math and physics? I would surely buy even more advanced topic like electricity, magnetism, and discrete math (Sets, proofs, induction etc.)

ivan_ah3• 12 years ago

Hi tictac, and thank you for the kind words.

I actually have a draft on E&M which is 70% done, but I've now learned that it takes me about 1 year to get a book into good shape so I won't try to finish it just yet and instead spend the next six months working on the business side of things: scaling distribution and sales.

Two other topics which I feel competent enough to write about are probability and vector calculus so by 2015 I'll get to these topics too. I don't feel I have enough experience teaching more advanced topics to write about them---also there is less need for No Bullshit guides, because advanced math/phys books are quite good and bullshit free. It seems it's the freshman-year books that suck the most.

yankoff• 12 years ago

I have both of your books: math&physics and linear algebra. Keep up a great job!

blumkvist• 12 years ago

bg?

ivan_ah3• 12 years ago

Да. Inspiration-а за книгата идва до голяма степен от кондензираните книги коите се използват в Българските университети.

alixaxel• 12 years ago

Just bought your book, looks awesome and I'm sure it'll come in handy! =)

danoc• 12 years ago

I didn't create it, but Pinboard (https://pinboard.in/) is a great example of a successful one person business.

Founder Maciej Cegłowski wrote about it here: https://static.pinboard.in/xoxo_talk_thoreau.htm

gmays11• 12 years ago

I'm doing http://justaddcontent.com solo and self-funded. It turned into a bigger project that I anticipated, especially for my first product.

I started working on it full-time in October. It started as a hobby project about two years ago. It took particularly long because I have a non-technical, military background and had to teach myself to code, design, write copy, marketing, etc. It's been a fun challenge.

I still work on it 12-14hrs a day on average, but I still love it and I love the problem I'm solving. The last few months I started focusing on product again and my customers absolutely love it, which is awesome. Now I'm turning my attention back to marketing.

Like the other guys, I'm not making millions yet, but I'm 100% self-funded and in no danger of running out of money. I continue to put 100% of what I make back in the business after my essentials.

I'm not sure when I'll start hiring, but I have some pretty major plans that I'll need help executing. It's just one of those things where it'll completely change the game, but it'll also change the dynamic of the business.

ramykhuffash• 12 years ago

Well done! I don't need a business website, but I felt a slight urge to give you my money after reading the value proposition. I especially liked the "what we do vs what you do" part.

gmays11• 12 years ago

Thanks, that really means a lot. Over the last few months I've been working hard to refine it. I feel like I'm finally getting there.

adventured• 12 years ago

What technical skills did you end up teaching yourself (if you don't mind answering)?

I was reading the about page, fast skimming, and thought for a moment you flew the FA-18. Nope, just your awesome wife!

In looking over your site, it might be valuable to add a blog, where you write about the needs of small businesses regarding hosting (what's new, what's coming, etc). Can be a great way to build some extra traffic, and authority.

gmays11• 12 years ago

Everything. My BA is in Psychology, my MS is in Finance, and I spent the last 8 years in the Marine Corps (joined right after college) so I had no experience with programming, design, product development or anything like that.

In grad school I built a website for my thesis (2010) and fell in love with web development. I originally wrote it in HTML, but became cumbersome updating menus on every page, so I 'discovered' PHP includes, which was like inventing the wheel for me. From there I started playing with different web development frameworks and doing more advanced stuff. I really just fell in love with web development even though I sucked at it (particularly because I'm color blind, figure that one out).

It was fun to see my skills evolve. I still have a long ways to go, but as I iterate I see my own progress. Since I've worked on it alone it's like a journey of self-discovery.

Yeah, my wife is awesome. I surprised her in when I told her I wanted to leave the Marine Corps to turn my hobby project into a business, but she was totally supportive once she saw how passionate I was about it...really can't ask for more than that. She also works 12-14hrs a day and we don't have any kids, so it's perfect.

I agree, you're absolutely right about the blog. I've been 'meaning' to do it for the last few months and I'm finally getting around to it. The blog should be up in the next week or so.

pedroo• 12 years ago

Sounds like an amazing journey. Congrats on all the hard work.

gmays11• 12 years ago

Thank you!

It totally was, and it continues to be. I built the beta in my free time when I came off missions on my last 12-month deployment to Afghanistan (returned April 2013). When I deployed in April 2012 I didn't know anything about tech. I listened to podcasts (I downloaded hundreds before deploying, mostly Mixergy) when I worked out (still do) and read a lot of business books.

I feel like I still have a lot to learn, but I've come a long way in the last two years. It's been one hell of a ride, I'm just happy I'm still enjoying it. Don't tell my customers, but I'd do this for free I love it so much haha.

whatevsbro• 12 years ago

> This website is protected and guaranteed secure by a 100% hacker free security guarantee. This guarantee ensures that this website was scanned and deemed free from of any phishing scams, exploits, or malware that could infect your computer and jeopardize your safety.

So you're selling snake-oil too?

dlss• 12 years ago

I think it's in the same spirit as a 100% update SLA or a 100% satisfaction guarantee

gmays11• 12 years ago

I don't believe so. All websites are scanned regularly.

There's no way to make a website completely hack-proof, so the guarantee means that any security related issues (hacking, malware, etc.) will be fixed at no cost to the customer.

In doing customer development I was surprised to learn how many small businesses had experience with hacking or had security as a primary concern. Website cleanup typically costs a couple hundred dollars on the low-end, so the guarantee provides peace of mind. It's a bit expensive on our end, but it's just an incentive to do an even better job.

Would you call that selling snake-oil? If so, let me know (my contact info is in my profile). I'm not a security expert, but I do hire them and believe the security guarantee is accurate. Please contact me if you disagree or I can improve it, I take this pretty seriously. Thanks for bringing it up, that's why I love posting here.

imjk5• 12 years ago

When you say, "built on the same platform trusted by Ford, NFL, Sony, eBay, CNN," do you mean they use the same backend technology, or that they're actually customers of yours?

gmays11• 12 years ago

The same backend technology. Most of my customers are small businesses or marketing departments in larger businesses.

bacon• 12 years ago

He means WordPress.

fuzzythinker2• 12 years ago

Really love how you layout the "What We Do" vs. "What You Do" - Strong selling point, visually appealing, and pretty unique.

gmays11• 12 years ago

Thanks, I really appreciate that. I'm actually pretty self-conscious about the design because I don't have a design background and I'm color blind. Every time I use new colors (which isn't often) I have to send them to my wife to let me know if they look ok. It's a real pain in the ass, but whatever, I love the work.

vram22• 12 years ago

Checked out the site a bit, looks good. Also good domain name :)

gmays11• 12 years ago

Thanks! I picked up the domain name for around $150, which I actually thought was expensive at the time. The .org and .net versions were available, thankfully.

santa_boy2• 12 years ago

Nice.

How do you market this stuff? How are you getting customers?

If you don't mind, can you share some stuff on the revenue numbers and what your experience has been from conversations with customers?

Is there a way we could chat up?

abdophoto• 12 years ago

I didn't create this, but http://viralnova.com is known for being run by one person and has been quite successful. Maybe the most successful that I've ever seen. http://www.businessinsider.com/viral-nova-considering-a-sale...

patio113• 12 years ago

Even if you were to scope it just to software/SaaS product companies, there's minimally hundreds of these in the world and dozens of them have HN accounts. Most don't post on threads like this, so I feel the need to pipe up and say "This is quite doable, and done, much more than you might expect."

I run a small software company (two, technically). Products include Bingo Card Creator (http://www.bingocardcreator.com), Appointment Reminder (https://www.appointmentreminder.org), and occasional offerings for training for other software companies. I used to do consulting, too, but quit to focus on products.

I'd describe it as "modestly successful." It's the sole financial support for my wife and I. I'm the only full-time employee of the business (for a very quirky understanding of the words "full-time").

iagooar• 12 years ago

A little bit off-topic, but I find it really interesting how some American webpages have a look and feel that is recognizable in a fraction of second. The website https://www.appointmentreminder.org/ is one of these, the second you enter, the second you know it is a US American page.

joelennon2• 12 years ago

What a bizarre comment, I expected to see American flags and red and blue text but the site looks like any website, American or otherwise.

peterjancelis2• 12 years ago

It's a theme from WooThemes, a company with 2 South African founders and one Norwegian one and, as far as I know, an international customer base.

Not sure what is so US American about this theme.

visualR• 12 years ago

Although patio is an American he lives in Japan

zerr3• 12 years ago

It really requires a different mindset. For instance, while BCC makes sense, I can't imagine someone willing to pay for something like Appointment Reminder.

JonoBB• 12 years ago

No need to imagine. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/01/06/kalzumeus-software-year-...

letstryagain• 12 years ago

I think my dentist uses it. It's easy to forget an appointment that's 6 months in the future.

patio113• 12 years ago

Suppose you run a professional services business where you have appointments. If people don't come to an appointment, you don't get money. You might pay an office manager to call people the morning of their appointment to remind them, so that they come into their appointment, so you get paid, right? Appointment Reminder is like an office manager who costs $200 a month, not $4,000 a month, is vastly more likely to successfully reach a customer, (virtually) never forgets to call, and does not consider boring, repetitive work to be an insult to her intelligence. For many of my customers, $200 is substantially less than they earn for a single appointment. (Think less "hair salon" and more "HVAC repair firm.")

davidw5• 12 years ago

This is a pretty good comment in that it highlights the thought processes a lot of us go through. "I can't believe ..." or "I can't imagine ...". Believe it - there are tons of people out there willing to pay for various niche things that make their lives/businesses better. I've heard the same thing about one of my own projects, LiberWriter. There's open source software that kinda/sorta does what we do, but a lot of people just want to pay someone and make the problem go away. They don't want to know HTML or how NCX files work.

glazskunrukitis3• 12 years ago

Pato11's stories are always inspiring and interesting to read. They were a huge motivator to start my own business, which I eventually did.

My first attempt in online business was GetSSL.me (https://getssl.me), which has been one-man shop most of the time. It was pretty simple to set up and run, but the biggest pain point was payments, because of my geographic location. Also marketing was a big issue, because I am not a marketer and had to learn everything on the go. To be honest it was more like trial and error approach.

imjk5• 12 years ago

As someone who has no idea about the SSL certificate business, how does your business work? Are you a reseller or do you make money on affiliate commissions? Just genuinely curious.

mstump• 12 years ago

Your cert for getssl.me has expired...

jasonkester2• 12 years ago

To underscore Patrick's point about just how many of these businesses there really are, he's one of the few folks I remember from the old Business of Software forums over at joelonsoftware.com that seem to have migrated over here.

That was a tiny little board where the owners of single player software businesses would get together to ask silly questions about how to update their shareware product's PAD files. There were a few hundred of these businesses represented there just among the regular users.

Most of them fly under the radar since, having products that provide a comfortable living with relatively low workload and no need to follow the latest hot technology trends, there's little reason your average Dot-Com-Thousandaire would ever stumble across a place like Hacker News.

Edit: forgot to plug S3stat (http://s3stat.com) and Twiddla (http://twiddla.com), my two main revenue generators, and FairTutor (http://fairtutor.com), hopefully the next one.

raphinou• 12 years ago

I like the idea of the cheap bastard plan of s3stat. Very well done and well presented.

jdeibele• 12 years ago

I have two daughters, a niece and a nephew who might be moving from Spanish Immersion this fall to classes that are more rigorous in math, science, etc. Maybe I'm your target audience., maybe not. When I look at your website, the last blog post and tweet are from 2010. It makes things look dead. We're not homeschooling but http://homeschoolspanishacademy.com/ looks a lot more active. Also, "fair trade" often seems to translate as "expensive". Education seems more valuable than coffee (now that I'm on my second cup) but not having any sense of what pricing or structure is like is off-putting.

kewball• 12 years ago

Thanks patio11 and everyone else who has shared their story. I have been consulting for a few years and I plan on moving to a product based income. Built products in the past that have not been successful but hearing stories of others who have done it is motivation to keep trying.

ohashi7• 12 years ago

1 man startup - http://reviewsignal.com/webhosting/compare I do web hosting reviews. Not the scummy pay-for-placement stuff you see, but an actual review site. It tracks what people are saying about hosting companies on Twitter and publishes the results.

The story is told a bit here http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/25/web-hosting-reviews-are-a-c... I was just tired after 10 years of still relying exclusively on my experience and the experiences of people I knew. Figured there must be a better way and I had been working with Twitter data for thesis and saw this opportunity.

cykho• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing - this is awesome. I've had an incredibly hard time finding good hosting service reviews.

ohashi7• 12 years ago

Glad you like it. It really is hard. You can read a lot of reviews and people will say contradictory stuff. One of the biggest takeaways from looking at all the data I've collected is that no company is even close to perfect. These services are pretty hard to compare apples to apples because there are a lot of touch points dealing with customers. The human interactions are hard to quantify. Sometimes a hard drive dies and you catch a support rep on a shitty day. You may have a really bad experience. Is that normal or just an outlier? It's really hard to tell without enough data. So I try and grab as much of it as possible and publish it transparently. My hope is that it is useful and people end up at companies they are more satisfied with, let the good guys benefit from treating people properly rather than paying the highest commission and locking people in.

BorisMelnik• 12 years ago

wow, love this. may actually be the first web hosting review site I would ever look at. I get more spam on my blog from web hosting review sites than anyone. not sure why but seems like you have a lot of blackhat competition.

love your site & framework. good luck! Will share.

ohashi7• 12 years ago

Thank you! The competition is incredibly black hat. Try running the sites listed for 'web hosting reviews' under some SEO tools and it's often very clear which black hat strategies they are using (blog spamming, edu/gov spam, etc). I haven't been able to crack the top search terms yet because it's incredibly competitive and it's not a level/fair playing field. But working on creating some interesting content and building high quality links will hopefully pay off in the long run.

I am always open to ideas and suggestions for how to market this better. And I appreciate you sharing it!

itry2• 12 years ago

Interesting. You make a living from this? Is it all SEO driven?

ohashi7• 12 years ago

Yeah, I've been working on it for 3 years, in the past year it's been able to support me. It's not a lot of money, but it's enough that I can subsist on it. It also doesn't eat my time 100% anymore, I can do some consulting on the side when I feel like it. I'm actually just traveling in south asia now, trying to live cheap and seeing if I can work from anywhere.

As far as SEO, I get some SEO traffic although most of it is to blog posts that aren't that related to web hosting. The most popular ones are about creating a reverse proxy/caching server with nginx and long running processes in php. web hosting review seo is super competitive and I'm nowhere near the front page for most terms unfortunately.

tbrooks• 12 years ago

I love the mad-lib style form on the home page.

I assum it converts well?

ohashi7• 12 years ago

It really depends on the traffic source/quality honestly. For some it can be exceptionally helpful (ie you have no idea what you need). For the HN crowd I linked directly to the data because I figured people would be far more comfortable with that.

fiatjaf5• 12 years ago

I don't know anything, but when I think of reviews I think about this: http://hammerprinciple.com/

Maybe it is interesting for you to know, maybe not. Probably not.

ohashi7• 12 years ago

That's pretty neat frontpage. I am a bit confused as to what it's doing, who's doing it and why. But it seems like a neat idea.

enigmabomb2• 12 years ago

I sent you a contact form email. =)

musgrove• 12 years ago

I run a web design and development studio that is just myself, although I established it as an LLC, and have been successful with it. I focus on WordPress solutions and started it by just diving in head-first and work pretty hard at it. I have a marketing background which helped me get it off the ground quickly, and am good at managing time, which has helped. I totally love it.

bdunn• 12 years ago

My company consists of just me, and is fairly profitable. And to reiterate patio11, there are quite a few of us. I detailed income and how much I contribute monthly to each of my income streams here: http://planscope.io/blog/how-i-changed-the-world-in-2013/

mattront5• 12 years ago

Just launched Pinegrow Web Designer (http://pinegrow.com) two months ago. The company is actually run by my wife and me, but I do all the work with Pinegrow while she is taking care of our other projects.

Pinegrow has been paying most of our bills since launch and I have a lot of expansions in the pipeline: full support for Foundation alongside Bootstrap, developer edition that'll work with templates, a similar app for designing emails...

abuzzooz• 12 years ago

Pinegrow looks awesome. May I ask about what library you used to write it on the Mac? Do you have an embedded HTML renderer, or did you write your own?

mattront5• 12 years ago

Thanks! It's a Javascript app packaged with node-webkit. At first I packaged it as a Chrome App, but node-webkit was a lot more flexible and simple.

At the moment it uses Chromium to render HTML, but I'll add a custom renderer to support various templates.

sheff• 12 years ago

This looks great! The upcoming developer edition that will work with templates sounds really useful as well.

Any plans to support the SASS version of Bootstrap ?

mattront5• 12 years ago

Partial support for SASS will be out next week (together with Foundation). The way it works is that when CSS rules are saved Pinegrow saves .css, .less and .scss versions. Variables, expressions and most of the functions are supported.

girvo2• 12 years ago

Gosh pinegrow is a cool project, but the massive deal breaker for me is a lack of a Linux client :( any chance of that at all? For distribution (cause packaging is a bitch, to be honest) you can use something like Ermine to compile twice (i386 and x64) and then convert to a single static binary.

For now, I'll continue playing with it on my Mac, but Linux support would be the best.

mattront5• 12 years ago

Actually, I have an experimental Linux build. Didn't really have a chance to test it. Here it is, if you would like to try it out:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gyzegb9sae3jlwh/Bv9NtDF96z (select ... and Download as zip).

Please let me know how it works out.

phantom_oracle2• 12 years ago

Wow! You're actually on HN! I've visited your site before, and you must see a lot of click-throughs from review sites, because you guys are up there with divshot and the other site-builders.

I'll also be testing out the linux client, and I'm sure that you are probably aware of the fact that a lot of web devs use some form of linux as their main desktop.

davidandgoliath• 12 years ago

Fantastic little app :)

mattblalock• 12 years ago

Man, 3 days is nothing!

Give me some time to fall in love, and I'll happily pay. It seems so shortsighted, as if I'd somehow use up all the usefulness of your app in 7 days or perhaps even 30 days.

Its a tool for work, and if it can reduce my load in any significant way I'd pay $500 for it. Now, I'll never really know. Too bad... for both of us.

mattront5• 12 years ago

Matt,

I get your point and have thought a lot about it before deciding on 3 days.

3 days was a compromise between having a short sales cycle (we are bootstraping the app) and letting users try the app before they buy it. We also have an online version available for free without any time limitations. The only thing the online version can't do is open local files.

We'll reconsider extending the trial to 7 days.

If you like the app and feel it could be useful to you it would be a shame to blow it off simply because of the short trial. If you need to try it out for longer, just send me an email and I'll set you up.

itengelhardt5• 12 years ago

I don't know whether HN is the right place to ask this question. The crowd for this frequents either http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm or http://academy.micropreneur.com

There's also a number of podcasts (notably "Startups for the Rest of Us" and "Bootstrapped With Kids")

davidw5• 12 years ago

Hi Christoph! I came here to post the bootstrapped.fm link too, but I think HN is a fine place to post this discussion too. I think the small, bootstrapped company is where it's at for many of us who don't want to or can't do the VC thing in SV. That's probably a large majority even on a site like this.

Rob's book is an obbligatory reference in this space too:

http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching-...

My own thing is not 'successful' in that it's not my main source of income just yet, but it's not too far off, either: http://www.liberwriter.com

One of the key things I've learned from it is to go do something that matters to 'ordinary people', rather than something that's "cool" from a computer guy point of view.

itengelhardt5• 12 years ago

Hi David! Great to hear that you are doing well with LiberWriter. That definitely is a pain point for people.

I like that you kept the layout simple using only bootstrap. that's a lot faster & cheaper than doing a full blown design.

dangrossman7• 12 years ago

Hey there. /raises hand.

https://www.improvely.com and https://www.w3counter.com

Five figures a month, just me, I've written about my solo business a couple times in other Ask HN threads. Ten years ago (almost to the day), in my college dorm, I was looking at the Webalizer web stats report my web host provided for my blog, and thought "I could do something much cooler than this". So I did. I had built a few educational sites and threw some ads on them for a couple years before that, but W3Counter was the first service I actually charged a subscription for, and now I make a living building and selling this stuff.

leobelle2• 12 years ago

Ghostery blocks w3counter so it blocked pretty much everything on the actual site, maybe use a static domain that isn't blocked by ghostery. :O

dangrossman7• 12 years ago

You're running Ghostery for the purpose of blocking W3Counter and every other site like it. You can't really do that then lament the fact that it worked. I'm not going to invest time and effort into evading you; if you want to see web stats sites, you can just turn off the extension. Somehow I don't think there are any Ghostery users looking to sign up.

zbeewhs2• 12 years ago

If you don't mind me asking, what is your background? Do you have any advice for someone who aspires to follow in your footsteps?

dangrossman7• 12 years ago

I was just a kid whose family bought a computer at the right time. I got hooked, taught myself programming from online tutorials, and never stopped creating things. The stuff I made got more complex and more polished each time, until it got to the point that I can create stuff other people are willing to pay to use. There's really no prerequisite other than a computer and an interest in programming.

fiatjaf5• 12 years ago

Do you have lots of users for W3Counter? How much users do you need for offering free content and making a profit from advertising? I'm interested.

dangrossman7• 12 years ago

There are about 70,000 users.

emilioolivares3• 12 years ago

Awesome Dan, thanks for sharing. Very inspiring to see a one man show producing such fine products. Is there anything you outsource? You should write a book on the details of how you did it, I'd buy it in a heartbeat!

benackles2• 12 years ago

Hey Dan, Improvely looks like an awesome product. Incredible work for a one-person shop. Our company was talking about a click fraud monitoring system last week. I'm going to pitch this to the rest of our agency tomorrow.

benackles2• 12 years ago

Do you have a way to track call metrics? We'd like to be able to track conversions from a Google Voice number.

dangrossman7• 12 years ago

Nope. Call tracking is difficult and expensive, both in terms of money and complexity; I'd have to 10x my prices before even touching it. You also wouldn't be using a Google Voice number -- call tracking services work by renting huge numbers of phone numbers, and assigning a unique number to each visitor to your site for some time. Each person sees a different number, and their calls get routed to whatever your real number is after being logged for analytics. Improvely only tracks stuff that happens on your website.

bobosha• 12 years ago

Not my business, but www.DuckDuckGo.com (Gabriel Weinberg) is a good example.

dangrossman7• 12 years ago

DDG isn't a solo business, not anymore at least. They've got "11-50 employees" now.

danpat6• 12 years ago

I created:

http://skitrails.info/

I'm an avid cross-country skier, and traditionally daily trail reports are done by hand by the maintenance staff after they're out all night working on the trails.

I had the bright idea of putting GPS tracking devices in grooming equipment and creating the "what's been groomed" report automatically, in real-time.

It took about 4 seasons to really get it right, and there was no appreciable income for that period. Lots of lessons learned about equipment (antennas, good wiring practices in vehicles, power cleanliness in big equipment, etc), good ways to present the data, map projections, how to deal with messy data, dealing with non-technical users, cross-border shipping tarrifs, mobile-network provisioning rules, the list goes on. I did it alongside my full-time job for the first 4 years.

It's a tiny niche, and one I never expect to get all that big, but it looks like I'll be able to make it my sole income source next season.

Which is great, because it'll let me go skiing more.

pokoleo• 12 years ago

Hey - you should add a "how to setup" link to your site.

peterjancelis2• 12 years ago

I looked at your website and don't really understand how customers start using your site and how they pay you.

Do you sell them a GPS tracker and show them their GPS logs in an online map maybe?

If so, I'd make the selling of the GPS tracker more obvious. You can also do customer testimonials.

danpat6• 12 years ago

The site is focussed mainly on the consumer, the skiers, for whom the service is free (they just look at the maps).

The "customers" are ski area managers, they pay me to publish their maps and generate their trail reports.

The sign-up process is slightly obtuse on purpose. Because I'm still busy developing the site, only the really motivated customers actually contact me (via the "Contact" page), so I don't have to spend too much time doing a sales pitch that goes nowhere. I'm fortunate that I have a decent runway to play with.

I'll change that a bit this summer once I'm no longer frantically building out features.

There is effort required on my part for each sign-up, mostly around cleaning up GIS data that new customers supply, although I do supply a backend with tools for map management. The ski area managers are often extremely non-technical, and like the personal touch. I charge a modest premium for that.

kyleblarson• 12 years ago

This is cool. I live in the Methow Valley and the MVSTA should use this!

dublinben5• 12 years ago

Or they could use a service that doesn't charge the public for the information.

danpat6• 12 years ago

The MVSTA did contact me back in November, but I guess they decided against it for the time being. Feel free to lobby them :-)

A couple of areas are funding their subscription by getting a local ski shop to pay for the service. There's a huge range of budgets across the industry, it's been tricky figuring out pricing that works for everyone.

sixQuarks2• 12 years ago

OP asked for businesses that provide a majority of your income. With a site that has an alexa ranking of over 3 million, there is no way this is your primary source of income.

eropple• 12 years ago

it looks like I'll be able to make it my sole income source next season

Chill, man.

danpat6• 12 years ago

The income from this website isn't strongly correlated to it's global web ranking.

Ski areas pay me to generate trail reports, and either link to the "default" report I publish for each area, or they publish the reports on their own websites. Reports are also printed and pinned up in lodges, or emailed by marketing departments to subscribed skiers. I'm not depending on people visiting my site for revenue.

What you have to realize is that people aren't out there searching for "gps grooming reports" (although I think I do pretty well in the search results for that phrase now). A this stage, they don't even know it exists. The sales channels that have worked so far are: word-of-mouth (it's a tiny industry where everyone knows everyone), personal introductions and a few cold-calls when I can summon the courage, and I don't expect that to change significantly.

This is the first "season" that I've worked on it full time and I've almost hit minimum wage. I expect to do better than that next winter. I have a decent runway, live very cheaply and don't have billion-dollar ambitions. I've supplemented the revenue with a little bit of side-consulting, but not a lot.

fookyong3• 12 years ago

http://beatrixapp.com

Solo, self funded and profitable. I work on it while traveling around Asia.

Agree with patio11 there's probably way more than would speak up here. I seldom contribute to HN or the bootstrapping forums mentioned in another reply. I browse a little, but 99% of my time spent in front of the computer is spent working on product or replying to customer emails.

How I got started:

I've built SaaS apps before but they were the dreaded "solution looking for a problem" type.

Then I decided to do things strictly the Lean way. Got out of the building. Talked to customers about an idea I had. Pretty soon I discovered an adjacent problem that everyone had, that sounded fun to solve, and that I had specific domain knowledge in. I built and launched my MVP in one month, from a beach in Koh Samui. I've been traveling ever since then, spending each month in a different country.

Charged from day 1. Had paying customers from day 1.

I find changing my environment enables me to compartmentalize my work better - like I try to get major new features rolled out before I head to my next destination.

Not planning on doing this solo forever. Not ruling out hiring some help down the line and maybe a permanent office somewhere.

But for now it's pretty fun the way it is!

sami_b• 12 years ago

I remember that you had other apps before like GoodGecko and Peashoot, what happened to them?

fookyong3• 12 years ago

Goodgecko just never made any meaningful amount of money plus it was a competitive space (surveys) so it was shut down.

Peashoot did ok but in the end there were too many free competitors (twitter analytics).

I think if the same thing happened now, I'm a more experienced entrepreneur so I'd be able to deal with free competitors better - figure out what customers are still willing to pay for, aim for the enterprise market etc.

icebraining• 12 years ago

Sounds useful, and I like the demo. Just a note: when I scroll down to the footer, the demo "pulls me up", hiding the links :)

bemmu6• 12 years ago

If I understand correctly, this will post automatically to a Facebook page when users sign up. Any trouble with token expiration? I think it was changed from unlimited to a shorter time recently.

fookyong3• 12 years ago

It's handled gracefully in the app. If it expires and the app tried to post something unsuccessfully the user gets an email asking them to reconnect.

Facebook tokens aren't unlimited but they are long enough such that the user doesn't have to reconnect all the time.

medius• 12 years ago

Can you please share how you marketed the app? What worked and what didn't?

Everyone: When sharing information about your app, I would request people to share marketing approaches as well. It would greatly help people who are just getting started.

goodproduce• 12 years ago

I've worked full-time as a consultant since 2007 and make a little over low six figures after taxes and paying contractors. We (http://www.goodproduce.net) do a lot of basic services like content development, web design (mainly WP), social media management, hosting, deck creation, and general "digital" consulting for high net-worth individuals (primarily athletes and their brand partners.

In the early days, I worked to stay visible through conducting interviews for my company blog - that got us on the map in the sports community. It also helps that we never say no to a request...ever.

scottclark5• 12 years ago

What billing model are you on? Hourly? Retainer? Fixed?

zengr• 12 years ago

I think newsblur.com (YC S12) is run by Sam alone.

bjoerns• 12 years ago

I run https://www.spreadgit.com, a hosted version control system for Excel. Doing this solo and full time. It's been a hell of a ride so far but I love it.

emilioolivares3• 12 years ago

Wow this is an awesome idea. Every business has this problem with multiple people trying to modify the same excel file.

_fountainhead_• 12 years ago

I run http://getreplied.com

It's a very simple app to help people get their email replied.

manish_gill• 12 years ago

Hey,

So I just clicked on your app, and ended up "cancelling" when Google OAuth asked to manage my email address. The app then took me to a Django debug log. Looks like you are running the app with DEBUG=True. You might want to change that, so it would show a generic error message instead of providing me with all the view/template info!!

boksiora2• 12 years ago

hi _fountainhead_ on your site, please give a demo of the products or at least some descriptions or screenshots, the only thing i see is now asking for my email and i don't know for what i am signing about

thinkcomp• 12 years ago

I run PlainSite:

http://www.plainsite.org

boksiora2• 12 years ago

Nice project

Ecio78• 12 years ago

I'm not sure he is particularly active on HN but Rob Walling[1] is a solo entrepreneur managing at least a couple of Saas products: Hittail[2] (which he bought and then grow) and Drip[3]. He also conducts a podcast on Saas[4] and also organises a conference for self-funded startups[5]. In the past Patio11 spoke there too

[1] http://www.softwarebyrob.com/ [2] http://www.hittail.com/ [3] https://www.getdrip.com/ [4] http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ [5] http://www.microconf.com/ [3]

raffi• 12 years ago

I run a business selling penetration testing software that I develop. It's completely bootstrapped. I do very little services work (I actively send this type of stuff to friend's companies). Right now, it's just me, although that's probably going to change. By most of my own definitions and the one you posted here... it's successful.

How did I get started on this? Sort of by accident.

I was working for Automattic after an acqui-hire thing. After a year there, I found that I missed working in security. I found a full-scope penetration testing gig three blocks from my apartment.

In my spare time, I started to tinker with a few ideas and released them as an open source project. Said project saw a lot of interest within the hacker community very quickly. I didn't expect this. Folks formed an opinion on it pretty quickly. Some people hate it. Others love it. Of those who know it, very few are in-between.

I left my pen testing job with a decent amount of money saved up. I didn't know exactly what I would go and do afterwards. I spent some time tinkering with Android, just for giggles.

I was very reluctant to start a business that used my "successful?" open source project. Partially because it leverages another open source project owned by another company.

I was at a conference in 2011 and someone from a US government agency asked if I was selling anything. I said no. He said that was too bad, because he had end of year money, and he liked my open source stuff. It was then that I decided to look at expanding my open source kit into a commercial product.

April will mark the two year anniversary of my first customer. My customers are well known organizations and they trust my software to assess how well they protect their networks. I'm constantly in awe of this.

suyash• 12 years ago

Congratulations on your successful business. Can you share link to your business website please?

zakelfassi• 12 years ago

http://www.advancedpentest.com/

brador• 12 years ago

When's the end of year money period?

spydum• 12 years ago

Pretty much oct, nov, december you will see large enterprise shops who have unspent capex budget, and are afraid that if they do not spend it, the next years budget will be reduced to last years spend.. So most enterprise fiefdoms spend 99-100% of capex budget regardless of if they needed it or not.

Coldmode• 12 years ago

For the US government it is usually August and September. The fiscal year ends on September 30.

gblanchette• 12 years ago

Hello from Quebec, I am on Hacker News, as a big reader not commenting. My online business, is profitable, it make all my income, an ok salary for me :-). I have read the book '4 hours week' and work only few hours a week. The business start with a shareware game (1990), quit my day job (2002) to create more sharewares, fail at the first one (the password/unlock was hack the first week). So I come with the idea of having a client/server game (2004) (harder to hack). That work enough to make a small salary. Then I build another client/server game (2011), almost the same as the first one but localized in 3 languages. Then I received a lawyer letter (2011) to close both of my online sites. I did make some modifications, after 2 years they leaves me alone... Being afraid of closing, I was looking for a plan B (2012), I works hard on web sites that have a lot of visitors to make money with AdWords, it works. Now half of the revenue come from the 2 online games, and the other half come from AdWords. The shareware, online games and web sites are all related to a very popular crossword game.

hgfischer• 12 years ago

I live in a draconian tax country. How can I open a online international business and receive money from anywhere in the world? Do I need to move to a tax heaven?

CyberFonic• 12 years ago

You might not have to move, just have your company operating from an appropriate tax haven. You typically need to pay lawyers, accountants, etc to achieve what you are thinking about and they end up costing more than the tax you would have to pay. Do your numbers first before you get too preoccupied with the tax. As a very general comment, in some low tax countries you need to spend a lot of money to have what you get more or less for free in other higher tax countries.

ivanca2• 12 years ago

You can save the money in an international account (paypal?) and when you need to retrieve the money fly to such country or someone else who can do it for you.

dublinben5• 12 years ago

From your perspective, the US state of Delaware might be an excellent location to incorporate. It's very inexpensive, popular, and would let you use all sorts of US-based payment services like Stripe and Paypal.

stevesearer5• 12 years ago

I run http://officesnapshots.com which publishes photos of office design projects from around the world.

I started it in 2007 as a gin side project to teaching history. I'm no longer teaching and it is the majority of my income.

cocoflunchy• 12 years ago

Just a heads up, I can't see any text on your website (Chrome 33.0.1750.146 on Mac)

http://imgur.com/Ptmxgsm

ct• 12 years ago

Chrome Version 33.0.1750.117 m on Win 8.1 doesn't show text either.

stevesearer5• 12 years ago

thanks for the heads up - I haven't been able to reproduce it myself but have received a couple other reports of that happening.

if you inspect element, is there no text as well?

bemmu6• 12 years ago

That's great to hear. I love the site and was always wondering if it was just a small side project or something bigger now.

stevesearer5• 12 years ago

Glad you've enjoyed the site, I always like hearing from people that have been reading for a while. I started it in 2007 and there are still a number of people that have been reading since it initially made it to the FP of Digg.

I've been adding new features recently, like the pinterest-like area for browsing office photos by room.

My goal of late has been to help people find and interact with the old posts that would traditionally be lost in the date-archive format of a traditional blog.

cauterize2• 12 years ago

What is meant by a "gin side project"?

dublinben5• 12 years ago

It might be a typo for fun side project.

stevesearer5• 12 years ago

Yeah, I meant fun :)

Basically I saw images of Google's offices and wondered if there were any sites that showed only office photos. There weren't any that I could find so I bought a domain and started posting photos I came across.

It was a collection of candid photos that weren't very good at first, but it is mainly architectural photography submitted by design firms now.

MikeX3• 12 years ago

How do you earn income from this site?

pharaohgeek• 12 years ago

I don't know why, but I've always enjoyed looking at things like this. Companies that have really cool workspaces always fascinated me. Great site! Keep up the good work!

spiritplumber2• 12 years ago

http://www.robots-everywhere.com I used to employ two people, but I automated them away. I am successful in the sense that I have clear title to my home at age 33, if that counts.

gmays11• 12 years ago

Did the employees feel an intense wave of irony wash over them when their job at Robots Everywhere was automated away? I'd be thinking, "Well ain't that a bitch."

Blahah• 12 years ago

Did the employee contract include a waiver:

"The undersigned, for one, agrees to welcome our robot overlords."

Also, clear title at 33 should meet anyone's definition of successful. I just got a mortgage at 28 and that day is a long way off. Must feel good :)

spiritplumber2• 12 years ago

Yeah, it did actually. The whole thing was written fairly tongue in cheek.

tomp• 12 years ago

Hey! I was always interested in building robots, but I always thought that (1) I just don't have the time to bootstrap, and (2) I'm only a software developer and don't know enough hardware. You're living my dreams! Congrats!

Osiris4• 12 years ago

I sell a laptop battery meter (http://batterybarpro.com). It's not income replacing; it makes about $1,000 per month, but it's been crucial in saving enough for down payments one two houses.

I've tried to get the revenue numbers up, but I've never been able to break a $2,000 month.

joelennon2• 12 years ago

Have you considered building a mac version? I love little utilities like this, especially at your price point. Nice product.

Osiris4• 12 years ago

I've never written Mac software. If someone is interested in going in on a port with me, let me know.

huhtenberg2• 12 years ago

I've never been able to break a $2,000 month.

Try charging $9.95 instead of $8.00? :)

Osiris4• 12 years ago

I did. It used to be $10. I've tried a whole slew of different pricing options, like cheap, but time-limited, as well as price points between $4 and $10. I've found that for a simple tool, people seem to find $10 a bit off-putting. I've been running a 50% promotion recently (for over a month now) and revenue is up about 70%.

bemmu6• 12 years ago

I notice you had a lifehacker mention, that must have been a huge boost?

Osiris4• 12 years ago

The lifehacker article came out in my second month of sales. I went from $400 in my first month to $1800 in my second month. Unfortunately, that's pretty much been my best month. I do get quite a few people coming in from web forums and other review sites though.

singingfish• 12 years ago

I spent a number of years wasting time on IRC looking at and chatting to people about techincal issues, plus a bit of humourous banter. These days the all of my income comes from activities where IRC is the main means of communication.

iends• 12 years ago

You run botnets?

paulhauggis• 12 years ago

You can have a successful online business with one-person, but there will always be a maximum to the amount of money you can make and it does not scale well.

I ran a 1-person company for the past 3 years (B2B SAAS). I now have 2 other partners in the company to pick up the slack and we will be hiring a few employees next month.

It's difficult to: maintain your current business (IE: new features, bug fixes, customer service) while at the same time, trying to get new business (marketing, new ideas, planning) and also have any kind of life outside the business.

You also won't be able to go on any kind of real vacation and time-off is challenging. I didn't think about these things at 20, but at 30, it's starting to become more and more important.

gmays11• 12 years ago

Excellent points, thanks for the insight. I'm not as far along as you, but already starting to see the same challenges.

cpncrunch5• 12 years ago

Actually, vacation / time off shouldn't be an issue. I've been doing this for 15 years and now my product runs like clockwork. Generally unless I'm doing new dev work, I only have a few support emails per day. As long as I go on vacation somewhere where I can at least have wifi in the evenings and mobile data during the day to occasionally check my email, it's not a problem. Also I regularly take long breaks during the day, or take days off to go on trips somewhere. I think you need to do this otherwise you'll be in danger of burning out.

It also helps to plan for the worst. Right now my slight concern is lack of RAID on my server. However I back up every day to a separate disk on the server (plus offsite downloads every couple of weeks), so in the worst case it will probably just take me an hour or two to get most things up and running on a new server. Obviously not the best thing to happen on vacation though :)

scottclark5• 12 years ago

LOL, when I was running my own servers it seemed the only time they would go down was when I was on vacation.

SyneRyder• 12 years ago

I was going to post something similar - I was able to take 3 months to travel overseas as a 1-person business, and the business didn't collapse or run into any calamities. I always had my laptop and answered customer emails every couple of days.

Maybe it's an issue if you're running a SAAS business. Instead my stuff is consumer downloadable software, so if there was a problem it was usually just a single customer, not my entire customer base at once.

scottclark5• 12 years ago

It's important to refine your process so that you can replace yourself. I know this first hand.. Tough. Good luck!

mihaela• 12 years ago

I sell Asterisk reporting sw for win @samreports.com. It makes about $1000 a month in revenues. I also work as iOS developer for the man. I have a free iOS app on the AppStore (HRTecaj), soon to be commercial, when I add ATMs. I was Asterisk integrator, and learned a lot about the system, made software to present call reports in customisable and pleasant way. SAMReports has been selling, consistently, for 4 years. I made a few updates, but now I'm working on a major update.

albumedia• 12 years ago

http://albumedia.com Just a one-man show creating simple web and mobile apps.

useflyer• 12 years ago

www.lawdingo.com is a single founder which is absolutely killing it

lalwanivikas• 12 years ago

Matthew Inman runs The Oatmeal (http://theoatmeal.com/) alone and he crossed $500,000 annual revenue in 2012.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oatmeal

nunodonato• 12 years ago

For those who have successfully started a one-man online business/app, how did you get it known? Adwords? Advertising?

cpncrunch5• 12 years ago

My own product spread virally. I think that is about the only feasible way to do it. I've tried advertising a few times myself, but it never, ever pays for itself.

gk13• 12 years ago

"I think that is about the only feasible way to do it."

It may be the only way to do it very quickly. Most companies don't just go viral on day 1, they work very hard to get customers. Some times advertising makes sense, other times it doesn't, but it's certainly not the only option.

whalesalad• 12 years ago

plentyoffish.com

cperciva• 12 years ago

I run Tarsnap: http://www.tarsnap.com/

I got started because I wanted good backups and there were no solutions available which I was satisfied with.

balladeer2• 12 years ago

Are you planning to build sth on top of Glacier or include Glacier as an storage option (seeing it's on S3 anyway)? It will bring the cost down a great deal.

ch0wn• 12 years ago

See http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-why-tarsnap-doesn...

dotmic_com• 12 years ago

I run a product search engine called Dotmic http://www.dotmic.com/ .Recently we partnered with 60+ store and now we are profitable. :)

nebulasri• 12 years ago

How do you market your site? Do you advertise (adwords perhaps)?

How do you get stores to partner with you?

waqas-• 12 years ago

hey. The good thing about a one man operation is that you dont have any overheads. I started my startup with 4 people, but later learned that one was enough to start off with and i should scale according to the profits im making - instead of putting my own money into it (which i didnt have much of anyway). My startups: (http://opensource.com.pk) and (http://sells.pk/) are web agencies specializing in different areas. The former provides managed freelance outsourcing for larger projects and the latter specialized in e commerce for small/medium businesses. The first few clients help you pay the bills and buy bread, but if you keep at it and be persistent after a year you will have more clients than you can handle, that is the time to get employees. I am almost reaching that point, and that is what excites me these days.

Orthanc• 12 years ago

Not sure if this is what Hacker News would normally consider a business but I run a YouTube channel as my one-person business: http://www.youtube.com/cgpgrey

benhohner• 12 years ago

Your videos are so informative. Thank you! I especially loved the series on FPTP voting.

vijayr• 12 years ago

Wow, you make your living from your youtube channel?

gtheme• 12 years ago

I am running premium Ghost Blog marketplace http://www.gtheme.io/

I solo doing design, develop, marketing, as well as writing contents around Ghost.

santa_boy2• 12 years ago

What kind of traffic are you getting? What is the source of traffic?

I was contemplating something like but thought themeforest may be a better channel to sell.

How do you market the site?

bemmu6• 12 years ago

I run http://www.candyjapan.com

It just crossed 500 paying members. I started it with my wife, but recently the shipping part is no longer done by us two manually, but by a local supermarket. In the beginning it was just an email to some previous customers asking if they might be interested in a club like this. Then a landing page and a HN post. From there it grew through blog mentions and now there is a trickle of organic traffic coming in.

Before this I had some small apps on social networks that made more money, but were much more unstable. While Candy Japan could wither away, I expect the death would be more gradual. I still have some of the older sites / apps which together are still making around $500 / month, which is a nice bonus.

Probably anyone working as a salaried programmer in the US is making a more money than I am currently, but I enjoy the freedom and the thought that there really is no upper limit. If we ever do hit 1000 members I'm planning to have a celebration :-)

yincrash• 12 years ago

I just subscribed. You should add a meta description / opengraph description / image so I can share it on facebook and have the description of the website show up properly rather than just be blank.

imjk5• 12 years ago

How much advertising do you do? I notice you're buying ads on search for key terms. Do you do much display advertising. I'm sure you've figured out the lifetime value of your customers and you buy advertising based on that. If your margin's decent, you can probably get more aggressive with display ads to scale the business. I think the business has a ton of potential.

bemmu6• 12 years ago

I've bought ads, but it would have been better not to. Total I've probably spent around $3000 over ~2 years for campaigns that only brought in around 30 conversions. It would have been better to just spend that time blogging instead. I tried Facebook (side banner, newsfeed and promoted posts), AdWords, web comics, stumbleupon, Reddit ads. Some of the campaigns were close to break-even, though.

With this few conversions, it's hard to make any judgement to what works and small tweaks in particular are basically impossible. Noise drowns everything. It's inviting to start getting fancy with A/B testing age ranges or gender targeting on FB ads, but unless I am mistaken about 230 conversions are needed to say A/B test male vs. female assuming it would give a 30% boost. If you know how to figure out the optimal targeting without spending ~$20000 on each test, let me know :-)

If I could get LTV up (reducing churn might be the lowest hanging fruit now), conversions up or write better ads, paid advertising could still be doable in the future.

daniel-levin• 12 years ago

I love this.

I clicked on the link, and being South African, I've been conditioned into thinking that all sorts of cool services/products from overseas either aren't available here or are prohibitively expensive to import. So, I was delighted when your page said, "Free shipping from Japan, even to South Africa". Thank you.

AlexMuir• 12 years ago

It generates that text from geolocation and is a brilliant move.

declan• 12 years ago

What a great idea! I'm looking at the site right now and I'm planning to sign up.

QuasiAlon• 12 years ago

Cool idea! I love it. Nice touch with "Free shipping, even to <my location>".

Question: what do you do about local laws for importing edible products? No doubt at least some of the countries you ship to has those.

Good luck!

gadr90• 12 years ago

You should check out the SideProject Book[1]. It's specifically about bootstraped, successful, single owner projects. It features some of the projects that appeared here, actually, like BCC.

As of myself, I am currently trying to educate myself into dividing my time better between my "day job" and my product. Hard to do, though, when your day job absolutely rocks... It's very easy to work all day long without realizing you should have stopped in the middle of the afternoon. Not a bad problem to have, mind you.

[1] http://www.sideprojectbook.com/

zrail2• 12 years ago

I wrote a book[1] that generates about $2k of revenue per month. Not quite your definition of success, but it's given me a taste. I'm now in the beta testing process for my next thing[2].

[1] https://www.petekeen.net/mastering-modern-payments

[2] http://www.pagesnap.io

ortuna• 12 years ago

Just want to say that I'm using Docverter to try to make a new business :D.

zrail2• 12 years ago

Awesome! Email me if you have any questions or need any help.

fleaflicker• 12 years ago

http://www.fleaflicker.com/ (A fantasy sports site.) Started solo, sold, bought back, now operates as a team of two but I am the sole technical member.

MattyMc2• 12 years ago

How do you generate revenue from this free service?

georgiecasey2• 12 years ago

wtf, that's where we do all our leagues every year! can't believe it's just 2 guys and one techie.

bizifyme2• 12 years ago

I am running a complete payment gateway that supports VISA and MasterCard and mobile payments by SMS.

The name of the service is: https://www.bizify.me

For an introduction to the service: https://www.bizify.me/hacker-news/

medwezys• 12 years ago

FYI HN is not indexed by google :)

bizifyme2• 12 years ago

Sorry for the long text. I had a pre-written text that I used for an earlier presentation, so I just copied the text and made some minor corrections. But hopefully, the text is a good introduction anyway. :)

christiangenco• 12 years ago

I've got three:

* Textbooks Please: a textbook search engine for college students. It's grossed ~$20k, almost all of which has been reinvested, and not paying myself that much. * dbinbox: an inbox for your dropbox for receiving files too large to email. It's got ~25k users, but has made less than $1k in donations. I need to give this one a reboot soon. * Email Tip Bot: send bitcoin with email. Launched two weeks ago and I've already got my first 200 users :D

I really enjoy the process of making these kinds of things, but I find it enormously exhausting to do the other half of marketing, SEO, publicity, etc. I'm working on getting better at SEO, but would love to find someone that likes the marketing side.

PS: http://solo.im/

fiatjaf5• 12 years ago

http://nomadia.com.br/

A website generator and a login/fetch user info/filter service attached for brazilian firms/hotels/inns that offer rooms to rent for long periods/temporary housing.

A very niche market in which I fill myself inn, was developing something just for me and got the idea of offering it to others. I have just one client (so I don't qualify to "successful"), but I'm following patio11 advice of offering services do niche underserved markets. Does anyone has any advice?

My biggest problem is how to market to such a niche. I'm trying to email people, but the people in niche are really non-computer users, so it is difficult.

pcunite• 12 years ago

I've worked goffconcepts.com full time since 2003 entirely alone (the "we" is my wife). My new product FileSearchEX is highly pirated so I'll probably be moving on to other things. I only recommend SaaS, forget about fat client software. The search engines enable a very toxic landscape otherwise.

huhtenberg2• 12 years ago

Can you elaborate? This is really interesting.

Do you have any (basic?) license enforcement and anti-reversal protection in your code?

What do you mean by toxic search engine landscape?

zerr3• 12 years ago

Interesting. I always thought that illegal downloads are negligible. Maybe your security is non-existent?

coreymaass• 12 years ago

I build MVP's for people who have an idea for a web app. It's at http://builtFromIdeas.com

fiatjaf5• 12 years ago

Do you have much clients? How can you work with a fixed price?

hartcw• 12 years ago

I develop and sell Smart Shooter.

http://kuvacode.com

Its a traditional desktop app (windows, mac), but only sold online via our own website or the mac app store. I created it about 4 years ago, and work on it solely in my spare time. In fact I'm employed full time at a major tech company but this I keep separate.

To claim its profitable is a bit misleading, because of cause the major cost in developing such software is my own time. I've incorporated as a limited company here in Finland but do not pay myself a salary, so the only costs to the business are web hosting and occasional hardware purchases (computers, cameras).

I started this as a project for personal interest; at the time I was working as a software engineer developing financial trading software. Smart Shooter was a good way to develop something that covered both my interests in graphics programming and digital photography, to alleviate the borebom from my day job.

So for me its been successful, its still an pleasureable hobby, allows me an excuse to play around with the latest cameras, and brings in some pocket money. It doesn't generate enough revenue that I could quit my main job, but the possibilities could be there if situations change.

amitmathew• 12 years ago

I run a small business called Cram Fighter (http://cramfighter.com) that is targeted at students (mostly medical) that are preparing for standardized exams. I got the idea after watching my wife preparing for her board exams and it seemed like a perfect little project to learn iOS programming. Initially my goal was to do earn maybe $5k annually, but now I'm on track to surpass my salary as senior developer by next year.

You'll find a lot of one-person businesses targeting tiny, but profitable, niches like mine. What's great about it is that often when you find a tiny opportunity, it opens up a lot of other problems that need solving that you would never find otherwise. It's also a great way to learn the skills of running a business in a relatively stress-free way (at least compared to running a startup).

The only downside is if you're anything like me, you'll get antsy working on small projects and yearn to tackle bigger, more ambitious problems. Sometimes 1-person companies have the potential for turning into a company with startup-like growth, sometimes not. I'm still trying to figure out how far I can take my company.

phantom_oracle2• 12 years ago

I like reading about stories like this (from all the successful solo founders).

It proves that you don't need to get multi-million-dollar valuations to be successful and that the general entrepreneur is pretty content with the amount he/she is making (+1 to thousandaire).

These are stories entrepreneurs (who are realists) should read about and we'd probably all be better off avoiding those "billion dollar acquisitions" (for fear that it will consume us mentally, physically and emotionally).

marxdeveloper• 12 years ago

I run a small online game called RPG MO(http://rpg.mo.ee). It gets about 20k unique visits every month. Money wise it generates enough payments to pay for the server and associated services and leaves a little for advertising as well. It doesn't cover all of my bills yet so I have to maintain a full-time job while studying in the university. I still have high hopes in this project though.

braindead_in• 12 years ago

I ran Scribie. http://scribie.com.

I started it in August 2008 and was the only person working on it for 5 years. In 2013 we established our first QA center and now we are around 20.

emilioolivares3• 12 years ago

Wow this is very cool. This you actually do the transcribing, I'd imagine you outsource this, correct?

vladstudio• 12 years ago

I've been running http://www.vladstudio.com (where I publish my wallpapers and other stuff) for several years, and for quite some time, it was my primary source of income. Unusual, because my premium accounts are not really a "product", but just a way to "like" or "donate".

reboog7112• 12 years ago

Since you didn't specify the type of business ( http://www.dot-com-it.com) ; I run a consulting business as a programmer that is just me. In the 'early' days (I started in 1999) I sort of fell into it. I was burnt out and walked out of a job.

Networking got me 2 consulting client, and things just ballooned from there. I fell into it accidentally and learned a lot of hard lessons along the way.

In the early days I did a lot of fixed fee projects for small businesses. On some projects I made tons of income; and on other projects I put in a lot of unpaid time [due to me incorrectly bidding the project and/or improperly handling change requests.

I tried my hands at podcasting with a sponsorships model ( http://www.theflexshow.com ). That made ~$30K throughout its' life. Even though I had a huge audience for the size of the market, no one was trying to sell anything to that market. I make ~$30K or so throughout its run and gave away a bunch of sponsorship in exchange for other services. Not bad; but not enough to pay the bills.

I took the profits from the consulting business and pumped them into a product business selling advanced components to Flex developers ( http://www.flextras.com ). I did this full time, stopping all consulting. The business was, in essence, a failure. It generated $10K per year which is a nice side income; but not a "pay your bills income. The business was slowly growing, until some Adobe PR mishaps killed executive confidence in the Flash Player as an application development platform; which killed our sales. It was generating about $10K per year and was growing. But, that is not enough to pay the bills. I shut it down and open sourced all the code.

Now; I'm back to consulting, however the bulk of my clients right now are hourly as opposed to fixed fee. This is very profitable because many clients just keep renewing contracts and giving me work. However, it is the least bit satisfying because there is no defined end point and it feels like I'm just churning my wheels to kill time. Sometimes it feels like clients are creating just enough work to keep me busy so that I'll be there when they really need me.

Despite having multiple ongoing clients; it doesn't feel like I'm a business owner because they are paying for my time, explicitly. That isn't scalable in any way.

I'm prepping to launch a book under the Nathan Barry's "Authority" model which will teach Flex Developers how to program in AngularJS. More info at ( http://www.lifeafterflex.com ). People seem excited about this beyond anything I ever expected. I asked my newsletter if anyone was interested in reviewing a pre-release copy and I got 20+ responses which is a significantly higher response rate than usual. If the early interest is any indication; more people will read my book than ever bought a Flextras component.

I've also dabbled with a in Mobile Game ( https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.igorKn... ), a recording studio (not online), and a CD duplication business (not online). All had varying levels of success.

scottclark5• 12 years ago

Sounds like we are in the same boat, er, treadmill. I always want to develop more products because I don't scale.

reboog7112• 12 years ago

Yep, exactly. Product Businesses are tricky these days.

xpose2000• 12 years ago

I run http://www.fantasysp.com/, which provides tools and services to help people manage their fantasy sports teams.

I started it because I wanted a faster way to get my player news... fast forward 7 years later and its a full fledged business.

MattyMc2• 12 years ago

Forgive me for asking, but what is your revenue model? (If you wouldn't mind sharing). Love the service.

senith• 12 years ago

I run http://www.graduatetutor.com/ myself. It is technically not one man because there are other independent tutors working with me too!

blantonl• 12 years ago

I own and operate http://www.radioreference.com and http://www.broadcastify.com. I do all the development, business management, and support.

I have a team of community volunteers that do a lot of day to day moderation and member management.

I got started simply building a set of community resources for the radio communications and hobbyist market.

We're very profitable and these businesses provide the majority of my family's income.

scottclark5• 12 years ago

Great Thread....

I live entirely in the consulting space working on SEO/SEM and content marketing, and have done so alone since 1997. After a few pivots in web design, hosting and domaining, I've ended up in a place where I can be picky with clients and charge good fees. I hit the website development market on its first big wave, and moved into search before 99% of other SEOs even knew the discipline existed (and before some were even out of elementary school!)

I make much more than a full-time employee would, but there is a lot of bosses and stress comes in waves. I have learned how to fire clients (hard to do) and how to size up opportunities. But the company is me. It's not saleable - no intellectual asset exists beyond what I bring to the table. So it's never going to have an "exit." This is my main gripe.

Also, I relocated to Kentucky after writing tons of code in The Valley and ended up in Lexington, KY - a great university town with a highly educated population (and a Google eCity.) This has offered me a nice lifestyle, plenty of time to raise my kids and material rewards for probably 60% of Santa Clara's cost. My company is at http://www.buzzmaven.com. Good luck!

enigmabomb2• 12 years ago

Cheers Scott, I consult in this space also, though recently I've been trying to productize my way out of it. I built http://killswit.ch to help folks like us who are one person agencies and have to deal with sending traffic to sites they don't control. It sucks when your KPI's suffer because of someone else. Let me know if you want to give it a whirl.

andersthue• 12 years ago

I run TSR Watermark Image software, a Windows Software (!) that people downloads and pay for once (!), it covers around 50% of my salary, the rest comes from consulting.

Working on other windows software, and working towards starting a SaaS app, blogging about it all :)

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

I'm trying to do a business on the side (besides my full time job).

Currently i created a member management site on www.ledenboek.be/EN for sport clubs, i'm still improving this. But it's also a test for marketing and gaining clients.

Next up is Surveyor ( a email/sms marketing web application which i used myself (not public yet). I'm going to use it first for clients who ask me to create their website.

But the big one is a document management system, that is totally different from the existing onces. I already have interest have a company with +/- 100 users and we are setting up a small demo in April there (ps. This will hit Hackernews in about 2-3 months)

lettergram• 12 years ago

I don't know exactly how you define "successful online business," but I am currently a university student making $500 - $2000 a month at about 5 to 10 hours a week.

Basically, there is a market for vintage computer hardware, so I post some adds offering to take away old office items they can't just throw away. Such as old keyboards, terminals, etc. and they pay me a nominal fee ($1 - $5 per item depending) to rid them of their "trash". I then resell those items after cleaning them up a bit for extremely high profit margins $35 - $120 for 20 minutes of work (since I was payed to take away the trash).

One of the things I did was sold Model M keyboards which I made USB compatible: http://austingwalters.com/keyboards/

Another way I make money is by tutoring or helping out with programming, I use to help out local people, but I have since switched over to Google Helpouts. Usually, it's just explaining some algorithms and writing some C code. Pretty easy, no real upkeep, and I can set what ever hours I want.

T-A• 12 years ago

PierreA seems to be doing well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6934352

dtracy4• 12 years ago

I run http://flevy.com. It's a marketplace for premium business documents (e.g. business frameworks/methodologies, financial models, presentation templates, etc.). I do contract work out via odesk/elance from time to time.

rs• 12 years ago

I run https://xp-dev.com and more recently http://deployer.vc and https://zoned.io - all as a solo. I am hiring now, have used freelancers for help over time, but generally it has been a solo effort.

Do tell if you have any specific questions, and I'll be more than happy to help out!

pushkargaikwad• 12 years ago

I am running inBoundio - http://www.inboundio.com (I call it basecamp of marketing) and is the only guy so I do all the work.

I am really not that worried about slow growth or not making much money, I am enjoying what I am doing, works on average 6 hours a day and can spend rest of my time on learning new things and thinking about life and philosophy.

I started because I felt that market (and so do I) need such simplified software. Most of the options were too complicated and were very costly.

I will soon be touching 100 paying customers so will write a detailed post and share it on hackernews.

graeme• 12 years ago

I run http://lsathacks.com, and have a related book series

I sell e-books on my site and through affiliates, and sell print books on amazon. All told I make around $3,000 a month in passive revenues. I also make $4000-$5000 more in tutoring revenues.

However, the site is fairly new (I just sold the books through affiliates/print previously). As I grow the site I expect I may be able to get over $10,000 per month passive.

The LSAT is an admission exam for American and Canadian law schools. My materials/lessons teach people how to do better on it.

cacahuates• 12 years ago

http://www.writtalin.com/

Content-based site.

rbchv• 12 years ago

I developed the Electrician Calculator Pro, a National Electrical Code compliant calculator for engineers, electricians, lighting designers, etc:

http://www.electriciancalculator.com

I first created the Android version about 3 years ago, then the iOS version about 1 year ago. It currently makes just enough to cover some bills, although I believe it has a greater potential. I'm currently looking for ways to make this a recurring revenue stream instead of a one time payment gig.

nns1212• 12 years ago

Not sure if this counts. I have created a simple landing page open source project: http://rails-landing-page.herokuapp.com/

I get a lot of consulting (development + design) business when clients learn about us via this application.

I also use it set up landing pages for any Startups/SMEs are developing their MVP/Beta application with me.

yanonymator• 12 years ago

My sales are $2000/day, 7 days - I'm in my 15th year of business. 100% of my presence is automated (I do nothing day-to-day). The only advice I'm qualified to give, is how to succeed: don't listen to anyone elses advice: use your brain. It is 100% common sense - everyone elses opinions are uninformed and almost always from someone who doesn't really know. Nobody who has succeeded will willingly reveal how to succeed - they're too busy enjoying the fruits of success to waste the time. If you find someone who is willing to tell you, they are usually fake - the "telling you" part is a cog in whatever scam they're involved with (stock investment, bitcoins, realestate, whatever).

Read my lips:

COMMON SENSE.

And, no, I like my income. I'm not telling what I'm doing!

fathobbitss123• 12 years ago

i run dealsextra.com.au

Ask HN: Successful one-person online businesses?

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